TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

I stand corrected.

[The Larch]

I'd dare say that she's a bit of an "it girl" at the moment, well on her way to become a household name in Hollywood.

[Eddie Teach]

She seems an odd choice to play Marilyn.

[The Larch]

Trust Hollywood's makeup artists.

[Sheilbh]

RIP Bernard Cribbins

[Eddie Teach]

Trust Hollywood's makeup artists.

Not much talking in that trailer.

She still had her accent playing a CIA agent in Grey Man.

[celedhring]

Her character in Grey Man is a Hispanic CIA agent, you know  - but her accent is indeed not entirely successful in the newest Blonde trailers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIsFywuZPoQ&t=64s&ab_channel=Netflix

[Syt]

This latest episode of Orville ... man, I've missed those kind of episodes on sci-fi shows recently.

The season so far was leaning heavily into character arcs while moving along the grander story of the galaxy at large.

This episode went full on pulp space opera: Shifting alliances between empires! Treason in the highest ranks! Mortal enemies joining in common purpose! A doomsday device! Big, dumb space battle with lasers and explosions! Dog fighting between fighters and even a bit of a trench run! Commando assault on an enemy base! Heroic sacrifice!

It threw me back to the days of B5 and DS9 (not quite reaching their heights, tbh), or some of the bigger battles on Clone Wars and Rebels. And damn, I've been missing this kind of high stakes, OTT space action. Star Trek had some of it in recent years but generally opted for a more grounded, grittier approach than this episode. The outcome/resolution was IMHO quite predictable, but it was still a nice throwback to a simpler time.

[Josquius]

Senior Year-Rebel Wilson is a high school cheerleader who wakes up after a 20 year coma.
Sure. It's never going to be the best thing ever. But still, its a workable enough concept there could have been something to it.
It... Has some small funny moments but generally it's just cringy. Way OTT about "lol gen z are really inclusive and weird"

[mongers]

RIP Bernard Cribbins

 

[garbon]

Trust Hollywood's makeup artists.

Looks like someone dressing up for Halloween.

[The Brain]

The Imitation Game. Alan Turing fights Hitler, the law. It was OK. I haven't read about the details, and I understand the need to dramatize and simplify in a movie, but the treatment of the question of what to do with Ultra information seems a bit too ridiculous.

It has always seemed to me that there are two stories about Turing: his war hero/science stuff, and his conviction for homosexuality and eventual suicide. The connection however is less obvious to me. Was it poor show of the state to treat a major (though secret) war hero like that? Kinda. But either the law was unjust (I think a good case can be made that it was) or it wasn't. All the thousands of average/normal/unremarkable men convicted were treated just as unjustly as Turing IMHO. If he had been convicted of a "real" crime I think his WW2 stuff should have counted for nought, and I don't see any difference for a "fake" crime.

Wiki tells me that men in Scotland and Northern Ireland are still waiting for their pardons in the style of the Alan Turing law. Is there any movement on that?

[Sheilbh]

I think there are in both jurisdictions. There's been a bill that's come up a couple of times in Scotland but normally it gets crowded out by more urgent stuff. Northern Ireland will probably be more difficult.

The Cairncross/Soviet spy stuff in that film really annoys me - because it seems to replicate the bigotry/stereotype the rest of the film is arguably trying to counter in some way.

[Tamas]

I think Turings case stands out because its easier to grasp of just how cruel the law was if it could hound somebody extraordinary like Turing to suicide.

Is that fair to the countless others who equally suffered because of that ridiculous medieval law? Of course not but also I don't think it hurts the understanding of their plight to have a high visibility showcase of it.

[Sheilbh]

Is that fair to the countless others who equally suffered because of that ridiculous medieval law? Of course not but also I don't think it hurts the understanding of their plight to have a high visibility showcase of it.

I agree but it's modern, not medieval. Medieval sodomy laws were actually fairly stringent - it was ecclesiastical (so penance was the punishment normally) until the Reformation. Though I don't think anywhere in England got as advanced as medieval Florence where they were basically taxing sodomy.

After the Reformation you get the Buggery Act which only covered anal penetration which was a capital offence (and then life sentence after the 1860s). But until the 1860s it required both ejaculation and at least one (possibly two?) testifying eye witness, which meant prosecutions were limited

It was a modern law that criminalised most homosexual acts. It's only in the 1880s with the Labouchere amendement creating the crime of "gross indecency" which was far more flexible - and not defined. It was in the middle of a moral panic about the degeneracy of London - sodomites everywhere (I think it's just before the Cleveland Street scandal), reports that you could buy children on the streets, modern Babylon etc.