Michael Hopcroft Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 Star Wars Episode I followed by Star Wars Episode IV. Haven't watched either in several years. Episode I just drags along, and I found myself checking the time in several places. The plot's overly convoluted, the characters unsympathetic. It's a movie in great need of an editor. Episode IV, on the other hand, flew by. There aren't really any dead spots, and the action is good. Humor doesn't seem to be forced (like in Episode I), and I found myself just sitting back and enjoying the show. It made a world of difference (and not in a good way) when George Lucas started really believing his publicity. Before Star Wars he was making crisp, tight films with little bloat or wasted footage. Then for a while he stepped aside, allowing experienced journeyman Irvin Kershner to direct and providing a team of screenwriters essentially a story outline. The result was one of the greatest space adventures of all time, The Empire Strikes Back. It's a shame that he contracted megalomania, began to micromanage, and decided to stick every possible bit of effects, makeups and other things into his films. There are a lot of characters in Return of the Jedi and the prequels who wear the suits (or later were made via CGI) who had no real reason they had to be aliens. IIRC Jabba the Hutt was originally intended to be human. BlueCloud2k2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueCloud2k2 Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 IIRC Jabba the Hutt was originally intended to be human. He was. Then Lucas decided a disgusting fat slob would be even more disgusting as a Fat Slug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 BlueCloud2k2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 Episodes 5 through 10 of Hannibal. And now we are introducing a character from the book Hannibal. And they killed off Chiltern early. Mads is compelling as Lector. Not for the squeamish. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheQuestionMan Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 Gotham Agents of SHIELD NCIS NCIS New Orleans Outlander The Glades The Blacklist Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted October 18, 2014 Report Share Posted October 18, 2014 The last three episodes of Hannibal. And now the goodies have a chance to catch him. Again not for the squeamish. Bram Stoker's Dracula. With and without the commentary from Francis (Ford) Coppola. Monica Belluci's first movie. Sir Anthoiny chews the scenary. Keanu Reeves fails to master the accent. Gary Oldman has a whale of a time. The first three episodes of Penny Dreadful. Eva Green and Timothy Dalton are hunting for something that they should not. Reworks the story of Dracula, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray and mayhaps the werewolf story. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hopcroft Posted October 18, 2014 Report Share Posted October 18, 2014 But on the positive of the Dracula film, it was shot beautifully. I've never seen another horror film shot so beautifully. And the idea that Van Helsing is in his own way just as evil and dangerous as Dracula is interesting (science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen wrote his own series of Dracula novels in which the vampire is "one of nature's noblemen" and Van Helsing is the villain). Coppola really bought into the notion of the vampire story as sexual metaphor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted October 18, 2014 Report Share Posted October 18, 2014 Saw Wes Anderson's latest, Grand Budapest Hotel, yesterday. An endearing collection of quirks, both cinematically and characteristically, easily on par with The Royal Tenenbaums. Fiennes, as M. Gustave H., must have had a really fun time while shooting. As everyone else must've had. Stars fight to get cast in Anderson's movies. I mean, George Clooney had a cameo in this one of not even one second! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hopcroft Posted October 19, 2014 Report Share Posted October 19, 2014 My new anime discussion group has two components -- movies and series. It's sort of like a book club -- the group (6 to 8 people depending on who can make the meeting) is assigned a movie to watch and a series to at least start. The second meeting our series is K-On! (the exclamation point is part of the title). It's about a high school's "Light Music Club", four freshman girls who have revived a once-defunct school club and, on the basis of it, are starting a rock band. Sadly, their lead guitarist has never even picked one up before.... It's funnier than you would think. It's in the school comedy subgenre where the humor comes from the quirks of the characters as opposed to them being placed in outrageous situations. One of the defining elements of that subgenre is the lack of romance plots -- these girls are too busy with adjusting to high school and trying to start their band to even look at boys. Instead the girls do things like recruit, figure out how to devote time to actual music, and take weekend jobs to help their distractable new recruit buy her first guitar. (The first meeting, when the assignment was made, we were put in the position of selecting our "waifu"s or "husbando"s in the process of introducing ourselves. It's a fairly standard anime-fan thing these days, but at my age it was pretty embarrassing. I ended up selecting Minamo "Nyamo" Kurosawa from Azumanga Daioh, partly because it would have felt really creepy not to choose an adult.) BlueCloud2k2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted October 19, 2014 Report Share Posted October 19, 2014 I'd go with the Major. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
csyphrett Posted October 19, 2014 Report Share Posted October 19, 2014 Watched The Equalizer with Denzel Washington. This is a slow action movie with McCall and his Russian counterpart displaying their skills until the showdown at the end. CES Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hopcroft Posted October 19, 2014 Report Share Posted October 19, 2014 I'd go with the Major. I think she plays for the other team (assuming she plays at all). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted October 20, 2014 Report Share Posted October 20, 2014 Hey, I can share! In the original manga, she had a boyfriend. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted October 20, 2014 Report Share Posted October 20, 2014 The second three parts of Penny Dreadful. Fankenstein's creature finds a job, the history behind Vanessa and the Murrys is revealed, the vampire fails to catch Vanessa, Dorian Gray who first takes Ethan Chandler to a dog fighting den and then home, and then takes Vanessa out, Sir Malcolm and Ethan confront the creature and lastly something very disturing happens to Vanessa. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted October 21, 2014 Report Share Posted October 21, 2014 The last two parts of Penny Dreadful. And Surprise, Surprise, there is a werewolf ! But the vampire we thought was the master was not..... Sets things up well for the new season. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted October 22, 2014 Report Share Posted October 22, 2014 300: Rise of an Empire. Having an Eva Green binge at the moment. I'll be getting Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, for the her alone. Also saw quite a bit of Dr Who: Mummy on the Orient Express which was a bit of a bizarre idea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
csyphrett Posted October 24, 2014 Report Share Posted October 24, 2014 Working my way through season nine of NCIS. I have one question. How the hell did Mike Franks get the confidential stuff he left to Gibbs? There was a whole box of files with a picture of the villains and victim in one of them. CES Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueCloud2k2 Posted October 24, 2014 Report Share Posted October 24, 2014 Series finale for How I Met Your Mother. Very bittersweet. I cried. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Hopcroft Posted October 27, 2014 Report Share Posted October 27, 2014 I went to an anime viewing party over the weekend where, unlike at the anime convention I went to last month, the point was actually watching anime. This is the first time I've done this in what feels like years. I brought some stuff to show off, and some of it was actually screened. But the highlight for me was discovering a couple of new shows from the current season that I actually love. And, thanks to the fact that almost everything put out in Japan gets put on various streaming websites in North America, you can watch them too -- legally. My highest recommendation is for Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, which is currently on Hulu Plus as well as Funimation's site. It's based on a horrible, horrible video game, but it's the most fun I've had watching anime in seemingly years. It's a fantasy series about rival bounty hunters, including a charming, clever rogue named Favaro who is very good at his job, but whose boasts to impress the ladies get him in way over his head -- caught up in a struggle of gods over an artifact of devastating potential. It sounds very cliche, and it possibly is, but it's also spectacular and funny and exciting and -- fun. One tends to use the word "fun" a lot when describing Rage of Bahamut (the anime, not the game). The other highlights included Gugure! Kokkuri-san, a supernatural comedy in which a fox spirit starts haunting a little girl who thinks she's an emotionless animated doll fueled by cup noodles, and Yona of the Dawn, in which a pampered princess is forced to flee for her life with her bodyguard after the boy she has loved her entire life murders her father -- and tries to kill her too. I regret that I had to leave before they screened I Can't Understand what my Husband is Saying, a series about what happens when a mundane woman marries a fanboy. Along the way they also showed the first episode of the horror series Parasyte and the truly bizarre Hi-sCool! Seha Girls (in which cute anthropomorphized versions of past Sega videogame consoles like the Dreamcast and Saturn are put through various game-related challenges in order to "graduate" from a strange school). Rage of Bahamut is available on Hulu Plus. Yona is on Crunchyroll. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enforcer84 Posted October 27, 2014 Report Share Posted October 27, 2014 Been watching Pointless on Youtube. My kind of gameshow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
death tribble Posted October 28, 2014 Report Share Posted October 28, 2014 Agents of Shield Season 1 I liked. The cameos from Hill and Fury were good and I really like Agent May. I liked Tracks were you have the train intercept and then seeing it from different viewpoints. Bill Paxton is always watchable. But the bit at the end where Coulson dispatches him was wonderful. It started with J August Richards and ended with him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 9, 2014 Report Share Posted November 9, 2014 Interstellar -- man, oh man, it's the 2001 of the 21st Millennium. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueCloud2k2 Posted November 9, 2014 Report Share Posted November 9, 2014 That good, huh? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 9, 2014 Report Share Posted November 9, 2014 Well, Inception was a better movie, and it was pretty clear where Nolan got his ideas -- but we finally got a cinematic wormhole and a black hole that looked right! Edit: Admittedly, there were parts of the science that I had to turn my brain off for, but I managed to suspend my disbelief willingly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted November 10, 2014 Report Share Posted November 10, 2014 Dying to see Interstellar, but the kids were dying to see Big Hero 6, and, well, they whine louder. Pretty solid superhero movie, though interestingly, it's also cyberpunk without the grimness. Best parts for me were Gogo's superhero character concept and the setting of San Fransokyo, which I would move to instantly if it really existed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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