STOCKHOLM - Ethan Hawke, Noomi Rapace, Mark Strong. Based on true story of bank heist in 1973 involving hostages whereby during negotiations captor and captive fall in love, begetting the term Stockholm Syndrome. Hawke is the bank robber and Noomi is an employee of bank. Drags on for several days and not much is accomplished. Hamilton, Ontario disguised as Stockholm Sweden. OK watch getting 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

moizmad wrote:
STOCKHOLM - Ethan Hawke, Noomi Rapace, Mark Strong. Based on true story of bank heist in 1973 involving hostages whereby during negotiations captor and captive fall in love, begetting the term Stockholm Syndrome. Hawke is the bank robber and Noomi is an employee of bank. Drags on for several days and not much is accomplished. Hamilton, Ontario disguised as Stockholm Sweden. OK watch getting 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

Interesting!
Did you know they've since debunked Stockholm syndrome? (the condition, not the robbery or the movie). Like a LOT of psychological conditions it was based on bad data and dodgy theories. People don't develop real bonds, they just say and do whatever they can to get out of the situation. Where it seems they DO join their captors it's usually for other reasons like coercion, or prolonged imprisonment and abuse etc…

———–

I am re-watching Andromeda, a SciFi series from 2000 that was from the Rodenbery stable (Star Trek family). From the mind of Gene but produced by Majel Rodenbery, his widow.
It doesn't hold up to Star Trek at all, but it's not meant to. It's an action oriented show with pretty actors, lots of colourful lighting, organic spaceships, and tight sexy space-uniforms with buckles and straps… (late 90s club gear). The show is VERY early 2000s, there were a lot of other series that all looked pretty similar at the time (Farscape, Celopatra 2525, Starhunter etc…), but it's fun. The actors are eye-candy for men and women.

Premise:
A “Federation” type system collapses into civil war and the galaxy is plunged into 3oo years of anarchy. Dylan Hunt is the captain of a space battleship which gets stuck orbiting a black hole, so time slows down for him to nothing. 300 years later a salvage crew manages to tow his ship out when its orbit is knocked free enough so they don't get caught themselves. Dylan defends his ship and they all choose to join him to restore the commonwealth and make the galaxy peaceful again.

It's fun by Kevin Sorbo (Captain Dylan Hunt) has a stupid haircut that doesn't fit with the setting so it's distracting, the same way Captain Janeway was in Star Trek Voyager with her 1850s old west hair. Sorbo has the SAME hairstyle as he does in Hercules: centre part, longings late 1970s style bowl style cut. Anything is ok in SciFi theoretically but it looks like it doesn't fit.

One final thing- the relationship between the ship's engineer and the ship's AI (which he gets a real human body for) is too close to EDI and Joker from Mass Effect. It's hard to imagine that was coincidence.

CALIBRE - Jack Lowden, Martin McCann, Tony Curran, Ian Pirie. Jack's wife is expecting and his old pal Martin is taking him on a weekend hunting trip. They get quite plastered the evening before with several locals in rural Scotland but manage to rise and dimly shine the next day for the hunt. Then disaster, aiming at a deer Jack misses and kills a young boy instead. Then Martin kills boy's father who was going to shoot Jack. What a mess, they gather themselves and bury the 2 bodies deep in the woods. Then back to town to try and act normal but too many loose ends. Watch and see what happens. One of the best films I've seen in quite awhile, getting 4 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

RED JOAN - Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Tom Hughes, Stephen Campbell, Tereza Srbova, Ben Miles. Present day Brit Joan (Judi) is shown being arrested for her actions in supplying classified info to Russia during the 2nd World War. Back then, she and some of her pals were commie lovers and she had a job involving the development of the atom bomb. She claims it would level the playing field and if all sides had the weapon, it wouldn't be used. The USA soon invalidated that policy. Much of the movie shows young Joan (Sophie) and her love affairs with Tom and Stephen. Loosely based on true story. A 3 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

THEY LIVE (1988) Roddy Piper, Meg Foster.

A great cult movie that inspired so many imitators and rip offs of tha tag line about chewing bubblegum and kicking ass.

First saw it on cable around 1989 or so. Great movie and worth another watch.

I always have my sunglasses on.

Rewatched:

5th element.
Best SciFi movie ever. So much, so fast. Great acting, music, costumes, sets, attention to detail. Better than Star Wars.

LEXX, first episode.
The effects have dates badly. They're like Cutscene animation from a late 90s game. Still a great iconic, classic B movie TV series movie though. Gross, grim, sexy, and funny.

Starhunter Redux.
The new edit of the series on Amazon prime. Weird… Some of the effects have been updated to match the second season. Episode elements have been completely reordered. I'm hoping it will make more sense this time.

Rewatched - Sin City, Lost Boys, Scrooged….and of course the Griswolds. NO Life of Brian this year, at least so far….

I'm so bad about keeping up with movies, so I see everything super late. I finally saw the second-to-most recent Star Wars movie ('The Last Jedi?'), because it came on regular TV. And… honestly, I don't know why it got so much hate. I mean, it wasn't great or anything, but it wasn't terrible either. It was just a bland, perfectly innocuous big budget space opera. I even appreciated that they took Luke Skywalker's character in such an unexpected direction, rather than go the easy route… though, fair enough, they did take a steaming crap on a lot of Star Wars lore with how that was handled. Fair enough; that wasn't all great. I actually really like most of the actors and their characters individually (Adam Driver and John Boyega are both excellent in this). It did at times feel like there were too many chefs in the kitchen as far as the writing goes, but overall it wasn't the disaster I'd been led to believe it was. If I'd paid to see it at the theater I wouldn't have felt like I'd wasted my money.

Score: 223.557 midichlorians


Also, for Christmas I got the complete Cowboy Bebop series on Blu Ray, so I've been slowly plodding my way through it. So far, so good. I've been told it's a great example of space opera with a more grounded setting… which is true somewhat, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. It's taking some effort on my part to get past some of the goofiness and tonal shifts, which seem to be a staple of Japanese animation, but beyond that the series is excellent and I see why people speak so highly of it.

Score: 8.6 refrigerator blobs

El Cid wrote:
I'm so bad about keeping up with movies, so I see everything super late. I finally saw the second-to-most recent Star Wars movie ('The Last Jedi?'), because it came on regular TV. And… honestly, I don't know why it got so much hate.

Neither do I. I binge watched both new trilogy Star Wars films because the wife and I were seeing the Rise of Skywalker on Christmas.

Fine space opera, complete with Mary Sue. My only real complaint is that Abrams stuffed in way too much into each film at a frenetic pace.

I watched Dead to Me and Russian Doll today.

Both were very good. Russian Doll was definitely more my thing with magical realism and unraveling the fabric of the universe sort of thing. It also had a decisive conclusion. Really enjoyable overall. Well-paced, intriguing, good progression.

Dead to Me was more emotional. Charming regardless. I do like the girl bromance stories. Conclusion was present but soft, like going for a second season setup, and that kinda annoys me.

Tried watching the movie Battlespace on Amazon Prime.

After over 12 minutes of exposition over the top of constant SciFi space action and CGI I quit.

Waaaaaaaay too much exposition! And it's impossible to concentrate on anyway when there's all those explosions.

__________

The Shadow.

A Chinese historical art film with a super complex plot about the rivalry between the king and his general. Everything is in black and white apart from their skin… All there clothes, the backgrounds, weapons etc.
Pretty film with good acting but the plot is too complicated and the subtitles go by too fast to follow what's happening.

Tankers (aka Invincible)(2018) A KV-1 beats up German tanks in 1942 on the Russian front. Lots of bits about keeping the tanks running and scavenging parts and just how fickle a beast the KV-1 was. Great KV-1 mock-up is used in the film but the German tanks are all the wrong version. Like that matters? I know the story but the battle scenes are intense, the characters stoic and heroic and the hour and a half flies by.

Fury is awful garbage compared to this movie. The Russians know how to do tank movies.

Saw all of The Witcher.
Not bad, some good acting and stories.
Issues though…

The writing has many problems:
-It's all done with skips in time and that's not indicated at all so it's pointlessly confusing.

-Characters keep going on about the disadvantages that women have but those are never seen. Women seem to be equal or socially superior to men in the Witcher world. If you complain about gender based inequality then you have to show it happening.

- the main female character complains that her choice of giving birth was taken away from her as the price of becoming a mage, which the writers seem to have forgotten was bullshit since it was her own personal choice as the price for her to look like a sexy woman.

- The stories all have the same twists: monsters are the real monster, it's people. Every time. Every single time. And every single princess is a dangerous magic user. Every single one.

Other things:
- No colours virtually. In a mediaeval setting you should always have colour, fantasy is no exception. The main colours are mud and shit and dust.

- The castle sacking in the first episode is very, very poorly depicted. It reminds me of fantasy from the early 80s like Story or something, it's by someone with no knowledge of anything, it's amateur level fantasy writing for settings and scenes.

- We have multiple ethnicities of people everywhere at random without any indication they come from different countries or places. Even in a fantasy world those things are markers of difference. In SciFi you don't have to worry about it but in an agrarian fantasy world you can't just make it a straight reflection of the modern world without setting up all the problematic and interesting reasons for it: slavery, colonialism, subjugation. The settings to avoid that in are port cities and trade hubs.

Ok, with all those very well deserved harsh words, it's a fun series. The on going ng Story is engaging. I would class the writing level as young adult. It's very fun for what it is. It reminds me of an anime series.

Two more Netflix things:

- The Messiah
I really, really wish they got the writers of this to do the Witcher. The writing is so very much better, the twists are effective, the emotional impact is strong, the settings are researched and the world is beleiveable, it's just so good.
Very good series.
Goes on you long though.

The story concerns a Jesus like man coming from the Middle East and getting a following around the world and how that changes politics and society. The mystery is whether he's actually the real sin of God, a plot by the Russians to destroy America, or a man that just wants to use the chaos to reshape the world.

- Dracula
A bit of a feminist retelling of the Dracula story Where nuns interview Jonnathon Harker. Van Helsing is also a nun.
It's pretty ok for what it is. My only critism so far is the Dracula character:
He's supposed to be a man of rare taste and status, an aristocrat. But as he gets younger and healthier he takes on the looks and persona of a middle class British shopkeeper. The accent, the hair, the outfit etc does not match his pretentions. It's a bad match. The creators of the show seem unaware that not all British people are the same.

I got bored of Ad Vitam after one episode. It's slow. And it feels like the interest lies in the concept/setting not the plot or characters, so I didn't feel like continuing. The concept could have been told in 20 minutes. It would have been a good Twilight Zone episode (and I think it was).

Currently I've been rewatching Supernatural.
The last season is currently live and I figured I'd re-watch the whole thing so by the time the last season is done I'm all caught up and I can just breeze through the last season peacefully. Luckily I don't have any friends that watch Supernatural so no spoilers for me :'D

I've also been watching Unbelievable, it's based off of true events.
*spoilers!!* the story starts with a girl who is sexually assaulted and because of who/what type of person she is people start to doubt her and eventually she just says it's a lie because she's getting stressed out but then more assaults like hers are actually happening and two detectives from different districts are on top of tracking this guy down.

I occasionally watch Merlin, it's very old, luckily still on Netflix.
I'm sure you all know how this story goes. Merlin, a magic user aids King Arthur in becoming the King he's meant to be :D

I'm waiting to watch the Witcher on Netflix. My boyfriend and I are planning on getting together at his house on his days off to watch it. We officially started a health journey this year together and we decided that the days we watch the Witcher or we get together which would be once a week would be our cheat day. So next week we'll officially start doing that. :) pretty excited for it.

I also watched the Witcher, Messiah and Dracula on Netflix (among a ton more shows but we'd be here all day). Basically agree with Oz on all points. Dracula's spin on Van Helsing was very interesting, until we FF'ed into the future and then she became boring. I wanted to see a LOT more the nun. The actual nun (won't spoil anything further). And the ending for me was …weak. I expected something a lot more bombastic and powerful in terms of psychological and existential explanations, including an explanation on why Dracula even existed, since they followed almost all of the tropes, but chickened out in the end.

The Witcher was interesting but it would have benefited a lot from a linear storytelling. Also some recognition that the main witch's gripe was basically buyer's remorse, and unfair buyer's remorse unless she wanted to return to being a hunchback. She would be a lot more interesting as a character if the narrative recognized she's basically either a hypocrite or too greedy to realize that she can't have her cake and eat it too. I enjoyed the Witcher himself though. Such a fun character, when he could have been pedantic and annoyingly preachy.

I just rewatched Miranda, because it puts me in such a happy mood.

usedbooks wrote:
I just rewatched Miranda, because it puts me in such a happy mood.

I've never watched that show… even though Hart is on my “Odd Girls I really fancy” list B-)

BearinOz wrote:

usedbooks wrote:
I just rewatched Miranda, because it puts me in such a happy mood.

I've never watched that show… even though Hart is on my “Odd Girls I really fancy” list B-)

I really love Miranda (show and person). I strive to be more Miranda-esque with my attitude.

Tantz_Aerine wrote:
Dracula's spin on Van Helsing was very interesting, until we FF'ed into the future and then she became boring…

Agreed! So much missed potential with the future Dracula but instead of following up with those new elements it was simply a straight forward retelling of the story in a modern setting.
I wanted the nun Van Helsing to be the one in control of things… it would have been fascinating, but what they did instead was laaaaammme. Wasted opportunity.

Tantz_Aerine wrote:The Witcher was interesting but

Agreed! The Witcher character himself was the best part of the show.

“Lobotomy”

This is a documentary about Georgia, talking about Russian aggression against the country.
To an intelligent viewer these sorts of “documentaries” are painful to watch because they have a huge axe to grind and only present you one very slanted side.

The main thrust of this documentary is that Russians don't know the truth of what happened in Georgia because their press is slanted and they're only getting very filtered propaganda. The very painful irony of this documentary is that IT in itself is very slanted, filtered propaganda. T_T


The most interesting thing I got out of this show was that the Georgians actually admit they were the ones who initiated the attack on the Russian base in South Ossetia, contrary to what all the world news was saying at the time (Especially BBC world). Initially international new services said the Georgians had attacked first and then all universally changed their line to say it was the Russians and kept up that narrative for years.


Apart from that all you really objectively learn is that war is an awful, awful thing (as it always is) in which innocents are always caught up, Russian conscript troops are terrible and corrupt, and that you should never f**k with a regional superpower no matter who you think your allies are. The superpower will crush you unfortunately.


There are no good guys in war. A documentary like this that tries to pretend there are is pretty shitty.

The Witcher. Sorry, I just couldn't take it. It felt as if it had been written by a room full of twelve year old boys who had seen too many Quentin Tarantino movies. It's set in yet another cookie-cutter Euro-medieval fantasy world. The the recurring motifs seem to be 1) sequences of a pouting stoic middle-aged thug who swaggers across the land wearing enormous shoulder pads while muttering angry one-word quips in a gravelly voice, or 2) sequences of the camera hovering lovingly over the naked bodies of women writhing in an ecstatic trance of some kind or another. About half way through, I realized that I would rather stab myself with a heel than watch any more of this uninspired generic swords and sorcery I.P.

damehelsing wrote:

I've also been watching Unbelievable, it's based off of true events.
*spoilers!!* the story starts with a girl who is sexually assaulted and because of who/what type of person she is people start to doubt her and eventually she just says it's a lie because she's getting stressed out but then more assaults like hers are actually happening and two detectives from different districts are on top of tracking this guy down.

I thought Unbelievable was really good!

fallopiancrusader wrote:
the recurring motifs seem to be 1) sequences of a pouting stoic middle-aged thug who swaggers across the land wearing enormous shoulder pads while muttering angry one-word quips in a gravelly voice, or 2) sequences of the camera hovering lovingly over the naked bodies of women writhing in an ecstatic trance of some kind or another.

It's certainly not a masterpiece but you'll find there was a lot more to it than that XD
There's a lot more female focus in the rest of the series with the sorceress Yennifer, a hunchback girl with a lumpy face.

JUDY - Renee Zellwiggle, Jessie Buckley, Rufus Sewell, Finn Witrock, Royce Pierreson. Cost me $7 but had to watch it, have not seen other actresses roles but I'm saying Renee has an Oscar cinch, she's in every scene for all 2 hours, did her own singing (altho didn't sound much like Judy) and except for her, the rest of movie is not much. So give RZ Oscar rest of movie is a 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

Titans : Netflix. I've never watched soapies - neither the U.S.'s Days of Our Bold Restless, nor the U.K.'s Constipation Enders. We did have Oz's Home & Away on for a year or two, but only for my early-teens (at the time) daughter. SO, I don't watch the “D.C.Channel” (FOX8 down here) for Flash, Arrow & co. …although I did allow myself to get sucked in for a season of their “Doctor WHO meets The Avengers” D.C.Legends thing, before coming to my senses.

SO, sucked in again (evening/day binge), I watched Titans. Interesting mix… with Hawk & Dove* and Doom Patrol** making appearances, along with Robin #2 and a seen-only-from-behind Batman… I was half-expecting the Guardians, JLA AND JSA to show up too ! I think the writers had done a Frank Miller course, as the violence, blood, guts and darker story line only needed a voice-over and some colour-leeching to be in the Sin City category… well O.K. not really. But it was clear why it was on Netflix, not FOX8 !
* I bought the original Steve Skeates/Steve Ditko Hawk & Dove, back in the late 60s, as a teen, along with ** some copies of Doom Patrol, around the same time. But for ME, anything with “teen” in the title was an immediate turn-off, so I certainly wasn't going to be buying “Teen Titans”…and I hated “sidekick” ones more than Stan Lee !

SO…they've dropped the “Teen” out of the title. D.C. IS trying hard to rival Marvel, but somehow, they just can't seem to get it right - except for Bale's Dark Knight(and the other cast members), and I DID like the Superman-V-Batman movie, specifically for the ‘dark’ Batman - the way I like him played. SO I liked the emphasis on a dark Batman in this series…and the way Dick Greyson was trying to back away from his own descent into Darkness in this (and the way it gets usurped by the inter-dimensional ‘bad guy’ at the end.

I'll give it a ‘solid’ 2.5 Goldilocks on the Bear meter.

(Not sure they'll suck me in for multiple series though)

BEIRUT - Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Mark Pellegrino, Dean Norris. Jon is a negotiator and was there to see his wife killed in 72 and is asked to go back in 82 to work a deal exchanging his old pal Mark with a terrorist's brother. Gets really complicated with all that Israel/Palestine crap that has been going on for a few thousand years. I think it all worked out, at least for awhile anyway. Always nice to see Rosamund and she gets it a 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

THE INSIDE MAN - Denzel Wash, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen etc. Clive dreams up the perfect bank heist down to the last detail. Anyone who saw this movie knows what the title means. But what I can't figure is when the police finally get into bank and start search why didn't they bring in a few dogs? They would've found the inside man pretty fast I'm thinking and even Clive didn't think about that, he who thought of everything.

moizmad wrote:
THE INSIDE MAN - Denzel Wash, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen etc. Clive dreams up the perfect bank heist down to the last detail. Anyone who saw this movie knows what the title means.

Not every police dept. IRL is as smart as the T.V. ones, Mo' !
I'd sort of forgotten about this film, until your review - I remember rather liking the plot (there are so few about, these days).
Yeah, it would get a good 3.5 Goldilocks from me.