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After finishing up Lucifer (and happy to see Netflix decided to give it a sixth season!), I started watching Army of the Dead. I was kind of hyped about it before it came out. Then I started getting mixed reviews on it. Since I was planning on finally checking out Train to Busan this weekend (and hopefully the sequel as well), I wanted to get this one out of the way. I'm almost halfway through it, and not sure how I feel yet. Some things I like, some I think are utterly stupid, but until I finish the whole film, don't have an overall opinion yet.
 
Have finally finished The Untamed and stand by my recommendation of giving it a watch and cementing it in a place of honor in my Appendix N.
 
Finished Lost Girl on Now TV, an urban horror/fantasy thing about Dark Fae and Light Fae with a Succubus trapped in between. Well, she won't join either side, officially, but spends all her time with the Light Fae and battles the Dark Fae. It was pretty good, but suffered from having to have a worse enemy each Season. It also got a bit smutty in the middle, which I could have done without, especially as my wife kept asking what I was watching.
 
My wife and I watched the original Ernst Lubitsch To Be or Not to Be, having seen the Mel Brooks remake a few weeks ago. The original is even better. It’s less of a farce (which is neither good nor bad), but also somewhat tighter and considerably grimmer in tone. Jack Benny has a smaller role as the lead than Brooks in his version, but handles it expertly, and Carole Lombard is both gorgeous and believable as his wife and stage co-star. Sig Ruman is hilarious as Col. Erhardt, the Gestapo commander in Warsaw—even better than Charles Durning in the remake. Ruman was in Ninotchka as well, which we saw recently, and played Sgt. Schulz in Stalag 17, the origins of the Hogan’s Heroes’ Schulz character.
 
Really happy that new episodes of Lucifer came out. I love that show. Watched episodes 9 & 10 of the current season. Looking forward to watching more tonight.
 
at least it didn't take itself entirely seriously
You think? :grin:

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So, 3/4 through season 5 of Flash and....well, why is Flash no longer the main character? I swear he's basically a secondary character now, or less
 
Yada Yada
So here I am making Jojo references. Does this mean I'm a weeb?
I don't know if you watch it with Japanese audio, but the fact that he says those things in English makes it extra hilarious. Every time he utters another "oh my god", "oh shiiiit", "oh nooo" we're dead.

Yada yada, is either yara yara in Japanese, something like a very bored "yeah yeah", or it could be yareyare, which means "good grief". This phrase is heard in a lot of anime.
 
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I don't know if you watch it with Japanese audio, but the fact that he says those things in English makes it extra hilarious. Every time he utters another "oh my god", "oh shiiiit", "oh nooo" we're dead.

Yada yada, is yara yara in Japanese, something like a very bored "yeah yeah".
I watched it with subtitles, although hearing the borrowed English in the Japanese dialog was quite amusing. I can't say it really grabbed me, but you can see why it has a major fanboy demographic.
 
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I watched it with subtitles, although hearing the borrowed English in the Japanese dialog was quite amusing.
I must say I found the show hilarious but stopped watching because it got too repetitive. Maybe I should pick it up again now that it's been a while and it's up on Netflix...
 
So, 3/4 through season 5 of Flash and....well, why is Flash no longer the main character? I swear he's basically a secondary character now, or less
See what I told you... We are the Flash

I know what they were going for, but really... it's terribly written and hard to swallow.
 
See what I told you... We are the Flash

I know what they were going for, but really... it's terribly written and hard to swallow.

I was just about to start watching the latest season, and I heard not only that they fired Ralph Dibny, but also Caitlin and Cisco get written out, and two new people are joining on "Team Flash", and I'm just ...I think I'm done. I think I'm just going to watch the Crisis crossover and call it good.
 
I was just about to start watching the latest season, and I heard not only that they fired Ralph Dibny, but also Caitlin and Cisco get written out, and two new people are joining on "Team Flash", and I'm just ...I think I'm done. I think I'm just going to watch the Crisis crossover and call it good.

Don't blame you. Ralph was about the twitter storm over twitter junk he did a while ago- mostly edgelord stuff to get a laugh. It wasn't funny and was obviously a put on. Cisco is gone along with Wells. Caitlin hasn't been written off. People are saying that she's the next to go, but no one has pointed to an definitive proof, and she's actually getting more time on the screen. Frost had a bit of a situation, and people were speculating that it meant that she was leaving also, but that was just the normal fan stuff. But it's not one of the shows that I'm looking out for every week.
 
I watched Special on Netflix. Not really sure what to think about it.
 
Watched Glass on Netflix. It seemed - short, like about a half hour's worth of ideas stretched to movie length. The acting and cinematography was great, as usual, but the director's trademark "twist" seemed heavyhanded and didn't make a lot of sense overall, as per everything past The Vilage

. KInda interesting at least to get a finale 20 years later.
 
Just started watching Wu Assassins on Netflix, stars the star of the Raid 1 & 2, and so far so good. Pretty cliched but martial arts are good :smile:
 
I heard good things about Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral when it came out in 2012 and intended to check it out but only got to it all these years later because I really liked his recent film Possessor I posted about earlier in this thread.

If anything this is even more of a horror film than Possessor with a truly grotesque and perverse finale. I liked it even if it lacked some of the tight-wound tension of the more recent film.

 
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Welp Crisis on Infinite Earths kinda sucked. Too bad. It actually took effort to get through, it was overall really boring.

And really, that guy from Pretty in Pink is the best they could do for Lex Luthor?
 
[The Flash is] not one of the shows that I'm looking out for every week.

I really loved the first two seasons of the Flash. It wasn't as dark as Arrow, and even though the effects budget isn't that great they did a good job for a TV show simulating the speed. It had some really good casting and tributes to older shows.

However, after that, it starts going downhill for me. The main reasons for that were these:
  • Season 3 introduced a mini-flashpoint, where some elements of the past were altered and it affected the present, and while that trick can work in some situations, more often than not I dislike it when it introduces new things we didn't get to see develop over time. All the sudden, we're in the dark and they can introduce new things without working for it.
  • They squandered a few opportunities for other shows, like moving Firestorm and Captain Cold to Legends of Tomorrow. While moving the former was okay, I really wish we could have seen Leonard Snart as an occasional villain (he is a Flash rogue after all!), than see him on LoT to just get killed at the end of season 1.
  • Season 3 got really dark for the Flash, didn't really care for the main villain.
  • Season 4 was very uneven -- there was some good stuff, but you then got silly stuff like the Council of Wells and it just felt off.
Season 5 was a step in the right direction with Nora and the overall storyline, but I think the show lost the wonder factor the first two seasons did. Maybe it's the showrunners changing, or Greg Berlanti not being as involved directly as much. I also think as the universe expanded with new series it weakened the attention you paid to these. I watched Season 6 for a while, but then missed some episodes and haven't watched since -- I might catch it on Netflix later, but the quote above is how I feel about it currently.
 
Every Arrowverse show (other than Superman and Lois and Stargirl if you consider it part of the CW) has had its missteps. It's really strange to track those:

Arrow (randomly dispersed- especially at the end of seasons after 1-2)
Flash (I track that by villains - Mad Thinker, Cicada, and whatever these last two seasons have been)
Legends of Tomorrow (season 1)
Black Lightning (avoided most CW tropes, but the writers were too unfocused making it good and bad the whole time)
Supergirl (never can stick the landing on any of its storylines other than the Lex one- really hated how they ended Manchester Black)
Batwoman (Alice was the saving grace- then this season has been surprisingly good after getting rid of Ruby Rose)

The only one I watch right after it comes out consistently is Superman and Lois. The others are meh- I'll watch them when I watch them.
 
Welp Crisis on Infinite Earths kinda sucked. Too bad. It actually took effort to get through, it was overall really boring.

And really, that guy from Pretty in Pink is the best they could do for Lex Luthor?
I didn't mind it too much, though it dragged at points. Jon Cryer is actually a great Lex Luthor- a lot better than I'd thought he would be. The death of Oliver Queen the first time was a terrible misstep, and I don't think they recovered from it. They seemed to be trying to hit all the beats from the comic rather than going for the spirit of the comics- which would have freed them up a lot since they had a lot fewer characters. And when they did change things (the Paragons) their choices were really baffling.

The best parts to me were the batwoman part with batman, the superman vs superman... and yeah, that's about it. There were a few fanservice moments that I loved- the Lucifer/Constantine bit was great as was the Lex vs Smallville bit.
 
Over the weekend, I watched Desperate Journey (1942) on broadcast. It’s a Raoul Walsh film about a bomber crew which crash-lands in Germany, escapes confinement before reaching the Luftstalag, and goes on a spree of sabotage while ultimately escaping the Nazis and bringing secret information back to Britain. At times it felt a bit like a Top Secret adventure with a very forgiving G.M., but it was well paced and had some fairly exciting scenes. Errol Flynn was good as the Australian flight lieutenant who took command of the crew after the captain’s death in the crash, and Ronald Reagan actually wasn’t bad as the plucky American. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of his films before. Alan Hale was fun as a Falstaffian enlisted man, though he barely bothered to attempt an English accent. Raymond Massey was menacing as the Nazi major who pursues the flyers across Germany, and Sig Ruman had a nice small role as an officious railroad inspector. Interestingly, none of the German was subtitled, and there was a fair amount of it in the film.
 
Just finished watching Invincible.

Holy fuck it was great! Loved every change from the comic, including some hints for future changes.

Yeah, favourite series of the last year. And I think it was better than the comic TBH
 
So my overall thoughts on The Flash

Hafway through the first season there was something that annoyed me that never went away. It didn't kill the series for me, but once I put my finger on exacty what it was that bothered me it did colour my perception of the series henceforth. Namely -

Despite being a scientist, Barry is portrayed as kinda dumb. Pretty much all the scientific solutions to problems, the clever uses of his superpower to defeat villains, were provided by "Team Flash". They told him what to do, they did the problem-solving, and he was basically a performing monkey. I understand the reason - it gives the audience the explanation, so Barry doesn't have to talk to himself. Thought bubbles work way better in comics than voiceovers in ive action media. Still, it ceented for me exacty wat I personaly want from a Flash TV show - Barry using his smarts to come up with cool new ways to use his powers ("Power Stunts" in Phaserip vernacular) to defeat different vilains. That isn't exactly what we got.

Still the show was compelling - Barry's charisma, his relationship with Joe, the unrequited Iris love story we can all identify with, and most of all Wells/Reverse Flash. Even up to the end of season 2, most episodes ended with me wanting to see what happened next. I grew fondish of Cisco...less so Caitin, who I never really warmed to except as (ironically) Killer Frost.

I think the show was, in retrospect, impatient. It got Barry and Iris together too fast. It resolved Reverse Flash and Flashpoint too fast. It made Captain Cold a hero and gave him a sacrificial death too fast.

Third season was probaby the hardest to get through. The villain was boring, and once the reveal came - I never realy bought it. Something MORE needed to have happened to turn our Hero into a killer. The Thinker was a good villain and season 4 was in improvement over 3, but the problems with too big a cast got compunded with "everybody gets superpowers". Cisco? Powers. Caitin? Powers. That chick Joe is dating? Powers. WTF? I think that's when the show really just stopped being "The Flash". And, closer to home....wel, Iris just isn't that interesting a person or character. No offense to the actress, but the show seemed to be bending over backwards to make her more important than she should have been.

Anyways, season 5 wasn't great, but it had enough good moments it seemed like a good place to stop.
 
The Thinker was a good villain and season 4 was in improvement over 3
See, I thought the Mad Thinker was weak. I didn't like Zoom that much (I think that was the second speedster's name) but he was more compelling than The Mad Thinker- especially his motivations. And they wanted to show him as smart, but his turns were not earned. Caitlyn and Iris both suffer from the fact that they don't really know how to write strong women, but know that they want to have women prominent in the story. I think where Arrow succeeded and the Flash failed (at least at first before it started flailing) was that it had a compelling first couple of adversaries- Merlyn and Slade were excellent. Season 3 even had a good villain. And then Oliver fell off a cliff and with it the whole series, as it became about things that it was not about, and Ra's morphed into something unrecognizeable. Again they fell into the trap of trying to write a stronger female presence into the show without knowing how to write strong females.

They need more writers that know how to make empowering storylines without being hamfisted about it or trivializing the story. But it seems they've learned with Superman and Lois how to balance that dramatic tension without going into melodrama. At least- I hope.
 
I've really been enjoying Superman and Lois, but I can't help but think - why can't we just have a normal Superman TV show? (Or a Batman one for that matter?) Why does it always have to be some "new different take"? Superboy, Lois and Clark, Smallvile, Supergirl, Krypton, and now Superdad...where is this generation's Adventures of Superman?
 
See, I thought the Mad Thinker was weak. I didn't like Zoom that much (I think that was the second speedster's name) but he was more compelling than The Mad Thinker- especially his motivations.

Weren't Zoom's motivations just "I want to be the fastest guy"? Zoom was kinda weird, since....well, he's really just Reverse Flash in the comics. I didn't mind what they did with him, made him intimidating, though when we finaly learned his origin it was a bit of a letdown (but not as much of a letdown as s3).

The Thinker was just a really nice change of pace, not having yet another Speedster as the big bad, and it was fun to see his plan play out over the course of the season, even if it ultimatey made no sense whatsoever. I still think Thinker's Hallways scene is better than Darth Vader's in Rogue One or Luke's in Mandolorian:

 
The Thinker was just a really nice change of pace, not having yet another Speedster as the big bad, and it was fun to see his plan play out over the course of the season, even if it ultimatey made no sense whatsoever. I still think Thinker's Hallways scene is better than Darth Vader's in Rogue One or Luke's in Mandolorian:
I did like that scene, but it was one moment in time. When your villain's ultimate plan is to make everyone stupid so they can be in charge... yeah, who's the stupid one now? I just couldn't take it seriously.

As far as Zoom's motivations, it makes sense that he had none, when you actually unravel who he really was. He was Hunter Zolomon- a serial killer. That was it in a nutshell. He became tapped into the speed force during his execution. He got tired of being the villain, and wanted to be a hero, but it just didn't stick- especially when he started his hero identity by killing another hero. He was just crazy. I can take that over Thinker's idiotic plan any day.
I've really been enjoying Superman and Lois, but I can't help but think - why can't we just have a normal Superman TV show? (Or a Batman one for that matter?) Why does it always have to be some "new different take"? Superboy, Lois and Clark, Smallvile, Supergirl, Krypton, and now Superdad...where is this generation's Adventures of Superman?
I think the best iterations of Superman are defined by Clark Kent and his humanity and his struggles with the same. Without a compelling Clark Kent story, superman becomes boring. I never really liked Adventures of Superman- it was the same thing week after week. It was acceptable in an era with serials, but I don't think that would fly today.
 
I did like that scene, but it was one moment in time. When your villain's ultimate plan is to make everyone stupid so they can be in charge... yeah, who's the stupid one now? I just couldn't take it seriously.

Yeah, the whole thing broke down. There was still a nice buildup though, there was a point, say around episode 18, when the parts of his plan were just starting to all be revealed where another writer could have come in and taken all those parts and wove a sensible ending, The problem being, of course, you need smart writers to write a smart character. But the journey was still enoyable up to that point. I liked him best as a Cenobite-looking Cyborg in floaty chair.



As far as Zoom's motivations, it makes sense that he had none, when you actually unravel who he really was. He was Hunter Zolomon- a serial killer. That was it in a nutshell. He became tapped into the speed force during his execution. He got tired of being the villain, and wanted to be a hero, but it just didn't stick- especially when he started his hero identity by killing another hero. He was just crazy. I can take that over Thinker's idiotic plan any day.

Just didn't do anything for me. Different tastes I guess.

I think the best iterations of Superman are defined by Clark Kent and his humanity and his struggles with the same. Without a compelling Clark Kent story, superman becomes boring. I never really liked Adventures of Superman- it was the same thing week after week. It was acceptable in an era with serials, but I don't think that would fly today.

Yeah Adventures of Superman was boring as all get out. But that's not what I'm asking for. I want a straight Superman series that is high quality an well written. The DCAU pulled it off without the Clark element at all. I'd like something inbetween that and the first three seasons of Smallville. Classic Suuperman. He arrives in Metropolis. He meets Lois Line and Jimmy Olsen. Enter Lex Luthor. Enter Braniac. Enter Metallo. The reliance on gimmicks is what's annoying to me. It's the same way Hollywood ca't seem to do a straight King Arthur or Robin Hood film these days.
 
Yeah Adventures of Superman was boring as all get out. But that's not what I'm asking for. I want a straight Superman series that is high quality an well written. The DCAU pulled it off without the Clark element at all. I'd like something inbetween that and the first three seasons of Smallville. Classic Suuperman. He arrives in Metropolis. He meets Lois Line and Jimmy Olsen. Enter Lex Luthor. Enter Braniac. Enter Metallo. The reliance on gimmicks is what's annoying to me. It's the same way Hollywood ca't seem to do a straight King Arthur or Robin Hood film these days.
So with Smallville as the beginning, and S&L after he settled- you want that middle ground after Tom Welling took off for the first time in Season 10 of Smallville. I can see that. But it wouldn't be in the Arrowverse. That had already flown the coop in Supergirl. And honestly, I think it was intentional on DC's part, just as it was intentional that he wouldn't be Superman in Smallville. I think Lois and Clark was the closest we've come in recent years, but that played up the comedy elements a bit much and was a bit cheesy (though I loved it- and actually still do). They save that portion for the cinema these days, just as they save Batman proper for the cinema.
 
So with Smallville as the beginning, and S&L after he settled- you want that middle ground after Tom Welling took off for the first time in Season 10 of Smallville. I can see that. But it wouldn't be in the Arrowverse.

No, I've given up on the Arrowverse, except for Superman and Lois. Only thing I might go back andd watch is the first couple seasons of Arrow

I think Lois and Clark was the closest we've come in recent years, but that played up the comedy elements a bit much and was a bit cheesy (though I loved it- and actually still do). They save that portion for the cinema these days, just as they save Batman proper for the cinema.

Yeah, that's a shame I think. I really think both Batman and Superman work better in serial format.
 
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