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We watched the second season of Nobody Wants This, the Kristen Bell Netflix romcom sitcom that I quite enjoyed first time around. But this second season is weak.

They do that thing of replacing the now-resolved will-they-won’t-they aspect of season 1 with drama that comes out of the characters just being dicks to each other, and not behaving like any sane person in a relationship would.

Plus the aspect of him being a Rabbi and her not being Jewish – which was handled with a relatively light touch in season 1 – is made a much bigger focus here but at the same time treated much more clumsily and without ever questioning his need for her to convert, which makes the whole thing feel a bit weird and cultish.

Ultimately it’s a romcom where you find yourself actively hoping that all the couples in it split up and find people that they’d be happier with, which I’m not sure is really the intention.

We also tried the new season of The Witcher and didn’t even make it to the end of the first episode. If you thought it had got bad before then this new season is just awful, dull and grey and lifeless. Losing Cavill must be the final nail in its coffin, it’s barely even a shadow of the fun, dynamic show it was in season 1.

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Uncle Retrospective

Dave wrote:

We also tried the new season of The Witcher and didn’t even make it to the end of the first episode.

Same here. Even the fact I was drunk couldn’t get me through that crappy episode.

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garjones, Todd, Sean Robinson, Dave

I’m sticking with Witcher, I don’t think the season is that bad and I want to see how it all turns out. Though it has to be said that which ever Hemsworth this is is, while doing his best, no match for Cavill by far. And, I mean, like last season I kind of miss the times when this show was fun. It’s all bleakness now, and this season is even worse when it comes to that because Geralt has a chronic injury kind of thing now and is just dragging himself around.

Christian wrote:

I kind of miss the times when this show was fun.

Yeah, I felt like this from season two onwards really. It’s like they suddenly became embarrassed that the show initially succeeded on the back of having two sexy leads, a load of grotesque monsters, and packing in a ton of gratuitous violence and nudity. A winning formula that they bafflingly abandoned in terms of focusing on goblin politics or some shit.

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Uncle Retrospective, Christian

We watched Deep Cover on Amazon Prime last night.

It’s a goofy crime comedy with a silly concept (improv comedians get recruited by the police as undercover operatives due to their skill set), but the three leads are good: Bryce Dallas Howard is the head of the group, Orlando Bloom is a method-actor type who is played for laughs and manages to be surprisingly funny, and Nick Mohammed is a meek office worker who is new to the improv group and constantly out of his depth.

And there are also some great supporting actors too (Sean Bean, Paddy Considine and Ian McShane all have decent-sized roles and there are loads of other cameos from UK comedians). Plus Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen (who are apparently big on YouTube as The Pin, but who I’d never heard of) play a pair of detectives that send up police procedural tropes and have a sort of Mitchell and Webb energy to them.

The story is pretty silly at times but exists only to serve the comedy, which hits the mark a lot of the time. The whole thing was more fun than I expected.

Yeah, Witcher’s always been around this level of bad by my measure, and the mage battle episode looked like it could have been footage from the weirdest club on Ibiza if you swapped in a rave soundtrack

I saw Bugonia the day before yesterday. What a fucking awesome movie. Expectedly so, but man was that a bunch of fun.

I want to see the Korean movie it’s based on now, too. Bugonia was unmistakably a Lanthimos movie, but the plot seems to be pretty much 1:1 from the original.

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Todd

Stranger Things Season 5

I’m two episodes into the four episode drop. Looking at the “kids”, this show really and truly should have been released yearly and wrapped up five years ago. It really has lost the “Goonies” feel and feels like 21st century YA. It has lost that early magic. Once the series is over, I can just imagine the disconnect a viewer will feel binging the series.

As to the two episodes so far, they’re okay. The first episode dragged because they were having to remind everyone of everything and set up the endgame. I will say the last part of the episode was quite intense and very good. The second episode was… okay? I just watched it barely remember much of it.

The bloom is definitely off the rose.

Todd wrote:

Stranger Things Season 5

I’m two episodes into the four episode drop. Looking at the “kids”, this show really and truly should have been released yearly and wrapped up five years ago. It really has lost the “Goonies” feel and feels like 21st century YA. It has lost that early magic. Once the series is over, I can just imagine the disconnect a viewer will feel binging the series.

As to the two episodes so far, they’re okay. The first episode dragged because they were having to remind everyone of everything and set up the endgame. I will say the last part of the episode was quite intense and very good. The second episode was… okay? I just watched it barely remember much of it.

The bloom is definitely off the rose.

I finished the other two episodes. They were okay, and while Episode 4 had an interesting ending, it just lacked the “WOW” factor for me.

For me, the show doesn’t feel the same anymore. While it is set in the 1980s, it doesn’t have that feel like earlier seasons. While there’s little detail la that say “1980s”, it feels like it could be set in the 21st century.

I really think the delays have seriously hurt the show.

The next three episodes drop on December 25th and the finale on December 31st.

I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…

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lorcan_nagle wrote:

I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…

When the satisfaction/pride in producing a successful single-season miniseries bumps up against the potential $$ in producing numerous sequel seasons, greed is always going to win out over creative integrity.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

njerry wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…

When the satisfaction/pride in producing a successful single-season miniseries bumps up against the potential $$ in producing numerous sequel seasons, greed is always going to win out over creative integrity.

That’s what happened to Squid Game. Seasons 2 and 3 really didn’t add anything to the story. If they had ended Season 1 with Seong Gi-hun just standing in the bording gate after receiving the phone call then smash cut to credits, I think that would have been a more powerful ending. Leave it ambiguous as to what he did and let the viewers’ imagination decide what he did next.

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lorcan_nagle

lorcan_nagle wrote:

I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…

It really did go off the rails starting with Season 2 and got worse after that.

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lorcan_nagle

Todd wrote:

njerry wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

I think continuing past the first series hurt the show…

When the satisfaction/pride in producing a successful single-season miniseries bumps up against the potential $$ in producing numerous sequel seasons, greed is always going to win out over creative integrity.

That’s what happened to Squid Game. Seasons 2 and 3 really didn’t add anything to the story. If they had ended Season 1 with Seong Gi-hun just standing in the bording gate after receiving the phone call then smash cut to credits, I think that would have been a more powerful ending. Leave it ambiguous as to what he did and let the viewers’ imagination decide what he did next.

Oh christ yes, Squid Game 2 and 3 were awful in the end

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Todd

Finished the current Witcher season. Yeah, that wasn’t great. Hemsworth was a pretty poor replacement all in all, and the whole season’s story was basically about sending the Witcher himself off on a wild goose chase, Ciri breaking bad and Yennifer fighting Vilgefortz – and none of those storylines ended up anywhere, really. Geralt just finds out Cirir isn’t where he was looking for her, Yennifer defeats Vildefortz but he’s still around, and Ciri’s new group are all gone at the end. So… feels like you could just skip this season and it wouldn’t matter, yeah?

Plus, there was a lot of talk how Geralt has changed and now has emotions or whatever, like anybody would give a fuck. The one good thing about the season was Bounty Hunter Guy, who was a pretty cool character and the sequence in which he [spoiiler]just went ahead and killed all of Ciri’s friends (who sucked ass anyway) was fucking rad.[/spoiler]

I think part of the problem is that the series seems to have been adapting half each of two books, so the end of the show is halfway through one of the novels.

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Christian

That’d certainly explain a few things, yeah.

Similar structural problem to the one they had with The Last of Us season 2.

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lorcan_nagle

It didn’t help the first two series of The Expanse much either, though that was a much better show than The Witcher

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Uncle Retrospective

To say the least.

I do wish they’d gotten a few more season of The Expanse. But at least they got to wrap things up in their own way.

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Uncle Retrospective

I finally watched Mickey 17 today. It was an interesting mess that felt like it wasn’t that interested in actually exploring all the ideas that it crammed in there, and although there are some good performances and amazing effects it didn’t quite hang together as a story for me. The first half is more personal and character focused like Moon and then the second half becomes a much broader (in style and in scope) satire that reminded me more of Starship Troopers. It felt like all the quirkiness and weirdness was quite superficial and ultimately the core ideas were all fairly familiar and well-trodden in sci-fi, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but I do wish it had done something more interesting with it all.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Dan, Christian

Christian wrote:

To say the least.

I do wish they’d gotten a few more season of The Expanse. But at least they got to wrap things up in their own way.

The main issue with adapting The Expanse is that the books have a 30-year time jump after the last book they adapted, so they’d probably have had to change things majorly to keep it going.

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Ben

It seemed like the Laconia scenes gave a hint of what might have come next.

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Ben

[lorcan_nagle]

Christian wrote:

It seemed like the Laconia scenes gave a hint of what might have come next.

They literally set up at least two major plot points for last three novels’ worth of story with the Laconia scenes in series 5 and 6

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by lorcan_nagle.

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Christian, Ben, Uncle Retrospective

Dave wrote:

I finally watched Mickey 17 today. It was an interesting mess that felt like it wasn’t that interested in actually exploring all the ideas that it crammed in there, and although there are some good performances and amazing effects it didn’t quite hang together as a story for me. The first half is more personal and character focused like Moon and then the second half becomes a much broader (in style and in scope) satire that reminded me more of Starship Troopers. It felt like all the quirkiness and weirdness was quite superficial and ultimately the core ideas were all fairly familiar and well-trodden in sci-fi, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but I do wish it had done something more interesting with it all.

I was thinking more about this film and realised it had a very Red Dwarf feel to a lot of it. It’s mostly set in a giant spaceship with a small crew who live in grey, submarine-like sleeping quarters and eat in grey cafeterias, the tone is a mix between character-oriented stuff revolving around the lowest-status members of the crew and absurd sci-fi concepts, the interactions between two duplicates of the same character reminded me of the stuff with multiple Rimmers, the technology to backup people’s minds feels very like hologram tech, and the bio-printer is straight out of one of the more recent episodes. Even the spacesuits remind me of the Series I-era suits.

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I watched the Blue Beetle movie tonight, which I’ve been meaning to do for, ooo, about a year.

It’s… fine? The cast is all good, the story’s alright, though my attention started to wander 2/3 in. I could have maybe lived without the emphasis on family after Shazam did that, but it does work. The effects are a mixed bag. I’m far from a snob about CGI, but it did look pretty weightless at times here. And then on the other hand, you’ve got practical fight scenes that feel a bit Sentai-ish (ie a tad cheap) but I don’t know, that worked for me. I liked the casual bounce of the extra legs looming over the shoulders when Jamie’s in costume but just talking. I wish all the weapons didn’t just magic out of nowhere (I’d have preferred an organic effect, where the suit grows them out of itself). I think the bigger problem visually is that the film half-heartedly goes for this 80s retro neon Miami cool blue and purple colour palette which doesn’t entirely work and it always looks better in the scenes where it doesn’t bother with that.

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lorcan_nagle

Oh, I finally watched Peachmaker S2, and while I thought S1 was better, I still liked it a lot.
There were a lot of fun moments and the story of Chris looking for validation, and then family, worked pretty well for me – even if the tie-in into larger DCU stuff towards the end didn’t always work.

I hope there’s another season.
(Presumably, that’d be… on Netflix, then?)

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Christian wrote:

I hope there’s another season. (Presumably, that’d be… on Netflix, then?)

Apparently Gunn has said they aren’t planning for another Peacemaker season but that the characters will show up in other DC projects, which is a bit of a bummer as it felt like so much was set up for a third season.

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Christian

Seriously? The last episode was nothing but set-up for another season. Then it makes no sense at all instead.

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Todd

Yep, it’s baffling.

https://www.avclub.com/peacemaker-season-3-james-gunn-no-plans

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Todd

Power Force  – the intrigue among Chicago drug dealers to be the sole distributor for a Mexican cartel. Exciting eh?

Tobias Radesäter wrote:

Seriously? The last episode was nothing but set-up for another season. Then it makes no sense at all instead.

Yeah, it’s weird. But apparently, it was actuall set-up for Man of Tomorrow…

I don’t know, I think in that case they’d better just have left it at the happy ending before that last two minutes.

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Todd

I miss the time when a crossover was “wouldn’t it be cool if Hellboy, John Constantine and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer hunted a demon together” and not “to understand this story, you must first read this story, and watch this movie, and find this thing that was released for a limited time on an exclusive platform only available in Papua New Guinea”…

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Todd, Sean Robinson, njerry

We watched Wake Up Dead Man aka Knives Out 3 tonight, having enjoyed the first two. This one isn’t quite up there but is still a good watch.

The weaknesses are that the characters feel a bit more thinly-sketched and the setup feels a bit more mechanical and inelegant, but the back half of the film is more satisfying as things fall into place.

More than ever it felt like a movie version of Jonathan Creek, but with a huge budget and a cast of great actors, as well as Jeremy Renner.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, njerry

Christian wrote:

Tobias Radesäter wrote:

Seriously? The last episode was nothing but set-up for another season. Then it makes no sense at all instead.

Yeah, it’s weird. But apparently, it was actuall set-up for Man of Tomorrow…

I don’t know, I think in that case they’d better just have left it at the happy ending before that last two minutes.

It is the US TV habit that tells me they have no confidence in their own product. Lincoln Lawyer S3 and Ballard S1? Good crime stories told across 10 eps, except for the last five minutes of the last episode.

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Christian

I rewatched Firefly this past week or so. First time in quite a while and I did worry that it wouldn’t hold up to it. I can’t remember if anything about it was brought up in Whedon’s cancellation (alongside his treatment of Charisma Carpenter), but it didn’t seem too bad on that front (until the final episode, where rape is used as a threat against Kaylee repeatedly, which is pretty gross).

Overall, I loved it about as much as I did back in the day. The characters are lovable, the found family aspect so charming, the setting a fun mix of Western and sci-fi while also keeping a foot in reality (amongst the Starship Trooper uniforms and cowboy outfits, everyone gets to wear just t-shirts and jumpers etc), the plots fun.

But damn everyone is so young (ok, maybe not Book). Even Nathan Fillion looks like a baby-faced child in it.

Not all of it has aged brilliantly, mind. I’m entirely forgiving of old CGI and effects and I think the way the show is shot helpless it still look good now (I watched it all on my 20 year old DVD boxset, admittedly on my blu-ray player which probably upscaled somewhat, and it looked great. Better than the first few minutes of Serenity on DVD did before I turned that off and ordered it on blu-ray). But the blue nitrile gloves on the sinister baddies look silly as hell and the aforementioned Starship Trooper battle armours do stick out.

And in terms of critical re-evaluation in light of Whedon’s fall from grace, it is quite weird that he created a future where Chinese has blended into English (which doesn’t always hold up either imo) and yet there’s barely any Asian people anywhere in this show. I could remember one off the top of my head and a quick scroll thru imdb suggested one more in a minor role and a third uncredited. Which isn’t great.

About 6-7 months ago, I posted about a random European-Japanese co-production anime I’d stumbled upon and the terrible Malaysian English dub it had. Well, Reporter Blues got its claws in me and I ended up getting hold of the entirety of it in French (along with the German DVD release of s1) and doing an English fan-sub of it all.

I was just going to put it all up on a torrent site like Nyaa, but it turns out that’s almost impossible to do (if only media piracy was as simple as the people who demonise it claim) so I’ve resorted to putting it up on my YouTube channel (soft-subs using YT’s built in caption feature because I really couldn’t be arsed to re-convert all 52 episodes yet again to have hard subs).

It’s all uploaded and scheduled to go 4 episodes a week for the next 13 weeks. Episode 1 went live this morning.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

Martin Smith wrote:

I can’t remember if anything about it was brought up in Whedon’s cancellation

Quite the opposite if memory serves – both Fillion and Tudyk defended him when the whole thing first broke. I think making Firefly was probably a very different experience.

And in terms of critical re-evaluation in light of Whedon’s fall from grace, it is quite weird that he created a future where Chinese has blended into English (which doesn’t always hold up either imo) and yet there’s barely any Asian people anywhere in this show. I could remember one off the top of my head and a quick scroll thru imdb suggested one more in a minor role and a third uncredited. Which isn’t great.

Yeah, that was already weird back then. On the plus side, he had two black people in the main cast from the get-go, which was a step up from Buffy for sure.

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Sean Robinson, Martin Smith

I’ve been watching an animated show called Pantheon on Netflix. It’s a pretty cool sci-fi thing about people who have died and been uploaded experimentally and then basically enslaved, and now they’ve broken free. It’s a well-made show and deals with its topics in interesting ways.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective, Dave