williamjm

8 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

But before that, I have to go all the way back to Matchstick Men

That's one I haven't seen yet, perhaps I should since Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell sound like they should be an interesting combination.

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

- All the money in the world (didn’t see it, don’t remember hearing about it)

I had forgotten that this was a Ridley Scott film. I thought it was an okay film, but nothing special. It's probably most interesting when focusing on Christopher Plummer's Getty senior and his refusal to pay his grandson's ransom but as a thriller it isn't particularly thrilling.

2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

Pineapples on pizza is rank heresy!

I'd rather have a burnt tyre for dinner. 

 

When I was in Italy last year we were at a restaurant on Capri and there were some British tourists at the next table who ordered a Hawaiian pizza, I've never seen a waiter look so shocked and offended at an order. He did come back to argue with them that it wasn't really pizza, although since it was on the menu perhaps he should have taken it up with the owners.

I read Jodi Talyor's Just One Damned Thing After Another, the first book in her Chronicles of St Mary's series. I thought it was a very quick book to read, it's definitely a page turner and goes through events at a fast pace. I thought Maxwell was an entertaining protagonist to follow, although sometimes a bit exasperating because she does make some terrible decisions at times. For a book about time travelling historians it didn't spend as much time in the past as I might have expected but maybe that will happen more in the later books in the series now that the premise has been established. Out of the various time jumps I think the one back to the Cretaceous did the best job of conveying a sense of wonder about being able to travel to the past.

I think there were some plot holes, even if you avoid trying to think too hard about the details of how the time travel works. The way St Mary's is set up doesn't make much sense, to some extent this is a plot point so things can be improved but it would still have helped if it was a bit more believable to begin with. The passage of time is also confusing, at one point Maxwell explains she has been at St Mary's for five years even though it feels like she has only completed her training recently.

Overall, it was an enjoyable book to read despite some plot issues and I will pick up the second book at some point.

I've now moved onto Roger Zelazny's A Night In The Lonesome October. I have heard a lot of praise for this and it has been good so far. I didn't know a huge amount about it beforehand so I was a bit surprised to find it was narrated by an admittedly very articulate dog.

5 hours ago, Loge said:

Deadline Hollywood claims that the movie "exceeded expectations." Apparently, those expectations were pretty low as far as box office revenue is concerned.

It's probably difficult to know what the expectations are for historical epics now given how rare they seem to be. It has already made more than twice what The Last Duel did.

I watched The Marvels. I enjoyed it despite its weaknesses. I think Kamala is the standout of the three leads, Iman Vellani is good in the role and her enthusiasm for everything does help the film feel fun. As in the TV show Kamala and her family are very likeable. I think Carol suffers from too much backstory that didn't appear in any of the films about what's been happening with the Kree and Skrulls and this film doesn't really have time to cover all that. Monica was fine but it felt like she didn't get much time to explore her own character beyond her relationship with Carol.

The three of them swapping positions when they use their powers did make some of the action scenes stand out a bit from other Marvel films, although it did end up in the traditional Marvel CGI climax. A couple of days ago I watched the most recent Dr Who episode and I think in some ways this has a similar feel to it, it moved along at a good pace and was fun to watch but ended up with a fairly daft ending.

Overall, I enjoyed it more than Quantummania but it's not going to be remembered as one of the classic MCU movies.

I finished the third season of Only Murders in the Building. I think this was probably an improvement on the second season which had felt a bit unfocused at times but having everything revolve around Oliver's play/musical helped. Meryl Streep was a good addition to the cast and Matthew Broderick's portrayal of himself as an obsessive actor was very amusing. The Death Rattle musical was both absurdly awful and annoyingly catchy.

It was a lot of fun to see Tennant and Tate back and the episode definitely moved along at a good pace. The plot twist could probably be seen from orbit, but The Meep was a fun alien of the week. I also agree that the action scenes benefited from the increased budget. The end was the weakest part, the actors valiantly do their best to try to make something dramatic out of a scene in which they have to flick lots of switches while yelling technobabble but it did all feel a bit ridiculous.

I finished Martha Wells' System Collapse. I thought it was another entertaining entry in the series. It picks up directly from the end of Network Effect as Murderbot and its allies try to protect several groups of colonists from a predatory corporation. We never really get to know the colonists well so it's a bit hard to care too much about what happens to them but it does set up some good scenes as their protectors try to outwit the numerically superior corporate forces. This is particularly tricky as the main character has to deal with some newfound vulnerabilities as they try to adjust to the situation they find themself in after the end of the previous story.

I'm now reading Jodi Taylor's Just One Damned Thing After Another, the first in what seems to be a lengthy series of time travel stories. It started off seeming quite whimsical but some more serious elements come in as the story goes along.

19 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Bingo. I think this works in their favor. Each movie in the series is marketed as an event film, but one that stands on its own, rather than being necessary viewing as part of a larger series, and each instalment is spaced out enough to let people have a breather. If they oversaturated, like you said, they'd kill their goose. 

At least, that's the impression I'm getting from having read up on it this morning. 

Also, looking at IMDB, it seems like the Monsterverse movies try to hire good actors that are interesting to watch, to (I guess?) balance out the insane VFX that dominates the viewer's screen. Looks like the movies thus far have included Lance Reddick, Kyle Chandler, Tom Hiddleston, Bradley Whitford (JOSH LYMAN!), Samuel Jackson, Jean Reno, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanbe, David Strathairn, and even Juliette Binoche?! Stacked cast there. 

I think anybody watching the Godzilla films for their human cast is going to be disappointed, they're not really given much to much work with. This is particularly true if you are excited to see what Brian Cranston could do as the lead character in a Kaiju film.

11 hours ago, Pellert said:

For sure, it’s not the most epic fantasy show I’ve seen, but I quite enjoyed S1, as a “passable” fantasy-show, not great but far better than many other adaptions or fantasy works (Shannara, Legend of the Seeker, Dungeons and Dragons (even though it’s probably not a fair comparison), to mention some ).

I have not gotten around to see S2 yet, so for someone that has not read the books, how is the ending of S2? Is it any point to watch it to have some sort of closure and conclusions of the plots/stories - or does it end with cliffhangers and a clear point to wrap everything up in S3? 

The compressed the second and third books in the trilogy so season 2 ends at the ending of the third book (although there are some significant differences in how it ends). This does mean that it wraps up the main Darkling vs Alina storyline so there is closure there, although it does also has some set-up for the stories in the two sequel duologies so not everything is wrapped up.

7 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Is it a return to form for Martha Wells?  I devoured the Murderbot Diaries in April 2022 on vacation, but couldn't bring myself to read Witch King after the bad reviews.  

So far I think the new story is on par with the previous Murderbot stories, it feels very much like part 2 of Network Effect.

I haven't read Witch King so don't know how it would compare to that.

22 hours ago, Werthead said:

Bringing in Deadpool, Fantastic Four, Doom and the X-Men and Brotherhood are all big, low-hanging fruit they can go all-in on, but I suspect they were aiming to be careful in the writing and casting and do that whilst the Kang Saga unfolded. With that on the rocks, the temptation must be to say "it's mutant time," and hope like hell they nail those movies.

I don't expect them to do it, but it might be better if their inevitable X-Men reboot was explicitly not part of the MCU. Some of the recent MCU entries like Eternals or Moon Knight were already not gaining anything in terms of story from being part of the MCU and we seem to be passing the point where being part of the MCU is an automatic boost to the box office. It would avoid having to explain away why the mutants weren't involved in any of the previous events in the MCU. The obvious downside from Marvel's perspective would be that they can't include the mutants in Avengers films.

21 hours ago, House Balstroko said:

A lot of that stuff is outright insane. Hopefully, those more extreme tendencies can be reined in.  

Some of the articles I've read pointed out that Milei's party did relatively poorly in the recent elections so they only have 38 out of 257 and 8 out of 72 seats in the two parts of congress. However, I've no idea how much power the Argentine presidency without needing congressional votes.

I think that ended up being a better grand prix than a lot of people had thought that it might be. The surroundings are probably still more interesting than the track but it did work well in terms of offering overtaking opportunities without making them too easy. Perez lost out right at the end for the second race in a row, but still a good result considering how far back he started. Le Clerc probably got unlucky with the safety car timing, he was probably the favourite for the victory before that happened. Perhaps Ferrari should have pitted him under the safety car so that the Red Bulls wouldn't have fresher tires at the end.

One thing I've noticed in the discussion is that we feel that there have been too many MCU TV series in a short space of time. I agree that it does feel that way, which is slightly odd considering that we are almost at the end of November and so far we've had a grand total of 12 episodes of MCU content in 2023. Maybe the perception of there being so much content is due to 2021/22 where there were over 50 episodes in about 18 months?

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

I said this many times in the past:  Ironman was about industrial espionage!  Hulk has always been The Fugitive... but green.  The MCU took off because it was telling grounded stories that people could believe.

Even the first Thor film is literally about him being grounded.

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

Season 2 felt like they had already been told they were cancelled and tried to throw too much into it that didn't all fit together. I'm disappointed because I still enjoyed it despite that and thought the cast were great together.

I think the show always felt like two different shows squashed together into one and season two additionally trying to cover the second and third books of the Grisha trilogy did lead to it feeling a bit disjointed at times. I think the Crows were the most entertaining part of the story but that did mean they had to invent a lot of plotlines for them. It's a pity they didn't get to adapt Six of Crows as the third season, which should have been the highlight of the show.

I agree it was enjoyable despite its flaws and it had a strong cast. At least it had a somewhat conclusive ending, even if they were setting up future stories. It does however leave one character in particular with a dramatically different ending to the books.

32 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

For those who have seen it: did Black Adam offer anything interesting?

It wasn't a terrible film (it is at least reasonably coherent which puts it ahead of several other DC films), but it was mostly a bit dull. I thought Pierce Brosnan's character was the most interesting in the story, Black Adam himself is so serious that he's not that interesting and The Rock tends to be better when playing more comedic characters.

I read Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquillity. It's a relatively short book but does still manage to fit in half a dozen time periods ranging from early 20th Century Canada to a lunar colony several centuries in the future. Despite that I thought this had a more focused plot than her previous book, The Glass Hotel, which had plenty of good writing but I was a bit unsure about the point of it. This has a much stronger science fiction element than her previous books and although I have seen most of the ideas in here before in books by other authors I thought those elements did work well. Mandel's primary strength has always been her characters and the same is true here where they do get plenty of depth despite mostly not being in the story for very long. I think the one character that didn't really work was Gaspery, who is frustratingly passive on many occasions and is very poor at doing his job.

I think there's some clear autobiographical bits in here with one character being an author who, like Mandel, had come to fame as the author of a novel about a pandemic a few short years before an actual pandemic. Unlike Station Eleven this isn't primarily a book about a pandemic but it is a subject that comes up multiple times throughout the story, I think perhaps the author had some thoughts about the topic she wanted to get out of her system.

I think Station Eleven is still her best book out of those that I've read, but I did like this a lot.

I have now started Martha Wells' new Murderbot Diaries story, System Collapse.

I watched Dream Scenario, which I thought was a good black comedy. By his usual standards Nicolas Cage is fairly restrained for most of the film playing a character whose natural inclination is to fade in the background and not take any action, although as the dreams he is appearing become more nightmarish this does change. It is an unusual premise and I like that they didn't really try to explain why Cage's character is appearing in people's dreams.

I also watched The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Netflix. I remember reading the story as part of one of Dahl's collections several times as a child but I had mostly forgotten the plot until I watched this when it did start to come back to me. I don't think there would have been enough material here for a film, but I think it works well as a 40 minute long short and I think it does suit Wes Anderson's style. I thought Ralph Fiennes was good as Roald Dahl and Cumberbatch as the title character.

I finished Josiah Bancroft's new book The Hexologists. I thought it was an entertaining mystery. To begin with I felt it was perhaps trying a bit too hard to be wacky at times but it felt like it calmed down a bit once the plot really gets underway. Some of the weirder things in the early chapters also make more sense in retrospect. The mystery part of the plot works well, there are definitely hints as to what the resolution but also enough misdirection so that things aren't too obvious. It's in a different setting to Bancroft's Babel series and the setting isn't as memorable, it feels a fairly standard fantasy city but there are still a few nice touches in the world-building. It does wrap up the main plot satisfactorily at the end but there are also some plots obviously being set up for later books.

1 hour ago, briantw said:

Nah, I read the actual book for this one.  It’s just that so many of the names have multiple ways to say them and a lot of them have the same prefix but different last names, but aren’t mentioned enough to clearly establish who they are in my head.  I felt like I was just getting it all straight and then the book ends.

I agree that the Celehar books are also definitely worth reading, although they do have a bit of a different tone to them. However, don't expect the names and titles to get any easier.

4 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Sri Lanka 14-6 off 10 overs chasing 358.....

Are they England in disguise?

9 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

Huh, I actually stopped watching after Ravindra was out, too much other sport on and I assumed it was over, obviously I should have had more confidence in the Kiwi tail.

They do bat very deep with Neesham (who nearly got them over the line) and Santner coming in at 7 and 8.

Ravindra looks like he could have a great career ahead of him.

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

Actually, it was a bit of a weird run overall to winning the World Cup as a whole. Lost to Ireland in the group stage, on the back foot for large parts of all the knock out games against France, England and New Zealand but just stuck in there. Sheer refusal to give up seems to be the main quality which got them through.

Winning the quarter final, semi final and final all by a single point is impressive.