TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

Your hip inside references known only to you frighten and confuse me.  Is that a crack at Cameron Crowe movies?  WKRP in Cincinnati?  Asian chicks?

It's a reference to your full fag music poll a few years ago.

[CountDeMoney]

   That was an awesome poll, man.

[garbon]

I feel Revenge was great at first, but then, they realized it actually attracted an audience, so they're milking it, slowing the pace, making it more about personal dramas than the Monte Cristo plot and as such, I feel it has gone down in quality.
Anyway, now I want to know the ending.

It fell apart after the 1st season.

[Ideologue]

I'd actually like to get into a spoilery discussion of why Iron Man 3 bothered me so much.  [spoiler]In case you didn't get it, it's because they decided that Iron Man's greatest villain, the Mandarin, was better served as a joke.  Also because the "twist" with Pepper Potts dying, even with suspension of disbelief in overdrive mode, is likely to be convincing only to head trauma victims and small animals.  Finally, when the mass-production of Iron Man suits becomes a possibility, or even an inevitability--and this is a problem inherent in the material--the concept breaks, even if Tony Stark remains interesting, because Iron Man as a comic or a film series is constrained by outside factors and can never pass through to the next level, and create the full-on science fiction future all Iron Man stories are prologue to.  Kleves had it right without going into it very much that it is a really stupid movie, but more than that--to paraphrase Roger Ebert--it's stupid in the way it goes about being stupid, and that's a pretty serious flaw.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]I don't care about Iron Man's comic background, so turning his greatest (comic) villain into a joke didn't bother me.  It helped that Ben Kingsley was awesome both as the badass and the degenerate.  I agree Pepper Potts "dying" was about as obvious a fakeout as I've ever seen, but it was redeemed by her not just surviving but kicking the bad guy's ass.  Finally, the suits weren't mass produced but from a period of fevered creativity by Stark.  Many of them weren't particularly good, being various test versions that served as mere distraction rather than being effective.[/spoiler]

My deal isn't necessarily that [spoiler]the Mandarin was different from in the comics (more in a sec) but that the reveal was nothing more than a bit of sleight of hand without a lot of point.  It didn't really change everything we thought we knew.  It's just that one of the bad guys turns out to be a drunken pussy.  WHOA HOLD ON THAT'S TOO AWESOME.  I will concede that the joke is funny.  It'd have been funnier in retrospect if the Mandarin had indeed been playing a Hans Gruber.  Further, though, I'm also kind of tired of politically motivated terrorists not being politically motivated terrorists.  It was shitty in Dark Knight Rises too, but at least they were still terrorists, just motivated by EVIL rather than a coherent if illegitimate agenda.  Unfortunately, while "assassinating political figures in order to secure defense contracts" may be slightly less cliched, it's boring.  Snake Eyes did it twenty years ago, and it was also a boring reveal.  I don't want to see 9/11 truther-style nonsense borne out in fiction.  I want to see an honest-to-God terrorist.

I also suspect that a Chinese villain was taken off the table very early due to the opening of PRChina to American cinema, which has so far been working out to be an absolute disgrace for Hollywood as an enemy of all mankind has been able to enforce their own ethnocentric censorship on at least one movie so far, and perhaps Iron Man 3 as well.  Okay, so was the Mandarin a racist caricature at his inception in the comics?  Maybe kinda.  More like a commie caricature, if I recall; but I'm sure there was some real ugliness thrown in for good measure, because it was the 1960s and we let our legitimate disgust at the abomination that was and remains the PRC bleed into residual yellow peril racism against the Chinese as a people.  But by the 1980s, the worst aspects had been cleaned up, and indeed in the comics he was a much bigger threat to the PRC than to America, since he was shockingly powerful and he operated in China.  He also awakened fucking dragons this one time, and it was really, really cool.  I think the dragons killed him and went back to space.  Comics can be pretty great.

I'm just saying that in a perfect world we'd have seen a Han Chinese Mandarin, with dragons.  But failing that, a Hui (or Turkmen, so as to accomodate a pretty-definitely-not-Chinese Ben Kingsley) Mandarin with bin Landenesque affectations and a terrorist agenda would have been okay too.  Overly reminiscent of the Joker, perhaps; overly intrusive into a fantasy world given its real life inspiration, perhaps again.  But sometimes it's okay to play things straight.

(And for what it's worth, overcoming space dragons and alien power ring technology, all by himself--kind of fitting in with Tony Stark's "they should have sent a poet to detonate that nuclear bomb" problems, don't you think?  Also fun to watch.  More fun than watching Tony Stark play Team Slayer on Blackout fight on an oil rig, anyway)

But instead, it's just another movie where Guy Pearce was an asshole all along.  Surprise!  I got sick of that last summer.[/spoiler]

I actually had problems with Iron Man 3, but my complaints were quite different and didn't necessarily detract from being a good popcorn flick (it helped I got to see it for free).

[spoiler]I thought the suit was meant to be a reasonably clever piece of design, although conceivably recreatable.  The real key was the light weight and powerful power source embedded in Stark's chest that makes it all possible.  Why did his experimental suit keep losing power despite being connected to Stark (and his fully operational power source) at the time?  Further, what was the bad guy's ultimate goal? Was he just trying to hide why these mysterious "explosions" were occurring?  It seems like a plot to take over the presidency is a bit extreme for just that.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Guy Pearce wanted the Engineers to make him immortal to sell superhumans to the U.S. government.  Something which he almost certainly could have done already, because crock pot bombs with no crock pots?  Not a job for superpeople.  That shit that happened in The Avengers?  Also not really a job for superpeople, but let's pretend since Joss Whedon wants us to that it was, and, yes, I'm sure they'd be in the market to buy a superperson drug even if it has some notable side effects.

For minor bullshit, how about the woman who regrew an arm, but kept her scar? [/spoiler]

Oh, and what they needed to do with the suit was have the interface cause neurological problems so that it couldn't be easily worn.  Iirc, the comics have played with this notion from time to time--it kept the Iron Man suit from being produced by the thousands and the USAF solving every problem on Earth instantly and trivially, and it also served as a nice substitution for Tony's alcoholism after he kicked it (for the first time, of something like eighty total times--comics are also repetitive ) following the "Demon in a Bottle" stuff which IM2 heavily referenced.

[Eddie Teach]

Oh I noticed what Viper was talking about going on during that first season, why I lost interest. The meta-plot was interesting, the subplots not so much.

[Ed Anger]

It's like reading a redacted government document in here now.

[Ideologue]

Ide's taste in movies.

No shit. Oz the Stupid and Boring gets a C? That was one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. Took the entire family - the wife is a Oz fanatic, both kids wanted to see it, and all four of us walked out saying it was stupid and boring.

Even my 9 year old daughter, who thinks EVERYTHING is great, thought it was lame.

Well, I'll tell you something that may enlighten you as to my grades--I had a B average in law school.  So, you know, that's a data point for you.

And I do think you're being overly harsh.  It was watchable.  It wasn't a total failure, like Total Recall or Prometheus.  It was just, you know, not very good.  A C+ is something I'd say is worth watching once, to see if it turns out you like it, but personally I doubt I'll ever feel like watching it again.

[garbon]

Oh I noticed what Viper was talking about going on during that first season, why I lost interest. The meta-plot was interesting, the subplots not so much.

Agreed. They just got bad enough during 2nd season that I stopped watching.

They seriously need to trim back on a lot of the characters as I'm not sure why we are supposed to care about them. Like Declan.

[Ideologue]

It's like reading a redacted government document in here now.

I don't want to get yelled at for spoiling the underwhelming twistiness.

[DontSayBanana]

Gotta say, I'm getting into Defiance.  It's got a definite "planetside Babylon 5" vibe to it.

[viper37]

Oh I noticed what Viper was talking about going on during that first season, why I lost interest. The meta-plot was interesting, the subplots not so much.

yeah, that's my problem.  The subplots seem to take way too much place, it started toward the end of season 1.  I'm sitll hoping it will pick up the pace at some point.

[Kleves]

redacted

[spoiler]You know, I actually didn't mind the "twist" so much - probably because I've not read the comics. It actually made the terrorist PSAs make a bit more sense - they did seem like something designed by a corporate committee ("Can we work Native Americans in somewhere in this terrorist pastiche? Oh, but we still need the Arabs; they play well with key demographics."). My problems was with everything else. Specifically, nothing else made any fucking sense. From the nonsense science to Guy Pierce's motivations, none of it really holds together very well. It's one of those movies which becomes worse the more you think about it.[/spoiler]

I do wonder what the scenes added only for the Chinese release looked like. Maybe Tony pledges allegiance to the PRC and then slaughters some student demonstrators.

[Syt]

I do wonder what the scenes added only for the Chinese release looked like. Maybe Tony pledges allegiance to the PRC and then slaughters some student demonstrators.

WaPo has some more details. It appears he's shilling for a milk-based drink, and a Chinese doctor is imperative to keeping him healthy:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/iron-man-takes-heroic-efforts-to-satisfy-chinas-state-censors/2013/05/06/62d11e08-b62e-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_story.html?hpid=z1

NMA parodies it nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6LU5zI2rZA

[11B4V]

Gotta say, I'm getting into Defiance.  It's got a definite "planetside Babylon 5" vibe to it.

It's not bad.

[Ideologue]

redacted

[spoiler]You know, I actually didn't mind the "twist" so much - probably because I've not read the comics. It actually made the terrorist PSAs make a bit more sense - they did seem like something designed by a corporate committee ("Can we work Native Americans in somewhere in this terrorist pastiche? Oh, but we still need the Arabs; they play well with key demographics."). My problems was with everything else. Specifically, nothing else made any fucking sense. From the nonsense science to Guy Pierce's motivations, none of it really holds together very well. It's one of those movies which becomes worse the more you think about it.[/spoiler]

I do wonder what the scenes added only for the Chinese release looked like. Maybe Tony pledges allegiance to the PRC and then slaughters some student demonstrators.

I'd like to see the OWS movement in Iron Man's universe.  You know Tony Stark makes a quip and then repulsors their faces off.

Actually, that reminds me of one of the things I liked about the movie--Tony is a bloodthirsty motherfucker.  They kill in the movies a lot more than they do in the comics, and that's a good thing, because the appropriate response to supervillains is often, and I want to say usually, to kill them.  (P.S. Batman is a pussy.)