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DireWolfSpirit
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Still Bones. I have opinions. a lot of teenage tv crush opinions. (I guess this may be interpreted as offensive or something, but come on, let’s be kind and liberal to the 13 year old in me)
 

Spoiler

Booth is so cute! *affected whining* he is such a sweetheart. You just want to cuddle the guy. And he’s tall and strong and fun and he wears a suit and does badass things for a living. Swooooooon. It’s so odd how I didn’t like Angel at all, like he didn’t tickle my attraction at all, nothing. And then you put the actor in a different outfit and give him a pleasant character that he seems to actually be in sync with and bamm. He is so cute! 

Hodgins is also cute. I’m a beard person. Not a curly hair person, but definitely a beard person. But also a dark hair person. Height is relative, but Hodgins seems to be on the shorter side compared to most other characters and I’m a tall man person too. So in a wide shot he wouldn’t necessarily stand out to my oh he looks damn fine radar. But then there’s a closeup and the actor will stare into the camera and that man has the most incredibly gorgeous eyes. Such beautiful, deep, warm eyes. Hodgins’ asking Angela out and taking her on that swing date. I would fall for that. I would fall for that so hard. Hodgins is so cute! 

Other than that Brennan is still the most unlikable and unrelatable character and still unrealistically flawless. I like Cam a lot. And Boooooooooth. And Hodginnnnnns. Angela and Zack just complete the group dynamics, I appreciate them too though. 

Edited by RhaenysBee
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Ok so yeah Cocaine Bear was ...what it advertised. and while the same could be said of Snakes on a Plane it never got that stupid or ran the idea into the ground. It's a much better movie. 

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The kids and a very game Kerri Russel kept it grounded. The little boy especially was great, and when Russel's character drags him along on her quest to save her daughter it makes no sense but still works.

I wish we got to see more of Matthew Rhys's character. It felt like the movie skipped an establishing scene with him and Ray Liotta. We just get a mention that he was insane. And while that comes across during his brief cocaine dumping scene, it's all rather abrupt and out of no where. Which is fine for a bear attack but less so for the opening scene of a bear attack movie? 

Edit: I should also probably note that one of my favorite/formative movies was PROPHECY. The 70's killer mutant Bear movie that at least to me was proto-X-Files and also just...amazing. 

 

 

 

Edited by RumHam
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Very solid second season for Carnival Row. I'm curious to see how they wrap this up this weekend. If they land it, I will declare this a great show. It develops fictional politics like I haven't seen since The Expanse, with which it shares a number of themes. Carnival Row remains much weaker when it comes to world-building, but they could improve on that if they get a couple more seasons.

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Vignette is not really unlike Naomi, and Philo, Holden. And their Marco Innaros is the leader of a Marxist revolution! What's not to like?

 

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On 3/10/2023 at 11:21 PM, DireWolfSpirit said:

HBO documentary: In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuvesant High

Really emotional, im not gonna lie I shed some tears half way through this. 

It's interviews of (now adult) students who were at thier high school just blocks away from 9/11 attacks. What they witnessed and thier stories, the life altering traumatic aftermath. 

Most of the students interviewed were from immigrant fanilies and thier stories are compelling.

Holy shit! I was a senior at Stuyvesant on 9/11 too! Liz and I had lockers pretty close to each other senior year and I knew a couple of others in the IMDB cast list as well (though not very well).

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Watched the 65 movie.  And it is certainly a movie.  Is it good?  No.  Is it bad?  Not really.  Is it seemingly competent in direction and acting?  Yes. Does it take any chances with anything whatsoever?  No.  Does it need to be set 65 million years in the past on Earth with dinosaurs(that look like Jurassic park dinos except mostly not recognizable ones)?  Absolutely not.  Could it have just been a plane crash movie in the Pacific northwest and substitute wolves and a bear for the dinos and literally nothing story wise would have to change?  You betcha.

My strongest though about it coming out of the movie was that it felt like Homeward Bound.  Yes, the dogs going home movie.

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19 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Very solid second season for Carnival Row. I'm curious to see how they wrap this up this weekend. If they land it, I will declare this a great show. It develops fictional politics like I haven't seen since The Expanse, with which it shares a number of themes. Carnival Row remains much weaker when it comes to world-building, but they could improve on that if they get a couple more seasons.

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Vignette is not really unlike Naomi, and Philo, Holden. And their Marco Innaros is the leader of a Marxist revolution! What's not to like?

 

I liked it for the most part. But it is the final season, I don't think they're returning. Sadly, Covid severely affected this production and with Amazon focusing more on The Rings of Power and likely even The Wheel of Time, this show was probably lucky to even get the release of season 2.

I don't know if you've watched the final episodes. It was a decent finale, with a more optimistic ending than I expected considering how dark and dreary some of the episode were.

But despite the good parts, there were some annoying flaws with this season, I would call them sins.

The biggest sin

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Fridging Sophie halfway through. WTF. She was a promising character. If we are doing analogies, she felt like a female Littlefinger with Targaryen incestous tendencies. I think she could have had a role in the final episodes, but apparently the writers didn't know what to do with her past a certain point. Not to mention that her fall came about a bit randomly.

A second sin. Spoilers for the finale

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Sergeant Dombey somehow ending up on the good guys side. I suppose looking at The Expanse, he's a bit of an Ashford, but still largely remains a racist asshole. I appreciate that the writers did make him a more three-dimensional character in this season, but I'm still not sure he deserved to finish alive and promoted.

As to other Expanse analogies

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Philo is Holden with Miller's cynicism, but Vignette is way more flip-floppy than Naomi. I agree that the world building isn't always that good.

The Marxist leader was a bit boring. But I appreciated that they tried to walk a fine live between glorifying their ideology and showing the bloodthirsty aspects of a revolution.

 

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2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I don't know if you've watched the final episodes. It was a decent finale, with a more optimistic ending than I expected considering how dark and dreary some of the episode were.

Way too optimistic for my tastes. I think it's a waste that they spent so much time developing all these complex themes in a gritty, realistic manner, only to go for a vanilla ending that kinda comes out of left field. The finale ruins much of the subtelty they worked on establishing. I wasn't expecting them to be too subversive, but they end up defending complete economic status quo (work, be happy and shut up) ; problem with that choice is that the season loses internal coherency and leaves plot points hanging imho.

I think you're right and that production problems affected the writing ; I don't think they initially intended for this ending. It seems they learned they wouldn't get a season 3 mid-way and rushed to conclude their story ; this would explain many odd choices in the final episodes. In fact, the season was initially supposed to be 8 episodes, so the last two were kinda artificially added to provide some measure of resolution.
 

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I didn't mind Sophie's execution tbh. To me it signaled they weren't afraid to surprise us and explore something potentially original. It's only in retrospect that I agree it's a "sin," because instead of exploring anything original, it drastically simplified the political arcs - gearing to a conclusion.

The greatest problem for me is thematic: they deliver a surprisingly good critique of capitalism (for a tv show), then introduce a flawed Marxist Leonorian revolution. Great. But then they utterly fail to resolve the opposition. Instead, the revolution "fails" and everything is miraculously better because of it.
Of course that makes no fucking sense. The Fae are still exploited, they will face even more hatred than before, and they have now been fed proto-Marxist thought. The Soviet Union New Dawn still exists and we can presume no treaty was signed. Why would everything be magically peaceful at the end? In fact, would Philo killing the sparas really be enough for the elite to accept him as chancellor? And why does he refuse? Surely he could have done tons of good ; in the same situation, Holden did much better.
The message this sends is that the revolutionary idea itself was the problem, not the inequality, the exploitation, or the racial hatred. People "are equal in front of death" says Millworthy at the end, and we should therefore not let ourselves be defined by skin color or status ; except the issue was precisely that Africans the Fae never defined themselves as inferior, the British Burguish did.
Avoiding this problem, the finale offers us some token progressivism: an interracial couple, a lesbian couple, and technological progress. Yeah. The monster (now a potential metaphor for the threat of any genuine social upheaval) was slain by our hero, so everyone can go back to their lives, "the future is here."
They could have done much better... Much worse as well, I suppose. Their vision of an optimistic ending unexpectedly reveals much about recent human history: from the socio-economic themes of colonialism and exploitation, we somehow switch to individual strife and token progressivism. The political and economic establishment is unchanged (our hero will be no Barack Obama), possibly worse than before since neither fascism nor socialism have been vanquished as ideas... but some leaders have died, so apparently they can be forgotten. And see, inequality is still a problem, but don't worry you can be a successful bastard regardless of your skin color (though you will have to be willing to do anything to succeed and "be free"). And now, let's give you some technological gadgets so you won't think about all this anymore.

 

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On 3/16/2023 at 7:51 PM, Slurktan said:

Watched the 65 movie.  And it is certainly a movie.  Is it good?  No.  Is it bad?  Not really.  Is it seemingly competent in direction and acting?  Yes. Does it take any chances with anything whatsoever?  No.  Does it need to be set 65 million years in the past on Earth with dinosaurs(that look like Jurassic park dinos except mostly not recognizable ones)?  Absolutely not.  Could it have just been a plane crash movie in the Pacific northwest and substitute wolves and a bear for the dinos and literally nothing story wise would have to change?  You betcha.

My strongest though about it coming out of the movie was that it felt like Homeward Bound.  Yes, the dogs going home movie.

So many questions. 

Listen fella, why don't you just stop pussy footing around and tell us what you thought of the film? 

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Watched Resurrection, a psychological thriller/horror film starring Rebecca Hall (amazing performance) and Tim Roth (always amazing). It's not a great film as such, it's uneven, but boy howdy, Hall just knocks it out of the park. The basic idea of the plot is that she's a businesswoman and single mother with a daughter about to go to college, who ends up encountering a man from her past (Tim Roth) that sends her into an immediate panic attack. Her life starts to fall apart as she relives her trauma and becomes increasingly desperate about his presence around her and what happened in the past. It ends pretty gruesomely.

There's a monologue that Hall delivers in a single take that is just a perfect performance.

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