TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Finished re-watching Battlestar Galactica. Ending was still dreadful. I think one of the biggest issues was that the 2nd half of the final episode (I guess Daybreak Pt III) was entirely superfluous.  When your series finale wraps up with multiple jumps to events taking place before the start of the series (the characters lives when Zak Adama was alive and when Roslin slept with one of her former students), you know you are in for trouble.

Perhaps similar to how Lost ended without satisfactorily explaining most of the mysteries in the series, though I don't know as I gave up on Lost early on.

That's a problem with shows that have overall story arcs--they almost never wrap things up in a reasonably satisfactory manner.  Only exceptions I can think of offhand are Babylon 5 and The Fugitive.  Well, maybe The Prisoner--you can't really say the finale explained everything, but given the surreal nature of the show, that was appropriate IMO.

DS9, too. Well, if you can buy into Sisko's "Ascension".

I've never understood why they didn't tie the Sisko/Dukat/Pagh Wraiths/control over the wormhole crap in with the end of Dominion War (it's like they forgot that the only reason the Allies were winning, other than biowar--it works!--was because the Dominion was relying solely on Alpha Quadrant resources and if the Dominion proper reestablished a bridgehead into the quadrant it was all over in a few weeks).

Then again, given how goofy that storyline wound up being, it's nice to be able to turn off "What You Leave Behind" halfway through.

Breaking Bad, I assume, will wind up having a pretty satisfying ending.

To Money:

[spoiler]Recalling that Pinkman's cooks are about as good as Walt's, here's a wild guess: the best way out for Walt once the Panzerarmee showed up is to sell Pinkman into meth slavery to Lydia.  The M60 and ricin stuff?  That's Walt on his way to get Jesse back.  It's the old redemption arc.  Realizing how he's harmed his own family--because Hank's dead as an MRF--he'll come back around to being a quasi-good dude. [/spoiler]

[Queequeg]

That's......pretty convincing, Ide.

[Ideologue]

[Admiral Yi]

About 2/3 of the French version of Touristas.  Without subtitles.

A little slower paced and a little grittier than the English version.  I thought the chicks were a pinch hotter too, but I could have been biased at the time.

What made absolutely no sense to me however is that when asked by some Brazilian where they were from, they said they were American.   

[The Brain]

Continued Band of Brothers. They're gonna have the geezers begin every episode? Breaks immersion.

[Savonarola]

The Raven (1915)

Sort of a biopic of Edgar Allen Poe, and sort of not.  Henry B. Wallthall (the Little Colonel from "Birth of a Nation") plays Poe.  The film has vignettes of Poe's life, interspersed with a couple fantasies of his work.  Something similar to Annabel Lee is shown while he and his cousin-fiancée sit by a brook.  The Raven is portrayed as a hallucination he suffers while drunk.  They even show Sarah Helen Whitman at the end of the film; but the film is so disjointed it's not clear what her relationship to Poe is and they're never on the screen together.

The film glosses over some to the unsavory details of Poe's life; most notably Virginia Clemm is played by a woman in her 30s, and couldn't at all pass for the 13 year old that Poe married.

Walthall does a good job as Poe, but even by the standards of 1915 the special effects and settings of this film are awful.  They look like paper mache props from a high school play.

[Ed Anger]

Continued Band of Brothers. They're gonna have the geezers begin every episode? Breaks immersion.

You'll get to see SS machinegunned in the back soon enough.

[Phillip V]

Clint Eastwood and his wife have separated. I wish to comfort his daughters.

[Admiral Yi]

Just watched Zero Dark Thirty.  I was expecting a lot, lot more.

[Habbaku]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8i5CR4kDjM

[Eddie Teach]

I guess McConnaughey's getting too old to keep making awful RomComs.

[Syt]

[Scipio]

Alter Egos, an indy film from 2012 about low-fantasy level super heroes with government funding.  Think Hipster Incredible Sucks. 

It shoehorns a conventional boy meets girl hipster love story into a conspiracy that's simultaneously bigger and smaller than you think, a sort of non-musical Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, with more annoying hipster douchery because it takes place at the Hamptons in the off-season, and the protagonist is a low-rent male version of DC Comic's Ice whose secret identity is that he's Steve Ditko.

It's like What If Woody Allen's Better Looking Cousin Became Hipster Iceman?, or, as the cognoscenti know it, Issue #87 of Volume 2.

Great throwaway scene of the protagonist cheating on himself with his girlfriend, doggystyle.

[Ideologue]

I feel like that review was translated back and forth from... well, not Japanese, but not a Germanic language, either.

[Admiral Yi]

Dude, you have no grounds to talk.