TV/Movies Megathread

[viper37]

Striking that all the actors are known for being conservative.

Sorbo and Jon Voight, sure.

Dennis Quaid considers himself an independant, but he voted for Reagan and considers him his favorite President.

The others, I don't really know.

[Gups]

A football fan's review of three seasons of Ted Lasso

As expected, the actual football is not the primary focus of the series. Which is good. Sudeikis is disarmingly charming, yet a bit of an empty vessel.
While remaining fairly true to football culture, and what I remember from locker rooms, its main weakness is that it gets a bit soppy. Funny? Yes. Definitely. Hilarious at times. Yet two episodes could easily have been left out. Coach Beard after midnight and the Amsterdam one.

Those two are, I believe, some of the best regarded ones of the whole series.

I mean you comment that the show is predictable, and yes in it's very basic structure it is - the fish out of water Ted winds up in fact bringing success to the team when nobody would have expected it.

But those two episodes were where the show reached perhaps the furthest to be weird and unexpected.

Glad you liked it though - there is apparently a Season 4 coming at some point.

I gave up at some point in season 2 where Ted and the owner deliver xmas presents to poor kids. Too cliched and sacchirine. May give it another go.

I definately did like bits of it though, some very good comic acting/timing.

[Josquius]

I've nearly finished the last series of Discovery.
Its sad how much hate the series gets because of teh woke...as it deserves a lot of actual criticism for the many errors it makes.
The first series was great. But subsequently...At best middling.
This last series... Jesus.
So they don't even know what a Breen looks like after a millenium? They never killed one in the dominion war?
The way they casually switch between English and Breen, as if universal translators aren't a thing?
The breen...just being gloopy green guys with nothing much special to them at all?- so many better ways they could have gone with this. I like the fanon idea that was around before hand that they're sort of evil communists and are actually made up of a bunch of species (Xindi and friends?) and they wear these suits so they're all the same. And their language is just encrypted.
How on earth is operating the discovery viable in this era?

A football fan's review of three seasons of Ted Lasso

As expected, the actual football is not the primary focus of the series. Which is good. Sudeikis is disarmingly charming, yet a bit of an empty vessel.
While remaining fairly true to football culture, and what I remember from locker rooms, its main weakness is that it gets a bit soppy. Funny? Yes. Definitely. Hilarious at times. Yet two episodes could easily have been left out. Coach Beard after midnight and the Amsterdam one.

Those two are, I believe, some of the best regarded ones of the whole series.

I mean you comment that the show is predictable, and yes in it's very basic structure it is - the fish out of water Ted winds up in fact bringing success to the team when nobody would have expected it.

But those two episodes were where the show reached perhaps the furthest to be weird and unexpected.

Glad you liked it though - there is apparently a Season 4 coming at some point.

Beard after midnight was indeed naff.
Struck me as one of those episodes you get in series like Dr Who where because of time and budget constraints they don't have the main cast available for the full series so have to do this weird 'light episode' (though I suppose its better than the old standard of a clip show).

The Amsterdam one though yep, it was amazing and absolutely pivotal.

I like Ted Lasso. Its quite a nice 'fairy story' vision of football. They're at the top of the sport but everything is so very low key, personal and amateur (much like its vision of London).
Not sure on series 4 though. They seemed to have everything all wrapped up.
I've heard rumours in the past of a spin off series with the womens football team plan at the end- this would be a better way to go IMO. Bring over some characters as leads and have others just doing cameos.

[The Minsky Moment]

Even in the books Tolkien's world building is very weird. We are told The Shire is not considered important, but it's a huge chunk of real estate with intense farming using what appears to be 18th/19th century tech, and this while most of the rest of the world is various forms of wasteland. One of the few other places that we are told has intense farming is Nurn in Mordor.

And then you have the extremely insular (that's a week's ride away, no one has been there in hundreds of years) and static (steady slow decay in tech over thousands of years) human societies. Tolkien's interests were languages and purity of blood, not other things, and Middle-Earth reflects that.

The Shire is a romanticized rural England on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and so of course is tidy and well-managed.  Rohan is some Indo-European pastiche with pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon influences and so appears less economically developed.  Gondor/France is a somewhat decadent kingdom conserving some of its former greatness; it still has significant resources to draw on, but no one either knows or cares to learn about the details of its economic base.

[Barrister]

A football fan's review of three seasons of Ted Lasso

As expected, the actual football is not the primary focus of the series. Which is good. Sudeikis is disarmingly charming, yet a bit of an empty vessel.
While remaining fairly true to football culture, and what I remember from locker rooms, its main weakness is that it gets a bit soppy. Funny? Yes. Definitely. Hilarious at times. Yet two episodes could easily have been left out. Coach Beard after midnight and the Amsterdam one.

Those two are, I believe, some of the best regarded ones of the whole series.

I mean you comment that the show is predictable, and yes in it's very basic structure it is - the fish out of water Ted winds up in fact bringing success to the team when nobody would have expected it.

But those two episodes were where the show reached perhaps the furthest to be weird and unexpected.

Glad you liked it though - there is apparently a Season 4 coming at some point.

I gave up at some point in season 2 where Ted and the owner deliver xmas presents to poor kids. Too cliched and sacchirine. May give it another go.

I definately did like bits of it though, some very good comic acting/timing.

So interestingly, boththe Christmas episode Gups mentions, and the "Beard after Hours" episode Norgy mentioned, were added near the end of production.  Apple decided to increase the number of episodes ordered from 10 to 12, so they added two relatively stand-alone episodes to season 2.

Complaints that they don't advance the plot are, therefore, quite true.  It's just a chance to noodle around with the characters.

I barely remember the Christmas episode - I think I thought it was fine.  As mentioned I thought the Coach Beard-focused episode was great.  Coach Beard is just such a weird guy, the fact you get to see him as the centre of an episode was fun, even if you didn't really learn much or advance any plotlines.

So Ted Lasso is 100% a very "sweet" show.  That's part of why I liked it.  But I never thought it was saccharine - the sweetness never seemed unearned in terms of plot or character development.  If that distinction makes any sense.

[viper37]

Even in the books Tolkien's world building is very weird. We are told The Shire is not considered important, but it's a huge chunk of real estate with intense farming using what appears to be 18th/19th century tech, and this while most of the rest of the world is various forms of wasteland. One of the few other places that we are told has intense farming is Nurn in Mordor.

And then you have the extremely insular (that's a week's ride away, no one has been there in hundreds of years) and static (steady slow decay in tech over thousands of years) human societies. Tolkien's interests were languages and purity of blood, not other things, and Middle-Earth reflects that.

The Shire is a romanticized rural England on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and so of course is tidy and well-managed.  Rohan is some Indo-European pastiche with pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon influences and so appears less economically developed.  Gondor/France is a somewhat decadent kingdom conserving some of its former greatness; it still has significant resources to draw on, but no one either knows or cares to learn about the details of its economic base.

The Shire is Ireland.

Rohan is the Frankish Kingdom with the heavy cavalry of Martel.


Mordor is obviously the UK with it's industrial revolution and trying to export its economic models through alliances and war when that fails.

[Norgy]

So Ted Lasso is 100% a very "sweet" show.  That's part of why I liked it.  But I never thought it was saccharine - the sweetness never seemed unearned in terms of plot or character development.  If that distinction makes any sense.

I am thinking that in a world of cynicism and a lack of optimism, "Ted Lasso" is a healthy antidote with its sweetness. So while I might seem critical of some aspects of the series, I would say it lifts the mood like a piece of chocolate and a cup of espresso.

My personal theory is that coach Beard's character is sort of created out of a sum of Brian Clough's assistant Peter Taylor and the so-called "boot room" at Liverpool back in the 70s and 80s. It was never about one manager, but the sum of all parts.

[Syt]

Well, here's a Minecraft movie trailer ....

PC Gamer's headline:"The first Minecraft movie trailer is here, and now I'm thinking the Borderlands film might not be the worst thing to happen to cinema in 2024"

[HVC]

Not as bad as I would have assumed. The kiddies will love it.

[Syt]

Yeah, this is clearly "for the kids."

What I detest is how often these kind of movies don't just exist in the game's world but have to bring characters from our world into it. I get that they want a viewpoint character for viewers who are not familiar with the source to cover exposition more easily (or to attempt to recreate the feeling of a player experiencing the world the first time, maybe), but it always takes me out of it. It's what made me groan so much when I saw the trailer for Monster Hunter. I'm not super versed in the Monster Hunter games, but I'm reasonably sure in none of them a USMC squad from Earth are the main characters.

I'd rather take something like the Warcraft movie that just exists in their own world. (Imagine Jack & Tina from Cedar Rapids, Iowa getting transported into Azeroth and being the main viewpoint character instead )

[HVC]

I actually think in cases like this the POV characters are for the adults. A olive branch of apology for a movie they were dragged to because of their kids

[Syt]

Maybe

[Josquius]

I'm not surprised they're making this but had no idea they were.

Honestly, I think this might be quite fine. A kids enter the game treat the whole thing like a big joke approach seems fitting for Minecraft, it being very lacking in lore or story by nature. And you can't go wrong with Jack Black.

Borderlands seemed to be trying to play things straight? (I've seen the trailer and played an hour of the game before realising its naff).

[Josquius]

Saw the first ep of Kaos.
Seems pretty good.
Though zeus was originally human? Never heard that myth before.

[HVC]

Saw the first ep of Kaos.
Seems pretty good.
Though zeus was originally human? Never heard that myth before.

That's just part of the show, not tied to a myth.