Ozoneocean
I found the first ep to be just trope, cliche, trope, cliche, and trope and couldn't get past that.

Yes, but so was Kill Bill, and still it was good. Also a lot of tropes from old japanese samurai series, I tought I was watching a modernized version of Ogami Itto, yay!
Speaking of wich, I'll probably try to find the italian edition of Lady Snowblood, that seems whence the main plotline was taken from.

(is “whence” a word in common use in english? google translate translates it in italian as “donde”, that while correct sounds like from 1800)

Genejoke wrote:
Yeah it's a weird mix of more modern stylings and a throwback. I found Angela really irritating, badly written and acted. Lot's of cringe inducing elements but strangely watchable, probably because of the character writing and generally interesting plots. I think mainly it's refreshingly lightweight given how dark, serious and drawn out most shows are now.

Well said.

marcorossi wrote:
Is “whence” a word in common use in english? google translate translates it in italian as “donde”, that while correct sounds like from 1800

Haha! No,“whence” is almost never used any more. It's mainly used in the phrase “back from whence it came”, when people are trying to sound classical and old fashioned. So pretty much the same as “sonde” 😁

———
I just watch Fortress, starting Bruce Willis. Oh what an embarrassment of a film 🤣 I won't even describe it. It's the sort of thing that would have been a $2 rental video in the action section in the early 90s. What it with pizza and Pepsi on a Saturday night in a marathon with 5 other movies…

———

I also watched The Jouralist staring Jack Thompson and Sam Neil.
It was Sam's first Aussie role. He was pretty good in it, though he only had a small part.
Jack was the main star. He was a big deal back in the 70s and 80s Australian cinema!


This was a boring, pointless movie though about the life of a philandering guy who couldn't keep it in his pants. The only value to the film is that it shows you what Sydney was like back in 1979.
They managed to have “staying alive” as one of their soundtrack songs though so that's a big deal… Probably because the Bee Gees knew some of the crew.

Bit of trivia: I met Jack Thompson back in the late 90s at a local concert here. He was quite tubby, bearded and very, very drunk. He wanted to chat up the musician/singer, but he had no chance hahaha!

marcorossi wrote:

(is “whence” a word in common use in english? google translate translates it in italian as “donde”, that while correct sounds like from 1800)

Ozone is correct. I mostly recall hearing ‘whence’ back when I was studying English literature and thence have hardly heard it at all.

Ironscarf thence

XD

I have been watching the series “A Friend of the Family” about the multiple kidnappings of Jan Broberg by an adult family friend. This has some fairly big names such as Colin Hanks and Anna Paquin and was endorsed by the victim as the most accurate version of her story.

It is unbelievable how people viewed crimes so differently just a few decades ago. This man abducted a 10-year-old, took her to Mexico, and married her. It was excused as a lapse in his religious faith and he was given 4 years, waived for first offense.

I can believe that this man manipulated a child for years and got her to leave with him willingly. Astonishingly, the girl's father did not kill her abductor. And even more surprising, her mother had an affair with the guy! Seriously, the Mom was the dumbest character I have ever seen on TV.

It is worth watching though, you can't write such an outrageous story.

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
Astonishingly, the girl's father did not kill her abductor. And even more surprising, her mother had an affair with the guy!

The weird thing about reality VS fiction is that it's so much more complex. In fiction and hypothetical situations when we think about situations like that we think: “yup, I'd kill that person for that”, but reality has proved time and again that approach is often a fantasy. I mean we wouldn't have scams, cults, and all the weird Harvey Weinsteins and Jeffrey Epsteins and Nazis and all the other crap situations in the world if people didn't behave that way.

—————-

I've been catching up with MORE 80s shows. Lately I've started watching Rip Tide.
I'd only ever seen a few episodes back in the 80s. I thought it was just another vehicle based action series- there were a LOT of those in the 80s! But while it IS, with the beautiful early 60s corvette, a wooden motor yacht (named Rip Tide), a high performance speedboat, and a Korean war era cargo helicopter, it's a smart action series that has good plots, good characters, and good writing.

It's a huge contrast with Bones, the more modern series I'm watching:
in Bones smart characters always laud their intelligence over others. More physical characters laud their abilities over others (strength, speed, sexual accomplishments) and so on. SOOOOOOooo much really TOXIC interaction on this modern show. I like it, but that aspect is wearing.
In Rip Tide there's a core crew of 3 guys, two very physical and attractive ex MPs working as detectives, and one very intelligent but very nerdy, weedy guy who's along for the ride after his business failed.
But the character dynamic is weirdly refreshing- When the nerdy guy says something smart the others ACTUALLY listen! They heed what he says, they remember it and use that knowledge, they thank him. When he wants to try to do more physical stuff they actually help him. When they don't understand the terms he uses he apologises and make it more understandable, he doesn't sigh or act like he's talking to idiots. They work together happily to come to a common position. No one lauds their traits over someone else or dismisses them for not having the same advantages.

After watching modern shows where they are always snide and toxic to each other (especially Bones), this is strange and wonderful. I love it.

I recently watched an episode of FINDING YOUR ROOTS, which featured LeVar Burton, who knew almost nothing about his father's side of the family, because he had been kept in the dark about it for much of his life. To his surprise, it turns out that he has white, Confederate ancestry . . . and now, the internet is taking this out of context and trying to make it seem like that he's pissed off that he's not 100% pure African-American and that he hates white people, which is bullshit.

The weird thing about reality VS fiction is that it's so much more complex. In fiction and hypothetical situations when we think about situations like that we think: “yup, I'd kill that person for that”, but reality has proved time and again that approach is often a fantasy. I mean we wouldn't have scams, cults, and all the weird Harvey Weinsteins and Jeffrey Epsteins and Nazis and all the other crap situations in the world if people didn't behave that way.

You are right. It is an ongoing theme throughout this show. They have no idea what Pedophilia is, believing the answer to everything is to pray harder. It never connects that Bertholt was raping their daughter over many years. After watching the documentary about the golden state killer, they were in a time when rape was considered a minor crime and women were not protected at all. It's this kind of BS that the #metoo stuff is really about.

McKenna Grace, who I believe is from Sheldon, plays the older version of Jan. She believes his story about aliens and messiahs and runs away several times to be with him. A few years after they find her the second time, it all finally clicks, and she realizes what he is doing to her. That was a very sad, well-acted moment.

Prometheus(2012), of the “Alien” franchise. I kind of felt like I was watching Ridley Scott making a parody of his own movie. The acting and the directing were good, and the film certainly looked like it was benefitting from a gargantuan budget, but the screenplay was awful. When the original “Alien” came out in 1979, it was ground-breaking in the science-fiction genre. But since then, many of the original's innovations have become tired-out tropes. “Prometheus” just takes all the science-fiction tropes it can think of, and throws them into an opaque, uninspired soup that adds nothing to the genre. I had higher expectations for someone of Ridley Scott's caliber.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
I had higher expectations for someone of Ridley Scott's caliber.

Personally I think this sort of thing is all he can manage and all he's ever been able to mange.
What I mean is that he's an expert, a prodigy, a genius at creating beautiful, striking and interesting scenes- a skill that he honed during his early days making ads. But that has been his only skill, just that narrow area of film making.
It's the editors, scriptwriters and all the other people around him who've been responsible for the rest since the beginning in everything from the Deulists, to Bladerunner, to Alien, to Legend, Gladiator, and whatever else.

He still does the same good work but maybe he believes his hype (like Lucas) and thinks he can manage more than he's able to so he doesn't get the same calibre team as he used to or more likely he over rides them and thinks he's expert enough to make all the decisions… so he comes out with lower quality stuff.

Ozoneocean wrote:

It's the editors, scriptwriters and all the other people around him who've been responsible for the rest since the beginning in everything from the Deulists, to Bladerunner, to Alien, to Legend, Gladiator, and whatever else.

Yeah, that's a good observation. Some of the screenplays he's worked with were some real stinkers.

Wan piss, mai hiro akademeea and “how to spell things the wort way”

fallopiancrusader Yeah, that's a good observation. Some of the screenplays he's worked with were some real stinkers.

Unfortunately it's not an unusual story :(
So many creators fall prey to that
Maybe that's why a lot of creators seem to produce worse stuff when they get older? -It's not that they lose their abilities, it's that they take too much control and don't work with teams as well as they used to?

Zero Hour wrote:
Wan piss, mai hiro akademeea and “how to spell things the wort way”

Is that Indonesian or something? XD

Zero Hour wrote:
Wan piss, mai hiro akademeea and “how to spell things the wort way”

I think Mai Iro Academia was very good in the beginning, but become boring later.

Uàn pis, on the other hand, totally sucks: I bought the comic before the anime was on TV (yes, we are speaking of more than 20 years ago) and tought: hey, what a crappy story, what crappy drawings! How could they publish it?

And yet, it still has enormous success.

One piece has great worldbuilding
and great comedy
it can also have badass and emotional moments
and it has s skeleton
and i decided to hurt bri'ish language for no reason

Finally watched the remake of DUNE and it's was bloody awful. Soooo boring. I made a big buttery salty bowl of popcorn and sat down to watch it after waiting years. Fell asleep about 30 min in woke up every time the music did that obnoxious inception horn blasting sound and immediately went back to sleep. Finally turned it off and woke up in the morning dehydrated.


The 80s version with Sting was fast superior. The new version didn't even show the guild navigators or the emperor and the Barron looked like an albino pedophile infant. The de Laurentiis version was weird, iconic, and inspiring. This new one is a drab desaturated wide-screne Dramamine overdose.

Zero Hour wrote:
One piece has great worldbuilding
and great comedy
it can also have badass and emotional moments
and it has s skeleton

It's a fun shonen anime. So it has all the advantages of that but also the disadvantages- i.e. the treadmill of constant new adventures that are basically a full structural repeat of the last one. Nothing much that's learned or gained means very much after a while because you know it's just a part of the same pattern.

lothar wrote:
The de Laurentiis version was weird, iconic, and inspiring.

David Lynch rather than de Laurentiis, since the de Laurentiis movie producer we mainly associate with movies is Dino, while Dune was produced by his daughter Raffealla, and she didn't have a stylistic thing at that stage.

-Triva: Conan the Destroyer was filmed down in Mexico around the same time and they shared some of the crew and production stuff :D

-I read a book on the making of the movie XD

It had a lot of good stuff in it but it changed things from the books a bit.
There was a cool TV version of the Dune story made for TV in the early 2000s that was closer to the books. That was pretty good, though of course the Lynch version has by FAR the better actors in every regard.

There will NEVER be a version of Dune made with better actors than the Lynch movie. It's just impossible.

Francesca Annis, Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance, Sian Phillips, Jürgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Dean Stockwel, Max von Sydow, Sean Young and SOooo much more. Amazing cast.

Watching more and more Bones…

I realised something funny and significant: although everyone in the show keeps calling Temperance Brenan a genius, including herself, the smartest character by faaaaaar is actually Angela, the super dooper annoying, patronising, conceited, self centred “artist”.

All the other characters just do things based off of other people's research. Basically they look at something and act from memory based on what they've read. They display not much more “intelligence” than an AI or any well trained technician.

Angelia on the other hand constantly makes vast leaps in her reasoning and constructs elaborate computer programs and whole machines to help her work things out, and if she doesn't make them she finds ones that will work for what she needs and learns how to master them in less than a day. While all the rest are just matching stuff to memory and reciting other people's work, Angela does all her own.

This show is a great study in how not to portray “intelligence”. The writers had such… Varying quality.

I watched The Marvels. It started entertaining enough but overall it's pretty awful aside from a few amusing moments. What it reminded me of was the little bits of the movies of the Seven from The Boys, only those are intentionally bad.

Genejoke wrote:
I watched The Marvels.

I wanted to see that so I started watching the Ms Marvel TV series to catch up on that character first.
Only seen the first episode so far.
It has some good points but it was mainly super annoying teen high school stuff. Ugh!
That wasn't even interesting when I WAS in highschool.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Genejoke wrote:
I watched The Marvels.

I wanted to see that so I started watching the Ms Marvel TV series to catch up on that character first.
Only seen the first episode so far.
It has some good points but it was mainly super annoying teen high school stuff. Ugh!
That wasn't even interesting when I WAS in highschool.

It's basically Marvel's Turning Red. The stuff with the text appears was cool though, just a small creative spark there. I started The Marvels, but to be completely honest I haven't got beyond the 20 minutes mark yet, not sure why, cause I've nothing against the characters, but it doesn't really excite me so far.

Ozoneocean wrote:

Genejoke wrote:
I watched The Marvels.

I wanted to see that so I started watching the Ms Marvel TV series to catch up on that character first.
Only seen the first episode so far.
It has some good points but it was mainly super annoying teen high school stuff. Ugh!
That wasn't even interesting when I WAS in highschool.

It's not a bad show, depending on your tolerance for teen stuff. Ms Marvel is probably the best of the 3 main characters in the marvels.

@Inky, the beginning is probably the best bit. somewhere round the halfway mark it becomes painful to watch. As you say there's sparks of creativity here and there, hell there's even the makings of a passable plot. It's just so shallow, as if they came up with a concept and started filming before there was a script. It's like a hyperactive teenager blurting out the plot without sufficient detail. they go here, they fight that, oh and it looks cool and they do this and she does that and… you get the picture.

The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
Original Title: Letyat Zhuravli
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov
Cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky

The Cranes Are Flying tells a story about being in love while the world is at war. Incredibly beautiful black and white cinematography that took my breath away. A rare film that can be appreciated for its aesthetic attention to detail from wardrobe to setting. This film deserves several repeat viewings to really appreciate all that the story has to offer.

All my feelings from the film are summed up during a scene where a letter is being read:

“It is hard leaving you
But it can not be helped.
There is no other way.
It is war!
I must go.
We can not continue as before:
Enjoying ourselves
While death stalks our lands.
We will be happy someday.
I love you, I believe in you.”

Dune by Denis Villeneuve (2021) This story is about a young man who is The Chosen One, who will Fulfill the Prophecy, and Save the Universe by using Magical Powers that only he was born with. I got about 20 minutes in, and then when I realized that this was yet another movie based on that idiotic, juvenile “the chosen one” trope, I just turned it off. I was hoping that the production would at least wow me with some ground-breaking set, prop, and costume design. But visually, it was basically just another Star Wars clone. Profoundly unimpressive

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Dune by Denis Villeneuve (2021) This story is about a young man who is The Chosen One, who will Fulfill the Prophecy, and Save the Universe by using Magical Powers that only he was born with.

lol is this jokey sarcasm? Genuinely asking.

dpat57 wrote:

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Dune by Denis Villeneuve (2021) This story is about a young man who is The Chosen One, who will Fulfill the Prophecy, and Save the Universe by using Magical Powers that only he was born with.

lol is this jokey sarcasm? Genuinely asking.

I was definitely attempting to be tongue in cheek, but I felt it was a pretty accurate description of the story's premise. It's just a premise that I find has been used way too often, and it's getting to be an irritating cliche. Especially in the speculative fiction genre. That being said, I think the world-building in Dune was amazing. But the characters and narrative were kind of two-dimensional.

fallopiancrusader wrote:

I was definitely attempting to be tongue in cheek, but I felt it was a pretty accurate description of the story's premise. It's just a premise that I find has been used way too often, and it's getting to be an irritating cliche. Especially in the speculative fiction genre. That being said, I think the world-building in Dune was amazing. But the characters and narrative were kind of two-dimensional.

No I can see as how, that's the problem with a world famous Sci-Fi novel that got written in the ‘60s I guess, “chosen one” stories wouldn’t have felt so overfamiliar then as they do now. You could say the same for many other elements in Dune, re-used and overdone in numerous Sci-Fi books and movies. But tropes aside there was still a sense of wonder in the Bene Gesserit's breeding program that was initiated 90 generations ago, to produce their long-awaited Kwisatz Haderach prescient wonder child. The best-laid plans, etc. I'm a big Dune fan (can you tell?) but I wonder if I'll watch the movie, it's just not calling to me.

@Dpat57: That's true. What is considered an overused trope today was still pretty new territory in the 60s. Back then, Science fiction was still a relatively unexplored genre. I remember reading the novel in the early 80s, and being blown away by the world-building, but even then, I couldn't get excited by the story. But I probably just have some psychological idiosyncrasies. I'm not a super big fan of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings either, even though both had an obviously huge impact on today's culture. Though I respect LotR because the main characters achieved heroic status by overcoming great hardship, rather than by benefitting from some sort of in-born superhuman powers. I liked David Lynch's version of Dune a lot. In my opinion, it played up the mysticism a lot more, and was a tour de force of design.

Indeed, I do prefer the design of the David Lynch version. I like the new Dune but some aspects didn't hit quite right for me, but maybe that's because it's just half a movie. thankfully part two is out soon.

DUNE

Does anyone remember the made for TV miniseries version from the early 2000s?
I didn't like their version of Paul but it was much truer to the books than the Lynch version.
The Lynch version gets better the more you watch it, there are a lot of interesting touches that take a while to absorb… It's not just a chosen one, like dpat57 says, it's a vast cultural and political conspiracy and Paul finds himself to be the unwitting focus of that, rather than a person who just happens to be born “special”.

I still haven't seen the new movie yet. Though I do remember a bunch of absolutely ignorant imbeciles raving about the designs of the still-suit costumes as being “so original”, “innovative” and clever, not realising that the Lynch version had already massively paved the way there far better and more interestingly, so much so that anything else is simply derivative, nothing more.


The books are interesting, they're not actually about a “chosen one”, the focus is more on dynasties, war, political intrigue, and life on a desert planet. Paul's origin story isn't what Dune is about, that's just the intro into the story.