Veltigar

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.

Fair point in general I admit. Perhaps it's just me but I usually do find Netflix' content somewhat lackluster so there is little in their back catalogue I'd like to rewatch. Who knows what will happen in the future though. Apple has so much money, if they really want to they'd be able to catch up. Ah, but isn't Apple cheaper?

Watched the latest episode of Rick and Morty. Greatly enjoyed the John Carpenter vibe they were going for with this episode and I feel like we are about one episode away from saying that the show is on a hot streak. Two excellent episodes in a row That seems a fair bet. It would be a bit anticlimactic for people after all the action that is to come. I assumed there were going to be only three seasons, but you think there might be a fourth one in the cards? Emotional reception wise, it reminds me a lot of how I felt about the first season of GoT. Not perfect, but given the practical nightmares involved they are doing as well as can be expected. A few things I would have adapted differently, but so far I think I see the reasoning behind most of the decisions they made. I might not always agree with it (although mostly I do), but the sum of the whole is definitely greater than its parts here. I hope the show will be able to maintain at least this level of quality throughout. If it does that, the audience will come. The IP is too big for a good show to fail, although sadly enough it will probably never eclipse GoT in popularity. Alas, I'll never venture to that forbidden zone. Too worried about GoT spoilers. I'd like to preserve as much surprise as possible for when the books are finally released Isn't that true for most of the streamers though? At least if you are interested in a certain degree of quality in what you watch

Great episode. Loved the horror vibes. Apparently they had been sitting on this idea already for a long time, carried it over from multiple seasons and for me this was a home run.

Yeah definitely agree here. The time jumps are a bit of a liability. That being said, I really do think the show is handling them about as well as can possible be expected. There are a few faux-pas here and there, but it's a superbly difficult thing to pull off. I see that @Raja for instance has difficulties with it and I totally understand that, but I don't see anything big that I would have done otherwise to make it work even better. Seeing it play out on screen, I not only have a lot of respect for the writing team, but I also appreciate HBO's decision to greenlit a show like this. Not sure which ideas were all on the table, but there were bound to be easier options to do on the adaptation front. I wonder whether season 3 will be (show & book spoilers): I think my least favourite episode so far was the fifth one. This sort of ties with the second one for the second least favorite episode, but apart from the 5th one I think they have all been quite strong. Remarkable really since this was all comparatively meek stuff in comparison with all that will follow. I would be very curious to see how effective they have been at this. On my side of things, I think every casual I watch this with is (show and book spoilers as well): This puzzles me tremendously Haven't seen it, but whoever is the inspiration

Breaking the rules of this thread once again to say that I watched and enjoyed the latest episode of House of the Dragon. Definitely not my favorite episode so far, but a lot better than last week's comparatively poor outing (although even that little bit of a false note was still a pretty good episode of TV all things considered) and that with a much heavier burden to lift than anything before. I think they did as well as expected introducing all these new actors into the fray, although the logic behind the decision to keep certain actors around was sometimes a little bit difficult (Ser Criston Cole being the major one). This was basically a new pilot and a lot of the more casual fans I watched this with definitely struggled making sense of all the children. Still, even they enjoyed it greatly and I will say that I am still impressed by the much more mature storytelling this show has in comparison to GoT. I don't think any woman got naked this week and there was a great emphasis on the realities of child birth which I found rather stunning (both in terms of inclusion and in the way this was used as character development) I think so far the writers and cast have done a remarkable job coloring in the edges around GRRM's writing There are a few decisions I found questionable. My least favorite part of the episode was probably I am also not entirely sure about

I zoned out during that song. I frankly thought it was annoying. I still can't get over how sociopathic the proto-hobbits are to buy into them singing sweet little tunes. It's all a trap before they kill you and eat your flesh. The poop goes into the pyre Denethor had prepared for himself and Faramir And the nonsensical aspect of Minas Tirith is indeed what @The Marquis de Leech makes explicit, the lack of farms and other supporting infrastructure needed to support such a large city dwelling population. That being said and to reiterate my initial point, PJ's Minas Tirith might be unrealistic but it looks epic, textured and really lived in. I don't feel nearly the same (or even any) sense of awe with anything we see in Numénor despite the fact that this should feel like their cultural zenith.

Just finished the latest episode of the Rings of Power. I was quite optimistic for the first three episodes. It was never more than serviceable, but I had hoped it would tick up. Instead I feel like I have soured on the show. It's rather dull and nonsensical, which is not a great combination. If something is dumb, at least I want it to be exciting and coherent. This show does way too many puzzling things without any pay-off in cool factor. I just want more scenes of Poldarkesque scenery porn with Galadriel smiling like she's on Quaaludes, but instead I get scenes where the show seems to go out of its way to make everything feel small.. Hope the quality will veer upwards in the last three episodes, but I'm not optimistic.

Just finished the last episode... I have no clue what I have just watched. When this show started, it was quite clear this wasn't going to become an artistic paragon for the ages, but I enjoyed it in all its glorious BBC Fantasy silliness for the first three episodes. After teetering on that "so bad that it is good" edge for three episodes, I felt they took a decided step to the wrong side last episode and with this episode they completely went off the deep end. I had to fight an urge not to send some emails for work tomorrow, which is not the way you should feel about a billion USD series based on beloved IP and pushed by one of the world's most dominant corporations. Seriously, the series lacks any hint of internal cohesion (Kemen's antics on the boat and then Isildur's inexplicable decision not to rat on him). Characters constantly do things that do not make sense and change completely in a split second (the whole Southlands storyline with Bronwyn wishing to give in). The same thing is true for organizations (who the fuck promotes people into a leadership role based on how good they are at cutting someone in a 1 v. 8 duel? That's a stupid idea to begin with, but they could have done something interesting with it if the character had done something clever to gain the upper hand, but no that is beyond this show). The motivations feel forced (Fighting cause you cannot stop? can they really not make this character work). The scale of action is too small (three ships do not make an army). The dialogue is so purple, if it suddenly became a person they would be emperor of Rome. The performances suffer because I think the actors themselves struggle to make sense of it all (when Elrond was explaining to Durin why he needed the Mithril, I earned a few laughs by pointing out that Elrond's baffled face seemed to indicate that even the actor was not buying what the showrunners wanted him to sell). The show was also visually not very inspiring this week. Someone already remarked that Numénorean soldiers looked terrible in the white outfits. I wasn't inspired by any of the vistas and I just feel they completely lack the sense of scale that is needed to make this era work. Forget about the books for a moment and just take a look at PJ's first trilogy. Gondor might not make any sense (where does the food come from?), but it looks so grand in comparison with the Nomenorean city. I'll probably finish this seeason, but not sure whether I'll tune in next season if it keeps dropping in quality likes this.

People kept popping up at that wedding party who weren't even in any of the previous episodes The person I watched it with just guessed that they probably had a massive party on that final day of shooting and asked everyone who used to be on the cost to hang out. They just didn't care enough to explain it all. Only the old favorites got some screen time with dialogue. Still strange to think it has ended. If you had asked me 3 years ago, I would have probably guessed that Neighbors would outlive me (and I plan to die at an age suited for Methuselah). Really quite stupid what the Australians did. Although it does not explain why no one stepped in to safe it. It can't be that expensive to make and the sheer nostalgia factor would probably bring in interesting demographics. For all the money being spent into streaming, you'd think there would be an appetite for cheap garbage with such a long pedigree. It's all about locking you into their ecosystem and simultaneously diversifying their sources of revenue. The Verge had a nice short article about it a couple of years back https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20942474/apple-tv-plus-amazon-prime-video-price-bundle-music-arcade-news-services Ah got you, I thought there was some active dislike for the platform. But if it is just a question of managing the subscription load then that is perfectly understandeable.

So I need to know, why the dislike of Apple TV here? I haven't seen much of their stuff, but they did give us Ted Lasso which to me is the best television show of this decade so far, so surely not everything about them can be bad

I like how they made about the same time jump in between season 3 and 4 as we did in real life

Something completely different now, but I just saw the series finale of Neighbors (yes, the Australian soap). There was a time during the pandemic that I indulged myself with it. I have also gone on record to say that all soaps are trash, but if you have to watch one of them, Neighbors is about as good as it gets. I was thus more than a little shocked when they decided to ax this iconic series. It's command of the watercooler conversation might have disappeared completely (I hear this was like GoT in the eighties, everyone wanted to talk about it, although back then it was probably of a better quality than the latter seasons of GoT ), but I was still surprised that in the age of streaming and endless niche appeal they could not find any streaming service willing to take over this series. I thus decided to watch at least the final episode, because I heard that many of the old favorites came back. In particular, I heard a lot of praise lavished on Guy Pearce for returning and actually committing to a storyline. Margot Robbie, Kylie Minogue, Natalia Imbruglia, etc. came back but didn't do more than a cameo, while Guy Pearce actually put a lot of effort in. All things considered, the finale wasn't great. You felt the emotion, but a lot of the wistfully looking back and the barrage of cameos was a bit much. Guy Pearce's storyline was the highlight though. While everyone else was stuck in nostalgia land, his return actually impacted the stakes of the story. It was very sweet to see how willing he was to give back to soap that started it all for him. So you are saying that there is a lot more to Rick and Morty than people think. Rick and Morty are like onions. Onions have layers, Rick and Morty has layers. It's been on my list for years, but the fact that most is dystopian and that it's an anthology has kept me from rolling with it. Perhaps I should indeed give it another go. I hate to break it to you, but there are actually 13 episodes in the sixth season of BCS, so you have some time left to play around with the characters I do agree with you however, that the episode you just watched was the best one of that season

Watched the fifth season of Cobra Kai over the last week. If I'm completely honest, I did not really feel this season. It took a great long while for me to get invested again, which is something I never had on this scale for this series before. There was still plenty to love, as it keeps on finding ways to mine the original trilogy for content and enrich plots and characters which were really very thin to begin with. All the actors were good in it, particularly the guy playing Terry Silver who played a rather fun villain. I think what didn't work for me was mainly two things. Firstly, how absurdly self-serious the series has become (I still cannot believe there haven't been more arrests yet). By always increasing the scale of the insanity it does feel like it lost its place a bit for me. Secondly, I also don't really like the diminished role for William Zabka. His character and his relationship with others is really what grounds this show for me. In this season, his Johny made some real progress as a human being, which is nice in comparison to the rather labored process that went before. I do however feel like they made too many cuts to his screen time as a result. I'm personally not that invested in any of Ralph Maccio's relationships which this season especially seem to have taken precedence. Okay sure, but that further illustrates why I'm frustrated. The Greens in the universe of the show do not really have a leg to stand on, but I feel like the show is still quite sympathetic towards their cause at this point. I'd put this in spoiler tags if I were you |dbunting. It might be very minor but it is still a spoiler for a quite recent episode. As to your point, I feel like it was a good choice to intervene in the source material there. Kudos for the writers for finding an area of improvement and going for it. I must admit that San Junipero reference flew completely past me, as I'm presumably one of the few people on here who hasn't seen Black Mirror yet. I saw the first episode many years ago when it first came out and I then completely missed the hype that would break out around later seasons. It was a great episode of Rick and Morty however even if I didn't get all the references

Of course he can offer her the only thing she's been after this entire time... The same thing Tauriel wanted from Kili or whatever that dwarf was called in the Desolation of Smaug

Ah I see, thank you Ran for the answer. I had hoped that GRRM felt so comfortable in this particular collaboration that perhaps the canons would be aligned, but this makes more sense.

I watched the latest episodes of House of the Dragon and Rick & Morty. As stated by others above, Rick & Morty's latest episode was really good. This whole season has been pretty good so far. I think the previous season suffered from some kind of fatigue induced mediocre episodes (although it did also have some great ones), but the writing room seems to have found a new wave of inspiration which I'm thoroughly enjoying House of the Dragon was not as good as the previous two weeks (but those were pretty great highs), but I still enjoyed it. I continue to be impressed by this series in general and Matt Smith's portrayal of Daemon specifically. He steals every scene he's in. I'm also very curious about the adaptation choices that were made, particularly because GRRM himself was involved with this show (book & show spoilers). One weakness I did feel was very noticeable and which I think @dbunting also felt was (show spoilers only): I also feel that so far, the Hightower party has been painted way more sympathetic than they deserve to be (show spoilers)

Oh no, you revealed my dastardly plot. Indeed, as the Sauron to Tom Cruise's Morgoth I was send out to extinguish you and your evil anti-Top Gun opinions from this world Lord knows that people on the internet who disagree on one thing can never again have a civil disagreement on anything else anymore without said prior point of contention rearing its head Obviously, like I have repeated several times in my prior posts on the matter, you cannot have a definitive answer to this whole debate because it is not made explicit within the confines of this show. What I think you can do with the material that has been released so far is look at what the show has implied and then take a stance on probabilities. If we reduce it to a binary choice for simplicity, where Galadriel has either: A. Pursued Sauron like a chump for a 1.000 years B. Pursued Sauron like a chump and did a bunch of other significant stuff (e.g. like founding Lothlorien) I feel the probabilities are more weighed towards option A at this moment, for the arguments I laid out in my previous posts (and admittedly, because I'm not feeling charitable towards the writers of this series, who have so far not really done anything to deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the assumption of intelligent writing). You feel like the options are weighed towards Option B, which is totally fine. The fact that we do not know what it means is already a pretty good indication that it isn't the greatest argument to built a case upon. I don't recall the exact dialogue here for the bolded, but it stands to reason that her activities are as Commander are tied up to mopping up any remnants of Morgoth's evil hosts, which naturally is the ideal position for someone with an obsession for Sauron and no clues about his whereabouts to be in. Hunt some orcs, hunt some trolls, try to find clues for where Sauron is, who in her mind (and in the show's reality) is calling the shots behind the scenes, rinse and repeat for a thousand years. I thought this was obvious from the Southlands storyline. Right after the defeat of Morgoth, evil's ascent might have been stopped, but there were still many of his servants (including Sauron) at large. Over the next couple of centuries Galadriel and her ilk were sent out to mop up everything and restore the lands to safety. They appeared to be very successful at this, suppressing the threat to such and extent that it seemed to have disappeared completely. Gil-Galad, his advisors and pretty much everyone except Galadriel saw this apparent success and grew tired of paying the price for their vigilance. They wanted to quit their (in their eyes) pointless search and move on to happier things. Galadriel was a nuisance to them, precisely for her inability to let go. It also seems that her single-mindedness grew ever worse until its climax in the first episode, as evidenced by the fiasco we see happen there with her soldiers refusing to follow her (unless that happened to her regularly of course) because she was endangering them for what they saw as no reason. That is why she was seen as a nuisance by the Double G and he wanted to get rid of her. You are asking a question here that I think is quite valid, but the show is not up to task of answering I fear. She's clearly of high lineage in the show and she seems physically more capable than regular elves when we examine the scene with the snow troll. Perhaps that's enough to be a commander in the show-universe? The fact that she fails to display any relevant soft skill needed for a role of commander in our modern eyes in all the scenes of her we have seen so far is one of the clearest examples of how poorly written this show is in general. Miriel and co grant her respect because she's high elven nobility. That is not that complicated. Elendil showing her their super-secret documents... Yeah, that doesn't make much sense, so it's poor writing. Unless this is all a long ploy to explain later on why they were all so easily taken in by Sauron. They are going out of their way to establish the people of Numenor as idiots XD Can't we all agree to steer clear of these cheap insults? Orcs/evil elves have feelings too you know. How would you like it if I were to call you a Boris Johnson

Ah yes, thank you for the reply, that does make more sense. Nothing really looked cheap, but unless their salary/cocaine bill was through the roof I had a hard time picturing them spending 15 Million USD per episode.

Not sure what you mean here, but I thought it was very heavily implied that her family died during one of the earlier trips, not necessarily that she was punished to draw a cart on her own.

An additional problem with that scene imo was that it made the show look rather fake. They made such a big deal out of it and then the camera panned out and the crowd was rather tiny. It was definitely not the biggest problem with that scene, but given the huge expenditure on this project, it would have been nice to see like a crowd more reminiscent of one of those old Bible epics from the 1950s.

Okay, I'm confused, I didn't know you were arguing about the foundation of Lothlorien. Ah well, now that I know that, I will reiterate my point. It is pointless to debate this, as the show does not provide a definitive answer about her founding her own realm. That being said, when you look at what the show implies (so basically the subtext), it seems pretty clear that the weight of evidence is more supportive of @ASOIAFrelatedusername's position that Showdriel has most likely been singlehandedly focused on catching Sauron and that to the exclusion of anything else. I myself see three main arguments to support this: 1. The dialogue and scenes cited by @ASOIAFrelatedusername earlier 2. The fact that no one identifies her as the ruler of Lothlorien in the series or that there has been 0 mention of the place so far 3. The fact that the character as depicted in the show seems to be woefully lacking in any of the skills needed for something as complex as founding a realm I'm not sure what arguments you have to counter this, apart from the fact that a 1.000 years is a long time and the fact that she did so in the book (both of which aren't very strong, since they are perfectly happy to ignore the books and the people in this universe seem to be such idiots that it doesn't take a big leap of faith to assume that they are all suffering from Parkinson's law on steroids), but if there are any other's I'd love to read them. If you do not have any counterarguments to support your position, does that then mean that the question is settled? Obviously no. As long as subtext isn't made into text they can do whatever they want. Given the level of intelligence displayed by the narrative so far I wouldn't be surprised by for example a surprise-third-season-reveal of a hidden Lothlorien to which Galadriel can escape to after a setback. I do however think it is quite reasonable to state that - given what we have seen so far - the probability is higher that the showrunners decided to omit Galadriel founding Lothlorien (perhaps to have it in there as a future plot point if they did so consciously, but just as likely the writing for the character is just so poor they forgot) and had her search for Sauron the entire time because they thought the idea of a 1.000 year quest was quite badass and grand.