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The Dead Zone is another good one.

Personally, I'd elevate Carrie into the solidly good category.

I haven't seen In the Tall Grass, but I read the novella. I liked it enough for the atmosphere and setting, but they didn't seem to have a good place to take the story. I'm curious to give the movie a look.
So many damn King novels and stories, it’s hard to remember all the adaptations.

I remember there’s also Apt Pupil.
Ian McKellan - You got me.
Ian McKellan as a Nazi - Now you’re just showing off.
 
I haven't seen the Dead Zone, or Carrie for that matter, since my childhood so I should probably give both another watch.
Carrie is the movie that made Stephen King a genuine celebrity. Obviously the novel had been a bestseller, but it is doubtful his future books would have gotten the same media attention and advertising budgets without it.

The Dead Zone is Cronenberg adapting Stephen King. It's an interesting combination as there is a fair amount of overlap in their interests. It's not hard to imagine The Dead Zone, Firestarter and Carrie being part of the same universe as Scanners and The Brood. Cronenberg certainly would have done a much better job with Firestarter than the movie we got.
 
I think the best adaptations of King's work tend to be the ones that are the most grounded; Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, Apt Pupil, Dolores Claiborne, Misery, and Secret Garden. I also think the Green Mile is excellent, but it does have the supernatural elements. Obviously The Shining is an exception.

Many of the rest struggle in some way. There are a few that are more supernatural that do manage to be pretty good films, but most fall flat in some way.
 
Honestly, the non-linear thing here felt even more gimmickyy than it did in The Witcher, as it served no purpose that I could tell in regards to information from past events significantly shedding light on events from the prsent preceeding them.

I think it was an attempt to tell the story in a more condensed way but it diluted the suspense and introduced the supernatural elements too early I thought.

The first 600 or whatever pages of Captain Tripps apocalypse in the book is some of the best writing by King up to that point and it moves like a freight train. The supernatural element is slowly introduced from what I recall. In contrast the serie's approach loses that momentum I think.

In terms of King film adaptations Carrie and The Shining are the masterpieces I think with The Dead Zone a very fine film too.
 
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Watching the Dead Zone now for the first time since maybe '88.

Young Christopher Walken is a trip.

And he opens the film taling to a school class about Irving's Sleepy Hollow, which almost made me do a spit take.
Wait til you get to Martin Sheen.
 
Watched the 2nd episode of Falcon & Winter Soldier. More action-driven than the first episode, but still had some really solid character work, as well. The appearance of Isaiah Bradley caught me by surprise, in a good way.

Edit: John Walker was less of an asshole than I was expecting, but there's still plenty of room for both personal growth and conflict with our two leads.
 
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My friend is a bit of a Stephen King nut so I get a lot of King books shoved at me, as a prelude to watching the movie versions (she's still waiting on me to finish Dr. Sleep).
His endings often suck... great set-ups that drive off a cliff.

My favorite of both movies and stories is The Mist... and I do like the movie's ending, even though it does drop a hint that the crazy lady in the market had the right idea (again with the blood thirsty old testament god).
I liked the Tall Grass story, but not the movie... maybe on its own terms it was OK.
 
Watched The Ripper documentary series on Netflix. This four part series on the Yorkshire Ripper manages to avoid pointless filler, focus more on the victims and their families and the societal significance of the murders rather than the serial killer himself. I love true crime but I'm often disappointed in the substandard, exploitive tone of a lot of low budget 'documentaries' on Netflix. This is a quality, serious treatment of the subject.

 
I just finished Utopia (the UK version) which I'd never heard of till last week. Luckily I was warned that the Amazon version had been censored/cropped, but I found it elsewhere.
I'm still digesting it but it did send my mind for a loop... super-saturated colors and lurid violence... plus, watching it for the first time in 2021 is a bit of a mind-fuck.
Also, like the villain in the third season of The Sinner, I find the philosophy of the bad guys in Utopia to be a funhouse mirror of my own.
I think I'm going to switch to watching old musicals for a while...

Utopia.jpg
 
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Watched the 2nd episode of Falcon & Winter Soldier. More action-driven than the first episode, but still had some really solid character work, as well. The appearance of Isaiah Bradley caught me by surprise, in a good way.

Edit: John Walker was less of an asshole than I was expecting, but there's still plenty of room for both personal growth and conflict with our two leads.

I’m really glad that Walker isn’t some snarling, overzealous thug or anything so one note. It actually makes it trickier if he’s basically a good guy.

I imagine we’ll see him fail to fill Steve’s shoes in some manner, though...validating Sam as Steve’s true successor. But we’ll see.

All in all a good episode. Sam and Bucky...or Mackie and Stan, I suppose...have good chemistry and play off each other well. Solid character work from them both.

Curious to see where things are going with the Flagsmashers and the Power Broker. Some ideas from the comics seem likely, but I’m sure some things’ll play out different.

Very surprised to see Isaiah. And I suppose that was Eli living with him! Six of the eight Young Avengers are now officially in the MCU (or will be once Hawkeye arrives).

One thing that kind of bugged me....does Bucky have enhanced abilities beyond the arm? First he took that fall from the plane and then he caught up to a truck as it was speeding away. I don’t recall if there were ever any hints that he’d been otherwise enhanced, but that was the impression I got here.
 
One thing that kind of bugged me....does Bucky have enhanced abilities beyond the arm? First he took that fall from the plane and then he caught up to a truck as it was speeding away. I don’t recall if there were ever any hints that he’d been otherwise enhanced, but that was the impression I got here.
For the fall from the plane, I noticed that he was using the cyber-arm the hit the tree branches on the way down. I would guess that the arm got upgraded with some vibranium while in Wakanda, which absorbed the kinetic impact from the branches he hit during his descent, also slowing the fall enough to make the sudden stop more stunning (and embarrassing) than bone-shatteringly lethal.

That said, he may have other cybernetic augments hidden inside his body, and it wouldn't surprise me if Zola gave him a cut-rate version of the super-soldier serum, which wouldn't put him on Steve's level, but might put him a bit past what even the best human could absorb and do, and just as importantly allow him to survive continually getting frozen and thawed on a regular basis.
 
He ran after a semi like he was Cap. I think that’s a good sign.

Right. That’s the moment that jumped out at me. I don’t think we’ve seen quite that obvious a display of superhuman ability from him, although in The Winter Soldier he certainly did some crazy shit.

But then I also recall in Civil War how he was basically the workout dummy for the actual superhumans once the Russians had created them.
 
Yea I don’t think he’s been quite as superhuman in previous ones. A lot of his arm but not lots else.

Also how about that John Walker? Also the nice hook in with Isaiah and Elijah.
 
Over the last week or so, my wife and I have watched series 12 of the 'new' Dr. Who--that is, Jodie Whittaker's second season. My overall reaction was, I guess, 'meh.' I wasn't as upset by the season as some fans have been, but I wasn't very impressed either.

I actually don't mind Whittaker's version of the Doctor, and I've come to have some affection for the companions, particularly Graham. But there were some real weaknesses to this series, I thought (spoilered to avoid, well, spoiling):
Although there were things I liked about the actor's performance, I didn't really care for the version of the Master introduced in this series. He was too psychotic and too endlessly talky for my taste. In fact, I ended up feeling that Chibnall was actually a good deal more interested in him than in the Doctor; the Master tended to take over episodes where he appeared, especially the finale.

I don't mind Dr. Who tackling current issues like pollution, global warming, and depression, but its handling of them, especially in Orphan 55, was very ham-handed. That episode also had real problems with tone, mixing black comedy or horror with action and adventure unsuccessfully, I thought. And very bad characterization for the 'terrorist' as well in that episode. Some other episodes had bad pacing or lackluster dialogue.

There were of course some bright spots as well:
I actually liked Jo Martin's brief appearances as the 'alternate doctor.' She seemed to radiate a good 'vibe' and her costuming was better than Whittaker's, which I've always found uninspired.

Some episodes were pretty good. The initial 'Skyfall' two-parter was intriguing, with some amusing James Bond parody, and it was nice to see Stephen Fry, if only briefly. I thought it was far too obvious that 'O' was actually behind the plot, even before we knew he was the Master. I also liked the 'Haunting of Villa Diodati' episode, though I'm a sucker for stories about the origin of Frankenstein.

My take on the elephant in the room:
Unlike many fans, I guess, I really didn't care one way or another about the retconning of the Doctor's origins and our discovery that she is the 'timeless child' who gave the power of regeneration to the Gallifreyans. I realize that this means there were other--probably many other--Doctors before Hartnell's 'First Doctor' but I don't really care about that. We joined the Doctor 'in media res,' as it were, far along in his lifetime, so I've always assumed that there was more that came earlier. Making it a great deal more is not a big deal from my perspective.

More interesting, and to my mind more revolutionary in terms of the Dr. Who setup, were the hints in the final episodes that the Time Lords had an equivalent of 'Section 31' from Star Trek, a secret organization dedicated to interference in time and space--and that the Doctor is one of (or maybe their only) operatives. It seems that they are the ones who have been erasing her memories every so often.

I guess I'm not too concerned about the retconning of the Doctor because, from my perspective, that had been done long ago. My Doctor is still Tom Baker. New Who is a lot different from that model. For me, a much more important change was the decision to remove the Time Lords as active players in the Doctor's story which was made with new Who. I miss the old days, when the Time Lords were still out there and the Doctor might return to Gallifrey every so often. One thing I liked about it was the way it cut him or her down to size--on Gallifrey, the Doctor was not this vast cosmic force, or something similar, but just a renegade Time Lord whose old tutors might upbraid him.
 
I watched Operation Odessa, the true story about some guys in Miami who were involved with trying to buy a Russian submarine for one of the Colombian drug cartels to use to try and smuggle drugs. I had read about it before, but they actually talked to the people involved. Pretty crazy stuff.
 
Today I finished watching all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I gotta say I liked it. It's optimistic vision of the future was a nice change of pace compared to more recent Sci-Fi TV. I thought that I'd be bothered by the Teleporters and Time travel, but it didn't really bug me that much. What did bug me was the Psychic stuff in the later seasons. MY guess is that one of the writers liked ghosts and wanted to integrate them into Star Trek. It was fairly easy to ignore though.
Now I'm debating watching either The Original Series or Star Gate.
 
We started watching Lore on Prime.

giphy.gif
 
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Not sure how widespread this is, but I thought I'd mention it just in case it's relevant to anyone else: several of the shows I've watched on Netflix lately have their episodes in production order rather than airing order. Wasn't a huge deal, since the shows in question were sitcoms without much overarching plot, but it was sometimes confusing when an episode would make reference to something that happened on a different episode that aired earlier on TV but comes later in Netflix order.

I've learned to look up what order the episodes originally aired in (usually easily found via your search engine of choice) and skip around in the Netflix menu so I can watch them in an order that makes sense to me.
 
Not sure how widespread this is, but I thought I'd mention it just in case it's relevant to anyone else: several of the shows I've watched on Netflix lately have their episodes in production order rather than airing order. Wasn't a huge deal, since the shows in question were sitcoms without much overarching plot, but it was sometimes confusing when an episode would make reference to something that happened on a different episode that aired earlier on TV but comes later in Netflix order.

I've learned to look up what order the episodes originally aired in (usually easily found via your search engine of choice) and skip around in the Netflix menu so I can watch them in an order that makes sense to me.
A lot of times it’s the opposite. Production order is correct, but they were aired in the wrong order due to schedule juggling.
 
Watching the Dead Zone now for the first time since maybe '88.

Young Christopher Walken is a trip.

And he opens the film talking to a school class about Irving's Sleepy Hollow, which almost made me do a spit take.
It's also Christopher Walken actually acting rather than being a parody of himself which is how his later roles turned out. Granted, I love Christopher Walken as a parody of himself... The Prophecy might not be an actually GOOD movie, but man I still love watching it for Walken.
 
Edit: John Walker was less of an asshole than I was expecting, but there's still plenty of room for both personal growth and conflict with our two leads.

I’m really hoping that it isn’t a fake-out, and they’re taking their inspiration from Walker when he first became Cap in the comics. He lost some of his attitude he first had as Super-Patriot, and he was portrayed as a complex character who was trying his best, but was both in over his head and being manipulated by, well, you know.

in the many years writers after Grunewald seemed to have forgotten that, and have either portrayed him. as flat-out insane, or an uber-jerk.
 
Today I finished watching all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I gotta say I liked it. It's optimistic vision of the future was a nice change of pace compared to more recent Sci-Fi TV. I thought that I'd be bothered by the Teleporters and Time travel, but it didn't really bug me that much. What did bug me was the Psychic stuff in the later seasons. MY guess is that one of the writers liked ghosts and wanted to integrate them into Star Trek. It was fairly easy to ignore though.
Now I'm debating watching either The Original Series or Star Gate.

They're both definitely worth watching. Stargate season 1 takes some time to 'reach its stride' so to speak, so if the first few episodes put you off you may like later ones better.

Have you seen the later Trek series like Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise?
 
Watched DOTA: Dragon's Blood on Netflix. Never played the games so have no clue how much (or little) the lore has to do with whatever is in them, but I really liked what they shown us so far.
Hopefully we don't need to wait too much for a second season.
 
No, not yet, I'm not sure they're on Netflix though so I might not be able to see them for a while.
If you are willing to put up with broadcast TV, there is a low-rent network named Heroes & Icons that re-runs all 4 Trek series every weeknight (and Sunday). It's a lousy way to watch the first series, because they cut part of each episode to show more commercials--when the show was made, back in the 1960s, American TV allowed fewer minutes of commercials per hour. This is less of a problem with later series. They start with the original Star Trek at 8 p.m. and move forward, reaching Voyager at 11.

Heroes & Icons is one of those networks that local broadcast stations will pick up to fill out the 'repeater' channels that they can use since the switch to digital TV. So you might be able to watch it in your area.
 
Caught The Band Wagon on TCM, a uneven musical but with the great Vincent Minnelli at the helm and Cyd Charisse and Astaire there are some definite highlights. Particularly the noir-inspired ' Girl Hunt' sequence. Charisse is a great dancer and smoking hot.

 
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Just finished the third episode of Falcon & Winter Soldier. Enjoyed it, but I think this episode wasn't as good as the first two, partially because the pacing seemed rushed, and also because I didn't like how quickly we went to Bucky springing Zemo from prison. That said, I liked that we got to see Madripoor, the return of Sharon (who got some kickass fight scenes, and an appearance of one of the Dora Milaje at the end.
 
Just finished the third episode of Falcon & Winter Soldier. Enjoyed it, but I think this episode wasn't as good as the first two, partially because the pacing seemed rushed, and also because I didn't like how quickly we went to Bucky springing Zemo from prison. That said, I liked that we got to see Madripoor, the return of Sharon (who got some kickass fight scenes, and an appearance of one of the Dora Milaje at the end.

I didn’t mind that they moved quickly at the start and kind of handled that with some flashback work....but the whole episode did feel a bit rushed overall. Like the previous episodes the action scenes kind of served the character or plot scenes, bit this one was almost the reverse.

Not bad, just a bit uneven, and I agree, the weakest of the three. Which seems odd given a lot of the major moments here.
 
No, not yet, I'm not sure they're on Netflix though so I might not be able to see them for a while.
Pluto tv has a star trek channel that runs 24/7, and it's free

I went and saw Godzilla vs Kong in the theater today. Loved the fight scenes (and wish I could have seen this in 3D).
 
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