What Are You Watching

[Solitaire1]

Naruto, Episode 33: Battle Formation: Ino-Shika-Cho!!

[Rumpelteazer]

I went to see the new The Crow on Thursday.

Was it better than I thought? Yes, but that isn't saying much. Because it wasn't that good.

It's true that it isn't a remake of the Brandon Lee movie, but it was said it would be "a modern re-imagining of the graphic novel" and would stay close to the graphic novel. Which isn't true, I think. It's been a long time since I've read the graphic novel to be honest.

What I did like was the concept of the story. It isn't a drug gang Eric (no crow inspired last name this time) is fighting. But the boss of a Big Evil Corporation, much more up to date. Of course his name is Roeg, pronounced as Rogue. The himself also has some magic powers, but only a very short explanation about how/what is given.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe. About half of the 1 hour and 50 minutes of the movie was dedicated to Eric and Shelly falling in love/lust. It slowed the movie down to a crawl and it left no time for, IMHO, more interesting things. I would have loved more lore on the Big Bad Boss. I would also have appreciated more about his connection to Shelly. The characterization of the boss is as flat as a pancake. You know he's the boss and has powers, but that's it. Granted, Michael Wincott as Top Dollar is a hard act to follow, but it feels like they didn't even try. The henchman are even worse.

Eric and Shelly aren't very rounded characters either. At the start of the movie we get a flashback to something that happened to Eric when he was a kid, but it feels like it has very little bearing on the story, besides introducing crows as a theme. We get a couple of short flashbacks of Shelly's life, but those are too short to tell the viewer anything. I guess it's to show that the character are very much living in the here and now. Which is ironic, since it's the past that's catching up with them.

There is one big fight in this movie. Where Eric uses a sword to fight his way through even more henchmen. This fight was heavily inspired by the John Wick movies. And that scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 where The Bride goes after O-Ren Ishii and first have to fight her way through the Crazy 88.

There is no big boss fight. There's a confrontation between Eric and Big Boss, but it's rather underwhelming.

The ending I'm ambiguous about. On the one hand I like it's different from the originals. On the other hand that isn't the lore. Crow lore is that the people who love each other are reunited in death.

Spoiler:

They have changed that to that Eric can bring him and Shelly back from the dead and then a twist is thrown in

The Brandon Lee movie had a great soundtrack. This new movie didn't even try. The combination of the music, set design, costumes/make up and the setting of the 1994 movie captured the early 1990s perfectly. With this "re-imagining" they mostly tried with setting, costumes and make up (Eric much critiqued patchwork tattoos), but somehow, to me, that doesn't work as well as the original did. But whether or not it captured the time is difficult to tell now, it's easier to do so in a couple of years.

Overall I found it boring. Mostly due to the long introduction of Eric and Shelly and the faceless villains. For an action movie it had surprisingly little action.

If you really want to watch it I would recommend waiting until it's on one of your streaming services. I wouldn't pay money for it to go see it in the cinema or rent it online.

[Karellen]

Finished watching Invasion (2005) last week. Intriguing storyline, but I became frustrated with it after about the tenth episode. It was let down by having too many episodes (22) which really stretched the storyline quite thinly, and needed propping up with irrelevant and silly minor story-arcs along with the agonising and annoying details of the back-and-forth of personal relationship problems between the main characters. The show could have been done a whole lot better with 12 episodes or less.

Now started Psych (2006) and 12 episodes into it and I find it hilarious. Great humour, great connection between the lead cast.
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/1447-psych?language=en-US

[Solitaire1]

YouTube videos concerning electric vehicles.

[Rumpelteazer]

Watched the original The Crow last night. Still very good.

The last year or so I've been mainly watching YouTube at night. So my personal watchlist (as opposed to the shared one with my sister) has grown a bit out of hand. So, with having a new TV, I'm going to try and watch a bit less YouTube and more other streaming services.

[DiapDealer]

Recently watched the two seasons of Dark Winds (AMC). This was apparently put together by Robert Redford and GRRMartin.

Set in 1971 on a remote outpost of the Navajo Nation near Monument Valley, Dark Winds follows Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Tribal Police as he is besieged by a series of seemingly unrelated crimes.

I wanted to like it (big fan of Zahn McClarnon)--and I did enjoy parts of it. But it was a fairly mixed bag of all kinds of stuff that didn't really gel. Some supernatural stuff in the first season, but absolutely none in the second. Seems like it was set in the 70s mainly because they didn't want people to be able cell-phone/internet their way out of trouble. But other than those amenities, everything (with the exception of a leisure suit or 2) just felt too modern for the time period they were supposed to be trying to capture.

Just odd.

[Rumpelteazer]

Last night we started A Good Girl's Guide to Murder on Netflix. The first two episodes were enjoyable. The reviews weren't great, maybe because the books it's based on are better?

Tonight we're watching a new episode of The Rings of Power. The first season felt like multiple separate story lines, but I feel this season might bring some of those together.

[ownedbycats]

Star Trek: Voyager S3E11 - Macrocosm

Voyager gets invaded by giant viruses (?). Which can fly and hover in the air. Apparently they get this big by absorbing growth hormones from the people they infect (??). All right then. Also Janeway crawling around the ship in a sleeveless shirt while carrying a huge-ass rifle (at the end she also bombs the holodeck). I wonder if someone was watching Alien.

[pdurrant]

I've been enjoying The Chelsea Detective. The plots are pleasantly free of highly intelligent villains with cunning schemes to commit the perfect murder.

[Scoob]

Watching Those about to die on Peacock. Its a fun watch a little too short and doesn't given enough time for things to develop. Lead charioteer of the new racing faction using third person is a joy to me and that in fact there was a very successful charioteer of the same name in ancient Rome

[DiapDealer]

I loved the first season of Netflix's "The Gentlemen". Smart and funny. I'm also enjoying "Bad Monkey" on AppleTV with Vince Vaughn. I found "Fool Me Once" (a Netflix limited series based on Harlan Coben's novel of the same name) to be atrociously bad. A thriller entirely dedicated to supporting an utterly preposterous ending.

[Rumpelteazer]

We went to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice yesterday.

A very enjoyable movie. However, there are so many story lines going on that some don't get enough time. Mostly the story lines of Astrid and her beau and the story line with Beetlejuice's ex. I would love to have those story lines extended. But since the movie was already 1 hour and 45 minutes there just wasn't time for that. Maybe they should have picked one and left the other for a third movie.

Still good, but a shame the most important story line were underdeveloped.

[DiapDealer]

Started watching "Kaos" on Netflix last night. The modern take on Greek/Roman mythology has been done to death, but they never cease to amuse me just a bit. Especially when they throw in a ton of quirk and satire like this one has. Jeff Goldblum has tended to creep me out in just about everything he's ever done in the past (and not in a good way), but at least this time, that's exactly what his Zeus character is supposed to be doing to me.

[Rumpelteazer]

We finished A Good Girl's Guide to Murder last night. It was enjoyable, but not very memorable. Apparently the books are better, so I've got the first one lined up.

Tonight we'll start with Kaos. I'm still trying to convince my sister to watch Good Omens and The Last of Us, but she's been resisting.

Over the last couple of days I've set up a Plex media server on a NAS. It's working good so far and it's nice not to have to rely on my laptop anymore.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

I'm still trying to convince my sister to watch Good Omens

Apart from the theme music, which I didn't enjoy, Good Omens is very good indeed, and not a disappointment compared to the books.