Yeah, the second half of this trailer made me laugh out loud.
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Interesting breakdown of what is new and what is reshot/moved in the series: https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/1jldtgk/not_sure_what_is_new_and_what_is_old_with/mk2x57g/
What people seem to not realize about Born Again is, the show was never originally bad. There was a problem of lacking context to feel like a sequel to the Netflix show, but it was never bad in concept to do something different. While the Netflix show went for a Brian Michael Bendis tone, Born Again wanted to go for something more along the lines of the Mark Waid comics. That means more jokes, but also using that to show Matt over-compensating for his depression. You talk about Episode 5 being too quippy, but that’s entirely in line with Mark Waid’s Matt.
The main problem was that, like most MCU productions, the scripts weren’t finished when it went into production, and they were trying to fix them up as they went along. Then the WGA Strike happened, and then they could only shoot stuff as written. Which caused Jon Bernthal, who signed onto the show, to walk off due to his issues with the un-shot Punisher arc scripts. That in turn caused production to halt, with them only having 6 episodes shot of the original 18 scripts. The White Tiger arc, the breather “day in the life of” episodes, and the Muse arc were shot, but nothing else.
By the time the strike ended, Marvel came to three conclusions. One, the scripts they hadn’t shot yet had spiraled too out of control and needed to be vastly redefined or scrapped. Two, they needed to make it feel more like a sequel to the Netflix show. And three, they needed the cast to be enthusiastically on board with the show, rather than only kinda on board and wanting changes. Notably, Jon Bernthal, hence why the new showrunner was hired from The Punisher show, rather than the first Daredevil show.
The changes were never really about “un-doing” anything. It was all about contextualizing the new direction better with the old one, and aligning the new one to eventually lead back into something more like the old one.
All that said, here’s everything that was changed during the overhaul, up to Episode 5 because I haven’t watched 6 yet:
Episode 1:
- The new pilot, entirely new and written by Dario Scardapane and directed by Benson and Moorhead
- Done to establish a connective tissue to the Netflix show and set up ways to eventually bring the show back in line with it later on as well.
Episode 2:
- The original pilot, written by Corman and Ord and directed by Michael Cuesta, White Tiger arc part 1.
- Cut the original proper introductions to Kirsten, Heather, and Cherry
- Re-shot the Vanessa scenes (She was originally re-cast, but Scardapane brought back Ayulet).
- All Vanessa scenes were shot by Jeffrey Nachmanoff.
- Any and all Muse scenes shot by David Boyd and moved up from later episodes
Episode 3:
- Original episode 2, written by Jill Blankenship and directed by Michael Cuesta, White Tiger arc part 2.
- Vanessa scenes re-shot by Jeff Nachmanoff
- White Tiger’s death re-shot by Benson and Moorhead (We have set photos confirming that)
- Any and all Muse scenes shot by David Boyd and moved up from later episodes
Episode 4:
Original episode 3, written by David Feige and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Breather arc part 1.
- Originally had a “day in the life” structure, with no time cuts happening.
- That structure was changed in the overhaul due to the logistics of the new Vanessa re-shoots (Nachmanoff) and the movement of scenes from later episodes.
- Muse scenes shot by David Boyd and moved up from later episodes
- Matt finding the bullet is new connective tissue added by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and new writer Jesse Wigutow during the overhaul
- Punisher scene originally shot by David Boyd for original episode 5 or 6 (Now 6 or 7) and moved up. Bernthal’s side remains unchanged.
- Charlie Cox’s side has some re-shoots and ADR by Nachmanoff and Wigutow to better connect to White Tiger’s death
Episode 5:
- Original episode 4, written by Grainne Godfrey and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Breather arc part 2.
- Unchanged entirely
- Always meant to be a “bottle episode”, a lower budget standalone episode of a show meant to focus on character in between plot stuff
- Meant to show Matt’s status quo breaking, as well as establish MCU connectivity with fun cameos
- Last of the breathers before “things get real”
It seems all the Muse stuff was originally contained to one or two episodes, and they moved a bunch of scenes to earlier in the season to build him up more. Which makes this episode feel like a real anti-climax.
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Wild that they chose to announce this on April 1st.
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About fucking time. What took them so long, anyway?
For the live-action one? Mostly Holland. He spent ages working on The Crowded Room, an Apple TV+ show he wanted to be his big serious prestige project, and apparently it was a terrible experience. When it came out everyone hated it, and he took a year off acting: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tom-holland-the-crowded-room-not-harmonious-animosity-1236097983/ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-06-08/tom-holland-acting-break-crowded-room
He’s been busy this year with The Odyssey.
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Sandman Mystery Theatre Compendium Two – Aug. 26th
888 pgs.
Collects Sandman Mystery Theatre #37-70, and Vertigo: Winter’s Edge #1-2.:O FINALLY! Thank you!
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I enjoyed the bank heist episode, but it felt completely out of place on this show.
Fun (to me) fact: The actor playing the main bank robber almost certainly went to the same primary school as me, two years under me.
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I’m watching The Sandbaggers, a British spy show from the late 70s. It’s very slow and mostly just scenes of middle-aged British men having conversations, but it’s very good.
One of its main legacies is probably that it’s very clearly the main inspiration for Greg Rucka’s Queen and Country, a series that’s now even older than The Sandbaggers was when Q&C started.
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My first thought was “didn’t Bendis just do this a couple of years ago?”
Seems like they just retconned Bendis away, which is okay.
Ooh, a new Legion of Super-heroes must be around the corner!If Waid is the current DC architect, then this will stay valid for 5 years, until 2030 (hmmm, DC’s 95th year. Could they hold off until 2035?)
Waid did it a few years ago, at Marvel, with Javier Rodriguez:
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I do find it frustrating that Disney decided to retain so much of that material anyway and front-load it into this series, seems like a very poor decision when it must have been obvious that things weren’t working.
They only started filming Season 2 in the last few weeks, so I don’t think they would have enough material if they cut out all of the old stuff. They would probably have had to push back to the end of this year or early 2026.
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I watched the first episode of the UK Last One Laughing on Prime Video. Never watched one of these before, but the UK one has a lot of people I like in the cast (Bob Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper, Joe Lycett, Judi Love, Rob Beckett, Sara Pascoe, Lou Sanders, Joe Wilkinson, Harriet Kemsley, and Richard Ayoade), so I gave it a try.
It’s fun so far, I’ll definitely watch more, and maybe try some of the international ones. I know they did an Irish one recently which I might check out.
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I watched episode two. It’s still pretty flat although there are some better Fisk moments. But it feels like the kind of show that’s embarrassed to be about superheroes and so is almost all legal drama instead. And it’s kind of boring.
That’s why they completely changed showrunners and scrapped all their plans after the strike. Episode 1 and the last two were created by the new creative team, but Eps 2-7 are from the old team when it was mostly just going to be a legal drama in the superhero world. I’m sure the new team reshot some stuff, added some scenes, etc, but it’s still mostly the original showrunners’ show.
We probably won’t see fully what the new team want to do with Daredevil until Season 2.
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Andor will release three episodes a week for four weeks: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/showatch/andor/listings/
Each block of episodes has a different writer, and they’ve said there’s a one-year time-jump after each block.
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95 is a good age to go, but his wife is much younger. Also the dog was found dead.
Yes, people are saying it sounds like carbon monoxide poisoning.
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The Wakanda/Dora Milaje spin-off series isn’t happening: https://tvline.com/news/black-panther-okoye-cancelled-spinoff-series-disney-plus-1235413579/
That means they’ve shut down every announced TV series that hadn’t already started production. There’s still Ironheart, Wonder Man and Vision Quest to come, and S2 of Daredevil, but they’ve nothing else in the pipeline, at least publicly.
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Roberto Orci Dies: ‘Star Trek’, ‘Transformers’ & ‘Hawaii Five-0’ Writer-Producer Was 51
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Honestly, maybe my least favourite MCU movie. Previously that was Incredible Hulk, but this is just a worse sequel to Incredible Hulk, in which they don’t even have the Hulk.
All the political conspiracy stuff raises comparisons to Winter Soldier, and none of those comparisons do the movie any favours. It’s a very stupid movie that has clearly had all the edges sanded off in reshoots and editing.
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I’ve skipped all of the recent Marvel animated shows except X-Men ’97, and had little interest in the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man show, but I am intrigued by the promo image from the Disney+ carosel that shows that the Slingers are in it:
I have a soft spot for that era of Spidey comics (though I’ve never actually read the Slingers series).
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I guess Malkovich is probably playing Nathaniel Richards, but he does look really like da Vinci from Hickman’s SHIELD.
I thought the consensus was that Malkovich is playing the Red Ghost.
I’ll be honest: I have absolutely no idea who that is.
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I really like the trailer. I honestly wish they would keep the F4 and the X-Men in their own universes and not merge with the MCU. The MCU is boring, this place looks fun.
I guess Malkovich is probably playing Nathaniel Richards, but he does look really like da Vinci from Hickman’s SHIELD.
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Or have I missed a few?
This seems more recent more recent (from November).Heh. It’s telling how there’s already two trailers for this and nerds like us hadn’t even noticed.
The trailers doesn’t look great either. And I don’t think anyone who didn’t watch the show can make heads or tails out of it. And given that quite a lot of people who liked the show in the beginning kinda gave up on it, this may be the first proper Star Wars movie dud. Apparently the budget is extremely low for this kind of movie (120 million), so it’ll still turn a profit, but it’ll still hurt the franchise if it’s a dud.
Those trailers aren’t real, they’re fan-made things.
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I haven’t seen I’m Still Here yet, but most of the BP nominees are pretty good.
My ranking:
- Nickel Boys
- Dune: Part Two
- Anora
- The Brutalist
- Conclave
- The Substance
- Wicked
- A Complete Unknown
- Emilia Pérez
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Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I saw it in the cinema, but I don’t think many did.
I watched the new Wolf Man, which I found very disappointing.
There are a few cool visual moments and some nice pieces of sound design during the transformation, but the script is awful. In his first scene, Christopher Abbott literally tells his daughter he doesn’t want to be the type of father that his dad was, in case we didn’t get the theme of the movie.
Julia Garner is seriously wasted. The advertising sells the movie as a mother/daughter story, which it isn’t at all. The only interactions they have are talking about what’s happening to Christopher Abbott.
The wolf transformation is fairly weak: from a distance it looks silly, close-up it looks gross, never scary. There’s not much tension; it tries to play off an incredibly obvious plot development as if it were a twist, and once the movie hits the midpoint everything plays out almost exactly as I expected, there were basically no surprises.
The mythology of the movie, what little of it is explored, doesn’t make much sense either. Is there just the one wolf creature? How did nobody kill him in the ten years or so since he was transformed? It doesn’t seem hard. If there are more, are the surviving characters just going to get brutally killed five minutes after the movie ends?
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H2SH is a very funny title.
Hush was the first Batman comic I ever read, and I enjoyed it at the time, but I re-read it recently when they put out the Compact TPB, and it’s a very weak story.
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Indie filmmaker Jeff Baena, husband of Aubrey Plaza, dead at 47: https://deadline.com/2025/01/jeff-baena-dead-47-independent-filmmaker-1236246487/
Tragic. I enjoyed the films he did with Plaza and Alison Brie.
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I liked 7. Natasha Lyonne as the very 80s metal daughter of Howard and Darcy is a bizarre concoction but fun (I thought for a moment she was called Debbie as a nod to Debbie Duck from Starbrand). Surprised to hear the name Exiles used. Slightly bittersweet as I guess it means we’re no more than five months away from Marvel comics launching Captain Carter and the Exiles featuring no trace of Blink let alone Morph.
A version of Captain Carter already showed up in the short-lived Saladin Ahmed/Javier Rodriguez version of the Exiles in 2018.
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Christopher Nolan’s new movie is an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey:
Christopher Nolan’s next film ‘The Odyssey’ is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.
— Universal Pictures (@UniversalPics) December 23, 2024
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I am binge-watching Ted Lasso. Second season isn’t as good as the first one, though. There’s not enough emphasis on football, or on Lasso as a coach. I don’t particularly care about Nathan turning into an arse, or Rebecca’s lovestory with what turns out to be Sam. I do like the addition of the psychotherapist, and the further exploration of Ted’s character that goes with it, but apart from that… It’s still a pretty good watch, but it’s definitely weaker than the first season.
Yeah, I didn’t like the second season much, and the reaction to the third season was so negative that I’ve never bothered.
I believe a lot of it is that Bill Lawrence left to focus on Shrinking, so was less involved in S2 and barely involved in S3 at all.
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I saw Kraven, which was awful. I’ve loved some of J.C. Chandor’s past movies, so I had a tiny bit of hope, but nope. Not even as goofy bad as Madame Web, just dour and uninteresting.
There’s no plot to the movie at all, and the story still feels like a mess. It wastes half an hour on an unnecessary and convoluted origin flashback, which leaves no time for a present day story. So we get some vague talk about how Alessandro Nivola didn’t want to wait for Kraven to hunt him down and decided to kidnap his brother to lead him into a trap. That’s the entire plot that remains in the finished movie.
Ariana DeBose, the only woman in the movie with more than one scene (the only other women are her mother and grandmother in the flashback sequence) is only in about a half-dozen scenes and she feels like she’s playing a different character in each of them, none of whom are at all interesting. She barely has a name, and even that I’m not sure of, given she reacts to Kraven calling her “Calypso” as if it were some secret codename.
Fred Hechinger as Kraven’s brother feels like he’s playing a proto-version of his Gladiator II character, coincidentally alongside Russell Crowe, wasted as the Kravinoff patriach. There’s also what definitely feels like a Gladiator reference when Kraven is near-death in the flashback, which probably would have played differently if this wasn’t coming out weeks after a Gladiator sequel.
The action scenes are the only good part of the movie, and there’s not many of them. They’re not great, but they kept my attention at least. There’s some extra gore and two f-bombs that are clearly an attempt to piggyback off Deadpool’s R-rated success.
There’s a terrible scene at the end threatening a sequel that everyone knows will never happen, but no credits scenes referencing Morbius thankfully.
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So considering the fact that there’s a Kraven movie in theatres (for a couple of days anyways), why is there no re-issue of Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt in a deluxe HC format?
I would pre-order right now.It was supposed to come out in January 2023, so the reissues came out over two years ago (not in hardcover though):
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Abrams has created for the most part very mediocre fare. That goes for all of his movies, really, and for everything he’s written or directed himself on TV, as well. Lost is a big exception, but that’s presumably because Lindeloff is a really good writer. Why anybody would think of Abrams as the next Spielberg is beyond me.
Bad Robot did produce some very good shows, especially the Jonathan Nolan ones.
Abrams had basically no involvement in Lost after the pilot, he left straight away to make Mission: Impossible 3.
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I’m wondering how they’ll blow things up in like 4 episodes time
It’s a six-episode season!
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You could look at SciFier.
They take a little time to despatch but do also give a timetable. £2 postage flat rate but items are well packed. Yodel is their carrier.
Used them twice recently and they’ve been pretty good.
Never heard of them, but €5 per order flat postage to Ireland is pretty good.
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I saw Moana 2, which was a disappointment. The songs are boring, none of the jokes are funny, and the story is nonexistent.
It was originally supposed to be a Disney+ show, and it’s very obvious. You can tell where the episode breaks are supposed to go, each episode has a song, a vague structure (the first episode lays out the concept, the second episode is her getting the team together, the third and fourth episodes have her interacting with guest characters, the fifth is the big finale, and the sixth episode is just an epilogue, and seems to have been mostly condensed into a montage), and a cliffhanger-ish ending.
The movie sets up a big villain early on, who doesn’t even show up until the post-credits scene. The closest thing the movie has to an antagonist is a nasty storm. The new characters are all completely one-note, though it’s nice to see Rose Matafeo getting more work.
The movie occasionally has the characters name-drop songs from the first movie, which just reminded me of how good those songs were and how lousy the new ones are.
I assume they’ll do a third movie that will be designed as a proper movie, and I hope they get more talented people to make it.
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I ordered the Aquaman omnibus out on the 3rd and no sign of it being dispatched.
I can see the publication date of Aquaman was he 3rd of December. Unfortunately, our supplier is still waiting for stock to arrive from the publisher. We would expect this to be very soon.
Once your item has been dispatched, you will receive a dispatch confirmation email.
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His episode of Deep Space Nine is one of the all-time best.
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Pretty good finale. I’m glad they didn’t really go down the redemption path for Agatha, and that there was no big Marvel cameo.
I’m curious about the implications of Billy having a “Once More with Feeling” poster in his room. Does he know what Joss Whedon did after Buffy? Does he know Emma Caulfield lives nearby?
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
I’d say the bigger issue is that he’s 27, only a year younger than Tom Holland. Miles should at least appear to be an actual teenager.
He can easily play younger though. He’s playing late teens in Penguin.
Realistically, I don’t think we’re likely to see a real teenager cast as Miles.
Tom Holland was 18 when he was cast as Peter. There are plenty of young actors who could play Miles, I don’t get the sense in casting a guy who would probably be in his 30s by the time he showed up (if they even have any plans for that).
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Plus if the kid in it isn’t already in consideration to play Miles Morales then the Marvel casting directors are missing the most obvious choice ever.
I wasn’t thinking that, but I am now. Good call.
Unsure if it’s canon, but he might already be in the MCU.
He was Alex Wilder in Runaways.I didn’t realise that.
I guess that seals it then, Marvel would never cast a prominent actor from one of their past projects in a high-profile role in a new movie.
I’d say the bigger issue is that he’s 27, only a year younger than Tom Holland. Miles should at least appear to be an actual teenager.
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The 6th Astro City Metrobook is out in January, collecting the final three, very hard-to-find collections. I don’t think the last two were ever even in released in paperback.
Astro City Metrobook TP, Book 6
WRITER: Kurt Busiek
ARTIST: Mike Norton, Alex RossJANUARY 08 / 496 pages / FC/ T / $34.99
The Broken Man’s history, spanning over a century and a half, is revealed at last. Michael Tenicek, Astro City’s most tragic survivor, hosts a support group for others like himself. And in between, we meet or re-meet heroes and villains ranging from Jack-in-the-Box to Mister Manta to Kittyhawk, G-Dog and the Pet Patrol. Star creators KURT BUSIEK, BRENT ANDERSON, ALEX ROSS, and friends bring to live the heroes, villains, and others of comics’ most astonishing city.
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The trade dress for the new DC Finest line looks nice. DC trades department doing a great job right now:
https://bsky.app/profile/yonatans.bsky.social/post/3l7eo7ye7ym2z
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Watched the first three episodes of the final season of What We Do in the Shadows, which is still great. Looking forward to seeing how they wrap it up; the storylines set up to run are interesting.
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First up was Shyamalan’s THE WATCHERS starring Dakota Fanning. I knew nothing about it going in but had some hopes in the first few minutes as it takes place in a forested area in the west of Ireland (the source of some great Celtic myths and folklore), but ultimately the film suffered from the director’s usual inability to develop characters that you care about.
That wasn’t an M. Night film, his daughter directed it. I thought it was okay, but suffered from pretty much entirely being focused on four actors, one of whom was fairly terrible.
It is very funny that the deserted rural road Dakota Fanning is travelling on is going from Galway to Belfast (with no turns, according to her GPS), a route thousands of people travel every day.
Costner should have made this a television miniseries where he could tell the story over the course of 6 or 8 or 10 hourlong episodes; instead we have to wait for Chapter 2 (supposedly due later this year) to get some sort of resolution.
There won’t be any resolution in the second one, it’s planned as a four-movie series, but it’s incredibly unlikely he’ll get the money to make the last two. Maybe he can squeeze it all into a third movie, but even that doesn’t seem that likely to happen.
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I saw The Wild Robot, which was lovely. Definitely one that’s going to get a lot of play for families once it shows up on Netflix in a few months.
I’m rewatching the first season of The Devil’s Hour on Prime Video, because the second season just came out and I have absolutely no memory of what happened in it. All I remember is that it was really creepy and I was shocked when they announced it was renewed, as I assumed it was a miniseries.
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Weekend estimate at $39-40M: https://deadline.com/2024/10/box-office-joker-folie-a-deux-1236107521/
Lower than The Marvels, on par with Morbius.
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I didn’t like the first one, but I thought Phoenix was great in it.
The sequel is mostly just boring, and Phoenix’s performance didn’t work for me at all, especially in the many musical sequences, which are somehow incredibly dull. Gaga is fine, but gets little to do outside of singing. She doesn’t feel like Harley at all.
I saw it with an almost-full crowd, who were mostly completely silent throughout.
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Joker 2 has a 34% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t unexpected, but it has a 36% from users, which is roughly 50 points lower than almost any user score I’ve seen for a big mainstream non-female-focused movie.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/joker_folie_a_deux
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Beasts of Burden is getting an Omnibus TPB, 592 pages for $30:
https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/3015-352/Beasts-of-Burden-Omnibus-TPB
I’ve missed a few of the later issues, so will definitely pick this up.
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24: Legacy
I never watched this one before. It’s better than I expected! I like the cast, it’s not just repeating the same beats over and over again, and the plot mostly works. Corey Hawkins is a decent lead, and I was rarely wishing Kiefer were around.
They do a much better job of building up the new CTU cast than the various agencies of the last few seasons. Dan Bucatinsky is probably the stand-out, though Teddy Sears is good too, and Miranda Otto is strong as the co-lead of the show.
The politics stuff doesn’t work quite as well. Jimmy Smits is a good Palmer analogue, but Gerald McRaney as his scheming father is a bit one-note.
It’s a bit odd to see Kathryn Prescott still playing a high school student almost a decade after Skins, even if she was an actual teenager on that show. Her terrorist plotline feels very disconnected from the rest of the show, if deliberately so. CTU basically have no idea about her plan until she successfully blows up the George Washington Bridge halfway through the season.
The show doesn’t go too heavy on connections to the original series – aside from a clunky namedrop of Edgar in the first episode, it’s just Tony’s involvement, which works okay. They can’t seem to decide if he’s a full heel (he’s a mercenary who tortures and kidnaps people), or still a decent guy.
I would say the show’s big problem was launching too soon after Live Another Day, less than three years later, and at a time when people weren’t watching much network TV anymore. There wasn’t much appetite for a revival yet.
My season rankings:
5
4
Legacy
2
7
Live Another Day
8
1
3
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24: Live Another Day
I’d forgotten how different a visual style this has to the main series – it tries to be a lot more “cinematic” in terms of camera angles, music, etc (though with a lot of dodgy explosion CGI). It takes a while to get get used to, as well as the disconnect of seeing the very American Jack Bauer running around London streets and housing estates.
Despite the different visual style, this is another season that just feels like 24 playing the hits: stolen military device, crooked White House staffers, muslim terrorists played by white people, a bunch of new agency people to spout exposition.
Goth Chloe is a very silly idea: it never stops looking stupid, and the revelation that her husband and son died offscreen after the last season is too dark an explanation for it. I get that they were trying to give Rajskub something new to work with, it just doesn’t work.
John Boyega has a fairly major role in the opening episodes, and then completely disappears, presumably right around the time he had to leave to film Star Wars. Michelle Fairley is good as the main terrorist, and Stephen Fry has some fun as Prime Minister. Colin Salmon gets little to do as an American General though, and then disappears, replaced in the last few episodes by Philip Winchester, as I guess Salmon was busy?
None of the CIA people make much of an impression, so it’s hard to care when they die or turn out to be baddies. Yvonne Strahovski is fine as the one person who recognises that they should listen to Jack, but it’s just a less fun version of her Chuck character.
The least British thing about the season: due to a product placement deal, everyone uses Sprint, a company that never operated in the UK, as their mobile operator.
Boy, is the ending of this miniseries a downer. Yet another Jack love interest gets murdered, and he gets taken by the Russians. The producers clearly thought that they’d get Kiefer back to do another miniseries a few years later, but instead he did Designated Survivor, they did the Bauer-free 24: Legacy, and Jack has been presumably stuck in Russian prison for a decade now.
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Are you going to watch Live Another Day next or leave it there?
Yeah, I’ve started on Live Another Day, and will watch Legacy, which I’ve never seen.
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24: Season 8
The final proper season, and it’s not a surprise. At this point when they add people like Katee Sackhoff (fresh off of BSG) or Anil Kapoor (just made a star in America by Slumdog Millionaire) to the cast, it feels like the actors would be better off somewhere else.
It doesn’t help that Sackhoff is stuck for half the season with a truly awful storyline where a dirtbag is blackmailing her into aiding in a robbery. She’s eventually revealed as a villain, and by that point I was just glad she wasn’t going to be around much longer.
The other big cast addition is Freddie Prinze Jr. He’s boring, though he does look a lot like current-era Chris Evans here. It’s just hard to care about any of these people.
There are some good moments, a young Rami Malek has a small but memorable arc as a reluctant suicide bomber, and it picks up in the final episodes when Jack goes full Taken after his girlfriend is murdered, roughly 45 minutes after their first kiss.
It barely feels like 24 though, Jack’s not trying to stop any threat, he’s just going on a murder spree for six hours. Although it’s very funny that they just flat-out repeat the “Jack attacks President Logan but it’s actually just a ruse to plant a bug on him” sequence from Season 5.
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I saw Alien: Romulus today and quite enjoyed it.
As always with these things it often feels as much like a remix as a sequel, and there were a couple of connections/reprises from the other movies that didn’t feel quite necessary. But it had the Alien/Aliens atmosphere down pretty well, a few decent setpieces and a couple of good scares, and after a slightly lukewarm start I felt like I enjoyed it more the longer it went on.
(I saw it in a Dolby screen with a big bassy sound system which really accentuated some of the moments nicely, and gave you a nice look at the production design, which captures the feel of Alien and Aliens really nicely).
I did find it felt quite videogamey in places though, the basic structure of the film and the way it progresses feels like any number of space survival horror games of the last couple of decades. Although they were all influenced by Alien in the first place so I guess it comes around.
I was very mixed on it. I loved David Jonsson as Andy, and Cailee Spaeny was pretty good in the lead, but all of the other characters were incredibly bland and forgettable.
I liked a lot of the horror-y stuff, especially the very silly/disgusting third act stuff linking back to Prometheus. I hated all of the Ian Holm bits though, it felt ghoulish and unnecessary.
The callback to the famous line from Aliens was one of the worst moments in recent cinema history, just awful.
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24: Redemption
Weirdly, not on streaming, so I had to watch my DVD copy.
24 is in an odd position to do a movie, as the problem Jack has to deal with needs to be small enough to be taken care of in two hours, but still feel like it deserves a movie. So, we get Jack trying to save a bunch of kids in Africa from being taken to serve as child soldiers.
One of the problems with the movie is that it relies on the acting talents of lots of children who are clearly unexperienced. Most of them are just required to act scared, but anytime one of them needs to show affection towards Jack it feels forced on both sides.
I’d always remembered Robert Carlyle as the villain of the movie, as he’s their big name guest star, but he’s just the friend who heroically sacrifices himself, and isn’t very interesting.
I’d forgotten how much of the movie was setting up the next season, with Jon Voight, Cherry Jones, Colm Feore, and co. It feels out of place, and definitely hurts the pacing. It leaves the movie feeling like an extended prologue to the next season rather than its own thing, and watching the season immediately after the movie confirms that.
24: Season 7
Another reset season, completely getting rid of the LA setting and CTU. It’s definitely better than the previous season, but at this point the show can’t help feeling like a parody of itself at times. All of the super-defensive “no, it’s good and necessary that Jack tortures people” stuff (and there’s a lot of it) is grating.
The midseason reveal of Jon Voight as a key player would work better if Redemption hadn’t already set him up, making me wonder for the first twelve hours when he was going show up. Once he does arrive though, he’s in fine scene-chewing form.
Bringing Tony back was a decent idea, but he’s barely in a lot of the season. I guess they didn’t know what to with him and were stalling until the eventual “no, psych, he really is a bad guy (maybe)” twist. The final episode where the one guy responsible for all of the terror attacks of the past three seasons inexplicably shows up in person so that Tony can try to take his revenge is very silly.
The new FBI characters are okay. The dynamic of “Jack suggests doing something illegal to get results, Renee reluctantly agrees, Larry gets angry at them” gets real old, real fast. Janeane Garofolo as a new Chloe is pretty obvious casting (Rajskub replaced Garofolo on Larry Sanders a decade earlier), but she doesn’t get much to do. The scenes in the final hours when they finally put them together are fun though.
Another part of the “playing the hits” aspect of the season is that, after mostly avoiding it for many seasons, we’re back to another “mole inside the agency” subplot, and it’s the most obvious person.
The one new character who doesn’t work at all is the president’s daughter, who becomes her new chief of staff halfway through the day, immediately orders a murder, and then tries very poorly to cover it up. It’s awful.
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24: Season 6
The worst season!
This is just all over the place. The scale is all wrong; they detonate a nuclear bomb in a California city in the fourth hour, and people have stopped talking about it by the afternoon. Giving Jack an evil father and brother is a terrible idea. It’s very soap opera-y, in a bad way. It definitely feels like Jack’s annoying nephew was going to be revealed as his son at some point and they just cut it out.
Wayne Palmer as president makes no sense. I’ve like Woodside in other roles, but he has none of the gravitas needed to pull this off, especially in the shadow of Dennis Haysbert. The only memorable thing he does as president is get blown up (but not dying until after the season ends, as FOX had a rule forbidding the show from killing a sitting president). Even the entire plotline where the Vice-President wants to attack the middle east, and the President is trying to prevent the attack is just a worse version of the second season.
This is also the season of “Islamaphobia is bad (sometimes).” The show tries to address some actual issues, but also has awful storylines like Kal Penn as a young terrorist in the suburbs. They also add a middle-eastern character to the CTU team, undermined slightly by her being played by Marisol Nichols, who is very clearly hispanic.
It’s also very silly that they won’t even bother making up a fake middle-eastern country name, so everyone keeps just referring to “Fayed’s Country” in a way that never once feels natural.
The entire conspiracy this season is a complete mess, involving some mix of Islamic extremists, Russians, and Jack’s immediate family, with it never being clear who’s behind what. That’s not even getting into the “kill the president” conspiracy, which never goes anywhere.
I quit/paused my NYPD Blue watch when Ricky Schroder joined that show, so I was not happy to see him show up here, still awful. Equally bad is casting Regina King as the Palmers’ never-mentioned sister and then giving her nothing to do (it feels like she was supposed to have a bigger role, given she’s credited as a regular, but they couldn’t think of anything for her to do).
There was another series of webisodes made to go with this season. It’s better than the first batch, in that they actually have a budget for props, extras, locations, etc, and were allowed to film on the set of the main show, but it’s otherwise completely unrelated and pointless.
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24: Season 5
The best season!
I think this was the first thing I saw Jean Smart in, and I didn’t appreciate how great she was at the time. I’m glad she’s finally getting the attention she deserves these days (still annoyed at how Prime Video are treating Hacks over here, S3 aired in the US months ago).
Gregory Itzin is great as Logan, especially in the scenes with Smart. Even before the big twist, he’s clearly a massive dick, as seen in his treatment of his wife.
The new CTU people are pretty good too; I only knew Sean Astin from LOTR at this point, and he’s good as a guy clearly in over his head as the new boss. We also get a young Kate Mara as a junior Chloe-type; it’s a shame she never returned.
Not everything works; Julian Sands escaping custody to seize control of a Russian vessel right at the end feels completely unnecessary, like they needed to have a few more gunplay scenes in case people got bored by all the Evil President antics.
It’s very silly how quick CTU are to release people from custody and have them immediately return to their jobs. Almost everyone who works there seems to be either arresting their fellow employees or being arrested themselves, with no paperwork needed for any of it.
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I was quite surprised to hear recently that, with the end of the Good Fight (I’ve still not seen the final season), the Kings had set up another Good Wife character in their own show: Elsbeth Tascione, the quirky lawyer played by Carrie Preston in, erm, Elsbeth. It’s good for Preston – she’s deserved a starring role for ages and Elsbeth is a fun character. But how does quirky lawyer’s lawyer work as a series lead? Seemingly by putting her in a murder mystery series! Well, I say “mystery”, the format is basically just Columbo so the viewer knows who the killer is and the show is about Elsbeth (secretly now a justice department agent and assigned to the NYPD as an outside observer) quirkily working out how to prove it. It kinda works so far. Seems to have a decent roster of celebrities coming in to play murderers doomed to be out-witted. As ever though, I suspect it’s already been cancelled in the US.
No, it was renewed! I don’t think they’ve announced any of the murderer-of-the-week cast for S2 yet.
I enjoyed it, though I was hoping for a few more links to the other TGW-universe shows. Aside from name-dropping Cary in the first episode, there’s basically nothing. I’m hoping we get a few familiar guest stars in the future.
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Watched the second season of Interview with the Vampirethat just went up on the iPlayer and it’s just as good as the first. It’s really well written, especially the way it plays with the fact that this is a story that’s being told, sometimes from different points of view. And the acting is top notch, especially Sam Reid as Lestat, who actually isn’t in this season very much but is fantastic when he shows up.
Its a bit of a shame this is kind of buried away on the BBC in the uk because I think it’s one of the best shows on at the moment that people don’t talk about.
It’s much more visible in the UK, on BBC, than in the US, on AMC.
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24: Season 4
Now this is much better, with a few exceptions.
The new female CTU boss, played by Alberta Watson, is shown as ridiculously awful, consistently making the wrong choices, with almost no redeeming characteristics. She mostly exists to justify Jack’s torture of suspects, by having her authorize torture of innocent people (Logan Marshall-Green and Lana Parilla), with no involvement from Jack, so the characters we like can say “no, that torture is bad, this torture that Jack does is necessary”. And if we didn’t get that she’s bad, she’s mean to Chloe, the only other returning character at the start of the season.
The most damning thing about Watson and Parilla’s characters is that the show doesn’t even bother killing them off; they just leave and go home in the middle of the season. The other new characters are better though, such as Gregory Itzin as President Logan, Tzi Ma as Chinese agent Cheng Zhi, and Kim Raver as Jack’s girlfriend.
The terrorist plotline in the first half is better than the past seasons, mostly due to Shohreh Aghdashloo, easily one of the best actors to be on the show. Even when the material isn’t great (and it isn’t), Aghdashloo elevates it. It loses something without her in the second half. The big surprise of the season is probably that Jack’s new girlfriend’s rich British estranged husband isn’t a villain, and is a pretty nice guy, who Jack gets killed.
It is funny how many times this season does the “that terrorist plot was just a cover for this other terrorist plot” twist. Marwan has concocted the most ridiculously elaborate one-day scheme in history. The train crash was a cover for kidnapping the Secretary of Defence, which was cover for melting down nuclear power plants, which was cover for blowing up Air Force One, which was just a step in his plan for stealing a nuclear warhead.
The climax of the season feels like they painted themselves into a corner with no way to stop Marwan and the nuke; the return of Mandy the sexy assassin comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit with anything else in the season. I was never a fan of the big conspiracy stuff hinted at with her and Nina that never went anywhere; I’m glad this is the last we see of her.
This season had a side-project, 24: Conspiracy, a series of 24 one-minute “mobisodes” that came out concurrently with the episodes and are set on the same day. I don’t believe anyone from the actual show was involved in any way; it feels like a mandatory workplace training video. It’s awful.
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24 Season 3
There’s a decent setup here, but this season is a mess, full of false leads and so many annoying new characters. It picks up a lot in the second half when they move past all of the Mexico/Jack undercover stuff, and actually get to the virus threat, but it doesn’t make up for the wheel-spinning first half.
The season has a bunch of stupid episode ideas, like “Jack plays Russian roulette” or “there’s a baby in CTU,” that feel like they’re just filling time, and the somehow season-long Palmer storyline with his brother having an affair and the woman’s husband dying is just boring, like an extremely drawn-out episode of Scandal.
Chloe is the only new character who works. She’s as annoying as the other new characters, but Mary Lynn Rajskub is a great comedy actress and plays it well, especially once they start putting her in scenes with Jack. Zachary Quinto’s character is just an asshole and gets nothing to do, the other new guy (Gael?) is a complete blank who I forget exists whenever he’s not on screen, and Wayne Palmer is one of the least convincing politicians in TV history. I’ve liked James Badge Dale in everything I’ve seen him in since, but he’s so dull here as Jack’s partner.
Kim now working for CTU is better way to keep Cuthbert on the show than try giving her her own storyline again, let down by her being entirely unconvincing at delivering tech jargon nonsense. I’m not surprised they felt the need to clear house and get rid of 90% of the cast for the next season.
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24, Season 2
Definitely better as a whole than the first season, though there’s still plenty that doesn’t work in retrospect. All of the Palmer stuff is better, and the lack of a “who’s the mole” storyline was refreshing.
Here’s all that torture! And more than I remembered! The situation they go to justify it is ridiculously extreme (there’s literally a nuclear bomb that will explode in the next hour if they don’t get the information), and still it feels oddly casual.
I watched a bunch of NYPD Blue recently, and this show’s treatment of torture is very reminiscent of that show’s treatment of police brutality, where the detectives would regularly beat confessions out of subjects, but only when they “knew” the suspects were guilty. And, of course, being a TV show, they were always right. And like how politicians and pundits used 24 situations to justify actual torture, cops loved NYPD Blue for how the police were depicted.
Speaking of NYPD Blue, one of the plotlines that doesn’t work at all is bringing in Lourdes Benedicto from that show as a new CTU employee with a mysterious past with Michelle, which they draw out for ages. They eventually reveal that she had an affair with Michelle’s brother, which ruined his life, but the original plan was that she was a predatory lesbian who sexually harassed Michelle and offered to promote her in exchange for sex. This is absolutely how Benedicto is playing the role in her first few episodes, and it’s probably for the best that they abandoned it, even if the eventual reveal doesn’t work.
While the season is better-paced overall, there are still issues. The plotline with the sisters takes so long to pay off, and by the time it does the twist (the white woman was the evil terrorist, not her Arab fiancé) is incredibly obvious. It also doesn’t make much sense (why did she schedule her wedding to be on the day she was helping terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb in the city?).
One element that doesn’t work at all is the Kim storyline. I get giving her her own separate thing so she’s not just getting kidnapped again, but a storyline in which see seems to get arrested about five times in one day isn’t better. People talk about the cougar as the low point, but the resolution to that episode, where Johnny Drama tries to trap her in his cabin and convince her the world has ended is much worse. It’s all bad.
Another missed opportunity is bringing back Nina. It feels obligatory, and doesn’t add anything to the storyline; it just feels like they’re spinning their wheels for a few hours. I also don’t believe Jack wouldn’t just kill her as soon as he could.
I forgot to mention in my first post that, especially for the early 2000s, this is the most mobile phone-heavy show ever. In some episodes, 80% of the scenes have characters using their flip-phones.
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Misha Collins, unlikely casting for Ivanek’s brother, is mostly just there to look cool
I’ve not watched 24 but I have seen Supernatural; surely Collins is there to look vaguely perplexed most of the time?
He mostly wears sunglasses, points guns at people, and doesn’t talk much.
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For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’ve decided to rewatch 24
The first season starts fairly strong, but falls apart completely in the second half, when their original plan had clearly run out. For a show all about a ticking clock, the last third of the season is lacking any urgency.
They have no idea what to do with any of the characters, which results in awful storylines like Teri getting amnesia for a few hours, and several episodes that mostly come down to the characters doing paperwork. David Palmer is TOO perfect a politician, constantly doing the right-but-difficult thing and, against all odds, being repeatedly rewarded for it.
Dennis Hopper was a good get for the eventual big bad reveal, but he’s very wooden in the role, and hampered with an awful European accent (Zeljko Ivanek, unsurprisingly, does a decent job with the accent; Misha Collins, unlikely casting for Ivanek’s brother, is mostly just there to look cool).
The season is notably absent of some of the elements that would become hallmarks of the show: there are no middle-eastern villains (as there are no notable middle-eastern or Muslim characters at all), and there are no real torture scenes.
Also, I get the real-world reasons why (it was November 2001), but it’s very odd that a character blows up an airplane in the first episode, and nobody working at a Counter-Terrorism Unit even mentions it for the rest of the day.
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X-Factor by Peter David Omnibus 4 coming next July: https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1302964259
I’d forgotten just how long that X-Factor run was, having not read most of it since it came out monthly. I read the other two omnibuses collecting it recently, and I didn’t realise until I was close to the end that there was still another 30 issues still to be collected (plus the All-New follow-up series).
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Which catalog is DC in Martin?
https://www.edelweiss.plus/#catalogID=5069369&page=1
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Bizarrely, the UK version of Jeopardy is coming back for a second series. I thought it had tanked, so that’s quite surprising. Also, ITV are reviving Deal Or No Deal, to be hosted by Stephen Mulhern. Very few people could feel like a downgrade from Noel Edmonds, but they’ve found one.
EDIT: oh apparently that Deal Or No Deal already happened it’s getting a second season. Shows how much attention I pay to ITV.
The tabloids really hated Stephen Fry. I liked the show, glad it’s coming back.
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I enjoyed lots of individual elements, and laughed a bunch, yet still felt underwhelmed for most of the movie.
Weird that for all the talk of this being Deadpool in the MCU, the only scene set in the actual Marvel Cinematic Universe is the Jon Favreau scene at the very start which was completely pointless and doesn’t connect to anything at all in the movie.
I expected it to end with Deadpool and friends being brought into the MCU, post-Secret Wars style, but nope. Everything’s back how it was, just with Logan and Laura there too.
Making the movie about Deadpool’s love for his friends and wanting to save them would work better if his friends got literally anything to do in the movie. Aside from Peter, they’re all basically just in that party scene and get maybe one-two lines each. We never even get a good look at the photo he’s carrying around. I assume they spent all their cast budget on the FOX all-stars and couldn’t afford to film anything with Karan Soni, Brianna Hildebrand, etc. I completely forgot that Shatterstar even existed.
Also, this movie overdoes all the Peter stuff. I like Rob Delaney, and enjoyed the joke of the character in the last movie, but the “everybody loves Peter” bits in this didn’t work for me at all, particularly when he kept showing up at the end.
I did like seeing all the FOX folk again (or for the first time for Gambit). I just watched Elektra for the first time, and her appearance here helps me forgive how awful that movie is.
Emma Corrin has fun as Cassandra Nova, up until the third act where they have nobody else to act against, are just doing CGI shit, and it sucks. I really hated the whole final setpiece, especially after the fun of the many Deadpool fight.
Matthew Macfadyen didn’t work for me as a villain either, he just seems like an asshole who’s only there to provide exposition and move the plot along without any actual character.
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If anyone’s been waiting on a deal on the second volume of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, it’s half-off at Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Favorite-Thing-Monsters-Book-Two/dp/1683969278/
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HBO have greenlit a Green Lanterns TV series, written by Damon Lindleof and Tom King: https://tvline.com/news/green-lantern-series-order-hbo-max-damon-lindelof-tom-king-1235271064/
HBO, in association with Warner Bros. Television and DC Studios, has given an eight-episode, straight-to-series order to the live-action Green Lantern series written by Damon Lindelof and Eisner Award winner Tom King.
Chris Mundy (True Detective: Night Country, Ozark) will serve as showrunner and executive-produce with Lindelof and King.
Lanterns follows new recruit John Stewart and Lantern legend Hal Jordan, two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, Earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.
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The Boys showrunner says it’s likely that the series will go on longer than its original five-season plan – GamesRadar/Newsarama
Click baitey and speculative article.
But it is news to me there was a 5 season plan, plus it is interesting he thinks it will go longer.He had a five-year-plan for Supernatural too, and that lasted 15 years.
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