Have we ever talked about Tiny Tim? I have his Christmas album, you know. Again, it strikes me that you are one of the only other people I know who might appreciate it like I do. Certainly no one in my household does.
And few outside
I really like Tiny Tim in small doses on rare occasions. Are you familiar with Darlene and Jonathan Edwards? Very good bad style singing. It’s actually Jo Stanford who really has a wonderful voice. She was a big band singer who had a hit in the 50s with The Shrimp Boats are a Coming. It’s Magic by Darlene and Jonathan Edwards He was Paul Weston and I think Jo Stanford’s real life husband.
I didn’t know about them previously but looking into them after your initial mention I was reminded of Mrs Miller, whom I also love but everyone else I know hates.
Yeah Mrs Miller was good. Also Jo Stafford not Stanford… damn auto correct. I used to pay in a band here in Austi with a fellow who has released a number of recordings under The Rudy Schwartz Project and he would make sure I heard all the stuff by these kinds of artists. He liked to juxtapose good to bad, hideousness to beauty, repulsion to cuddly.
Anyone watching “Invasion” on Apple TV+?
I’m finding it hard to give a shit about 50% of the people; especially evil Rick Astley. Fuck that little shitweasel.
I watched the first three episodes. But, now I’ve hit the pause button until the end of the first season at which point I’ll try to finish. The production quality (especially the musical score) is top notch but the character development is plodding, at best. It’s clearly a character-driven drama vs.sci-fi or a alien/space opera. Three shows in, you can barely tell it’s sci-fi but that’s ok. The problem is, if it’s a character-driven drama, the characters have to be compelling. Which, I’m not seeing yet. No amount of quality production can save it otherwise.
Back to the score, I am loving it. I like how the score changes and is very well matched for each location in tone and tempo while also being discongruent in style and am mesmerized each time they go to the Tokyo location. Really, really excellent.
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I watched Ep. 4 and it doesn’t get much better, but at the end they lay down a marker for what it wants to be.
I will keep watching purely to see a resolution to the JASA plot line, which is the only one that has any real stakes, intrigue or characters to care about.
I turned off about 15 mins into the latest episode of “Invasion”. The stupid choices and plot nonsense were coming so thick and fast my only viable choices were turn it off, or take off and nuke the TV from orbit.
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This guy’s rant is on movies mostly, but it’s Star Trek-centric so I’ll post it here.
He mentions Discovery too, and his analysis of the crew reminded me why I never got past the 2nd episode.
He’s not completely wrong. The fact that he mentions Star Trek in the context of modern big-budget cinema is probably his best point. Movies do require broad appeal in order to make enough money, and so a movie’s potential can end up getting watered down. I’m reminded of an Onion(?) article about Star Trek Beyond’s development whose headline went something like “Star Trek Beyond Script Improved by Making It Less Like Star Trek”.
However, I have three big problems with his criticisms:
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A few lines of informal dialogue are the best Discovery examples he could come up with? Weak sauce.
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He seems not to understand that Trek has always, always been a product of its time.
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He goes too far by casting aspersions on the people who like the material he is calling out. He asserts that writers don’t give their audiences enough credit, and then he himself goes on to not give those audiences enough credit. I hated Into Darkness, but I am smart enough to realize that it wasn’t made for me, and that’s fine.
He could’ve left well enough alone by stating the facts that he stated: movie studios’ profit motives, the difficulty of telling a good Trek story while also satisfying those profit motives, the issues that modern Trek shows like Discovery and Picard suffer from (and which I’ve talked about in this thread). But his “fuck the writers for writing this, and fuck the audiences for liking it” attitude is the kind of toxic gatekeeping that Trek has way too much of already. Fuck that.
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Yeah, I’ve watched some of his stuff and he tries to play the “alpha male” stuff off as schtick, but he clearly believes it. He goes off the deep end when existing characters are changed to add diversity, inclusion and representation, stating (rightly, in some cases) that they should write new characters and leave the existing ones alone. But he also blasts the new characters (e.g. Michael Burnham), so he is not really staying true to his own principles.
In the context of a character like James Bond, he wants the hard-drinking, date-rapey elements of the character to be preserved forever. He thinks that’s ok, but I don’t, and I suspect that a lot of people feel the same and would be turned off by a 1960’s Bond showing up in a 2020s movie. The studios know this too, which is why they changed such characters to better suit the times; not to neuter them in some sacrifice to gender politics, but because they want to make money.
Yikes.
I just thought Pine’s cadet to captain required me to shut too much of my believability cortex in an otherwise enjoyable frolic.
And I actually liked the depressed 36th birthday drinking session. The rest of that movie … good performances hampered by silly writing. Dirt bike, Beastie Boys. 13 year old in 1998 write it?
But that YTer sounds like a piece of work himself.
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There is a lot that he’s right about. There are a lot of movies that blow themselves up in pursuit of a perceived need to provide broad representation (the new Star Wars trilogy being Exhibit A), instead of letting the needs of the story dictate the participants.
But he promotes the case that men are bigger and stronger than women so should always be presented as such, while women should only be shown using looks and guile because that’s the only way they can best a man. He actually said this in a video about Black Widow, while casually crapping on Scarlett Johansson.
But this ignores movies like Atomic Blonde, where Charlize Theron is shown credibly fighting men by using superior skill. Her strength deficit is acknowledged by the fact that she takes significant damage in order to join the fight, and has to work extra hard to prevail. For example, when she stabs a goon in the chest, she has to follow up and hammer it home.
Meanwhile, Edgar Wright made credible combatants out of Michael Sera and Jason Schwartzman. Meaning that it just a fucking movie, and anyone can be a badass if they want to present them as such.
I don’t know.
He was pretty ripped for a while there on Arrested Development.
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Here’s the (not quite) final battle from Scott Pilgrim. Spoilers…obviously.
If you haven’t seen Atomic Blonde, skip this clip and watch the whole thing asap. You won’t be sorry.
But to explain my comments above, here’s the amazing, “single take”, main fight scene. The participants get hurt, are hobbled by their injuries and get tired, unlike most fight scenes in such movies. And you’ll see what I mean about a woman holding her own in hand-to-hand combat in a way that is completely credible and natural.
Hawkeye is entertaining and, so far, has included a nice mix of lighter moments with hints of an exploration of Hawkeye’s darker past as Ronin.
But again with the daddy issues as the motivator? Hawkeye’s wanna-be apprentice joins the list of MCU heroes driven to do what they do by something from the past to do with their father. That list includes [checks notes] all of them, up to and including Shang Chi.
I don’t think either Captain America or Captain Marvel, at a minimum, meet that.
Man, it’s almost like losing a parent at a young age is really traumatizing.
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