Watching the latest season of The Orville.
It's dropped the comedy and gown straight to drama.
I really like that it takes so much influence from Star Trek the next Generation.

However, Seth MacFarlane is not a clever man… He'd like to be, but he's just not. He can't do subtle and he doesn't even understand the intricacies of the ideas that he uses. For example - in several episodes they take on the idea of female empowerment and subjugation within a male-centric culture, but all they really do is use old ideas of gender based biological determinism. It's so disappointing that they don't understand that :(

So they're not giving us a new an interesting way of looking at a social issue like the real Star Trek would, rather they always give us old traditional views presented in fancy ways so they LOOK progressive.

Seth is an old fashioned Gen-Xer… Us Gen Xers often have surprisingly old-fashioned views that we think are clever and new 😅

I just saw Spiderman Homecoming.
Oh I so hated it.

It had a really pretty good villain, the stakes were not ridiculously high, there weren't masses of meaningless Cthulhu monsters (or any), and there wasn't a secret big boss introduced right at the end, so it avoided all the terrible tropes Marvel movies always seem to fall afoul off.

But the young highschool kid Spiderman was SOOOOOOOOOO irritating. He's meant to be in his final year of highschool but he acts like a 12 year old the whole time. And young creepy aunt May was awful. And his geeky friends were just ew. Even the bully was geeky. I so, so, so, so hated the Tom Holland Spiderman in that film.
His homemade suit sucked too. And the digital animated scenes of hm with the suit on were so bad. Stretchy gumby crap.

Holland is a good actor, it's just that how his character was written and how he portrayed it was not enjoyable.

I just finished Season 1 of Teenage Bounty Hunters, a show that the Pandemic sadly killed off.

Maddie Phillips and Angelica Bette Fellini both give hilarious star-making performances. This show does such a great job of showing instead of telling. The girls start “twin speaking” and nobody turns to the camera to explain what they were doing because you know they've been growing up around all these kids for years.

At least three plots come to light in the second half of the season explaining the characters' behavior in the first half.

Watching Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels on Netflix after getting drunk on cider. I blame the UK for this effect:P

To be fair that's not a bad thing to blame us for. There's definitely nworse things🤣

Andreas_Helixfinger wrote:
Watching Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels on Netflix after getting drunk on cider. I blame the UK for this effect:P

I liked that one way better than Guy Ritchie's other films.
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I just watched Hell Comes to Frogtown
This has always had a bit of a cult status I think, maybe because of the good makeup and costumes, or more likely because it stars Roddy Piper as the titular “Hell”.
Sandahl Bergman is also in it as a sexy scientist. It's not much of a role for her but it's good to see her in other movies besides her best outing in Conan the Barbarian.

This is a very small scale, cheaply made post apocalypse sexploitation film, with good the performances and costumes in spite of the cheapness. Still it'd be better as a TV show than a movie.

The premise is that nuclear war has ended society but it has been rebuilt with women in charge. The nukes also caused most people to be infertile and also the creation of human/frog mutant people.
Piper's character has been imprisoned by a sadistic police officer who's all set on torturing him but he's saved by officials from the MedTech company. They need him for breeding because he's fertile. His job will be to go with some army-women into the wastes and, help rescue and impregnate a bunch of women captured by the Frogtown mutants.

It's funny and a little bit sexy. It has a tiny cast and a silly story but it's fun and the mutant makeup and effects are great.

I love Hell Comes to Frogtown It's the kind of movie I'd like to make if I ever the intestinal fortitude to make a pitch.

bravo1102 wrote:
I love Hell Comes to Frogtown It's the kind of movie I'd like to make if I ever the intestinal fortitude to make a pitch.

It's a very Barvo type story! Also very reminiscent of PitFace's Putrid Meat.
Also reminds me super strongly of LEXX- Interestingly it seems it often comes packaged in a double feature with Pal Donovan's (LEXX showrunner) DefCon4.
Classic sexy post apocalypse fun film :D

There are also two sequels! The second on stars massive faced Robet Z'Dar and Lou Ferrigno, and the last one is a weird D movie apparently.

There's sequels to Hell comes to frogtown? I'll have to find a way to watch them.

The Sandman- I'm really enjoying the live adaptation that I have been waiting for to arrive on netflix. The casting is very well done and elements from the comic to the show are incredibly transitioned. I keep pausing parts of the show to famous images of the comic. Bravo chaps. Hopefully it isn't canceled after season 1 and they adapt the whole comic.

ONE PIECE - Friends have been telling me to watch this anime forever. I finally have been making my way through the anime series even though there are over 1000 episodes now. I believe they started making the anime back in the late 90's. At the beginning I had a rough time watching because the background art looked so washed out. The art is pretty rough the first couple seasons but the characters and stories kept me invested. I've made it past the Alabasta arc and the show and art keeps improving in my opinion. The villains that pop up are always creative and the main characters seem to keep evolving. So overall I'm enjoying the show. My one big issue that I can't get over is the show is terrible at drawing women! They all look the same except for their hair and the anatomy is horrible. The women have these tiny waists that don't match the body. It's like lupin the 3rd art, pretty terrible.

Right now I'm watching an extremely rude elderly woman attempt to tune a ukulele. Any other customer I'd offer assistance but this old bitches manners would make the Kray twins uncomfortable.

Been rewatching all the Predator movies, cause they're in a conveneint collection on Disney right now.

Predator is still a perfect movie and Predators is still the best of the sequel/crossover bunch. Prey was mostly a pleasant surprise as it didn't lean too far into being a parody or ripping off the original beat for beat… but it could have been so much more. I wish it had committed fully to its grittyness. I whole-heartedly agree with what one reviewer said, the movie would have benefitted from not having any dialgoue at all. (I guess you sorta achieve that if you watch the Comanche version without subtitles… which i did. Recommended viewing experience.)

Predators though succeeds where Prey fails, it builds upon the original and subverts your expectations. Perfect example: the sacrifice scene. The original had the iconic Billy stays behind moment, when it cuts away and you don't get to see the duel… Predators subverts this and gives us a full-on Yakuza VS Yautja duel in all its glory. How can you not love that? And probably the biggest reason it deserves resepct: it doesn't shy away from giving you a bad ending. They ain't making it out of there alive and you know it.

TheJagged wrote:
Predator is still a perfect movie

True.
And the funny thing this that the characters are hyper-masculine to a “toxic” level, but that doesn't matter because the film is not espousing or promoting that way of life, it's just showing people with those characteristics battle this alien monster.
It's pretty neutral about them really, no value judgments either way. No comeuppance or rewards, moralising or ethics based on the type of people they are, like you get too much of in lessor action films then and now, it's just them as they are in a fight with the creature.
That makes it work so well.

Jason Moon wrote:
ONE PIECE -

I really tried with the show, but once they got to that place in the clouds and started fighting the lightning god guy it all fell apart for me. That's where I got tired of the continuous cycle of it and just couldn't do another round.

ALL long-running Shonnen anime are the same in that the same things just repeat over and over in each arc: We're having good time, getting stronger, having fun- Oh no! There's a new enemy. He's super strong, we can't beat him! We need to train. Now let's come up with a plan… We had a big final battle and finally beat the enemy… Lets start having a good time again and get stronger. Oh no! There's a new enemy…

With other Shonnen anime they are not as long running so you can pretend you haven't seen it all before and just squeak through another arc, but there are too many in One Piece. No mater how different they are in story-line the character patters and plots are too similar.
So I gave up on it lol!
I wish you luck!

She-Hulk. Funny and it reminded me of the comic when I use to buy them. I like it better than Ms. Marvel and I liked Ms. Marvel the series. (And I’m into Green women.)

The best movies i watched recently were both stop motion: Mad God and The Wolf House

Both are unique masterpieces in their own fashion. Mad God is steeped deeply in a post-war, Heavy Metal magazine zeitgeist. It's as grimdark as it gets and i adore every second of it. The soundtrack was stuck in my head for days. I will say though, you can tell that it was cobbled together from several different short movies, overall it still works as a whole but some scenes feel more out of place than others. Definitely worth a watch though if you can stomach it.


The Wolf House is more artsy fartsy, but in a good way. It's like arthouse ASMR. It hypnotites you, puts you into a trance with its slow building of every scene and the constant, quiet crackling of ambient noise. And the idea of turning the entire room into a canvas to draw the movie on… unlike anything i've ever seen.

I watch Mannix reruns (Mon-Fri) usually fall asleep before end but I'm always amazed how many times he gets bonked on the back of his head at least once in every show, and are the bad guys bad shots or what?

I caught up with Superman and Lois. The 1st season was a refreshing take on Supes. The 2nd season slogs a bit and falls into the Arrowverse format too often.

Only so many times I can watch a character storm off, leading to a heart-to-heart that doesn't resolve because “there is too much going on right now.”

Got done watching Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) yesterday, i didn't bother with the anime at first since the manga left me very unimpressed. But since it's apparently breaking every record in anime history i figured i'd give it another shot. And yeah, it's a super fun show. The story is dumber than a sack of hammers but i don't exactly expect (or want) a storytelling masterpiece when i'm looking for an action adventure anime. Shonen is about 3 things: Action. Characters. And manly tears. And it got all of it right.

The action is well directed/animated, when it wants to make you cry it will make you bawl and Tanjiro is too good for this world. I love the whole cast, even the gag charatcers like the weapons smith are fun. And then there's Inosuke…I love Inosuke so freaking much. Soooo freaking much. He is best boy, don't even argue.

Thor love and thunder.

I came away feeling somewhat ambivalent. Taiki Watiti (however you spell it) mostly got it right with Thor ragnarok, even though it did lean perhaps a little too much towards wacky humour. With this he takes the wackiness too far and it's generally cringe worthy. That said it's a fun some of the time.

Documentaries about 9-11. I mean really, what else is there to watch today?

Mad god looks interesting.

I've been catching up with Solar Opposites- It's by many of the same people as Rick and Morty, the animation and character design is straight from there and the voices too.
So the humour is quite similar too. It's also pretty savage…

I think the differences in shows stem from the very different setup: It's four aliens that have crash landed on earth and making it their home. There aren't any portals or Rick type characters that are super smart and can never lose, so that makes it a very different show, even though the starting conditions are the same, if you know what I mean?
They could all exist in the same world almost.

Soap.
That great sitcom parody of soap operas that ran from 1977 to 1981. Binge watching it, I'm halfway through season 2.
It's in the 50 of the top 100 greatest sitcoms of all time and the Tates/Campbell's are in the top 20 favorite TV families of all time.
Every bit as good as I remember it from way back when I was in high school. Actually more funny now that I've lived some crazy situations like on the show..
Remembering Bert Campbell got me through a lot. ;D

Decided to catch up on Attack on Titan, and immediately remembered why i stopped watching it. This show is the anime equivalent of Lost, it's so bad at moving its own plot along. Every time a question gets answered it brings up a million more questions as to wtf is actually going. It's such a frustrating experience…


Another thing that i actually enjoyed and is comic boook related: How the Maxx broke Sam Keith, a very intricate look on how the Maxx was made. The dude here really went out of his way to do research, even did interviews with some of the creators. That's the kind of passionate content i watch youtube for, and it's a crime it's not getting more views. Too niche i guess.

@Bravo- I tried to get into soap back in the day but it was just too silly for me back then haha! It wasn't shown in Australia when it was first aired in the US. With the fame of Katherine Helmond from Who's The Boss and of course Billy Crystal, that gave it enough reason to be shown in the late 80s/(maybe the early 90s?), but it was a bit dated by then and didn't pick up an audience in Australia unfortunately :(
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@TheJagged-
Oh dear, Attack in Titan is so depressing, I couldn't get into it, and shows that propose questions and more questions are too frustrating!
I love the MAXX, I'll have to watch that!

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I've been watching The Inbetweeners.
It's a UK series about 16 year old boys. It centres on nerdy nebbishy Will who's been pulled out of private school because of bullying and put into a comprehensive state school. He makes friends with Simon (sort of normal), Neil (tall lanky moron), and Jay (sex obsessed inveterate liar).
It's an interesting dynamic- it's a hilarious comedy, gross-out at times, with the characters acting very realistically with realistic scenarios, although exaggerated for comedic effect.

It's really interesting to see a comedy done with such an unbalanced setup. The boys are different kinds of characters but they don't balance each other out or compliment each other in any useful way (not in intelligence, social dynamics, coolness, luck, strength, or anything), and that results in things going out of control ALL the time.
Despite the CRASSNESS of Jay and the sex obsession of all of the characters I liked it a lot.

The secret of watching Attack on Titan is just seeing the two live action movies. The whole plot condensed into a four hour narrative where it actually makes sense as linear story telling. And the swinging around isn't nearly as unbelievable and the angst so overwhelming.
Seen them both around three times each and they're a lot better than the drawn out anime.

“The Imperfects”. The lead characters are three young people who have been turned into reluctant superheroes. The writing is comedic, but more in a quirky word-wit way, rather than slapstick. The first three-quarters of the plot is tightly written, but then in the last quarter, the plot becomes unfocused and confusing.

Just watched Atlantis Inferno (1983), commonly known as The Atlantis Interceptors (1983), on Netflix. Fairly straightforward, italian 80's action flick for the most part.

Lots of explosions, lots of brutal kills.

Comes with a positively bewildering sci-fi theme, about ancient Atlanteans - who all look like they came out of a Mad Max movie - returning from the depths of the ocean to reclaim the surface world, that I feel gave this movie that extra add of visuals and atmosphere it needed to not be mediocre. Loved it👍

Also, now I know where Noah Antwiler, aka the Spoony One, got the theme for his Reb Brown themed reviews from back in the day:P

While not right now, the other night I watched a new documentary special about th 50th anniversary of my favorite show: M*A*S*H.

Spoiler-y, I guess.

I thought I would give Birds of Prey a go, since the clips made it look like a fun movie, it is not a fun movie, it is full of psychopaths and ghastly tortures and deaths, I have no idea who decided to give it this urgh! factor but they need help. Stopped watching, even though, yes, I'm probably missing the more fun scenes ahead.