The TV and Streaming Thread: That's Entertainment!

[Sarex]

An extra episode of Sandman came out. Covering Death's comic. Wonder if that means they will do the prequel/sequel.

[LadyCrimson]

I watched 16 minutes or so of that War of the Worlds on Prime, while elliptical-ing. I can safely report that yes, it is "worse than you think." 

Can't even blame the trailer-maker for making a terrible trailer. It's just that bad. lol

Edit: that guy who played ... agent Coulson? in the Ironman/other movies has a role. Rumor has it this was filmed around Covid - perhaps they were all filming in their living rooms?

Edited August 2 by LadyCrimson

[rjshae]

Penny Dreadful is quite well done. It's like watching a Masterpiece Theater series, except it's 19th century horror. Eva Green remains a particularly good actor who is perfect for her role, and the cast is marvelous.

[Lexx]

Watched Weak Hero: Class 1. Not bad, but I have no idea who that hero is, and I don't know who the weak one is, since everyone is beating up each other all the time. It got a bit much and highly criminal in the end, which kinda made it too unbelievable to me.

Edit: Damn, s2e1 was really good.

Edited August 3 by Lexx

[LadyCrimson]

Mercy For None - Netflix (7 episodes)

Hm. The 1st 4 episodes were decent in that revenge John Wick/Nobody/The Professional kind of way. Y'know, who cares about the story really, just a near mythical ex-mob fighter going for bloody revenge after his brother is killed. The end of the 4th episode would've been fine as a conclusion. But then the last 3 episodes brought in a bigger "oh but wait, that wasn't really who/why" bigger/conspiracy plot and it kinda falls apart. Even some of the fight sequences became less interesting (more fast cut editing vs. wider frame).  I watched because I love So Ji-sub and he's great playing that kind of character. But imo one would be better off watching the 4 episodes and deciding that's the end of the series.    1st 4 - 7/10 (8/10 for the fights). Last 3 - 5.5/10 (7/10 for fights).

I think that's enough beat 'em up shows for me this week. Time to find another rom-com.
And yes I've been watching way too much TV the past couple weeks. Heh.  >.>

Edited Sunday at 10:38 PM by LadyCrimson

[Lexx]

Watched more of Weak Hero s2 and after the first episode it's basically constant fighting again. What's funny is that almost all of the shows issues could be solved if people would just talk with each other. 

[LadyCrimson]

7 hours ago, Lexx said:

Watched more of Weak Hero s2 and after the first episode it's basically constant fighting again.

Oh - yeah, that's kind of the point of the series. Which is why I mentioned shounen. Which I know can encompass various and broader friendship related themes vs. actual fights (like sports teams) but WH seems more akin to a schoolyard bully Bleach (especially the 2nd season) in terms of pacing. Fighting/confrontation every several chapters/pages, the end of every episode, or whatnot, working up to some big conflict denouement, with the general "friendship/hoohaaa/survival/conquer/victory".  The episodes aren't that long 40min avg. vs. 50-60+) so it kinda feels a bit condensed in that way too. But yeah I would've liked a couple more episodes per season to flesh it out just a little more. eg, the friendships seem to happen overnight.

I think WH2 is loosely based on a webtoon (unread by me), although my impression is that a lot of WH1 isn't actually in the webtoon itself - or maybe the webtoon had a lot of "backhistory" chapters and TV creators turned most of those into elaborated S1 backstory 1st season. Unsure.

WH1 = "trauma", WH2 =  PTSD/"recovery."

Edited Monday at 05:37 PM by LadyCrimson

[LadyCrimson]

Since it was in my watchlist - rom-dramedy Destined With You/Netflix.

After the first couple of episodes or so there were a few episodes of hilarity re: believed love potion hijinks, then it went for centuries ago past life/destiny with a dash of crazy stalker/killer. I'm pretty over the whole past-life hook in k-drama's so overall it was only mildly ok for me. It did however, kinda make me want to rewatch Goblin again.

[Lexx]

I have 1 episode left of Weak Hero s2. Will probably watch it tomorrow.

Tbh, I kinda need a new lighthearted romantic k-drama to swoon over. Feels like I already watched everything that interests me, which sucks. Saw that Jung So-min had a new show in 2024, so went into it immediately.. just to see that I already saw it, lol. Or rather, I started watching it, but it didn't click with me at all and dropped it after a few episodes. Nothing new from Bae Suzy yet either, sux too.

Edited Monday at 07:17 PM by Lexx

[LadyCrimson]

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

Tbh, I kinda need a new lighthearted romantic k-drama to swoon over. Feels like I already watched everything that interests me, which sucks.

I was going to try Twinkling Watermelon (2023) next.  Two of the 2L's from WH are in it and I've heard some good things. Guy goes back to the 90's, has to get his parents together. So heartwarming family drama/romance/comedy, maybe with a focus on music?  Of the streaming I sub to, it was only on my Viki website/tablet app, dunno if it's on other services/other regions etc. Edit: think the FL is Seol In-ah.

There were two common teasers I found, one more the comedy and the other maybe the family drama side.

Edited Monday at 08:59 PM by LadyCrimson

[Lexx]

Saw that earlier today. The name felt a bit off putting to me, but ok, I've added it to my list and will check it out next.  

[rjshae]

Final season of Picard became "Star Trek: The Next Geriatrics". Hmm. While I enjoyed it for the most part, I actually preferred the earlier seasons when it was less about nostalgia. Different strokes, I guess. Still, it was fun seeing the band get back together again.

[LadyCrimson]

9 hours ago, Lexx said:

Saw that earlier today. The name felt a bit off putting to me, but ok, I've added it to my list and will check it out next.  

Got about halfway through it. 1st 2 episodes with most of the setup were typically pleasant enough. Some of the humor after initial "back in the past" was funny.
For my tastes it's pretty inconsistent and the main teen ML was a tad annoying (if also funny at times) in the "is he stupid?" kind of way, for too long, lol.  So I'd like scenes/parts a lot, then start to get a little bored or annoyed by something, then more scenes I liked kept me watching etc. Also, their scene structuring (a lot of chrs PoV back and forth) was kind of annoying at times. I can understand why some might like it a fair bit but for me it's ok but kind of middling.

Definitely more of a general family drama-comedy. Has romance but it's more of a situational backdrop until a fair ways into the series.

And yeah - the name is silly.

[Lexx]

Ok, finished Weak Hero s2. The ending was nice, I liked it. 

[ShadySands]

Tried watching Ironheart again but could barely get through the second episode. I think I'm just going to skip this one.

[majestic]

War of the World (2025)

I don't get the reviews. When you're sitting in front of your TV, looking at Ice Cube sitting in front of a green screen that is reflected in his glasses, the correct choice is to review and enjoy the film for what it is. The wrong one is to review it as if it would be a serious work of art, because if there's one thing the reviews are right about, then it is this: War of the Worlds (2025), which was originally filmed during the 2020 lockdown, is an utter disaster. From the terrible cinematography, to the forgettable sound design, to the incredibly bad acting of the entire cast and digital effects on the level of 2003 game cinematics (the arrival of the tripods basically looks like it was copied and pasted from the arrival of the Burning Legion in Warcraft 3), one can only come to the  conclusion that even Uwe Boll movies are better.

Now, the techincal aspects aren't Neil Breen level terrible, but if you've ever seen a The Asylum film (I would recommend Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies if you haven't and are interested), that's about what you're getting - just that everything looks like found footage because most of the cast filmed their scenes with their phones' selfie cams.

With that out of the way, what an enjoyable silly ride this was. The premise, the acting, the cinematography, the editing, the effects - combined everything is so bad it breaks the laws of physics and becomes a stunningly enrapturing mixture. Plus it has Clark Gregg, and let's face it, anything that has Clark Gregg in it automatically gets taken up a notch. If you don't agree, then fine, but know that you're wrong.  

Spoilers from here on out. I'll not mark them, because, well, what would be the point?

The film features, of course, Ice Cube sitting in a chair, cast in the worst role you could think of for him, a high ranking intelligence officer. His daughter Faith, a genius biologist, is dating an Amazon delivery truck driver so Ice Cube can get a thumb drive at the end of the movie. He keeps a really close tab on his family, down to checking what Faith eats during her pregnancy, but he's completely oblivious to the so-obvious-it-hurts fact that his son Dave is the hacker and conspiracy theorist Disruptor that he spends the first fifteen minutes of the film trying to find. 

Shortly after yet another failed raid, meteors rain from the sky. The Burning Legion tripods arrives on Azeroth Earth. In what is a fun little twist and about the only interesting thing the film really does, the initial counter attack by various militaries around the world is highly successful. These tripods are not invincible, and they're taking down easily by concentrated missile and tank attacks. Ice Cube is swivelling on his chair yelling BOOYAH at the green screen - you know, like any seasoned intelligence officer would. Who could blame the guy.

Alas, all that was just a diversion. Some tripods manage to locate data centers, and that is where the film really goes off the rails. See, the tripods in this version grow tentacles and start injecting tiny cybernetic insects into the data centers - insects that feed on data, and the more data they consume, the smarter they get. All the world's data gets eaten from the data centers. Power plants fail everywhere, Facebook pages disappear, the military is now completely incapable of fighting back as fighter jets and commercial airliners just fall from the sky, tanks stop dead in their tracks and not a single digital gizmo keeps working. 

Except Ice Cube's computer and Faith's, Mark's, Sara's (NASA friend of Ice Cube's) and Dave's smart phones, plus all the apps running on them. The internet is still working fine too, in spite of a global power outage. The tripods also forgot to attack or deactivate all the US drones cruising about. After Ice Cube finally finds out that Dave is DISRUPTOR, Dave's hacking collective develops a computer virus to drop the enemy mothership's shields infect the tripods, but it fails. Why? Well, as Eva Longoria puts it, the insects are part biological and part cyber. 

A couple of seconds later they got it all figured out, they combine Faith's research into anti-viral agents with their computer virus (DNA is just a sort of code, after all). Now all that is left for Ice Cube is to plug in his thumb drive, download CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE and upload that to the super secret government surveillance programm GOLIATH - which will infect all the aliens once they consume it. Only hitch in that plan? Ice Cube doesn't have a thumb drive. Top secret military installation, he says, ain't allowed to bring one to work. 

Makes sense. On the other hand, he's using Facebook at work and has Zoom and WhatsApp installed. Well, can't be perfectly secure in all aspects, can we. Anyway, now's Mark's time to shine, because Ice Cube just needs to buy a thumb drive from Amazon - which still works, by the way, even after the world's data was eaten by cybernetic insects - and out comes the Amazon delivery drone. Dave covers Mark with a leftover Predator drone and shoots down some aliens and crashes the drone into a tripod.

Meanwhile the tripods are converging on Washington D.C., and a couple of B2s take off to carpet bomb (nuke, maybe, they are talking about a blast radius of five miles) them into oblivion. Well, them, the residential area of D.C., and most importantly, the GOLIATH data center hidden beneath Ice Cube's workplace. Please don't wonder how there's still working military equipment at this point after it all failed without data, and also don't think too hard on how and why the military would not constantly fly sorties against the alien invaders. They just knew they'd need to be on standby to bomb the ultimate goal of the alien invasion. 

Mark saves the day by successfully delivering the thumbdrive to Ice Cube, who barely makes it down to the server room. He plugs in the thumb drive and poof, alien threat vanquished. Yep. CANNIBAL_CODE.EXE does the trick.

While writing this post I've racked my brain trying to find a worse film that I've seen, and somehow I come up short. Not even 80ies B-movies are this bad. Definitely a "so bad it's good" sort of film. A+, a 10/10, five stars. Will be shown at film schools all over the world in the future as an example of how not to make a film. 

Edited yesterday at 03:35 PM by majestic

[LadyCrimson]

5 hours ago, majestic said:

I don't get the reviews

If they make their sole living reviewing (vs. random influencer ranting), they are generally expected to try giving the "masses" an idea if they would consider a film worth their time to watch. "So bad it's good" isn't, imo, a "masses" type of thing to view as being favorable in some quirky way. That's more niche. And what is "good" about "bad" is very hard to define. So I do understand them.

--So Bad It's Good (usually viewed with some level of humorous or nostalgic affection), also just imo, is not the same as A Movie You Love to Hate ("majority" doesn't even find it humorous), although sometimes a film can certainly be seen as both/cross borders. I think WotW/2025 falls more firmly into the latter category, which is why it's getting such viscous blowback online vs. falling into almost immediate "eh, another bad movie" obscurity. The fact it's a giant Amazon/Prime ad doesn't help. 

I do wonder why Amazon, after having the film on the shelf for so long, decided to run it vs forever-binning. I guess they had savvy ppl who realized massive high view counts re: trainwreck-curiousity might be almost as good as high view count for artistic accolades.   (more likely some legal obligation or consideration).

Note: I didn't ever go back to watch past that first quarter hour. I've liked a lot of why-am-I-still-watching stuff others might think is awful, so no judgement re: likes or dislikes - but for me, definitely not worth my time to even find out. I didn't like so-bad-it's-good  Sharknado or WickerMan or some others, either. Heh.

Edited yesterday at 08:55 PM by LadyCrimson

[Lexx]

Finished Twinkling Watermelon. I actually liked it. That time travel thing came out of the left field, I did *not* expect that one at all. But then the first episode and such started to make sense, because I was *really* confused for a while with those characters. 

Thought it was funny how in those shows they sometimes name drop famous bands, like "we will be the Coldplay of X" ... and then they play their music and it is nothing like Coldplay, hell it's not even remotely the same genre. Why can't they commit? It's always terribly generic and mushy k-pop slob.