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Todd wrote:

onestly, the first season was lightning in a bottle. It was just the perfect confluence of talent and timing. They can keep trying, but I don’t think they will ever be able to replicate that first season.

Yeah, it really was the combination of Fukunaga’s direction and Pizzolatto’s writing that made the 1st season so special. I still haven’t seen seasons 2 and 3, but at least those were written by Pizzolatto. I suspect that one big difference there though is that Pizzolatto carried the idea for the first story around with him for a long time, whereas he had to write the other seasons in a hurry.

Anyway, now that it’s both directed and written by entirely different people, it’s turning into just another crime show.

Watched Ghostbuster: Afterlife. And didn’t much care for it, unfortunately. It just took too long to get going – I was still watching that annoying family after half an hour and nothing had fucking happened. And, I mean, given the slow pace, they really didn’t do shit to make the characters three-dimensional and interesting. Older brother is a brat who doesn’t like being in the countryside. Younger sister loves sciences. Mum is horrible to her children and hates her dad. There’s nothing going on with these characters beyond that, and weirdly also no real feeling of affection for each other (contrast this to “Locke and Key” where they managed to make the dynamics of a fucked-up family work really well). Paul Rudd manages to breathe a little bit of life into the movie for a bit, but he’s just has too little to work with. And for like 2/3rds of the movie, they keep the slow pace and they try to keep the suspense mostly with nostalgia bait. It was all just so boring.

The ending was kinda nice, though.

So while Shin Godzilla was a shoe-in for a general cinema release, and Shin Ultraman got a single screening on a single screen outside of the Japanese Film Festival, I figured Shin Kamen Rider wasn’t going to get on the big screen over here outside of this year’s Festival in April… so I… acquired it in a perfectly legitimate manner.

Much like Shin Ultraman, this movie feels like a compilation of episodes from an updated Kamen Rider TV show that never existed.  The core plot is the same as the original Kamen Rider show – Biker Takeshi Hongo is abducted by the secret organisation SHOCKER, who transform him into a cyborg warrior, but before he can be brainwashed into following their orders mindlessly, he’s freed by Dr. Hiroshi Midorikawa (here played by Tetsuo the Iron Man creator Shinya Tsukamoto) and his daughter Ruriko, and Takeshi and Ruriko dedicate themselves to destroying SHOCKER, and the movie then shows their battles with a number of SHOCKER’s augmented leaders with a couple of twists along the way, many of which are recreating specific sequences or episodes from the original TV show.

As this trilogy has progressed, my knowledge of the source material has decreased.  Like I’ve seen every Japanese Godzilla movie at least once, for Ultraman I’ve read some old manga, watched the Netflix CGI anime and a few things here and there.  But Kamen Rider is something I’ve read about rather than experienced on its own merits, meaning I came to this movie as largely a blank slate for better or ill.  I can’t tell you if the movie’s use of prana as an energy source is an Anno creation or from the original show, for example. As it is the movie is a lot of fun with some very impressive fights and enjoyable characters, but it didn’t set my world on fire.

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Todd

lorcan_nagle wrote:

but it didn’t set my world on fire.

I got about 30 minutes in and had to turn it off. It seemed a cheesey mess.

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lorcan_nagle

[Sean Robinson]

Edit responding to True Detective: Night Country

I’m more forgiving than you guys. I was enjoying the ride, and expecting train wreck at the same time, but thought it worked in the end.

Fits with whats going on in the world.
Alaska is it’s own thing which i thought they showed very well.
There is no Canadian comparison where I can go from southern BC and visit a friend in the Yukon.

It’s another world where a significant portion of the white people have run from something (how many actually born there?) and now mix with the (large) indigenous population.
Huge learning curve on that one, and I wonder how long it takes to get a passing grade?
A lot of broken of broken people.

It worked for me, but it did feel like they were being presumptuous along the way.
I called the episode 5 ‘thing’ (almost, not quite, but something needed to be revealed by thst point.

Anyone notice its a polar opposite of McConaughey & Harrelson in a warm environment?

Season 5?
Keep changing it, but not opposed to showing a Season of Fargo from another viewpoint.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Sean Robinson.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Sean Robinson.

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Todd

Argh, I had a review of Dunes written out but the board logged me out as I hit post and lost it. Suffice it to say, it’s good.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Christian, Ben

Nooooooo!

Ah well, I am sure we’ll get more into it when more people’ve seen it.

Damn, I have to figure out when I can watch this. Not this week, that’s for sure.

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lorcan_nagle

It’s been sold out in my local cinema all weekend, I pre-booked my ticket for opening night weeks ago and the screen was packed on Friday night.

Plus, they’ve been putting up cute posters for all the sold-out movies, like this one yesterday:

 

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Uncle Retrospective, Christian

[Christian]

Heh. That’s awesome.

There seems to be quite a hype around Dune 2. It’s interesting that Warner seems to really be pushing this movie (there’s promo clips all over my social media, mainly interviews with Chalamet and Zendaya), given Part 1’s so-so boxoffice performance (it’s counted as a success, but mainly because it was made surprisingly cheaply). Of course, that was still during the pandemic, so it’s not like anyone can tell how it would’ve normally done.

Anyway, it’s cool that with part 2, Dune seems to really be becoming a thing now.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by Christian.

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lorcan_nagle

I assume they folded streaming numbers into Part One’s measure of success, given it was available online the same day as it hit the cinema

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Todd

Code Eight

This was a surprisingly good SF-superpowers combination, featuring the Amell brothers (aka Firestorm and Arrow). Turns out in the future a minority have superpowers and that is used to justify the cops being allowed to deploy Terminators. Ah, nope, here, they’re called Guardians, but they will terminate your arse.

It’s a straightforward and compact story, just over 90 minutes.  It doesn’t do any of the “let’s assume we’ll get a second movie”, there’s no last minute cliffhangers, it turns up, tell its story and ends.

It’s also a very grounded, street level view of superpowers.  People might have an ability but it doesn’t render them superhuman or immune to injury

Code Eight Part II

A smart self-contained sequel, this is a story of broken promises and organisational corruption.  This time it is claimed the Guardians have been retired, in favour of non-lethal K9 robots. Guess what turns out to be the case with these creepy robodogs?

What unfurls is a story of a corrupt cop exploiting systems to cover up his crimes, while getting widespread political backing.  Oh and a whole lot of willing enablers.

This is a good, self-standing continuation that manages to also be a distinctly different story to its predecessor.  It retains the limited portrait of superpowers and superpower justified over-reach.

Will there be a third? There is space for it.  But if it ended here? That works too.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

I threw on Zodiac for some background, but now it’s what I’m doing and have forgotten something…

I love this movie and the cast is spectacular. All the way through, Fincher picked good people.

Now, I am very susceptible to “based on a true story” and if I like it then it must be true.
But there are alternate stories to the movie that are valid.

A good takeaway is what the fuck were they thinking in the 60’s and 70’s? Like they were only empowering future generations of serial killers.
Or does that only apply to the West Coast of North America?

[Sean Robinson]

So my Alien Anthology blu-ray box set (has the director’s cuts) has “Weyland-Yutani Corp – Building Better Worlds” (with Tokyo-London-San Francisco-Sea of Tranquility-Thedus underneath) on the screen, it will actually stay there after the disc ejects.

Kinda creepy. Happens on every Blu-ray player that’s been hooked up to it.

Maybe it’s how my TV reads it? Pioneer Elite plasma, and while it still looks very good, 2008 was 16 fricking years ago.
Wow. How have I stayed 39 all that time?

Anyways, lazy Sunday had me throwing on Aliens after Zodiac. Now I’m trying for Alien. 3 movies uninterrupted? Hope I haven’t jinxed it.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by Sean Robinson.

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Christian, Todd

“It’s got a wonderful defense mechanism. You don’t dare kill it.”

I miss those that are gone.

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Todd

The Alien Anthology set is superb. I like all the alternate cuts but the workprint of Alien³ in particular is fantastic and transforms the movie into something else entirely.

Aliens has a 4k remaster due out soon, looking forward to that.

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Todd, Ben, Sean Robinson

I just finished Poor Things. For me, it was just okay.

The pacing was too slow. I think if 30-45 minutes had been cut, it would have been a better movie. It also can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy or drama. It didn’t feel like it was succeeding at either. It had some fun lines (“I’m my own means of production.”) but it just didn’t grab me.

I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it in the theater.

Had the day off today so snuck into an early showing of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I quite enjoyed it, feels like an 80s-style Spielbergy romp, an old-fashioned adventure movie that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but does what it needs to for the sake of a decent yarn, there’s setups and payoffs and character arcs and it all works pretty well. The old cast and young cast are all decent too.

There’s probably a little bit too much going on in terms of the number of characters and ideas, but it’s not the end of the world, just leaves it feeling a bit messy and unfocused. The only real weak spot is James Acaster, the guy cannot act and sadly kills pretty much every scene he’s in.

So I got a bit of a flu and spent two days pretty much in bed. Watched Hypnotic, which was fun enough, though not exactly a good movie. The dialogue is too convenient and there’s a number of lines and plot stuff that doesn’t make much sense, or is just too clichéd. On the plus side, the whole Hypnotic idea is not badly done, and there are some even great moments when it comes to that. So some of it looks like B-movie version of Inception, sure, but why the fuck not. The plot is original enough, especially in the last third when they start to really play around with the ideas.
Where the cast is concerned… well, Affleck is wooden, as he often is, and there wasn’t really any chemistry between him and Alice Braga. But then again on the plus side, this is Rodriguez so the pacing is so fast that you don’t really have the time to get annoyed with the tired dialogue and the average performances; there isn’t any fat at all there, and the movie’s done in 90 minutes. So yeah, worth watching if you like a bit of a clever mindfuck in an otherwise very average movie.

Also saw “Men”, Alex Garland’s second-to-latest, finally. It’s classic British rural horror in many ways, and it is very successful in being creepy and unsettling and sometimes terrifying. And Rory Kinnear is fantastic at playing all of the men in the movie in different ways; he’s clearly enjoying the hell out of this. There are also some just very beautiful images.

It also goes a bit deeper; I have three different interpretations that I think are all valid (and possibly even intended) on different levels):

First of all, there’s the, you know, rural supernatural horror thing, with the pagan Green Man choosing Harper for his fertility ritual and to bear his children (as represented by the symbol of the seeds); as such, he represents the brutal nature of male energy in general that Hazel already had to suffer under in her previous relationship. Her defeating him allows her to also finally defeat the James, who is an aspect of the Green Man (as are we all). In this interpretation, you can either assume that the men actually all look different and Harper sees them as the same (because they are actually bound by the same either magic ritual or because it’s all psychological, either interpretation is fine where that is concerned.
You can take that last one a bit further; Green-Mannishness aside, you could also read the story as the story of a haunting (which is, after all, what Harper herself says at the church – that she’s being haunted by James). As such, the ghost of James, who is seeking revenge, is using the mask of the Green Man and his incarnations to terrify Harper and to try and take her back from the Beyond; her conversation with him in which she demonstrates that he has no power over her anymore at the end mainly leads to his acceptance of his death and letting her go.
Thirdly, there’s the psychological interpretation (and I don’t mean this in the sense of “It was all in her head”, which would be a cheap cop-out and is explicitly rejected by the ending of the movie, but rather in the sense that there is another psychological level beyond the obvious interpretation of ghost equals guilt, monster men equal male toxicity etc.), and the main thing I noticed there was that during the end credits, right after we see the symbol of the danelion seeds again and they form what looks like an embryo, there was a noise background of… family noises, I guess. Definitely there was the laughter of children playing and all that. And pregnancy is something that comes up in various forms in the movie. So my theory is that Harper is pregnant with James’ baby and is debating whether to keep it or not; the various incarnations of the men represent her fear that a child of James’ will turn out like him, will turn out to be violent, and also her fear of being dominated by James after his death in the form of a child. This is truly what is being symbolically represented when the Green Man blows the dandelion seeds at her and she inhales them; she has in fact already been impregnated. All of this is being expressed in the multiple processes of the Green Man birthing himself in different forms, until the true fear – James himself – is uncovered. By recognising this fear and revealing its pathetic nature, Harper can let go of it and have the child, which is what the dandelion embryo and sounds during the end credits represent.

Over-interpretation? Maybe, sure (and maybe those family noises are just part of the song that’s also playing in the background), but I like it, man. And you have to bloody to something with that wonderfully disgusting birthing sequence, don’t you.

Oh, the terrible people in the German film business who do such things gave the movie another title. It’s called “Men – Was dich sucht, wird dich finden” (Men – what’s looking for you, will find you), which is just so incredibly, horribly dumb and a cheap effort to make this look like a fun Blumhouse slasher kind of movie. Fucking bastards.

Thanks, I’ve not read the spoilers, but that enough to get Men put on my up next list!

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Christian

I liked Men as an experience but I also found it somewhat unsatisfying as it didn’t go quite far enough in articulating its ideas, especially at the end where I feel like a little more was needed. I felt like the ideas around toxic masculinity were ultimately conveyed in a slightly clunky and blunt way and wished there was a little more to it. I like your interpretations though Christian!

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Christian

Struggled through the first season of 3 Body Problem on Netflix. This is meant to be their next big thing but I just don’t see it, at least not yet.

This season takes to long setting up what the main thrust of this show is actually going to be. And that means we spend to long in an annoying and kind of badly done vr game, with an obnoxious friend group that I couldn’t care less about. It’s very much a prelude to more exciting things that might happen in future seasons, and this is Netflix sooo🤷‍♂️.

Ian Smith wrote:

with an obnoxious friend group that I couldn’t care less about

That’s something I also heard in a review, that those friends and especially their reactions to what’s happening are completely annoying (as compared to the novel, in which apparently there’s just one central figure noticing what’s going on).

Shogun (2024)

Just finished the fifth episode and this series is phenomenal. Performances are great and the effort put into authenticity to the period is incredible.

I think the best is knowing that this a 10-part miniseries based on a single novel. There’s not going to be a “season 2” or the worry that future seasons might waver in quality.

If you want the Game of Thrones experience without the dread of it tanking at some point, Shogun is the way to go.

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Ben

Todd wrote:

Shogun (2024)

Just finished the fifth episode and this series is phenomenal. Performances are great and the effort put into authenticity to the period is incredible.

I think the best is knowing that this a 10-part miniseries based on a single novel. There’s not going to be a “season 2” or the worry that future seasons might waver in quality.

If you want the Game of Thrones experience without the dread of it tanking at some point, Shogun is the way to go.

Curious… How does it compare to the 1980 mini with Richard Chamberlain?

 

Ian Smith wrote:

Struggled through the first season of 3 Body Problem on Netflix. This is meant to be their next big thing but I just don’t see it, at least not yet.

This season takes to long setting up what the main thrust of this show is actually going to be. And that means we spend to long in an annoying and kind of badly done vr game, with an obnoxious friend group that I couldn’t care less about. It’s very much a prelude to more exciting things that might happen in future seasons, and this is Netflix sooo🤷‍♂️.

Sounds like an accurate adaptation of the novel, at least.

My very soon to be brother-in-law said about 3 Body Problem:

Best review on Rotten Tomatoes so far: “It’s the equivalent of a cheap house flip, gutting a beautiful midcentury structure and redoing every room in shades of millennial gray.”

Both of us still plan to watch it at some point, but it somehow immediately became not must watch.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

I saw Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire this evening which is perfectly decent. I don’t think there’s anything terrible in it, but it doesn’t reach the heights of the original nor arguably Afterlife. It definitely felt like a gift for Dan Aykroyd, letting him ramble on about various pseudo-sciences, ancient civilisation stuff and drive a vintage motorbike. I think its biggest weaknesses are too many “cute” callbacks and references to the original and Patton fucking Oswalt being in it (and being fifth in the credits despite only being it for about five minutes).

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Dave

Al-x wrote:

Todd wrote:

Shogun (2024)

Just finished the fifth episode and this series is phenomenal. Performances are great and the effort put into authenticity to the period is incredible.

I think the best is knowing that this a 10-part miniseries based on a single novel. There’s not going to be a “season 2” or the worry that future seasons might waver in quality.

If you want the Game of Thrones experience without the dread of it tanking at some point, Shogun is the way to go.

Curious… How does it compare to the 1980 mini with Richard Chamberlain?

 

I honestly don’t remember the original.

The 2024 version, in style and execution, is definitely more historically accurate. They actually tweaked some of the names from the novel to make them more accurate to the time the series is set.

Here’s a good video to show you what has gone into making it:

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Al-x

Martin Smith wrote:

I think its biggest weaknesses are too many “cute” callbacks and references to the original and Patton fucking Oswalt being in it (and being fifth in the credits despite only being it for about five minutes).

And James Acaster. I’d never seen him act in anything before, and I still haven’t.

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

I think its biggest weaknesses are too many “cute” callbacks and references to the original and Patton fucking Oswalt being in it (and being fifth in the credits despite only being it for about five minutes).

And James Acaster. I’d never seen him act in anything before, and I still haven’t.

Yeah, he’s definitely not acting (or at least not acting outside of his stand-up persona, which may be a bit of an act) but I thought he worked ok. Was a bit weird he was in it though, given his lack of credits. I’m surprised they didn’t put a current SNL person in there, given the film’s heritage.

Martin Smith wrote:

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

I think its biggest weaknesses are too many “cute” callbacks and references to the original and Patton fucking Oswalt being in it (and being fifth in the credits despite only being it for about five minutes).

And James Acaster. I’d never seen him act in anything before, and I still haven’t.

Yeah, he’s definitely not acting (or at least not acting outside of his stand-up persona, which may be a bit of an act) but I thought he worked ok. Was a bit weird he was in it though, given his lack of credits. I’m surprised they didn’t put a current SNL person in there, given the film’s heritage.

It filmed in the UK while SNL’s last season was still on, so probably not worth flying someone out for what would only be a cameo.

Martin Smith wrote:

I saw Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire this evening which is perfectly decent. I don’t think there’s anything terrible in it, but it doesn’t reach the heights of the original nor arguably Afterlife.

Ah. Well, given that I thought that Afterlife was pretty shit, I’ll stay the hell away from this, then.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

paul f wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

I think its biggest weaknesses are too many “cute” callbacks and references to the original and Patton fucking Oswalt being in it (and being fifth in the credits despite only being it for about five minutes).

And James Acaster. I’d never seen him act in anything before, and I still haven’t.

Yeah, he’s definitely not acting (or at least not acting outside of his stand-up persona, which may be a bit of an act) but I thought he worked ok. Was a bit weird he was in it though, given his lack of credits. I’m surprised they didn’t put a current SNL person in there, given the film’s heritage.

It filmed in the UK while SNL’s last season was still on, so probably not worth flying someone out for what would only be a cameo.

I didn’t realise it was filmed in the UK. Still, even a recent SNL alumni like Beck Bennett or Kyle Mooney would have felt more in place. Acaster is a very odd choice.

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Argh, I had a review of Dunes written out but the board logged me out as I hit post and lost it. Suffice it to say, it’s good.

I’ll also make it short: Yep, it’s definitely good. And Dune 1+2, seen as one, are a great adaptation of the novel. But I’m a bit surprised that 2 was received/reviewed better than 1; seen as separate movies, I’d say that 1 is the much stronger one, mostly because the fall of House Atreides makes for such a fantastically compelling story. When it comes to Paul’s war against the Harkonnens, I have to say I am unconvinced that all the added Fremen politics with the North and the South and the fundamentalists and the sceptics and whatnot, and Chani’s resistance to the Prophecy, really added all that much to the story – those are all interesting ideas, but they kind of work against the story and I think it’d have worked better if they’d focused more on the Harkonnens as enemies (and left in, say, the Baron’s strategising with Rabban and Feyd-Rautha) and left all the other stuff for the next movie. It makes sense to have all that in there if you’re assuming that this’ll be the end of it and that there won’t be another movie, but as apparently there will be, it’s kind of unnecessary and just hinders the flow of the story, which is about Paul becoming the kwisatz haderach and wreaking satisfying revenge against the Harkonnens.
As it is, with the little screentime they have, the Harkonnens are maybe too much pantomime villains. I mean, they always are and will be to an extent, but I think they could have been more compelling with some more character development. As it is, their deaths left me pretty cold, as did Gurney’s return really. All of that could’ve worked better, I think, if they hadn’t put in all the other stuff.

Tiny notes and nitpicks:
– Tsk. They already showed the sandtrouts as baby sandworms. Urglm.
– The Great Houses rejecting Paul’s claim and him immediately calling for Holy War is just bullshit. He’s got the Spice in his hands, after all, so what happened to that? (Again, this should’ve been left for the sequel, or for those who’ll read the novels if there isn’t one.)
– Chemistry between Paul and Chani didn’t really work for me. Which is a bit of a shame. I did like how they portrayed Chani in general, it’s more that I wasn’t really feeling Chalamet in those scenes.
– Also, Chani leaving at the end is just bullshit. More importantly, it’s bullshit that Paul didn’t talk to her about his strategy beforehand. What, Chani is supposed to care about offworld marriage rituals now? Come on.
– Where do the Harkonnens sit, I wonder? The Baron has his tub, but apart from that… I mean, there are never any chairs around with the Harkonnens!
– It’s a shame they decided against Alia, I was looking forward to seeing her. And to seeing her kill the Baron; that would’ve been so much more awesome.
– But I did like how creepy Jessica got.
– Still no mentats. :(
– Still no navigators. :(
– Christopher Walken was a bit wasted as Emperor, wasn’t he? I liked what they did with Irulan, but it did feel like it was at the expense of Shaddam IV, which is a bit of a shame, because he comes across as a bit of a bumbling idiot.
– Also, the Sardaukar weren’t impressive enough this time around.

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lorcan_nagle

[lorcan_nagle]

Christian wrote:

Ian Smith wrote:

with an obnoxious friend group that I couldn’t care less about

That’s something I also heard in a review, that those friends and especially their reactions to what’s happening are completely annoying (as compared to the novel, in which apparently there’s just one central figure noticing what’s going on).

I’ve watched the first two episodes and what they’ve done is take the main characters of all three novels and make them friends, but they also moved some plot points around between them. Eliza Gonzalez’ character is more or less the protagonist of book 1, Jovan Adepo book 2, and Jess Hong book 3.  But the character Jess Hong is based on never goes into the VR game, that’s only in book 1.

So far, it’s very on-point for a Weiss and Beinhof adaptation.  The stuff that hews very close to the source material – the flashbacks to Ye Wenjie’s life are very good, and the bits they’ve added – the interpersonal relationships between the characters in the present day story are less good.

That said, with the exception of Da Shi and a couple of others the characters in the novels are more or less there so the plot happens in the presence of a human as opposed to having things like motivations and agency, so who’s to say giving them some more material is bad overall.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by lorcan_nagle.

I’m a few episodes in, and having never read the books it still feels like a bit of a jumble of interesting ideas rather than feeling like a great story, but it is at least starting to come into focus a little bit now. I like its ambition and the variety of ideas being played with, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Plus I love that whoever cast it clearly has a weakness for UK comedians. Only three episodes in and we’ve had Ade Edmonson, Kevin Eldon, Peter Serafinowicz, Reece Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss and Phil Wang all show up in small roles.

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Martin Smith, lorcan_nagle

Only a matter of time til Acaster then!

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Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

Only a matter of time til Acaster then!

Ha! Let’s hope not.

We finished 3 Body Problem. For me it falls under “good but not great”, this season feels like a lot of setup and not that much substance, although there are a couple of nice moments.

It also has a weirdly flat ending and a couple of (so far unexplained) gaps in the story that mean it doesn’t quite all hang together as strongly as it should.

For example given what we know about the alien technology and what they were able to send to Earth, how were those super-advanced VR headsets constructed and distributed? It feels like we’re meant to just assume a level of magical ability on the part of the aliens and not think about it too much. Also, while the Wallfacers idea is a fun one, I’m not sure how having strategists with a human lifespan hold their plans entirely in their own heads tallies with the 200/400-year timespans that are being talked about for alien contact.

It’s still an enjoyable series though, with some interesting ideas.

For me it’s Benedict Wong that holds it together and is the real heart of the show, he feels most like a character you can relate to and sympathise with, whereas a lot of the others often feel a bit like plot-delivery-devices.

Overall though I enjoyed it and I’ll definitely watch a season 2.

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lorcan_nagle, Ben

I finished watching 3 Body Problem last night and I found it quite a mixed bag.  I’ve read the novels and it’s very difficult to separate them from the adaptation because the show is about half a very faithful adaptation and half new stuff, and the changes are good and bad at an almost random frequency.

For example, moving the action primarily to the UK makes some level of sense in terms of familairity for western audiences, but part of the novelty of the book was that it was quite a standard SF short told through a Chinese lens – Chinese characters in China are the central actors with support from Westerners – a reversal of a frequent SF trope (see, for example The Martian, which recently returned to Netflix over here).  There’s also an anglicisation of the Chinese characters who haven’t been raceswapped – Cheng Xin in the novels becomes Jin Cheng, and Shi Quang becomes Clarence Shi, for example.  They did leave Ye Wenjie’s name intact but her daughter went from Yang Dong to Vera Ye.  The renaming is a minor thing but like, why do it?

A bigger thing that irked me was a change to Ye Wenjie’s backstory.  In the books she’s in a relationship with the lead scientist at the observatory, and he’s the father of her daughter.  After communicating with the aliens she murders him to keep the secret, and she and Evans bond over ideology instead of any romantic feelings.  I feel the back half of the show did a bit too much to humanise and redeem Wenjie while the novels has her confront the women who killed her father and while it acknowledges her monstrous actions it doesn’t do a huge amount to redeem her.

In terms of things I liked more, I think the show did a very good job of the two big setpieces – The destruction of Judgement Day, and the creation of the Sophons, and i found it quite interesting that they more or less wrapped up the plot of book 1 in episode 5, with the last three episodes being the early events of the second and third novels which would have happened contampereanously. It’s an interesting approach but it does mean there’s a lot of faff at the end instead of a big build-up or terrifying moment like became standard in Game of Thrones.

Overall, I worry about the path of the show if it continues, but that’s partially because I was a lot less fond of the sequels compated to book 1.  It’s definitely to Weiss and Beinhof’s benefit that the books they’re adapting are completed this time, they did some good work in laying down elements of Jin/Xin’s plot in book 3 here, and there are a couple of pointed pieces of dialogue that hint at the grander themes of the series. It’ll be interesting to see where they go next.

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Dave

Oh and as to Dave’s question about the VR headsets, in the novels It’s just that VR tech is more advanced in the world of the book.  The characters are wearing full-body suits to track their movement, it’s a known, if rare level of equipment.  Sophon, the alien charaacter who goes around beheading people in the game isn’t in the books until much later and there’s no barrier to enter the game once you have the tech and know how to access it.

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Dave

Ah, that’s interesting to know, thanks. I wonder if it will ever be explained in the series. Probably not.

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lorcan_nagle

Presumably in the show the headsets are made from materials and with techniques available to humans and just using principles that the Trisolarans/Shan-ti are able to describe via visual or text messages.

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Dave

Yeah I guessed something like that, but couldn’t reason out the practicalities of manufacturing and distributing something like that without it catching someone’s attention.

Fallout Season 1

That is quite a series.

Non-spoiler review: Good characters, and perfornances for them. A strong set of themes which were well executed. A very neat design aesthetic that invoked the source material perfectly, with a sharp sense of humour. It also had clear timeshifting for when it did flashbacks, unlike some series – Witcher S1, I mean you.

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Uncle Retrospective

I’ve finally circled back to watch s5 of SNL. I got 1-4 on DVD ages ago but could never find 5 for a reasonable price so moved on to watching 6 online and just carried on past it. I caved and DLed 5 a while back but never get around to it.

It’s er not very good. I was never mad about 1-4 – they’re good but they have about the same hit-miss ratio as most seasons and are saved by chapter markings that make easily skippable sketches – but 5 is a step down, certainly.

This is mainly because Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi left after season 4 and the show has no contingency for it. They didn’t really bring new people in (Harry Shearer is hanging about – apparently he thought he was hired as a cast member, the cast thought he was hired as a writer – but has minimal impact so far) and so there’s just a gaping void in the cast left to be filled by Bill Murray. And Murray’s good but when it’s being left to him to play pretty much every white male character in every sketch, in the very white male centric late 70s, it just feels a mess. The numbers are made up by Shearer, Al Franken and Tom Davis and Paul Schaefer (of all people), along with some of the writers, but it’s baffling, even if Lorne Michaels knew this would be his last season, why they didn’t go and hire a couple more actors to properly be in the cast and give Murray a break.

Beyond that, things feel a little tired, as SNL often can when there’s been no injection of new talent for a few years. Also just from the creaky, slow pace of 70s TV generally, especially live, to be fair.

But there are still good bits. A parody melodrama about the psychological turmoil mastectomies have on men. Buck Henry hosting amid fake riots and all the cast hating him and eventually chasing him off the stage and out the studio during the goodnights. Some great musical guests (but also Bob Dylan, so a mixed bag).

But man, imagine if they’d gone casting for this season and hired Tim Kazurinsky or Gilbert Gottfried a year early or even discovered Eddie Murphy.

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Todd

Oh the other thing going on in SNL s5 (early on at least) is Andy Kaufman doing his open challenge to women to wrestle him. Kaufman’s been a semi-regular guest on SNL since the start and I’ve never liked any of his anti-comedy schtick. Oh, miming along to the Mighty Mouse theme, how clever. The wrestling thing is especially irritating though because he’s just ripping off standard wrestling heel patter and gimmicks, with a dose of misogyny, and I just can’t tell to what end he’s aiming. It’s clearly not on the level – I don’t think he was genuinely that much of a misogynist – but it’s not funny in any conceivable way, even by his usual standards, it’s not really proving any kind of point or making any comment on anything. He’s just using a position of privilege to rip off the methods of an, at the time, more obscure medium to get attention for himself. It’s kinda gross.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

So that Fallout show is pretty fun, eh?

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Uncle Retrospective, Dave, Ben

Watched the Fall Guy film.
It’s ridiculous, needlessly meta, half assed romcom where a bunch of stunt actors spend the entire time showing off.
It was pretty much everything I wanted it to be. 😁

Yes some of it is bobbins but I honestly don’t care when it’s this much fun.

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Ben, Dave, lorcan_nagle, Todd

Something else I’ve been watching recently: the first season of Digimon.

And I know what you’re thinking. “What? Why, Martin? Why? Why would you do this? Even 25 years ago this was an odd choice but now it’s just weird. Why? What are you doing this? What is wrong with you?” And if you just calm down for a minute, I’ll explain.

I remember seeing bits of Digimon at the time, enough to be familiar with the characters. But it always seemed like the poor alternative to Pokemon (weirdly, they were on the same broadcaster here in the UK – which left the BBC to go for Monster Rancher. No wonder Live & Kicking struggled in this period) and like most of the target audience of the time, I kind of dismissed it. But I saw more of one of the later seasons (it was on Fox Kids before or after episodes of one or other Transformers series) and I actually thought it had some interesting stuff going on. So recently I was reminded of the existence of Digimon and figured I’d give it a proper go. I got a sub of the original Japanese version of the first season.

And it’s actually pretty good.

Not entirely though. The monster designs are, broadly, dreadful. Comparisons against Pokemon are going to be unavoidable (which is slightly unfair on Digimon but go cry about it with Gobots) and where Pokemon wins out definitively is that there’s a better cohesive feel to the world and monster design there. By doing “it’s a horse but its hair is fire” and “it’s a big sleeping bear thing” and “an electric mouse” you get a theme. And ok it pushes that a bit in places with sentient magnets and whatnot, but it instinctively makes sense. Digimon doesn’t. The main “child level” monsters are ok, if we breeze past the subtle nightmare fuel that is Gabumon (who appears at first glance to be a little chubby wolf like guy but is actually a horned reptile wearing the pelt of a wolf thing), but so many others are just weird AF. Loads of them feature cyborg parts, many are humanoid, several are just grotesque. On top of this, the progression between evolved forms is often incredibly tenuous. Again, in Pokemon, they usually make sense. The caterpillar guy turns into a chrysalis dude and then into a butterfly. The electric mouse turns into a bigger electric mouse. Here you get weirdly bipedal plant girl turns into massive cactus with vacant, jack-0-lantern esque carved face, for instance. Little guinea pig thing with wings for ears turns into a full on Judeo-Christian angel (through an anime style lens, obv). Even when they thematically make sense – weird punk seal thing turns into massive furry narwhal type thing – there’s very little linking them visually, no shared motifs or design elements or colours. It’s like most of the designs were farmed out to different artists who couldn’t see each other’s work and then just thrown together anyway.

The other big difference to Pokemon is that evolution isn’t a permanent thing. The Digimon are constantly sliding up and down their evolutionary ladders within episodes, let alone the series. It’s an interesting difference but does mean a heck of a lot of stock footage use for those evolutions (and the use of the same damn song every episode for the ensuing battle). It also means the Digimon are constantly changing names, as they’re only known by their species names, which everyone just rolls with, which is a little admirable I guess but also a tad disorientating.

The strength of the series is really in the story. It focuses on seven kids who get spirited away from their summer camp into the Digital World, paired up with Digimon and left to work things out for themselves. It’s like Narnia but less Christian (although actually, given the angels and prophecies of “chosen children”, maybe not) and initially there’s a real emphasis on basics of survival, just finding somewhere safe to sleep and edible food. The series is completely serialised and a lot of episodes just stop rather than end. It’s a pretty good story though, for all that it often comes down to “burning justice” style power-ups and finding yet another level of evolution, and constantly has me going “oh just one more then”.  Although it does get bogged down a half a dozen episodes in the world’s limpest mystery, which the show doesn’t even attempt any kind of pretence that the audience don’t know the answer to, it progresses well and doesn’t get samey. There’s threat escalation, especially when the kids go back to the real world mid-series and it just fucking goes for it. You’ve got Digimon trashing recognisable Tokyo landmarks, a vampire style Digimon rounding up all the citizens of one prefecture and planning to kill them all in the search for one kid. It gets pretty damn dark.

Between that, all the comedy pink turds and one episode where the kids have to hitch-hike home and use the two girls (who are, I think about 11) to secure a lift from a guy who, lets say shows an unhealthy interest in only the girls, I have no clue how this was localised to the West.

So yeah, Digimon. Surprisingly alright. It’s completely understandable why it got dwarfed by Pokemon but it’s not entirely fair that it did.

Yeah, I remember spending way too much time watching Digimon in my twenties. It really wasn’t bad.

American Fiction was really good. Expectedly so, of course, and I am totally the target audience for a movie about authorship. But from the trailer, I thought it might be a broader satire than it turned out to be. This could easily have been an absurd comedy that takes its core concept much farther than the movie did. Instead, it was mostly a slow-paced exploration of this man and his relationships and didn’t really focus on the literary satire a lot of the time. And that was all for the better, really – it’s rather deeper and more gentle than I would have expected it to be.

So, yeah, very much worth watching.

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Todd, Dave, Uncle Retrospective

Christian wrote:

But from the trailer, I thought it might be a broader satire than it turned out to be.

Yeah, I think they definitely sold it as more of an out-and-out comedy/satire than it turned out to be.

Initially, I wished there was more of that – but reflecting on it after watching, I ended up feeling that it was all the better for the additional depth and drama, which obviously tied back into the wider point about making Black stories that are more universal and not defined by Blackness.

A very good movie.

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Christian

I also saw Oppenheimer. It was… well, good. Very impressively made, apparently quite accurate, definitely kept me watching. But given the hype, it was, well, you know, it was a biopic, I suppose. There’s only so much you can do with that that’s interesting or original. It’s… a solid movie. But I can’t say that it was more than that, for me.

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Uncle Retrospective

Saw Renfield.

I think I remember someone here being a bit disappointed with it (Martin maybe?) because it didn’t delve more into the relationship angle between Renfield and Dracula, but I liked it fine. Dialogues are fast and funny, action’s good, performances are fine, plot is ridiculously unrealistic (and I don’t mean Dracula, but the police stuff) but nobody cares. It’s a pretty gory action comedy that knows exactly what it wants, delivers and gets the hell out of there in under 90 minutes. Fun night.

Just finished Fallout. Great first season, maybe the best first season of a new show since Westworld. All the leads work well but Goggins in particular is great and steals every scene he’s in.

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Christian, njerry, Ben

Shardlake

This is a compact, well paced, well plotted, four episodes with an excellent cast. It also takes an interesting look at Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

From a disability perspective it is of note for Shardlake being both a disabled character and is portrayed by a disabled actor, Arthur Hughes. Given his skills here, I’m not surprised that his Richard III was excellent.

In casting terms, it’s interesting to compare Sean Bean’s version of Thomas Cromwell here, with Mark Rylance’s in Wolf Hall.

Overall, this is well worth watching, if you have access to Disney+.

Ben wrote:

Shardlake

This is a compact, well paced, well plotted, four episodes with an excellent cast. It also takes an interesting look at Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

From a disability perspective it is of note for Shardlake being both a disabled character and is portrayed by a disabled actor, Arthur Hughes. Given his skills here, I’m not surprised that his Richard III was excellent.

In casting terms, it’s interesting to compare Sean Bean’s version of Thomas Cromwell here, with Mark Rylance’s in Wolf Hall.

Overall, this is well worth watching, if you have access to Disney+.

Casting director: Do you know any actor who has experience playing a trusted advisor to a king, who then falls out of favor, gets beheaded and gets his head put on a spike?
Assistant: Yes!

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Ben, Dave

Dave wrote:

Just finished Fallout. Great first season, maybe the best first season of a new show since Westworld. All the leads work well but Goggins in particular is great and steals every scene he’s in.

Yeah, he’s fantastic, and I loved the whole backstory for his character.

Just an incredibly fun show. Friend of mine said it was very Ennis-esque, and there is something to that, as well.
(Lisa Joy’s other recent Amazon show, Mrs. Davis, was also very Preacher-inspired.)

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Dave, Ben

Inside No. 9 kicked off its last series tonight with a nice Twilight Zone style episode that took some unexpected turns. Looking forward to the rest of this final run.

I watched Can’t Hardly Wait last night, which is a teen movie from 1998. It’s fairly standard high school tropes fare, with the slightly novel premise of mostly being set in a single graduation night party. It deals heavily in stock characters, to the point that most of the characters are simply named like “Jock #1”, “stoner guy” etc, even ones that have lots of lines. It’s also let down a bit by the main plot thread being a slightly dodgy story about a guy who has obsessed over a girl in his year group for four years without her even knowing who he is, yet he manages to snag her after professing his love.

Yes, that is a spoiler, but the story isn’t the reason to watch this. There are two reasons this has value. 1) a pretty great contemporary sound track. A wonderful time capsule of the late 90s. 2) the cast. Kudos to the casting director because this film is stuffed with familiar faces. Not only people famous at the time like Jennifer Love Hewitt, Seth Green and Melissa Joan Hart, but what feels like a huge percentage of all the actors of that generation: Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, Sara Rue, Amber Benson, Clea Duvall, Selma Blair, Lauren Ambrose, Jason Segel and several more people who you’ll recognise from something even if you don’t really know their name.

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Todd, njerry

I’m watching Knuckles, a show that’s a lot less about Knuckles than it is about Adam Pally and bowling. It’s fun though.

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Martin Smith

I went and watched the Transformers 40th Anniversary event (possibly titled Till All Are One, I don’t know – the branding seems oddly vague). Despite a lot of people, even those who booked tickets, thinking it was going to be the 80s movie, it was the first episode of the G1 cartoon with a new voice track provided from a table read. This was performed by a mix of original actors playing their original characters (Cullen, Welker, Gilvezan, Bell), original actors replacing their dead or unavailable colleagues (Paul Eiding and Gregg Berger) and a couple of new guys also filling in (Arif Kinchen and Frank Todaro).

Which was a pretty fun idea and it works fairly well. It was a split-screen deal, the original cartoon on the left and then a view of the table read on the right, so you got to see the voice actors performing, which was interesting. Todaro was pretty intense, Welker was having conversations between himself on the fly etc. The cast was generally great. It’s the best Cullen’s been as Prime in years, I think because the table read environment replicated the 80s recording session style more – a jokey, relaxed environment – that counter-acted his tendency to make all of Prime’s dialogue heavy on gravitas at all times. It’s the best I’ve heard Welker as Megatron since G1 too, without any effects used. Todaro was great as Starscream, though having him do the full Latta cast was a misstep, as he wasn’t great as Wheeljack or Reflector. Kinchen was good as Jazz, Gilvezan doesn’t sound any older as Bumblebee (which is impressive for such a “young” voice), Eiding did a great soundalike for Ken Sansom as Hound and Michael Bell still sounds like Michael Bell.

Alongside the new voice track, the original score and sound effects were included, which presumably means they have access to isolated tracks for all of that in order to make a new voiceless mix. Which makes it more of a shame that the following three episodes were presented with just the original mono TV mix.

One thing the table read really made me aware of (and the promo clip of Earthspark at the start) is how much music was in G1. It’s wall-to-wall with no quiet moments. And that’s great, I love that music and it makes for a fast-paced exciting cartoon. But when you get three episodes strung together with no room to breathe (the credits were both sped up and cut down and the opening titles excised), with the music, sfx and voices all mixed to the same level and played LOUD on a cinema’s sound system, it gets physically wearing by part three of MTMTE. I was considering bailing before the end of the last episode because it was just a bit painful. Interesting to see them on the big screen, I guess, but it really does highlight the flaws in the animation. Also, the episodes without the table-read component mostly fill the screen, but framed by the same style overlay graphics the split-screen had and have the title permanently on the bottom for some reason. Really reminded me of G2.

Another thing the table-read really made me aware of for the first time is just how few speaking parts there are in the first episode, at least compared to the amount of characters in Transformers season 1 and even those first three episodes as a whole. It’s surprisingly economical and leaves the likes of Mirage, Bluestreak, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker, Shockwave silent until later episodes. Also it’s the first time I’ve seen the episodes with the break bumpers left in, which is just weird. I don’t get why those aren’t cut out from US home releases (I’ve got the US DVDs of GI Joe and Real Ghostbusters which leaves them all in and they’re just repetitive. Cut ’em out and include them as special features!)

Staying for the end gave a little reward of an easter egg. Overall, it was an interesting experiment. I wouldn’t say it was entirely successful. I got my ticket free through Sky Cinema, so I don’t feel ripped off at all, but it would have been worth a fiver or so. I think if they were to do something like this again (and it doesn’t seem particularly likely) with Beast Wars or GI Joe or Visionaries or Jem or something, they’d be better off doing a full feature’s worth of episodes (at least three) as a table read recreation or at the very least doing a new sound mix for the “bonus” episodes.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

Saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, and two things stand out for me:

1. Fuck, this movie has a lot of exposition. It’s like a third of the movie is spent on explaining a needlessly complicated plot.

2. Mission Impossible really has become a pretty unremarkable James Bond clone, hasn’t it? This movie pretty much copies the Bond formula step by step, and apart from some nice action setpieces I kept wondering why I was even watching this predictable, bland movie. Fallout was saved by Cavill’s performance, I suppose, but at this point, I think the Cruise/McQuarrie combination is delivering fare that is very much just (slightly sub-)standard.

Also, Cruise’s age is really showing. They’re kind of at the point where they can’t keep just ignoring it, and they really should make it part of the story that he’s way past his prime.

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Ian Smith, lorcan_nagle

I’ve spent the last week or so watching Bret Maverick, the early 80s sequel series to Maverick. Which is not something I had considered doing before now. For some reason, I was of the (received) opinion that it wasn’t very good. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just a snap judgement on the premise and the unflattering pictures of Garner on the DVD covers (which make him look rather past it in a way the series generally doesn’t). Certainly the vibe I got from Ed Robertson’s history of Maverick book that I read recently was that it wasn’t very good (but then that book is bloody awful, so I’m not taking its word for it).

I ended up going it a go because I’d recorded off CBS Legend a Kenny Rogers TV Movie. He’s done a series of Western TVMs called the Gambler where plays… well, he seems to just play himself, as far as I can tell. As a singer, Rogers is no loss to the acting profession. What I’ve seen of this series it feels like a play fantasy for a very rich, well connected man. Anyway, one of these has a load of cameos from people who had been in older TV Westerns, reprising their old roles – Chuck Connors off Rifleman, David Carradine off Kung-Fu and Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick. That was all I was interested in seeing and he turned out to be right at the end, in a big stakes poker game with Rogers, some other old TV guy I didn’t recognise, Patrick MacNee as an English guy who has history with Rogers’ characters (you’d hope in the previous TVM but I wouldn’t put money on it) and a mystery fifth entrant who turns out to be none other than President Theodore Roosevelt, who they all fawn over. Bart gets pretty short shrift really. When he gets eliminated from the game, he makes a remark about “I guess now we all know who the best poker player in the Maverick family isn’t” or something. It’s about how he’s not as good as Bret and, guys, come on. I know he’s not James Garner but he showed up for this indulgent LARP you taped for Kenny, show some damn respect.

For some reason, that got me thinking about Bret Maverick, so I borrowed it from my Auntie Torrence and it’s actually pretty good.

There are clear differences to the original though. The main one is that it’s no longer an odyssey Western but a community Western. Bret turns up in the town of Sweetwater for a high stakes poker game at the Red Ox Saloon and ends up winning it. The saloon that is. In the old series, Maverick would have been shot of that within the hour, but here, on the advice of an older gambler type, he decides to take it as an opportunity to settle down. He buys a ranch outside town and dupes the now ex-sheriff into buying into the saloon, which turns out to be heavily in debt. And so instead of a series about a drifter getting into scrapes across the country, it’s a series about a wideboy trying to settle down and make his new town appreciate that just because he’s partial to the odd con job, he’s not a bad guy really.

But that’s tough due to the other big difference this series has to the original. There, despite the theme song lyrics calling him a legend of the west, Maverick was generally fairly anonymous, known usually only to fellow gamblers/grifters/con-men. He could breeze into a town under an assumed identity or even his own and have no trouble. Here, he is properly famous, living under the shadow of his own reputation. The first episode has a fun scene where, entering the poker game, he’s required to give up his guns. He offers the very visible pistol in his holster. The sheriff stops him and slowly goes through a series of other hidden guns he knows Maverick has hidden away thanks to newspaper articles about him. There’s also a recurring plot point in the first few episodes of the town’s newspaper editor, Mary-Lou Springer, continually trying and failing to get a clear photo of Maverick and an interview/feature for the paper (this eventually evaporates, which I took to be the mystique of the famous gambler wearing off the more they got to know him). In the middle of the series, Maverick wins a silver mine that he tries to off-load for profit but can’t because as soon as anyone hears him mention silver mine for sale, they assume it’s a con job.

The other main difference to the original is in its central conception of Maverick the character. The original wasn’t above a con job. The most famous episode of the original series, Shady Deal At Sunny Acres, was ripped off for the movie the Sting. But Maverick usually only ran cons on people to get even (such as in Shady Deal, where he’s screwed out of thousands of dollars). He certainly enjoyed it and was good at it, but duping people and conning them wasn’t his driving motivation. He was a poker player at heart. Here though, he is a compulsive con man. A central point of tension in the series is between Maverick and his partner Tom Guthrie, who hates that Maverick is always “working a game”, usually in the saloon. But while Bret enjoys running these schemes, and at times does them to help out people in the town (such as screwing an unscrupulous real estate guy or fooling some bank robbers) there never seems to be any particular driving motive that explains why he’s doing it when he’s got the ranch, the saloon, a regular table to play poker. The saloon’s in debt, which Tom is stressed about, but Maverick never seems bothered and regularly has enough money to pay off the debt, but uses it for cons instead.

The show is helped by the stable location. I’m not sure 80s TV production (or even modern TV production) would have been as able to produce the endless string of frontier towns that the original series got out of the Warners back lot and its plethora of stock sets. The recurring cast are quite fun too. Guthrie is a stock gruff frontier lawman, so it’s fun seeing him both living alongside and butting heads with Maverick. Despite the fact she looks like she’s stepped out of an 80s department store dressing room, ML Springer is interesting too, a foil for both Maverick and Tom. Her wide-eyed, impressionable young assistant Rodney hits a nice balance of being in awe of Maverick but not too starry eyed. And the new sheriff, the well-meaning but inept Marshall Dowd is an interesting wrinkle, though not much of a foil for Maverick. The only dour point is Philo Sandine, played by Stuart Margolin (Angel off the Rockford Files – this show has a much connection to Rockford as it does Maverick) who is just annoying.

Although the series does run into some format issues – there’s only so many times Maverick can get jailed on presumption of committing a serious crime which he clears himself of, by the same sheriff, before it gets a bit ridiculous; only so many travelling con men that can happen upon the town he lives in – it is a lot of fun. Different but not worse than the original.

One of my favourite bits comes in the show’s final episode. The whole story has Maverick setting up a long con on an exiled English Lord, wiring money to associates across Europe and the US to keep the guy on the hook and lure him down to Sweetwater, where he sets up a fake Mexican heiress to stumble into him and sell him a story about how it turns out she owns the rights to all of Arizona. This plays in the background of Maverick dealing with another scam of some fake pre-Colombian death masks he’s made up a big story about a selling to people (again, not something original series Maverick would have done just for the hell of it) and a sheriff’s election. End of the episode, Maverick dresses up as the heiress’ bumbling accountant, meets the stagecoach from which his accomplice alights and is introduced to the “robber baron” Lord who turns around and is actually Bart, who has been running a con from the other side the entire time, neither knowing the other was involved. They’re momentarily aghast, then laugh and hug. It’s a lovely moment.

It’s a shame Bret Maverick was cancelled after its first season. It was already retooling at the end for a second series – Tom was going to become the sheriff again, giving Maverick more opposition on that front. The local madam had bought out Tom’s share of the saloon, up-ending Maverick’s cosy base of operations. And Bart was going to be brought in to help run the saloon and presumably carry a lot of the community plots while Bret started travelling further afield again. I think bringing that odyssey element in, while still keeping the community core, would have only strengthen the show.

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

Christian wrote:

Saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, and two things stand out for me:

1. Fuck, this movie has a lot of exposition. It’s like a third of the movie is spent on explaining a needlessly complicated plot.

2. Mission Impossible really has become a pretty unremarkable James Bond clone, hasn’t it? This movie pretty much copies the Bond formula step by step, and apart from some nice action setpieces I kept wondering why I was even watching this predictable, bland movie. Fallout was saved by Cavill’s performance, I suppose, but at this point, I think the Cruise/McQuarrie combination is delivering fare that is very much just (slightly sub-)standard.

Also, Cruise’s age is really showing. They’re kind of at the point where they can’t keep just ignoring it, and they really should make it part of the story that he’s way past his prime.

I put my initial disappointment with it down to my cinema experience being a bit crap. But watching it again at home I think it’s on the weaker side of the franchise.

The AI villain was to big of step into sci-fi for me. The universe has always been heightened, but that was a bit of shark jump moment. The retcons of the IMF agents being criminals, Ethans secret pre MI1 love interest who was killed by some big bad we’ve never heard of..It all feels like a franchise running on fumes.

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Christian, Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

I took my son to see IF today, as he’s a huge Ryan Reynolds fan and will watch him in anything. Even he found this disappointing though.

It’s a weird film, it tries to appeal to both kids and grown-ups with its imaginary-friends-reconnecting-with-their-long-lost-kids story, but it’s too slow-moving and unfunny and sincere for children, and is too obvious and shallow for adults to get much from it.

The cast are all OK (particularly the child actor who leads the movie, she’s pretty good) and the effects for the creatures are pretty good too, but there’s a lack of substance and energy to it that kind of makes it feel like a whole lot of nothing. One to avoid.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

Renegade Nell

This is pretty good but it’s let down by a pathetic pair of villains and a weak ending. Adrian Lester’s puppet master arch villain is pretty good though.

The ending also suffers from the plague of film and TV – night sequences that are far, far too dark and murky. It also lets the two sub-villains off too easy.

Could there be a second series? Yes, but it shouldn’t bring those two wastes of space back.

Victoria Day long weekend here. Shameful lack of superhero and sci-fi movie marathons on ‘free’ TV.

So Alien is on in background, yet what is foreground if thats where my eyes are?

Right now is Ash.
“Perfect Organism”
Already lost Kane, Brett, and Dallas.

So who’s still alive (and for how much longer)?

Tom Skerrit is 90, 91 soon.
Veronica Cartwright is (just) 75.
Sigourney Weaver is 74, within 6 months of next B-Day

Yet the biggest question for me is Jones, or Jonsey?
I swear I remember the cat is Jonsey, but she’s looking for him right now and repeatedly “Jones”

And there go Lambert and Parker.

Like, just a great fucking movie, and all kinds of reasons to say better than Aliens.
But why feast on yourself?
How many franchises not named Godfather can match this 1 and 2 combo?

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Dave

Sean Robinson wrote:

How many franchises not named Godfather can match this 1 and 2 combo?

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Ben

Oh, so now at the end.
Honestly why would you ask Sigourney Weaver to strip down and show off wearing underwear that could only fit anorexic pre-teen girls?

Not a highlight, never fit right for me, and worse in hindsight.
Especially considering 1979 with a commanding female lead.

Not enough to call him out publicly, I’m just saying

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Uncle Retrospective

[Sean Robinson]

Ha! Just checked phone, last reply just sitting there.

Amyways, Terminator is like DC comics to me.
Completely fricking awesome if I put on certain blinders.
Crisis on Infinite Earths has my own re-writes.
Exhausting to be a fan, though.

Anyways, Terminator is awesome for that budget, just that ’80’s sound is cringe-worthy. Overlookable for a genre fan.

Terminator 2 is great too, a little too, I dunno, over the top? But well done for a bigger budget.

Your point is made.
But like I can get my parents to watch and enjoy Alien and Aliens (dad Loves the cast of Alien) and they can respect the viewpoint of a different genre challenger to Godfather, they just can’t see Terminator in that argument.

(But I’m the only one that would bring that up?
Why would they?
Oh, I guess my point is the general public perception.
Terminator(s) below Alien(s)

• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Sean Robinson.

So have thrown on the first Terminator.
Stand by what I said about the sound, but I could say that about a bunch of stuff.

And I’m immediately absorbed into this movie.
James Cameron should cast Michael Bien in everything.

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Uncle Retrospective, Dave, Ben

There’s a lot of great sequences in Terminator but the Tech Noir one, with minimal dialogue and perfect soundtrack remains a stand-out.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Dave, Sean Robinson

So a friend stopped by (best friend, far above me on movies), just before the Tech Noir scene.

He didn’t buy my argument on the sound. Low budget ’80’s had a lot of that.

But he did agree on the Alien second place to Godfather.

And the part where my online friend posts “Fuck You Asshole!”?
He says “I like your friend”

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Uncle Retrospective, Ben, Dave

Ha!

I’m biased as I’m a huge Terminator fan but I think both are fantastic movies, and weirdly echo the Alien franchise quite closely – the first is much more of a personal and atmospheric horror, with a genuinely unsettling and scary vibe to it; the second is much more the glossy action movie take on the same idea, with a bigger budget and amazing effects but maybe less of the raw immediacy of the first movie.

(Incidentally, did you know that the actor who played Vasquez in Aliens is also John Connor’s Foster mother in T2? Took me years to realise.)

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Uncle Retrospective, njerry, Todd, Ben, Sean Robinson

Dave wrote:

(Incidentally, did you know that the actor who played Vasquez in Aliens is also John Connor’s Foster mother in T2? Took me years to realise.)

Did you twig she’s the comm officer on the Enterprise B in Star Trek Generations?

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Sean Robinson

Sean Robinson wrote:

Oh, so now at the end.
Honestly why would you ask Sigourney Weaver to strip down and show off wearing underwear that could only fit anorexic pre-teen girls?

Not a highlight, never fit right for me, and worse in hindsight.
Especially considering 1979 with a commanding female lead.

Not enough to call him out publicly, I’m just saying

As an interesting sidenote to this, Sigourney Weaver refused to shave or trim her pubic hair for that scene, there was some level of push for her to do so after initial daily showed a bit peeking out of her underwear.

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Todd, Sean Robinson

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Dave wrote:

(Incidentally, did you know that the actor who played Vasquez in Aliens is also John Connor’s Foster mother in T2? Took me years to realise.)

Did you twig she’s the comm officer on the Enterprise B in Star Trek Generations?

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, lorcan_nagle

Vasquez? I absolutely love her, and now see what you’re saying (without looking it up.

How long she lasted, and being a rock star until the end (and she was going to smack Gorman but he went back for her).

What was I…, oh yeah. Nice that a non-white character had a memorable arc in a favorite of mine.
But two black guys bought it early (one had a scene with “cornbread”) and even then we noticed.

Like a previous statement, not enough to call out.
But can talk about and put an end to that.

Dave wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Dave wrote:

(Incidentally, did you know that the actor who played Vasquez in Aliens is also John Connor’s Foster mother in T2? Took me years to realise.)

Did you twig she’s the comm officer on the Enterprise B in Star Trek Generations?

She’s also the very Irish woman in Titanic.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

So one of those channels I pay for has the Lord of the Rings trilogy on (properly, no commercials). Even though I have the Blu-ray box set (and gave the DVD set to a good home when I upgraded) but cannot stop watching.

Eomer is Karl Urban!
Did I know that? Maybe, but obviously forgotten.
And I love that guy whenever I see him.
Prayed for more Judge Dredd.
Love his embrace of “Bones” McCoy, because if you cant channel DeForest Kelley then step away or go completely different.
I love The Boys, and he’s great in it.

Wow, thats four characters in nerd culture, and all good portrayals.
Maybe James Gunn will give him a spot for a fifth.

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Ben

Sean Robinson wrote:

Wow, thats four characters in nerd culture, and all good portrayals.
Maybe James Gunn will give him a spot for a fifth.

You’ve obviously forgotten his turn as the Executioner in Thor: Ragnarok.

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Todd, Sean Robinson, Ben

Correct sir. And (looking for something…), well dammit.

Caught, but point still stands, maybe.
But I’m wide open to a movie buff putting forth a better argument.
(Yet that’s only a good thing, in the right frame of mind)

Sean Robinson wrote:

Maybe James Gunn will give him a spot for a fifth.

Who could you see him as in the DC universe? I think he’d make a great Guy Gardner, but that role is already taken.

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Sean Robinson

Christian wrote:

Who could you see him as in the DC universe? I think he’d make a great Guy Gardner, but that role is already taken.

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Christian, Uncle Retrospective, Todd

I have no idea why Hitman hasn’t been optioned yet.

I’ve watched that Twisted Metal series on Prime. Compared to Fallout (which it shares some of the setting and themes with), it’s quite a few steps towards Complete Silliness. But it really is a lot of fun, I thought, and both Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatrize (NINE NINE!) do a good job.

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Uncle Retrospective

I noticed Belfast is leaving Netflix at the weekend and I’d been meaning to watch it for ages, so I popped it on this morning.  And it’s pretty good.

If you went into this movie without the foreknowledge that it’s loosley based on Kenneth Brannagh’s childhood, you’d definitely come out the end realising it.  Brannagh’s stand-in character is Buddy, a nine year-old boy who’s life revolves around playing on the streets, movies, the one girl he likes in school, and figuring out exactly how Catholics and Protestants are different.  But it’s 1969 and the Troubles are kicking off in a big way and they keep intruding.  The opening sequence shifts suddently from an idyllic scene of childhood to violence as an anti-Catholic riot spills onto Buddy’s road, smashing in windows and yelling at any Catholic families on the road to get out.  And this sorta sets the format for the movie, as it lurches from vignette to vignette, where Buddy is either being a child or facing the intrusion of reality, be it his family’s problems or the burgeoning violence in the city.  There is a level of narrative running though as well – Buddy’s parents have financial problems and his father’s job as a joiner in Britain means he’s gone a lot of the time.  There’s pressure on the family to throw in with the growing Protestant sectarianist movement, and Buddy’s grandfather has a health issue that he’s ignoring which of course becomes more serious as the movie progresses.

What makes the movie work is a sense of heightened reality, it’s very much the vibe of someone trying to piece together childhood memories.  It’s made very clear in shots like one of the early confrontations between Buddy’s dad and the local rabble-rouser, where at the end he’s shot from below against a stark sky, emphasising how larger-than-life a father can be to a son.  Similarly, and in a clear nod to Brannagh’s autiobiographical elements in the movie, the only time colour intrudes on Buddy’s life is when he’s at the cinema or theatre, with the rest of his life rendered in black and white.  There’s a very nice touch when Buddy and his grandmother are at a production of A Christmas Carol, and while they’re in black and white the reflection of the stage in her glasses is in colour.

Ultimately, the leven to which you can take the heightened reality will determine how much you enjoy the movie. As the plots come to a climax they get more Hollywood fancy and less gritty drama, and that feels like the point that will make or break the sense of immersion in the movie.  The majority of the cast are Irish, and even those from the Republic do a good job of getting the accent and mannerisms right.  Judi Dench is a bit of a weak point in terms of accent – she lapses in and out – but her mannerisms and the way she’s shot give her the sense of a quintessential Irish gran.

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Christian, Todd

[Martin Smith]

Dead Man On Campus , another 1998 teen comedy, although college based and with much older stars, including Tom Everett Scott, who was 28 and looks it. Two college roommates fuck up their first half term and decide the only way they’re going to not get kicked out is if they have a roommate commit suicide and get a free grievance pass.

It’s kinda fun but takes a bad turn when demented frat boy Chuck turns up. Mark-Paul Gosselaar is good in a role not a million miles away from Zach Morris, while it also has Jason Segel, Linda Cardellini (both just before Freaks and Geeks) and Alyson Hannigan, which is a nice casting curio.

• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

It was documentary day for me today.

First up, I watched Framed Youth, a 1983 piece made by a number of London-based gay and lesbian groups, basically assesing the place of gay people in British society at the time.  It’s broadly broken up into three segments – a vox pop in a busy market, gay and lebian people talking about their lives, relationships, realising they were same-sex attracted, coming out and the hardships they face (including the members of Bronski Beat before the band formed, I actually found out about the documentary via a YouTube retrospective on the band I watched last night), and then at the very end it delves a bit into politics, explaining how being out, especially in the 80s can be a radicalising experience.

I found it very interesting to watch, the vox pop was by turns heartfelt (people who said they’d gladly accept their kids if they came out) and amusing (one woman literally runs away when the interviewer informs her she’s a lesbian), and the various people talking to the camera about their experiences was a very interesting look at an era that’s increasingly obsolete in the Global North, with people being very careful about how they talked about their sexuality until they knew they were safe.  A number of switchboards numbers were shown at the end of the documentary and after it aired on UK TV they were apparently swamped with calls.  The last section was quite interesting becuase it serves as an interesting parallel to political splits in modern queer communities.  One person talks about how he realised what the media told him about gay people was wrong, and therefore he started to question other things which lead him to anti-capitalism. His experiences with the police told him they couldn’t be trusted.  And the normalisation of queer people today means they don’t have to hide in the same way and aren’t demonised, and as such aren’t exposed to the same radicalising elements.  But it also means that you can have groups like the Log Cabin Republicans in the US and nominally gay and lesbian anti-trans groups in the UK that end up allying with openly homophobic and misogynistic organisations and people without realising they’re next against the wall.

It’s worth checking out, and it’s on YouTube

Then in the afternoon I went to 17-5-74: Anatomy of a Massacre in my local cinema.  A far more sombre affair, it was about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings on the titular date.  A series of three bombs that were detonated across Dublin city centre over three consecutive minutes and another one in Monaghan town centre about ninety minutes later, the death toll was 34 with 300 wounded – the single deadliest attack of the Troubles and the deadliest attack in the history of the Republic of Ireland.  The film begins by introducing some people who were injured in the attack, were witnesses or family members of the dead, and then goes into detail of the events of the day primarily through their accounts and the use of file footage and photographs.  It notes that nobody was ever held responsible for the attacks.  And at this point I was thinking the film was fairly short, but it continues, looping in a number of other bombings, notably two in Dublin in the prior two years and a couple elsewhere on the island, looping in accounts of family members of the victims where they can. All the investigations into these events petered away quickly, the file on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings themselves was adjourned after a mere three months.

And then it returns to the survivors and their family members, who were somewhat scattered, nobody really knew each other and there seemed to be a tendency to downplay that they were the victims of a terrorist attack – one woman who lost the use of an eye says she’d tell kids in her childrens’ school that she fell on some glass instead of she was in a bombing, for example.  It wasn’t until 1993 and a British investigative journalism show digging into the affair that connections between the bombings, loyalist paramilitaries and members of the RUC (the Northern Ireland police force at the time) and the British military were uncovered.  At this point the UVF claimed responsibility, a mere year after they were removed from the proscribed organisations list int he UK. This lead to an increased awareness of the bombings in the Republic, memorials for the victims, and pressure to investigate further.

The Irish investigation into these events was thorough, but the British government refused to cooperate, so things eventually hit a dead end.  Even then it seems the collaboration between the defence forces, RUC and UVF was all but proven, and the film goes on to allege that members of the Glenanne Gang, a group made up of UVF and sympathethic defence force personnel were involved, and some of those same people went on to take part in the Miami Showband Massacre (itself the subject of a Netflix documentary 5 years ago) and other bombings and killings.  It then states that a proper investigation into the bombings before 1974 could have prevented all of these deaths.  As of right now, British and cross-border investigations have finally been launched and reports are due later in the year.

The makers of this movie produced the excellent 406 Days last year, so when I saw this come up in the listings for my local cinema, I was primed to check it out. The bombings took place before I was born, but my dad was driving through town right as it happened – he thought a gas main had blown and didn’t find out it was a bomb until after he got home.  One of the bombs went off beside the nightclub Laura and I frequented when we were teenagers and into our 20s, I walk past the spots where all three bombs went off on a regular basis – Trinity College still carries damage from the one that went off on its north perimiter.  It’s incredibly harrowing to compare the places I know and frequent to what happened then, it was probably the most heinous scar the Troubles left on the Republic overall.  It reminds me of taking a trip to Belfast in 1995 and a friend of my mum showing me Republican neighbourhoods getting ready for marching season, only to see those self-same neighbourhoods on fire a few weeks later when that year’s parades descended into violence.  That harrowing feeling turns to anger when the film turns to the total abrogation of responsibility by the Republic’s government, the way the survivors were just left alone, the stonewalling by the British government, it works very well to bring you through the emotional progression, and while it can seem a bit manipulative to say nobody has been held rsponsible for the attacks earlier in the movie, it’s not entirely incorrect so cna be forgiven for the sake of building a compelling narrative.  Overall an excellent film and well worth checking out.

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Uncle Retrospective

lorcan_nagle wrote:

gay and lesbian anti-trans groups in the UK that end up allying with openly homophobic and misogynistic organisations and people without realising they’re next against the wall.

This baffles me. I really don’t understand these groups.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Sean Robinson

Uncle Retrospective wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

gay and lesbian anti-trans groups in the UK that end up allying with openly homophobic and misogynistic organisations and people without realising they’re next against the wall.

This baffles me. I really don’t understand these groups.

It’s a weird mix of believing that the class mobility and privelege they’ve acquired will protect them but also a fear that it can be taken away.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective, Christian

I saw Furiosa tonight. It was OK but I can see why it’s not getting the same buzz as Fury Road, as it’s not as relentlessly energetic and visually arresting as that film.

The story is also very thin, which is fine for a movie like this, but it does mean that when things slow down there isn’t much to get your teeth into and it feels like a lull.

That said it’s still a well-made, well-shot film and the cast are fine in it, although Hemsworth is a bit pantomimey at times.

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Todd

I finally went to see Civil War tonight. I enjoyed it, a well-made film with some good performances and some moments that work really well, but at the same time it sort of feels like it doesn’t add up to anything greater than that either. I’m not sure how much I really took away from it. Towards the end especially it feels like it becomes a slightly different and less interesting movie.

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Christian

Godzilla Minus One

Holy hell, this film has a huge reputation but did it live up to it!

It manages to be both homage and re-invention of the older films. Also, when you get right down to it, Godzilla is a total bastard. Turns up, wrecks stuff, kills people, stomps off.

Setting it in post-war Tokyo and telling its tale over 3-4 years is a clever structure. It allows for both an episodic story, while examining the changing culture in Japan, as it’s people moves away from the ideal if death in battle.

The ground eye view of Godzilla it adopts enables both a homage to old style effects, with new style efffects for how Godzilla’s rampage would be felt.

Very smart, clever, fun and entertaining.

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lorcan_nagle, Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Dave

Yeah, I think it’s a great take on Godzilla and a really engaging film with a lot of heart and soul, while still managing to be a fairly tight no-flab watch. Current bloated Hollywood blockbusters could learn a lot from it.

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle, Todd, Ben

Ever since Andre Braugher passed away my phone has been giving me Brooklyn Ninety-Nine clips.
I had never seen an episode. Being a Homicide purist I couldn’t imagine Det. Frank Pembleton doing comedy, and had no interst in trying.

I have done myself a disservice (ooh, there’s the title of my sex tape).
Fuck me this is funny (even better title!)

The entire cast is genuinely funny and awesome.
Can’t believe I wouldn’t bother to try, but now I’m addicted.
Sometime this summer I’ll start watching from the beginning (one of the many streaming services I pay for or steal should have it).

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Ben, Dave, Uncle Retrospective

Sean Robinson wrote:

I have done myself a disservice (ooh, there’s the title of my sex tape).

Are you okay there, Sean?

Fuck me this is funny (even better title!)

Never mind, I know the answer.

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Uncle Retrospective, Sean Robinson

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francisg