Yeah, I’m still on the first, but noticed that season 3 only has less than half the amount of episodes. Thought it may have run out of steam
Pass on "Stillwater". Long, slow grind unless that's your thing. Matt Damon with the Covid moneygrab flik.
Watched The Suicide Squad last night on HBO Max Was entertaining and good for some laughs, but I wouldn’t classify it anything more than just decent. I am not sure if I would recommend it being worth the cost of the theater, the plot was a little ridiculous at times. Outside of the Dark Knight trilogy have still not found many DC based flicks at the level of most of the MCU ones. But in all fairness I will say that I grew up at a big Marvel comics guy.
Yeah, I felt the same way watching The Suicide Squad. It was fine. It is getting overhyped online and with reviews. James Gunn did a great job directing, but the story is weak, as are most of the characters.
All in all, I’d give a Black Widow a no-frills B, saved only by the performance of Florence Pugh as Yelena, opposite Scarlett Johansson. A good enough performance that I actually looked up her name. Two big issues with this movie, though - both script-related, but one of them isn’t entirely the writers’ fault. The part that WAS their fault - some spots with pretty lazy writing and enough holes in the story to be annoying snd distracting. The last 10-minutes is stocked to the gills with both. The second glaring script issue was the result of Marvel Studios waiting until now to do a Black Widow movie. Her character has probably been in more movies than any other - ten years since her character first appeared - but Marvel waited until NOW, after the full Avengers story has played out, to fill us all in on her backstory. They had too much to do and only a two-hour movie to do it. I get where Black Widow isn’t a strong enough character to support a movie on her own, which is why her sister Yelena is so important to this movie; but, if you’re going to do a movie featuring the BW character, you needed to do it 5-6 years ago. I could pick half a dozen Marvel movies that contributed nothing to the Avengers storyline. Chucking out any one of those and giving one of those slots to Natasha Romanov would have been a better choice. I suspect they know this, but figured it out too late to do anything about it, because they made the same mistake with the Hawkeye character but scrapped a backstory feature film mid-script. You know about such nonsense when you’re pissed off about a poorly-scripted movie to look things up. In other news - My nephew made me watch The Tomorrow War. I didn’t want to, but wasn’t disappointed. A little hazy with its time travel logic, but two better hours than I expected. Biggest movie surprise of the last two-years for me? Brace yourself - Cruella. Maybe a product of two really poor years for film and entertainment generally, but a pretty good script and two fantastic performances by Emma Stone and Emma Thompson. I mean - for women. One new-ish movie recommendation: The Vault on Netflix. I had it running in the background while doing something else, and it caught enough of my interest to go back and watch again without distraction. A decent caper movie.
Watched extraction last night on netflix, with the chris who plays thor. It was pretty good. Not that over the top for an action film these days either.
I just saw a preview for Eternals. I don't think all of the CGI and smooth production conditioning in the world is going to save that turd, but I've been wrong about MCU movies before.
'The Family That Walks on All Fours'. I saw this documentary years back. Don't do it. Which means you'll all do it. EDIT: Autocorrect. Ugh.
Yeah, I am hoping they made that trailer purposely generic because it did not look interesting at all. I have heard great buzz for Eternals, so maybe they just made it that way to keep the story a surprise. We will see. Good post, Jack. Welcome back. I agree with all of that. I will check out The Vault this week.
Stray (2020) If you love dogs, or exotic foreign settings (for us 'Mericans anyway), or award-winning movie-making, I highly recommend this movie, and if you love all three of those things, it's a must-see.
Definitely looking forward to Dune. I wish Eliza Dusku would start the ball rolling on The Black Company. That one is going to take us by storm if it is done right.
The Black Company has the potential to be as big as The Game of Thrones series was. It doesn't have the HBO hype machine behind it so it won't get there but it was a better set of stories than George RR Martin ever put together. I introduced a friend to the series a decade or so ago. She called me up one night and asked why I had turned her on to such a derivative series. Great writing but it stole from x and y and z in the process. I told her to look at the copyright date on the first book. The "derivative" writer had actually been the defining writer for the genre. Everybody else had stolen from him, making his 30 year-old (at that point) works the centerpiece of the dark fantasy universe. The problem I have with Eliza Dusku being the person who has acquired the rights is that she's doing it as a vanity piece, planning to play the The Lady - who is one of the main characters in the series. I'm not sure she has the role in her and I'm almost certain based on the interviews I've seen her give that she does not understand that The Lady is not the protagonist in the series. The protagonist shifts slightly from trilogy to trilogy but it is always the Annalist of the Black Company who narrates the tale, telling the stories of the men and women in the company. BTW, if you haven't read it I'd highly recommend reading at least The Black Company, the first book in the series. It's one of the 10 books I think every fan of Fantasy/Sci-Fi should read. It has a different take on morality than the usual Fantasy trope and it manages to maintain that difference through many transitions. And of course, everybody should know about Tonk.
It's been a long time but I read the whole Black Company series, and yes it was great and a unique reading experience. I really don't see something good about it coming from her though. Is she going to use the vision she developed on Buffy the Vampire Slayer to guide the production?
I think she just got pitched the project from the standpoint of "there is this great female lead role and you'd be perfect to play her." Obviously her role as Faith Lehane, a morally twisted slayer who nonetheless is killing the big evils in the world probably informed the opinion of the person who pitched her. Dushku was offered a spin-off as Faith when the Buffy series wound down. She declined that offer and has probably been looking for something to top it ever since. The Lady is like Faith Lehane writ large, with all the moral ambiguities and yet part of something bigger wherever she goes. I'm guessing Dushku sees the possibilities in developing the character. Unfortunately the series is not about character development. It's about a big fork in the road and the path the characters of the company take when they reach that fork. On a related note: character development always comes at the expense of the big story. Shows that spend a lot of time developing their characters almost inevitably lose something in the grand theme as they do that. I've written a bit here and there and I'm always looking to develop the grand theme over the individual characters. If a character feels like it could use some real work I tend to kill that character off to save the big story. There are only so many hours and resources available in this type of project and it is much better when those assets are expended to advance the tale as opposed to getting caught in the cul-de-sac of character development.
I think the advent of streaming media and the boost it got from Covid is about to start paying dividends for things like epic fiction if they don't go on the cheap like Netflix has. Online platforms have a far better accessibility for a global audience than studio productions and network media, what it lacks is the gaudy funding of the big production companies, but that is slowly changing. Large scale epic productions have a far better chance of staying true to source material on a platform like that as they learn the lessons that the network production companies failed to.
Saw the first half of The Green Knight, i thought it was excellent. The gf thought it was slow. It's by A24 which i love, so if you like that production company i think you'll like this film as well.
