kawaiidaigakusei wrote:

Mufasa (2024)

An orphaned lion adopted by a tribe of aristocratic lions with European accents

So I'll never watch Mufasa since I never liked the Lion King, and anyway I would watch it dubbed so I wouldn't get the accents, but I'm a bit curious: when you say “European accents” you mean they all sound British or that actually there is one who sounds French, the other German etc.? That would be very weird.

marcorossi wrote:

So I'll never watch Mufasa since I never liked the Lion King, and anyway I would watch it dubbed so I wouldn't get the accents, but I'm a bit curious: when you say “European accents” you mean they all sound British or that actually there is one who sounds French, the other German etc.? That would be very weird.

The lions spoke with the same European accent as Jeremy Irons in the original, but if they were going for historical accuracy, there would have been British, Dutch, Portuguese, and a lot of French thrown into the mix.

Mad Max Fury Road. The story was moronic, but the car designs were great.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Mad Max Fury Road. The story was moronic, but the car designs were great.

I saw Fury Road while I was in Athens with Pitface and Tantz. I liked it ^_^
Yep, the story isn't smart, but it does the job.
I think that with something like a dieselpunk fantasy like that the smartest way to go is to have a very simple story. The story to Fury Road had perhaps a little much in it- all those women used for milk, blood donating slaves, the rival brothers, the warboys, the castle hoarding water etc, that was too much. Way too much and none of it makes sense in our real world or their fantasy one.

Eliminate the captives, blood and the milk etc. Keep it tribe VS tribe, Guns, cars and fuel and you win.

—————–

I watched The Nutcracker and the Four Realms on Disney Plus.
It was a nice Christmas fantasy with the whole nutcracker thing as inspiration.
It went its own way.
The story is that a girl gets a pass to a magical kingdom that her dead mother created. She goes there and there's strife. With the help of the Nutcracker she fixes things.
It looks beautiful. he acting, effects and costumes are a joy.
The story is fine, it does the job.
Noting bad to say about it. ^_^

It's been cold as a witch's nose here so I've been staying inside and binging.

Finished up Pantheon Season One on Netflix. Season Two is on youtube but I'm saving that for a bit.

Finished first seasons of Shield Hero, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Delicious in Dungeon. Need to finish first season of The Continnental.

Ozoneocean
Wrote:
Eliminate the captives, blood and the milk etc. Keep it tribe VS tribe, Guns, cars and fuel and you win.

Yes, that's what was bothering me. Too many superstructures of weirdness to pull you out of the narrative. I did respect the fact that the movie was essentially one long car chase, and was honest about it.

I saw Furiosa and I had a better impression than Fury Road. I feel it was surprisingly heartfelt. More attention was given to character development and psychological journey than was seen in the other installments of the franchise. At least for the title character. The villain was a vaudevillian clown, which is entirely appropriate for a Mad Max movie.

Personally I liked both Furiosa and Fury Road, but I liked Fury Road more. The basic idea of Fury road is something like a feminist theory but taken to the extreme and grotesque, that worked well in the setting that requires extreme characters.

Also the idea of the extremized warrior honor among the kamikaze warriors was very cool and, while again an extremisation, it does express something that exists in the human mind.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Yes, that's what was bothering me. Too many superstructures of weirdness to pull you out of the narrative.

Exactly. When taken in context with the franchise too it sort of ad fantasy elements that go beyond what could possibly fit…
Taken in its own right it's a bit fat.

marcorossi wrote:
The basic idea of Fury road is something like a feminist theory but taken to the extreme and grotesque.

True, but more like a fantasy, silly version of that theory… Like you say exactly, but to a magical extent haha!

Dune, part 2 Interestingly, I liked it a lot. I didn't like part 1, so I wasn't going into it with high expectations. I have also always loved David Lynch's “Dune,” so my bar was set pretty high.

When I read the book in my late teens, I remember thinking that the world-building was mind-blowing, but the plot was uninspired. So mine is certainly a subjective opinion.

My impression was that part one was mostly focused on the plot and the superficial details, while part two really delved into the world-building more deeply. So in part two, I just got more of the things that I care about.

The ending gave a pretty clear impression that there is a part three coming down the pike (possibly starring Anya Taylor-Joy).

I've often thought of Dune 2 as a volume of exposition to prepare for Dune 3, haha. Of course that doesn't do it justice, really. Also, I've only read the books so the movie versions may be quite different for all I know, especially in terms of pacing.
The world building is stunning in all of them anyway. Frank Herbert paid a lot of attention to detail, without shoving it into your face. It just all has its natural place, as it would have in any real world.

Must have been a movie maker's nightmare to get that just right. If they did.

Watched The Return with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche the other day.

It's a take/interpretation of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after 20 years and how he reunites with Penelope after (spoiler alert?) he completely annihilates the suitors that have been rampaging the land and eating off his wealth trying to pressure Penelope to marry one of them, assuming him dead.

Good things first: Amazing performances by Fiennes, Binoche, and pretty much everyone in the cast. They all brought their A game to this and I really enjoyed that. They show how little human life is worth in a world where everything is settled by blood. The cinematography is really good, too, and the choreography of the fight scenes really drives home how a true veteran of Troy fights against a bunch of bullies that have never seen battle. Eurecleia (Odysseus' nurse) IS AMAZING. Exactly spot on, as Homer describes her. I loved her in every scene. Lastly, the scene with the stringing of Odysseus' bow was excellent.

Things I'm ambivalent about: There are no gods in this movie. Which I appreciate on the one hand, but on the other they were so pivotally important in the story of the Odyssey I'm not sure it can really function without them very well. (Odysseus' disguise is literally divine intervention. He's not as old as Fiennes. In fact considering he couldn't have been more than 16-17 when he left for Troy, he's just pushing 40 when he returns, and he looks an old man solely because Athena made it so) The reasoning given for Odysseus' late return doesn't jive with his character at all, given that now he's not actually obstructed by the gods. On the other hand, it's not that it CAN'T work as a story without the gods but it does need some serious reworking, turning the gods into forces of nature and they didn't do that in The Return.

Negative things: The script? Director? Anyway the creative choices COMPLETELY miss the mark of the essence of who Odysseus and Penelope are. They are an OG power couple that were separated and then reunite. They are two sides of the same coin, arguably with Penelope being even more cunning than Odysseus (she managed to hold off dozens of aggressive men by literally stringing them along for more than a decade AND kept her son from being killed). Penelope had NO qualms about the suitors being butchered. Being a creature of her society, she also had no questions about why her husband went to war. And she never, not once, had even a hint of a thing for Antinoous. My gosh. And she was never at odds with Odysseus. She challenged him to make sure it was him, but she didn't chew him out for going to Troy to pillage the city/ wage war on it/ etc. Sometimes, Penelope's soliloques come across as anachronistic and that took me out of the story.

Telemachus was not a whiny audacious brat to his mother OR his father (which he is in the movie. They make it reasonably understandable why but still, that's not Telemachus). He was eager to find his father and when he did find him, he immediately joined forces to kill the suitors. There was no angst involved, and the reason for that was because such was the culture of the era. Prestige, rank, honoring of hospitality and honoring of the hosts WAS FUNDAMENTAL. It is not illustrated at all in the movie and it feels like the writers didn't understand Mycenean or Greek culture at all.

Costuming was …not great. They looked like prehistoric people not Myceneans. I could buy that for the shepherds in the mountains but in the main palace halls (even a palace in disrepair) I expected murals, good lighting, fine clothing, COLORFUL clothing, and a ton of jewelry. Elaborate jewelry. There was some research done for sure but it's like they just took the images of the ruins and just plopped the actors there with a couple of woven towels wrapped around them most of the time. Thankfully, the movie is atmospheric enough that you don't quite notice. It's like it hits you the day after you've seen the movie really. (What happened to me)

All in all… I'd give it 7/10 just because the acting was so good. I still recommend the movie, just don't take it as anything more than being inspired by the Odyssey, rather than adapting it or interpreting it in its proper spirit.

Severance is SO good. Probably my best watch since Mr. Robot. And Mr. Robot was written brilliantly. This is more about how the base idea has all these layers that go perfectly together as distopic sci-fi, corporate satire, psychological, philosophical, mystery… If you haven't watched it yet, it's worth your time, especially now, that season 2 started.

I'm watching a range of Sitcoms because it hard work looking after my recovering tomcat and I need something to make me happy :)

Rewatching Parks and Rec:
This is my 3rd or 4th time for some episodes. I love it so much. It's so positive, fun and friendly. And it has such stand out actors in it.
I loved it from the first episode I ever saw: A show about life in an unimportant local government office and people trying to push though projects and run things… YES PLEASE. <3

Rewatching Absolutely Fabulous:
Some episodes I've seen many times and some I haven't seen since their first airing in the 90s. It's surprisingly modern. It's SO well written and acted. It's a jewel! Amazing series about a wealthy, stuckup fashionista, her coked out best friend and prim daughter.

Drifters:
A series about three 20 something women who are best friends, finding their way, trying to earn money, keep jobs and find places to live while partying and misbehaving. It feels very current. And it portrays women as normal humans: being stupid, gross, bad, making poor decisions, and having fun.
Too many old sexist shows portrayed women as perfect dolls on a pedestal and too many new ones do exactly the same thing while pretending to be “woke” but in reality just repeating the same sexist tropes.

Siblings:
This is about a 20 something brother and sister pair living together and getting into scrapes… They're like the brother and sister from Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a way, they're both selfish, self centered, stupid people who ruin the lives of others and ultimately have a bad time themselves.
I don't like this one much.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Rewatching Absolutely Fabulous:
Some episodes I've seen many times and some I haven't seen since their first airing in the 90s. It's surprisingly modern. It's SO well written and acted. It's a jewel! Amazing series about a wealthy, stuckup fashionista, her coked out best friend and prim daughter.

Absolutely Fabulous is one of my all-time favorite TV shows!

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Absolutely Fabulous is one of my all-time favorite TV shows!

It's top quality and frightening how little the episodes have aged.
But also weird how when I first watched it I had all the sympathy for daughter Saffi, but now it's all for Edina and Patsy. - but also Edina's exes XD

Jentry Chau VS the underworld (trailer): a recent netflix serie, targeted to adolescents. It has action, horror (but that horror-action thing, not true horror) and romance elements. I think it is very good:

Pros: the serie is self conclusive in its 13 episodes (maybe they will do a 2nd season, but is not needed), the animation is manga-like but not too much, the horror/action scenes are very well done.

Con: since it is targeted to teenagers, some elements of the plot sound a bit stretched if you are not a teenager anymore.

It reminded me a bit of Big Truble in Little China, both because of the eastern mythology setting and because of the humour/action mix, although it lacks the parody element of Big Trouble.

Edited for spelling

Who needs Joker or “You”, when you can watch Eric Roberts in this series of Lifetime trash as he plays a successful and professionally acclaimed doctor that also just happens to be a deranged incel maniac with fits of rage, stalking his female patients. And you can tell he loves every minute of it. I'm only through the first film, but it's amazing how batshit insane and funny a film can get if it takes itself seriously enough, while throwing in cliché after cliché. Hope the others won't disappoint either.

I watched indiana jones and the dial of destiny and i have to say it was fun. Rating it i would say i liked it more than the second movie!
The movie had tons of action, snappy dialogue and harrison ford's signature crankiness.

It also showed off ford in all his aged glory and didn't shy away from it. several franchises reboot characters like batman, superman and james bond retooling for a new generation but ford is identified with jones the same way connery was with bond.

the de-aging effects were decent and the new characters added to the story. the movie had a lot of nostalgia for the indiana jones fan with a heartwarming scene at the end.

I went into this movie not excited after the terrible crystal skull entry but i was wrong this movie is good. i think ageism played a big role in negativity surrounding this film

I must seek this out and watch it! Sounds pretty good despite perceived flaws.

Tantz_Aerine wrote:
Watched The Return with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche the other day.

takoyama wrote:
…
I went into this movie not excited after the terrible crystal skull entry but i was wrong this movie is good. i think ageism played a big role in negativity surrounding this film

I personally liked the movie enough, but for example my mother went with a friend of her own age and they didn't like it because it did show Ford as an old man. I think somehow it reminded them of aging. So in this sense it is ageism, but not in the usual sense of the term.

OTOH, I watched Indiana Jones and the temple of doom when I was 8 years old, so:

1) first of all something that you see when you are 8 will influence you more than something you see at 48, so it is obvious that for me Temple of Doom will also be better, but also

2) when the Indiana Jones came out, it was extremely fast paced for its times, so it was special. Rewatching the old movies doesn't give the same effect because, since Spielberg had a lot of success, everybody copied him, so that modern day action movies are moch more fast paced that movies from the 70s. So in some sense Indiana Jones (the old movies) are victims of their own success: they were copied so much that today they don't look special at all. In this sense also the last one is a nice action movie, but it is not “great”, it is one of the many good action movies that are now on offer.

dpat57 wrote:
I must seek this out and watch it! Sounds pretty good despite perceived flaws.

Tantz_Aerine wrote:
Watched The Return with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche the other day.

This inspired me to seek out the Armond Asante miniseries from 1997. I always liked that one. Bernadette Peters is wonderful as Circe and Isabella Rosselinni makes a very good Athena. But that's me. I must have watched the Kirk Douglas movie a dozen times growing up.

This new one looks like how we deconstructed the Odyssey in my college Greek history class going in all about culture and societal roles of the characters for post Mycenean Greece. (Formerly known as Greek Dark Ages, a now outdated term actively discouraged in the new scholarship of the Bronze Age Collapse.)

I watched Sorcerer and naturally, when it came to the 2nd half of the movie, it blew me away (get it? blew me away). Which is exactly what makes a now 48-years old movie great, that it can put you on the edge of your seat like very few movies made these days. I think a lot of this builds on the Vietnam War, because it's exactly how I imagine the psychological effects of war to be: the incredible tension that any second could be your last, the struggle to focus with all your might, while facing again and again the very real possibility that you never had any control over your fate to begin with. Plus, of course you're risking your life to protect the investment of some huge company that considers you expendable. And of course, Apocalypse Now is another masterpiece that deals with what war does to people, but that is in your face direct and Sorcerer doesn't even need piles of bodies or battles to show you absolute terror and madness, all it needs is sending a truck filled with nitroglycerin across a swinging, damaged rope bridge in the middle of an epic storm (without CGI, might I add, holy shit, that scene is definitely in the top 5 most impressive things ever filmed for a movie). I'm sure the older The Wages of Fear and the original writing it's based on has its strengths as well (not the 2024 one, based on trailer and reviews that looks like trash).

InkyMoonDrop wrote:

Severance is SO good. Probably my best watch since Mr. Robot. And Mr. Robot was written brilliantly. This is more about how the base idea has all these layers that go perfectly together as distopic sci-fi, corporate satire, psychological, philosophical, mystery… If you haven't watched it yet, it's worth your time, especially now, that season 2 started.

Severance is great - I've been excited to watch it ever since I heard about the concept. Didn't actually see it until Christmastime - and now caught up on season 2 so far. Fantastic show. Such a cool idea. A slow burn scifi-drama-thriller… very human characters. Loving it so far. I'll be sad when season 2 is over. Hopefully it won't be too long until season 3!

bravo1102 wrote:

This inspired me to seek out the Armond Asante miniseries from 1997. I always liked that one. Bernadette Peters is wonderful as Circe and Isabella Rosselinni makes a very good Athena.

THAT is a great series! With gods!!!!
When it came on back in the day I was SOOO sceptical that it would be an good, especially coming from a greeting card company haha! But I was shocked. They made GOOD stuff- they had Gulliver's Travels and the Arabian Nights etc, all well done.
They even had the real hairstyles I think! I remember the appearance of Agamemnon (LOVE his name) and his brother Menelaus and the hair and beards were 100% <3
Good series.

———

I've started another anime series on Crunchy Roll, an Isekai:
Campfire Cooking in Anther World with my Absurd Skill
I know the Isekai trend is going on too long and too dumb now but this is another tilted take and it's more fun because of it.
The “hero” guy is and “older” 27 year old salleryman who gets transported by mistake along with the usual highschoolers. He doesn't get assigned any special powers apart from “online shopping”, so he asks to be allowed to leave the kingdom and go his own way so he won't be mixed up in dramas and maybe killed.
He becomes a merchant using his online shopping skill and makes yummy meals from the food he buys and the local game people catch using stuff he bought online. It's really nice and fun :)

So far it's not pervy or overpowered like the bad stuff in this genre can become.

Re-watching Desert Punk -

This is anime from the early 2000s based on a late 90s manga.

Synopsis:
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Desert Punk is a mercenary based in the “Kanto Desert”. He's one of the best at what he does and doesn't care who pays him. He's greedy, totally amoral, lecherous, and a bastard, but a great fighter. It's an action comedy with some drama.

It's clever, a little arty, and doesn't always follow typical story structure or character development. But at the same time it pretends to be something that is typical and conventional so it's weird.
It can be hard to watch at times because Desert Punk is SO amoral and repellent. He sort of has a hear of gold under there somewhere though… at least from memory.

Watching it for the second time I don't know how I got through it the first time LOL!
It's very good but hard to watch watch a person with that alignment. Very anti-hero.

Severance is great - I've been excited to watch it ever since I heard about the concept. Didn't actually see it until Christmastime - and now caught up on season 2 so far. Fantastic show. Such a cool idea. A slow burn scifi-drama-thriller… very human characters. Loving it so far. I'll be sad when season 2 is over. Hopefully it won't be too long until season 3!

Hah! I'm watching The Conversation right now and noticed how similar their music is. Perhaps a “hidden” homage?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRz8Msb43cQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-_SX5MheDI

I like stuff like this. Loki did that, constantly referencing A Clockwork Orange through the anti-hero MC, the main theme, the retro sets, the literal orange-colored clock mascot… :D And both the originals and these fresh theme songs are pretty cool too.

Watched She-Ra and the princesses of power (2018) on Netflix, and it's surprisingly good.
I binged like 6 seasons in a pair of weeks (it helps that the episodes are 20 minutes long).

Trailer

I tripped over “Barry” on one of the streaming channels and have been watching several episodes a day, I just got to season three. Bill Hader's very good, the storylines are fun. Although some grim things often happen. And I gotta say that sometimes I skip forward past some of the actors doing acting scenes when they get too corny, but I'm enjoying everything else.

Just want to say that Flow winning the Oscar for Animated Feature film as not only a pretty amazing little independent film from Europe, but also something made in Blender is really great and after so many years of Disney-Pixar films getting that award I didn't expect it to happen. I'm not sure how much this was good marketing, and obviously having 3,5 million EUR for the budget is not the same as just spending years making something in your basement with your own pocket money (Friedkin said Cassavetes was perhaps the last truly independent filmmaker, since he ventured with his own money, if his movies failed he was gonna lose his house), but still, it should be inspiring to indie creators.

Fieren: Beyond Journey's end
This is an anime.
It's a fantasy (NOT Isekai). The premise is that the small group of heroes have finally killed the “Demon King”, and they go their separate ways.
The party consisted of a “hero”, an elf mage, a priest, and a dwarf.

We follow the elf, Fieren. She's much longer lived than the others. Their journey together lasted 10 years and changed all their lives and the whole world but she's 1000 years old so it was barely a blink to her…

It's a really interesting take! We get into her perspective- she never completely clicked with her group because of the age difference and perception of time and now she's trying to make up for that, visiting them as they age and die… which is often heartbreaking. She's also coming to terms with the legacy she's left the world with the changes she's wrought over her massive lifetime. We even get flashbacks to her first teacher who is now regarded as a mythical figure by the people of this world.

It was really slow to start and it was hard to get into the calmness and relflecvtiveness of it but it picks up speed and adds action and adventure and drama as it goes. I love the focus on age, change and mortality.