The first season was too episodic and did nothing for character development if I recall, after that it got better, but the thing about the Red John storyline that I hated is that apart from an episode or two they just kept teasing and teasing and by the time it got resolved I found it disappointing. Didn't watch beyond that point, perhaps I should. Still, I watched it for longer than Castle, or Lucifer because after the third time detectives accepted the reasoning “it's way too simple like that” to continue an investigation or when bodies are dropping like flies because of a bad boy consultant and they're still “open-minded”… I just couldn't.

There was a show full of crazyness that you don't see mentioned much these days, it felt a little overcrowded sometimes with events happening, but at least each season got some new stuff to throw at you and it was quite entertaining if I recall. Nip/Tuck.

Genejoke wrote:
I watched that not long ago, I kept expecting it to veer more into psychics are real territory, luckily it didn't. I did feel the whole red john thing went on far too long, 4-5 seasons too long.

Yep, they went on WAYYY too long with it. People are just too addicted to arcs :(

InkyMoondrop wrote:
The first season was too episodic and did nothing for character development if I recall, after that it got better

I love episodic things. It's a real art to simply contain stuff in an episode and not have it always spill over. I LOVE that <3
It got much better after they finished with Red John.
I actually liked the way they finished with Red John in that after all his buildup and grandiosity they handled him in such a pathetic, sad way. When he begged to be able to explain how he did his clever tricks and knew what he know, Patrick just said he didn't care and killed him, so in the end nothing he did meant anything- a fitting end for such an evil manipulator.

I will look for Nip Tuck. Truth be told I don't like things with violence and murder, it's just that murder mysteries tend to have consistently good writing.

I started watching Sasaki and Peeps and Davey & Jonesie's Locker.

Davey & Jonesie's Locker is on Amazon Prime.
It's like a cut priced, high quality student play version of Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Loki TV series crossed with Sliders.
It's very good, funny and watchable.

It's a bit too frenetic and conceitedly woke at times too in a way that no high school ever is- it has much more of an art-school or performing arts school feel with young 20 year olds rather than older teens and they should have gone with that… But apart from that it's top notch.

It's about two girls who're best friends who get lost going through different alternate dimension versions of their school because of various reasons.

——————–

Sasaki and Peeps is a really cool anime on Crunch Roll.
A 40 year old salaryman in a dead end job going nowhere gets a pet bird who introduces him to learning magic, going a magical world, getting a new job as a psychic detective (because they think his magic is a psychic power), etc… But it's all really fun because the approach is SO mundane and basic. He just wants some joy in life and a bit of an escape but he doesn't want to go crazy or get into any danger so he always just plugs along in the most mundane way possible. Reminds me a little of One Punch Man.
I love it!

I tried watching Fallout on Amazon Prime

Had to quit it because it was far too violent for me.
When did TV shows think it was ok to get to that level of hardcore violence?

I don't know how faithful it is to he games because I've never played them. The graphic volence was sickening and over the top. Not for me.

Mortal Engines on Netflix. The story is rather formulaic, but not completely terrible. The production design is amazing.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Mortal Engines on Netflix. The story is rather formulaic, but not completely terrible. The production design is amazing.

Is that the movie or is it a TV series?

I found the movie really flat and it was SO weird that they used really bad CG for the robot assassin guy when he could have been much more easily and far better done with a decent costume and make-up. Seriously. I could have done it myself and I know many designers who could too, for minimal cost.

It was a popular young adult book series, I haven't read it but I heard the radio play version and it was quite good. The movie writers just had no idea. They were actively poor.

I don't know how faithful it is to he games because I've never played them.

I don't know either, because I sucked at playing them. The games do have a very good appeal of retro futurism. They obviously went out of their way to bath the Amazon series in it. I'm not surprised it's so graphic and violent, after all it's adapting an action game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But although it's good to pass the time with a few good actors thrown in, I don't really see it as a very high standard of television entertainment. Neither did I see The Last of Us that way, which was also okay, even pretty good at times. The best they're good for is making me wanna play these games. It's probably just me, because people are going crazy for these game adaptation shows nowadays, but they don't really leave any lasting impression on me. It's like they went for Westworld vibes with it, but without anything even remotely clever. So we get a bunch of awkward, not too likeable characters with some over the top violence and it's not even funny.

I don't mind explicit violence shown like this, but it felt so calculated, just violence for its own sake, because “it works”. Don't get me wrong, I find it equally bad when people act like fucking Dexter was an explicitly violent show. Please, it was more like a soap opera than anything remotely horror about a serial killer. I often see completely vanilla scenes hailed as “the scariest scene in television” on social media and I'm like… are you kidding me rn?

Ozoneocean wrote:
It was a popular young adult book series, I haven't read it but I heard the radio play version and it was quite good. The movie writers just had no idea. They were actively poor.

Yes, the movie. I figured it was an adaptation of a YA fiction book. The movie was made by the exact same team that did “The Lord of the Rings.” I was hoping they would have done a better job, but alas, they didn't. I watched it a second time with the audio turned off, just so I could enjoy the designs of everything.

bravo1102 wrote:

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
Have been watching Christina Ricci movies, she was in a bunch of Indy movies that I have never watched.

All is Faire In Love:

After.Life:

Distorted:

So I saw this and figured why not? Love Christina Ricci.

I've read that Christina Ricci likes doing indy movies because she isn't fond of typical Hollywood fare and likes the kind of subject matter you only do in indie-produced movies. But she still shines in a big period piece like Bel Ami set in Third Republic France (that's the late 19th century after Napoleon III and before WW2)

And I really liked All is Faire in Love because it worked as a goofball comedy and you can tell the cast had a lot of fun. Seeing stuff on Amazon Prime you can look up the cast. Pretty sturdy bunch with lots of credits and the legendary Ann-Margret. Fortunately, Adam Sandler didn't kill comedy for me. Heck, I still watch Bob Hope movies and count all the routines everyone has stolen from him over the years.

I was being too hard on All is Faire in Love. I meant to say that Adam Sandler did a lot of damage to comedies, and this movie was an attempt to make something like an '80s sex comedy. Even though I did not like it, only three or four movies made me laugh, I appreciate the effort.

And you are right Ricci has said that she likes working on Indy movies because they allow her to play characters other than Wednesday. I found it weird that she was at a peak in her career, with Oscar nominations, and here she is in this low-budget goofball comedy.

OzoneOcean said: Fallout Had to quit it because it was far too violent for me.
When did TV shows think it was ok to get to that level of hardcore violence?

The games have a lot of exploding heads and over-the-top cartoon violence. If you have any interest Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favorite games ever, and definitely worth grabbing. Fallout 4 is good, but it is only half-finished and crashes all the time.

I saw the entirety of the series The Mentalist. It was really good actually. It's another in the genre of the murder mystery show with an outsider genius detective helping the police (there are so many of these from Monk, to Bones, to Castle, to Psych etc…).
The series ending was good.

Simon Baker was very good in The Mentalist. I always found it odd how similar this show is to Castle. Both are procedural crime comedies, with one outside thinker paired with a tough female cop. Jane/Lisbon and Castle/Beckett have almost the same dynamic, and later they both join the FBI. There are almost identical episodes where Lisbon/Beckett is trying to get Jane/Castle to leave them alone during their first week with the FBI and Jane/Castle winds up being hired as a consultant again.

A minor thing that bothers me, especially with The Mentalist, is that everyone is amazed by the things he does. But other shows depict detectives of doing similar things. So the CBI just looks like idiots around him.

Fallout on Amazon Prime feels like every post apocalyptic movie just rolled into one. That was sort of the gist of the game franchise. Just take every post apocalyptic trope going back to the 1950s and throw it together with the ones from more recent exploitation movies and wrap it up in 1960s style retro technology as if the Atomic War happened according to one of those Twilight Zone episodes or maybe the movie Failsafe . There are obvious references to A Boy and his Dog as well.

(I said atomic war as opposed to nuclear as the warheads depicted at the beginning are not modern thermonuclear warheads but 1960s stuff. It wouldn't take three warheads to take out a city with modern weapons. But the timing of the Shockwave to blast was dead on.)

About the only original thing is some of the casting. The whole time line of it being 2077 doesn't work at all. In the next fifty years everyone reverts driving 1950s cars? But it really works for 1967.

“Anna”(2019) Written and directed by Luc Besson. The premise, basic story arc, and even some of the scenes are an exact rip-off of “La femme Nikita” (1990) (The classic French one, not the god-awful Hollywood re-make). Now, who wrote and directed “La femme Nikita?” you may ask? Why, it was also Luc Besson! So, I'm just baffled: why did he make what is essentially a rip-off of his own movie? Is he running out of ideas? At least the plot of the new one is more sophisticated than the old one.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I don't know either, because I sucked at playing them. The games do have a very good appeal of retro futurism. They obviously went out of their way to bath the Amazon series in it. I'm not surprised it's so graphic and violent, after all it's adapting an action game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Despite being based on a violent game I'm STILL shocked it's so violent. Movies and TV is vastly different from games, the violence in games is far less “real” because it's only on animated CG characters, not really good human actors with clever scripting and visual and sound effects designed to make it look more real and get an emotional reaction :(

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
Simon Baker was very good in The Mentalist. I always found it odd how similar this show is to Castle. Both are procedural crime comedies, with one outside thinker paired with a tough female cop. Jane/Lisbon and Castle/Beckett have almost the same dynamic, and later they both join the FBI. There are almost identical episodes where Lisbon/Beckett is trying to get Jane/Castle to leave them alone during their first week with the FBI and Jane/Castle winds up being hired as a consultant again.

A minor thing that bothers me, especially with The Mentalist, is that everyone is amazed by the things he does. But other shows depict detectives of doing similar things. So the CBI just looks like idiots around him.

There are SOOooooo many of those shows thoough and they're all pretty much the same: Monk, White Collar, even Chuck (though it's about spies): an amazingly skilled outsider joins a team of established professionals and does the job way better than them, they resent and are suspicious of the new person but eventually learn to respect and love them and make an amazing team together…

I think it's based on the Audience's wish fulfilment for the character of being that expert and going out and solving those crimes better than the police and being looked up to and respected XD

bravo1102 wrote:
Fallout on Amazon Prime feels like every post apocalyptic movie just rolled into one.

I haven't watched more than halfway through the first episode, but the setting of the 1960s for the initiation of the disaster was pretty unique? In 99% of this genre we start of decades after the disaster hit, and the time of the disaster is usually always assumed to be the present day that the audience is loving in or a few years in the future…

It seemed really off though is the 1960s aspect- Amazon media has this thing at the moment where they're working TOO hard to erase ethnic and “racial” differences, but 1960s US was definitely NOT a rainbow community and a future society based in that era would not be either. Gotta knowledge those issues and show how they got past them rather that erasing that from existence.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
…why did he make what is essentially a rip-off of his own movie? Is he running out of ideas? At least the plot of the new one is more sophisticated than the old one.

That's not unheard of… there have been a few directors that have done this, essentially doing the same story again. It'd be interesting to catalogue them! I can't recall any now but I remember reading somewhere about this sort of thing.

Though didn't Luc Besson already do a remake of the idea with The Professional? I mean it's different but the themes are so similar hahaha!

I watched the first two episodes of “Ooku: the inner chambers” on Netflix.

I already read the whole manga, the anime is very faithful to it so I don't know if I will actually watch the other episodes, but the quality is quite high and the story is very peculiar:

In a parallel history, in medieval Japan, due to an epidemy that only affects males, but kills 80% of them, Japanese society is remade with women taking the place of men in work etc., while the few existing males are a rare commodity and their main job is to give well remunerated sexual service.

The shogun though (also a woman) can afford to have a full-male harem, the Ooku.

The story is generally highly dramatical and follow the lives of some dudes that end up living in the Ooku. It follows the evolution of this world over many generation so each episode might tell the life story of a different person (though some characters span more than one episode).

I'm watching gameplay of the Survivor trilogy of Tomb Raider which serves as an origin for Lara Croft. It's really good actually and while Lara is clearly a newbie, she's still a badass and in character. I would play the games, but I don't have the reflexes for such things anymore. Hee hee.

mks_monsters wrote:
I'm watching gameplay of the Survivor trilogy of Tomb Raider which serves as an origin for Lara Croft. It's really good actually and while Lara is clearly a newbie, she's still a badass and in character. I would play the games, but I don't have the reflexes for such things anymore. Hee hee.

I really didn't like those reboot versions of Lara Croft :(
They changed her from a smart, smooth, clever actionhero into a dirty victim.
It's really NOT Lara Croft anymore, it's basically a totally different character with zero connection to the original.

-That's just my opinion though, i'm glad you enjoy it and you should definitly try to play the games! :)
I wouldn't worry about relexes with those- in the originals it was quite trcky at times but the rebooted ones simplified that greatley and it was often cutscenes that you had to click at the correct time.

Rebel moon, part 2: I can’t really give a thorough review of this film, because I had to turn it off after 30 minutes. Maybe the film was actually written from the get-go as a farce, and my mistake was that I took it seriously. The only movie that I can think of that is somewhat similar to Rebel Moon 2 is “Spaceballs” by Mel Brooks. Go ahead and watch Rebel Moon part 2 if you want some comic relief, but other than that it appears to be a real stinker.

The Endless series by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

This is a series of loosely related films. What they seem to have in common is the existence of a so far unseen reality-shaping monster who has been living in a southern Californian lake for eons.

Resolution - After receiving a suicide note a man rushes to California to force him to go to rehab. They encounter several eccentric and dangerous people, and find clues to a mystery. The movie is mainly about them coming to terms with the relationship they have let slip, but there is more going on. Great acting and slow burn of tension, that ends just as you understand what's really going on. You will be shocked at who the monster is. RECOMMEND.

Spring - A California man abandons his life to visit Italy. He falls for a stunning woman who has a terrifying secret. How do you really know you love someone? What sacrifices would you make to be with them? This is a wonderful and original romance film along the vein of “The Shape of Water”. This is film is the reason I watched all of the others. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

The Endless - Two brothers visit a doom cult they escaped from years earlier. But they discover these people aren't as crazy as they believed. This is a partial-sequel to “Resolution” starring the two directors, who are good actors and carry the film well. It takes place in the same setting and has a few of the same characters and locations. Not on the level of Spring, but worth watching. RECOMMEND if liked Resolution.

Synchronic - Starring Anthony Mackie, which is enough to sell me. A pair of EMT's investigate a mysterious street drug made from a red flower found in California. Another “bottle episode” driven by conversation, but I love those. Also great use of CGI and costuming, sets ect. RECOMMEND if you have liked the other movies so far.

After Midnight (Something Else) - Starring Jeremy Gardner and Brea Grant. A man coming to terms with his Girlfriend leaving him, is visited by a monster every night after midnight. A more traditional monster film, but it is really about two people deciding what to do with their lives. This was produced by Moorhead&Benson and co-directed by Jeremy Gardner. Gardner plays a very relatable, flawed everyman. You shouldn't like him but you do. RECOMMEND.

She Dies Tomorrow - A woman tells her friends that she knows she is going to die Tomorrow. They dismiss her as crazy, but soon the feeling spreads like a cold. If you can get past the first 20 minutes of a woman walking around in near darkness with no dialog, it starts to get interesting. Also produced but not directed by Moorhead&Benson I liked it but I would not recommend to everyone. (As far as pacing goes, it is still “The Fast and the Furious compared to Andor”.)

Something in the Dirt - Two strangers see odd things in their apartment and start filming it for a documentary. Filmed during the pandemic and starring Moorhead and Benson again, but as completely different people. Again I liked it, but it's not for everyone.

Overall I would recommend Resolution, After Midnight, and especially Spring. Moorhead and Benson understand the importance of a strong script, make good use of their low budget, get good performances out of their actors, and don't let the movie end without a solid payoff. This is the kind of Science-Fiction and Horror that I really enjoy.

Double posting, pathetic I know:

Outlander: Not the Bodice-Ripper. This is a 2008 Predator knock-off featuring Vikings. Featuring John Hurt. Similar to the comic Autumnlands where the Vikings encounter a human space traveler with advanced technology. The creature is extremely dangerous (which is a nice change) and has as much right to live as they do. They made great use of their budget, the creature looks great and they put a lot of work into the scenery.

Cinderella's Revenge: One of the new Twisted Childhood movies. I have seen the Winnie The Pooh slasher and was surprised to find that both of these films are very well made. There is more thought put into the logic of events than most modern TV.

Spoiler: For example, after Cinderella goes on her first rampage, they don't immediately go after her because A) she is locked up in her room. B) She's a woman who would not likely be able to overwhelm one of the male victims.

Fallout: Maybe you have to be a fan, but I am really enjoying this. It looks EXACTLY like the games. The vaults, the interiors, the guns, and the food they eat, are right out of the game. It uses the lore and even deepens it. In the games, you are usually a vault dweller but you don't experience much of your life in the vault. This is an ensemble show with 4 main characters and through their flashbacks you see vault life and prewar life, and learn a lot more about the Ghouls (finally). Operation Anchorage is a major event that is mentioned several times. They even mention the golden rule of the wasteland “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bull**** every god****** time.” which sums up the gameplay perfectly.

I just got through the Knuckles series yesterday. If you're looking for a family friendly comedy about bowling, it was a pretty fun watch. As a Knuckles spinoff though… it was a bit sparse on the Knuckles.

Columbia Pictures is celebrating its 100 year anniversary and to celebrate, each Spiderman film is being released for 3-4 days.

I just caught the re-release of Spiderman 3 as it has been seventeen years since I first watched it on the big screen. The movie theater was sold out, so I had to sit in the second row really close to the screen. The audience dressed in Spidey costumes, they handed out anniversary posters. The crowd cheered when Peter Parker bought his new suit. I even cried when “Signal Fire” played at the end credits.

I love a good comic book film that really understands comic book fans.