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well why not posted:It was cool and tough and 'justified' so it works. People think that if you're a cop outside of your home country, you can basically just murder fools. Setting aside the whole "extrajudicial execution" issue here, what the gently caress is going on with that editing? Slowmo! Fastmo! Bright flashes! Fades! Sound cutting in and out! It's like the editor had only just bought adobe premiere a day ago and went hog wild on all the effects.
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Aug 3, 2017 14:41
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Guy Mann posted:A lot of The Shield has aged pretty poorly because it tried so hard to show that this ain't your daddy's basic cable cop show in a way that looks hilarious to modern eyes, but nothing tops the end of the first episode: there's a huge dramatic moment that more or less the entire rest of the series hinges on and the entire scene is set to a loving Kid Rock song. That reminds me of the season 2 finale of The O.C.. Now, I haven't actually watched that show myself, but apparently it was a fairly dramatic moment complete with a character death and everything. And then they put it to this music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46LisJJzBQ
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Aug 30, 2017 12:20
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well why not posted:Ally McBeal was 100% replaced by Boston Legal in the sort-of-dramatic lawyer comedy. Speaking of Boston Legal, in retrospect Alan Shore's (Spader's character) ongoing verbal sexual harassment of basically anyone in a skirt is pretty loving  . I mean, the show at least does acknowledge he's a creepy lecher, but it's generally laughed off as just a character quirk.
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Sep 6, 2017 10:06
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U-DO Burger posted:The Man in the High Castle is a recent, ongoing show (based on an older book but w/e) but it already aged poorly because the best, most sympathetic character on the show by far is a literal Nazi I'll have you know that Nobosuke Tagomi is most certainly not a Nazi. 
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Oct 17, 2017 07:50
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maltesh posted:See "Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog." Lasted one season. I barely remember anything from that show despite watching most of it, but you better believe the theme song stuck with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx9qvcXFEyo
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Oct 24, 2017 15:54
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maltesh posted:I remember very little about the show myself, being pretty far out of the demographic at the time... but I've never heard that version of the theme. It's definitely catchier than the theme I recall from Fox Kids. Was it used outside of the US, or something? I'm reasonably sure it was used as the theme in Germany, at least, so yeah. Might have been spurred by the Kelly Family being better known/more popular over here at the time.
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Oct 25, 2017 18:53
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spincube posted:He drove, angry, in Drive Angry, is what. There is nothing in my heart but earnest love for that film. He was also pretty great in Ghost Rider 2, Kick-rear end, and particularly Bad Lieutenant. Basically Cage seems to need a particular kind of director who's capable of really harnessing the full Cage insanity and making it work well.
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Nov 8, 2017 22:20
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dissss posted:I found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy incredibly different to follow because the main characters were so difficult to tell apart. I had that same problem with (the otherwise mediocre) American Assassin. The protagonist looks like this:  Whereas the antagonist looks like this:  They're not twins or anything, but throw a baseball cap on either of them and it's starting to become different to quickly recognise which one you're looking at offhand. Particularly since the movie liked to hop around between perspectives and locales with relatively little in the way of introduction.
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Feb 19, 2018 20:50
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Pick posted:Brooklyn 99 has always been problematic, but it was recently announced it wouldn't be renewed. And as if to rub salt into the wound, Tim Allen's thoroughly garbage and racist show Last Man Standing was just revived and picked up for a new season on Fox.
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May 11, 2018 15:41
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SpacePig posted:Link? I can't find anything confirming this, and the only thing keeping me being actively upset about B99's cancellation is that at least there's a chance it's replaced with something good. Like, B99 I think ran its course, because this season was kind of wearing thin on me, but if they cancelled it to make room for Tim Goddamn Allen, I will be incredibly angry. There's been no official announcement yet, but supposedly Allen just recently closed a deal to that effect: http://deadline.com/2018/05/last-man-standing-eyes-return-fox-tim-allen-1202379904/ . So we might just get lucky and the whole thing gets axed at the last moment.
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May 11, 2018 18:09
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JacquelineDempsey posted:
The same thing happened with the pretty decent Almost Human as well. Which hurt it pretty bad, since the most fun part of the show was the growing buddy-cop dynamic between Urban and Ealy. So you'd have one episode fairly early on where they're already palling around like old friends, and then the very next one they're back to a pretty cold "barely even know this guy" state, and then bouncing back and forth between those.
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May 29, 2018 09:38
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fruit on the bottom posted:I’m guessing that show must have had some drastic improvement by the end of the season because otherwise yikes Yeah, I gave it a try after all the glowing reviews and bounced off hard after a handful of episodes. Pretty much none of the jokes landed for me, but the constant attempts to be funny sure managed to undermine any attempts at drama.
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May 29, 2018 22:17
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Araenna posted:I mean, is it any different when a human experiences an emotion? Hormones are released due to stimuli, and we have an emotion in response. Doesn't seem that different than a program running due to stimuli. Hell, in a very (very, very) abstract way that's already kinda sorta how machine learning already works today. Based on some metric you provide the AI with either positive or negative feedback depending on what it's doing, to get it to develop towards a certain result. Layer a sci-fi level of sophistication and personality on top of that, and the positive feedback might reasonably be described as "happiness", and the negative feedback as "sadness".
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Jul 13, 2018 18:48
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Krispy Wafer posted:I couldn’t get over the part where he had to wheel and deal to avoid a lawsuit by the family of a girl who died texting and driving. They made a crisis where one wouldn’t have ever existed. It gets worse later on when he actually becomes president and unveils his flagship piece legislation: "America Works". Basically a reverse New Deal that would eliminate most/all welfare programs in exchange for a massive governmental job program. It's incredibly dumb, politically infeasible, hugely unpopular, and still this character who never has shown much attachment to any one political agenda is completely married to it and fights tooth and nail to push it through.
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Aug 26, 2018 22:23
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Winklebottom posted:Too bad about present day John Cleese Present day John Cleese also does cast the whole "What have the Romans ever done for us" scene in a rather different light. It is, after all, a bunch of Brits sitting around a table joking that the natives never appreciate all the supposed upsides of being colonized.
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Feb 4, 2020 16:09
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Boston Legal had its moments. My parents used to get a kick out of the end of show quips on the balcony. I kind of want to rewatch some of that sometime and see where it falls apart and doesn’t live up to my memories. Yeah, Boston Legal is pretty  by now. A lot of things that were written as "Oh look at these two old sacks being horny all the time" are in fact actually more like "Look at these two senior partners committing severe workplace sexual harassment towards every single female colleague and client". Still has decent bits, but goddamn that is pervasive.
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Sep 7, 2020 12:41
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Urban was also quite good in Almost Human, though that ran only for a single season before it was unceremoniously cancelled.
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Sep 29, 2020 10:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:La Marseillaise and the Soviet hymn are the only good national anthems to ever exist. Oh Canada bilingually gets an honourable mention. South Africa's is also legit. "gently caress you, we're using all our languages, go learn how to pronounce Xhosa words."
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Nov 2, 2020 09:59
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God, this discussion reminds me of when we were playing a PnP game called Degenesis. Basically it's set in post-apocalyptic Europe after a series of asteroids hit it and released a variety of fungal spores that lead to funky mutations all over. We mostly picked it up cause it had a neat and unique aesthetic and played a couple of self-made campaigns in that setting. Then at some point the developers dropped a big old campaign/setting splatbook, and we decided to give that one a try. First couple of sessions were pretty straightforward: go to a new city, come across an important NPC being hassled by some local religious fanatics, rescue her, and then she has a big old prophetic vision that kicks off the plot. So far, pretty standard RPG fare. Except, as it turned out afterwards, that was the version heavily edited for sanity by our GM. Because as the encounter was written in the book, it would have involved   the NPC being gangraped by those fanatics and screaming out the prophecy in some hosed up orgasmic episode while the players are expected to just kinda stand by and watch.As it turns out, that whole escapade appears to be pretty true to form for the development studio as a whole, and we ended up dropping that whole mess shortly afterwards.
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Nov 9, 2020 12:04
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pentyne posted:Newsroom was embarrassingly bad in so many ways not just the "great man" mythos they tried to do with Jeff Daniels but all the insanely terrible dramatic poo poo they tried to pull. The Genoa plotline would been a failing grade in a high school creative writing clads. God, the Genoa plotline, why'd you have to remind me  Cliff's notes for those fortunate enough to not have seen it themselves: At one point, the Newsroom crew catch wind of a military operation called "Operation Genoa" where US military not only used lethal chemical weapons, but used them on civilians. A lot of hay is made out of how explosive and influential this story is going to be if it pans out, causing everyone to work themselves into a frenzy over it. So far, so good. After all, the show likes to (pretend to) be topical, so having a go at a US war crime, even a fictional one, could make for a perfectly valid storyline. But then, a twist! They run the story, and the government can immediately and trivially prove that alleged incident never happened. This is of course a major blow to the reputation and credibility of the Newsroom program. Much of the story line is then focused on the ways they hosed up to the point where they ended up running a patently false story. And while "actually this alleged US war crime was a fabricated lie and never happened" is really not a good look, there's still a perfectly valid storyline in there about why journalistic due diligence is so important, and how even small lapses can add up to major mistakes. But then, another twist! Turns out the whole false story pretty much boiled down to two causes: First, their newest hire (a firebrand with an axe to grind about US drone strikes and war crimes) maliciously edited an interview to make it look more convincing, in order to fast-track a story he believed to be a sure thing. Secondly, a critical piece of evidence they relied on was in fact falsified and leaked by a government official specifically so that the Newsroom would run the story and look bad. So, moral of the story? Uh, journalistic malfeasance is a thing that exists, but when it happens in the Newsroom, the core crew is functionally blameless cause it's all the fault of bad actors. Well, except for two female characters, one of whom hired one of those bad actors while the other unintentionally messed up another interview by asking mildly leading questions. Because Sorkin cannot help but display his loathing of women whenever possible.
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Nov 22, 2020 13:52
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Best QI panelists are Sue Perkins and that old guy who has an anecdote for literally everything, don't @ me.
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Dec 17, 2020 10:02
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Alhazred posted:They also had an episode about the bloodthirsty maniac Napoleon versus patriotic good guy Washington. Oh, I remember that one. The tests were also thoroughly biased in order to get Washington the win, because of course they were. 
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Feb 19, 2021 12:38
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Asterite34 posted:AoT does seem fairly anti-fascist in its leanings, but it does that thing a lot of Japanese stuff does where it uses a lot of fascist and vaguely Nazi-esque imagery because they think it looks cool. Not to say Japan is unaware of Nazi atrocities, but they seem a bit more inclined sometimes to see western fascist iconography as "that cool style the Germans were into back in the 40s." That touches on the one thing I that I actually ended up catching about the whole AoT thing. Apparently the people who are related to the first Titans (and can in turn potentially turn into Titans) are very explicitly coded as 1930s Jews, complete with being forced into ghettoes and made to wear star-shaped insignia distinguishing them. And, well, "these people are an intrinsically different monstrous race who may pass as regular people but could easily destroy your society from within" is a super bad look in that context.
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Mar 13, 2021 18:37
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Whybird posted:"British comedy has not aged well" should not really be news to anybody, but jesus christ Harry Enfield was a vile little poo poo without the slightest redeeming feature, wasn't he I watched this and kept waiting for any sort of punchline or attempt at humour, but there just... weren't any. Just three minutes of "wow I sure hate women". 
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Jul 16, 2021 10:47
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One of the weirder episodes I remember from HIMYM was one where Ted was dating some psychologist for a bit. After she had to spend some time with the gang she basically went "this is the most incestuously unhealthy codepent group of friends I have ever seen, gently caress this I'm out", and the reaction was basically them (and by extension the show) just shrugging and carrying on as before.
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Sep 3, 2021 14:00
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christmas boots posted:Horny aside tbh I don't even think it would work on a practical level, seems like it would be very difficult to move in. That's something the actress specifically confirmed even. They initially tried a costume closer to the original one, but it turned out she simply outright couldn't move properly in it. Aside from that, it apparently also tended to shift around and ride up and was overall horrendously uncomfortable. Naturally, the nerds' response to that was "well here's a cosplayer leisurely walking along, so actually you technically can move in it!!!"
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Sep 7, 2021 08:55
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Hell, I could see Dafoe having a legitimately fun time shooting it. Imagine reading through a script and coming to the realization that it would be physically impossible for you to overact and that you can go as ham as you like.
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Nov 4, 2021 15:28
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There's also a nice bit of characterization in the storyline with the queen of fables about Harley still having standards even while pursuing villain status. Sure, she'll maim and/or kill a guy when he has it coming, but she's not gonna get into indiscriminate mass murder just for giggles. It's really a weird perfect storm of a show that works so much better than it has any right to. Perestroika has a new favorite as of 19:18 on Nov 16, 2021 |
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Nov 16, 2021 16:46
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On that note, every now and then I remember the covers for the German translations of Game of Thrones: "I'm here to draw shirtless vikings and I don't care what you say it's about."
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Dec 6, 2021 20:13
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That reminds me, I recently ended up watching The Rookie (I just like Nathan Fillion  ), which does strike a somewhat different tone. As in, they have a public defender secondary character who is shown to do good and important work, every cop is shown as being extremely conscientious about following all the rules, the use of force generally seems to be not excessive, and so on. It's still obviously and undeniably copaganda since it just acts like corruption and abuses of force don't really happen, but I guess it's less... malicious than the likes of SVU, which outright celebrate that kind of thing. I wonder if that's indicative of a shift in attitudes, or just a coincidence.
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Jan 24, 2022 11:13
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Ellie Trashcakes posted:Weirdly enough, a lot of terfs are wildly antisemitic and a lot of their theories on WHO'S BEHIND THE TRANS AGENDA are similarly so Yeah, there's one particular high-profile academic terf who built up a whole conspiracy theory/headcanon about how the entire trans "movement" by one particular jewish millionaire who is also a transhumanist that wants to turn everybody into robots or some poo poo. She's one of the more annoying ones because she usually gets incredibly condescending to people who never heard about her theories, along the lines of "Oh, you're a trans activist but you don't even know your own history (that I completely made up)?!"
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Feb 9, 2022 09:07
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Tiggum posted:Different standards of beauty? Well yes you see, one has a slim waist and big tits, and the other has a slightly slimmer waist and big tits. Diversity!
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Feb 10, 2022 11:41
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Oh my god, I'm watching The Last Ship, and it's such rank propaganda it almost loops back around to being funny again. The basic setup is that some US Navy ship was on a months-long training operation under radio silence, and while they were at it a global super pandemic swept the world and basically ended most governments, and the titular last ship has a couple of CDC scientists aboard who might just be able to create a vaccine. Basically their first stop after learning about this is literally Guantanamo Bay, to resupply food and fuel. Once there, it turns out that the US government basically abandoned the place, and the few private contractors left there decided to free the remaining prisoners, since it's basically the end of the world. Said prisoners immediately turn around and attack the remaining contractors, somehow materialize turbans and shemaghs from somewhere, and lay an ambush for the ship's crew Taliban-style. At the end of the episode the ship's captain ends up in a standoff with the prisoners' leader, who (quite reasonably) demands that the captain doesn't take their food and leave them to starve. The captain then literally drops a "We don't negotiate with terrorists" and murders the rest of them. This poo poo would have been weird and gross if it was made near the beginning of the "War on Terror", but that this got made in loving 2014 is mindboggling Fake edit: And of course it turns out that the one surviving private contractor they rescued of the island is characterized as a cool  tier 1 super operator.
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May 1, 2022 15:23
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Cleretic posted:I've been making it a thing over the last couple years to watch through classic anime I know I'd like that I missed through having poor access to it over my life--and given my tastes, it's been mostly sci-fi and mecha anime. There's a lot that actually ages extremely well (Evangelion honestly hasn't aged a day), while some are very clearly of their time even if they're still very good (basically every Gundam series). Not even sure about "they wouldn't do this today". A while back I tried out "The Seven Deadly Sins" as Netflix kept pushing it at me and it seemed to have pretty decent ratings. Turns out one running gag in there is that the protagonist guy keeps constantly peeping on, groping, and otherwise sexually harassing one particular female character, with the joke being that she's largely too oblivious to really notice. And that poo poo was made in like 2014.
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May 10, 2022 15:15
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Sounds like the time I had a creepy coworker try to get me to watch Goblin Slayer because it was so cool, but added "Just so you know, it starts off really rapey. But it gets better." God, that reminds me. A friend had pretty highly recommended a show to me, but I had forgotten the name and only could remember it was "[Noun] Slayer". I saw Goblin Slayer pop up on Netflix, figured it was that, and went into that with pretty high hopes. Turns out it's absolutely horrid rapey trash that was clearly written and drawn one-handed and I noped out half an episode in. Later when I asked that friend "hey what the gently caress?", it turned out they'd said "Demon Slayer", which is indeed actually pretty good.
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May 11, 2022 07:52
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It's kind of funny, I'm actually watching Breaking Bad for the very first time right now, and it's striking how absolutely loathsome Walt is very nearly from the word go. Sure, he has relatable moments every now and then, but even cutting him all the slack in the world for his cancer he's still an absolute egomaniac. It's wild to think that people were (or still are) actively celebrating and rooting for him.
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May 18, 2022 08:41
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CelticPredator posted:You want him to win because if he wins, his family wins. But after a while it becomes painfully clear that his goals aren’t about that any more. Oh absolutely, he's wildly entertaining to watch, especially when he vacillates between awkward dumpy dad and wannabe criminal mastermind. But at very nearly every point of the story everybody else would be vastly better off if he'd just dropped dead.
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May 18, 2022 11:12
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Plenty of the classics are full with dynamics that we'd consider fanfiction hallmarks, too. Lancelot from the Arthurian myth is basically one author's pet Original Character Do Not Steal, put in there to be basically the best knight in the world who is even more fated and noble than Arthur and also gets the girl. And of course Dante's Inferno was basically author's self-insert getting to hang out with his favourite idols from history while describing how his contemporary rivals will totally burn in hell.
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Jun 12, 2022 16:16
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Jedit posted:I find it very hard to take a claim that Lancelot was more noble than Arthur seriously when the girl he got was Arthur's wife. Galahad is the gentil parfait Knight, and not getting the girl is kind of his thing. That bit in particular is actually a pretty interesting example of how literary mores changed over time. Later writers were quite critical of their affair as Christianity had a greater influence on their writings and obviously adultery doesn't quite fly there. But for earlier writers it was a prime example of courtly love as it was in fashion at the time, which was all about mutual pining after an unattainable partner. It being adultery wouldn't have been considered morally wrong, as it was actually the very thing that made the affair all the more romantic and meaningful in the first place. The marriage between Arthur and Guinevere would've been thought of as just a practical matter, whereas the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere would've been thought of as genuinely romantic and literally ennobling.
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Jun 12, 2022 18:17
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Pratchett was by all accounts an excellent person all around: https://twitter.com/thetallulahhh/status/1422487507413917698
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Jun 28, 2022 08:45
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