TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

So Greece got me into this Doctor Who thing.  I've obviously been aware of the show since forever, and being on the Internet and talking with total dorkburgers like you I was relatively familiar with its mythos long before I ever watched any of it, knowing what a Dalek is, that the Master is a renegade Time Lord, that a Time Lord is a Gallifreyan and has lives like a cat whose cat actor's contract periodically expires, etc.  lot.  But I'd never really watched it with particular dedication.

So, in rectification, I was watching the first series/season/thing with Christopher Eccleston, and that guy's great, because he's, like, a genocidal maniac, but he's also sweet and funny, but not a hipster-looking spike-haired doofus or Neanderthalish nerd.  I got to the final episodes of his series, Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways. It was related in backstory that the Doctor had killed about a billion Daleks, but some survived this neblous "Time War," through vaguely explained means, and now they run a bunch of game shows in the Mojoverse Future, for vaguely explained reasons.  The Doctor faces his greatest nemesis!  AND IT WAS THE LAZIEST SHIT.

So the Doctor has the option of killing all remaining Daleks (again), but the indiscriminancy of the weapon will kill many/most humans too (but it's in the year A.D. 200,100, so who cares).  He sends his companion, Rose, in the TARDIS back to Chav Street, London, 200x, nominally to deny the Daleks the advanced Time Lord technology (which, um, don't they already have?) but primarily to save Rose because despite his mess of alien genitals he wubs her and wants to make spontaneous abortion babies with his Time Lord seed.  So, this act of salvation accomplished, he faces the Daleks with his improvised kill-everything button, but his genocidal maniac credentials, he declines.  Lame.

Then Rose goes fucking nuts in 200x trying to get the TARDIS to work with a real misplaced sense of urgency because one thing I've learned from watching even just a few Doctor Who episodes is that the writers don't seem to understand the central technology of the show is time travel.

Throughout the series, the words "bad wolf" have appeared as a sort of beacon or code, and it turns out I guess that, through vaguely explained means, Rose wrote them, and they are a semantically useless message that she magically deciphers to mean "Save him," which 1)duh and 2)is the same number of letters and is much clearer.  "Bad wolf": it's not even an anagram.

So she opens up the TARDIS' heart which apparently gives you Dark Phoenix powers and kills the Daleks with a wave of her hand, since having godlike powers puts her under no obligation to not just murder, but then Empress Lilandra hunts her down and she takes her own life to save the man she loves but the Doctor sucks the poison out so Rose is ok I guess and the Eccleston is CGI'd into a guy with extremely mid-oughts hair whom I immediately now dislike, even though I thought he was fine in the episodes I've already seen him in.

It's possible I might have missed something in the couple of episodes I skipped because I was impatient to get to the Dalek part.  But I don't think so.  It just seems like things happened in the plot because BBC accepted the first draft of the script.

Still, there are indeed lots and lots of Daleks rolling around shooting people and plunging stuff and saying things like "PREDICT! PREDICT! PREDICT!" and "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" so a pretty solid B I guess.

[CountDeMoney]

I have an irrational hatred of Doctor Who stemming from my childhood;  when we didn't have cable when I was growing up it was absolutely the only thing on television--on PBS no less--with that atrocious BBC production value after Saturday Night Live went off the air and the other networks shut down for the night.*  Talk about a boring ass Saturday night at 2am when you don't want to go to sleep.

Fuck Dr. Who.  I will never watch that bullshit.  The scars run deep.





*I also believe this is the same childhood trauma that forces me to subscribe to every cable channel possible.

[Ideologue]

I tried to watch an old Doctor Who serial, and they're obviously too long for their stories to support--maybe they were meant to kill time for children once a week, like my Flash Gordon or Commando Cody serials, but even more repetitively.

In this one, the guy who controls this fictional world casts illusions that can only hurt you if you believe they're real.  The Doctor figures this out pretty quickly and explains it to his companions.  Their opponent continues to send illusions.  The Doctor continues to have to explain it.  This goes on for maybe about forty minutes till I go the fuck to bed.

[Eddie Teach]

Craig's movies (and the last Brosnan) have made me tired of the series.

[Ideologue]

Did Roger Moore's make you cheer?

[Eddie Teach]

Moore's films were a mixed bag.

[Darth Wagtaros]

He was good in Cannonball Run II

[Admiral Yi]

Moore's films were a mixed bag.

Great Bond girls, great production values, big stiff girly man in the lead.

Imagine how Connery would have done with Moore's budgets.

[Eddie Teach]

Moore's not so bad. He gets the silver.

[Josquius]

Dark Knight Rises- Finally saw it for the first time. It was surprisingly good given the dissapointment of the second Nolan film.

Boys on the Run- My slog through Japanese drama continues. This one is interesting. The first episode or two pretty much cover the plot that is usually the entirity of a drama series (cliched guy likes girl but doesn't know what to do, gets his guts up, they like each other, there are drawbacks but ultimately yey). It then develops into pretty dark directions. Albeit with a J-drama bubblegum finish. hmm.... Its no kekkon dekinai but its good.

[Admiral Yi]

Moore's not so bad. He gets the silver.

I'd give the silver to Brosnan.

[Eddie Teach]

So the little girly man over the big one? 

[Admiral Yi]

Sure.  Less girly than Moore and more suave.

[The Brain]

I haven't seen any post-80s Bond, and I count myself lucky that I haven't. They suck ass.

[Eddie Teach]

Goldeneye was worth watching, you got to see Ned Stark play a bad guy. Also Famke was hott and Boris was funny.