TV/Movies Megathread

[Sophie Scholl]

I just saw a commercial on Sundance for a new reality show, "Push Girls".  4 chicks.  In wheelchairs.

Now that shit is hilarious. 4 chicks. In wheelchairs.

I honestly believe we're reaching the end of possibilities for reality show themes.  4 chicks. In wheelchairs. 

Reminds me of a terrible story about "Meals on Wheels".

[Josephus]

I caught Push Girls once when flipping channels. A couple them pretty hot.

[Admiral Yi]

I caught Push Girls once when flipping channels. A couple them pretty hot.

Hardbodies with beat up mugs.

[garbon]

I love when it is clear on wiki who wrote the article.

Sundance Channel will premiere season two of their groundbreaking docu-series with ten highly-anticipated new episodes

[Ed Anger]

I caught Push Girls once when flipping channels. A couple them pretty hot.

You can have them

[Razgovory]

I caught Push Girls once when flipping channels. A couple them pretty hot.

Hardbodies with beat up mugs.

Well how do you think they ended up in wheel chairs.

[11B4V]

The Hunt – The CW   

The young adult novel sensation has been rocking multiplexes around the world for years now and none have had more impact than the amazing The Hunger Games stories – now The CW is ready to bring that tale to life on televisions everywhere with the new reality series The Hunt. Submissions for contestants for this epic reality game show are being accepted now from people from all ages and from every corner of the country. This is your chance to live out your Hunger Games dreams for real and for real prizes in front of millions and millions of viewers.

[CountDeMoney]

The Hunt – The CW   

The young adult novel sensation has been rocking multiplexes around the world for years now and none have had more impact than the amazing The Hunger Games stories – now The CW is ready to bring that tale to life on televisions everywhere with the new reality series The Hunt. Submissions for contestants for this epic reality game show are being accepted now from people from all ages and from every corner of the country. This is your chance to live out your Hunger Games dreams for real and for real prizes in front of millions and millions of viewers.

I can't wait to debut my young adult novel sensation as well, Hot Wheels Tracks. 

It will be the powerful chronicles of a young girl's first awakenings of her womanhood, torn between two suitors who vie for her heart--a humble yet exotic foreigner with nothing to offer but organically grown beets, counterfeit copies of Microsoft Office 2010 and his unselfish love; the other, a wealthy Ohioan landowner: married, mysterious and magnetic...with a terrible Dutch Oven secret that may be the undoing of them all.

[CountDeMoney]

Aww, Jean Stapleton died.  90 years old.

[Kleves]

The Hunt – The CW   

You know, I might watch that if they actually killed each other. 

[Ed Anger]

The Hunt – The CW   

The young adult novel sensation has been rocking multiplexes around the world for years now and none have had more impact than the amazing The Hunger Games stories – now The CW is ready to bring that tale to life on televisions everywhere with the new reality series The Hunt. Submissions for contestants for this epic reality game show are being accepted now from people from all ages and from every corner of the country. This is your chance to live out your Hunger Games dreams for real and for real prizes in front of millions and millions of viewers.

I can't wait to debut my young adult novel sensation as well, Hot Wheels Tracks. 

It will be the powerful chronicles of a young girl's first awakenings of her womanhood, torn between two suitors who vie for her heart--a humble yet exotic foreigner with nothing to offer but organically grown beets, counterfeit copies of Microsoft Office 2010 and his unselfish love; the other, a wealthy Ohioan landowner: married, mysterious and magnetic...with a terrible Dutch Oven secret that may be the undoing of them all.

[Ideologue]

After Earth (2013)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Written by: Gary Whitta, M. Night Shyamalan, Will Smith
With: Will Smith (Cypher Raige), Jaden Smith (Kitai Raige), Gwaihir the Windlord (himself)

Welcome to the Wicker Future.  Take a knee.

A thousand years ago, the human race had to evacuate an Earth made increasingly uninhabitable by global warming or possibly anthropogenic vulcanism.  The United Rangers were organized by the governments of the world to conduct the evacuation.  Wagon training to the stars, humanity found another planet named New New Mexico.  There, we built tents and wove furniture such as even God has never seen, and put electronics in them.  Unfortunately, the new planet was already claimed by its current inhabitants, whom we drove off or killed, because human nature.  Upon fleeing, the natives released their arsenal of CGI, the Ursas, a species of monster they had (poorly) designed specifically to wipe out human life.  The Ursas are blind, but can smell fear.  However, Ranger officer Cypher Raige has developed an effective countermeasure to the depredations of the Ursas: the technique of "Ghosting," a martial discipline which grants its adherents the capability to experience no fear, rendering the Ursas truly blind, so a man could walk right up to them and stab them with whatever tool on his Swiss Army nanotechnology seems most handy at the time.  In the process, he became legendary.

Now, personally, I'd have suggested the deployment of security forces with machine guns, grenades, land mines, and Hellfire-equipped drones, but those technologies, as their manufacture does not rely upon the skillful artisans of the spaceship loom, appear to have fallen into disfavor, if not lost entirely, along with Earth, the color green, and bound books, such as Moby Dick (featured in the film, to no cognizable artistic effect) and On the Origin of Species (not featured in the film at all, even by inference).

Cypher has a son named Kitai, who fails to make the cut to join his father's organization, and the central arc of the film is his development from disappointing crybaby to murderous robot.  This  regurgitation of the hero's journey is brought to us courtesy of a father-son bonding trip gone horribly awry when their spaceship is downed by asteroids and they make their emergency landing on (wouldn't you know it?) Earth.  All the bit players die (conveniently), an Ursa that was being transported for Ghost training is released (oops!), Cypher's legs are broken (ouch!), and Kitai must undertake a dangerous hike in order to communicate with his User--um, activate a distress beacon.

Despite what we're constantly told during the first thirty minutes and Cypher's invocation of Screenwriter's Evolution, Earth is basically 100% fine, except 1)in the thousand years since exodus some species have rebounded in numbers, found new geographic ranges, or gotten somewhat larger and 2)the atmosphere has changed to become entirely deadly to humans.

Those who have received even the most perfunctory education will find those two items mutually contradictory and their placement side by side may make you, like me, feel extremely annoyed.

That's a science nitpick that most people wouldn't care about, and I wouldn't care about it either, except that After Earth is not generous when doling out things I might care about otherwise.  The ridiculous space accent employed by the Raiges in their dialogue stops being particularly amusing rather quickly, and after a fashion you can unironically enjoy their interactions when they are playing to their characters' ideals as stoic, understated warrior and wannabe, respectively.  Sometimes they are even legitimately funny.  Too bad there's parts in the script where the younger Smith has to actually act; these never stop being funny, legitimately or no.

Which is not to say Jaden Smith failed to make me feel any sympathy for him.  Just not for his character.  Kitai Raige may have a distant and stern dad, but Cypher has a certain objectivity which you can admire.  Early on, when Kitai gives Cypher the bad news that he was denied admission into the Rangers, he admits, "You were too young.  You weren't ready."

Will Smith has never and clearly will never say the same thing to his children, even though the past few years have taught us that it's something he should be saying all the time.  Although he has a certain degree of heritable charm, as an action hero or as a dramatic actor, Jaden has less range than his mood-ring survival suit, and since he carries this sparsely-populated and ponderous film almost entirely on his shoulders, it was inevitable that he'd buckle beneath the weight.  After Earth gives the "story by" credit to the elder Smith: working through issues with fiction is a healthy thing, but having someone film it and try to sell it to the world, might be less so.

I'll grant that Jaden did fully convince me that he is NOT A COWARD (repeat as needed).  Someone who has an appreciation of fear would be unlikely to take on this demanding role with basically no experience and marginal evident talent.  Unfortunately, what this movie about overcoming fear proves is that discretion is indeed the better part of valor.

But you know?  For all the negative aspects of it, of which there are many, it's M. Night Shyamalan's  best directorial effort since Unbreakable.  High praise, I know.  But you could do worse than After Earth, and Shyamalan certainly has.  The man can still shoot shit pretty well.

It's funny, though, because this is a movie that could've used a twist.  While watching After Earth, I wrote a much better movie in my head involving the Ursas as changelings or Terminator-like infiltrators, and it turned out Kitai was the alien predator, having been replaced and his personality assimilated (not much to assimulate there), after the crash.  OK, maybe not "better" in the sense of "more good," but certainly "better" in the sense of "more anything."  Because After Earth only has about an hour's worth of material, but is an hour forty long.

Overall, I can't say it's truly very bad.  I even appreciated its old-school B-science fiction tone, with its inherent anti-human bias.  I can't shake the feeling that I'd appreciate this movie a lot more if it'd been done in black and white, in the 1950s, by Roger Corman.  And yet, even discounting nostalgia, Teenage Caveman is still the superior film about what may happen once our civilization on this planet is gone.  (And Teenage Caveman does have a twist.  A decent one.  Which, regret to inform you, I just spoiled.  I'm sure you're broken up.)

After Earth appeared faintly dull even from the trailers, was directed by a pariah of American cinema, and received dreadful reviews, so I was surprised to walk into such a large crowd (in fact, I vocalized my surprise and annoyance with a fully audible religious expletive).  I expected maybe five or six people at my matinee showing, but there was a packed house.  The audience seemed, unaccountably, to respond to the movie, especially the cameo appearance by the Lord of the Eagles.  I didn't hear anyone laughing at the parts I did, like the cameo appearance by the Lord of the Eagles.  (I'm really only barely kidding.)

As I left, I could hear thrilled whispers quoting from the film, adding to the culture's fund of instantly recognizable lines: "Graviton buildup could be a precursor to mass expansion."  That's a useful advice for almost any situation.  But if you're going to watch a movie that takes place on the cursed Earth, I think Oblivion is still out.

C

[Ideologue]

After Earth is currently sitting at 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

how much of that is sheer Shyamalan hate by the critics?

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/the-awful-i-after-earth-i/276417/

On the upside, this may be the first terrible movie by M. Night Shyamalan that's not primarily his fault.

 

  I honestly didn't read Orr's review first.

Anyway, the takeaway is true.  Shyamalan's direction (well, more to the point, frequent Cronenberg collaborator Peter Suschitzky's cinematography) is probably the only truly enjoyable thing about the movie.

[Kleves]

You're a braver man than I, Ide (or, you know, you have a higher tolerance for crap). I wrote off After Earth after hearing it was directed by Shyamalan (and a hundred-million dollar vanity project for Smith's kid), but even if I hadn't, the trailer would have done it for me. "We're on Earth, upon which everything has evolved to kill humans, a species which has not existed on the planet for a thousand years."

[Ideologue]

You're a braver man than I, Ide (or, you know, you have a higher tolerance for crap). I wrote off After Earth after hearing it was directed by Shyamalan (and a hundred-million dollar vanity project for Smith's kid), but even if I hadn't, the trailer would have done it for me. "We're on Earth, upon which everything has evolved to kill humans, a species which has not existed on the planet for a thousand years."

The funny thing is, while they say a lot about evolution (that is wrong), the visual effects artists aren't very concerned with it.  There are baboons, mountain lions, bison, and humpback whales, which are all more or less the same as they are presently.  The only presumably evolved predators are that dumb flying cobra, and this ridiculous bird.  The flying cobra is true neutral and the bird is actually helpful to humans in one of the movie's goofiest scenes.  What I wish is that they'd gone for it, and had this be Earth a million or ten million or [pick an arbitrarily high number] years later, with radically changed flora and fauna.  This of course is completely doable if you get rid of FTL travel, which is a meaningless conceit here.  I actually expected some creatures, but the dearth of imagination at work meant that I got big cats.

Off the top of my head, how about giant carnivorous plants, or house cats... that hunt in packs?

Note that I gave it a C before Atlantic Orr reminded me that there's a Emmerichian turn where a temperate rain forest freezes pretty suddenly.  I guess baboons, mountain lions, and bison spent the last thousand years evolving to not freeze, as well as evolving mechanisms to breathe poison and/or less oxygen despite being huge, fast, and warm-blooded.  That's science, kids!

It's a very low C.  Star Trek Into Darkness is marginally better, but AE is less anger-inducing.  AE is significantly better than, say, Prometheus.  WAY better than The Hunger Games or Total Recall.