You Have Been Watching

Halfway through Andor – man it took a while to get going but E6 was really good. It’s all very disparate for the first 3 or 4 eps (and we have to watch it with captions on as not only is there a lot of mumbling but new people and place names).

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Uncle Retrospective, Ben, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Finished watching Wednesday with the kids. A quality family show and I hadn’t realised what a massive hit it has been, behind only Stranger Things 4 and Squid Game on the platform. Even with no announcement yet I think this is a safe bet to come back, Catherine Zeta-Jones can’t charge that much.

The kids rather nagged me into watching it as I said earlier and that kind of viral push to watch stuff is invaluable in the streaming age, Lady Gaga is now copying her dance moves from the school prom. Nice when it is a genuinely good show, Jenna Ortega really good in the role too straddling the balance of having a character with limited emotional range (she doesn’t blink and briefly smiles about 3 times over 8 episodes) and still have you really liking her.

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Chris-S, DavidM, Dave

Ben wrote:

You might find, to your surprise, that you continue to use captions.

It’s on default for every streaming service now for me. It started because I rented a flat for a year that was on the international flightpath, so every 20 odd minutes a jet would fly near and make everything inaudible.

However I never stopped after I moved from there to a lovely quiet area. There’s a lot of mumblecore nonsense, the subs remain on.

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Andrew, Ben

njerry wrote:

Halfway through Wednesday and enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. I hope the remaining (non-Burton) episodes maintain the quality and thrills.

There’s nothing notably different to be honest, the transition is very smooth.

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njerry, Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

Also didn’t know Brie Larson was, but that’s fair enough because she’s 13 years old with no lines so it would have been weird if I had known that first time around.

Dammit, Martin!! Now I’m gonna have to watch that film again just to try to spot Brie Larson.

EDIT: no, it’s okay; I just looked it up on Google Images. I’m good now; carry on.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by njerry.

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Todd

Jackie Brown

Well 24 minutes because (beep), it was all (beep) and (beep) that, and after 20 minutes or so of that, I was done.

This is one film that has aged very badly.  It also gives rise to the question of what happened to Chris Tucker, who gets the definition of a bit part.

A surprisingly fast crash ‘n’ burn.

I’d have to get past the N-per minute frequency, along with caring about the plot and characters, but within the first 25 mins? It’s that N-per-minute frequency that comes to the fore.

Meanwhile, have restarted His Dark Materials as the final series is here. I’d forgotten just how much I want to take a flamethrower to Coulter’s golden monkey daemon.

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Uncle Retrospective

DavidM wrote:

I watch a detective series called Murdoch Mysteries, set in Toronto 100+ years ago. Bizarrely, the last one I watched featured Geddy Lee, yes, that Geddy Lee, in a bit part as a cab driver called (wait for it) Thomas Sawyer. He had 2 minutes of screen time and 3 lines of dialogue, and that was it. And I’m left wondering… why? :D

My sister watches the series on a streaming service.

As I understand it, it is considered a badge of honor for Canadian entertainers to make cameos on the series. Lee making an appearance is actually par for the course.

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DavidM

At my sisters, picking a “Christmas” movie, the women of the house all over-ruled me and my brother in law’s suggestion of Die Hard, so we ended up watching something called The Holiday, which they had all seen and absolutely loved (apparently). When I say “we” watched it, I mean my brother in law and me. The women talked all the way through it.

Do not watch The Holiday!!! It may be the worst film I have ever seen. The plot is ridiculous, the characters unlikeable, and the dialogue is embarrassing. By which I mean, I’d be embarrassed to write something that bad.

The only part I came even close to enjoying was a sub-plot involving Eli Wallach, which was so divorced from the rest of the movie that it felt like somebody had found a treatment for a completely different movie and stuck it in the middle of The Holiday to pad out the running time. And the Mexican gardener, who has zero lines in the movie and still manages to be funnier and out-act everybody else in his scenes.

1/10. Would recommend talking through it if you ever have the misfortune to be in the same room as a TV showing it.

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Todd

I watched it when it came out on DVD many years ago and my recollections were of a fairly bog standard rom-com (it’s not a genre that has many standouts, a few but not many).

That it’s kind of built this reputation as a ‘Christmas Classic’ over the last few years really demonstrates the paucity of good Christmas films. If I think about it most the of ‘Christmas films’ when I was a kid weren’t actually about Christmas, just stuff the BBC repeated a lot around the period (Sound of Music, Great Escape etc) and a James Bond on ITV.

So now when people want to look for a Christmas film they kind of rotate Love Actually, Elf, The Holiday and Muppets Xmas Carol (not forgetting the alternative take of Die Hard). There’s a massive bag of money waiting for someone who can make a really good Christmas film, as the most recent of those is 16 years old and isn’t very good but still gets an ongoing repeat audience.

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DavidM

I think with both Christmas movies and music, it takes a few years for something to bed in. Elf came out in 2003 but I swear none of the mad love for it started til about 2011. Similar with the Holiday. I remember it coming out to mediocre reception, no-one talking about it for years and then it’s suddenly anchoring Buzzfeed lists. I think it’s due to a huge part of all Christmas things being nostalgia.

I don’t put Christmas music videos on a huge amount, but I’ve noticed Ariana Grande’s one – Santa Tell Me from 2014 – is appearing in rotation more and more this year. I think that might become a staple. And Sheeran and Swift do have their own (not that I can remember anything about them) so who knows, they might make.

Martin Smith wrote:

Speaking of Christmas films, what is it with Sky doing them on trains lately? Last year it was Last Train To Christmas, with Michael Sheen wandering up and down his own timeline as he moved between carriages and now This Is Christmas, about a guy with an occasional Brummie accent inviting all the people on his regular commuter train into London to a Christmas party. What will Christmas 2023 bring?

Industrial action!

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Uncle Retrospective, DavidM

Martin Smith wrote:

I think with both Christmas movies and music, it takes a few years for something to bed in. Elf came out in 2003 but I swear none of the mad love for it started til about 2011. Similar with the Holiday.

I agree, it’s a good point. Love Actually on release got tepid reviews (unfairly for me as I like portmanteau films and think it better than 4 Weddings and Notting Hill) and The Holiday was petty much ignored. The ‘Elf’ love from my experience also happened a decade later as you say, nobody gave a shit when it came out, I only ever watched it about 2 years ago.

This is the thing, if you could align that eventual nostalgia with proper quality the cash could be never ending.

Yea, Glass Onion is a rare sequel that’s better than the first. Really enjoyed it.

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Dave, Todd, Ben

I’ve been watching a sentai series lately. Dairanger, which is my third after Jetman and Zyuranger. Zyuranger was the one that was the original basis for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, while Dairanger is the following year’s series, the one that Saban almost reluctantly used only a few bits from – the mechs, some of the monsters, the White Ranger but crucially not the main team. And it’s interesting to watch from a production stand point. I don’t have many specific memories of the season of MMPR that used this material (and I don’t think I could bear to watch an episode of Power Rangers now) but working out how they could get any usuable material out of it is fascinating.

It’s also interesting seeing those elements that MMPR nicked in their original context. I’ve not got to the White Ranger yet, but seeing the team he’s from, it’s clear that his design meshes with them more than the Zyuranger suits MMPR paired him with. It’s like seeing one of your colleagues that doesn’t quite fit in with everyone with their own mates and them suddenly making more sense. The Chinese mythology elements are curious too. The mechs were Westernised as the “Thunderzords” and called things like unicorn and phoenix, but they’re all Chinese mythology creatures, such as the Qilin and Shishi. The combined form has overt samurai stylings – especially in how it fights – which went way over my head as kid.

But beyond that, the show is kinda fun in its own right. The opening and ending themes are total bangers. There’s loads of great action sequences and stunts, which seems to have been a focus over say, character and plot. The first episode does so little to explain anything in the set-up of the series it’s mad. Most of the team is already together with no explanation, the Ryuranger (red) gets recruited by dodging a clever thrown at his face and told he has chi powers and then two minutes later is commanding a giant dragon robot as if its the most natural thing in the world. The necessary shortcuts of a decades old series that churns out 50 episodes a year, I guess.

The other plus point is that the show is absolutely mad. One episode has possessed hand puppets and plush toys terrorising a city. So you get a My Pet Monster toy stealing a kid’s trike alongside a demonic looking Santa puppet firing on people with an actual handgun.
The episode I just watched had a tofu monster force the Qilinranger into a drinking contest, which the ranger won by revealing that he’d rigged it with the help of the other Dairangers, who were disguised as some of the minion monsters, and swapped out the sake for water. This despite the fact *all the other rangers were shown doing something else concurrently with this entire scene*. It has absolutely no narrative sense or logic at all, but it doesn’t matter because being as mad as a box of frogs is this show’s forte. The Qilinranger then defeats the tofu guy by throwing an old style Chinese booze urn on a rope at him (drunken boxing style) until the monster’s sloshed, at which point he unleashes a special technique that the narrator describe as specifically being based around getting your enemy drunk and then magic punching them in the head. And this is ostensibly a kid’s show.

So I’m guessing this monster wasn’t brought over for Power Rangers.

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

I watched two different series that had been sitting on my DVR for a while.

First up, American Horror Story: NYC. In 1981, there are two serial killers targeting the gay community. This season was far less over the top than previous seasons. Unfortunately, the story just wasn’t strong enough to carry it for 10 episodes. The last two episodes felt completely unnecessary. It had some standout performances but the cast didn’t have much to really work with. There was a story with potential buried underneath that could have been interesting. Unfortunately, it just got bogged down with a lot of crap. It’s not awful but it’s far from great. Watch it if you’re a “completist”.

The other series I watched was Season One of The Old Man. This was really good. It had so many strong performances. The story and pacing made it feel like something from John LeCarre. While it did have moments of violence, its strengths were in character moments and building tension. I highly recommend the show.

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Chris-S

I was a bit torn about watching the movie adaptation of The Amazing Maurice as it’s one of the last few Discworld novels I’ve not yet read and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to potentially ruin it by seeing a likely terrible film of it first.

But I did watch it and it’s fairly good. I don’t know how faithful it is to the book, obv, but you can definitely hear Pratchett’s voice in it, which isn’t a given for adaptations of his work. The film-makers clearly have love for the source material, with some nice easter eggs Rincewind and Two-Flower! A bust of Pratchett in the villain’s lair!.

And there’s a really great cast. Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, David Tennant. They even convinced Rob Brydon to get over his Discworld Noir trauma and be in it.

The problem is that visually it’s pretty bland and in parts ugly. The humans all feel like Dreamworks rejects, the world quite empty and flat, while Maurice himself is the biggest problem, with his mouth full of way too many, too human teeth. ::shudder::.

What’s especially frustrating is that there’s a really nice 2D art style used in the film for some story book sections and it feels like the film as a whole would have looked great done in that. But of course everything has to be 3D now, so I guess that was never an option.

Interesting documentary film on BBC 2 tonight (and thus on iplayer, presumably) called My Old School, about a 32 year old guy in the 90s who pretended to be a teenager and enrolled in a secondary school.

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Todd

That’s the rub of it probably – kids were so used to seeing 30-years-olds in schools from the TV that they didn’t bat an eyelid when that guy came in going “How do you do fellow kids!”.

Seriously though that looks like a lot of fun:

Great idea to have Alan Cumming lipsync the guy.

Christian wrote:

That’s the rub of it probably – kids were so used to seeing 30-years-olds in schools from the TV

My favourite of those was the 1970s sitcom ‘Please Sir’. The teacher on the far right was 28 when the show started and all the ‘kids’ well into their 20s but playing 16. The guy second left in the back row could easily be 40.

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Christian

Christian wrote:

That’s the rub of it probably – kids were so used to seeing 30-years-olds in schools from the TV

In the US there are strict labor laws regarding the number of hours children can work (i.e. being on set). The New York State Labor Law says:

(j) Outside of live theater and other live performance, a child performer at least sixteen years but not yet eighteen years of age may be permitted at the place of employment for a maximum of ten hours per workday. When school is in session, the ten-hour period shall include no more than six hours of work, at least three hours of schooling, and up to one hour of rest and recreation. When school is not in session, the ten-hour period shall include no more than nine hours of work and up to one hour of rest and recreation.
(k) In all covered employment, when any child performer at least fourteen years but not yet eighteen years of age obtains permission from school authorities to work during school hours for up to two consecutive days, the working hours for such child performer during either or both of such days may be extended to but shall not exceed eight hours per day.

This is one of the reasons why older actors are hired to play “kids”, since adults don’t have the same time limits on work hours.

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Todd

To bring it back to Buffy, Eliza Dushku was 17 when she was hired as Faith and had to legally emancipate herself from her parents to be able to work the long nights.

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Christian, Uncle Retrospective, Todd

Dave wrote:

I just finished watching Light & Magic, a six-part Disney+ documentary on the history of ILM with lots of contemporary footage dating all the way back to the first Star Wars, as well as plenty of input from the key players (and other major filmmakers) through present-day interviews.

It’s wonderful stuff and really makes the case for these guys being some of the most important creative figures of our age, in terms of being responsible for these iconic images that have connected with people the world over. And the technical side is amazing too, seeing them invent all these technologies that we now just take for granted.

While it’s (necessarily) very Star Wars-oriented, especially early on, I appreciated the later attempts to branch out and show what ILM meant for filmmaking more widely, especially once digital technologies were on the rise.

I also liked the personal aspects that the interviews brought out. Hearing Phil Tippett talk about how stop-motion animation helped him to deal with his anxiety and depression was quite moving.

It’s not totally flawless – the elephant in the room is Lucas’s Star Wars remasters that replaced a lot of early ILM model work with CGI, and it’s simply never referred to (with all footage used thankfully from the original version of the OT) – and I also wished there was a bit more context for what other players in the same industry were up to at the same time (Stan Winston shows up here in connection with Jurassic Park but it’s only a very brief, cursory mention). But maybe that would have been too much for an ILM-focused documentary to also deal with.

Overall this was a great watch that took me back to the Making Of documentaries I watched in my youth, and it feels like required viewing for anyone who grew up on Star Wars and 1980s effects-driven movies.

The series does briefly cover just what a seismic shift the move to CGI was for ILM. While it had to be covered, the sense I got from the people in the episode it was a box that they wished to open minimally.

There’s a story to be told there, but not for this series. I think it’d need someone outside of the company to tell it.

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Dave

Thinking about it now I think you just have to cast small adults.

Jenna Ortega in Wednesday and the previously mentioned Coughlan do pretty well passing as 15/16 and are both only 5′ 1″ tall. Tom Holland works well as Spider-Man and he’s 5′ 6″. It looks like they have some growing to do.

As an extension of this theory I am now pitching Danny DeVito in a remake of Doogie Howser MD.

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Christian, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Kaleidoscope

This is an interesting experiment. Is it one that works? Not for me. It falls down in its primary aim, after seeing it once seeing it again in a different, random order is unlikely to supply much that is new.  Second, it really messes up its ending.

The best reason to watch it? Easy, this is Giancarlo’s show from start to finish.  All the other characters are far weaker and don’t do much.  Though the FBI agent Abbasi matches Andor’s Dedra for being a vicious piece of work.

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Todd

It starts off on full cheese, the opening Danger Zone is 150% nostalgia.

But it then heads into unexpected territory, with Maverick being guilt-ridden over Goose’s death and hitting his limit over how he is able to go in the Navy.  The later scene with Ice is excellent on this.

I also really liked how the film went with the idea that telling is not always enough, sometimes you have to show how to do something.

It is still, to its core, a big Hollywood blockbuster.  But in other ways it went in very different, unexpected directions.  It’s probably the best of the various 80s sequel movies I’ve seen.

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Chris-S, Dave

So Laura and I watched the movie version of Matilda The Musical the other day, we’re both fans of Tim Minchin in general and went to see the musical early in its London run and enjoyed it, so we were both primed to enjoy this version. And yeah, it’s pretty good. It follows the plot of the stage show almost to a point, is shot wonderfully with a great mixing of the mundane and the bizarre, the adult cast is great, especially Emma Thompson as Miss Trunchbull and Lashanna Lynch as Miss Honey. the CG is a bit ropey at points but that’s forgivable, especially as the physical sets are wonderful (and actually serve to enhance the final conflict between Matilda and Trunchbull in a way the stage show just couldn’t).

But two things drag it down from the perspective of someone who’s seen the stage version: The first is they cut Matilda’s Dad’s song – at the end of the intermission he comes on stage, berates the audience for reading, and sings about how you can learn everything you need from watching telly. And the other is that the child actors here are a bit too squeaky and it was hard to make out their vocals a few times, while the recording of the original stage cast is clear and easy to hear. Their version of When I Grow Up plays over the closing credits to boot, so the comparison is right there. They’re minor things and you probably won’t realise there’s an issue unless you’ve seen the show with the cast I did or listened to the album, but it is what it is.

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Dave

The new Quantum Leap is back and up to its ninth episode now, which I am happy to report is the best one yet. After a rather rocky start the show is starting to really come together now. The ongoing storyline about what is going on with the project team in the ‘present’ is getting to be rather intriguing, while this was their best effort yet at a strong leap story in the ‘past’. Kudos too to Debora Ann Woll for her performance as a Stevie Nicks style ’70s singer in the leap. I certainly wouldn’t have expected that she had it in her based off of her Karen Page in Daredevil. The show has been renewed for a second season now, so hoping they can keep the positive momentum going.

Also watched a bunch of old Mr Bean episodes with the young ‘uns, who very much enjoyed them. I hadn’t seen them at all since the ’90s and it was a welcome reminder of just how fantastic Rowan Atkinson was as a physical comedic performer.

So I live just outside Dublin City centre, in one of the oldest neighbourhoods outside the original Viking settlement and the Monastery that predated it, and the northmost edge of that neighbourhood marks the start of a road which rings the city and leads down to the docklands. Many of Dublin’s infamous and historical neighbourhoods and landmarks are on or near the road, and they’re the subject of North Circular, a documentary which I went to see in the cinema today.

Shot in incredibly vivid black and white and making extensive use of local trad musicians, the movie is essentially a series of vignettes centred around a different point on the road, talking about the changes to areas – a common theme here is the slow carving out of communities in favour of property development, people’s lives and how they interacted with institutions in the area – one man talks about his time in Grangegorman – a church-run institute that was just as bad as the infamous mother and baby homes, another talks about being in Mountjoy prison, and it concludes with a lengthy piece around Sherriff Street, an area with an infamous bad reputation that has also been hit hard by property development at the cost of the local community, the main person talking there is a musician who’s made a number of songs based around the stereotypes of people who live there, and her comments are contrasted against footage of people in the area watching Katie Harrington’s Olympic win, and her triumphant return to her home.

There isn’t much of a narrative to the stories here, except for a brief shot at the end showing that planning permission for a contentious hotel development near me was blocked after showing protests around it earlier in the movie, but as a series of snapshots of what life in this city is like, it’s fantastic. Highly recommended.

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Andrew

In an unlikely turn for me, I went to the cinema two nights on the trot, as I wanted to see Rashomon and it was the time that suited me best this week. I’d never seen it, the only Kurosawa movies I’ve watched were Yojimbo and Sanjuro way back in the day, but it’s a movie who’s reputation precedes it and we’ve all seen a movie or TV show that riffs on the framing and storytelling device. But like Citizen Kane and other trailblazing movies, the original stands out and is still fantastic, some 73 years later.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the movie begins with a woodcutter and a priest recounting the story of a trial they were witnesses at to a peasant at the titular gate outside Kyoto. The Woodcutter came across a dead man in the woods and it transpires that a bandit had raped a woman and then killed her samurai husband in the woods nearby, but the events of the trial have deeply disturbed the witnesses.

The true strength of the movie comes less in how it tells the story and how it uses the differing accounts of the rape and murder to offer the audience some difficult questions and no answers – it becomes clear that the bandit, the wife and the samurai’s ghost all lie to show themselves in what they see as a good light, and the core of this is what perturbs them – the priest’s faith in humanity is shaken by the trio lying about such an important issue, while the woodcutter is angry for reasons that come to light as the story progresses, and the peasant offers wry commentary that both explains the motives of the people involved in the crime, and mocking the handwringing of the witnesses.

Ultimately, the movie reminded me a lot of existential plays like No Exit or Waiting for Godot, with the souls of the Woodcutter and the Priest laid bare between their conversation and a confrontation with the peasant at the end. The Priest is something of an innocent, and the Woodcutter’s anger is driven by a mix of guilt and confusion at how the natural order of things has been upended while the Peasant is a cynic and has no time for the Priest’s philosophy or the Woodcutter’s anger. He cuts to the core of why they’re upset but he can’t give any resolution because his cynicism is empty, it’s no different from a 4chan screed or one of those South Park episodes that basically says “caring about things is stupid”. Kurosawa leaves it to the audience to find their conclusions, to decide which elements of which stories are real, which of the three characters at the gate are right or wrong, and what it all means.

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Ben, Todd, DavidM, Dave, Bruce

Binged the first half of The Bear last night and two more eps tonight, 2 to go. Well written, well acted, short episodes and low stakes. I loved Ebon Moss-Bachrach ever since seeing him in Girls and he’s shown up in three big things in the past year (this, the Dropout, and Andor).

I didn’t expect it to be on Disney+ since a lot of the FX shows end up on the Fox controlled streamer here (which we’re not subscribed to) – so far it’s very episodic in the classic sense; there’s not an apparent overarching storyline pushing things along; it’s a new problem or situation every week, which is refreshing – also even though it depicts running a small restaurant as backbreaking, stressful, hard work… it really makes it look appealing to me.

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Todd, Dave, lorcan_nagle, njerry

I’ve been hoping for a cinema release of Shin Ultraman for ages, and it happened this week. But apparently only for one showing, on a night I already had plans and a cinema clear on the other side of the city. So I… acquired it for home viewing.

I was a big fan of Shin Godzilla, and as such had high expectations for this and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a ground-up reboot of the Ultraman saga, starting with a breathless montage of sequences showing the sudden appearance of Kaiju on Earth, and the eventual formation of the SSSP to coordinate efforts to defeat them. When the kaiju Neronga attacks, all attempts to contain it fail until a silver giant crashes to earth, fights and defeats the monster. SSSP member Shinji Kaminaga gets caught in the blast rescuing a child, and acts oddly when he returns, catching the attention of new member Hiroko Asami who’s task is to investigate Ultraman and is meant to be his partner on the team.

As the story progresses a collection of aliens arrive, present themselves to the Japanese government with a deal that’s too good to be true but of course they’re manipulating humans for evil gain and they’re confronted by the SSSP and Ultraman, culminating in a battle with the fate of the entire world in the balance.

The movie is very episodic, it feels like one of those compilation movies that are often made of anime or other Japanese TV shows, but the TV show never existed. And I kinda want to see the 26-episode Ultraman TV show written by Hideki Anno and directed by Shinji Higuchi. It looks amazing, like CGI in Japanese TV and cinema often lags behind western examples in very noticeable ways, but Anno and Higuchi worked within those limitations in Shin Godzilla in smart ways – fast cuts, very wide and very close-up shots giving enough information to understand what’s happening without spending enough time to realise the limitations of the effects, and leaning into the uncanny valley with weird designs and movement. They also did some of the major sequences at night – like Godzilla’s atomic breath attack – and mixed CGI and physical effects but Shin Ultraman doesn’t do the last two very much. The Kaiju have a similar feel to Godzilla in terms of texture and movement while being updates of designs from the original TV show. And the two main antagonists – Alien Zarab and Alien Mefilas make amazing use of CG. Zarab is basically the front layer of a 3D form, but viewed from behind he looks like half a mould or something. When human-sized he mostly wears human clothes so it’s not noticeable for a while, but when he grows to giant size to fight Ultraman it’s clear and the weirdness works really well. Ultraman is rendered a little bit differently and it helps to make him stand out, especially as most of his effects are designed to resemble the TV show’s ones, even down to him looking like a little prop Ultraman when he’s flying. The Spacium beam looks really cool as it moves from looking like blue lines rotoscoped over the footage to a spectacular, detailed CGI explosion.

The movie has a very interesting cinematographic eye, I’m not familiar enough with Higuchi’s work to say if it comes from him, but it bears a strong resemblance to Anno’s earlier live-action movie, Love and Pop. Now that was shot in such a way that you don’t know if it’s amateurish or someone who knows what they’re doing deliberately trying to make it amateurish – there’s lots of weird angles and light balance issues in Love and Pop, and the weird angles are all over this movie – shots of characters in chairs where the camera is between their ankles, a montage as the SSSP meets in a secluded tunnel where the camera moves between looking straight at the characters’ faces, or wider shots from around them at different distances, each time the camera remains static. There’s a sequence where one character opens a bag of crisps and the camera is at the bottom of the bag looking up!

There’s definitely thematic links to Shin Godzilla here, especially around the portrayal of government. Power plays, attempts to maintain institutional power, drafting of legislation in order to control superhuman ability are all on display but they’re a background noise as opposed to the point of Shin Godzilla’s sharp, biting satire. Shin Ultraman is a far more optimistic tale. I’ve often half-joked that when you’re watching Evangelion there’s often a scene where Gendo or Misato hangs up a phone and says “The Tokyo-3 government has authorised NERV to defeat the Angel”, and Shin Godzilla is the story of that phone call – but Shin Ultraman is the flipside of that, where the SSSP has a lot in common with Rando Yaguchi’s task force from Shin Godzilla but without the red tape, they don’t have to fight against the slow-moving bureaucracy of government until it’s too late.

There’s other similarities to Evangelion as well, with the SSSP playing the role of the NERV crew in Central Dogma providing technobabble to explain the high concept part of the story or to come up with audacious plans with a one in a million chance of succeeding. It’s almost a reconstruction of a lot of the stories Eva deconstructed, a fun superhero story where the stakes are high but the heroes are both up to the task and willing to fight.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

Dave wrote:

my wife watched it and while she liked it too, she felt like it was pretty derivative of other dystopian future stuff.

I felt the same way tbh… it was fine, but like, I dunno, nothing new or particularly exciting… I know of the game and what it is about roughly, but haven’t played it myself but anyways the point is that it didn’t feel like a “must watch” kind of show. Weird that they’d change one of the core concepts of the story to make it more like a regular zombie thing Anyways, yeah feels more like “yet another zombie/dystopian show”.

Dave wrote:

What are you referring to?

That the infection isn’t airborne, in the show it’s transmited by zombie bites… not quite but basically… whereas I’m pretty sure in the game it comes from inhaling spores, which is of course marginally more original than zombies.

ahhh I thought it was more prominent…. nevermind then… still, that would’ve made for a less zombie-y show. I guess they also did it so Pedro Pascal doesn’t need to hide under yet another mask =P

I saw the pilot of That ’90s Show and it was decidedly average, which is in line with expectations really. I enjoyed That ’70s Show back in the day but then tastes do change a bit over twenty-odd years. That said, the original show did benefit from strong chemistry between the cast members that elevated it above the standard sitcoms of the time.

It was fun to see some of the original cast members show up again here and revisit those characters (my goodness, Topher Grace has neither aged a day nor gained a pound). Kitty and Red are very much overlooked when it comes to great sitcom couples. No Danny Masterson, of course, and his Hyde character is not mentioned at all. That’s the best approach to take but even the absence still casts an unavoidable, icky shadow over proceedings.

Not entirely sure who the show is aimed at, really. I presume fans of the original who want to indulge in some nostalgia but they’re not going to be interested in the new crop of teenage characters, none of whom stand out whatsoever. Younger viewers are unlikely to be hooked by all the callbacks to an older show presented in an outdated, multi-cam, laugh-track format. Probably the better approach would have been for Eric and Donna to move into the house next door to Kitty and Red and just go from there.

Now, let us never speak of That ’80s Show ever again.

I’m three episodes into That 90s Show. It’s ok. I think it relies too heavily on returning characters. Hopefully it’ll settle down on that as it goes on, give the new kids (and Kitty and Red and Andrea Anders) space. And man, you can see the despair in Wilmer Valderama’s eyes that he’s playing Fez again. “I’m on NCIS FFS, why am I stuck doing this stupid accent again?!” he screams silently.

Pale Blue Eye is a beautifully shot movie that creates an intense atmosphere, and watching Christian Bale work is great as always, and the Edgar Allen Poe aspect of it is also pretty neat. But in the end, the murder mystery aspect of it is rather trite, I thought. Still, worth watching.

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Chris-S

Todd wrote:

I FINALLY got around to finishing Welcome to Wrexham. It was a great series. I think what made the show for me was that it focused on the players and the residents. It also didn’t pull punches. It had the right amount of Rob and Ryan and it showed they had to make tough, serious decisions. But most of all, it really celebrated the people of Wrexham and what the club means to them and the city.

I’m looking forward to Season 2.

It surprised me how good it was. I was always going to watch anyway because of the Welsh links but I often have issues with US documentaries as they (and some British ones) have a habit of trailing what’s coming up and sensationalism. None of that happened in this show and the focus on the players and the community over the celeb element was refreshing. Even the stuff with Rob was often quite relatable, watching live streams in his pyjamas at 5am with his son. They have good self deprecating humour, the translator they use is a journalist based in the US who answered an ad for a Welsh speaker and they came up with the gags to have her insulting them.

I know a lot of people who have never watched a game of football in their lives really enjoy it.

An interesting omission is ‘The Captain’. He’s a Wrexham fan I have known about on Twitter even before the club was bought, his face appears briefly but they didn’t feature him. He’s quite a funny character who posts a lot of videos online and has thousands of followers and they even named a Wrexham brewery beer after him. My suspicion is they didn’t use him because he has a relationship with alcohol that they probably don’t want to promote, he does seem to be drinking and drunk most of the time.

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Todd

Two interesting but flawed films I watched recently.

Yes, Madam

This is a mid-80s HK action film and the one that made Michelle Yeoh’s name (though she’s credited as Michelle Khan, but you know what I mean). And Yeoh’s really good in it, although eclipsed somewhat by Cynthia Rothrock, who admittedly has more training. That’s in martial arts terms. To be honest, given the way they’re made, I don’t think it’s even possible to put in a good acting performance in this kind of film.

The weird thing is though, given the title and billing, you’d think Yeoh and Rothrock are the stars, but they’re pretty much edged out, in terms of screen time and narrative agency, by three low levels crooks Panadol, Aspirin and Strepsil. They’re pretty stock comic relief characters, yet just dominate the run time of the film. That, a pretty sketched in plot and an abrupt, bleak ending make for a slightly unsatisfying film. It’s similar to the other HK Rothrock film I watched recently, Righting Wrongs in that regard and with both films, I felt like seeing just the fight scenes out of context would have been fine. (oh and weirdly, the same guy plays the police chief inspector in both films).

Shiva Baby

Is an indie film about Danielle, a directionless early twenties Jewish woman who is dragged by her parents to the shiva (Jewish wake) of a woman she didn’t really know. There she runs into her childhood best friend/ex-girlfriend, who her parents warn her not to “get into any funny business with” (seeing their past relationship as “just experimenting”) and also her sugar daddy. Pretty much the whole film takes place at the Shiva, as Danielle is trapped both in the building with her parents and various neighbours and relatives and also in a web of her own lies. She’s been telling her parents she’s working as a babysitter while finishing her vague uni degree, but her sugar daddy (where she’s really getting her money) that she’s in law school. Her anxiety builds as it turns out her sugar daddy has a wife and baby he’s not mentioned, and they turn up to the shiva too.

It’s all nicely claustrophobic and complicated and the film expresses Danielle’s growing anxiety pretty well, but unfortunately it doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s no climax, it just sort of ends. And I really thought the subplot about Danielle’s father being worried about having misplaced his phone was going to feed into Danielle getting messages on her misplaced phone from a prospective new sugar daddy, with the dad turning out to be the new client, but neither of those things went anywhere.