Would like to humbly recommend Jay rewatch Short Cuts… could maybe even make a great group review. Not only is it a great film and one of Altman’s best, it’s an awesome Stowe role.

Shame that the Tangerine Dream score wasn’t included on your version of The Keep. It’s my favorite Tangerine Dream score.

What episode was Frank’s rant about game changers? This was no longer than a year ago, no? Now that an actual pandemic is CHANGING EVERYTHING, crickets from Frank.

We’re all thinking the same thing, will there be a 90’s erotic thriller premium?

My version did have the Tangerine Dream score, but at the expense of video quality I guess. It is a great score though.

Jay can continue the Stowe streak since she made a few. Not to mention that Paul Verhoeven was the auteur behind Basic Instinct and we could all use some more classic Verhoeven reviews. For some reason I thought there was a Verhoeven premium.

I would never do such a thing. Although it is also an unofficial Mondo-style poster, which I’m sure he hates.

Re: Devs discussion

Like Frank, I have also been thinking a lot about the nature of reality, recently. One thing that has motivated it, for me, is Stephen Wolfram’s (Wolfram Alpha guy) recent project, which he describes as a “path to the fundamental theory of physics”.

An idea in his work regarding determinism, that sorta works for me, is the possibility that the universe is “deterministic” but “computationally irreducible”. Meaning, even though things happen because of some basic rules about how objects interact [and couldn’t have happened any other way], the interactions are so complex that they could not be computed ahead of time; so, no predictions are possible on a large scale. Maybe this idea could help Frank, like me, stay sane in quarantine solitude.

So, I guess this is my TV recommendation for Frank: https://youtu.be/rbfFt2uNEyQ?t=170

I really enjoyed Sean and Frank going deep in their discussion, thanks guys!

Here’s my take on Devs.
It seemed like the show was exploring determinism vs. free will, but it was firmly on the side of free will long before the finale. We see multiple universes represented throughout the series (the car crash, outside the lecture hall). This isn’t an opinion expressed by a character, it’s shown as an objective fact. The show itself is saying “Who do you believe; these people spending 8 hours adamantly insisting that determinism is the only possibility, or your lying eyes?”
To be fair, I, too, spent the entire series thinking that determinism was a possibility, and I think the reason for that is almost all the conversation surrounding this debate came from two obsessive true believers of determinism, Forest and Katie. Everyone else is at least open to the possibility of free will, but they end up getting shut down by Forest and Katie every time it comes up. They monopolized the conversation. You asked why no one ran a simple experiment to settle the issue, but that was never the point. They weren’t trying to settle the question of free will vs. determinism. They were only trying to prove what they already knew in their hearts to be true, and damn any evidence to the contrary.
(I think it’s interesting that some viewers, like Forest and Katie, believe that determinism is the only possibility and therefore can’t wrap their heads around the ending of the show)
(Also, I think that aspect can be added to the commentary on tech giants. The insistence that reality will conform to their view and not the other way around)
As for the the idea that Lily was somehow special, that was also a delusion of Forest and Katie. So far as I can remember, we see only two scenes where people (other than Forest and Katie) see their future and have a chance of changing it. Forest and Katie wouldn’t allow looking into the future, presumably because they were afraid that someone would pierce their delusion. When the devs see themselves one second into the future, they don’t have enough time to process what they’re seeing and change their reactions. Lily, on the other hand, has minutes to formulate a response. It could have been anybody. Forest and Katie were just dressing it all up in some sort of mythology.
As for why we didn’t see wildly divergent alternate universes, my guess is that what they were doing was drawing from alternate universes that were nearest to their own both in structural differences and in time to create a composite. For example, Forest’s daughter. They had incomplete data for their universe alone, but, if you were to draw more data from a universe that only had the slightest deviation from ours (like an extra hair on her head) and was created at the start of your viewing (and therefore that extra hair hadn’t yet had time to cause major ramifications to that universe), then you could add more detail. Obviously at some point, when Forest and Katie weren’t watching, someone would boot up some What If scenarios, like what if the Axis had won or JFK had survived. They never had the chance so we never saw it until the end, when we do see various universes.
(I also think that the reason Forest’s daughter hasn’t aged when we see Forest and Lily have their conversation at the end is that in that universe she was born later, making that particular universe Forest’s preferred one)
Anyway, despite all that I admit that, like Frank, I enjoyed it up to a point. There are a few things that I had trouble with.