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Are you going to watch Live Another Day next or leave it there?
Yeah, I’ve started on Live Another Day, and will watch Legacy, which I’ve never seen.
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24: Live Another Day
I’d forgotten how different a visual style this has to the main series – it tries to be a lot more “cinematic” in terms of camera angles, music, etc (though with a lot of dodgy explosion CGI). It takes a while to get get used to, as well as the disconnect of seeing the very American Jack Bauer running around London streets and housing estates.
Despite the different visual style, this is another season that just feels like 24 playing the hits: stolen military device, crooked White House staffers, muslim terrorists played by white people, a bunch of new agency people to spout exposition.
Goth Chloe is a very silly idea: it never stops looking stupid, and the revelation that her husband and son died offscreen after the last season is too dark an explanation for it. I get that they were trying to give Rajskub something new to work with, it just doesn’t work.
John Boyega has a fairly major role in the opening episodes, and then completely disappears, presumably right around the time he had to leave to film Star Wars. Michelle Fairley is good as the main terrorist, and Stephen Fry has some fun as Prime Minister. Colin Salmon gets little to do as an American General though, and then disappears, replaced in the last few episodes by Philip Winchester, as I guess Salmon was busy?
None of the CIA people make much of an impression, so it’s hard to care when they die or turn out to be baddies. Yvonne Strahovski is fine as the one person who recognises that they should listen to Jack, but it’s just a less fun version of her Chuck character.
The least British thing about the season: due to a product placement deal, everyone uses Sprint, a company that never operated in the UK, as their mobile operator.
Boy, is the ending of this miniseries a downer. Yet another Jack love interest gets murdered, and he gets taken by the Russians. The producers clearly thought that they’d get Kiefer back to do another miniseries a few years later, but instead he did Designated Survivor, they did the Bauer-free 24: Legacy, and Jack has been presumably stuck in Russian prison for a decade now.
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It was national cinema day in the UK yesterday, where all tickets are just £4, so we went to see the new 3D re-release of Coraline. I don’t love 3D films but this was great, the effects works brilliantly for stop-motion animation and actually emphasises the tangible nature of it all (whereas I feel like it’s often a distraction in live-action). I’d definitely see other similar animations in this style.
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The least British thing about the season: due to a product placement deal, everyone uses Sprint, a company that never operated in the UK, as their mobile operator.
That’s up there with an episode of The Blacklist that has a short scene set in “Leeds”, where a guy and his young daughter are walking down a very American suburban street, see a kid with a lemonade stand and says “we always stop for lemonade stands”. And then get blown up.
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The least British thing about the season: due to a product placement deal, everyone uses Sprint, a company that never operated in the UK, as their mobile operator.
That’s up there with an episode of The Blacklist that has a short scene set in “Leeds”, where a guy and his young daughter are walking down a very American suburban street, see a kid with a lemonade stand and says “we always stop for lemonade stands”. And then get blown up.
The IRA’s most nefarious plot
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I’ve watched the first two episodes of Kaos on Netfilx and it’s a lot of fun. Jeff Goldblum is having all the fun playing Zeus. It’s a fun bit of world building as well.
I watched the first two episodes last night too, and thought it was a bit better than I expected.
In some ways it’s kind of weirdly dated in its approach – it basically feels like someone deciding to do Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, but with the Greek gods – but it kind of works and is fairly watchable. Jeff Goldblum is the standout being very Jeff Goldblum, but the cast is pretty decent in general. I’ll definitely watch a bit more at least.
Another Netflix show that has started out better than I expected is the new Terminator Zero anime. Only one episode in, but it looks like quite an interesting story so far, and feels tied to the franchise without just imitating stuff that’s come before. I’m watching in Japanese with subtitles though as I found the English dub quite grating.
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Slow Horses 4, episode 1 — Fucking awesome!
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24: Legacy
I never watched this one before. It’s better than I expected! I like the cast, it’s not just repeating the same beats over and over again, and the plot mostly works. Corey Hawkins is a decent lead, and I was rarely wishing Kiefer were around.
They do a much better job of building up the new CTU cast than the various agencies of the last few seasons. Dan Bucatinsky is probably the stand-out, though Teddy Sears is good too, and Miranda Otto is strong as the co-lead of the show.
The politics stuff doesn’t work quite as well. Jimmy Smits is a good Palmer analogue, but Gerald McRaney as his scheming father is a bit one-note.
It’s a bit odd to see Kathryn Prescott still playing a high school student almost a decade after Skins, even if she was an actual teenager on that show. Her terrorist plotline feels very disconnected from the rest of the show, if deliberately so. CTU basically have no idea about her plan until she successfully blows up the George Washington Bridge halfway through the season.
The show doesn’t go too heavy on connections to the original series – aside from a clunky namedrop of Edgar in the first episode, it’s just Tony’s involvement, which works okay. They can’t seem to decide if he’s a full heel (he’s a mercenary who tortures and kidnaps people), or still a decent guy.
I would say the show’s big problem was launching too soon after Live Another Day, less than three years later, and at a time when people weren’t watching much network TV anymore. There wasn’t much appetite for a revival yet.
My season rankings:
5
4
Legacy
2
7
Live Another Day
8
1
3
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It’s a bit odd to see Kathryn Prescott still playing a high school student almost a decade after Skins, even if she was an actual teenager on that show.
I just went and checked to see if she was the twin that got really hench and into bodybuilding and that turns out to be her sister, Megan (who is now using OnlyFans to fund a Fringe show about how being a child actor is a bit like being a sex worker… :s) while Kathryn has had three years of major surgery and recovery after being run over by a cement truck. :|
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We saw Beetlejuice 2 today. A real pleasant surprise, it matches the original and maybe even betters it.
It just feels like a prime-era Tim Burton movie but made today, even down to Justin Theroux as a classic 1980s sleazeball.
Plus I like that it doesn’t just try to remake the original but actually tells a different story that’s actually strengthened by its relationship to the original.
Keaton, Winona Ryder and Wednesday are all great in it and supporting players like Willem Dafoe and Monica Belluci seem to be having a great time too.
Lots of laughs and a runtime barely over 90 minutes, what’s not to like.
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Over the weekend we watched The Perfect Couple, the new starry Netflix whodunit miniseries.
I like a good murder mystery and this has all the ingredients, with a decent setup and a White Lotus-style combination of both wallowing in and satirising all the luxury and excesses of the rich.
But it ends up feeling a bit repetitive and one-note, with multiple twists around who’s fucking who, and which characters were secretly watching other characters secretly watching someone else, and the later revelations get increasingly silly and implausible to the point where the whole thing falls apart.
The only really good performances in it are Liev Schreiber as the washed up sleazy dad and Donna Lynne Champlin as one of the investigating cops. Everyone else is pretty much reduced to one-note eye-candy.
At least it’s self-contained and only six episodes.
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Watched The Rings of Power S2 finale.
I liked this second series a lot more than the first, but it would not have been able to do what without what the first series put in place. If Amazon are smart they’ll confirm series three fast.
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The Notorious Betty Page.
You’d think a Betty Page fan that has a thing for Gretchen Mol (God, she is beautiful) would’ve seen this long ago. Damn near 20 years old.
Good movie, just not great. It stays on the safe side of not being porn.
Great cast, Gretchen is perfect, a bunch of familiar faces I like, and Jared Harris can never be wrong.2 users thanked author for this post.
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For reasons passing even my own understanding, I downloaded all of Saved By The Bell: The New Class recently. I’ve been playing a game on Switch that is very grindy, so something to have on TV and not have to pay full attention to while playing in handheld mode is nice.
I quite liked the original Saved By The Bell when I was a kid and I still have nostalgia for it (I’m not convinced how much it’d hold up to modern viewing, especially after seeing TNC). I think it helped that I was about 5 or 6 when I started watching it. If I’d been the same age as the characters, I don’t think I’d have been at all interested. But I was all in on those Peter Engel shows in my single digit years: SBTB, Hang Time, California Dreams especially and The New Class. But I only ever caught the latter sporadically, on both TCC and Channel 4, and it never seemed to have the same cast members between episodes. That’s a reason why I decided to go through it, starting with season 1 and… wow is it bad.
There’s two main problems. (Well, three if you want to include the scripts, but I can’t imagine they’re much, if any, worse than the ones original SBTB had). First is that the acting is broadly terrible. The cast are, admirably, all roughly the same age as the characters, there’s no 25-year olds as teens (well, maybe for some of the minor roles) but that means they’re not desperately well trained. They don’t gel well and they’re all delivering their lines awkwardly. Someone really needed to just spend some time with them, as a group, and get them to relax a bit.
The other problem is the set of characters. They’re mostly fine, with two exceptions. You have Vicky, a sort of generic 90s awkward headcase (she’s vegan! she’s a hypochondriac! she’s for animal rights probably!); Megan, the smartest girl in school (played by Beyonce’s half-sister); Lindsay, who… is just blandly nice; Tommy D, Lindsay’s biker-ish boyfriend; then Scott and Weasel, who are basically clones of Zack and Screech.
I can sort of see why they felt recreating that was a good idea, but it really isn’t. It makes the whole show feel like “here’s a bunch of knock offs” rather than just “here’s another group of kids”, especially as they initially have Scott break the fourth wall the way Zack did. The bigger issue is just that the actor playing Scott, Robert Sutherland Telfer, has negative charisma. The Zack/Scott archetype is a charming con man type, a loveable rogue. Mark Paul Gosselaar nailed that. Telfer just makes Scott seem like a sleazy dickhead. The stories don’t help: in the first episode he falls for Lindsay and starts trying to manipulate her into breaking up with Tommy D for him – in the second episode he’s resorted to dressing in drag and posing as his own cousin to attend a sleep-over to gaslight Lindsay into thinking she has nothing in common with Tommy – but Telfer just seems like a creep the entire time. He’s incapable of conveying sincerity, so when he inevitably has to apologise or show contrition, he still sounds exactly like he did when he was pulling the con or manipulating people. Weasel isn’t as bad, though Isaac Lidsky hams up his lines too much, but ultimately he just does feel like Screech 2.0.
The most interesting thing about this first season is actually what happened to the actors who played Scott and Weasel after SBTB. They were both dropped after season 1 (along with Bonnie Russavage, who played Vicky, who was arguably the best actress in the group). Telfer, allegedly, because of his bad behaviour on set, which extended to trying to pick fights with random extras. He doesn’t have any other acting credits on IMDB but now has a public Facebook page where he posts lots of angry right wing memes. Meanwhile, Isaac Lidsky, (who, like Dustin Diamond before him, was only 14 playing older as Weasel) was diagnosed with a degenerative disease in his eyes that led to him going blind. He went to college at 15, graduated Harvard at 20 with a computer science degree, founded an internet advertising start-up in 1999 that survived the dot-com burst and was sold for millions years later. But he’d left that to go back to Harvard to get a law degree, after which he became a clerk to Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and RBG and is now a famous lawyer and activist.
Very divergent paths from a Saved By The Bell sequel, of all things.
Anyway, I lasted about three and a half episodes into season 1 before just skipping around. I’m mainly just looking for episodes where future famous people show up, such as James Marsden as a popular sleaze in one episode (who out-acts everyone around him, although he was 20, so probably better trained) and Buffy’s Emma Caulfield in a season 2 episode, where she plays a school nurse who has a thing with Screech.
Ah yeah, Screech. So in retooling for season 2, some new kids were brought in. There’s Brian, who is still a bit like Zack and Scott, but it’s dialled back a bit, he doesn’t break the fourth wall and he’s Swiss, for some reason. Then there’s his best mate Bobby, who is more of a unlucky in love loser than a Screech (and played by a guy with the incredible name of Spankee Rodgers. He has no other credits on IMDB and I fear to google him) and rich girl Rachel, who had been in an episode in season 1. She’s played by Sarah Lancaster, who actually progressed to a decent career in things like Chuck (to be fair, Linsday and Megan’s actresses have subsequently done stuff as well, I’m just not familiar with any of it).
But the main addition is Screech, who returns to the school as an admin assistant to Mr Belding. It… doesn’t work. He’s incredibly annoying, which admittedly is Screech’s whole deal, but his dynamic with Mr Belding is just odd and it feels like a desperation move all round. Dustin Diamond is fresh off the just cancelled SBTB: The College Years and really this should have been the point in his career when he went off to reinvent himself, as the others did. Instead, he retreated to the security of Screech for six more seasons, which killed his career long-term, because he became indivisible from the character. But ultimately it just gets in the way of the actual kids taking centre stage fully.
The acting seems marginally better for season 2, but the weirdest bit is that all the episodes, in air date order, are out of order. First episode, everyone is going back to school (presumably for the start of a new years, but possibly just term). Second episode: school’s out for summer, Belding and Screech are working at a country club (huh?) and the kids are hired on as staff (huh?). There’s about six episodes set in that country club, along with two at Screech’s cousin’s dude ranch (of course) and they’re just sprinkled through out the series. The two part series finale (set at the school, just to make the timeline make less sense) didn’t air consecutively either. American TV, man.
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We watched Nobody Wants This, a new Netflix romcom series about a female sex/relationship podcaster who starts dating a male rabbi, and how their relationship develops and copes with cultural obstacles (most notably the fact that she’s not Jewish).
It’s fun and likeable but very lightweight and frothy – Kristen Bell is the lead and is always charming, but her counterpart Adam Brody doesn’t get much to work with as his character is just a bit too perfect and flawless to ever feel like a real, fully-rounded character. Plus the sex/relationship chat is more chaste than SATC was decades ago, and their relationship difficulties never really feel like more than minor speedbumps along the way.
Having said that it’s still very watchable, with a supporting cast that help add a bit of life to a fairly bland main story – particularly Timothy Simons (Jonah from Veep) and Justine Lupe (who I know as Willa from Succession), who are both good.
We got through it very quickly and would happily watch more, with this first season very much leaving things open for a continuation.
(Now watch Netflix cancel it.)
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We watched Nobody Wants This, a new Netflix romcom series about a female sex/relationship podcaster who starts dating a male rabbi, and how their relationship develops and copes with cultural obstacles (most notably the fact that she’s not Jewish).
It’s fun and likeable but very lightweight and frothy – Kristen Bell is the lead and is always charming, but her counterpart Adam Brody doesn’t get much to work with as his character is just a bit too perfect and flawless to ever feel like a real, fully-rounded character. Plus the sex/relationship chat is more chaste than SATC was decades ago, and their relationship difficulties never really feel like more than minor speedbumps along the way.
Having said that it’s still very watchable, with a supporting cast that help add a bit of life to a fairly bland main story – particularly Timothy Simons (Jonah from Veep) and Justine Lupe (who I know as Willa from Succession), who are both good.
We got through it very quickly and would happily watch more, with this first season very much leaving things open for a continuation.
(Now watch Netflix cancel it.)
Nobody Wants This Renewed for Season 2 at Netflix, With New Showrunners
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I went to see Transformers One earlier today and had a good time. Set in Cybertron’s distant past, it’s 50 Cycles (presumably meaning years this time around) since the end of a war with the Quintessons in which the Thirteen Primes and the Matrix of Leadership went missing, and the whole Cybertronian population moved underground. Without the Matrix energon doesn’t flow naturally across the planet so an underclass of Cybertronians without Transformation Cogs mine energon from deep inside Cybertron’s ever-shifting interior while Sentinel Prime leads expeditions to the surface in search of the Matrix.
Orion Pax, a miner is constantly pushing against the strictures of society, breaking into archives to try and find information on the Primes and the Matrix, disobeying orders, and sneaking into the presigious Iacon 5000 race. His best friend, D-16 frequently gets caught up in Pax’s rebellious actions, either being dragged along or haivng to bail him out afterwards. After finding a a map that might lead to the Matrix, Pax, D-16, their former supervisor Elita-1 and the overly talkative B-127 wind up on the surface of Cybertron, find the last resting place of the Primes, and discover that their whole lives have been a lie, leading them to take extreme action.
So we’re in origin territory here, and the story is basically a remix of elements from prior Transformers universes. The main elements come from the IDW comics/Cyberverse with Orion Pax/Optimus Prime and D-16/Megatron being friends who begin a rebellion and end up having ideological clashes, but there are elements from the Aligned Continuity in here too as well as a few other little bits thrown in here and there for good measure. It’s a very resnonant tale between the idea of an abused proletarian underclass rising up and the erosion of a close friendship, and this is very much a movie about D-16 becoming Megatron, even moreso than Orion becoming Optimus Prime. Orion doesn’t have as far to go, there’s a scene where Elita-1 talks about how he’s always had hope, which leads to him taking massive risks even when they’re stupid, and that’s really the core of Optimus as well, that hope and drive. But D-16 goes from being a reluctant accomplice to incandescent with rage and then as Megatron, driven by that anger to tear everything down. There’s some really nice visual tells for this, like D-16’s eyes darkening over the back half of the movie.
And on that note, while the cast is dominated by celebrity voices, it doesn’t feel like gimmick casting. Chris Hemsworth gradually moves from a more neutral voice into something close to a Peter Cullen impression, Scarlet Johannson doesn’t have as much to do as Elita but she’s got some great line deliveries, Keegan-Michael Key is very funny as B-127 in a role that could very easily have been as annoying to the audience as the characters in the movie find him, John Hamm is fantastic as the slimy and duplicituous Sentinel Prime and Buscemi’s gruff voice is oddly perfect for Scarscream, like Chris Latta’s rasp was downtuned. But Brian Tyree Henry as D-16 steals the show, he has so many amazing moments and rants as the movie progresses.
There are issues though. As a Transformers nerd and a big fan of the IDW comics, the smoothing out of the Thirteen Primes to being depicted as unequivecably good is a bit eh. Like there’s potential to go back and add the shades of grey… and black but I’d be shocked if any potential sequel touched that. Also the plot is a bit overstuffed with a lot going on. A lot of people complained that the first trailer concentrated too much on the funny moments, but the second concentrated a lot on the darker elements later in the movie and really, neither of them really reflect the movie as it is. Some dangling plot points are basically left to a sequel to deal with. The action scenes have a tendency to degenerate into lots of fast moving objects that kinda blend together, but at this point I feel that’s just the price we’re gonna pay for Transformers on the big screen if there’s more than a couple in any scene.
A lot of people have been declaring this the best Transformers movie yet and I don’t know if I agree. It’s certainly up there with the 1986 one and Bumblebee, but I don’t know where I’d put it just yet.
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I have seen where Transformers One is the first of a trilogy, and they will all serve as a prequel to the Michael Bay TF movies.
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I think they’re outright stating that TFOne is an entirely new continuity. Like I know the Bayverse sees internal continuity as some sort of nerd bullshit, but I don’t know how they’d reconcile D-16 finding Megatronus’ corpse in TFOne with Megatronus being the main antagonist in Revenge of the Fallen.
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I don’t know how they’d reconcile D-16 finding Megatronus’ corpse in TFOne with Megatronus being the main antagonist in Revenge of the Fallen
The Transformers MultiVerse, obviously. Why should Marvel have all the fun?
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The fan club comics got so wound up in multiverse bullshit they actually had to do a story that closed it up, basically Loki series 2 with robots. If a Transformers nerd starts talking about universal streams or uses terms like Primax, Viron, or Tyan, just make your excuses and leave as quickly as you can. Unless you have trouble sleeping, anyway
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Watching The Rings of Power, and I don’t really know why. Way less enthused about season 2 than Ben seems to be; it’s more of the same to me, as of this point (ep 4). Which means to say, it’s pretty mediocre fantasy.
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If a Transformers nerd starts talking…just make your excuses and leave as quickly as you can.
Edited this down to a snappier version.
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So I’ve been watching a bunch of new anime recently, all of which are on Netflix as it happens.
Ranma 1/2 is the one with the fewest episodes out so far, episode 3 goes up tomorrow evening. It’s a new adaptation of the classic manga which is one of the cornerstones of the modern manga and anime romantic comedy. The plot, for anyone unfamiliar centres around the Tendo school of Indiscriminate grappling. Soun Tendo only has daughters and is worried about the legacy of his school, so he and his friend Genma arrange that one of Soun’s daughters – matriarchal Kasumi, laconic Nabaki and athletic boy-hater Akane will marry Genma’s son Ranma. The thing is when Genma and Ranma return from a training trip to China to meet the Tendo girls, Genma is a panda and Ranma is a girl…
Turns out they went to a cursed set of springs to train where every spring bears a horrible curse. Ranma knocks Genma into the spring of drowned panda – a very tragic story you see, 500 years ago a panda drowned in that pool and now whenever someone goes into the pool they become a panda. And enraged at becoming a panda, Genma in turns knocks Ranma into the pool of drowned girl – a very tragic story, you see… When they get hit with hot water they turn back to their original form, but cold water turns them into a panda or girl respectively. Nakabi and Kasumi basically volunteer Akane to be Ranma’s fiancée, and we’re set for a screwball comedy where they hate each other and learn to love each other over time, sprinkle with a bevy of people who all love Akane or Ranma and are all martial artists in their own rights and you’re ready for mayhem.
It’s very early to declare the overall quality of the show, but the first two episodes were a hoot. They’re fairly accurate adaptations of the first couple of chapters of the comic, down to using a bunch of the same jokes and 30 years later they still make me laugh, and even laugh out loud with the delivery. A large amount of the cast from the original anime is back and they inhabit their roles with ease, adding so much to the sharp dialogue with comic timing and expert delivery. The animation is fantastic, especially for the action scenes, Akane and Ranma’s fight in episode 1 is fantastic, with Ranma deftly avoiding her attacks. I’m having a great time with the show and hope the quality remains.
Moving on to a brandnew show but still based on a popular manga, there’s Dandadan, which with only 3 episodes out is already one of the rising stars of the current anime season. It focuses on Momo Ayase, a teenage girl who’s just split up with her asshole boyfriend and in lonlieness strikes up a friendship of sorts with a boy in her class she nicknames Okarun. They argue over the supernatural, she believes in spirits, he believes in aliens and they vehemently disbelieve in the other’s obsession. So they make a bet, he goes to a site of alleged spiritual energy, she to a place people claim they’ve been abducted by aliens and whover finds evidence of the other’s belief has to serve the other.
Naturally, she gets abducted by aliens who want to get her pregnant to propagate their species, and he gets posessed by Turbo Granny, a demon obsessed with eating genitals. in escaping the aliens Momo’s chakras align and latent psychic powers are unlocked which allow her to keep Turbo Granny from taking control of Okarun’s body, and they end up fighting spirits and aliens.
This is another comedy action hybrid, which has the potential to also do a romantic plot between Momo and Okarun (who coincidentally is named Ken Takakura, a real-world actor Momo sees as her ideal man despite the height of his career being in the 50s and 60s), but for now it’s more the pair bouncing off each other as they move between tender moments of friendship and frustration at the situation they find themselves in. The animation is by Science Saru, who recently did the Scott Pilgrim anime and their work here is phenomenal. The show is a joy to watch with fluid and dynamic animation and stylish, stylised action.
Finally, we have Gundam: Requiem for Vengance, which is the most recent release but all 6 episodes were released the same day, so it’s the only complete viewing experience. And this show asks the question: What if the hero mech of one show was a horror movie monster in someone else’s show? Set a little after halfway through the original gundam TV series, it focuses on Iria Solari, the leader of a platoon of Zeon Mobile Suits. After taking a base in Romania from the Earth Federation, they’re subject to a counterattack from a Gundam, which handily destroys the Zeon forces and leaves Iria leading a small group of soldiers including the only other survivor of her team across the European countryside as they look for safety in a warzone, encountering and attempting to escape the Gundam time and again.
So this is an interesting entry in the Gundam franchise. It’s primarily a western production, written by Gavin Hignight who’s got a lot of credits writing kid and family-favourite animation like Transformers, Marvel tie-ins and Ninja turtles, and directed by Erasmus Brodau, best known for the Warhammer 40,000 fan-film Lord Inquisitor. The last time something like this happened we got G-Saviour, which is the only Gundam production to be decanonised but I feel Requiem for Vengance is safe from that fate by virtue of being pretty good. It’s all photorealistic CGI, and to be quite frank a lot of effort was spent on lovingly rendering Mobile Suits and other military hardware, and less effort spent on the characters. It doesn’t detract from the story too much, but there are a few moments of uncanny valley. But really, this show is about the mecha, and the show delivers in spades here.
As I aluded earlier, the Gundam seen in this show feels as much like a monster in a horror movie as it does a piece of military hardware. There’s shades of this in the original Gundam TV show towards the ends where Amuro is dispatching Zeon mobile suits by the dozen and you get brief shots of their pilots in terror as they die. For the first three episodes especially the Gundam feels like Pyramid Head or something, appearing exactly when the characters feel safe and leading to a hasty, terrified retreat. There’s no supernatural powers on display though – well, beyond the whole Newtype psychic thing- it’s just the Gundam’s superior technology and weapons allowing it to handily destroy just about anything sent to fight it. There are also more traditional military conbat scenes, or as traditional as you can get when giant robots are increasingly commmon in combat.
Sadly, the show falls down a bit at the end, the last two episodes feel more like stand-alone stories that are linked to the first four as opposed to a direct continuation of those events and the while the ending has a lot of cool moments and a decent capstone to the journey of the characters both emotionally and physically, there’s other elements that are a bit rushed or unsatisfying. Overall it’s still a fun watch even if just for the mech mayhem, but like all the best Gundam shows there’s more to it than just mayhem.
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I saw The Wild Robot, which was lovely. Definitely one that’s going to get a lot of play for families once it shows up on Netflix in a few months.
I’m rewatching the first season of The Devil’s Hour on Prime Video, because the second season just came out and I have absolutely no memory of what happened in it. All I remember is that it was really creepy and I was shocked when they announced it was renewed, as I assumed it was a miniseries.
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A couple of surprisingly good movies based on 80s toys for me recently.
Transformers One, which I wasn’t going to bother with, but I kept hearing positive things from various corners, so caught it in the cinema. Really fun. Gorgeous graphics, though too much shaky cam. And Scarlett Johansson didn’t sound bored, which is astonishing.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I’ve had on my Sky box for months. When the first trailers came out for this, I thought it was influenced by Spider-Verse. Seeing the full film, that’s both right and wrong. It’s aiming more to replicate something like Eastman and Laird’s art style (albeit with different Turtle designs) in 3D, but I do think they were only able to try that because of Spider-Verse’s success. The importance of the soundtrack felt very Spider-Verse inspired too. Overall, I liked it. Nice to see the “teenage” emphasised for once. I didn’t really like its take on Splinter (though him being inspired to teach them martial arts through media was quite fun) though. But it’s an generally a fresh, interesting new take on the concept and I can see why it’s done well.
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I watched the first few episodes of The Franchise, the new Armando Iannucci comedy about the makers of a big superhero movie. It has a lot of good people in it, it looks good and there’s plenty of scope for skewering the MCU and the superhero fad in general… but somehow it feels like it doesn’t make the most of it all. There are occasional chuckles rather than big laughs, the storylines are kind of boring, the elaborate sweariness feels a bit overdone at this point, and there are too many characters to really get to know any of them.
I like Iannucci’s stuff so I’ll continue to give it a shot, and stuff like Avenue 5 definitely took a little while to grow on me, but this doesn’t feel as good as I was hoping.
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I’ve really been enjoying The Penguin. It’s awesome.
I do wonder who’s story this is. There is no obligation for Oz Cobb to win it all, he could simply be part of someone else’s rise to power (Sophia, who I cheer for.)
Also nice for me to get a ton of other people to watch.
Very easy once the see the first episode.1 user thanked author for this post.
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I just caught up with The Penguin. I’m really enjoying it, it’s much better than I expected based on the first episode.
It’s a very well-made show in general, and Farrell is tremendous in it, he totally disappears into the character (the impressive prosthetics help) and is a great centre for everything going on around him.
But he’s not the only good thing in it, the kid he takes under his wing is good too and the actress playing Sofia is just right for that character.
Most of all it’s a comicbook show that doesn’t seem embarrassed of the source material and adapts into something more sophisticated than dumb teen fodder.
At first I had thought it was going to be a Sopranos knock-off but it’s doing a good job of melding that influence with more comic-book crime aspects.
A really good show.
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
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What We Do In The Shadows
The first three episodes of Season 6 (the final season) aired Monday. The show is still hilarious. I really loved Episode 3. I honestly don’t want to go into any detail, so some bits are not ruined.
So far, it looks like it will go out on a high note.
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The Penguin has been a pleasant surprise with how good it is. My favourite thing about it is that they haven’t tried to pull a Sony and make Oz into some kind of antihero. He is still very much a villain and he’s doing awful things to achieve power.
My only nitpick with it is that no one has mentioned Batman. The Bat would be the talk of the villain community so it’s kind of unbelievable that they wouldn’t be talking about him.
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Probably so they’re not trying to tease viewers with a cameo, which they said won’t happen (and I hope they stick to their word).
Anyways, good viewership for a show like this, and getting better.
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Flew home today from London to NYC and had the opportunity to watch three recent films.
First up was Shyamalan’s THE WATCHERS starring Dakota Fanning. I knew nothing about it going in but had some hopes in the first few minutes as it takes place in a forested area in the west of Ireland (the source of some great Celtic myths and folklore), but ultimately the film suffered from the director’s usual inability to develop characters that you care about.
The second film, Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR, was amazing and scary and should have been this year’s blockbuster hit. A fantastic cast led by Kirsten Dunst imagines what might have happened if Trump retook the White House after January 6, 2021. Shown from the POV of a mix of news reporters and photographers covering the war, the film has great cinematography and seamless SFX, superb writing and direction, and moments that brought a lump to my throat. Dunst and Garland deserve Oscar nominations for this one. I really don’t understand why this hasn’t been the blockbuster hit of 2024…but maybe I do understand…
The third film was the 3-hour HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA, CHAPTER 1 directed by Kevin Costner. I’m not saying this is a bad film; I’m saying this is only part of a film. At the risk of spoiling this for anyone planning to stream it, the film doesn’t come to a conclusion. Instead, after following the interlaced stories of various characters in various parts of the American West circa 1859-1861, the film just…ends. Not a single storyline is resolved, there’s no satisfactory climax or resolution of various plotlines, it all just ends with a whimper. Costner should have made this a television miniseries where he could tell the story over the course of 6 or 8 or 10 hourlong episodes; instead we have to wait for Chapter 2 (supposedly due later this year) to get some sort of resolution.
But, seriously, find CIVIL WAR on a streaming service (I believe it debuted on HBO MAX in September) and watch it.
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First up was Shyamalan’s THE WATCHERS starring Dakota Fanning. I knew nothing about it going in but had some hopes in the first few minutes as it takes place in a forested area in the west of Ireland (the source of some great Celtic myths and folklore), but ultimately the film suffered from the director’s usual inability to develop characters that you care about.
That wasn’t an M. Night film, his daughter directed it. I thought it was okay, but suffered from pretty much entirely being focused on four actors, one of whom was fairly terrible.
It is very funny that the deserted rural road Dakota Fanning is travelling on is going from Galway to Belfast (with no turns, according to her GPS), a route thousands of people travel every day.
Costner should have made this a television miniseries where he could tell the story over the course of 6 or 8 or 10 hourlong episodes; instead we have to wait for Chapter 2 (supposedly due later this year) to get some sort of resolution.
There won’t be any resolution in the second one, it’s planned as a four-movie series, but it’s incredibly unlikely he’ll get the money to make the last two. Maybe he can squeeze it all into a third movie, but even that doesn’t seem that likely to happen.
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Watched the first three episodes of the final season of What We Do in the Shadows, which is still great. Looking forward to seeing how they wrap it up; the storylines set up to run are interesting.
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The second film, Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR, was amazing and scary and should have been this year’s blockbuster hit. A fantastic cast led by Kirsten Dunst imagines what might have happened if Trump retook the White House after January 6, 2021. Shown from the POV of a mix of news reporters and photographers covering the war, the film has great cinematography and seamless SFX, superb writing and direction, and moments that brought a lump to my throat. Dunst and Garland deserve Oscar nominations for this one. I really don’t understand why this hasn’t been the blockbuster hit of 2024…but maybe I do understand…
I saw this at the cinema when it came out. I thought it was good but did tail off at the end as it became a different, more conventional kind of movie in its final act. But the first two-thirds or so are great. The incredibly tense sequence with Jesse Plemons is the standout.
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Watched all of Kaos now and I’m a bit pissed off Netflix didn’t give it a second season. I really liked it a lot. Great casting, for one – Goldblum as Zeus was a stroke of genius. Of course casting Goldblum is always kind of genius, but I don’t think the whole show would’ve worked as well without his weirdly magnetic presence. But there are other great performances, too – the trailers didn’t even show David Thewlis, so that was a happy surprise, and Stanley Townsend is fantastic as Minos (you can tell he comes from a theatre background, he’s got an incredible presence). And Eddie Izzard as one of the fates was also a nice surprise.
I also just loved how they re-told the story, taking the building blocks quite faithfully while also changing them wherever they felt like it. It all felt very firmly rooted in antiquity while also being very current. And the presence of Prometheus as narrative voice worked very well, and the dialogues were really good overall. It really is a shame it won’t be continued. But at the same time, it also kind of works as an ending – this could have been the first book in a trilogy, so to speak, but it also works as a standalone, for me. Because the story as it was set up really is kind of completed; you can see the rest of the prophecy working out from here.
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways. -
Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
I’d say the bigger issue is that he’s 27, only a year younger than Tom Holland. Miles should at least appear to be an actual teenager.
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Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
Yeah, I mean, they would be crazy to do that. Oh, wait….
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Forgot that I wanted to mention that Kaos is also a great example for how to make a diverse cast really work. You’ve got color-blind casting for one thing, which works great because it just doesn’t give a fuck what ethnicity the characters have – it’s a bit like the theatre works in that way. And then, you’ve got a character whose being trans-gender is actually an important part of the story that doesn’t feel tacked on but really works for the story, and you’ve got an actor with a disability with Daedalus and that isn’t a part of the story, it’s just never mentioned, and it also works completely fine. And so on.
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
I’d say the bigger issue is that he’s 27, only a year younger than Tom Holland. Miles should at least appear to be an actual teenager.
He can easily play younger though. He’s playing late teens in Penguin.
Realistically, I don’t think we’re likely to see a real teenager cast as Miles.
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
I’d say the bigger issue is that he’s 27, only a year younger than Tom Holland. Miles should at least appear to be an actual teenager.
He can easily play younger though. He’s playing late teens in Penguin.
Realistically, I don’t think we’re likely to see a real teenager cast as Miles.
Tom Holland was 18 when he was cast as Peter. There are plenty of young actors who could play Miles, I don’t get the sense in casting a guy who would probably be in his 30s by the time he showed up (if they even have any plans for that).
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After some trepidation and delay we started season three of The Bear last night (eps 1-4) and watched 5 and 6 tonight. Wife and I (but especially I) loved the first two seasons, but when S3 came out I only saw online commentary that it had really fallen off and was no longer any good, hence the reluctance to start it.
So far anyway it’s great, no drop-off compared to the earlier seasons, with the creators still willing to take risks making it a show unlike any other I’ve seen recently. Every episode has its own tone and flavour, with experiments in format and style. The cast is amazing and the soundtrack packed with the perfect songs at the perfect moments. Stressful, funny, touching – I really REALLY love it.
We also watched all of English Teacher a few weeks back, having followed the star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez on socials for a while – it’s a pleasant comedy that deals with issues of race and sexuality and adolescence without getting too heavy. Alvarez plays the titular gay teacher at a high school in Austin, Texas.
Solid cast, some laugh out loud moments, and I hope we get a few more seasons with these characters.
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I enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher, so I decided to finally watch Midnight Mass. It’s very well done. It takes a lot of time to build its little island world before anything much starts to happen at all, but you don’t mind that at all because the characters and their dynamics are very involving, and it also manages to very slowly build a creepy atmosphere that becomes quite unnverving. And in the centre of this, Hamish Linklater as the town’s new pastor is really unnverving. He’s really great in that role.
Uh, I didn’t really know anything going in, so a few spoilers in tags now:
One thing that’s a bit of a shame is that you can see from the start that everybody very old is just a younger person in make-up (who often also over-acts being old), so you directly know that part of the plot will involve everybody getting younger.
The moment of reveal of who he is and that it’s actually a vampire show is very neat though, and I look forward to the next steps. It’s been ages since I’ve watched anything that managed to build a really creepy Stephen-King-esque atmosphere, much less in a vampire story. And I’m enjoying that a lot.1 user thanked author for this post.
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We went to see The Wild Robot today as it just came out recently here. I wasn’t familiar with the book as it wasn’t ever well-known in the UK, but I thought the film was beautifully done – lovely animation, a great heartfelt story and a script that knew when to be direct with its messages and when to let the visuals do the talking.
I imagine this will be loved by parents just as much as kids, there were a couple of moments that definitely had me teary-eyed. The best animated film I’ve seen for a while.
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Finally saw Deadpool and Wolverine.
This was good, yet somehow I feel a little bit cheated as we were at the door of awesomeness, just not quite that.
Fun, and if everyone jumped all over it with hate I would defend immediately.
Just, well my first thought still stands.4 users thanked author for this post.
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We went to see Paddington In Peru today. Not quite as good as the first two – it misses the fish-out-of-water comedy of London and is instead more of an adventure/quest, like Indiana Jones for kids – but is more fun than I expected it to be and Paddington is as charming as ever. And as always there are some fun performances from the adults, particularly Olivia Colman as an unhinged nun. Antonio Banderas is starting to look his age though.
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The Penguin finale was really good. It’s been a solid series throughout but the various payoffs in this final episode all worked well. Farrell is amazing and manages to be compelling and watchable even in his darkest moments. I hope there’s more in future.
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Been watching Severance over the past couple of weeks as I missed it on first release. I thought it was great and thoroughly enjoyed it throughout, one of the best shows I’ve seen in ages. I’m glad I watched it so close to season 2 as I thought the final episode was excellent and I just want more now.
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I know nothing of Apple+, but maybe this will help.
Presumed Innocent does sound good, as does Constellation.
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Bad Sisters series one was ace. Word on the street is that series 2 is nae so good.
I loved Shrinking, and obviously Slow Horses is a must watch. So is Ted Lasso.I loved Lessons in Chemistry, Spirited but I think those are more personal.
The Afterparty was light and fun.
I need to see if Dick Turpin and Time Bandits were any good, but I have a feeling they were not
Severance I keep meaning to commit to.1 user thanked author for this post.
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BBC daytime staple Doctors ended today after 24 years. I’ve been dipping in and out for the past month or so and watched the past week fully. It’s an odd show. It juggles ongoing storylines for the main cast and case of the day stories for patients. Some of that ongoing stuff is interesting – there’s been a storyline running up to the finale about a manipulative new GP in the practice trying to take over, scheming to get rid of people he doesn’t like etc (at the end, when he was ranting at being kicked out, it felt a bit like a strawman for criticisms of the show and BBC generally) – but the case of the week stuff is pretty limp. They never really seem to resolve, they just… stop.
Anyway, the show’s notable because it’s had a lot of actors at the start and twilight of their careers turn up in it. The show ending has prompted me to go and watch some of those, so I’m bouncing around season 1 episodes (all on YT), from 2000. So there’s the guy who played Ronnie in Renford Rejects and pre-Footballer’s Wives Zoe Lucker and Honor Blackman and a young Sheridan Smith. But you’d be hard pressed to tell at times because dear lord the camerawork is awful! Frenetic, wobbly, full of awkward close-ups while continually failing to show what’s happening, loads of dreadful “natural” lighting. And this is across all the episodes, not just one rogue director. It’s a shocking production choice and not something I remember being particularly common or en vogue at the time. I’m amazed it got recommissioned frankly.
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I saw Gladiator II today. It was pretty good. Like a lot of these legacy sequels, it’s a film that always feels like it lives a little bit in the shadow of the original, but this one does make a compelling story for itself that’s separate (but still linked) to the original while also feeling like a pseudo-remake or reboot.
Mescal is a bit bland as the lead but luckily Denzel Washington steals the whole film and virtually makes it his own, I’ve always loved him and this is another great performance. And there are quite a few decent actors in supporting roles too.
There’s lots of solid action (Ridley Scott is one of those old-school directors who can still direct fights where punches feel like they land and you’re never confused about where people are and what is happening to whom), plenty of spectacle and a few standout shots that are just beautiful in their own right.
And while it’s a long film it doesn’t feel like it overstays its welcome – the final act is surprisingly tight and a lot happens pretty quick once all the pieces are in place.
A little better than I expected.
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Starting the last season of Cobra Kai. Most of the young cast look older than high school seniors and I hope the season wraps it all up. The first season was a nice call back to 80s nostalgia, but now 5 seasons later, it is time. It would be nice to see Hilary Swank. I hope she shows up.
It is one thing to learn some self defense martial arts techniques to get back at a school bully and maybe a regional contest, it is another thing for the techniques to carry you into world class tournaments.
They were never seen studying all that much and yet, they make it to some of most elite campuses (Stanford, MIT) in the country. 🤣
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I saw Wonder Woman 1984 last week. It was bafflingly bad. They managed to make a movie in which nothing works. The dialogues are terrible, the characters are unconvincing, the CGI is bad (every time she uses the lasso it looks so bad it takes you right out of the movie), and the overall feel of the movie is more like a throwback to the kind of over-the-top silly superhero movies they tended to make in the eighties, which, yes, might be the point here, but the thing is, those weren’t very good and they certainly aren’t when you make one today. Also, the whole make-a-wish plot device is a horrible idea and Max is a 2D panto villain who for some reason then gets a whole dumb backstory and a son, but only so he can then go on to panto villain some more. And the one thing the movie should have going for it, which is that Gal Gadot was a pretty good Wonder Woman in some other movies and is absolutely beautiful of course, turns out to not matter because the movie exposes her as a very much less than good actress.
Pine and Pascal do the best they can with what they’re given, but man does that not make a difference. Wow. What an utter and complete failure of a movie.
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On the other hand, I saw The Substance yesterday and that was absolutely glorious. It’s a fucking amazing movie and if you haven’t seen it yet, bloody well go out and do so.
It’s Cronenbergian body horror meets media world satire, and it’s very secure in its aesthetics; the whole movie is shot beautifully disgustingly. It also does the Cronenberg approach very well. The story is a Darian-Gray-ish concept in which Demi Moore creates a younger version of herself who is still bound to the old body because she needs to take a fluid from it, and they have to switch every seven days and the other body kind of just lies around during that time. And if you’re not on time switching, well, terrible things start to happen.
The whole movie works fantastically well and I was quite happy with it, but in the last act (non plot-specific light spoiler, but I’ll blot it just in case) it switches gears and goes full Troma, which was utterly brilliant and unexpected.
So, yeah, watching how confidently and boldly that movies took on its themes of fading beauty and ageing women in a patriarchal society and turned it into something wonderful and stomach-turning was an absolutely great night out. Much recommended.
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I saw Wicked Part One yesterday. It’s a frustrating film that is occasionally good but mostly pretty mediocre, with the main problem being that it just drags. It’s 2.5 hours long and barely anything happens in this first of two movies; they clearly should have done it as a single film but obviously wanted double the cash.
It’s a shame as the two leads are pretty good (especially Erivo as Elphaba who is great and carries the whole thing really) – but aside from a couple of nice little moments together they can’t make an incredibly dull script interesting. We went with one of my kids and a mate of theirs, and both of them said it was boring and overlong – one almost fell asleep and the other said it felt like being in school.
It’s unfortunate that the story is so uninteresting as (like so many of these big-budget adaptations and spinoffs these days) the budget is clearly there – the sets and costumes look great, they’ve got good acting talent involved (Jeff Goldblum is great as Oz, but it’s pretty much just an extended cameo; Michelle Yeoh is wasted as a sorcery teacher who barely does any teaching), but the story just isn’t there. It ends up feeling like magic school for people who thought Harry Potter was too grown-up and sophisticated.
Also, like a lot of these prequels, there’s a weird fetishisation of iconography that isn’t important in-universe but has become symbolic outside the film. So you get an explicit origin story for pretty much everything in Wizard Of Oz, particularly around the witch – the hat, the cloak, the broomstick, the flying monkeys, even the yellow brick road – and it’s all just a bit of an eyeroll.
The songs are also pretty forgettable except for Defying Gravity which has been so heavily used in the marketing that you feel like you already heard it a million times before.
(Plus there’s also this horrible Ned Flanders-like babytalk slang sprinkled throughout it which is vomit-inducingly cutesy.)
Just very disappointing given so many glowing reviews.
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One further hilarious detail of Wicked is a subplot about a secondary character at Shiz University (yes, it’s really called that) who is from Munchkin land and who supposedly has it tough in life because of his height – so there are scenes where he can’t see over the top of a crowd, or needs to climb on objects to reach eye-level, or whatever. But the filmmakers clearly got cold feet about the possible repercussions of casting someone with dwarfism in the role, so just cast a regular-height adult man instead.
So you have these ridiculous scenes where a normal-size guy is climbing on a stack of books to have a conversation with someone the same height as him. Just absurd and nonsensical. If you’re going to tell a story that’s constantly highlighting the importance of accepting people who are different to you, maybe you should actually let one of them be in your movie?
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I saw Wonder Woman 1984 last week. It was bafflingly bad. They managed to make a movie in which nothing works. The dialogues are terrible, the characters are unconvincing, the CGI is bad (every time she uses the lasso it looks so bad it takes you right out of the movie), and the overall feel of the movie is more like a throwback to the kind of over-the-top silly superhero movies they tended to make in the eighties, which, yes, might be the point here, but the thing is, those weren’t very good and they certainly aren’t when you make one today. Also, the whole make-a-wish plot device is a horrible idea and Max is a 2D panto villain who for some reason then gets a whole dumb backstory and a son, but only so he can then go on to panto villain some more. And the one thing the movie should have going for it, which is that Gal Gadot was a pretty good Wonder Woman in some other movies and is absolutely beautiful of course, turns out to not matter because the movie exposes her as a very much less than good actress.
Pine and Pascal do the best they can with what they’re given, but man does that not make a difference. Wow. What an utter and complete failure of a movie.
Then there’s the whole matter of WW raping the guy Steve possessed.
Everyone and everything else popped out of nowhere. They couldn’t have done that with Steve? Naaahhh, let’s put Steve in some rando’s body. The rando has no agency, and WW and Steve have sex. He could have been gay, for all we know. It was a horrible decision to do this and was quite unnecessary.
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Then there’s the whole matter of WW raping the guy Steve possessed.
Well, there’s also still the possibility that Steve actually took over his body permanently and kinda extinguished his soul, and when Steve leaves, all that remains is a braindead husk. In that case it wouldn’t be rape, it’d just be murder. That any better?
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I’ve watched the first two episodes of the Dune show, and it’s decent enough. Very Game of Thronesey, there’s a massive cast and they’re all plotting away as we start to learn who they are. I’ve spent a lot of the runtime so far remembering stuff from the background, like House Richese are important in the first two episodes and it was… I think even after episode 1 had ended that I remember they’re the Ixians, for example. I wouldn’t call the show essential but it’s scratching a Dune itch for now.
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Last night, I watched the 9th episode of the final season of What We Do In The Shadows. It was a hilarious riff on the movie, The Warriors. It also has a great cameo. This season has been hilarious as ever. No drop in quality.
This is the show’s 6th and final season but to me, it doesn’t feel like a final season. It honestly feels like a normal season. Most shows, when they know it’s their last season, they will pull out all the stops and get all emotional and schmaltzy. You can tell the show is about to end. Not WWDITS. At this point and if you didn’t know, you would think there would be more seasons. They have two episodes to wrap it up. I personally love this. It really does feel like it’s going out while maintaining its high standards. This does not feel like a show that’s ending that’s been on the air too long and you are hoping gets a merciful finale.
I am confident they will stick the landing, and WWDITS will go down as one of the best sitcoms ever made.
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I saw Moana 2, which was a disappointment. The songs are boring, none of the jokes are funny, and the story is nonexistent.
It was originally supposed to be a Disney+ show, and it’s very obvious. You can tell where the episode breaks are supposed to go, each episode has a song, a vague structure (the first episode lays out the concept, the second episode is her getting the team together, the third and fourth episodes have her interacting with guest characters, the fifth is the big finale, and the sixth episode is just an epilogue, and seems to have been mostly condensed into a montage), and a cliffhanger-ish ending.
The movie sets up a big villain early on, who doesn’t even show up until the post-credits scene. The closest thing the movie has to an antagonist is a nasty storm. The new characters are all completely one-note, though it’s nice to see Rose Matafeo getting more work.
The movie occasionally has the characters name-drop songs from the first movie, which just reminded me of how good those songs were and how lousy the new ones are.
I assume they’ll do a third movie that will be designed as a proper movie, and I hope they get more talented people to make it.
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I’ve been watching the 90s Iron Man cartoon lately. I picked it up on DVD for £3. It ran for two seasons, which are very different.
The first is the epitome of a Saturday morning cartoon. It feels very obviously based around selling toys of Iron Man, his various armours, allies and villains. To that end, Iron Man is working with Force Works (though I’m pretty sure they’re never called that in this season) – War Machine, Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch (with a terrible mostly Russian accent) and Century. They’re pitted in every episode again Mandarin and his array of flunkies: MODOK (his 2IC), Justin Hammer, Blizzard, Whirlwind, Hypnotia, Grey Gargoyle, Dreadknight, Blacklash and Living Laser.
It’s a pretty dumbed down premise and not helped by just not being well made. The animation is crap (they constantly fail to properly do looping backgrounds for flying vehicles etc). Presumably most of the budget went on the CGI sequence of Iron Man putting his armour on, which I remember being wowed by as a kid, but has not aged well at all and doesn’t gel with anything else in the show (vs say the Battletech cartoon, where the CGI was used for the mech battles, so the difference worked ok).
The writing is dreadful too. The head writer is Ron Friedman, who wrote the first three GI Joe mini-series in the 80s, among other things. It’s all too rote and repetitive. About half the episodes focus on Mandarin and co sabotaging the test/demonstration/unveiling of a new Stark Enterprises vehicle or weapon. One episode literally ends with a trite “Tony was a robot decoy” reveal. The writing of Spider-Woman and Scarlet Witch is especially bad, as they’re just there to fawn over Tony and be catty with each other. Such a disservice to the characters.
Perhaps the most ridiculous part of how this season is put together is the opening titles. The music’s fine, but there’s a rollcall element to the animation, showing characters with graphics of their names. Except, it goes through all of Mandarin’s team (except Living Laser, who feels like a late addition) but only Iron Man and War Machine for Force Works, which seems like a really mixed up set of priorities. Why is Blacklash getting higher billing than Hawkeye?
The main redeeming factor of the season is the voice acting. Mostly. Robert Hayes (from Airplane) is Tony and he’s really good. I still think he’s the definitive “classic” Iron Man for me (as opposed to RDJ, who is a very distinct version of Iron Man). Dorian Harewood is good as War Machine too.. eventually. Rhodey is initially voiced by James Avery (Uncle Phil! Shredder!) who is fine, but clearly had scheduling issues, because not only does he disappear a few episodes in, there are moments where lines he couldn’t record are very poorly filled in for by Jim Cummings (who plays MODOK), doing a terrible impression.
Season 2 sees an entire overhaul of the show. New animation studio in the form of Koko (who would go on to do Spider-Man Unlimited), new producer and writing team, replacement voice actors for most of the cast (Hayes, Harewood, Cummings and Neil Ross as Fin Fang Foom survive) and just higher quality over all. Interestingly, it doesn’t just make a clean break and does actually go to the trouble of exploding the status quo of s1, by having Mandarin’s goons captured and jailed, Mandarin losing his rings and most of Force Works leaving after Tony faked his death. This leaves just Tony, Rhodey and Julia, which is a much more managable cast and there’s a nice sub-plot through the series for Rhodey about losing confidence in using the WM armour.
Oh and there’s also Homer, a dry, sardonic AI virtual assistant that works with Tony and talks to him in and out of the armour. It is the genesis of JARVIS, really and I think it’s original to this show.
Freed from the Force Works vs Mandarin set-up, the show wanders into other areas of Iron Man lore, like Madame Masque, Firebrand (voiced by Neal McDonough, later Dum Dum Dugan in the MCU), AIM and adaptation of Armor Wars. It works well, being much more varied than series 1 and, largely, being better stories.
Most interestingly, there’s a much different tone to the show. The new animation style is flatter but also darker, there’s lots of shadows, but also the writing feels far less pandering of kids. Dialogue is clipped and wry and doesn’t over-explain what’s going on. It suits Hayes really well.
Plus, Stingray is in the Armor Wars episode, so it’s a clear 5/5 for me.
It’s hard to think of any other show that’s been so radically and successfully retooled between its first and second season. Well, the 90s Fantastic Four cartoon of course, which was paired with Iron Man in the Marvel Action Hour and also went from being absolute dreck into an underrated gem. But beyond them, hard to think of much. Even TNG took longer to get better after its dreadful first season than this.
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Anyone else been watching Dune Prophecy? I’m mostly enjoying it, but a lot of that enjoyment is putting together the pieces of how stuff here relates to the OG novels. I’ve not resorted to grabbing the Dune Encyclopedia down off the shelf but it might happen yet! It’s very Game of Thrones series 1 right now, for good or ill and I’m wondering how they’ll blow things up in like 4 episodes time
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I’m wondering how they’ll blow things up in like 4 episodes time
It’s a six-episode season!
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Well in the next 30 minutes or so, then!
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Anyone else been watching Dune Prophecy? I’m mostly enjoying it, but a lot of that enjoyment is putting together the pieces of how stuff here relates to the OG novels. I’ve not resorted to grabbing the Dune Encyclopedia down off the shelf but it might happen yet! It’s very Game of Thrones series 1 right now, for good or ill and I’m wondering how they’ll blow things up in like 4 episodes time
I’ve never read any of the novels, so this aspect of the story is all new to me. (I have seen three different adaptations of the first book, though.)
The show has been okay for me. It’s not horrible by any means, but it’s also not truly blowing me away. (I still have to watch last night’s episode.)
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Season 2 sees an entire overhaul of the show. New animation studio in the form of Koko (who would go on to do Spider-Man Unlimited), new producer and writing team, replacement voice actors for most of the cast (Hayes, Harewood, Cummings and Neil Ross as Fin Fang Foom survive) and just higher quality over all. Interestingly, it doesn’t just make a clean break and does actually go to the trouble of exploding the status quo of s1, by having Mandarin’s goons captured and jailed, Mandarin losing his rings and most of Force Works leaving after Tony faked his death. This leaves just Tony, Rhodey and Julia, which is a much more managable cast and there’s a nice sub-plot through the series for Rhodey about losing confidence in using the WM armour.
Oh and there’s also Homer, a dry, sardonic AI virtual assistant that works with Tony and talks to him in and out of the armour. It is the genesis of JARVIS, really and I think it’s original to this show.
Freed from the Force Works vs Mandarin set-up, the show wanders into other areas of Iron Man lore, like Madame Masque, Firebrand (voiced by Neal McDonough, later Dum Dum Dugan in the MCU), AIM and adaptation of Armor Wars. It works well, being much more varied than series 1 and, largely, being better stories.
Most interestingly, there’s a much different tone to the show. The new animation style is flatter but also darker, there’s lots of shadows, but also the writing feels far less pandering of kids. Dialogue is clipped and wry and doesn’t over-explain what’s going on. It suits Hayes really well.
Plus, Stingray is in the Armor Wars episode, so it’s a clear 5/5 for me.
It’s hard to think of any other show that’s been so radically and successfully retooled between its first and second season. Well, the 90s Fantastic Four cartoon of course, which was paired with Iron Man in the Marvel Action Hour and also went from being absolute dreck into an underrated gem. But beyond them, hard to think of much. Even TNG took longer to get better after its dreadful first season than this.
You forgot to mention the awesome season 2 intro:
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You’re right, I don’t know how I forgot to mention that. Stonking theme tune.
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