You Have Been Watching

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Turns out Ronny Cox really was playing Trump in his various corporate / political bastard roles over the years.

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njerry, Todd, Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Sam Altman is a proven liar and this is more of his bullshit.  The for-pay version of the AI models are either exactly the same as the “free” ones or only a minor improvement over them.  They’re attempting to do the stage of… ugh… disruption where they throw scads of investor cash at a service to offer it to end users for cheap or free so when they raise the prices to the point that it’ll turn a profit enough people are on the hook that they have no choice but to continue using the product.

I’ll have to take your word for that. I didn’t simply believe Altman, mind you (or pay that much attention to what he said in the first place, to be honest), but this is what I took away from a conversation with a friend who is a professor for IT security at a university here and who works a lot with AI in coding (and is also desperately trying to figure out what to do with this when it comes to teaching and training students).

Some shows are back again like DD Born Again, Boys, and Euphoria starts tomorrow.

Last time it was set as the cool kids in high school and the show went viral. This season is a time jump of 5 years and picks up where they all are now in their lives. Most likely it will be the last season as season 2 was a long time ago, times have changed, no longer set in high school, and most of the cast got very popular and moved on to movies and other projects.

I’ve started watching Don’t Trust The B In Apartment 23, which is a delight. Unfortunately, I got about halfway in in before I realised Disney+ has got the episodes out of order (they’ve gone with air date order and ABC showed them in a seemingly random order it seems). It completely messes up the running plot threads, the build up of relationships etc. I can see why anyone watching it at the time would have been thrown by that and how it could have led to its cancellation. You know, like it did for Firefly. It’s almost like airing shows out of order is never a good idea or something.

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lorcan_nagle, Uncle Retrospective, njerry

Martin Smith wrote:

It’s almost like airing shows out of order is never a good idea or something.

I watched the first season when it aired and gave up because I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

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Martin Smith, lorcan_nagle

That show is criminally underrated, I love how it’d jump from just standard sitcom to demented and back

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Martin Smith, Uncle Retrospective

Uncle Retrospective wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

It’s almost like airing shows out of order is never a good idea or something.

I watched the first season when it aired and gave up because I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

You’d think that people who work in television, of all people, would understand the importance of being able to coherently follow a TV series, and yet…

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

I’ve been watching Blue Lights after many recommendations and it is very good but it is notable mostly for including an actress drawn by Frank Quitely.

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Christian, Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Martin Smith, Ben, njerry, lorcan_nagle, Tobias Radesäter

garjones wrote:

I’ve been watching Blue Lights after many recommendations and it is very good but it is notable mostly for including an actress drawn by Frank Quitely.

I still maintanin that Rosie Huntington-Whiteley looks like Frank Quitely was trying to draw Cameron Diaz.

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Christian, Martin Smith, lorcan_nagle

I’ve been buying a lot of stuff from Japan recently. Mainly Beast Wars tat, video game stuff (GameCube controllers in Japanese exclusive colourways but also a complete copy of Kid Icarus for the Famicom Disk System. I do not have a FDS), but also blu-rays of the Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire canon.

I first watched them all around 2012, when BBC filled the resultant void of putting all its kid programming only on the dedicated channels with old movies, and really loved them. Ginger Rogers especially is a brilliant comedic actress. Weirdly, of the 9 films Rogers and Astaire did together, the only one that’s had a blu-ray release in the West is Swing Time, in the Criterion Collection. I rented that a few years back and was surprised by how much I remembered being in it wasn’t. In Japan though, most of them have been release on blu-ray by IVC. I took a punt on getting one in my first proxy shopping shipment and it turned out to be region free, so I’ve scooped up most of the rest (can’t find a copy of Top Hat unfortunately and I might just get the Criterion release of Swing Time, as the restoration on these Japanese releases isn’t stellar).

I watched Shall We Dance last night, and turns out, all the stuff I’d thought was in Swing Time – the dance on roller-skates, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Fred dancing with loads of women wearing creepy masks of Ginger – it’s in Shall We Dance. Which is fine, just a fluke of my poor memory. But it does make me question even more why Swing Time is the only one that got the nod from Criterion. It can’t be a rights issue, because all but one of them (which they did for MGM years after all the others) are in the RKO catalogue, so have the same ownership. So they must have purposefully picked Swing Time, even though it’s not the most famous (Top Hat), arguably not the best (Top Hat or Shall We Dance) and has a whole blackface dance routine they have to acknowledge. Or maybe that’s it. Maybe they picked it *because* of the blackface routine so they could do the commentary and special features about it.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

lorcan_nagle wrote:

That show is criminally underrated, I love how it’d jump from just standard sitcom to demented and back

Yeah, that show was great. Too bad there wasn’t more of it.

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lorcan_nagle

I finally saw 28 Years Later, and it was really great, I felt. Once again, what starts as a pretty typical post-apocalyptic zombie movie turns into something entirely different at some point (while still being that, of course). This movie was far more loving and tender than I expected it to be.

Very much looking forward to The Bone Temple.

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Dave, njerry, Uncle Retrospective

Wow, what an immensely satisfying finale to The Capture‘s second series.

Rarely have such a bunch of deserving bastards been so screwed over.

Of course, the terrifying aspect that looms over all of it is the technology is scarily plausible.

Christian wrote:

I finally saw 28 Years Later, and it was really great, I felt. Once again, what starts as a pretty typical post-apocalyptic zombie movie turns into something entirely different at some point (while still being that, of course). This movie was far more loving and tender than I expected it to be.

Very much looking forward to The Bone Temple.

I felt the same, it was much better than I expected and surprisingly emotional in places. Parts of the story I found really moving from both a parent and child perspective. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes were both great in it. I need to see the new one too.

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Christian, njerry

Christel wanted to see The Devil Wears Prada 2, because she loves the original. The sequel is mediocre at best and doesn’t come close to the original. You can tell they struggled to come up with viable reason these characters would get back together. At the same time, it introduces a bunch of new characters that have no development whatsoever. There are a lot of cameos that feel like they’re there for sake of having the cameos. If you want to see it, definitely wait till it hits streaming.

The Capture Series 3

Apparently three series was always the plan, which is odd given how this series ended. Unless you view the set as a modern noir tale, as then it works better.  In more than a few ways it’s a darker UK riff on Person of Interest, sans any reassurance.

Watching Widow’s Bay on Apple. It’s a fun horror / comedy, with some good gags and some good scares.

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Todd, Dave

At a loss for stuff to watch on the long weekend I decided to put on War Machine on Netflix, and… yeah. Opening in Iraq with two brothers who are in the army, the older is a mechanic repairing a Humm-vee in the younger brother’s platoon in the field, they had a dream to join the Rangers but that’s fallen by the wayside and now the younger brother convinces the elder to try again.  And then everyone gets blown up!  The elder brother survives and goes to Ranger School despite having PTSD, and we get… some interminable amount of fellating of the US Special Forces and it’s fucking amazing to subject yourself to that level of privation TO BE A MAN! (Yes, even the women, because we’re all about people of all genders murdering brown children). Anyway, the elder brother is put in charge of a trainee platoon for their last training mission, and they get attacked by an alien mech.  The movie turns into an action/horror thingy as the Ranger trainees are picked off while they try to escape and/or fight back.

I was told the action was great, but to be honest I wasn’t impressed.  And there’s not much to this aside from testosterone poisoning, an obscene amount of pro-US military propaganda, and an odd level of dehumanising of the cast.  Literally three characters have names, two of them being the sergeants you see leading the training, and everyone else is either referred to by their role in the movie (Jai Courtney is credited as “Squad Leader”, or their assigned number in the training platoon.  The only person to get any characterisation is the elder brother (number 81), and it’s not particularly complex, he’s got survivor’s guilt because he tried to get his brother back to base but collapsed and when they found him his brother was dead.   The story unfolds as you’d expect, I didn’t enjoy it.

 

I went on to watch the recent movie of The Fall Guy, which was a lot more fun.  Ryan Gosling plays Lee Majors and Emily Blunt plays Heather Thomas, who are a stuntman and camera operator who are in a burgeoning relationship while working together on big-budget movies.  Gosling’s character breaks his back in a botched stunt, leading to him abandoning showbiz and walking out on Blunt.  Flash forward a year and a half and he’s recruited to come back to the next big movie, which his her first job as director, and it turns out their producer (Hannah Waddingham) has hired him surreptitiously to figure out where the star (Aaron Taylor-Johnston) has vanished off to.  There are twists and turns and some fun action moments, with a conclusion that reminded me a lot of F/X: Murder by Illusion in how it used  the characters special effects knowledge to figure everything out in the end.

The movie didn’t do well though, and I can see why.  It’s trying to walk a tightrope between a genuine action comedy and a wry, self-referential post-modern satire and it doesn’t come together properly.  It’s a bit too smart to appeal to people who just want the former, and doesn’t go far enough for the latter.   Fun, but inconsequential

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Ben

Uncle Retrospective wrote:

Watching Widow’s Bay on Apple. It’s a fun horror / comedy, with some good gags and some good scares.

I’ve been watching this too. Really good. It does well in balancing the spooky horror and the comedy without undercutting the creepier elements, and Matthew Rhys (who I liked a lot in The Beast In Me) is a great lead. Already looking forward to the next episodes.

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Uncle Retrospective

I saw Mortal Kombat II. it isn’t going to win any Oscars but it’s a fun time if you like Mortal Kombat. Compared to the previous film (which I thought was good but not great) this one learns some lessons and features lots of great fights, plenty of fun personalities, less extraneous storytelling detail and a simpler, more fun plot that is just an excuse for lots of fighting. There’s lots of reverence for the original games but without constantly hitting you over the head with every single wink or reference. A proper 90s martial arts Friday night movie, and second only to the original 90s MK film in terms of how fun it is.

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Uncle Retrospective, Martin Smith, Ben

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

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Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

I’m not sure how serious this question is, but no, not really. There are a few characters that return from that movie and a bit of backstory but it’s all recapped in this one.

There wasn’t even a fighting tournament in the first one – that happens in this one – so in retrospect the whole first movie feels like a glorified prologue for this one.

It does mean though that there isn’t much of Scorpion and Sub-Zero in this sequel as they were the focus of the first movie.

I mean, Mortal. Kombat. What more info do you need?

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Todd, Dave

Legends

From the writer of The Gold, a pair of series with a focus on what happens after a gold bullion robbery, this new Netflix series shifts to 1990 and the dying months of the Thatcher government amid a heroin flood. In response Customs mounts an undercover operation to nail the drug trade.

There’s a wry cynicism running through the story, from the way the team is assembled to its triggering incident, a Cabinet Minister’s daughter overdoses, to politicians heedless of operational or practical realities. At the same time there’s a sharper edge to the nature of undercover work.

Like with The Gold, Forsyth has a keen eye for everyone getting their due, albeit sometimes in very quiet, limited ways. There’s a hanging plot thread of what happens after time spent undercover, as the criminal underworld has a long memory.

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Todd, Dave

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

I’m not sure how serious this question is, but no, not really. There are a few characters that return from that movie and a bit of backstory but it’s all recapped in this one.

There wasn’t even a fighting tournament in the first one – that happens in this one – so in retrospect the whole first movie feels like a glorified prologue for this one.

It does mean though that there isn’t much of Scorpion and Sub-Zero in this sequel as they were the focus of the first movie.

It was a serious question, though I realise it sounds a bit silly, as I’ve not seen the first but I understand it focused on some new character (Cole?) rather than the ones from the game.

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Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

I’m not sure how serious this question is, but no, not really. There are a few characters that return from that movie and a bit of backstory but it’s all recapped in this one.

There wasn’t even a fighting tournament in the first one – that happens in this one – so in retrospect the whole first movie feels like a glorified prologue for this one.

It does mean though that there isn’t much of Scorpion and Sub-Zero in this sequel as they were the focus of the first movie.

It was a serious question, though I realise it sounds a bit silly, as I’ve not seen the first but I understand it focused on some new character (Cole?) rather than the ones from the game.

That’s right. He also features here but not in such a leading capacity – this is more of an ensemble piece, although nominally I guess the leads of the movie are Johnny Cage (played by Karl Urban who does a decent if unremarkable job and plays it exactly how you’d expect) and Kitana, who gets a surprisingly decent story arc.

All the Cole stuff is explained in this movie to the extent that’s needed, and the plot of the first one doesn’t have a massive bearing on this sequel – everything that you’ll need to know is explained.

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Martin Smith

Finished my Star Blazers re-watch.
Season 1 – Quest for Iscandar.

Good stuff, just ended a bit flat.
Good ride all in all

But where can I find season 2, The Comet Empire?
All on You Tube, watching it now.

Honestly starting flat, just started episode 4, finally disobeying and heading out, I think? Should happen this episode.

And might be unfair to judge Japanese Season one 1974, season 2 1978, and season 3 1980.

But only one wonan? I love Nova, just scared lady friend (sometimes demon woman) wakes up and sees me.

Or should I just stop talking now?

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

Sean Robinson wrote:

Finished my Star Blazers re-watch.
Season 1 – Quest for Iscandar.

Good stuff, just ended a bit flat.
Good ride all in all

But where can I find season 2, The Comet Empire?
All on You Tube, watching it now.

Honestly starting flat, just started episode 4, finally disobeying and heading out, I think? Should happen this episode.

And might be unfair to judge Japanese Season one 1974, season 2 1978, and season 3 1980.

But only one wonan? I love Nova, just scared lady friend (sometimes demon woman) wakes up and sees me.

Or should I just stop talking now?

You need to check out Yamato 2199, it’s a fantastic update and remake of the original series.  The various sequels to it aren’t as good but often still a lot of fun.

Like, check this shit out:

 

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Sean Robinson, Todd

Dave wrote:

I need to see the new one too.

I think it’s better. It isn’t as experimental in the film-making as 28 Years Later but I like that Boyle let Nia DaCosta do her own thing and it’s more memorable with one incredible set piece scene .

I can’t wait for the final episode.

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njerry, Dave

I had to break my watching of The Bone Temple into two parts (which I hate doing, but needs must and all that) and I do love that they made Jimmy Saville the villain of this piece.
Good to see Cook from Skins finally getting his proper break, too. Took Jack O’Connell a bit longer than the other guys, but what a year he has had, playing the villains in this and in Sinners. He’s going to be big, and well-deservedly. Cook was one of the most compelling characters in Skins and a lot of that was his performance.

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garjones, Uncle Retrospective

Christian wrote:

I had to break my watching of The Bone Temple into two parts (which I hate doing, but needs must and all that) and I do love that they made Jimmy Saville the villain of this piece.

It’s an interesting part of the concept that essentially culture in that world ended around 2003. Savile remained an eccentric entertainer and not a massive sexual offender. It’s hugely provocative of Garland to go there but in that world he has no dark connotations.

There is no news, TV, music or anything in the past 28 years. They live off remains or memories of Teletubbies, Iron Maiden and Duran Duran.

Good Omens “Season 3”

It’s always fun seeing Sheen and Tennant chewing the scenery together.

When it was announced that Season 3 would be a movie instead of 6 episodes due to Gaiman and his controversies, I was disappointed and apprehensive as to the results that would be generated. Having watched it, I think that was the right choice.

I have complained that some streaming shows really should be movie. They will stuff so much filler in them, they end up dilluting the finale product. Could the story have been told in six episodes? Yes. And yet, GO S3 told a complete story. It had good character bits and funny scenes. I think it could have used an extra 20 minutes to flesh out Jesus’s story a bit more. He really seemed a bit extraneous. Overall, I felt I got a satisfying conclusion to the story.