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I keep meaning to check out Superstore. I didn’t realise it was by the same team. I think I’ll get on that.
The first season of Superstore is fairly rough, but it gets better immediately after; the second and third seasons are great. The creator/showrunner is less involved in the later seasons, and it’s not quite to the same level, but still good.
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I have been watching my favorite scenes of “The Last Action Hero”.
It is underrated imho. It got a raw deal as in 1993, it came out with Jurassic Park
I liked the idea of parody with the action movie tropes, and Arnold’s self parody. The kid grew on me, but Charles Dance (Game of Thrones, The Golden Child) stole the movie.
Favorite line for me was “You were trying to sucker me with marked bills weren’t you?”
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I watched the latest episode of Futurama the other day. It was a big riff on Covid and the craziness that is associated with it.
I’ve said it before, but DAMN, this show is not as smart as it used to be. This episode felt like a rehash of done-before pandemic jokes.
It’s like the show is afraid to be smart and creative. I just hope it gets better.
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This week’s episode of Ahsoka was pretty good. It’s a middle ep of an 8-ep series so it has clear limits on what it can do, or so it might be thought.
This pushed the boundaries quite neatly – Ahsoka vs Marrok, Sabine vs Shin, Ahsoka vs Baylan. They also managed to make each duel distinct. The one with Marrok ended samurai-style, one strike, one kill. And the wat Marrok’s body so rapidly disintegrated suggests there’s more to him than is known. Shin and Sabine was far more scrappy. Baylan and Ahsoka had a great sense of psychological engagement, of careful, probing strikes and then quick attacks. Along with a clear suggestion of there being history between Baylan and Anakin / Vader.
Talking of, I did not see that cliffhanger coming. Ahsoka in what looks to be the World Between Worlds, last seen in the finale of Rebels, and Anakin.
The other good strand was Hera nabbing a load of X-Wings pilots, including Carson, and taking them and the Ghost to the Deneb system. Oh and if you think you won’t care about a load of redshirts, you may be surprised. The destructive backwash from the hyperjump was a nasty but logical surprise.
The only duff note was just how stupidly micromanaged the New Republic is to its staff. The guy telling Hera she couldn’t leave without authorisation, hello? A war was fought over this you muppet.
It is a terrible shame this is the only series where we get Ray Stevenson’s Baylan because he is a great villain. His duel with Ahsoka and his verbal manipulation of Sabine were good demonstrations of how dangerous he is. And contrasts him well against his far more unstable apprentice.
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I agree this was the best episode so far… but the show still isn’t grabbing me. It feels very mechanical in terms of storytelling, like Filoni is following a screenwriting manual that states the points that plot beats should fall at. I had no doubt of the outcome of this episode’s action but not in a “I wonder how they’ll pull this off” kinda way. That said the action was noticeably better this week, and Ray Stevenson is clearly the show’s best asset. I just wish the show was interested in giving people who never watched Rebels or Clone Wars a reason to care about anything in here.
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I just wish the show was interested in giving people who never watched Rebels or Clone Wars a reason to care about anything in here.
As a fan of Clone Wars and Rebels, I’d love this show to give me a reason to care about anything going on here. 🤷🏻♂️
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I don’t mind Ahsoka as I find all the characters fairly enjoyable to watch and the production values are great.
But at the same time it feels very Star-Wars-by-numbers – pretty much every scene is a photocopy of something we’ve seen before – and fan-servicey stuff like the ending to this episode just washes over me these days. They’ve been back to that well too many times for it to feel special.
(And digitally de-ageing Hayden Christensen with more weird smeary CGI feels pretty silly, as the guy is still not that old. Just put him in a costume, slap some makeup on him and let him act.)
Ray Stevenson is by far the best thing in the show, a great performance with real presence and even a bit of nuance to his character. A shame that he’s gone.
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I really liked that they went back to the OT-style duels but then added to them. The PT style became a bit too flashy – though the Maul-QuiGon-ObiWan dust-up I really like. The ST? Didn’t have a style of its own.
Here they used the duels to illustrate the characters. Thinking about it, in its better moments the ObiWan series did similar.
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“You punched that girl.”
“She deserved it.”
Yeah, she’s definitely your kid Raylan.
The first episode of the Justified sequel is OK, hopefully it does what the main series did and gets much better with its second ep.
Still D+ UK did drop the entire series, which for this series, I think will benefit it.
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In the latest episode of Ahsoka, I literally laughed out loud when Darth Barbie threw a fucking smoke bomb! If that was supposed to be dramatic, it failed completely.
This is all I could think of when she did that:
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Back to the 90s:
Watching some scenes of Six Degrees of Separation.
Stockard Channing (who played Rizzo in “Grease”) is there, as is Donald Sutherland and Ian McKlellan.Will Smith put in a lot of work for his role, and the critics at the time did give him some credit
for someone who just did “Fresh Prince”He worked so hard at his dramatic acting, his first wife felt neglected and they split up.
I mentioned Charles Dance previously. I would like to have seen a production with Patrick Stewart, McKlellan, and Dance.
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I gave up waiting for Sky and have started watching the revival series of Law & Order through other means (when I managed to track down somewhere to acquire it from – it’s been a while since I needed to resort to the high seas for anything). I’m three episodes in and I have thoughts!
First, while I appreciate the continuity of cast back to the end of the original run, I think they’ve been too conservative. I don’t just mean Burn Notice guy’s character being almost cartoonishly right wing, but in general choices. McCoy still being DA just feels utterly unrealistic. It’s, what, ten years since the end of the first run? He was precariously placed as DA then, there’s no way he held on to the job. Anthony Anderson coming back as Bernard is solid though and I’m glad he did it, even if it’s only temporary, as I understand it (no spoilers please).
(Carey Lowell showing up as Jaime Ross again in ep 1 was odd, given she’s suddenly an ADA now, when she had become a judge previously, and they didn’t even give her a scene with McCoy).
But even with the new casting, there’s a sense of flying too close to the established norms. You’ve got the same dynamic they had for years in terms of gender balance: a female lieutenant, a young female ADA and an (English) man of indeterminate age as EADA. They really should have mixed it up a bit – at the very least a women of indeterminate age as EADA with a younger male assistant. A female detective (even if that one they paired with Green way back didn’t turn out too well) maybe.
No-one in the cast is particularly bad. I’m struggling to get past my inherent dislike of Burn Notice guy and I don’t especially care for Hugh Dancy either, but eh, they’re generally fine.
Storywise it’s solid but unspectacular. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m more likely to be aware of the news stories they’re ripping from the headlines than I used to be, but so there was one about pseudo-Cosby and one about pseudo-Theranos woman and neither felt desperately strong. There’s not been a particularly meaty scene that’s grabbed me on either side of the show so far and the pseudo-Theranos episode wasted Rachelle Lefevbre (who I love) with a very weakly sketched in attempt at a controlling narcissist. I feel like the run time has been squeezed even shorter than it was in 2010 and that’s not helping.
The updating for the modern day is intriguing. Most of the sets have changed, although McCoy’s office looks at least like the same room, which is nice. The biggest change is that the magical phone call has mostly evolved into “oh, important plot information has appeared on my phone”. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s weird that it also seems to have replaced process servers with blue bits of paper turning up to deliver notice of changes in legal strategy or a new witness etc. Is that a real world change, that information being delivered digitally? It feels phony and less dramatic.
I’m glad the show’s back, but it hasn’t yet made a particularly strong case for being back, if you know what I mean.
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Does the fifth episode of Ahsoka merit its limited cinema release? Not really, but it is a very good episode.
It is one of the few SW stories that addresses the whole Anakin-Vader dual aspect, while examining Ahsoka’s past with both.
The one duff note in it was the depiction of the New Republic. A toxic, micromanaging management style from its senators, hugely distrustful of its people and very fast to go nuclear. It’s said there’s too few ships to do stuff earlier, but here, they send three entire cruisers because a general decided to act on their own initiative? The way the NR is portrayed in this series is such you will need permission to take a dump. And yes, this is something that Mothma is responsible for.
The purgill scene was neatly bonkers, although Hera’s fate is likely to be screwed over.
Still, this was an enjoyable episode despite the defects.
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I gave up waiting for Sky and have started watching the revival series of Law & Order through other means (when I managed to track down somewhere to acquire it from – it’s been a while since I needed to resort to the high seas for anything). I’m three episodes in and I have thoughts!
First, while I appreciate the continuity of cast back to the end of the original run, I think they’ve been too conservative. I don’t just mean Burn Notice guy’s character being almost cartoonishly right wing, but in general choices. McCoy still being DA just feels utterly unrealistic. It’s, what, ten years since the end of the first run? He was precariously placed as DA then, there’s no way he held on to the job. Anthony Anderson coming back as Bernard is solid though and I’m glad he did it, even if it’s only temporary, as I understand it (no spoilers please).
(Carey Lowell showing up as Jaime Ross again in ep 1 was odd, given she’s suddenly an ADA now, when she had become a judge previously, and they didn’t even give her a scene with McCoy).
But even with the new casting, there’s a sense of flying too close to the established norms. You’ve got the same dynamic they had for years in terms of gender balance: a female lieutenant, a young female ADA and an (English) man of indeterminate age as EADA. They really should have mixed it up a bit – at the very least a women of indeterminate age as EADA with a younger male assistant. A female detective (even if that one they paired with Green way back didn’t turn out too well) maybe.
No-one in the cast is particularly bad. I’m struggling to get past my inherent dislike of Burn Notice guy and I don’t especially care for Hugh Dancy either, but eh, they’re generally fine.
Storywise it’s solid but unspectacular. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m more likely to be aware of the news stories they’re ripping from the headlines than I used to be, but so there was one about pseudo-Cosby and one about pseudo-Theranos woman and neither felt desperately strong. There’s not been a particularly meaty scene that’s grabbed me on either side of the show so far and the pseudo-Theranos episode wasted Rachelle Lefevbre (who I love) with a very weakly sketched in attempt at a controlling narcissist. I feel like the run time has been squeezed even shorter than it was in 2010 and that’s not helping.
The updating for the modern day is intriguing. Most of the sets have changed, although McCoy’s office looks at least like the same room, which is nice. The biggest change is that the magical phone call has mostly evolved into “oh, important plot information has appeared on my phone”. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s weird that it also seems to have replaced process servers with blue bits of paper turning up to deliver notice of changes in legal strategy or a new witness etc. Is that a real world change, that information being delivered digitally? It feels phony and less dramatic.
I’m glad the show’s back, but it hasn’t yet made a particularly strong case for being back, if you know what I mean.
You have summed up my thoughts on the show. I think I was over the various L&O franchises many, many years ago.
I guess I’ve watched too much Legal Eagle on YouTube and seen some much with real life law enforcement issues that I honestly find all the L&O series to be practically cartoonish nowadays.
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I have been watching my favorite scenes of “The Last Action Hero”.
It is underrated imho. It got a raw deal as in 1993, it came out with Jurassic Park
I liked the idea of parody with the action movie tropes, and Arnold’s self parody. The kid grew on me, but Charles Dance (Game of Thrones, The Golden Child) stole the movie.
Favorite line for me was “You were trying to sucker me with marked bills weren’t you?”
I love Last Action Hero. Always have. It’s far better than pretty much anyone realised back then.
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Anyone here currently watching Only Murders in the Building? I’ve been watching the new season. Still stuck at the 6th episode. I’m enjoying it currently, not as much as the first season though.
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Yeah, it’s got a different vibe to when it started, but I think that’s inevitable. I really liked the episode with Matthew Broderick. Very sporting of them to completely send themselves up like that.
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Yeah, I still enjoy Only Murders as the lead performances are so good that it’s never less than entertaining, and this season’s guest cast is pretty decent too.
Although it is kind of funny how Streep is so obviously only in every other episode – I feel like they’ll have to lampshade that at some point.
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I watched season 1 of Harley Quinn. I really enjoyed it. A lot of great dialogue and performances.
The show really reminds my of The Venture Brothers in the vein of humor and setups. There are times where it almost feels like a wholesale ripoff and that can be distracting at times. The portrayal of the Legion of Doom here is very similar to the Guild of Calamitous Intent, which I think was a parody of the LoD.
All in all though, it’s a fun series that I’m going to continue with.
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Snowflame is a drug-powered supervillain and a member of the Legion of Doom.
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He does cocaine, a lot of cocaine.
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I know nothing of the source material but, with Netflix actually going for a second series, am working my way through One Piece.
And it is excellent. Good characters, active heroes and villains, smart use of and clearly indicated flashbacks, topped off with a great sense of balance. It knows when to be fun, scary, action, dark, mysterious – you get the idea.
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The final three episodes of One Piece stumbled a little but also recovered well to conclude strongly. They also really hedged their bets with the finale. There’s a TBC aspect but it wraps up all the main plots from this first series. Unusual but all the better for it, especially with the finale, literally, bringing down the house.
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The Super Mario Bros Movie was a riot of fun. Clocking in at just under an amazingly compact 90 minutes, it doesn’t waste a second.
There a genius use of visual motifs and sound in the movie. From doing a training montage to I Need A Hero to a gorilla security escort wearing an 80s white sports jacket, who bundles them into a kart, dons shades, drives off and Take On Me kicks in!
Not the only two either. At the same time it has clearly looked to the likes of Pixar and SpiderVerse. The visuals are consistently incredible to look at. The rainbow road sequence is a great showcase of just how good they are.
At the same time it is also attentive to characters. Mario and Luigi have their own arc, but the biggest beneficiary of this is Peach. The film renders her a far more active character. Peach gets several great sequences.
There is so much heart and fun to this movie. It has an excellent sense of momentum, never slows down, has a wonderful sense of design – with some sequences being a homage to the 2D game – and is, well, so very fun.
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I know nothing of the source material but, with Netflix actually going for a second series, am working my way through One Piece. And it is excellent. Good characters, active heroes and villains, smart use of and clearly indicated flashbacks, topped off with a great sense of balance. It knows when to be fun, scary, action, dark, mysterious – you get the idea.
My kids are One Piece mad, the anime just goes on forever, they are on episode 270-something (Netflix drop a dozen new episodes every month).
They liked the live-action adaptation and it’s received a pretty good reception from anime fans who have a history of disappointment with ‘Hollywood’ adaptations so are not the easiest to please.
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I’m coming to the end of Peaky Blinders (2 episodes left), a show I have ‘binged’ on Netflix over a few weeks.
I’ve really enjoyed the show. The last series suffers from absence of Helen McCrory who died of cancer before filming. She was rarely front and centre in any of the stories but her influence more obvious when the ‘matriarch’ role is removed.
It’s a beautifully filmed programme with great performances, there are some stretches of credulity in the plot of season 4 (which has Adrien Brody really hamming it up as a New York/Italian gangster like he’s been asked to parody Brando in the Godfather) but they tone it back down again after that and despite it all the tension in the final episode of that season is really quite scary.
Tom Hardy’s appearances though are riveting. I’m not in a position to say if his character verges on Jewish stereotypes in places but the cadence of his delivery and dialogue mean you never know what he’ll say next and he lights up every scene he’s in.
It was interesting Googling the factual side of it. The ‘peaky blinders’ criminal gang did exist in the Small Heath area of Birmingham, they did dress really well and as wealth came moved into posher circles and country houses. The timeline has been manipulated, the show starts at around the time their influence was on the wane but narratively I can see why the post WW1 setting works so well for the characters.
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Could someone please tell the rock snail things in Ahoska that I hate them please?
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Ahsoka Ep 6
For me, this was the first episode where I felt a bit lost and emotionally detached because I never watched the Rebels series. It also didn’t help that when Sabine and Ezra where finally reunited, it felt too understated and emotionally underwhelming. She has been on a crusade to find him and done some really stupid and dangerous things to get to him. Yet when she finally finds him, it’s all so muted. There was no emotional payoff. It felt flat for me.
Is it me or did Thrawn appear a little pudgy? Maybe food was how he dealt with exile.
While the actress who portrays Sabine is very hot, the character is kind of annoying to me.
Could someone please tell the rock snail things in Ahoska that I hate them please?
Thanks.The Product Development, Marketing, and Licensing divisions of Disney don’t care what you think.
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The Product Development, Marketing, and Licensing divisions of Disney don’t care what you think.
This was made very clear with “Porgs”
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Hasbro have an hours-long livestream of toy announcements today, I’m fully expecting to see the little turtle guys all over the Star Wars segment
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Saw “See How They Run”, a comedic whodunnit using a Westend performance of Christie’s The Mousetrap as the background of an actual murder investigation. The script has some clever meta touches and the movie stars Saorsie Ronan and Sam Rockwell (whom I love dearly), but it all doesn’t really work. The script isn’t quite clever enough to pull off the parody and at the same time actual mystery that it wants to be, and the direction feels a bit TV a lot of the time. And the comedy veers into pure silliness a little too often.
Just… not enough talent in there, overall.
I saw this recently and quite liked it. It was goofy and silly in places but I quite liked the knockabout tone and slightly farcical elements. I also thought Saorsie Ronan was really good in a more comedic role, she had a great knack for timing and delivery.
Also there are quite a few supporting actors in there from the UK comedy scene which were nice to spot.
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Catching up on Strictly and realising exactly how out the loop I am by not recognising any of the celebs in it.
Edit – wait, not quite, recognise Jody and Krishnan.
How quickly we forget Les Dennis.
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Three, three celebrities, ha ha ha
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I saw this recently and quite liked it. It was goofy and silly in places but I quite liked the knockabout tone and slightly farcical elements. I also thought Saorsie Ronan was really good in a more comedic role, she had a great knack for timing and delivery.
Also there are quite a few supporting actors in there from the UK comedy scene which were nice to spot.
I am glad you enjoyed it! Maybe it just wasn’t quite my cup of tea.
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I think I forgot to mention this, but I saw “Pig” recently. It was a very dark but also very tender movie. The latter surprised me – I didn’t know anything about it going in and I had no idea whether this would become a kind of slow, moody, low-key John Wick kind of movie, only with a pig. But instead of the main character being a master assassin, it turned out he used to be a legendary chef. Which could’ve been rather silly, but Pig is such a completely serious movie and so clear about its ideas that it worked really well for me. Overall, it was an excellent movie about loss.
Nicholas Cage, man. What a career that guy is having.
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THIS WEEK ON AHSOKA: Galaxy Quest!
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I don’t think Ahsoka is packing in enough cameos. Maybe they could have a hologram of Liam Neeson show up next week to name-drop Darth Maul, or the Emperor cameo with a subplot about him having faked his death so he could go and hunt down Kyle Katarn.
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My “oh fuck off” when Threepio showed up wasn’t as emphatic as when CGI Zombie Luke did in Mandalorian, but it was there.
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Just wait until teenage BB-8 shows up in the next episode.
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BB-4
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Oh, I think I also forgot to say that I watched Highrise recently. That was a great movie. Probably because it’s also a great novel (haven’t read it, but it feels that way). Interestingly, it was very similar to the more recent Triangle of Madness (which I think won the Palm d’Or, and was really good, too), but I liked Highrise more for its absurdity and its kafkaesque/magic-realist approach to the issue of class. Great cast, too!
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I don’t think Ahsoka is packing in enough cameos. Maybe they could have a hologram of Liam Neeson show up next week to name-drop Darth Maul, or the Emperor cameo with a subplot about him having faked his death so he could go and hunt down Kyle Katarn.
More like Katarn hunts the Emperor.
The ep was OK. Like its predecessors elsewhere it’s leaning into RoS, with the Emperor’s death being hazy. But there’s also the idea that anyone can tap into the Force.
Thrawn is another case where he is less than he was, much like Sidious in RoS. Some will view Thrawn as little more than a cheat, which in the books, with a mad Jedi helping him and a secret info source, he was. Tactical brilliance built on a magic crutch isn’t that impressive.
3PO turning up as Hera’s escape card was kind of funny. As was watching waste of a sperm Xiono more or less crap himself when told to take it up Leia. An insecure, cowardly waste of space. As for Mothma, here she’s more clueless than Valorum was. This series has been pretty much a disaster for the character.
Shin is…. useless. And she have been killed and sent back to Thrawn in pieces. Baylan is a lot better but answers are needed now as to what he’s up to, it’s ran too long.
I liked the Imperial minefield -don’t think those have been seen before and it demonstrates that’s Thrawn’s a sick bastard. That the whales warped out was a neat “fuck your minefield” move.
Ezra not using a lightsaber and still kicking arse was neat. Had elements of Chirrut’s style in there too. Tennant’s clearly having fun as Huyang in here as well.
It’s an OK penultimate episode but needs to stick the landing next week.
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Oh, I think I also forgot to say that I watched Highrise recently. That was a great movie. Probably because it’s also a great novel (haven’t read it, but it feels that way). Interestingly, it was very similar to the more recent Triangle of Madness (which I think won the Palm d’Or, and was really good, too), but I liked Highrise more for its absurdity and its kafkaesque/magic-realist approach to the issue of class. Great cast, too!
Yeah I liked that one. And I went to see it at the cinema with a mate who hated it, which is always interesting.
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As for Mothma, here she’s more clueless than Valorum was. This series has been pretty much a disaster for the character.
She’s certainly aged beautifully in the intervening 15 years since Andor though.
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I’ve been enjoying Ashoka. It started off with some wonky pacing but it’s levelled out, it’s had some good action and great visuals. And since I just finished watching Rebels, its cool to go straight from that to seeing Ezra kicking ass in live action.
I’m pretty sceptical of it having a satisfying ending though. It seem like we’re headed to our heroes and Thrawn being back in our galaxy and just waiting for them to pop up in the next series or this Filoni film.
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I have to skip the Asokha comments because we’re not quite there yet – last episode we saw was the one with Asokha making the whale jump. But I have to say I quite enjoyed those three episodes yesterday. Jolly exciting space battles, pretty nice fights, and the plot developed at a nice pace. The only thing that really got on my nerves was the old “my superiors are incredibly dumb” trope, especially as those conversations were sooooo badly written (with Hera telling them nothing about fallen Jedi, huge hyperspace rigs and the like and just going “uh, no, I can’t prove that Thrawn is involved…”. It’s just such an annoying plot device, every time it comes up, and in Star Wars it’s always been especially horrible because it has painted the Jedi Council as such an incompetent circle of arrogant jerks that they all deserved their fate.
Funnily enough, the only Star Wars scenes in which superiors were portrayed as competent, as listening attentively and making clever decisions were the Imperial secret service staff in Andor. Those guys should’ve won, really, all things considered.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeadInTheSandManagement
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I don’t think Ahsoka is packing in enough cameos. Maybe they could have a hologram of Liam Neeson show up next week to name-drop Darth Maul, or the Emperor cameo with a subplot about him having faked his death so he could go and hunt down Kyle Katarn.
More like Katarn hunts the Emperor.
The ep was OK. Like its predecessors elsewhere it’s leaning into RoS, with the Emperor’s death being hazy. But there’s also the idea that anyone can tap into the Force.
Thrawn is another case where he is less than he was, much like Sidious in RoS. Some will view Thrawn as little more than a cheat, which in the books, with a mad Jedi helping him and a secret info source, he was. Tactical brilliance built on a magic crutch isn’t that impressive.
3PO turning up as Hera’s escape card was kind of funny. As was watching waste of a sperm Xiono more or less crap himself when told to take it up Leia. An insecure, cowardly waste of space. As for Mothma, here she’s more clueless than Valorum was. This series has been pretty much a disaster for the character.
Shin is…. useless. And she have been killed and sent back to Thrawn in pieces. Baylan is a lot better but answers are needed now as to what he’s up to, it’s ran too long.
I liked the Imperial minefield -don’t think those have been seen before and it demonstrates that’s Thrawn’s a sick bastard. That the whales warped out was a neat “fuck your minefield” move.
Ezra not using a lightsaber and still kicking arse was neat. Had elements of Chirrut’s style in there too. Tennant’s clearly having fun as Huyang in here as well.
It’s an OK penultimate episode but needs to stick the landing next week.
Okay, caught up on Ahsoka now. And yeah, the two penultimate episodes were alright, but also a bit of a drag somewhow. I do like that Thrawn actually puts some thought into what he’s doing, even if it actually isn’t all that clever. And man, that senate hearing scene was terrible. If bad guy senator was actually supposed to run all of this by Leia, Mothma must be dumb as shit not to have noticed, and the way he was just running the room before that was just such bad writing.
Ezra and the turtle guys were… okay, I guess. But I thought his refusal to take up the lightsaber was just daft, and it was probably only there to make it a big moment when he finally does use a saber. Fight choreography is also still less than impressive. And Ray Stevenson’s been doing great with what he was given, but given that Skoll hasn’t really been fleshed out at this point, it’s probably not going to happen – there’s not a lot of time left to wrap everything up, and it’s not like they can continue his arc next season, unfortunately.
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I watched most of the first episode of the Hulu series (on D+ over here) Reboot, which it turns out is not about green CGI people living in a computer. It’s actually a sitcom about a 00s sitcom being rebooted with its original cast. They’re lured back with the promise of it being a darker, more realistic take on the concept, written by an indie film maker played by Rachel Bloom. But at the last minute, the original creator swoops in, fires her and takes over.
It didn’t really work for me. On the one hand, it does gratuitously let you see Judy Greer’s very nice breasts. On the other hand, it’s not particularly funny. Also, the sitcom they’re rebooting is from the early 00s yet it is quite clear an 80s sitcom of an ilk with cheesy, broad, social messaging stuff like Full House. There’s no way it would have existed in the early 00s. But it has to have for the set-up of the original cast coming back to work and it feels like an awkward bodge job.
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That’s a shame, I was going to take a look at this because it has Keegan-Michael Key in it and Paul Reiser and the concept sounded like fun. Maybe I’ll still have a gander.
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Also, I tried to post about this when the board was having its issues, but it didn’t go through and I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it since; off the back of really enjoying Strange New Worlds, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning recently. I’m astounded at how bad it is.
I’ve never really been into Star Trek, but my brother has since we were kids, so I have an extensive surface knowledge of it and have seen various bits and pieces. I also knew that the first season or so of TNG was considered a bit ropey, but that didn’t prepare me for just how bad it’s been. If Encounter At Far Point had been a network pilot, rather than the first of a made for syndication series, there’s no way it would have been picked up for a full series. It’s dreadful. So much of the show feels like left-overs from the 60s, from the scripts (the third episode with the planet of black people whose culture respects people stealing women) to some of the production methods. The alien planets almost all look like they’re sets from TOS, from the fake rocks to the colour-lit backdrops. The costumes and props are terrible too, with the initial phasers looking like garage door remotes.
And so much of that pilot is spent – both screen time and money – on stuff that just doesn’t work or is some pointless fancy of, I assume, Roddenberry. The floating chair thing for Q in the trial scene, which I’m sure cost a lot yet still looks bobbins. The lift in the engineering section, which is big enough only for one person to stand in it, perfectly flat to the back, just to make the journey of one short staircase. The saucer separation function and secondary bridge (which takes AGES) feels like one of those ideas that usually gets cut for convenience and time, but there it is. I was amazed when it was used again in a later episode.
And then there are bits that feel modern for the time, but are incredibly dated now. The set design of the Enterprise is bizarre. In trying to be very modern, they ended up being inescapably late 80s. The naff carpets, the pot plants, the reclining leather seats at the helm (oh how much they recline!) the three part command seating section that just feels like a family sitting down to watch TV. It’s all so dated and naff. The Enterprise just feels like every dentist’s waiting room from the 90s. (I will give them the touch screen computers though, those look good).
I’ve stuck with watching it as much out of morbid curiosity as anything. I know it must get good at some point (surely!) and I’m curious to see just how bad it gets. It helps that it’s the kind of thing I can put on as background noise while doing something else too. And it’s been rough going. The holodeck is already intensely boring. They introduce it in the first episode as this amazing technological wonder and then within the first half of the season they’ve done two more episodes about it being upgraded to become even more of a technological marvel and neither of them worked. There’s that episode which ends on an attempted comic punchline of one group of aliens delegates having captured and killed a different alien delegate and apparently taken them to the ship’s chef to cook, which is a staggering bit of writing. There’s far more mentions of rape gangs than I ever expected from Star Trek and a lot of mentions of sex in a way that thinks it’s being intellectual and mature but is really like a schoolkid thinking they’re being very clever by breaking a taboo.
I’m most of the way through s1 now and I thought perhaps it was getting better (or that I had perhaps suitably lowered my expectations). The episode with the Klingons wasn’t too bad. But then there’s the one where Tasha Yar is killed off. Oh boy.
This was one I had on while doing something else and to be honest, I barely even noticed the moment she got killed, so mundane that it was. It was only when they explicitly said she was dead that I paid some attention to it. I knew she did get killed off, but I didn’t realise it was as soon as this. And to go out in such a bad episode (even by the standards of the season) is the greatest indignity. That sludge monster thing is laughable in every regard and the plot is just a tedious circling of a few banal pseudo-intellectual moral points. And the whole thing is capped off by a terrible holographic recorded goodbye (in the holodeck, which makes raises the question why she’s a translucent “hologram” for it when it does literal solid holographic people), in which she takes time to say goodbye to Wesley, of all people. None of her security team, but sure, the annoying “boy genius” that hangs out on the bridge.
I read that Crosby wanted to leave the show in part because the cast was too big to have room for everyone to really get much development. And she’s right to a degree; Worf has barely been more than an extra up til this point (save for the episode with the Klingons). Yar did better on that count than him, but none it’s particularly good and she’s not a compelling character.
I think of the original cast, the two most interesting (by which I don’t especially also mean “good”) characters are Data and Troi. They present an interesting view of Roddenberry’s thinking on updating Star Trek. In the 60s, you had Spock, who was there to be the ideal of science and logic. But he had to be half-human in order to make that more relatable. If he’s been entirely alien, then you’d have been completely Othering that position and it would unbalance his relationship as one of the contrasting voices feeding to Kirk (alongside Bones, as the epitome of raw human emotion, though mostly masculine ones). Here in the late 80s, we have computers, so logic can be shunted off to a robot (albeit a human looking one) without it being overly diminished. Then there’s the new leadership fulcrum. Instead of Kirk balancing between logic and anger, we get Picard balancing action (Riker) and empathy (Troi). It’s very late 80s/early 90s that emotional intelligence is brought forward as a key consideration. But this is Star Trek, an actiony-sci-fi show aimed largely at men/boys, so you can’t just have a human doing that, it would be sappy. Hence we get Troi, who is made half Betamax in order to Other it a bit. Basic human emotion is given an alien set dressing and made to seem novel. I don’t know if I necessarily think that’s bad, mind. Troi isn’t a great character (so far) because she’s a bit of a drip and the pseudo-psychic powers are pretty silly – she basically uses them to make text of subtext that isn’t conveyed well otherwise. She exists to vocalise what should be Picard’s intuition on reading people – and I really don’t get why she stops wearing a uniform after the pilot and ends up in all that silly lycra (except I do and I suspect it’s a Paramount exec desperately looking for some sex appeal).
My main takeaway from this is that I’m amazed the show lasted long enough to get good. I can’t see that it would have lasted more than a season in the current TV landscape (though I supposed Discovery has and people hate that). I especially don’t get why BBC execs were looking at it and going “well clearly Dr Who can’t compete with this, we must cancel it immediately”. I can’t imagine any writer or script editor worth their salt would make that comparison, between TNG s1 and the Cartmel era of Who, and come away thinking Who was being clobbered. Budget-wise, sure. Production-wise, maybe but not really. But writing? No way.
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That’s a shame, I was going to take a look at this because it has Keegan-Michael Key in it and Paul Reiser and the concept sounded like fun. Maybe I’ll still have a gander.
By comparison I quite enjoyed Reboot, it’s definitely a bit out of time with the format of the old and the new sitcom, but the character interactions are a lot of fun. There’s some level of ongoing plot in there, Johnny Knoxville’s something of a revelation in his role, and I’m generally there for Rachel Bloom getting to say cunt a lot.
That said, the show’s been cancelled so it’s not a huge commitment either way.
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That’s a shame, I was going to take a look at this because it has Keegan-Michael Key in it and Paul Reiser and the concept sounded like fun. Maybe I’ll still have a gander.
I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t perfect but I had a good time watching it.
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Cheers, guys, I’ll definitely take a look then
I might give it another chance too.
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I found what I wrote about it on here after watching the first three episodes:
https://thecarrier.net/forums/topic/what-are-you-watching/page/9/#post-100007
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After this discussion I tried the first episode of Reboot last night and quite liked it (it’s definitely my second-favourite show called Reboot, at least) so will likely watch the whole thing.
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I watched the first couple of episode of the new Takeshi’s Castle, which has finally been made available in the UK. It’s fun! I like that the guy they had as a stand in for Takeshi in those two episodes was freely criticising/mocking the format. I’m only really familiar with the Jonathan Ross era of British dub (which was based on the Malaysian or Thai version, I think) so I don’t know the original format too well. I assume it wasn’t split into two episodes originally. You get a much better sense of who is going through the events and the general flow of things here than you ever did in that dub/edited version (not least because it’s much longer). But then, a lot of that is baffling. Even knowing about the second chance events and the Fighting Spirit awards, it was hard to follow the numbers of contestants. And why do they keep adding extra rules to events halfway through when no-one has passed them? It seems arbitrarily cruel (which I know is kinda the point, but still).
I did find myself wondering a lot about how it’s made. Do they do an entire episode’s worth of events in one day? The BTS bits in the end credits for the first episode said it was a three day shoot, but I don’t know if that was that pair of episodes or the full run. I also assumed initially that Ueda and the main hosts were doing their stuff after the fact, but then they show up for the final event (which is awesome) so I guess they’re there on the day watching events as they’re shot/edited?
Out of curiosity, I watched a few minutes of the new British edit with Romesh and Tom. Well, I say “edit”, I was expecting it to be that, with English graphics and a new cut, but it’s basically straight dub over the Japanese version, including all the Japanese text and the bits with Ueda and the lords. I can kinda see why the held back the sub in the UK and why they attempted this, but it’s surprisingly low rent compared to the Comedy Central version.
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I might do that. I know I want to watch Severance – and other tips?
For all minkind is fantastic. Mythic quest is really good when it gets going…
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Apple TV has a few good shows… unfortunately, because fuck Apple… but I guess that’s why the seven seas exist
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I did find myself wondering a lot about how it’s made. Do they do an entire episode’s worth of events in one day? The BTS bits in the end credits for the first episode said it was a three day shoot, but I don’t know if that was that pair of episodes or the full run. I also assumed initially that Ueda and the main hosts were doing their stuff after the fact, but then they show up for the final event (which is awesome) so I guess they’re there on the day watching events as they’re shot/edited?
I think each of the two-part “battles” was a single day of the three-day shoot, with them filming the episodes that Takeshi was actually there for at a later point. And yeah, it’d be interesting to see if the hosts were commenting in real time or if they showed up for the final battle and then did the green screen sequences another day.
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Watched the Only Murders In The Building finale. Lots of fun and a good wrap-up to what’s been a great season all round.
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I did find myself wondering a lot about how it’s made. Do they do an entire episode’s worth of events in one day? The BTS bits in the end credits for the first episode said it was a three day shoot, but I don’t know if that was that pair of episodes or the full run. I also assumed initially that Ueda and the main hosts were doing their stuff after the fact, but then they show up for the final event (which is awesome) so I guess they’re there on the day watching events as they’re shot/edited?
I think each of the two-part “battles” was a single day of the three-day shoot, with them filming the episodes that Takeshi was actually there for at a later point. And yeah, it’d be interesting to see if the hosts were commenting in real time or if they showed up for the final battle and then did the green screen sequences another day.
I just watched the first Naomi Fortress episode and it had BTS bits in the end credits again. The wording in that implies the shoot for that pair of episodes alone was three days (it says shooting across three days with around 100 competitors).. That would track with some of the episode: one of the people going into the consolation games after the second round was told he was due at 4pm, which is late in the day for 1/3 into the show, and it was getting dark near the end of the Daruma game. So I’m thinking the stuff with the Lords is shot on the final day, using an early edit of all the previous rounds (there’s a couple of moments where they’ve been given a heads up of what’s going to happen), before they go into the finale late in the evening.
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Ahsoka gets a few more quality “oh fuck off” moments into the finale. Some good fights but this show never made me feel anything, and dear Bob, the dialogue was awful. Most two-head conversation scenes felt more like two people talking at each other, not with each other… I see a lot of people really enjoying the show but I just don’t get it.
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Ahsoka gets a few more quality “oh fuck off” moments into the finale. Some good fights but this show never made me feel anything, and dear Bob, the dialogue was awful. Most two-head conversation scenes felt more like two people talking at each other, not with each other… I see a lot of people really enjoying the show but I just don’t get it.
I felt like Ahsoka started off okay, but the last few episodes have been on a downhill slope and the final episode was very poor. In fact it’s hard to think of a less satisfying finale.
I think the people behind this story lost sight of basic aspects like what each character was actually trying to achieve and why, and the whole thing feels like a massive “so what?” as a result. I struggled to care about any of it, and climactic developments that felt like they should be a big deal just landed with a wet thud and went nowhere.
Most of all, it’s just not really an ending to this story at all. One of the curses of these sprawling shared universes is that people think they don’t actually have to do endings any more.
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Most of all, it’s just not really an ending to this story at all. One of the curses of these sprawling shared universes is that people think they don’t actually have to do endings any more.
This is a big concern I have about Loki as well. If Kang’s appearance at the end of series 1 was a setup for series 2, then it’s a really strong ending. But if it was just to set Kang up for the broader MCU and he won’t be back for series 2, it’s less satisfying.
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Most of all, it’s just not really an ending to this story at all. One of the curses of these sprawling shared universes is that people think they don’t actually have to do endings any more.
This is a big concern I have about Loki as well. If Kang’s appearance at the end of series 1 was a setup for series 2, then it’s a really strong ending. But if it was just to set Kang up for the broader MCU and he won’t be back for series 2, it’s less satisfying.
As far as Loki goes, I think they haven’t hidden the fact that Majors will be back in season 2.
But with Ahsoka I get the feeling that this is all now just glorified setup for the big Mando/Ahsoka/Blue Man Group crossover movie that Filoni is overseeing.
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The Kang variant scene is on the end of Quantumania I believe, not GotG3 (which has lots of post-credit stuff, but not that).
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Damn, you’re right! Still, go watch GotG 3, Lorcan.
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All right, Ahsoka ep 8, let’s fucking go…. What a total, goddamn mess.
What was Shin all about? Dunno. Baylan? Dunno, but given Disney doesn’t have the nerve to recast, also likely never know. This is especially bad as Stevenson was the best actor in the show by miles. Not even an attempt at resolving anything for either of these. Still, did see it coming with there being 13 mins left and no sight of either of them.
Meanwhile, zombie troopers. Do Jedi not get taught D and D? Dismember and decapitate? With sabers that strategy would be easy; wait, this is a D+ show so we can have zombies but not show them being cut to pieces! Morgan? Meh, waste of space, as was the blade of Talzin. That is a significant name but the blade is nothing special.
Without his bit,sorry, witches, is Thrawn worth anything? If you go his portrait here he isn’t living up to his billing at all. With the Chimaera above Dathomir there’s clearly going to be an army of the dead, but without any of the blood and gore such a thing would entail.
Stuff that worked? Er, there really wasn’t much. Ezra’s conversation with Huyang, building his new saber and reunion with Hera were great. That’s about it.
This was an utterly weak finale. It may be mitigated in future by knowing it gets followed up on with A, B, C, but that only helps so much. It still needs to be good on its own and this isn’t.
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This is especially bad as Stevenson was the best actor in the show by miles
Yeah I was really disappointed that his story came to nothing in the end. I wonder if they had bigger plans for his character.
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The only half credible idea I’ve seen for recasting, that I doubt Disney / LFL will pull the trigger on, is Liev Schriber.
The way this was written says a second season was guaranteed, with the story continuing there.
Of course, with US TV, guaranteed never really means guaranteed.
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Watching more Takeshi’s Castle and it does at times feel like a show that’s made to fulfil someone’s very specific kink. Thinking of in the second Naomi episode where the football player is going through the false walls game and they set her up with a false tip so she’ll hit walls and then clearly let her win after she’s fallen in pretty much every mud trap.
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All right, Ahsoka ep 8, let’s fucking go…. What a total, goddamn mess.
What was Shin all about? Dunno. Baylan? Dunno, but given Disney doesn’t have the nerve to recast, also likely never know. This is especially bad as Stevenson was the best actor in the show by miles. Not even an attempt at resolving anything for either of these. Still, did see it coming with there being 13 mins left and no sight of either of them.
Meanwhile, zombie troopers. Do Jedi not get taught D and D? Dismember and decapitate? With sabers that strategy would be easy; wait, this is a D+ show so we can have zombies but not show them being cut to pieces! Morgan? Meh, waste of space, as was the blade of Talzin. That is a significant name but the blade is nothing special.
Without his bit,sorry, witches, is Thrawn worth anything? If you go his portrait here he isn’t living up to his billing at all. With the Chimaera above Dathomir there’s clearly going to be an army of the dead, but without any of the blood and gore such a thing would entail.
Stuff that worked? Er, there really wasn’t much. Ezra’s conversation with Huyang, building his new saber and reunion with Hera were great. That’s about it.
This was an utterly weak finale. It may be mitigated in future by knowing it gets followed up on with A, B, C, but that only helps so much. It still needs to be good on its own and this isn’t.
For me, the series got worse as it went on. It became harder and harder to stay engaged with it.
I think my biggest problem is that the actors had no chemistry with each other. It felt like every actor perfomed seperately and they got edited together in post-production. And for the huge deal that finding Ezra was, especially to Sabine, everyone’s reaction to him when they see him alive is, “Oh hey, it’s Ezra. ‘Sup?” As I have said before, I never watched the animated series and I would assume that a lot of people may not have. Knowing that, the creators have a responsibility to provide emotional payoffs so we can connect and embrace the characters. Ray Stevenson was the only decent performance on the show. He honestly did the best he could with the shit he was given. He was the only one to even try. And I also wasn’t that impressed with Thrawn. He did not live up to the hype.
I do appreciate that they went The Empire Strikes Back route and having the bad guys kind of win at the end.
And Ezra, why the fuck do you walk out of that shuttle with your fucking Stormtrooper helmet on? Creatively, I understand it was for dramatic effect but it really made no sense.
It seems like Disney is sticking with Dave Filioni as the shepard of their television projects but I hope that once this “cycle” wraps up, they find someone new. Like Marvel, it feels like they need some fresh blood.
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I watched Totally Killer on Prime Video, the latest in the line of “[Movie], but with murders.” Happy Death Day was Groundhog Day with murders, Freaky was Freaky Friday with murders, this is very clearly Back to the Future with murders, with Kiernan Shipka travelling back to 1987 to prevent a string of murders at her parents’ school.
It’s much more a comedy than a horror movie, and a pretty funny one. It doesn’t take itself too seriously (I was wondering for the first act how they send her back in time, and then they just reveal her best friend built a time machine for a science project), and the choices on the 80s differences to focus on are pretty fun (she’s surprised she can just show up to school and go to classes without any paperwork or ask which class a student is in without anyone caring about data protection).
The murder-y are parts are enjoyable too, especially the final showdown with the killer, which is a very fun setpiece.
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