Discuss your current viewing here.
What Are You Watching?
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Been watching the second season of After Life, and it’s very good. It’s interesting that it’s entirely left behind any comedic cynicism and is instead almost painfully sincere now, really wearing its heart on its sleeve. In the process of mourning, this is acceptance, I suppose, and we see Tony openly mourning and slowly coming to terms with how to do that and still go on living.
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Watching The Northman.
If you’re making a movie where the main characters mostly speak english, speak plainly. It irritates the hell out of me when they all have accents.
If you want them to sound scandinavian? Have them speak scandinavian.
It’s okay for a character here or there to speak with an accent to emphasize that they’re not a native speaker of the language that english is a placeholder for, and such. But everyone speaking with some sort of old-scandinavianish accent? Ugh.
It’s like the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo again. I can’t take it seriously. I really can’t.
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You’d hate Allo Allo.
No I wouldn’t. No no no. I do hate it. But for a completely different reason that has less to do with the show and more about the circumstances under which I’ve watched it.
In ‘Allo ‘Allo, it’s fine and done for comedic purposes as well as being a way to get the characters to work together. Adventures of Picasso does something similar, although everyone speaks in swed-ish gibberish.
The examples above, The Northman and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, are not comedies and the characters speech patterns are not played for laughs, but I can’t take them any more seriously than I would take Inspector Clouseau seriously because of their accents. It breaks the spell of the movie for me. I mean, if they’re doing this faux-pax modern english but accented shit, why are they not just as well wearing modern clothes like jeans and shirts that have been dirtied down to look like they’re medieval or riding around in cars painted with the word HORSE on their side?
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Frasier seemed to wage a one-show war on English accents as they had a slew of English characters, many of which were played by English actors, yet all of their accents were completely bizarre.
Of course, they also had John Mahoney, an Englishman, working a perfectly acceptable American accent for the entire run.
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The best one was when they got around to introducing the rest of Daphne’s brothers, including one played by Robbie Coltrane who just flat-out gave up on any attempt at using actual words.
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But maybe it just stands out a little more than usual when you’ve got English-speaking actors in a relatively unusual setting like Scandinavia, especially when that’s your ‘home’ territory as a viewer so you’re more sensitive to it being done (and done badly).
Yeah, I guess it grates more because it’s my home territory, but it’s hard to know for certain. The accents The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo were bad, the accents in The Northman are good. It’s the fact that they’re there that’s bad not the execution as such.
The Last Duel is another good example of this, yeah.
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We Own This City
This was a fantastic HBO miniseries. Jon Bernthal was great and deserves an Emmy for his performance. Josh Charles is almost unrecognizable as a truly horrible cop.
The series is about the real life Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore. It was corrupt as hell. It also deals with the impact the Freddie Gray death had on Baltimore police.
The miniseries was developed and written by George Pelecanos and David Simon and feel them in every scene. Of course, there are a few Wire vets in the series.
As with any show from David Simon set in Baltimore, it is bleak, infuriating, compelling, and depressing.
I highly recommend this series.
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But I guess it’s inevitable with any story that isn’t being told in its native language. You either have to go full-on foreign language (which then necessitates subtitles for non-native speakers, which would be most of the audience, and which can distance you from the story), or choose between either conspicuously modern English/American accents in a period piece or cod-local/historical accents to match the setting. All of these approaches have their advantages and drawbacks.
I’m with Anders here; the bad accents break the illusion for me. I mean, aren’t these guys supposed to be speaking their mother language? If so, why would they speak it with a weird accent that suggests that it’s foreign to them?
Of course, I was raised on watching dubbed German versions of American and English movies, so it’s the most natural thing in the world to me that Texans and New Yorkers and British people all speak High German when they’re talking to each other.
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I’m with Anders here; the bad accents break the illusion for me. I mean, aren’t these guys supposed to be speaking their mother language? If so, why would they speak it with a weird accent that suggests that it’s foreign to them?
It’s a fair point, but in the end it’s all part of the stylised way that the reality is presented in a movie like this. It’s not pretending to be true reality, but it’s trying to convey the essence of the story through heightened conventions, just like a lot of other cinematic or theatrical conventions that don’t stand up to scrutiny as being truly realistic. It’s an indicator of location without going the whole hog and having people speak the original language.
There are certainly other ways of approaching this kind of thing though. I loved the way that Iannucci’s Death Of Stalin handled it – had a crazy mix of completely different regional British and American accents for the Russian characters, which all fitted their personalities and worked beautifully.
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Ffs, the forum ate my post in the edit and now it’s not allowing me to repost it. I’ll try splitting it in half.
It’s a fair point, but in the end it’s all part of the stylised way that the reality is presented in a movie like this. It’s not pretending to be true reality, but it’s trying to convey the essence of the story through heightened conventions
I know, another classic trope is punching sounds. Normally, punching someone in the face is almost completely silent, but in movies it’s all thud whack pow etc. If it’s done sparsely or tastefully, it can work. But if it’s done too much, like either to extreme sounds or maybe just the same sound over and over and over (looking at you HRAFNINN FLÝGUR) it completely breaks the spell and becomes comical. Some people have a hangup with the classic wilhelm scream (was that you, @Christian?) being used again and again in a movie.
Another way that makes THE NORTHMAN inconsistent about this is that when they’re singing or praying, it’s all in some version(s) of old norse or gibberish sounds that are pretending to be. It breaks the already broken spell even harder for me. Like, why are they singing in yet another different language.
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There are certainly other ways of approaching this kind of thing though. I loved the way that Iannucci’s Death Of Stalin handled it – had a crazy mix of completely different regional British and American accents for the Russian characters, which all fitted their personalities and worked beautifully.
I really liked how they did it in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. The people playing russians speak russian until a point fairly early on where they’re in the captains quarters and reads a quote from a book (the bibble?) in english. After that they just continue speaking in english. I liked it, it was a way to let us firmly know they’re russian while also letting Sean Connery schpeak in hisch norrmal mannerr thrroughout the film. Which, to be fair, is a part of his appeal.
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The Orville: New Horizons
WOW.
Talk about diving into the deep end. Coming back after 3 years and starting with an incredibly serious and dark episode. Very bold. You knew how part of it was going to end but it still was one hell of a journey.
A great start.
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As for fight sounds used for comedy, I grew up on Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies which are the absolute pinnacle of ridiculous fight sounds:
Oh man, I loved those two when I was a kid… kind of like the modern Asterix and Obelix… almost =P
Also, rewatching that clip you posted I just realized my step-father kinda looked like Hill and my father kinda looked like Spencer… I wonder if that sort of influenced anything subconsciously…
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Oh, so The Orville has started. Are they weekly episode drops?
On Hulu in States, I’m pretty sure I get it on Disney+
Looking forward to it.Yes, they are weekly drops.
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but the last two are too dependent on previous experience.
But what possible audience would be coming to this, the third film in a sequel series, without prior knowledge of the previous Harry Potter films?
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But what possible audience would be coming to this, the third film in a sequel series, without prior knowledge of the previous Harry Potter films?
Seven-year-olds.
You’re telling me seven-year-olds can’t torrent old movies? I despair of today’s youth.
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This came up in my Recommendations on YouTube:
I finally watched this and it was … ok.
For a crowd-funded, amateur, straight-to-youtube production, it didn’t look cheap. The sets were extravagant (pretty much all shot on location I assume), the camerawork and directing was fine, the costumes were fine, the special effects were good enough for a TV show. The actors were good look-alikes for their cartoon counterparts.
Where the gloss slipped and it showed its amateur roots was in some of the acting (definitely not A-list standard) and the script was … competent rather than sparkling. Apparently the actor who plays Fred also wrote the script and effectively the whole project is his vision, and maybe it could have benefitted from bringing in another writer to polish it.
And it took itself far too seriously. I appreciate that they are re-imagining the cartoon for a modern angsty teen audience (and I recognise that I am not in that audience) but … jinkies, guys, lighten up! I do like the way they have given all the characters actual backstories that make them feel like real people (with built-in issues and melodrama, obviously), and generally updated the characters and mood for a new generation, but I think it’s lacking some spark that stops it short of being compelling viewing.
Perhaps my favourite part was actually the interview segment at the end of the video, where the cast and director answer fans’ questions (including a hilarious answer to “Will Scooby talk in this series?”). It shows you how much the cast care about this project, and makes me hopeful that they will learn as they go and hopefully find that spark that’s missing now, if they can continue to find the funding.
Someone had similar thoughts:
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Jurassic World Dominion: What an awful movie! Worst blockbuster I’ve seen in years!
I didn’t like Fallen Kingdom, but I was intrigued by the setup at the end with dinosaurs in the outside world and all the story possibilities that come from that. Instead, this movie ignores all of them and is just a bad kidnapped child drama, with occasional dinosaurs.
The movie opens with a presentation on how the world has changed since dinosaurs were released in the last movie, and the answer seems to be “not much!” There’s a statistic that there are 37 dinosaur-related deaths worldwide every year, which is a hilariously small number, but does set up how the dinosaurs in this movie feel completely harmless.
They keep bringing back supporting characters from the past movies as if we care about them, but have no way to fit them in naturally, so a bunch of past Jurassic World employees now work for the CIA for some reason.
The main characters don’t do much better. Bryce Dallas Howard, whose primary characteristic in the previous movies was “doesn’t want kids” is now solely defined as “mother who wants her kid back.” It’s insulting.
There’s not even a decent villain. They needed a tech CEO bad guy, but I guess all the good ones were taken, so they had to base theirs on Tim Cook. Nobody cares about Tim Cook! He’s not even hateable, he’s just pathetic.
Trevorrow’s terrible direction is most evident in the impenetrable geography of the main compound where the movie is set. It’s big enough that it needs its own hyperloop-style train system and contains several different climates, but small enough that the characters never seem to be more than five minutes walk from each other, and there’s only one security person for the entire compound.
I’ve never seen a more toothless action movie. All of the characters seem to have a forcefield around them protecting them from any harm, because it would be a bummer if they would die, and the movie’s afraid to take any risks whatsoever.
The movie is ridiculously bloodless. There are maybe five dinosaur killings max, most of them in a fairly early scene with some poachers. The only death in the entire third act, everything goes wrong, sequence, is the CEO. Even BD Wong gets out alive with an undeserved redemption arc.
The one bright spot is Jeff Goldblum, who seems to be having fun with the material (and presumably the massive paycheque). Maybe someone will compile a supercut of his best moments that you can watch instead of the movie.
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Don’t hold back, Paul. Tell us how you really feel.
The worst part is that it’s probably going to make a load of money, and Trevorrow will be given some other franchise to drive into the ground.
I hated The Rise of Skywalker, but I still feel that whatever Trevorrow would have done if he wasn’t kicked off it would have been worse.
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The one bright spot is Jeff Goldblum, who seems to be having fun with the material (and presumably the massive paycheque). Maybe someone will compile a supercut of his best moments that you can watch instead of the movie.
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The movie felt like a relic from an older era, like the 1980s. It was war-porn to be sure, but it was Generation X nostalgia-porn. It’s a movie that was common back many years ago but you really don’t see much nowadays. I can see why it was popular but it really didn’t connect with me. I feel like it’s something I would have loved as a teenager but as an adult, the faults and flaws are just glaringly obvious and they diminish the experience.
It is the sort of movie where the often misused phrase “turn your mind off” applies and it does that pretty expertly. The perfect escapism that was common in 80’s movies but engineered to the extreme by the new studio/marketing process.
Essentially, that means that there is nothing distinctive or even very specific in the characters or story. Nothing you haven’t seen before and never a moment where you can’t tell what’s coming next. They even repeat the same unidentified enemy convention of the original film – though back then, it was easier to guess who it might be.
That’s what felt out of place for me is that the US military and foreign policy has changed quite a bit and war is very different while this didn’t seem to recognize much nuance in that regard. We had the opening scene where Maverick faces the obsolescence of his very profession in the form of an Admiral pushing drone fighters – and that is a very interesting conflict, actually – but that entire theme is quickly discarded once he’s back at Top Gun.
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The concept of “dogfighting” really felt antiquated. Everything I’ve read is that with modern aerial warfare is that you’re firing missiles and rockets at each other from miles away. They can’t even visually see their target. Granted, that makes for an unexciting movie.
This bugs me about SF in particular. They dogfight in the later Star Trek series, which given their level of technology is complete insane.
We know that phasers have ranges of thousands of miles. They can fire from orbit to ground with pinpoint accuracy. In TOS they fired on Gorns at distances great enough that they couldn’t even see the target, it was just a sensor blip. Dogfights in that universe are nonsense.
But audiences love to see dogfights. The spectacle is more important than the logic.
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The concept of “dogfighting” really felt antiquated.
No shit, dog fights have been outlawed since like.. the 1800s?
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The concept of “dogfighting” really felt antiquated. Everything I’ve read is that with modern aerial warfare is that you’re firing missiles and rockets at each other from miles away. They can’t even visually see their target. Granted, that makes for an unexciting movie.
This bugs me about SF in particular. They dogfight in the later Star Trek series, which given their level of technology is complete insane.
We know that phasers have ranges of thousands of miles. They can fire from orbit to ground with pinpoint accuracy. In TOS they fired on Gorns at distances great enough that they couldn’t even see the target, it was just a sensor blip. Dogfights in that universe are nonsense.
But audiences love to see dogfights. The spectacle is more important than the logic.
That’s because realistic space battles are boring on screen. Babylon 5 experimented with more realistic looking battles and found they were hard to make look interesting, you couldn’t really follow what was happening and the flow of the narrative didn’t work, so they wound up recutting those battles to be more dynamic and close-ranged. The big example is The Fall of Night, when the Narn raiders are ambushed by a group of Shadow ships.
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Nobody, the recent Bob Odenkirk, is 90 minutes of silly old-fashioned action-movie fun. Odenkirk is surprisingly credible as an action lead, and while the plot is cartoonish and nonsensical there’s always something diverting happening on-screen to keep you entertained.
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That’s because realistic space battles are boring on screen.
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Yeah it is 0ne of those many areas where we rather pass on reality for something that’s interesting to watch (see hackers in the movies).
It’s also true with how often people with guns in movies use hand to hand combat or other weapons because frankly it’s more entertaining to watch than someone shooting from behind a barrier. It’s less effective but more fun to watch and the Indiana Jones comedy bit has an element of self-mockery because they are guilty of it through most other scenes.
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That’s because realistic space battles are boring on screen. Babylon 5 experimented with more realistic looking battles and found they were hard to make look interesting, you couldn’t really follow what was happening and the flow of the narrative didn’t work, so they wound up recutting those battles to be more dynamic and close-ranged. The big example is The Fall of Night, when the Narn raiders are ambushed by a group of Shadow ships.
As a matter of interest (as I haven’t seen it), how realistic are the space battles in the Expanse series? Because that was one of the big things that impressed me about the book, but I wonder if they felt they had to sex it up for the screen?
The thing about TOS of course is that it was practicalities of budget that meant their battles had to be “static ship fires beam of light at unseen target, unseen target fires back, ship shows no visible damage but crew throw themselves around and report damage”. Put like that, it sounds terrible. But I’d argue that in being forced to work with these limitations the writers and directors actually ended up with a more believable narrative. And not being able to show a Romulan warbird executing tight manoeuvres around the Enterprise did nothing to lessen the tension of Balance of Terror, for example. Sometimes less is more.
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That’s because realistic space battles are boring on screen.
Good news, Legends of Galactic Heroes isn’t realistic either!
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As a matter of interest (as I haven’t seen it), how realistic are the space battles in the Expanse series? Because that was one of the big things that impressed me about the book, but I wonder if they felt they had to sex it up for the screen?
The battle closest to the book is the attack on the Donnager in series 1, and after that the attack on Thoth Station is very much a dogfight, and the big setpiece battle in series 6 between the Roci and the Pella is close to the one on-page, but still much closer quarters than the novel.
The thing about TOS of course is that it was practicalities of budget that meant their battles had to be “static ship fires beam of light at unseen target, unseen target fires back, ship shows no visible damage but crew throw themselves around and report damage”. Put like that, it sounds terrible. But I’d argue that in being forced to work with these limitations the writers and directors actually ended up with a more believable narrative. And not being able to show a Romulan warbird executing tight manoeuvres around the Enterprise did nothing to lessen the tension of Balance of Terror, for example. Sometimes less is more.
Something like Balance of Terror works great because it’s a drama story set during a battle rather than an action sequence. For the same reason the Strange New Worlds episode Memento Mori would work without snazzy effects – but it’s basically a modern reworking of Balance of Terror. But think about a large action setpiece like, say the Klingons attacking DS9 in Way of the Warrior, or Sheridan retaking Earth in Babylon 5. Realistic space battles would be less visually interesting than the ones we got, and the scope of the story there relies on broad spectacle and grand vistas instead of tight, personal drama.
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And how about those Fast & Furious movies? Nobody drives like that!
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I think there’s a difference for movies that are created solely to be mindless entertainment. If you’re analysing the logic of F&F then you’re in the wrong movie. But for something like Star Trek, Babylon 5, The Expanse, and I guess Top Gun, they at least pretend to be “serious”. So anything they do that is blatantly stupid just for the sake of spectacle breaks their implied contract with the audience.
It’s like, you wouldn’t complain if you went to see an Adam Sandler comedy and it had fart jokes, but you would think the same jokes were out-of-place in a courtroom drama.
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There wasn’t a deleted scene in A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson had a particularly flatulent day?
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There wasn’t a deleted scene in A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson had a particularly flatulent day?
“You can’t handle the toot!”
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I think there’s a difference for movies that are created solely to be mindless entertainment. If you’re analysing the logic of F&F then you’re in the wrong movie. But for something like Star Trek, Babylon 5, The Expanse, and I guess Top Gun, they at least pretend to be “serious”. So anything they do that is blatantly stupid just for the sake of spectacle breaks their implied contract with the audience.
This is partially why Ronald D Moore used the term “Naturalistic Science Fiction” to describe his remake of Battlestar Galactica – he wasn’t striving to make a show that was realistic, but it felt that way, partially by using certain stylistic and visual choices. Shows and movies like Star Trek, Babylon 5, The Expanse, and Top Gun all have elements in them that are utter howlers if you’re familiar with science and engineering or flying a fighter plane, even the ones that hew to realism. Like, David Cronenberg recounted a story of a test screening of Crash, where someone complained that the movie was unrealistic because none of the cars exploded – he’d never seen a crash in person and was only familiar with them from movies and TV shows that he thought were realistic.
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none of the cars exploded
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Finished Severance over the weekend (the last three episodes) after a many weeks long break. What a well done show, the rare thing where so much real care has been taken on every shot, every frame – it’s all so deliberate and gorgeous looking.
There was one contrived part of the finale and a weird red herring, but apart from that I found it very captivating and creepy – not at all slow or boring. It’s the kind of show I expected the AVClub to have episode write-ups for – but no.
We then started the new Stranger Things; the first two episodes – I don’t get the hate so far. There’s a comfort to returning to these characters and their town and world – and there’s an additional warmth to picking up on something that last graced our screens pre-pandemic. One laugh-out-loud moment too – “Is that a foot?!” “I think it’s just a shoe”.
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Paramount+ is up in the UK now, though not through Sky yet. https://www.paramountplus.com/
The catalogue is fairly underwhelming, at least on the TV side. Aside from Trek, none of their originals look good, and their archives don’t have a whole lot to appeal to me. They have a Comedy Central hub, and it’s literally just five shows and a Russell Brand special. There’s a load of US stuff that’s never aired here that I was hoping they would include, but nope.
There’s a bunch of Showtime stuff there, but Sky already had all of it.
Their Nickelodeon hub has a bunch of 2010s stuff, but the only “classic” shows are Spongebob, Fairly Odd Parents, and Rugrats. They have Avatar and Korra, but those are also still on Netflix.
They do have all of Cheers and Frasier, which is nice.
They do have a handful of movies I’ve wanted to check out, like the original Bad News Bears and The Longest Yard, but not a whole lot.
I get the service bundled with Sky Cinema, but otherwise I wouldn’t bother with it outside of one month to catch up on some stuff and then cancelling.
At least it’s better than Peacock UK?
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Channel 5 are showing just the first episode of Halo tonight, in order to get people to sign up for Paramount+. I didn’t even realise they were owned by Paramount.
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The Glades
A fun murder show on Disney+ that ran 2010-13, it’s pretty good except… and you know what is coming….
It gets completely screwed over by getting a no-notice cancellation. Thus the fourth series kicks off, goes along, develops plots and then they are all left hanging, as part of a cluffhanger that’ll never be resolved.
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Rediscovered the Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon on YouTube.
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Rediscovered the Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon on YouTube.
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The Lazarus Project on Sky/Now is a really good watch. Lots of time loop shenanigans and compelling characters. There’s a particular brutal episode with a pregnant character going through multiple loops and the way they deal with that was surprisingly powerful..Hopefully it’ll get renewed for a second series.
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Watching more Henry Hill documentaries on YT. Scorcese did well in giving the gist, and what he decided to leave out wouldn’t really have furthered the movie but would have
sidetracked it.A few things:
The real Tommy was taller, younger, more of a hothead and was more into cocaine.
He killed Batts not just over that insult. Partly, when Batts was in jail, someone took over his racketeering operations,
and with Batts returning would have to return it to the made man. So it was reasoned that Batts had to go…Batts was with Gotti and that “family” and most likely it was Gotti behind Tommy’s demise.
When Hill was in jail, Paulie and Hill’s wife had an affair.
Tommy tried to SA Hill’s wife on another occasion.It goes on and on. Still give credit to Scorcese who should have won it all that year.
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I’ve decided to rewatch some MCU movies in the run up to Thor 4 – something I’ve not really bothered doing after a few years into the MCU, when the release schedule got so full and the back catalogue so sprawling.
Anyway, started with Thor and Avengers. Weird the things you forget. I would not have believed you if you told me the end credits for Thor was accompanied by a Foo Fighters song and Avengers by Soundgarden. And that Avengers is in 16:9 with no letterboxing.
Also completely passed me by that Powers Booth’s character from Agents of Shield was one of the security council in Avengers.
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So after meaning to do it for years, I finally got around to watching Repo! the Genetic Opera and eh…. It’s one of those things where the idea is great – a cyberpunk musical about the fucked-up machinations of the family who own the corporation that controls the organ market – but the execution falls apart in a very mediocre way. I’m not going to take potshots at the production values – there’s a lot of mid-2000s CGI and visual filters that give the movie a dated look but it’s a product of the budget and the era it was made. The more unforgiveable elements are in the way they choose to tell the story, where you’ll get dialogue explaining something, then a comic strip showing the events that have just been described, and a song about it elsewhere. And the songs are often just the characters talk-singing dialogue or shouting or singing over each other making them hard to follow – a far better idea would have been to give each character a solo song. There’s only a handful of standout numbers in the movie, and really the only good song is Zydrate Anatomy. Also, as a Skinny Puppy fan it’s pretty fucking criminal to hire Ogre and not give him a solo song or even have him prominently in one or two tracks.
Also in the macabre category is Deadly Cuts, a recent Irish comedy that takes a hackneyed plot – the community bands together to save a valued community asset – in this case a row of shops with the titular hairdressers in the middle – and the competition they plan to use to save the day is a best salon one that the owner was disgraced at when she entered it many years prior. But there’s a few complications to make it fresher – most notably that the excuse to knock down the shops is that they’re a focal point for a criminal gang… and the girls in the salon kinda sorta kill the gang’s leader during a heated confrontation and dump his body in the butcher next door’s incinerator… The other thing is that the movie is very much a Dublin movie in the same way The Commitments or the other Barrytown movies are. The sense of humour is blunt, and raucous, and vulgar and uses Dub slang to great effect so if you know the term you’ll laugh, and if you don’t they give you just enough context to get it a second too late. I’m not sure how well it’ll play with people outside of Ireland, but I had a good time. There’s solid performances all around, with Angeline Ball from The Commitments and Pauline McLynn from Father Ted in there alongside a bunch of less well-known Irish faces.
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Watching the current season of the Umbrella Academy, which is as good as the other seasons. Lots of fun.
As expected, Vanya transitions to match Elliot Page’s gender.
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The dance sequence in episode 1 and fight in the supermarket in episode 2 cracked me up so much. The show’s really grown into the weird vibe it was trying a bit too hard for early on while also working on its drama and action chops.
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I’m still making my way through Blake’s 7 and I’m in season 3, the first without Blake. It’s a credit to the show that it still works without him. Well, the show and especially Paul Darrow as Avon.
The new guy Tarrant is interesting. Mainly because he sounds exactly like Matt Berry in the interview sections of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
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I just watched the first episode of the new season of Only Murders In The Building.
I liked season one a lot but as I probably said at the time, I thought that they might struggle to bring it back for a second season and still maintain the energy and freshness of the first without it feeling like recycling old ideas.
After watching this new episode I can confidently say I’m an idiot.
There’s a huge amount here in terms of new ideas, interesting continuations of the previous plotlines, character development and great performances. In particular Martin Short seems really energised and on form, and it feels like a real gift that we’re getting something as good as this from him and Steve Martin at this late stage in their careers.
Looking forward to more.
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I revisited a couple more MCU films the past two days.
Thor: The Dark World
I’ve often said this is a perfectly decent film but far from great. I mostly stick by that, though I certainly saw more of its flaws this time around. There is definitely a better film wanting to get out of it. There are good ideas here: the singularity grenades, the animated gif book Odin has… some other things I can’t think of right now. I am certain that at some point in pre-production the fight between Malekith and Thor was awesome – an epic battle across the nine realms that presumably involved people getting punched into different realms and all sorts of hijinks. Unfortunately, by the time it ended up on screen, it was pretty dull and lifeless, with only a couple of comedy moments (Thor on the tube, Thor and Malekith sliding down the Gherkin) livening it up.
Eccleston is wasted here as Malekith. It really doesn’t help that 90% of his lines are in a fake language (which often doesn’t feel like it’s matching the subtitles, when proper nouns that shouldn’t really have a translation show up in the subtitles but not dialogue) and his motivation and characterisation is wafer thing. Oh, he wants to go back to the dark void before the universe? Why exactly? Ranting villains is a cliche, but if he’d actually had some more dialogue in that final battle, it would have helped some of these issues. And making the “Dark World” look like a Zack Snyder film is a nice burn (if it was intentional) but it just ends up looking dull throughout the film. This really needed a better director than an HBO stock director, not least because it might have coxed some more interesting performances out of people. Hemsworth is surprisingly bland through the middle of the film and Hopkins just seems to be rushing through his lines half-heartedly in places (when he’s talking to Thor about the state of the realms early on especially). There were so many places where I just found myself thinking “that’s a poor choice of shot” or “that would have been much more interesting if they’d done this” rather than being engrossed in the film.
Guardians of the Galaxy
8 years after release, this definitely lands very differently. It’s a combination of reasons, I think: the tone and style it set has been imitated and copied and used as inspiration for so many other things now, that the novelty of it here has lessened, especially – I kept thinking as watching it – compared to Thor: Ragnarok (which I aim to re-watch in a few days time, so we’ll see how that stacks up). The noxious ubiquity of Chris Pratt in the intervening years also hasn’t helped, as I had a strong reaction of “ugh, this guy again”. I found myself having no time for him trying to be a bad ass calling people “bitch” and “turd blossom” like a desperate twelve year old. (On a similar note, I listened to about half the audio commentary and it’s mostly just Gunn talking about how all the cast were either existing friends of his or now super-best friends with him, which seemed a little pathetic, honestly.)
But part of my problem is just things I didn’t want to admit, openly or to myself, when the movie first came out and was so popular. Which is that it’s not a very good adaptation of the comic it’s allegedly based on. None of the characters have the same personalities – not even Groot (especially Groot) – to the point that if you changed all the names of the characters and locations here (and quietly sliced out Thanos) you could pass this off as an entirely separate and unrelated film, completely divorced from anything to do with Marvel. Which isn’t a good thing for an adaptation. Even Knowhere could, if you just changed the name and dropped the design, be literally anything else, even just a normal planet, and still function identically to the plot of the film. Which isn’t a great thing to say about a decapitated head of a giant alien floating in space.
The only thing really setting this apart from, say, the old Mario Bros movie is that, while not a good adaptation, it is a decent enough film on the whole. Except for Peter Serafinowicz though, who at no point feels like he’s in the same movie as anyone else and whose line reading of “what a bunch of a-holes” is completely jarring. I could have sworn he said “assholes” in the trailer version of that scene.
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I remember being surprised at the time that GotG was praised for being so original, as I think a lot of its humour has roots in the Whedon style that was already popular at the time (including in the MCU with Avengers). I also never really got the appeal of Pratt.
So my feelings on it haven’t changed much – I thought it was a decent enough fun Marvel movie then and I still do now, even if it’s never blown me away like it did some people.
But what I do think it offered in terms of freshness and originality was a much more colourful and vibrant take on sci-fi space adventures – really bringing that bold look of the Marvel cosmic comics to the screen, in a way that has been imitated by lots of other movies and TV shows since. If it’s had any lasting influence I think it’s probably that.
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Spoiler from Westworld season 4 episode 1: TEDDY!!!!!!!!!!!
Why would you do that and not spoiler-tag it? I haven’t had a chance to watch the episode yet.
I’ve edited it now but it would be great to keep spoilers to dedicated threads rather than the general watching thread.
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I have a lot of trouble with spoiler text and it really isn’t that great of a spoiler. BUT i apologize for spoiling it. I looked at it as more of a tease than a spoiler myself.
he does not appear until ep2 cliffhangeryes it worked. dont look at this spoiler it is more than just a test.
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Spoiler from Westworld season 4 episode 1: TEDDY!!!!!!!!!!!
That was announced before the season started.
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That was announced before the season started.
I hadn’t seen it talked about anywhere, and it was pretty obviously considered a spoiler by the fact that it was introduced as a spoiler from episode 1.
I don’t want to make too big a deal of this in the grand scheme of things, but there’s really no need to be posting spoilers for something as soon as it’s aired.
All it means is that I’m now going to be looking out for something and expecting it, rather than being surprised by it.
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(spoiler)Bruce Willis is Luke’s father(/spoiler)
Noooooooooooooo!
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(spoiler)Bruce Willis is Luke’s father(/spoiler)
Noooooooooooooo!
Search your feelings, you know this to be true.
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(spoiler)Bruce Willis is Luke’s father(/spoiler)
Noooooooooooooo!
Search your feelings, you know this to be true.
It’s a trap!!!
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(spoiler)Bruce Willis is Luke’s father(/spoiler)
Noooooooooooooo!
Search your feelings, you know this to be true.
It’s a trap!!!
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
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This week’s The Orville: New Horizons was an incedibly powerful episode that called back to a previous pivotal episode.
And we finally get to see Bortus do something that has only been hinted at.
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For All Mankind S3 continues to be great, four episodes in. I saw someone describe it as a season made up entirely of episodes that could be season finales, and that definitely feels right. I hope they can keep it up.
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Watching The Birdcage (1996)
Excellent film. Restrained Robin Williams and unhinged Nathan Lane. Azaria is great fun too.
Hard to believe I missed this in my Robin Williams marathon.
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It’s a Sky science fiction show, so my expectations were low, but I watched and really enjoyed The Lazarus Project, a show about a shadowy organisation with the ability to reset the timeline to the previous July 1st in order to prevent world-ending events. It’s created by Joe Barton, who also did the excellent Giri/Haji a few years ago.
It does a good job of mixing a main season-long storyline with individual episode stories, a bunch of which use Lost-style flashbacks to give backstories to the various team members. It makes good use of the specific version of time travel rules the show sets out, and it’s the first time in ages I’ve gotten to end of the first season of a new show and felt like I’d be pissed off if it gets cancelled.
The lead is Paapa Essiedu from I May Destroy You, and the series’ main antagonist is Tom Burke, but I didn’t know the rest of the cast (aside from Caroline Quentin as the group’s boss), all of whom I liked.
Sky’s shows rarely get much attention (the only other one I watch is Gangs of London), but I hope that this one can break through, if only among SF fans.
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I finally got around to watching Last Night In Soho tonight. I liked it quite a bit – the first half especially is great and it has a very decent cast – but it did tail off a little at the end as it struggled to bring everything together for a satisfying finish. I enjoyed it though.
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Some more MCU rewatching ahead of Thor 4
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Remember when supposed feminist Joss Whedon made an Avengers film that had a forcibly sterilised woman calling herself a monster because of it? Remember when Joss Whedon spent so much of the run time of his second Avengers movie insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that there was something between Banner and Natasha? And then it basically got dismissed with one line in the next Avengers movie?Generally, this is better than I think its reputation now suggests, but there are parts of it that do feel, retrospectively, like hints towards the kind of person Whedon has been revealed to be since. And the Bruce-Natasha thing is just bizarre. There’s no previous set up for it really, the actors don’t really have any chemistry (Natasha has more chemistry with Cap in one charged exchange. Hell, Banner has more chemistry with Stark), and it just sucks up time that could have been spent on other things. Like Stellan Skarsgard, who ends up doing sod all here.
Remember when the film came out and Whedon said that he was forced to include Thor’s vision in order to keep the farm scenes, and this got presented as art striving agains corporate demands? But Thor’s vision stuff is crucial to the plot and gets so off-handedly done that it doesn’t entirely make sense.
Guardians 2
This is a step up from the first Guardians film. The more internal focus – pretty much everything is based around personal and inter-team dramas, rather than having to try to sell some space genocidist as a legitimate threat – gives it a more even feel. The humour feels much better written, relying far less on “hey, Chris, just think of something funny to say here”. The direction is more self-assured visually too. Plus, Sean Gunn is really good in his expanded role, one of the rare times film nepotism paid off.I wasn’t expecting much from this after the disappointment of revisiting the first. And really, the further I got away from seeing it the first time, I found myself remembering it less fondly each time, but it’s good.
Thor: Ragnarok
Absolutely holds up. Brilliant in every regard (ok, maybe not Cumberbatch’s yellow gloves, but at least they tried it!). Even Hemsworth’s Aussie accent slipping out in places feels like it’s character development based (as Thor continues to get less stuffy and stuck up). Shame the whole Starship Asgard set-up at the end is immediately trashed by…Infinity War
Which I actually double-billed with Raganarok tonight and it wasn’t as long as I expected, all told.
Again, this holds up pretty well. It juggles its many balls sufficiently and it successfully captures that comics cross-over event feel. Star-Lord feels more like the dickhead he was in GotG 1 than he was in GotG 2, at times, but I think that’s understandable given the different teams and cross-over in production periods. I’m not wild about Stark’s nanobot stuff either, which takes the armour concept into the realms of space magic.I don’t think I’d noticed before that the film ends with “Thanos will return”. And I certainly didn’t know until looking at imdb tonight that Kenneth Brannagh did the Asgardian distress call.
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Watching some Seinfeld reruns:
My favorite one was when George decided to do “the opposite” of all his first impulses.
He ended up getting this new girlfriend and landed a job with the NY Yankees.
In the same ep, Elaine’s story was the contrast and she messed up as her boyfriend dumped her and
she got fired. Jerry was also a contrast and kept on breaking even.The other ep was the one where George resented Jerry for always being “the life of the party” in all
the social settings and double dates.Seinfeld is 90s, but a few eps still hold up. But now when I see Julia (who plays Elaine), she is assembling her own SH team in the MCU.
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I watched Spiderhead, which had some interesting ideas – it’s about prisoner volunteers in a drug program, using drugs that influence their behaviour supposedly to help people with, like, addiction problems and whatever, and there’s a few twists and turns that could’ve been quite good but somehow lack an impact – but didn’t quite manage to turn them into a good movie. Hemsworth turned in a good performance (if maybe a bit too deliberately doing too much), playing the bad guy with a lot of charm and energy, that was very watchable – which was a good thing because Miles Teller opposite him was as devoid of charisma and just empty as he always is. It’s a mystery to me why this guy has one of the hottest carreers right now. It’s an okay movie to watch on Netflix, basically.
Also, Umbrella Academy’s 3rd season had a great wrap-up. Fantastic season overall, I thought.
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