Completed Five Seasons of Boardwalk Empire and Observations

 This week, I finished up the 50-odd episodes of Boardwalk Empire.  If you asked me to define the HBO series....I'd say they took a fair sized chunk of the 1920s/1930s American history....which had to deal with prohibition, the mafia, corruption in government, and consequences of life.  My ten observations:

1.  A lot of killing within the 50-odd episodes. Virtually every single character that you might have gotten attached to....dead in the end.

2.  It's simply a lot of history that people aren't aware of, or were given 10 minutes of discussion in high school.

3.  I spent a lot of time....freezing the frames and looking at landscapes, clothing and cars.  It's a five-star series at giving you the type of clothing and attire of the period.  

4.  One of the few things that people don't grasp....prior to 1920....we consumed a lot of whiskey and beer.  Cocktails?  They all came after 1920 and prohibition.

5.  Get rich schemes?  Virtually everyone was hooked onto some idea.

6.  Travel by train?  It was the normal thing in that era.

7.  I really hadn't thought much about it.....but coffee in the 1920s was 2-cents a cup.

8.  This Remus-character became my favorite of the series.....only because he always talked of himself in the 3rd character ('Remus thinks this would work' would be a comment that he'd speak).

9.  Just me talking, but I always think the 1920s/1930s were the most rich era for evolution of America.

10.  At the end of the 50-odd episodes.....I came to realize that no one of the bunch ever got really rich.  Money slipped in....was spent, and wealth was lost....all in a matter of months, weeks, or days. 

Too Dark?

 In the past week....an episode of 'House of the Dragon' aired, and within minutes after it wrapped up....folks took to social media to complain.

The criticism?  The landscape/lighting....was too dark.  They couldn't see much of anything.

Back when Game of Thrones ran....in the last season....they had an episode like this as well.  I watched the Game of Thrones episode in question and would readily agree....pretty much one-third of the episode was crap.....you saw mostly nothing.

To be honest, I can think of a dozen shows over the past decade (Boardwalk Empire is one of them) where scenes were shot in marginal to zero lighting. 

Its something you would have never noticed in the 1970s or 1980s.  

Today?  Between poor lighting and poor sound....at least once a month.....I'll be watching something and have to adjust the sound to maximum, or halt the video to go strictly to B/W.  It's crap production where some director thinks he's adding value with total darkness.  

At some point in the next year, I expect an idiot to make a movie, where it's in total darkness of some cave, where some demon comes out to terrorize some folks, but you never see the demon.