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You Have Been Watching
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Holy fuck, hadn’t realized there were new episodes of Black Mirror.
Thank you.You’d think Netflix would have included that info in one of the 18,000 emails per month they send me, especially since they know I’ve watched all 6 previous seasons.
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I haven’t watched Black Mirror in ages but I’ve heard good things about the new series, I should get around to it.
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Havoc
Unbelievable, the film is nearly all set at night and I can see everything in it!
None of that murky, can’t see dark scenes, no. Nope, this film has action scenes and it’s going to show them off. Some guy goes through a wall headfirst? That stuntman’s pain gets to be seen.
Plot and pace are both good too. A tightly controlled set of characters with casting to match and superb pay-offs.
Yeah, this is good, very good.5 users thanked author for this post.
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It feels like this latest season of Black Mirror hasn’t got that much traction – like a lot of Netflix shows it seemed to get a blip of attention and then everyone moved on – but this season has been one of the best and most consistent in quite a long time.
I’ve seen a lot of ads for and clips from this season, though. Seemed to me like they were pushing it quite a bit.
I’m looking forward to it, too. My Netflix subscription is currently asleep, but I’m looking forward to soon reactivating it (when my Disney+ subscription goes to sleep) and watch Adolescence, Black Mirror and the new season of Stranger Things.
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Oh, and I saw A Real Pain, which was absolutely wonderful. It has so much to say and such a great way of doing it, and it is just so wonderfully entertaining to watch Eisenberg and Culkin as these two cousins who are very close and estranged at the same time, and both in a pain that is just, well, life.
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Saw Sinners today and thought it was excellent. I managed to stay fairly unspoiled going in, and I think that’s the best way to see it.
The story is good and it’s a film that has things to say as well as being entertaining, but the music and sound design especially is outstanding. An Oscar surely beckons. There’s one scene in the middle where everything comes together in an unexpected, transcendent way that I found surprisingly and suddenly moving. And another scene towards the end that really hits.
I’m glad it’s doing well, it deserves to.
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I regret to inform you, I have been watching anime.
Well, Italian-Japanese co-production anime. It’s by RAI (the Italian state broadcaster, I think) and TMS and is called Reporter Blues. It’s set in 1920s Paris and is about a journalist, Toni, who gets into scrapes. I’ve only watched one episode actually, which was quite interesting. Or more the existence of the show itself is.
The copyright date on the title says 1989, but the earliest it aired was 1991, AFAIK. It had either a full season of 52 episodes or two seasons of 26 episodes, but only those first 26 were shown in 91, in Japan at least, possibly in Europe too, with the second lot seemingly not aired anywhere until about 1996. That’s definitely when it turned up on Malaysian TV, with an English dub. Lorcan’s probably ahead of me here, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dubbed by Omni Productions, the same team that did Transformers Headmasters et al and various Shaw Bros films. If not, it’s certainly in the same style. It’s not as bad, but it’s certainly ropey.
The weird thing is, only a few episodes have been found with the English dub and that’s through dual-language broadcasts on Spanish TV. They’re all from the second half of the series. Meanwhile, the German dub has been released on DVD (a couple of times) as “the complete series” but is only the first 26 episodes. There doesn’t seem to be any (available) version of it complete in one language.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve watched The Residence on Netflix – largely because I’ll take a chance on anything if it’s sold as a cosy whodunnit, but also this looked like a fun premise (a murder takes place in the White House during a state dinner, and everyone there – staff and attendees – is a potential suspect).
Very early on it seems like it’s going to be a fun show, but it quickly becomes so drawn-out and padded and repetitive that by the time I got halfway through I was struggling to find the enthusiasm to press on. The sub-Sherlock detective has no personality other than being rude and liking birdwatching, the various quirky characters are mostly grating, and the mystery itself just isn’t interesting enough to sustain eight episodes. And the final episode is 90 minutes long! You could tell an entire story in that time.
Even a Kylie cameo couldn’t save it. One to avoid.
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Saw Sinners today and thought it was excellent. I managed to stay fairly unspoiled going in, and I think that’s the best way to see it.
The story is good and it’s a film that has things to say as well as being entertaining, but the music and sound design especially is outstanding. An Oscar surely beckons. There’s one scene in the middle where everything comes together in an unexpected, transcendent way that I found surprisingly and suddenly moving. And another scene towards the end that really hits.
I’m glad it’s doing well, it deserves to.
I saw it recently and it is SO layered. There is a lot to unpack.
Now I hear Ryan Coogler made a deal with the studio about the movie and getting the full rights later on.
Next: Thunderbolts
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Of course, it’s on Apple so virtually nobody will see it, but I’m looking forward to more.
I definitely want to watch this. I’m going to get an apple+ subscription because I also want to watch Murderbot (that one looks really awesome) and (finally!) Severance, but I’ll probably wait until summer. Currently I’ve got my hands full with The Last of Us and with finishing Andor.
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So it’s a long weekend here.
Victoria Day. Really unsure why, but British monarchy, something something.And I’ve got Tuesday and Wednesday off, plus people have left me alone.
So, I put on the first season of Fringe.
It was only going to be be background all day, just really takes over.Love the cast, and the sporadic players.
Jared Harris? Love him (he’s on the screen right now).Great show. Really should have done a rewatch multiple times already.
And for whats com8ng, well it’s been seeded from the beginning.
John Noble just plays that perfectly.I do like Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson, but also having Noble, Lance Reddick, and Kirk Acevado (well, for the first season, he wouldn’t go from Toronto to Vancouver for second season and on)
If you’ve never seen, this is comic geek heaven.
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If you’ve never seen, this is comic geek heaven.
One of the things I loved about the FRINGE series is that events of the final season tied back to previous events of the series, all the way back to the first season. It made me feel like JJ Abrams wanted to tell a complete story and avoid the mistakes of previous shows like LOST and X-FILES that failed to resolve plot points. The finale was a reward to faithful viewers instead of yet another unsatisfactory disappointment.
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Yeah, I didn’t like the first few episodes of Fringe – lack of believability, generally speaking; the way the characters behaved in these situations just felt ridiculous to me – but I did watch the last season, and I liked how far out it was while clearly building on the previous seasons. Just going for it, at the end there.
Jared Harris? Love him (he’s on the screen right now).
I fucking adore Jared Harris. Have you seen The Terror? He’s absolutely amazing in that.
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The Last Of Us season 2 ended.
While I enjoyed some moments of this second season, it’s not up there with the first – there’s nothing on the level of the Bill and Frank episode – and I feel as though the story and structural choices that made the second game inferior to the first have only been magnified in the TV adaptation (plus they’ve added some problems of their own like the erratic pacing and on-the-nose dialogue).
Ultimately it’s just not the same show as it once was, and it’s only going to feel more different in season three.
I think critics have been relatively kind to this second season – there’s still goodwill there from season one maybe – but I predict that enthusiasm for the show will really dampen with the third season. And I’m really not sure how they can sustain this for four seasons, which is apparently the plan now.
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One recurring flaw in Naughty Dog’s games, both in Uncharted and The Last Of Us, is their attempt to fuse moral complexity with rat-in-a-maze gameplay. Thus you get a level where, as Drake, you slaughter goons all over the place then the villain tries to guilt trip you over killing his goons, but the game never enabled any alternative either, so it falls flat.
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The Last of Us is another show, like House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, where I enjoyed the first season, but felt no desire to keep watching when it back after the long break between seasons.
I’ve started watching Murderbot on Apple TV+. I was skeptical, as I enjoy the books a lot, but it’s been good so far. Alexander Skarsgard is a good lead, and I’m enjoying his dry delivery in the voiceover. Some of the subplots aren’t great so far, but it’s only ~22-25-minutes episodes, so it mostly breezes by.
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I’ve only watched a couple of episodes of Murderbot but I’ve found it very nothingy so far, there’s just very little story to it and the humour falls a bit flat for me. Feels like a decent cast and production values have been a bit wasted.
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The Last of Us is another show, like House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, where I enjoyed the first season, but felt no desire to keep watching when it back after the long break between seasons.
I’m finding that with season 3 of The Great, which I recorded all of last year and have finally got around to. Even with a big handy recap at the start of the series, I find myself not caring too much about it. Maybe it’s been too long, maybe its quirks feel a bit stale (huzzah!).
Also, anyone else feeling a bit underwhelmed by season 2 of Poker Face? The mortuary episode was ok, but the gator cop one was awful. It’s really not grabbing me like season 1 did.
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Just really want to throw on Homicide.
No, too much. Where to start?With Homicide? Start at the start, and you can stop after Season 3 (which is actually only 1.5 seasons of episodes).
Homicide starts great, but gets progressively worse every season as they run out of material from David Simon’s book, and get rid of the original cast and replace them with younger more annoying people. Seasons 4-6 are still pretty good in parts, I gave up on the final season two episodes in.
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The Last Of Us season 2 ended.
While I enjoyed some moments of this second season, it’s not up there with the first – there’s nothing on the level of the Bill and Frank episode – and I feel as though the story and structural choices that made the second game inferior to the first have only been magnified in the TV adaptation (plus they’ve added some problems of their own like the erratic pacing and on-the-nose dialogue).
Ultimately it’s just not the same show as it once was, and it’s only going to feel more different in season three.
I think critics have been relatively kind to this second season – there’s still goodwill there from season one maybe – but I predict that enthusiasm for the show will really dampen with the third season. And I’m really not sure how they can sustain this for four seasons, which is apparently the plan now.
Yeah, I loved the Ellie-and-Joel episode (which was truly heartbreaking), but other than that… I don’t know, it felt like in the last three episode there was just too much random running around. This is something I kind of blame the game for (without knowing if that’s accurate) because it felt a lot like the walking around looking for stuff that you do a lot in games. And then, there were the repeated last-second-saves by people finding Ellie who shouldn’t have been able to find her in exactly that moment. That’s kinda lazy.
It was also a problem for me that the season was so short. There was a lot here that was really interesting – mainly concerning the Wolves and Scars – that I would have loved to see further explored, but we got to see just glimpses of Isaac and of the whole cult thing the other side has going on.
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Yeah it’s a weird combination of some very padded sections and some parts that feel very rushed, like the developments of the final episode. The pacing has been all over the place.
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I’ve been watching Robot Chicken from the beginning lately. The first couple of seasons I’ve seen, but beyond that it’s very hit and miss. The show hasn’t aged brilliantly. The edge-lord humour relies on a lot of misogyny, especially early on. It is getting better on that, a bit, now I’m in s4. But while there are some truly great sketches (the architect of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s opening temple giving a tour to the client) there’s still some that are pretty distasteful. One has even turned out to be proposed current US government policy (American Gladiators at the border, with citizenship the prize).
And some sketches where I’m surprised they convinced people to do them. There’s a Punky Brewster parody where he magic creature friend in her closet (which I’m guessing is from the cartoon, not the live action sitcom) curses her with infinitely expanding breasts, a joke at how actress Soleil Moon Frye, erm, developed early and considerably and had to get breast reduction at a young age. So you wouldn’t expect Soleil Moon Frye herself to be playing Punky in that sketch and yet, there she is. Odd.
Another is a sketch skewering A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, portraying her as a poorly programmed robot that malfunctions and crashes a helicopter into the set (which is relatively tame by the standards in which RC depicts women like Paris Hilton, Linday Lohan, Britney Spears etc) in which Tila Tequila plays herself. The only thing more surprising than that was looking up what ever happened to her and finding out she went full Kanye but years earlier and like 150% harder. She’s openly Nazi, homophobic, anti-vax and a flat earther. Yikes.
So truly early Robot Chicken is a cultural treasure trove.
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Just back from seeing S/He is Still Her/e, the official Genesis P-Orridge documentary. P-Orridge was the originator of the term Industrial Music with their band Throbbing Gristle, went on to be a pioneer of acid house with Psychic TV, and with their second wife, Lady Jaye Brewer, engaged in the Pandrogyne project where they both underwent cosmetic surgety and hormone replacement therapy to better resemble each other, rejecting their individual selves to become a single entity named Breyer P-Orridge.
It was amazing. Less a retrospective of their life and more a look inside their life, how it felt and how it impacted on the lives of their family and friends, primarily drawing on interviews with Genesis themself before their death, their daughters Caresse and Genesse, bandmate Alice Genese, and friends Clarity Haynes and David J Haskins (of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets), it presents P-Orridge as a walking set of contradictions – seen as too extreme for punks in the press, but a loving and rather domesticated parent in the flat over the combination merch store and ritual sex space that made up the Psychic TV headquarters.
The heart of the documentary is the daughters walking around the home they lived in after they fled to the US (A Channel 4 documentary alleged Psychic TV engaged in child abuse, the footage they claimed proved this was in fact a recording of a sex magic ritual between consenting adults that Channel 4 in fact partially funded. They were on an exentded trip to Thatland at the time and decided to not return to the UK and fled to the US, living in Winona Ryder’s family house for some time), and then talking about Gen’s relationship with Lady Jaye… Which gets utterly heartbreaking with Jaye dies suddenly and tragically young. You can see how this ages Genesis, and while they continue on with music and art, the absence of Jaye in their life clearly leaves a gulf, and it’s so heartbreaking to see that grief played out on the screen followed by the decline of their own health and death.
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Department Q
Meet DCI Carl Morck, a human wrecking ball for both his own life and those he works with. Fortunately for Carl, and everyone else, he has Rose and Akram, easily the best character by far, to keep him sort of together, along with his ex-partner cop and perpetually hacked off boss.
It’s impressive writing to have Carl be the mess he is, not without reason, but not go so far so as turn off viewers. Also, while he has neither tact nor grace, he is often right.
The supporting cast of other cops, lawyers, gangsters and psychos make for a slowly engaging tale. One that suggests its various threads might converge, but don’t. This may leave scope for future series.
One weakness is the final resolution with the final villains. Then again, if the point is to demonstrate that violence and crime is weak, petty and pathetic, it certainly succeeds.
Netflix would be rather stupid not to build on this with a further series or few. The core cast is excellent, the writing is smart and the Edinburgh backdrop gives it a very distinct feel. True, it’s not revolutionary or innovative, but it doesn’t have to be. All it has to be is good and it is very good.
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DEPT Q
We enjoyed this one too, but my recommendation to my fellow Murricans is to watch it with subtitles in English, otherwise some of the Scottish accents are too dense for comprehension.
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I watch everything with subs, if it has it.
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That show is on my radar, but I haven’t watched it yet. I’ll get back to you when I do.
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Squid Game 3
A couple of things upfront:
1. The 9-episode season 1 is perfect as a standalone story. It didn’t need anything beyond that. But hey, capitalism.
2. The next story didn’t need to be broken into two long parts. But hey, capitalism.The performances are great and the tension is perfectly executed. By having a 7-part SG 2 and 6-part SG3, it does allow for you to spend more time with the characters and get to know them better. While that’s a positive, I think it would have been overall better to tighten things up and tell the same story in 9 episodes. The story does lose some of the urgency the first season had.
A good chunk of the last episode is a “where are they now”. There’s a big celebrity cameo that essentially acts as a springboard to possible future seasons/spinoffs.
Overall, SG2 and SG3 were good, but it would have been even better if it had been just 9 episodes.
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A friend started a rewatch of The Leftovers.
Said it’s been too long for a proper rewatch, and he’s loving it all over again, but had to take a break after season one.
“Emotionally exhausting, but in a good way”So I started a rewatch.
Fucking started crying right at the beginning.
The “3 years ago” scene where the baby goes missing along with 2% of the world’s population.
But it’s a good cry.Up to the Nora episode.
Love Carrie Coon, and heart-wrenching when she hires a prostitute to shoot her (in a Kevlar vest) to feel something.Great cast.
Justin Theroux, Amy Brennamen, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Liv Tyler, Ann Dowd, Regina King, Scott Glenn, Paterson Joseph.
Plus more.
Plus some good background “look who it is” (like Carisi from SVU, more).Enjoying this.
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So finished season one of The Leftovers.
More than one cry, but it’s weird that I was crying on the very last scene, when “look what I found” is so fucking beautiful and needed .Then the first episode of season two. This is when Regina King and Kevin Carroll show up, in the fictional town of Jarden Texas, where no one was lost to the sudden departure.
So of course our cast moves there, and now something happens to the daughter of there next door neighbor.
And I need a break. My friend is right.
Becoming “the opposite of young”, and being human and empathic (or trying at least) has it’s limits.
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I still needs to see The Leftovers for the first time. Maybe that’s project for the summer.
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argh, I spent ages writing reviews of Lazarus
I watched Lazarus and thought it was okay. It dragged in the middle a lot, and the last episode just seemed to wrap everything up way too quickly. I think a much shorter season would have conveyed the urgency of the situation so much better. (This is the same criticism I have with Squid Game 2 and 3.)
It will be interesting to see what they do for second season, if it is renewed.
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I finally watched Alien: Romulus, to warm up for Alien: Earth. It’s good fun. Not exactly amongst the strongest movies in the franchise, but a pretty good re-invigoration of what Alien movies should be, after all the shit we had to endure in the last almost 30 years.
And now Noah Hawley can blow this thing out of the water.
I also started watching The Penguin, which is better than it has any right to be. It’s not the Sopranos though, mind you, however much it would like to be.
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I have watched four episodes of The Sandman season 2, and I’m kind of enjoying it, but feel that most of my enjoyment comes from remembering the comics that tell the same story a hundred times better. The tv series feels rushed. They have removed almost everything except the scenes that are necessary to tell the story. But the scenes that are missing are the ones that made the story great instead of just ok.
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Poker Face season 2 finished this week.
As a season overall, it had a bit of a rough start but hit a solid patch in the middle of the season when it was doing what it does best – small-town detective stories full of lies and with Natasha Lyonne being charming as fuck.
But towards the end of the season it tries to go big in a way that doesn’t really work for the show, like trying to build a wider mythology that doesn’t quite fit.
So while I still enjoyed it overall, it didn’t feel quite like the same show I loved in the first season.
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We watched Sirens on Netflix over the weekend.
I had it pegged as another White Lotus/Perfect Couple drama about shitty rich people and their glamorous lives, but there’s actually a lot more depth to it than that, and the way the story unfurls often challenges your initial preconceptions.
It has a good cast – Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon are both really solid in it, and Milly Alcock and Meghann Fahy play the two lead sisters well – and it’s pretty tight and self-contained at just five episodes. There’s also some interesting thematic stuff about the title that is confident enough to remain subtext rather than bashing you over the head with it.
Better than I expected and quite compelling, we got through the whole thing in a little over 24 hours.
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Finished The Penguin, and it remained a very good show. I love Cristin Milioti, and Farrell was really good. It’s one of those shows where you keep rooting for the protagonist in spite of him having hardly any redeeming qualities – Oz is a monster in every way, and yet he has this Tony-Soprano-esque charm about him and moments that make you really feel for him. It’s really well done because, you know, this isn’t Breaking Bad or the Sopranos, where the main characters also have good sides to them. Pretty much everything we see Oz doing is bad, and he keeps doing worse and worse stuff in the course of just these few episodes – and yet, you keep rooting for him. Maybe not at the end. I am not happy with him killing Vic, by the way. I get that they wanted to have him do this final thing to really drive home how monstrous he is, but it just doesn’t make any logical sense. Yes, they showed that Vic is potentially a danger because he knows too much and he has seen Oz being weak. And they’ve also shown that with his mother gone, Oz wants to remain free of the weakness that comes with human attachment. But still, Oz is also pragmatic if nothing else, and in Vic he had a right hand that was absolutely loyal now and that he could’ve used as a sacrifice later on. So it’s too obviously a plot device, I think.
Anyway, good fun overall. I am still not sure whether this needed to be a Penguin series – this could have been any mafia character, really – but why the hell not, I suppose.
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There’s also some interesting thematic stuff about the title that is confident enough to remain subtext rather than bashing you over the head with it.
I was actually expecting that to become a more significant “thing”, and was disappointed that it did not.
I haven’t actually sat down and watched the show, but over the course of a long weekend I was exposed to two binge-watch sessions by other various family members. They (all women, I should point out) absolutely loved it.
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I was actually expecting that to become a more significant “thing”, and was disappointed that it did not.
I think they deliberately set up the idea early on to make you wonder whether there’s something supernatural going on (the singing in the bath, the dreams, the idea of men lured to their deaths) only to subvert it later on by pivoting to show that these women are not as in control of the situation as we might have thought, and are not plotting to undermine, kill or usurp the male figures in their lives; that instead, these powerful men are ultimately in control and are instigating the situations that lead to their own downfall, but frequently blaming it on the women. The female characters all end up being pretty sympathetic people who have largely been pushed around or abused by the (more powerful) men in their lives, and are just doing what they need to do to survive.
In the end I found it to be quite an effective feminist take that pushes back on what was historically always quite a sexist idea of dangerous, monstrous women.
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Sirens sounds really interesting, I’ll have to keep it in mind for when I get another Netflix subscription.
Hm… Sandman, Black Mirror, Sirens. ‘s about time. On the other hand, I’ve been waiting to watch Severance, Murderbot and The Studio on Apple TV. Hm. I think Apple first.
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Oh, and I watched Love Lies Bleeding, which was a lovely little film noir. Kristen Stewart, bodybuilding, lesbian love, murder.
It does its thing extremely well, and if you’re in the mood for this kind of movie, it’s well worth watching.Loved how at the end it veers into magic realism.
The director, Rose Glass, is someone to watch out for.
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Oh, and I watched Love Lies Bleeding, which was a lovely little film noir. Kristen Stewart, bodybuilding, lesbian love, murder.
It does its thing extremely well, and if you’re in the mood for this kind of movie, it’s well worth watching.Loved how at the end it veers into magic realism.
The director, Rose Glass, is someone to watch out for.
Yes, this was great and one of my favourite movies of recent times.
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Oh, there’s a bottle of wine or three involved, soUll wLk away with something
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It may come as no surprise that production of the effects was as much a mess as the rest of the movie behind the scenes. The original plan was to reuse the models made for Phase II, but they looked terrible on the big screen. The Enterprise model was damaged twice, and some effects shots were literally finished at the last moment after a guy the main effects company know started his own company so he could hire a bunch of talented amateurs…
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I went to see that first ST film in the theater with a friend who was a HUGE fan of the original series. The film was so bloated and tedious and full of itself that even he described it as a self-masturbatory disaster. In particular I recall the scene where the camera circled the newly-built Enterprise for waaaay too long for no good reason except to say to the viewer “look how cool our special effects are!”
Thankfully they followed this mess up with The Wrath of Khan and got the franchise on track.
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Thanks to Dave for catching my “fat fingers moment”, and did that ever accidentally (I swear) work perfect!
Now onto the serious things in life, like when Ripley places the gun on the bed it is later shown further away on the counter.
Ha! Continuity Error!However AI (that I never fucking authorized to have anything to do with me or my phone) tells me it’s heavily implied that Burke moved it (he just couldn’t get caught with it).
So, yeah. Of course, I think.
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The Naked Gun (2025)
Christel and I saw it today and I thought it was okay.
There are funny bits but it really lacks the spark Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Pat Proft put in their work. (I do have to admit that while I enjoyed the Naked Gun movies, they were never as good as the Police Squad TV series.) There is an elusive alchemy to creating a movie like this. When it is done well, it clicks and works perfectly. But if your formulation is off even the slightest bit, the whole thing can come apart easily. The movie was 90 minutes, but the timing and pacing of the jokes just felt off. It was like someone watched the works of ZAZ and tried to replicate it, without talking to them or understanding their mindset.
I will say, Liam Neeson really does work well as Frank Drebin, Jr. He understands that you have to play the role straight, which he does a good job of. There are gags scattered in the end credits, and a stinger.
It’s not horrible, but you can probably wait to see at home.
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The Naked Gun (2025) Christel and I saw it today and I thought it was okay.
I saw this last night too. It’s decent enough without being great – there’s a good gag-per-minute ratio but it’s pretty scattershot, and the style of humour is quite different to the old Naked Gun movies and Police Squad (which I loved) – although they do reprise one or two of their gags directly.
I still had a good time with it, but it wasn’t as much fun as the reviews had led me to believe. I think it leans into the goofiness a bit too hard when Police Squad and the Naked Gun always played it a bit straighter.
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I finished Batman Beyond and it’s ok. It squanders a lot of its potential, I think. On the positive side, I liked Terry a lot, having Bruce sort of end up being Alfred was interesting. I even like Terry’s friend Max being in on his secret and that dynamic (though I can understand why others don’t). And the show creates a decent, original rogue’s gallery, while being somewhat restrained in bringing back old enemies (limiting itself to Mr Freeze, Ras and a legacy Royal Flush Gang, all of which work well).
Where it falls down is that it gets less cohesive and stringently made, I guess, as it goes on. Mid season 2, it switches to the digital ink and paint I was expecting from the off, which looks good but unfortunately comes with a drop in animation quality, with the frame-rate nosediving off a cliff. Season 3 pulls it back, mostly, on that front. But even the Return of the Joker movie, which is animated by TMS, is inconsistent. One second it’ll be silky smooth and then suddenly choppy as hell.
That I can live with. The bigger issues are in other aspects. It’s weird that it spends season one slowly building up Blight (a name which just appears at some point, is never given to him), the man ultimately responsible for Terry’s dad’s death, as the big bad but then he only really has one confrontation with Batman as a proper out and out supervillain at the end of the season. And then that’s it. It’s clearly left open enough for a return down the line, but they don’t bother. In the course of that, they set up Blight’s son, Paxton, as the new head of Wayne-Powers and again as an ambitious conniving antagonist but we don’t see him again until a story that gets rid of him.
The voice cast is generally solid but in season 3 so much of it falls away and is replaced. Stockard Channing is gone as Barbara (presumably busy on the West Wing) and it seems every time someone comes back they’ve been recast (including the aforementioned Paxton Powers). Even a new villain created for season 3, Big Time, doesn’t have the same voice actor across his two appearances. There are some weak episodes in s3 as well, especially the finale, Unmasked, which really teases something significant with its title, but is a throw-away thing about a kid seeing Terry unmasked, all told in flashback (a format I kinda hate). It feels like a show that is just becoming a low priority for everyone involved, to the point that I’m surprised it got the Return of the Joker movie.
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Late Night with the Devil is a really neat little movie. It’s got a great premise, and it follows through on that very nicely. A really fun low-budget horror flick.
Also, I really liked Murderbot.
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So the first two episodes of Alien: Earth dropped yesterday.
(I’ve got my PVR ser to record off of FX Tuesday nights, but I think Disney/Hulu streaming is up earlier in the day.So yeah, really enjoyed that.
Everyone good, Timothy Olyphant very good (giving me the creeps sometimes? Hmm…).Very cool retro future vibe amd tone to match up with Alien.
Very ominous beginning.
Synths, Cyborgs, and Hybrids.
“Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe.”Here’s a quote from a review:
“Little does anyone know for sure what awaits inside the ship. But this anemic plot is made up for by an abundance of atmosphere, direction, and a loving rendition of the Alien universe. For the first time ever, the Alien saga feels genuinely extended to the medium of television than it is rebooted or modernized for anyone too young to have ever discovered Aliens on cable.
Edit to add:
Forgot to mention the world building that gets done very efficiently.
Plus ending the first episode with “E5150/The Mob Rules” and ending episode 2 with “Stinkfist” was pretty cool.
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Timothy Olyphant very good (giving me the creeps sonetimes? Hmm…).
Yeah, Olyphant has that acting ability where he can be the good guy in one show (Justified) and the villain in another (Die Hard With a Vengeance), or even a nasty good guy (Deadwood).
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Yeah, I also liked the first ep of the show a lot. Like I hoped and expected from Hawley, the show obviously goes way beyond just doing an Alien horror thing – not that there would be anything wrong with that, as such. But there are a number of other themes being established in the first ep (which does a lot of work, but without getting too clunky, I thought) and I am very much looking forward to how it deals with them in the next episodes.
Man, it just feels good to have a new Hawley show on TV.
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I watched the first couple of episodes of Alien: Earth too.
I thought the second was better than the first episode, which felt a bit like someone wanted to write a Blade Runner sequel more than an Alien story. But the second is a bit more like it and features some cool scenes.
Overall it all feels very faithful to the look and feel of the early Alien movies, perhaps overly so – there are sequences in the first episode that feel more like a straight remake of Alien. But having said that there are also some new horrors introduced (which I think the franchise needs – it often depends too much on the Xenomorphs alone, which are shown a little too much here), there are some visual aspects lifted from other franchises too like Evil Dead, and the story and setting all feels right for the Alien universe, with a story that’s getting richer as it goes on.
Hopefully it will continue to be good.
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Butterfly
Quite honestly, do not bother with this.
It’s a shame, as Kim does his best to sell it, but he nevers comes across as this legendary, whirlwind of death assassin the story says he is. It also does a rubbish final minutes cliffhanger that the writers overlooked reverberating backwards to wreck the preceding eps. But even before that it was being far too soft to its villains.
Then there’s Rebecca, who is at the centre of the plot, but is also too much of an utter psychopath.
Fun but not good.
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We started watching Casino Royale last night as the kids had never seen any of the Daniel Craig Bonds. Hard to believe this movie is coming up to 20 years old next year. It holds up pretty well though, it’s a well-made action movie with plenty of decent, well-staged setpieces (that mostly feel free of invasive CGI), it’s serious without being too po-faced, and the story has a strong sense of momentum that keeps it driving forward. And it doesn’t hurt that Eva Green is absolutely smoking hot in it.
Also Mikkelsen is a great baddie in Le Chiffre, the MCU really messed up by making him the villain in the Dr Strange movie when they should have saved him for Doom, he’d have been perfect.
I also learned how the new generation sees Bond: apparently he is very “chalant” and is constantly “aura farming” for “rizz”.
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I also learned how the new generation sees Bond: apparently he is very “chalant” and is constantly “aura farming” for “rizz”.
Ah yes. Just as I suspected.
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“Chalant” is a humorous, informal term that means the opposite of “nonchalant”. It’s not a real word in the sense that it’s not found in standard dictionaries. However, it’s used in a playful way to describe someone who is careful, attentive, or concerned, contrasting with the “nonchalant” person who is cool, calm, and seemingly unconcerned.
“Aura farming” refers to the practice of strategically performing actions, often in a performative way, to cultivate a desired “aura” or cool image, particularly in online or social settings. It’s essentially trying to gain social capital or admiration by appearing effortlessly cool or stylish. The term borrows from gaming, where “farming” means repeatedly doing something to accumulate resources or level up.
“Rizz” is a slang term, primarily used by Gen Z, that refers to charisma, charm, or the ability to attract and seduce someone romantically. It’s essentially a shortened version of “charisma” and often implies having “game” in romantic pursuits. Someone with rizz is considered smooth, confident, and skilled at flirting.
So, to translate, when Dave’s kids say Bond is very “chalant” and is constantly “aura farming” for “rizz”, what it really means is that all of us here on The Carrier are old farts who need to get a life.
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Yeah, we old, but I just watched…
K-Pop Demon Hunters
I am manifestly not the target audience for this, but the sheer level of buzz around it made an excellent case for seeing it.
And yeah, it’s a lot of fun. The demins’ masterplan? A demonic boy band and it almost works. Along with an evil moggy.
Well-paced, with a smattering of smartly positioned action sequences and sings and a great animation style.
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doesn’t hurt that Eva Green…
Hmm, I’ve forgotten so let me… oh yeah, I love her
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“Chalant” is a humorous, informal term that means the opposite of “nonchalant”. It’s not a real word in the sense that it’s not found in standard dictionaries. However, it’s used in a playful way to describe someone who is careful, attentive, or concerned, contrasting with the “nonchalant” person who is cool, calm, and seemingly unconcerned.
“Aura farming” refers to the practice of strategically performing actions, often in a performative way, to cultivate a desired “aura” or cool image, particularly in online or social settings. It’s essentially trying to gain social capital or admiration by appearing effortlessly cool or stylish. The term borrows from gaming, where “farming” means repeatedly doing something to accumulate resources or level up.
“Rizz” is a slang term, primarily used by Gen Z, that refers to charisma, charm, or the ability to attract and seduce someone romantically. It’s essentially a shortened version of “charisma” and often implies having “game” in romantic pursuits. Someone with rizz is considered smooth, confident, and skilled at flirting.
So, to translate, when Dave’s kids say Bond is very “chalant” and is constantly “aura farming” for “rizz”, what it really means is that all of us here on The Carrier are old farts who need to get a life.
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This is possibly going to get a bit old man yells at cloud, but damn it, these are bad clouds.
So it’s the UK school summer holidays at the moment (though the weather has definitely taken a bit of turn, so it’s starting to feel a bit “back to school” season now). As an adult with no kids that’s largely irrelevant to me, but I’m a sucker for nostalgia and it’s hard not to feel a pang of wanting to recapture those past summer holiday joys. As me hanging out in a playground for a day would be frowned upon now, I’ve looked to other areas. And, sad as it might sound, one of my fondest summer holiday memories is getting to just sit around and watch TV all morning. Even in the era of all-day dedicated kids channels, summer holiday programming felt a bit special. CBBC on 2 would run longer into the morning, the Big Breakfast would decamp to a desk in the garden for the Bigger Breakfast. Hell, in 1995 even Sky Movies Gold got in on it and did Schools Out For Summer, showing Transformers, MASK, that weird old Dick Tracy cartoon and finally the Lucy Show (which I never watched, but fondly remember as a sign that it was time to go do something else).
It’s a bit depressing then to see the state of summer holiday programming on TV now. Ok, there are the dedicated kids channels still and they’re probably serving their audiences’ needs (again, childless adult, I don’t know). But ITV has hidden CITV away on ITVX, CBBC is only allowed on its own channel now, not BBC 1 and 2 (with Animal Park being the only summery feeling addition to the schedule – and it’s impressive that’s still going 20 odd years after it started) and even T4 doesn’t exist any more, which is just weird. Channel 4 is probably the most depressing, as it’s only concession to the summer is just playing a few more episodes of all the same sitcoms it’s been endlessly repeating in the mornings for the past twenty years after it gave up on proper morning shows. Another Frasier repeat?! Oh Mr Channel 4, you do spoil us! Props to Channel 5 for Milkshake, which isn’t extended in the summer (still a hard cut to Jeremy Vine at 9am, which must really get the kids switching over), but it’s the only part of Channel 5 that has remained since it launched and hasn’t been hidden away in its own digital TV ghetto. The CBBC thing really annoys me actually – can’t possibly ever simulcast any of that on 1 or 2 cos it has its own channel but the News channel is always treated as a schedule filling fallback.
I know people will say “ah but the kids all watch YouTube now instead” but it’s not entirely that YouTube won the kids over, it’s that TV capitulated on them. And not just in terms of visibility, but presentation. In-vision continuity/presentation is a rarity now but think about what draws kids to those successful YouTube channels like Mr Beast – it’s the familiarity of personalities. Pretty much every successful YT channel is built around its presenters, but TV channels don’t seem to get that. Stuff like TISWAS and Live & Kicking aren’t fondly remembered just because of the cartoons they showed.
Related to all this, one of the shows of summer holidays past I’ve found myself thinking of lately is something called Bug Juice, which I have fond yet dim memories of being on the Bigger Breakfast one year. It was made in 1997/8 and is what we called then a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a US summer camp. I managed to get hold of most of the first series and I’m about halfway in it. It’s really fascinating in several aspects.
First is that it’s an absolute treasure trove for 90s fashion. Which makes sense, I suppose. What’s is a bit surprising though is that I look at the styles and fashion trends and realise that I don’t think I saw any of those in the UK until at least one, maybe two years later. There really was more of a trans-Atlantic delay back then.
Second is that it’s so incredibly and delightfully tame. It’s essentially a predecessor to modern reality shows and even has direct to camera interviews with the kids and counsellors interspersed into the material. With the counsellors especially this is to shape a narrative for the episode, but it’s stark how lacking that is in artifice and fake drama. One episode has the boys cabin, who are mostly 15 year olds, getting annoyed with the one 12 year old that is, for some reason in there with them (even though there are other cabins for kids his age – I don’t know what’s up with that). They just think he’s trying to hard to fit in with them and they want him to calm down a bit. So you get some footage of him being a try-hard, a few to camera bits from him and the other kids talking about the issue, then the discussion the cabin has (led by the counsellor) about it, and a bit of how the kids feel after it and then… yeah, it’s resolved. They show the 12 year old getting into photography, they have to-camera bits where he and the others say they feel better for having talked about it and it all ends pretty positively and relatively weightlessly. If anything, I think they’ve maybe edited some things (like when two of the girls have a spat for a couple of days) to be less dramatic. There’s no way that would happen in a modern show. It would be milked for so much drama, especially with dramatically edited act break cliffhangers, replays of those high drama moments etc (it’s stark how even non-reality shows pad themselves out now by replaying and restating information in each part, compared to Bug Juice, which just gets on with it). Really shows how much TV has changed.
Another wild thing about it is just the summer camp itself. The range of activities they offer is – to this working class Brit – insane. There’s a lake for various kinds of watersports, including a speedboat for water-skiing; various sports fields; arts and crafts, including pottery, photography, candle-making etc; a theatre in which they put on a full play; an outside performance space, in which they put on various other shows; horses; a martial arts centre; archery; general outward bounds camping type stuff; a creative writing course. For one, it sounds exhausting. But I went on a school camp in the Lake District when I was about that age, for a week, and it was literally some semi-permanent tents and a leaky dining hall from which we did archery, kayaking and various things that just involved wandering around a wood. Mind you, I didn’t pay the $20k or so this camp (allegedly) cost, so…
The final thing of note is that it’s hard to watch this and not think about the fact that all these kids are about 40 now. Which is weird. Also that the counsellors are mostly only in their early 20s, so only about five years or so older than the kids, but there’s already this gulf between them. The show mainly focuses on two, one from the boys cabin and one from the girls, and the latter, Luna, is lovely, but her attempts to be the fun cool relatable counsellor with the kids often feel incredibly cringeworthy. And it might well have been that she was just as cringeworthy when she was a teen, but it really highlights that there’s a point at which you just become ineffably othered from teens simply due to age, even if it is an age difference that would be insignificant at later points in life.
There’s an oral history about the show on Vice or somewhere that I’ve got bookmarked and I’m keen to read that when I’ve finished the series.
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I know people will say “ah but the kids all watch YouTube now instead” but it’s not entirely that YouTube won the kids over, it’s that TV capitulated on them. And not just in terms of visibility, but presentation. In-vision continuity/presentation is a rarity now but think about what draws kids to those successful YouTube channels like Mr Beast – it’s the familiarity of personalities. Pretty much every successful YT channel is built around its presenters, but TV channels don’t seem to get that. Stuff like TISWAS and Live & Kicking aren’t fondly remembered just because of the cartoons they showed.
In my experience it’s not just YouTube and Tiktok but the migration to streaming services, just like adult viewers. My kids are watching plenty of TV in the school holidays, but it’s Wednesday on Netflix or Ghosts on iplayer or The Simpsons on Disney+.
And really, ever since the advent of on-demand viewing, the idea of TV providing specific scheduling at certain times so that kids can watch is a bit of a nonsense. I used to love settling down after school as a kid to flick between the Broom Cupboard and CITV between 4pm and 5:30pm, but now that you can watch what you want when you want, why do you need that time carved out on linear broadcast channels? Which is why that slot is now filled with Bargain Hunt or Pointless or whatever.
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the idea of TV providing specific scheduling at certain times so that kids can watch is a bit of a nonsense. I used to love settling down after school as a kid to flick between the Broom Cupboard and CITV between 4pm and 5:30pm, but now that you can watch what you want when you want, why do you need that time carved out on linear broadcast channels?
I mean on demand programming is great, but there is something to be said for just taking TV as it comes, channel surfing etc. The same way that radio still exists and does well in a world of personal music players, let alone streaming.
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(Knowing that I’m at least a decade older than most of the other members here) The current generation of kids and generations to come will likely never know the joys and sorrows of Saturday Morning Cartoons. The joy of looking forward each week to a new episode of Wacky Races or the Herculoids or the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour; and the sorrows of discovering two beloved shows are airing at the same time on different channels. Sure, on-demand viewing is convenient, but something has been lost. Saturday is just another day now.
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the idea of TV providing specific scheduling at certain times so that kids can watch is a bit of a nonsense. I used to love settling down after school as a kid to flick between the Broom Cupboard and CITV between 4pm and 5:30pm, but now that you can watch what you want when you want, why do you need that time carved out on linear broadcast channels?
I mean on demand programming is great, but there is something to be said for just taking TV as it comes, channel surfing etc. The same way that radio still exists and does well in a world of personal music players, let alone streaming.
Oh I agree. But my kids have been trained to actively avoid doing either of those things. They never turn on the TV or radio to see what’s on, they know what they want to watch/listen to and seek it out (or at best they browse the limited selections that Spotify or Netflix offer).
The biggest loss there for me isn’t so much the joy of channel surfing or the comfort of Saturday morning cartoons, but the possibility of discovering something that you never would have ordinarily chosen for yourself. Loads of my favourite TV shows or movies were things that I initially stumbled across or checked out on a whim, rather than actively wanting to watch already.
And while the streaming services do offer recommendations, these are inevitably algorithm-based – and so are offering essentially more of the same of what you like already, rather than opening up the possibility of genuinely broadening your horizons and getting you into something new.
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