Veltigar

True or not, I'd take a better TV-show though XD

I'd also add The Children of Húrin novelization. That's always been my favourite work set in Tolkien's world, even though Christopher Tolkien has almost as much to do with that one as his father with all the compilation that happened. @Lady Anna this is also set during the First Age, so it has a rather distinct flavour compared to the Third Age stories like LOTR and The Hobbit.

The ending of that honest trailer is brutal. Also, the call and response compilation made me spit my drink XD

I watched Black Adam the other day. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed myself. It's basically your standard run-of-the-mill superhero origin movie (with a few interesting titbits added that weren't properly utilized and therefore sadly cannot impact the score positively), so you are not missing out on anything if you decide to skip this. As someone who does tend to like The Rock in films however, I liked this slightly more than other average superhero origin movies. I did catch someone falling asleep at the theatre however, so if you are neither into superhero movies, nor like the Rock as an actor than I would probably skip this.

I actually like Bradshaw. Although I'm always more intrigued by his reviews for smaller films. Anyways, he was wrong on Spectre and other films, but that is why you need to know the critics you follow. I have a couple of people/places that I go to and taking each of their strengths into account usually saves me from watching a lot of duds

Watched House of the Dragon's finale on Monday. I liked it a lot although the best episode of the series so far and the clear peak of this show after season one remains episode 8 for me. There were still some odd choices. All in all though, it was a decent episode that bowed out gracefully and left me wanting more. A tall order for a show like this and I hope the same level of quality (or even better) can be reached by further seasons as well. Agreed on the map table. It was an epic detail in a series full of them. You really feel that a lot of thought have been put in the details. I hated GoT in the end, so the fact that someone who loved and who hated GoT both thought this first season was excellent is a strong endorsement. Yeah, we only have ourselves to blame unfortunately. If no one is checking films like this out in theatre, no one will be making them. Mostly everything related to Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn's characters

I went into the vault and rewatched Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story with Ben Still and Vince Vaugn yesterday. It's amazing to see how far we have come since 2004 as there is a lot of comedy in there that I do not think would work particularly well today. That being said, I still greatly enjoyed this film. Not sure why it never seems to have captured the zeitgeist as much as Zoolander did, but I think I probably prefer this one. The character of Patches O'Houlihan just cracks me up.

It is not for me to disagree with the great useful source that is RT, but every critic or outlet I tend to follow has published intensely negative reviews of the entire season. Some of them did change tack however (the initial The Guardian reviewer was in hindsight hilariously over-the-top positive about the first few episodes, but the guy doing the retrospective absolutely slagged the season), so not sure how that impacts the RT scores. The best and most positive reactions I see from the people in my immediate surroundings is that it's not too bad if you do something like fold your laundry while watching. That's admittedly a small sample size, but compare these reactions against the budget and the reception that something like The Boys is getting and I would assume that some people might be worried.

I haven't really weighed in on this show's end yet, due to the fact that basically everything has already been said about it. The enormous amount of both fan and critical backlash it has been getting however does make me rather curious. What is Amazon thinking at the moment? Will there be changes to their approach as a result to all this ranting about the show? Do w have any rumors or more credible sources about this?

I had the unfortunate displeasure of having to sit through Baz Luhrman's purported Elvis biopic yesterday. I find it hard to imagine that any film that I see in 2022 could be worse than this one. This "movie" is an incoherent mess that takes forever to go absolutely nowhere. If I had not watched this in company I would have just walked out and done something more productive with my life. All in all, it has only two saving graces. Firstly, it is a reminder that despite how awful Rings of Power was, it could always have been much, much worse (think Rings of Power by Baz Luhrman ). Secondly, the guy playing Elvis is really good and his performance is absolutely wasted in this one. What an incredibly stupid idea to center the film on Tom Hanks' grotesque and amateurish performance as Tom Parker when there is a young actor with this kind of skill at hand to play Elvis. Such a shame though. The official trailer for this film might be the best I have ever seen. It's a classic bait and switch though, as whoever cut this trailer focusses almost exclusively on Austin Butler's performance as Elvis since that is both the only thing people who go and see a movie called Elvis want to see and because Butler is the only thing in this failure who actually puts in a grounded performance.

I think that was certainly a contributing factor for me (and something the show will have to work on in coming seasons, as the Greens' side of things should also be engaging. Luckily Aemond has a lot of potential), but there were also some clear attacks on my suspension of disbelief. The biggest being of course

Watched Rings of Power's finale and the ninth episode of House of the Dragon. The former was basically a joke, putting the The latter was also somewhat disappointing. I think for me it is between this and episode 5 to determine the weakest episode of the season.

Don't forget the volleyball!

I watched Triangle of Sadness yesterday. The Golden Palm winner of this year. It was a weird experience. I liked it a lot, mainly due to an incredibly entertaining second act (the film is split in three distinct chapters) but I do wonder whether it was an exceptionally weak year in Cannes, because it's not a great movie in my opinion. It's entertaining enough for a night and I am definitely not sad that I spent money on it, but for this film to win the Golden Palm? Kind of weird.

Another nice expert reaction video:

I didn't have much time this week, but I did manage to watch both the latest episode of Rick and Morty as well as the latest House of the Dragon episode. Rick and Morty was a good episode, but not a remarkable one. Still, I would be very happy to have more shows that have this as a baseline. House of the Dragon this week was spectacular in my opinion. The best episode of the season. I'm still amazed just how much superior this is to any season of GoT and I hope that they will be able to stick to this level. It's so refreshing to see a fantasy series focus on the characters and invest time and resources in these little moments and set pieces that do not end in a giant pile of VFX nonsense. I absolutely adored (show spoilers) I just hope that they won't lose themselves entirely in VFX shlokfests in the next seasons. We'll definitely get way more action and the narrative will be more easy to follow without the constant time jumps, but I hope they'll keep on adding these character touches throughout the series. They do seem to have simplified the story somewhat (book and show spoilers) I agree with you in any case. It's a very mature approach for the writers to take and rather refreshing that they were able to convince HBO that viewers would be able to keep their focus for that amount of character work and throughout all those time jumps. On that front, I think the "prequel problem" is a sobriquet that should be solely reserved for RoP and The Fantastic Beast And I Don't Care Where to Find Them films. Those are boring retreads, but HotD actually does some really interesting stuff which no normal producer would ever allow anyone to do (especially with such a massive budget) if it was not already an established piece of IP. I think all of us would like more original high quality content, but sadly enough that's not how the movie and TV business work nowadays. IP is king. Films and series like Cruella, Better Call Saul and (so far) House of the Dragon (and based on what I hear, Andor) proof however that we shouldn't have to settle for blandness even within an IP dominated industry. Let's hope that this insight will dawn on many people in the industry.

Has anyone seen these videos online? The one for the latest episode isn't out yet, but I laughed my ass off with the ones I have already seen.

Not for everyone I would imagine. I personally dislike them. Give me the elves, Rohirim, Men of Numénor/etc. every day of the week over the hobbits. Although I have to admit, that's based on everything available in print and previous adaptations I have seen. The Harfoots are weirdly inoffensive in the grand scheme of RoP. They are clearly going to bring him back into the story later on. It's terribly stupid and incompetent of the writers to only mention that character for the first time at this point in the season, but I wouldn't fret about it.

Watched the latest Rings of Power episode. it wasn't terrible, which is really great praise for this show.

You know, I actually didn't hate this episode. Indeed, I even kind of enjoyed it. Last week, the incompetence was really frustrating to behold, but now we were back to the BBC fantasy level quality that is this show's peak. Lot's of dumb stuff that happens, but it was presented with enough panache to accept it and then move on. I also really liked the opening of the episode. It beggars belief that anyone is still alive, but I felt like that the heavily orange ash scenes in the beginning was one of the best scenes this show has had so far. I also liked all the scenes with the dwarfs (weird how that is probably the most competent plot line, despite the inclusion of the entirely insane Mithril idea).

I thought the lighting in the last episode of HotD was indeed quite bizarre, but I still thought the episode itself was rather good. In particular, I was rather pleasantly surprised by (book spoilers) The only baffling thing was (show spoilers) I also watched the latest episode of Rick and Morty. They really hate fortune cookies, but what a funny episode.

Obviously the only reason I have to reread the Silmarillion at this particular moment instead of spending my precious reading time on any of the many books that I have yet to read for a first time, is to immerse myself into the events that inspired this show. They might not have the rights to the entirety of the materials (pretty fortunate probably), but what material they do have access to in the appendices will show some marked similarities with what is in the Silmarillion.

Watch, watched, watching: Amazon's Stinks of Power The score is indeed rather dreadful and I get your take on Broderick. He warmed on me during the film however and I thought his asides to God were rather well done

I watched Ladyhawke and the latest episode of the Rings of Power yesterday. I won't talk about the latter, apart from saying that I find it singularly terrible at the moment and have already said my piece in the dedicated thread. Ladyhawke on the other hand, is something that I will talk about with quite some joy. I actually think this might be one of the best fantasy movies I have ever seen and it came out of nowhere. A friend and I decided to watch some 1980s fantasy classics more than a year ago (Willow, Dragonslayer, I also started Krull) but none of those ever rose above the level of guilty pleasure for me. Ladyhawke on the other hand was genuinely good. I love the cast, the fights were well done and I felt really transported to some medieval legend. The world the film inhabited felt far more authentic than a lot of other stuff we get to see passed off as fantasy (*glares at Rings of Power*). The film is also shot in a rather modern way. Looking at it, it didn't have anything particularly 1980s about it apart from the score (which was the weakest element of this film I would say, the synths were overbearing). So yeah, if you want to see some good fantasy and haven't seen Ladyhawke yet. There is no time like the present.

This was absolutely embarrassing on pretty much all levels. It seems like every episode, they do their best to move closer to PJ's Hobbit trilogy and it's just so terribly stupid. I'm not gong to list all the dumb contrivances this writing room throws at us, but I will harp on about the fact that this series has no sense of scale or geography whatsoever. I was enjoying it in the beginning in that sort of BBC The Adventures of Merlin or Dr. Who kind of way. It's quickly wasting its potential however and given the budget that these people get to work with, it almost beggars belief. I also have some serious questions about most of the acting and other creative aspects of the show (like the fight choreography and the Numénorean armor that seems almost as bad as the ball sack armor from The Witcher), but it all flows down from the writing. You can't blame the actress for Galadriel-Hitler, no one could make that purple dialogue work imo. And if these writers decide to waste budget on a sequence of water flowing in a volcano and causing an eruption (like WTF? Even the professor in the article linked up thread seems to find it implausible), instead of cutting out the middleman and just have the volcano erupt through magic than can you blame the other creative departments for having to take shortcuts elsewhere? This is now actively discouraging me from rereading The Silmarillion. It has been many years for me, so I don't remember much, but if I read it and fully realize how much potential is being wasted I would probably go bonkers.