So glad you like it man!
A 3rd of the way through the plot went in a direction I found annoying, but it comes good in the end!
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
What are you watching right now?
Finished daredevil season 2. Fantastic stuff.
Next up? Well this week's arrow was weak but did seem to end the awful oliver/felicity relationship and made digs at celebrity couples being named by merging their names. Despite that it was still a weak episode.
Grimm is… well it's grimm. The writers know how absurd and convoluted the plots and character relationships are andnit hey play on it.
Watched Electric Boogaloo, the documentary about Cannon Films, earlier tonight and it was fantastic. If you grew up in the 80's, you'll no doubt be familiar with a good volume of their catalogue: Delta Force, Cobra, Lifeforce, Bloodsport, the later (more insane) Death Wish installments. Basically, if it was a movie that leaned hard on White Guy Karate as its gimmick, they probably put it out. They also released Superman IV, and Masters of the Universe - both of which could have been huge moneymakers were it not for the fact that the company was run by lunatics. Highly recommended. It's available to watch on Netflix.
Sway wrote:I watched that! Fun trip down memory lane. I remember really liking Delta Force back in the day.
Watched Electric Boogaloo, the documentary about Cannon Films, earlier tonight and it was fantastic. If you grew up in the 80's, you'll no doubt be familiar with a good volume of their catalogue: Delta Force, Cobra, Lifeforce, Bloodsport, the later (more insane) Death Wish installments. Basically, if it was a movie that leaned hard on White Guy Karate as its gimmick, they probably put it out. They also released Superman IV, and Masters of the Universe - both of which could have been huge moneymakers were it not for the fact that the company was run by lunatics. Highly recommended. It's available to watch on Netflix.
I saw Glengarry Glenross last night, on the recommendation of Banes.
The acting was top notch, Jonathan Price was wasted though, he's as great an actor as the rest but had nothing to do.
The story was very intelligent as well as entertaining, but I don't think it was translated well to film. It still seemed too much like a play, especially with the dialogue: it was in that extremely repetitive, over-stylised form that's typical of mid to late 20th Century plays, which is FINE for a play but here in this film it's upping the realism level, it's not on a stage, the sets are way better, the atmosphere, sound FX, lighting, SFX like rain etc, people driving in cars, all make it more real but the stylised dialogue takes you back out of that.
That's a significant criticism but it was still a very good film.
Being a play gave it a lot of good points too: I liked how tight it was, the story was very compact and neat with no blubber or waste. There was a very limited bunch of locations used. The whole story took place over about 24 hours so that was nice and compact too. Then there's the limited cast of characters so you get to know everyone somewhat, even the minor guys like Jonathan Price and Alec Baldwin- but you don't get their whole life stories either, you get just enough hints through dialogue with other characters that it rounds out who they are.
The clever twist of the story and the downfall of Jack Lemon's character was also very neat and impressively done. No melodrama, just the beautiful dawning realisation of how far he's fallen.
A good story about unwinnable situations and young bucks taking over from the old guard.
Anime: Grimjar of Fantasy and Ash
This is about a bunch of kids who wake up in a fantasy land with no memory and have to get by in the usual Dungeons and Dragons inspired dungeon crawling way that you do in computer RPGs.
Except for them this RPG is solid reality.
There are a LOT of shows in that genre but where this is different is that no one thinks they're in a game or even knows what a game is. Indeed, I'm up to episode 8 and nowhere in the show has it been said that it's a game world, even though that's what all the interactions and mechanics are based on.
The other thing that mightily sets this apart, and I even find very inspiring, is the treatment of the grunt enemies they fight- the low level goblinsL
So normally in any game it's just unsaid that you go and kill the low level grunts to level up. They're just walking XP, nothing more. Even in fiction they're simply low-level evil, venal creatures who the good guys do the world a favour by getting rid of.
However, in Grimjar, when our heroes go on a goblin hunt they typically find the goblins kicking back and fishing, or minding their own business and eating by a warm fire. They attack totally unprovoked and he poor creatures scream in surprise and terror and then fights back as hard as it possibly can ro try and stay alive while screaming for help the whole time.
And when the kids kill they don't do it with balletic skill, no, they do it like murderers, stabbing at random while the thing bleeds and struggles to get away, fighting on.
It's horrific to watch the fight scenes, not heroic or glorious. And it that it does SO well!
They manage to humanise these non-speaking monsters using only their actions, without complex backstories or stupid lines like "I'm gonna retire tomorrow and go camping with ma' wife…" or "Tell my wife I… love… her… ahh…."
In that it's a lesson to us all!
ozoneocean writ:
I saw Glengarry Glenross last night…
Glad you saw it. Those are some lucid, valid points you make. I don't know why, but I feel like that's a movie everyone should see. Even if you don't like it, you should see it.
it's just so…I don't know…depressing. haha!
But for the Alec Baldwin scene alone, it's worth it. Such a cultural touchstone, that scene. Although it's the painful sequence of Jack Lemmon desperately trying to sell in a customer's living room that always comes to my mind. And Jack Lemmon in that whole movie. Amazing.
When he says to Kevin Spacey, "You ARE a shithead, Williamson…", it always busts me up.
Just saw "Hush" on Netflix. Great movie!! Wow! If you like the masked killer outside the house type of thing, that is.
Funny, I had this idea about a woman in an isolated house, and isolated life, being stalked by a masked killer. Didn't get too far with it, but HUSH is better than anything I'd have come up with. Making the main character deaf was genius! Quite scary, and a fantastic performance.
Every time I read a review of a home invasion movie, the critic (or blogger) talks about how overdone that genre is. I'm kind of a horror fan, but I haven't seen all that many! I liked "You're Next" and "The Strangers" a lot, but I don't know many others. Of course, that genre is an offshoot of slashers like "Halloween", one of my faves.
When I hear of a "masked invader" flick it's ALWAYS worth a look to me! "Funny Games" was one I just couldn't take. Didn't make it twenty minutes. Maybe because they didn't wear masks?
I saw The Fore Awakened last night, rented in HD off of Google Play. I had to do some jigging to watch it IN HD though on my big old comp with to good speaker system.
You CAN'T play it in HD in Chrome, you need to get the Google movies desktop app instead.
OK, the movie…
Quick review:
It was fun, had some great scenes in there, didn't do anything too annoying, and it looked fantastic. The call-backs to the first film were too obvious, the CG was often only console quality and dialogue was too childish in parts. Mainly It was a worthy addition to the franchise and I am too old for Star Wars now.
Long review and spoilers:
My main lasting impression of the film for me was that it felt small, like a very small group of actors running around green screens all days and everything is filled in digitally. It never really rose up to be a BIG enough, awesome expanse of a movie like it needed to be- none of the bigger places were made real enough for me to see them as big places (Like Jaku and he Death Star planet), it all could have been done as a play or a weekly TV show in a studio with a live audience and they just cut to digital pre-recorded clips when they need to and show them on big screens.
It seemed like a low budget affair. They really skimped badly on the CG, they limited the amount of actors and extras, most of the sets were mostly CG… Maybe all the budget went to getting Ford back in there? I seriously reckon it did.
Things it did right were the practical effects and the CG enhancements of practical effects and most CG robots and ships were done ok, except notably the Millenium Falcon which seemed like they used the old Jurassic Park crap CG on that. The actors they chose were all great and the characters they played fit well in the world. There were good battle scenes, especially with the star fighters, and the way they handled NOT making Rey a damsel in distress with Fin as her saviour was done well too. The overall story was just the first film re-done but that was deliberate and it worked ok.
Unfortunately what they didn't learn from the prequels is that space is bloody HUGE and you need to give some sense of that. Instead they had all action taking place as if everywhere was just across the road - individual people amongst the billions of others separated by billions of miles of space etc. Travel takes zero time and communication is instantaneous: While Leia and the staff are back at the rebel base they know what's happening in REAL time during the battle on the death star planet!
That was amazingly idiotic… You have scenes of general staff following battles in the first and third films, but there it was set up that way: They're on board battlefleet flagships that are supporting the battlesquadrons they they've travelled there with. In THIS film all the X-wings just blast off from a planet on one side of the galaxy to fight on a planet on the other side of the galaxy in only a few minutes and leia and the gang just lounge around watching everything as it happens in the control room.
So the internal logic of the world is very thin: space means nothing. You may as well not bother with big spaceships, all you need is little fighters.
Also the blast from the deatstar planet moves visibly slowly, just creeping across the sky, and yet it's apparently crossing the vastness of space…
I could go on and on (there's WAY more), suffice to say the internal logic of the film is closer to the shit in the prequels the the simple but sensible stuff in the original trilogy. You CAN put it out of your mind and enjoy the film, but it really cements Star wars as being something for kids. Not much thought has gone into the world as shown in the film (even in terms of a fantasy world and not Scifi), even though the story was broadly good and the film was entertaining.
Just about caught up with Hell On Wheels, the story of the trials, tribulations (and Hell) of building the transcontinental railroad. Excellent characters, lots of action – I'm going to miss this one when it's over.
And then Sunday nights it's Game Of Thrones and Penny Dreadful (which may drop off the list–the acting is still solid, but the story doesn't know what it wants to do)
The second half of the Attack on Titan live action movie, Attack on Titian: the end of the world. I saw it dubbed in Russian with bad English subtitles.
The digital effects are impressive especially if you have seen the anime. yes, they did manage to do the titans live action. But there is a whole lot of steam probably to hide the seams. And yes, the crazy glasses wearing lady scientist is well represented. I mean the lady twerks an RPG-7, how crazy cool is that?
I can only recommend it if you want to know what the story is while waiting for season two of the anime to ever appear.
And then there is Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova DC the movie. It summarizes the series in the first 45 minutes. Really its only a highlight reel. But in the second half we get new story and some new ships (Fletcher class destroyer Natori light cruisers and fast battleship Hiei). I peaked at the next movie Cadenza and we get the Yamato superbattleships. I mean it's a Japanese anime you gotta have the Yamato class. I have to say models of these ships would be stunning as they're not your normal grey. Pink, purple, sky blue… really would look great on the shelf. And the girls are cute too. Shazam!
That Blue Steel thing sounds good!
I just finished a couple of series. One was "Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun" - or "Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun"
I liked it because it totally mixed up all the normal anime character roles.
It's about a girl who has a mega crush on this boy in her class: a big tall guy who's stoic and looks like an athlete. She tries to ask him out but gets too nervous and tells him she's his biggest fan instead, so he gives her an autograph… which she has no idea what to do with.
It turns out that he writes and illustrates a girl's romance manga and he though she was a fan of that. She ends up helping him with it and meets the rest of his helpers along the way (background artist, effects artist etc), as well as the models he bases his characters on- a very vain but painfully self concious boy is the model for the heroine, a handsome girl who plays heroic men in the school dramas and who all the girls fawn over becomes a model for a male charter in his manga… We learn that he identifies more with his main female character than his male one etc.
In the story there are a lot of boyish, confident girls and guys who are self concious or whatever… It's just nice to see the traits being mixed up a bit and in that way it arrives at a sort of almost realism: people are weird and don't always conform to stereotypes, or they try to but just don't fit them. And it also lends a more realistic view to the creation of a comic, in that you identify strongly with your characters, have trouble drawing certain things and scenes, need references, editing oversight, have trouble coming up with plots or ways to get your characters from here to there and so on.
It's a silly, light comedy, but had enough little bits of "meat" to be interesting.
I am into the last season of ST: DS 9 and the whole war thing gave the writersame the chance to drag out every war story trope ever. Somehow having a planetary siege feature characters and dialogue out of Platoon or Hamburger Hill just seems so anachronistic. Sure Klingons would spout things like a barbarian warrior or samurai, but the Federation troops sounding like Vietnam grunts or a World War II GI ? One would also think that Star Fleet would have dedicated ground pounders. Most fans realized this and came up with the Federation Marines. The shows always refused. The security guys are supposed to do that. Right that grey jumpsuit is perfect for ground combat. A Klingon is more sensibly dressed for ground pounding with the leather armor and spiked boots.
And the anime Gate is turning out to be better and better with every episode. The main character is a slacker Otaku who is an expert special forces who doesn't apply himself outside of Fandom but is an excellent soldier. There is a great bit with the JSDF air mobile troops consciously acting out Apocalypse Now, just like soldiers would. Great stuff. Really worth watching. Great meta stuff but the characters are believable genre savvy types like a lot of the guys I served with.
Call Me Tom wrote:I have two full collections of the whole series on DVD, that's how much I LOVED it. 3rd series is AMAZING, 2nd series is gold and shit mixed together, 1st series is weird and cool, last series is strictly for the fans and just gloriously silly.
I've been rewatching Lexx… I think I now like the bits I didn't when I was a teenager and hate the parts I use to like.
bravo1102 wrote:I read a Gizmodo article the other day where they said: "Here's a bunch of war books that are essential reading for people writing military SciFi"
Somehow having a planetary siege feature characters and dialogue out of Platoon or Hamburger Hill just seems so anachronistic.
The trouble was that apart from a measly 2 exceptions EVERY single one was about US conflicts from a US only perspective.
And even the exceptions were lame:
One was about Russian female fighterpilots during WW2- so it was a situation hat was an exception and only bought up because it was novel.
The other was about women fighting on the side of the North Vietnamese army- so all you get there is the "enemy" perspective of another typical US conflict.
It's no wonder that every single America military space show is ALWAYS based on the same few American wars: Revolutionary war, Civil War, WW2, Korea, Vietnam. With a delicate sprinkle of WW1, Bosnia, and Iraq 1 and 2.
Those guys need to start reading about non-US wars, or about parts of those wars that didn't involve the US.
———————-
Have you seen "Upotte!!"?
It's a very freaky anime. Very freaky! I still haven't fully wrapped my mind around it.
A bunch of Middle school girls are actually guns… They are named after various assault rifles, which they train to use and compete with, but they actually ARE guns as well… in some way.
Their sisters in high school are battle rifles, and their sisters in grade school are sub machine guns,
They can never move up a grade because the type of gun they are will always be in that grade…
Some of the girls wear thongs because the gun they are has a skeleton stock. The AuStyre rifle girl has an optional longer barrel, which means she suddenly gets longer hair and becomes bolder.
They can get shot and it doesn't hurt them… Because they're guns and not people… but they ARE people and they use guns…
IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This show is aimed a very weird gun fetishists of the worst sort, I'm sure this would make perfect sense to Ted Nugent.
I tried to start with the next seasons of Durara X2 but the story telling is so involved with more characters introduced and episodes running backwards that it is hard to follow. What is meant by running backwards is that the action is told in a series of nested flashbacks, with each one explaining the events that just happened. Totally unlike Star Trek it is NOT a series where each episode reminds me of other shows I have seen .
During a bout of depresasion I watched 8 seasons of big bang theory. It's an odd show… well not odd exactly. I mean it's exactly what you expect from a US sitcom, it's quite funny and very formulaic. It occurred to me while I was midway through it that I didn't actually like any of the characters. I could relate to them all in different ways but like them, nope. It also doesn't seem to know whether it should be proud to be geek or ashamed of it.
It's hard for me to like shows with laugh tracks, and then I don't like the characterizations in Big Bang. So after watching 1-1/2 episodes, I generally shut up about it since so many of my friends like it and I. Really. Don't.
I just finished watching the 3 seasons of The Newsroom. Now I'm going through withdrawal. Sorkin is a phenomenal writer, the cast was wonderful (I love just about everything that has Sam Waterston's name to it), and the issues are still timely, even though the series ended in 2014. In fact, I think it should be mandatory viewing for all US voters.
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