Just watched this. It's ham-fisted as ****.

I mean it's not outright bad I guess, but I would hope it isn't a serious contender among the BP nominees.

**** I watched this week:

Hawkeye: Best of a mediocre group of MCU shows.

Bad Batch: Finally finished this off. Worst of the Star Wars shows. Hopefully, like other SW shows, S2 will be better, but I have some real disdain for the child character and some of the logic/continuity stuff.

For All Mankind: Trying to plow through as many Apple shows as possible with 3 free months w/ my new ipad. Quality show so far. Joel Kinnaman seems to be in as much **** as Giancarlo Esposito these days. I'm almost shocked when I see something without either one of them.

From (EPIX): The creators of Lost. So if Lost were in a town instead of an island and it's an RV instead of a plane. First ep super creepy. Has potential. Thought the main character was Paul Rudd for half the ep, trying to figure out how the hell they got him for this show, then you finally see him from the front and realize it's not him.

I think I liked Loki best of the MCU shows. Hawkeye and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier were both good shows too though, I thought. I gather I liked those shows better than you did. WandaVision did very little for me, which is disappointing since I had heard such good reviews. I only watched one episode of What If...? before quitting on it.

Yeah, I don't think any of them were bad, but nothing really stood out and I liked the connections and story most with Hawkeye. Really digging Florence Pugh's character as the new Widow. Most of my appreciation for Loki stems from how good Hiddleston is in that role. What If became somewhat interesting and all tied together eventually, but again...meh.

I know that people were generally really enamored with Hiddleston as Loki in the Thor movies, and I didn't see the big deal (though I did think he did a good job). It was somewhat surprising to me that I liked his show the best. I enjoyed Owen Wilson's part quite a bit.

In terms of leveling up a character into actually being something interesting, the Hawkeye show may well have made the strongest contribution.

When I first saw Alfred Molina show up in Maverick, I was convinced that Crush had crossed over into movies.




I don't feel that dumb about it.

Did you not lol at people for watching matrix 4, does the same not apply to anything star wars, mcu etc?

3 Episodes into peacemaker and whilst it's a vast improvement on the dross that was suicide sqaud, it's very plain. I'd argue it's more than plain but I have soft spots for Cena and Danielle Brooks.

I also watched Reacher which was dreadful.

If anyone has tv show recommendations I'm all ears as I need something to sink into.

Pui Pui Molcar on Netflix.

Made for kids but fun for all. Only takes a half hour to finish the series.

I did. I guess I'm not sure what I said here that prompted the question. I liked most of the MCU stuff; the worst example of it (Iron Man 3) was nothing that prompted me to question whether the whole franchise was on the verge of falling apart or anything. Re: Star Wars, if my revisiting of Phantom Menace had been as bad as I remembered when I watched it 20 years ago, I'm guessing I'd have quit again. But since I found it surprisingly enjoyable, I went forward and watched more.

Those franchises also bought a fair amount of good will by cranking out several high-end movies; parlaying just one really good movie into at least three sequels is crazy to me. But since Matrix 2's entire mission was to convince its viewers to violently abandon the franchise and pretend that there were no sequels, I haven't actually seen part 3 or 4.

None of this is meant aggressively so sorry if it comes across that way. It genuinely is our of interest and a level of respect otherwise I would not bother asking. I just thought you'd fall more onto the side of lots of average puts you off, when I suppose (and I agree that it makes more sense) some very good with nothing aggressively bad holds on to people much more.


As someone who has never had any of those big franchises appeal to me I don't have that buy in point. Speaking of peacemaker I really enjoyed Super, but that's probably much more as I like Rainn Wilson and Elliot Page than it's a particularly good movie (though I think interesting in the genre).
I respect this enough even if it is a troll answer to give it a go.

I tend to take a pretty dim view of the expected quality of sequels generally, outside of the rare Lord of the Rings scenario where there was a clear plan right away to roll out three movies. It's no surprise that all three turned out to be pretty great.

There are historic examples of the sequel managing to achieve a similar level of quality to a high-quality original - Godfather Part II, Aliens, Terminator 2 - but in a clear majority of cases, there's a significant drop-off.

It seems like a very rare scenario where the drop-off is then followed by a significant bounce-back. Raiders of the Lost Ark to Temple of Doom was a huge drop-off (though there is a troubling lack of hate for Temple of Doom), then Last Crusade was really good. That was such an uncommon sequence. Usually if the sequel is bad then the downslope will just continue. And the really long gap in years from one installment to the next? That always seems like the biggest red flag of all. I didn't need to be warned to not bother with the revisiting of Dumb and Dumber (and I loved the original).

This seems to be shaping up as a notably weak Oscar year. Just watched West Side Story tonight. I liked it better overall than The Power of the Dog or Don't Look Up, but these are not movies worthy of winning Best Picture. None of the above are bad, but this should not be a list of a year's top films.

Haven't seen them all yet, but I'm in agreement unless the last few wow me. Pretty big step down from last year.

CODA looks like the most interesting one that I haven't seen yet. I suppose I can spring for the $5 to tap into Apple TV+, even though I'm kind of loath to do that when Ted Lasso isn't in season.

Welp. This is pretty much the worst Seahawks news I could have seen short of the team being sold to a corrupt businessman from Oklahoma City. I don't know what we're getting back yet, but there's no chance in hell they got a haul big enough that I would actually approve of it. Little did I know at the time that the death of Paul Allen was a one-way ticket back to the Behring years.

Is there a non-zero chance Rodgers would ask for a trade to Seattle now?

I mean, Rodgers just re-signed in GB today. If he wanted to be traded then he was still under contract and likely could have forced the issue in that direction.

No, I don't think there's any real backup plan here. Pete Carroll, in the year 2022, has had too much success to recognize his own mortality and the possibility that the game has passed him by, and is still convinced that the way you win championships is through defense and a running game. They keep crapping out on desperate trades that have depleted our draft capital, so the way to bolster the defense and the running game was to ship Wilson off and collect some high picks.

The intelligentsia deemed that the best way forward was to boot up a full-on rebuild with a 71-year-old coach. Within two years, that seemingly ageless coach will have newly bottomed out the team and will suddenly no longer feel this magical youthful energy he is so famous for. At that point, he'll exit stage left, and the powers that be will have made the grand choice, amid a clear power struggle between a star QB and an old dinosaur coach, to have chosen the path where we dump the star QB for a pittance relative to his value so that the dinosaur could guide us gently to rock bottom.

If they actually did have a plan in place to pursue a talented QB...and I hate to even type this possibility into existence...it would probably be Deshaun Watson. And that would only further my disgust.

Only stopping by to point and laugh at LKJ

Carry on

My angry rants are far more dignified than yours.

Just watched West Side Story.

It was very well done, but...unnecessary?

It's one thing to remake a movie that was poorly done or one that didn't reach a wide audience, but the 1960s West Side Story was a classic. It has the 4th most Oscar wins of any movie in history.

I don't have the exact formula of time and acclaim where it's okay to make a remake, but West Side Story doesn't pass it. It sure as **** shouldn't be getting any Oscar nominations.

Rant over. I did enjoy the movie. I'm sure I'll complain again in 5 years when somebody decides to remake Braveheart.

Yeah, I was going to mention before that for some reason I haven't seen the original West Side Story, and I'm sure having seen it would have colored my view one way or another.

Remakes seem like they should be about whether the filmmaker can actually bring something new to the table (though I realize they're about whether or not they will be profitable). Doing a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho was ridiculous. Although they did a fine job with the remake of 12 Angry Men (feat. Jack Lemmon), it didn't bring anything new to the table and also fell under "unnecessary." Rather than actually redoing the same movie, it seems to work better to rip off the movie's concept while tweaking it enough to make it your own, e.g. Rear Window --> Disturbia, An Affair to Remember --> Sleepless in Seattle. I didn't really enjoy Sleepless in Seattle, but it obviously worked for a lot of people.

Thankfully, of all the movies that I think of as my favorite of all time (The Godfather I and II, Shawshank, Pulp Fiction), it's difficult to imagine anyone doing anything as silly as remaking those anytime soon. I can imagine them running A Few Good Men back during my lifetime I suppose.

I liked Nightmare Alley a lot. My new favorite of the BP category for this year. Betting odds say it's drawing dead to win, but it at least strengthens the category in my eyes.

Okay, I simply don't think I can finish the Bad Batch. Every time I try, I just end up falling asleep. I'm somewhere in the middle of the season. There's nothing glaringly bad, it just isn't gripping me at all.

Kenobi trailer has me hyped, though. Getting started on Rebels.

I've kind of been on pause for a bit with The Mandalorian. It's not bad, but it really hasn't hooked me in the way that Clone Wars and Rebels ended up hooking me.

There are only five episodes left, so I'll surely watch them.

Bad Batch is rough.

Mando starts to pick up after S2E2, (the frog lady with the eggs the child keeps eating). That seems to be right around where you left off. They start to bring in some more interesting characters.

Also watched Green Knight, Many Saints of Newark and Eternals over the last couple of weeks. None of them really jump out as exceeding expectations. Realizing that I'm saying that about most movies the last few years. I think part of it might be that scripted TV is so competitive and strong now that I don't feel like I have enough time to connect with many characters enough to care too much in a two hour movie anymore.

Finishing up The Morning Show now. Was hoping for something like Newsroom and not disappointed. Steve Carrell's arc is particularly strong, though I kinda hate Jennifer Aniston's character. Billy Crudup is good too. Seems like a completely different actor than the guy who played in one of my favorite movies 20 years ago (Almost Famous).