Travelers. Surprisingly good sci-fi time-travel yarn, bleakly funny and touching in places. There’s the usual c‘mon-guys-it’s-clearly-Vancouver-again location, but fine. That said, the ending to season 2 was a downer and trashed quite a lot of the premise that had made the series engaging, so eh. I guess we‘ll see how season 3 goes now it’s been uncancelled.
Started on Patriot- up to ep.2. Very dry, black humour.
I’m looking forward to Season 3 of Colony. They moved up to Vancouver to shoot, so I think they actually left LA in the season finale of Season 2.
Made in Abyss. Improves slowly as it goes on, with the final few episodes performing leaps in maturity and quality, elevating it beyond being just another anime. Some very grim moments amidst a lot of fantasy.
So still working my way through the Arrowverse in the the proper viewing order.
Just finished Supergirl through episode 17, and that is surprisingly much better than I had expected. Calista Flockhart is so good as Cat Grant, not to mention they write her all these great lines that poke fun of normal super hero story tropes.
That viewing order only had me watch 3 episodes of Legends of Tomorrow so far, more up next. Not sure how I felt about that on yet. Kind of too big of a cast to wrap my head around.
Legends of Tomorrow gets much better in the 2nd season, mainly because the main villain in the 1st season is just so badly-acted.
Also, in the 2nd season, it embraces the relatively silly premise and really has a lot of fun with the character interactions. Mick is the best!
Mick is hilarious.
I’m planning on wrapping up Dark tonight or tomorrow and it has been entertaining. The dubbing is painful. But I’m really dying to know the back story of that bit part investigator who, for no reason at all, has a bandaged head and eyepatch! What’s his story? Why the fresh wounds? Come on, Germany, why do this to me?!?!
I’ve been quite enjoying this. Very dark comedy / coming of age.
I’m still not sure why Netflix doesn’t have an alternate listing for shared-universe shows allowing users to easily view them in air-date order. Seems like it’d be easy enough.
Especially given they have their own shared-universe shows that are tremendously popular.
Just rewatching them myself, am about midway trough the 110 episode gargantuan monster that LotGH is.
And boy o boy is my Native language butchered. Either by typical japanese (back then at least) bad use of literal translation or the japanese voice actors trying to wrap their tongues around the unusual German pronounciation of names.
Beside that and its age it is still a classic. I have now tracked down the side (prequel) series as well and will watch them afterwards.
Oh and also the japanese novels the anime is based on are in the process of being translated to english.
I’ve already downloaded the First novel and will plunge into it when my current Arthur C. Clarke Marathon is complete (Rama II atm)
The more I watch the more impressed I am. It really is straining the limits of the medium, but the way it shows planning, staff officer work, nepotism, factional infighting and inter-service rivalry, etc is just more than most shows ever attempt.
Finished Patriot. Well, that was … different. Michael Dorman as Monsieur Triste en costume was excellent. Very unexpected. Tried Beyond for another dose of small-town sci-fi, and no. Good premise, dull characters and leaden writing.
Mrs StC‘s turn to choose and it’s season 3 of How to Get Away with Murder. Like Scandal, I hate all the characters and think they should all be in jail, but the writers of Beyond could take a few lessons in how to tell a simple-ish story stylishly.
Altered Carbon. From what I remember, the book is good, with only a few parts that have not aged well, and in truth were probably terrible even back then. This is one of those situations where having read the book is probably a disadvantage as there have been so many changes to things I know, and so much left unchanged, that everything strikes me as wrong. There are some alterations that could make more sense if handled deftly down the road, but this does not seem to be the creative team to do that. Starring Joel Kinnaman’s abs as Takeshi Kovacs (you will not know him from the Robocop remake because quite frankly who gives a shit), the much better Martha Higareda as Kristin Ortega, the detective who loathes him but loves his abs, and James Purefoy as Laurens ‘Oily’ Bancroft.
Too much of the book’s prose is handed out in poor narration, with no real emphasis and, I suspect, zero understanding. Important tenets of Kovacs’ history and training are voiced seemingly at random. The direction is either macabre or tasteless. I’m halfway through the series and I need the flashback scenes to stop, they are awful.
A lot of the book shines through a hamfisted adaptation, with some excellent noir/scifi elements, but even the violence is lacking punch.
We have watched through episode 4 now. The flashback stuff is all modified from books 2 and 3. I have read the trilogy several times, and I kind of like that things are changed. I already know the original stories well enough, seeing them with a different interpretation is something I am enjoying.
I actually kind of liked that movie.
I think it has now been thoroughly proven that no one should try to remake a Verhoeven. His mastery at melding lowbrow action with highbrow satire and concepts has been criminally underestimated for decades. All because he got blinded by Jesse Spano’s admittedly magnificent rack into making that terrible Showgirls.
In general the remakes are too po-faced (and I’m sure the proposed Starship Troopers remake would fall prey to this, too), but the RoboCop one benefited from a little bit of timely messaging about autonomous weapons systems and also from the direction of Jose Padilha who did the way-better-than-its-title-suggests Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, which you should watch if you haven’t already.