Kevin_Maness

I read couple of essays about this movie, not being very familiar with Buñuel's work, and they were very philosophical and praised the film most highly as one of the director's finest works.

To me, it seemed pretty much like a long episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus that made me smile a little and shake my head rather than laugh out loud or wonder why in the world anyone would think this is funny. That, and the transitions between sketches were smoother.

Don't get me wrong: I liked it, and I appreciated the social satire, the absurdity, the iconoclasm, the relinquishment of narrative convention, and especially the excellent timing of the transitions (which were almost unerringly placed just when I got really interested in how a story would play out). It's not that any of the erudite film analyses were wrong or that they were overreaching, necessarily. It's just that I kept noticing that I'd felt this way before watching something else, and when I realized it was Month Python, it simply fit so well. At first, I thought Buñuel's film must have influenced the Python people, but then I looked up Monty Python and was reminded that the TV show ran from 1969-1974; so it might actually be the case that Monty Python influenced Luis Buñuel! There may be a master's thesis in this for some aspiring film critic who doesn't mind causing a kerfluffle among very serious art film fans.

I love Neil Gaiman, but there are books and groups of books that need to be made into multiple seasons of TV episodes, and then there are books that might make a fine movie if handled very skillfully, and American Gods is definitely NOT the former. Consequently, the show's creators have produced a rambling, meandering mess that uses boobs, buckets of blood, and vintage pop songs to distract viewers from the fact that the entire show run is a single idea (old gods vs new gods) spread way too thin.

I finished season one, forced myself to watch half of season two, then practiced self-compassion by letting myself stop.

Every. Single. Thing. About this series is derivative, but somehow it works. I'm scared, I can't stop watching. Totally gripping. I'm not sure why.