My wife and I watched Beverly Hills Cop on Amazon Prime.
It holds up surprisingly well for a movie that was released in the year I was born.
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You’ve held up surprisingly well for a HUMAN who was released the year you were born!
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I am as surprised about that as everyone else. 
Joke aside, I was referring to how many movies from the 80s (especially those that contain significant amounts of comedy) have something to them that just makes them incredibly un-funny and thus less enjoyable to me.
I was surprised that I still like this one a lot.
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Surely you can’t be serious.
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What better to distract from the horrors of the current war than the horrors of a past one?
Very well made. I loved the depth of characterization and the fact that most actors look like real people, not barbie dolls.
That sentence makes me feel very old 
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That’s one of the cool things about Mudspike for me:
I get to feel young as most members here are actually older than me. In most places I visit online these days that’s not the case it seems.
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I’m as old as A New Hope 
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Don’t you start aswell … I was 16 when top gun came out
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That my friend, is not as bad as the moment a year or so ago when i googled kelly mcgillis (dont.) To see how she is holding together and realised she is the exact same age as my dear old mum.
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Yeah I’m old enough to remember seeing the trailer for that on TV before it came out!
Luke: “What a piece of junk!”
Young Me: “Wow, that is an old looking ship!”
A couple of months later in theater me: 
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So this is the best series that I’ve seen in a long while. Excellently written, directed, and cast. Directed by Ben Stiller, whom to before now, I’ve only thought of as a comedic actor. Wrong. This a sci-fi thriller is so well directed and acted, that it makes one wonder how much of this is actor and what part is director.
Excellent review.
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Severance has been a fun ride. But I was expecting it to end on a limited run. Where can it go for season 2. Basically the story is a mystery where we learn a little more each episode. I’m getting vibes of Lost.
I can see where a Lost comparison might be made up through perhaps the middle of this initial season. But beyond that, there are so many reveals in Severance, I’m less convinced that analogy holds up.
My wife and I debated Lost for years. She loved it, but I loathed the series for two reasons. The biggest was that none of the characters behaved rationally. Case in point, if I were walking in the jungle and encountered a big monster, after I got over the initial shock, I would run out on the beach yelling, “There is a gosh-darned big freaking monster. Everyone RUN!” But in Lost, the character who encountered the beast would walk stoically out of the jungle, not telling anyone what they saw, until it was drawn painfully out of them. Yeah, that monster who chased me to the beach is not a threat to anyone. Their actions met the narrative, what little there was, but hardly believable. This used to infuriate me to the point that I stopped watching after season 1, other than a few episodes to spend time with my wife.
Secondly, and this was confirmed in an interview with the series’ creators after the last season wrapped, is that it never felt like it was leading to a conclusion. It didn’t, because the writers never had a clue either. They just wrote enough to bridge to the next episode or season. I’m not saying that there were not some interesting characters or subplots, but probably because it was written for a broadcast network audience, IMO it digested like bad pulp fiction.
Severance is so well crafted and the story more developed just in the first season, that it is immensely more palatable. It will be interesting where they take it, but at least we know who the antagonists are.
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Yeah…I enjoyed Lost during the first half of the journey, and finished it because I felt at that point as invested as I was, may as well see it through. I agree completely with a lot of your assessments about characters, especially when main characters suddenly went through complete 180s inexplicably, and the very obvious rambling, meandering, and finally stumbling into a doubt semblance of a plot arc (see also: all my complaints about the JJverse Star Trek and Star Wars movies).
Also Garfunkel and Oates had a very good point:
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Ha. Great.
I should have added that my wife is more well educated and successful than I, so there is little value in my opinion. Show preference is nothing more than what one chooses for entertainment.
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The difference in the approaches of Lost and B5 show what happens when you have a clear understanding of where you’re going and how you mean to get there.
This is why book adaptations tend to do so well, because most authors actually care about what they’re leading up to, they have a sense of the goal, while many TV and film writers just want to build to a hook for the next season/sequel at best.
Look at Game of Thrones. The TV writers knew what they were going to end with but didn’t have a clear roadmap at the end. So instead of following the clearly defined path (with admitted detours, additions, and skips along the way), when they reached the end they just flew a straight beeline for the end at full speed. Once they knew there wasn’t anything else coming after, they just wanted to get it done.
Also interesting how after being the hottest names in scriptwriting/showrunning up the final season, when it ended suddenly all the reports of what they were going to do next dried up…
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I would argue they also were more excited about the Star Wars series they’d been promised, and phoned it in as a result of that.
I like stories with a beginning, a middle and end. I also like long-running faithfuls that tell a unique (or nearly unique) fresh story with each episode. It’s when the distinction between the two genres blurs is where I assess if the years it takes to finish the story is worth my attention. I started Severance with the same excitement that I experienced with the similar Maniac (Netflix 2018), or the magnificent Russian Doll at around the same time. Both had really satisfying endings after the planned run of ten or so episodes. That’s eight to twelve hours to tell a story the way no movie ever can. But I imagine that the single season model is a cash-calf. For longer runs, the inter-season hype almost guarantees an even bigger audience the next time around, a la Stranger Things. They made a mint on the second season that probably dwarfed the the take-in from the first. Anyway, it was a disappointment. In retrospect, the only show that followed this model, hooked me, and kept me hooked, was Breaking Bad.
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