Ok, about Scott Pilgrim, I can easily unpack that- with Scoll Pilgrim Edgar was doing something totally new with his skills, he was taking the sum of all he'd done before and turning it up to 11, using it in new ways to produce something different.
In Sean of the Dead all he did was remix a bunch of old Spaced TV episodes into a homage of a Romero film. Spaced was GREAT show, but we'd seen it all before, ON the show. Nothing new, it was basicly the movie version of the show for those that hadn't seen the series.
HotFuzz finally moved away from Spaced. It had a little bit of a satire on American cop movies in there but the majority was another homage/riff, this time it was of British TV shows from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Anyone who grew up with those would recognise all the tropes.
*SPOILER*
Whole villages secretly being part of a cult is as old as old as old and it's been made fun of many times before too from Doctor Who to Randal and Hopkirk, so this was very old ground for a British film, being trodden largely the same exact way. The gun-nut supercop was a nice new touch but not enough.
That's why I feel the way I do. :)
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
What are you watching right now?
Hit man agent 47. It was okay I suppose. The first attempt at a hit man was better though. The thing is, the film makers clearly didn't get the game. They've taken the character and almost made him into a terminator not a highly skilled assassin. Far too much guns blazing and hand to hand and not enough being stealthy and clever.
ozoneocean wrote:
Ok, about Scott Pilgrim, I can easily unpack that- with Scoll Pilgrim
Edgar was doing something totally new with his skills, he was taking the
sum of all he'd done before and turning it up to 11, using it in new
ways to produce something different.
I can see your point there. While I feel that Shaun and Fuzz were incredible mixtures of genres executed with mastery, Scott Pilgrim was something quite different and I was surprised it wasn't a bigger success (though it's hopefully getting its due as time goes by!)
Just watched Safety Not Guaranteed. It was in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn't sleep and it had a major effect on me in those emotional hours. Good stuff!
Funny that they reference Star Wars several times in that flick, and the director is now in line to direct the ninth Star Wars movie in a few years. Neat. Like seeing the Batman symbol in Christopher Nolan's first film, "Following".
Just been made to sit through a fair chunk of meet the Spartans.
I know it was going to be bad. In fact I knew it was going to be shockingly bad. I just didn't realise the extant of its awfulness. Spare yourselves and never watch any of it. It's nearly as bad as the film Adam Sandler did with Paul Thomas Anderson, punch drunk love. Only better as it is very occasionally amusing.
What am I watching? Right now?
At this moment, I am watching TLC's Married By Mom and Dad because I am curious to see how letting parents make that really important life decision would play out in the Western world. I trust and love my parents very much, but I do not know if I could trust them with selecting my future husband.
Arranged marriages would make life so much easier.
At the moment I've just stared watching Daphne Of The Brilliant Blue.
I picked it because of the title. It's an anime… I like for a couple of reasons: even though it's not high concept and the animation style is certaly not top notch the plot intrigues me and the costumes effing ROCK!
Two of the female detective characters basically wear a skimpy cup bikini, thigh highs and a C-string and nothing else when on a job. A C-string! That means to all intents and purposes they're basically bottomless. Yeah.
Aaaanyway, the set up is there are a bunch of women running an od-job detective agency that fix issues for people, big and small from capturing criminals to finding lost cats and they were sexy clothes doing it- so far so ho-um whatever, right?
Well what intrigued me was that it didn't start out focussing on the kick arse skimpy ladies, rather the entire focus was on this 15year old girl who just completed school and was looking for a job so she could keep her house. She was going to get one with this high profile marine agencey and it looked like a certainty but it didn't go through. She had to look for another job all over the city, couldn't find one and got evicted. She couldn't find another place to stay even though she ended up on the more dangerous, down trodden side of the tracks and so she ended up on the street.
That was what the first two episodes were about! Eventually she gets mixed up with those detective ladies, but as a victim/casualty who they take cruel advantage of instead of helping. But she proves herself self sufficiant and so they decide to give her an aprentace like position and living space.
So this setup has made it feel a lot more real than the usual shitty anime about skimpy kickarse detective women.
I just watched BIG again, after all these years- because it was a free purchase on Google Play, so I watched it on my Chromecast on the big screen.
It was so magical and cool when I was little, total awesome wish fulfilment, but OH SO unremittingly creepy now. SO, so creepy…
As an adult watching this it was so cringeworthy. Skinscrawlingly weird and wrong.
No wonder we all grow up with such twisted expectations.
Re-watched another classic last night: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
-I love that my phone remembers the spelling of that name because I never can.
I loved this film from the trailer alone. The film was better than I ever hoped when I actually saw it… And when I come back to it again I just see more stuff to love about it.
With The Life Aquatic I can truthfully say that it makes me laugh AND cry. Some well handled pathos in there, lots of jokes, lots of stuff that would have been wish fulfillment for me when I was a little kid- all the ship travel and oceanographic stuff.
It's a smart, fun, sentimental film with a lot of heart, about the love of a father and being a father to someone. And who wouldn't want Bill Murray as their dad?
It was the first Wes Anderson movie I ever saw. I've since seen others by him and I really like them all, but The Life Aquatic is still my fave.
Last weekend I re-watched Fury Road four times on the biggest screen in the house.
Also my son has recently become obsessed with Doctor Who, so that same weekend we watched the 9th doctor's season. This weekend we've been pecking away at the 10th doctor.
Other noteworthy binging this month:
F is for Family is a good show. If you grew up in the 70 it's a great show.
I finally got through the final season of Justified that had been on my dvr for almost nine months.
I watched season three of House of Cards in preparation for season four.
I re-watched The Guild…
Master of none is really good, up to the last minute where I found myself saying "Dev, you idiot!" (I won't spoil why. Also, some would say he did the right thing.)
As for shows on actual channels, I've been keeping up with Supergirl, Agents of Shield, and Face Off just started back up.
Stuff I'm waiting for… Legends of Tomorrow, House of Cards 4, Dare Devil 2, Walking Dead 6.2, Game of Thrones 6, Better Call Saul 2, Agent Carter 2.
I just hope the rest if the season of the walking dead is better than what we have had so far. It hasn't really worked for me this season, some good elements but some really bad pacing and the whole Glenn thing… guh! It's a shame as I've always really liked the show up until now.
Oh, man, you're in for a treat, GJ. I thought DS9 really kicked into gear toward the end of season 3. Some really extraordinary episodes for the time…and then season 4-6 are some of the best TV ever!
Oh, wait…you said REwatching. Just realized. I was gonna say I envy you getting to watch those seasons for the first time.
But I can rewatch, too! So I'll skip the envy this time!
I'm psyched to see the new X-Files and check in with Mulder and Scully after so long! Looks like Darin Morgan wrote one of the new eps; he did those great semi-comedic stories in the old series. I think his episode this time around is the one that features Rhys Darby, who is absolutely hysterical on Flight of the Conchords.
Really? I preferred the old style DS9. When I was whatching that I just kept thinking "when are they going to reslove that crap like that usually always do? Why are the Klingons enemies again??? Dammit!"
It was frustrating for me.
I finshed Daphne in the Brillaint Blue and it was just as good as it promised to be. The overarching story had some holes, like they usually do in anime, but the character dynamic was unusual and really fun to watch! It also had some reasonably clever Scifi elements in there in the context of the future world it was set in- most of the earth's surface is submerged and people live on scattered islands, they get from city to city using Ekronoplanes- huge planes that use the ground effect force to fly.
Anyway, it was good.
I'm now watching Btoom and Good Luck Girl. Btoom is about a bunch of people dropped off on an island and forced to fight to the death to get the chance be allowed to leave- using bombs. It's farely realistic, very grim. It's reasonably well done, but people's personalities tend too much toward "evil", as always happens in these Lord of the Flie scenarios… Whihc is a little silly, but it's a trope and it makes a good story, even if it spoils the realisim.
Good Luck Girl is a welcome funny parody anime about a bitchy big boobed girl who has all the luck and hapiness and even sucks it out of people around her, and a poverty god sent to make her normal. It's a hell of a lot of fun and just gets better and better. It's very self aware and constantly breaks the 4th wall.
Hmm…interesting! Well, I thought the depth of character, and the humor really found its groove shortly before Season 4. Subjects like sex, spirituality, and moral uncertainty were explored more authentically than Trek ever had before (or since).
I loved the serialized storytelling, which was apparently difficult to fight for at the time. Despite the humor, the thing had more darkness to it than the other Treks, but was still ultimately positive and…I guess the most "human"?
p.s. Season Four also features the episode "The Visitor", which is just an extraordinary standalone story. If you can get through that one without welling up, you may need to check your pulse! :D
I watched the visitor the other night, a great episode, I'd never seen that one before.
I took a break from DS9 today and have had the x-files on, I'm working my way through the whole series… but still on series one. I've seen all of season one before, and probably all of 2 and I think 3. I think it was around season 4 or 5 that I started loosing track of it. certainly I've not seen any of the last few seasons.
I watched the first episode pf season 2 of agent Carter. Very good stuff, although noticably more humourous than the first series. A very underrated show.
Chappie. It had a lot of negative press when it came out but I really liked it. I wonder if the accents put people off? To me that's part of what I liked about it. It didn't feel like an American or English film, it had a definite cultural identity, or rather a mishmash of them. The action was really well directed, which makes it a shame Neil Blomkamps alien 5 has been put on the back burner and may not happen.
My run through of the x-files continues. I'm now about halfway through season 3. It's funny that I've seen less of the season than I had previously thought. Then again around the time it was showing originally I was discovering night clubs and binge drinking.
One thing I've noticed watching it is how well it's aged, sure consumer tech has come a long way since then but it still holds ito own against more modern shows.
I'm all about the binge watching, so I don't generally catch what's current, with an exception for Lucifer (good casting with the lead and fantastic music), which just started here in the States.
In the past few weeks I've finished up:
Mr. Robot (loved it)
Galavant (an adorable MUSICAL)
Spiral (gritty French police/detectives, thank heavens for subtitles. For whatever reason, I imagine Genejoke could get into this. Certainly Bravo, with his savoir faire et al)
Mozart in the Jungle (via Amazon video, re trials and tribs of NYC orchestra)
Currently watching Longmire (a sheriff in current day Wyoming).
Spiral and Longmire are off of Netflix, which always has something good: The Fall (Gillian Anderson with a convincing British accent is after a serial killer in Northern Ireland); of course House of Cards (Kevin Spacey); and funny/sweet Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Out of all those I only know House Of Cards, but I've only seen the British version.
I just watched The Brothers Grimm.
So typically Gillaim in a lot of ways- Jonathan Pryce, stuff happening during the reign of Napoleon, magical reality, children being weird, blood and guts and Bones, bugs… The CGI wasn't quite up to scratch but the conflation of all the fairytails was very clever- the wicked queen was the snow queen, Rapunzel, the wicked stepmother, and the evil witch in the gingerbread house… As well as the bad fairy godmother too I suppose.
Loved the outfits and uniforms. The pace was pretty clunky though.
I finished the Anime Snow White with Red Hair.
This was so weird. I THINK it was aimed at girls. The lead character, chihiro or something, falls in love with a prince but also wants to be independent and have her own job and status. It was weird because although it kept setting up big dramatic things they never went anywhere and everything stayed really small scale, day to day and peaceful.
- which was JUST what I was after actually. I'm SO tired of anime where they ramp up the drama, add melodrama for spice, and then raise the stakes so high that you couldn't care less anymore.
The world's going to end if the hero doesn't kiss his sweetheart and she doesn't remember when he pledged marriage to her when they were both just 3 years old playing in a sandbox? Well then maybe it SHOULD if that's what it all comes down to. A world like that isn't worth living in.
Bates Motel, season three is on Netflix. It had been a year since I'd seen season 2, so I'd forgotten a lot of details.
This series is fantastic - I'd never have thought a prequel series about Psycho would have worked, let alone worked so damn well.
IMO, it's the best of the movies-turned-series genre, (though I like FARGO a lot, too), and one of the best prequels I can think of offhand.
It doesn't seem to suffer from the prequel problem of having no tension/anticipation.
Maybe I'll write something about that on The Duck this week.
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