TV/Movies Megathread

[Ed Anger]

All this talk of '90's movies makes me want to see Killing Zoe again.

[garbon]

And no one cares about Godzilla fighting a giant spider (I'm sure it has a name) or a giant mantis (it probably has a name too).

What about a giant moth?

That puts asses in seats.

I love Mothra.

[Ideologue]

Mothra's my favorite, because she's the smartest.

[Tonitrus]

Gamera.  What could be better than a giant flying, spinning turtle with flames shooting out it's ass?

[Darth Wagtaros]

Mothra's my favorite, because she's the smartest.

I believe Gamera is fairly bright.

[garbon]

Mothra's my favorite, because she's the smartest.

Somewhere in my morass of an apt, I have a Mothra toy.

Re-watching the first episode of The Good Wife after watching the most recent ep. They've sure come along way. The writing was so heavy handed at first, I'm surprised they got past a pilot.

[Ed Anger]

Gamera is a child molester.

[Viking]

Mothra's my favorite, because she's the smartest.

Somewhere in my morass of an apt, I have a Mothra toy.

Re-watching the first episode of The Good Wife after watching the most recent ep. They've sure come along way. The writing was so heavy handed at first, I'm surprised they got past a pilot.

The initial premise of The Good Wife was quite interesting. Now that Alicia and Peter's relationship issue seems resolved the whole thing is pretty uninteresting. Now it is merely an above average legal drama.

[garbon]

Mothra's my favorite, because she's the smartest.

Somewhere in my morass of an apt, I have a Mothra toy.

Re-watching the first episode of The Good Wife after watching the most recent ep. They've sure come along way. The writing was so heavy handed at first, I'm surprised they got past a pilot.

The initial premise of The Good Wife was quite interesting. Now that Alicia and Peter's relationship issue seems resolved the whole thing is pretty uninteresting. Now it is merely an above average legal drama.

I like above average legal dramas. And I agree that the initial premise was interesting and so I was being willfully obtuse when saying I didn't understand how it got beyond a pilot. Really that was rhetoric to stress the change in dialogue writing from then to now. Everything in this first ep is so...forced.

[Viking]

I like above average legal dramas. And I agree that the initial premise was interesting and so I was being willfully obtuse when saying I didn't understand how it got beyond a pilot. Really that was rhetoric to stress the change in dialogue writing from then to now. Everything in this first ep is so...forced.

I only like superb legal dramas. The genre isn't interesting to me in general. But still the first two seasons were well made and are worth watching. Season 3 is not worth it watching for me.

[garbon]

I like above average legal dramas. And I agree that the initial premise was interesting and so I was being willfully obtuse when saying I didn't understand how it got beyond a pilot. Really that was rhetoric to stress the change in dialogue writing from then to now. Everything in this first ep is so...forced.

I only like superb legal dramas. The genre isn't interesting to me in general. But still the first two seasons were well made and are worth watching. Season 3 is not worth it watching for me.

I'm hoping on my re-viewing that the rest of Season 1 is... as that's what got me hooked in the first place, not the first episode. I was really just shocked how rough it was as I only first saw it a couple years ago.

I like Law & Order. That's about as above average (or perhaps average, although the field has been weighted down by a lot of other series) as you can get in this field.

[garbon]

"The Weekend"

If you don't quit, I'm going to come down there and rape your holes.

[Tonitrus]

Been watching Star Trek: DS9 on Netflix.

Chief O'Brien must be the most duplicated, cloned, tortured, and overall alien-abused member of Starfleet.

[Ideologue]

Red vs. Blue Season 9 again.  It felt like a real mess when I was watching it week to week, but maybe as a whole it'll seem more coherent.  So far, not so much.  I don't understand why they just didn't make two things: one about the fucking unending action sequence that is the Freelancer story, adding more content to it that helped it as a story rather than a very long CGI demo reel; and another one, a more fleshed out tragicomic story about the actual RvB gang (or their avatars within Church's memories, anyway--this show's complicated).  Especially seeing as how those two aspects of the show were, afaik, handled by different production teams; and, iirc, never, ever intersect, and don't even take place in the same timeframe, while apparently some crazy awesome stuff involving the RvB gang (the actual ones) happens completely off-screen.

I guess it could still prove me wrong in the rewatch, but I remember being really disappointed in how the creators apparently completely failed to understand their creation and why and how it worked so well in the previous seasons, even, perhaps especially, the Recollection Trilogy of 6-8, when they first introduced the more serious, more actiony elements.  (Hint: it involves the RvB characters rising above their limitations and doing cool shit while cracking wise; it does not involve action scenes which last thirty minutes and involve characters we hardly know and fighting for reasons we do not understand.

Despite all the criticisms, it's still pretty good.  I'm not rewatching it for money, after all.  The actual RvB stuff is just fine.

And the Freelancer stuff is okay, too, it's just that in the way it's executed, it completely overwhelms one's appreciation for well-choreographed action and becomes dull after a while.

For example, there's nothing in it, despite all the technical wizardry in full display, that comes close to matching the actual giving-of-shit I felt for the climax to season 8.  There, we knew who both sides in that fight were, and what they wanted, and it mattered because it involved characters we cared about and because the good guys were tremendously overmatched, but still won.  At best (and this is charity), you care solely about the Freelancers in their story in season 9, and the nameless, faceless (well, you know what I mean) people against whom they fight are complete ciphers, that barely manage to pose any threat, let alone one that you can't see how the heroes will beat and thus does what all action stories need to do, provide antagonists that capture your interest.

I guess the Director's pretty antagonistic, but whatever.  If the core conflict is purely intramural, why are we spending forty or fifty minutes watching the Freelancers fight the fiction equivalent of NPCs in increasingly preposterous action scenes?  That's bad storytelling.

P.S.: I've been told that one of the reasons the story was split was so the CGI guy could go apeshit with his craft and the RvB characters could be done in machinima alone.  This is stupid on its face and for more reasons than I care to count.  The CGI scenes in Recollection weren't seamless with the machinima, but so the fuck what?  They felt seamless.  Because they were awesome.  Because they involved interesting occurrences.  And if they made you laugh with their over-the-top nonsense, it was intentional and contributed to the story.

[FunkMonk]

Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the other night, which was stupendously well-done and well-cast. Favorite bit of the flick was Lenin Claus singing the Hymn of the Soviet Union at a Christmas party. I haven't read the book and I'm heavily inclined to read it now.

Coincidentally, I caught The King's Speech for the first time on HBO tonight, which also starred Colin Firth. The man definitely deserved his Oscar.

His greatest movie will always be Fever Pitch, though. 

And I just realized he was in my favorite HBO film Conspiracy.  I must watch that again.