R.CAllen
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Days Won
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Posts posted by R.CAllen
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ninth episode – this is the one that’s Aliens (1986)
Wow! This blue alien guy looks great!
Not the first time I’ve wondered if the order of these episodes was juggled! (Oh, wait, guess not?)
Verdict : Not too bad! A rip-off but that’s one of the better things for an episode of Star Trek to be, y’know? Kinda hate all the tearful goodbyes. Prob. one of the worst things about DSC is that every other episode there’s a tearful goodbye. Whether or not it’s fitting to the characters or the needs of the story there’s just characters doing the send-off to other characters.
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eighth episode – this is the one that’s The Princess Bride (1987)
Music cues reminiscent of VI playing as Dr. M’Benga does what basically amounts to a grade school child’s idea of medical experimentation — beakers, flasks, dripping coloured droplets from said beakers into said flasks — gotta give them credit, a strong choice, the show’s sensibilities are always on display to great effect.
Augh! I hate it when he says “Pike to engineering” and we actually SEE engineering and Lt. Hemmer on the main screen!!!!1! I hate it so much! I’m going to be so disappointed if it turns out that this is actually a relatively commonplace bit of visual language which used to happen fairly often on the old show(s). Can’t stand it! Just have the characters talk to each other like normal! That’s not what the main screen is for! Auuuuuuugggggghhhhh.
Wait, his first name is Joseph!? What!? Pretty sure it was Dr. Jabilu M’Benga in the books/comics, maybe even back to the original James M. Blish stuff. Okay, I checked. It was Jabilo and not Jabilu.
Verdict : episode goofy but not the bad kind of goofy, y’know!? Gotta give them credit for that. Still, its moral conclusions are heavyhanded and fairly repugnant (not as bad as the episode of DSC where that guy just died on the asteroid and was left there to die, though) and not really well handled whatsoever. And the way the story is staged is just no good, no sir, can’t cut away from the one character who knows what’s going on to see what the other characters who don’t know what’s going on are doing. That’s no way to do it, man! Gotta stay with the point of view character(s)! In a sense, we, the audience, us, we’re Dr. M’Benga. We’re not, like, Queen Uhura or whatever. It would’ve been fair play to cut away to Lt. Hemmer, though. All in all though not too bad.
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I keep forgetting to give over my Star Trek thoughts, my Star Trek opinions, my Treknobabble.
seventh episode
Is that the first time we’ve seen a Jefferies tube on the show!? Neat! (Just before that, the soundtrack seemed somewhat reminiscent of a theme from VI, too!)
Alpha Braga IV! Hah! Great! They should blow up Matalas Prime next!
Wait, why do they fire on the ship!? They want that Vulcan guy alive, right!? (Omigosh! Incredible who that Vulcan guy turned out to be!)
Tropic of Capricorn ref! Kind of coming up all over the place this week. Rewatched Philip Baker Hall’s Seinfeld and it’s the titular book in his episode that Jerry didn’t return to the library back in high school. (Actually, no, it’s not that book. It’s the other book ‘Tropic of Cancer’. Yeah. Anyway, Philip Baker Hall BD”E.)
Verdict : good good ep. A heater, straight down the middle. Some small sketchiness around the details (re: communication, re: firing on T’Pring’s ship) but you gotta give them credit here! Solid!
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Just going to zoom through this and pick out the stuff I’ve seen and liked : The Handmaid’s Tale, Difficult People, Future Man, Solar Opposites, I thought the Hillary docuseries was kind of interesting (there’s a bit in it where one of her campaign aides is making very clear and cogent points to her as to how ‘16 is different than ‘08 and she just sort of cuts the conversation short so the two of ‘em can ride to an event in different cars and tells the guy they’ll continue later; there’s a bit where Tim Kaine sort of gleefully recounts how President Barack Obama told them there’s a fascist on the ballot; there’s a photograph of Bill Clinton in the 70s where he’s reading a copy of The Atlantic where the cover story is a work of fiction by my favourite author, I don’t know, I guess that one there is mostly just of interest to me), umm, let’s see, let’s see, I’ve watched some of The Wrong Mans, I really liked the first few seasons of UnREAL but I’m not sure I’ve seen it all the way to the end, oh Letterkenny, yeah, that’s my recommendation, final answer : Letterkenny. Give that a try if you haven’t seen it already.
I hear good things about The Bear, though. Going to give The Bear a watch sometime.
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I watched the first few episodes of The Orville (‘17-?????) and gave up. Not funny! Less funny than its source material! Less funny than the episodes of Enterprise (‘01-’05) in which Seth MacFarlane cameoed!
There was maybe one half-decent joke — there’s a bit where the crew sees a magnificent vista and Doctor Kassidy Yates earnestly quotes something from literature and Seth MacFarlane pretends like he knows it and faux-wisely responds with something like, “Ah yes, Shakespeare.” and she corrects him that, no, wait, I’m completely misremembering the details here’s a link — and just lots of really sloppy writing. They introduce the crew (in this comedy! it’s a comedy!) by just having Seth MacFarlane walk up to each character standing at attention individually in a line and having earnest one-on-one conversation with each one without any sort of crosstalk or commentary or interruption or jokes of any kind whatsoever!???? A character is established as having superstrength in the pilot and then there’s an episode where that character doubts themselves and struggles with who they are and yet there is no, literally no, allusions to the fact that this character has superstrength!??? Yeah, it’s been years since I’ve seen this stuff and I still remember these flaws, I’m gonna die mad about the little bits of dumbness in what little I’ve seen of Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek parody show (I love a good Star Trek parody show! I love Hyperdrive (‘06-’07)! I love Other Space (‘15-’15)!) because that’s the way I am.
I choose to believe that Seth MacFarlane is absolutely positively miserable making that show, though. I refuse to imagine a universe in which he’s happy. He was almost fourteen years old by the time TNG (‘87-’94) premiered! There’s no way he’s loving re-enacting it! That’d be like me loving re-enacting Enterprise! He’s a TOS (‘66-’69) guy! That’s what was on when he was a kid! That’s what he does all the impressions of! He wanted to make his Star Trek show but everyone he needs to make his Star Trek show is dead so he’s settled for making a copy of a copy of the Star Trek show he really wanted to do! There’s no way in his heart of hearts he wants to be Picard! He wants to be Kirk! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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I’ll try to clarify my opinions, man.
Re: actual political praxis — My thing is that they seem to aiming straight for the absolutely smallest of ways to hold these people accountable instead of going big. They could’ve started out by declaring that they’re going to recommend to the Justice Department that they charge the former president of the united states and eleven other speakers at the rally with pretty much the same offenses they’re charging every other dumb dumb who went into the capitol building on January 6th, right!? The hearings could’ve been about laying out to the public why they’re doing that. Instead it’s about ... ??? ... the soul of the nation??? The future of democracy???
Re: political spectacle — My thing isn’t about changing hearts, it isn’t about changing minds, it’s not about changing positions, my thing is that they’ve got to show the shit smeared on the walls of the capitol building. They’ve got to show the blood on the corpses. They’ve got to show the gravestones of everyone who died that day or died a few days later. That’s what I mean by substantially redefining the event itself. Something like six out of ten Americans think the president committed crimes so if they’re not going to go big and actually put the cuffs on him then they can at least make it brutally clear to the public imagination what the nature of that crime was.
Re:historical record — For the hearings they conducted a lot of interviews, right!? I’m seeing excerpts of recordings of those interviews played during the hearings. I think the entirety of those interviews, soup to nuts, should be made available to the public, to the world at large, for the sake of history, for posterity itself. Because it’s the 2020s they can just put this stuff online, right!? They clearly have videos of these interviews! I’m seeing bits and pieces of these interviews and I want to see the rest! I want to read the transcripts of these interviews! That’s what having things be online has to do with the historical record, man! Historians have Internet too! They’ve got the same Internet I gots! I acknowledge that I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know if that is or isn’t strictly speaking legal. Maybe the reason we’re only seeing the relevant portions of what Bill Barr or whomever said under subpoena is because that’s the way it works. Maybe all that stuff will be released/published later. I don’t know! I’m speaking in ignorance here, on this and so much else!
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I’m watching bits and pieces but so far it all seems kind of ... scattershot????? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be functioning well as actual political praxis (nobody important is facing charges!), it doesn’t seem to be functioning well as political spectacle (they’re not substantially redefining how the public sees the event itself!), it doesn’t seem to be functioning at all to provide what’s necessary for the historical record (forgive me, I’m not a lawyer, but shouldn’t every moment of every interview be online!?!?), what is it then!? What does it do? Who is it for? Probably better to do it than leave it undone, I suppose. It’d be odd if there weren’t hearings, y’know? It’d seem weird.
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Tough one! I’ve personally used Psalm 91:15 (“He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him, and bring him to honour.”) in a little mini-speech to mark the occasion of my grandfather’s death but I’m not necessarily sure the particular contexts which made it meaningful will automatically translate outside of the local circumstances. Umm, I’m thinking, I’m thinking ... oh wait, I see you’ve said that Psalms is already covered and you’re trying to cover the Old Testament now, oops, sorry... umm... okay, now I’m just looking through my browser history trying to find what bits and bobs of the Bible I’ve looked up recently (I Samuel 13:19, Song of Songs 2:13, Genesis 2:7, Deuteronomy 23:3, I Kings 11:3; nah, not sure these would really be fit to purpose) and coming up kind of empty.
Huh. I don’t know. There’s Numbers 11:11-17 where Moses complains to God about how tough is to look after others (“I am not able to bear all this people myself alone, because it is too heavy for me.”) and God is all like, okay, man, I’ll find you some folks to help you out, here you go dude (“And I will come down and speak with thee there; and I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone.”).
There’s Isaiah 53:10 (“Yet in whom the Lord delights, He oppresses them with disease; to see if their soul would offer itself in guilt, that he might see their children, lengthen their days, and that the desire of the Lord might prosper by their hand”, I’ve freely translated there a little, sorry) and Jeremiah 15:18 (“Why must my pain be endless? My wound incurable, resistant to healing? You have been to me like a spring that fails, like waters that can’t be relied on.”), probably too morbid, hmmm, I’m trying I’m trying, let’s see.
Uhm. Isaiah 43:2 (“"When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee") and Job 22:21 ("Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace, thereby shall thy increase be good")? Micah 4:6 (“On that day, saith the LORD, will I assemble her that halteth, and I will gather the outcast, and those I have afflicted”)? II Samuel 22:29-30 (“For Thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord doth lighten my darkness. For with Thee I run upon a troop; with my God do I scale a wall.”)? Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you a future and hope.”)?
I don’t know. Bibbling and bobbling through Sefaria Dot Com trying to find relevant verses kind of makes me feel like Matt Walsh’s character from Veep (‘12-’19) asking his phone why God allows suffering. Hope this helps!
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Mazel tov to the happy couple! I wish them every happiness — well, not literally, some of the things that’d make them happy would make me unhappy. So, nope, like, for instance : I don’t want Donald Trump and JFK Jr. to become president in 2021 (resurrection and time travel!? I don’t know. I guess that footage is old??????) and I don’t want to find out how noted conservative James Woods is a part of the conspiracy to defraud the American public into believing that Joe Biden is alive!?!? How does that work??? He’s a Republican! James Woods is a Republican! Oh, wait, acting! He’s pretending to be a Republican the same way he’s pretending to be Joe Biden, the same way he pretended to be Sharon Stone’s boyfriend in Casino (1995). I guess he’s not actually her boyfriend. I guess he’s not actually a Republican. Stagecraft! Showmanship!
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My condolences. If there’s anything you need, anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to reach out. No idea what that might be and what I could realistically provide under this scenario but I’d like to emphasize that the previous sentence was not some pro forma statement but a genuine offer of any kind of help I can give — I don’t know, I could proofread a eulogy or whatever. I’m so sorry! I hope things will be better in the future.
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Saw the fifth and sixth episodes! No real complaints! I mean, I guess maybe the game of b-i-n-g-o has substantially changed by the time of the 23rd century but other than that, nope, rock solid episode. And, well, for the sixth episode, I kinda, wait, this is sort of a spoiler ...
The episode really needed to end with some ponderous speeches between Pike and other crew members over the whole Omelas dilemma. Can’t just have him look out the window and take a sip of scotch while the music swells! It needs the speeches! Sure, we get a little bit of the speeches what with the Lindy Booth baddie making her case for it (not well enough, though, she shouldn’t be dunking on the Federation! She should be dunking on our society, in classic Trek fashion, she should be referencing the history of Earth!) but that’s too little too early for me.Still, all in all, pretty good! Got to give it up to them for doing a classic Trek show about the crew encountering an idyllic society only to uncover the evil underbelly! Barely even missed the Andorian guy this time around! Guess this is just the norm for SNW. I’m always going to be missing some of the crew for each and every episode! Oh well!
Fifth episode in particular was a good episode for the guy they got playing Spock. In that one he plays Spock but he also plays a nightmare all-human version of Spock AND a nightmare all-Vulcan version of Spock AND he plays T’Pring’s consciousness in Spock’s body AND he also plays T’Pring’s consciousness in Spock’s body pretending to be Spock. Pretty fun episode for Gregory Peck’s kid!
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There’s also one where the guns are arranged so it looks like they’re sort of cresting in a wave behind the person being photographed!?!?!? There’s a lot of these photographs. A lot of people getting their digs in on the people in the photographs. I can’t really criticize! I’m one of the former people(s)! I posted my dig right here!
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There are these photographs of people in and outside their homes surrounded by their gun collections which have been all over the social media. Not sure where/when they’re from — assume they’re from some news story, looking up one of them makes it clear they’re at least a month old, oh wait, it’s from here, taken by Gabriele Galimberti for The Sunday Times — but my thing is that I’ve seen one of them (there are others, there’s one where the guy is sort of trapped inside his own little gun room while his spouse sits far away in the kitchen, there’s one where the gun guy isn’t a gun guy it’s a gun girl, a little teenager, a gun child!?!?, there’s one where the guy and girl are on a bed in their underwear!?!?) probably a dozen times --- it’s this one ---
--- people pointing out the guy looks super duper old, people pointing out the lack of helmet on the kid riding the bike, that sort of thing.
But I only just just just just juuuuust noticed the roof. Look at the roof! I’ve seen that photograph a lot a lot and never noticed up until now the guns on the roof. I laughed! You gotta laugh. Or not.
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Saw the 4th episode. I’m still on board! The dialogue in these things is still kind of rough any time it strays outside treknobabble but on the whole this was a good’n! Love to see the ship! Love to watch the people on the ship nobly sacrifice themselves for each other!
* I didn’t put it together before this episode but if this show has a single touchstone in prior Trek it’s actually not TOS. That’s right, you guessed it, it’s Season 4 of ENT. Think about it! Aenar! Augments! Gorn! The folks at Paramount+ know what the fans want, what the fans NEED, they’ve done the research, they’ve done the testing, and they’ve decided to go with continual references to everyone’s favouritest Star Trek spin-off and everyone’s particular favouritest season of that spin-off. The fans love Captain Jonathan Archer! (Real talk : it’s just that they’re so unoriginal the franchise itself has already been unoriginal in EXACTLY the same way they’re doing now. They’re tripping over their own unoriginality from years before! It’s like how VOY is just a copy of a copy. But I shouldn’t complain. Hope this show ends up as good as VOY, honestly!)
* in 1000% percent agreement w/you on the suits issue, Spider-Man. No, actually, like 10000000%! They should wear an EVA suit and another EVA suit on top of that EVA suit. Maybe also those life support belts from the animated series too. Safety first! Can’t be too careful! After all it’s like Captain James R. Kirk famously said, “Risk is not our business.” (Yeah, sorry, I don’t know why I’m making fun. I have my own peccadilloes! Every time they use the bridge screen in a way that I dislike and personally register as a kind of breach in the established grammar of the series — talking to people inside the ship itself; demonstrating things I’d prefer to see on some other screen elsewhere or in some other room entirely — it makes me feel like I’m watching the first season of TNG and they haven’t yet figured out how to do what they gots to do.)
* re: the crew quarters thing, well, that’s been on my mind since last week and thinking of the Scotty episode of TNG where he has that line about how even his paltry guest quarters on the 1701-D would’ve been fit for an admiral back in his time. I don’t care, really, can’t fault the show for wanting to have things look good for locally accepted values of good, can’t fault the show for not wanting to be a braindead 1-to-1 correspondence with the exact dimensions of the sixties show (if you want to see that sort of thing there are fanfilms and stuff like that, v. impressive stuff), anybody sufficiently nerded up about all this should also be able to recall that it’s established canon back in Pike’s time his Enterprise had ~half the crew it does in Kirk’s.
* But wait, omigosh, speaking of fanfilms! I just put two and two together here! There was a fanfilm a few years ago. Walter Koenig was in it! It was called something like Renegades or whatever. It featured Khan’s granddaughter! The show, which is in and of itself a wholly unoriginal exercise, is so committed to scraping the bottom of its particular barrel that the tools it’s using to do this were first held by the hands of the very audience members it’s pandering to! I mean, c’mon already! They may as well just have Lt. Mary Sue Smith, aged 15½, beam aboard!
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Yeah? Probably, yeah. If it’s the sort of thing that everybody did all the time as kids and the joke is that he’s a grown-up just taking it unusually seriously, sure. (Feel like that’s the type of gag they’d do fairly often, actually? First sketch that comes to mind w/that premise is the one with a bunch of people on a bus singing ♫ NOBODY LIKES US ♫ EVERYBODY HATES US ♫ LET’S JUST GO EAT WORMS ♫ and then they actually do it.)
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There’s a thing about that bit that they show actual footage of in the documentary (which is fantastic!) which makes it clear that ... it’s something they used to do on stage!?!?!? I don’t understand how it’s funny if you can’t actually show through forced perspective that he’s crushing their heads. But apparently Mark McKinney used to get laughs at the Rivoli long before the TV show even existed just sitting up there and doing it to the audience. I guess the people there would imagine what he was seeing!?
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I waited for the trade on this one. Except ... there is no trade!?!?!? Can’t buy it on DVD. Can’t buy it on Blu-Ray. Disney doesn’t want anyone to buy any of its Star Wars no more. They spent four billion dollars for Star Wars and have no desire whatsoever to earn any of that back through the home media market. Disney just wants you to pay them a little walking around money every month so they can pipe Star Wars into your home 24/7. Seems like they’re leaving cash on the table maybe? Probably a good idea for someone out there like The Asylum to put out “Star’s Book of War Feats” and “The Patagonian & Baby Yoga” so confused grandmothers rushing towards big-box store checkout lines can plunk down ten bucks and get their grandkids a nice little gift.
Watched it over Passover. Didn’t really leave much of a lasting impression on me, I guess. No real memories. No real opinions. I think that’s got to be due to a point raised in one of those Behind The Scenes books (I’m not talking about the ones that tell you how many B1-series battle droids fit inside those elephant-looking thingies; not the Visual Dictionaries, these are the The Art Of books, the Phil Szostaks, the account they offer of the production of these things is probably just as much a contrivance as the “Valorum decicreds are worth the same amount of Muunilunst fiat currency as Palpatine coinage” stuff but they’re still fun to look at and there’s the occasional tidbit of behind-the-scenes info that feels vaguely close to some kind of reality) about how these TV shows have less time and less money to make more hours of footage than the movies. I mean, I’m blaming them for being unimpressive but maybe it’s on me for being unimpressed??? Maybe if I’d watched this stuff week to week like everybody else it’d have stayed inside my skull longer. Maybe it’d have hit me deeper. No way to know for sure now one way or the other, I suppose!
Anyway, the Obi-Wan show is coming up soon so I figured I’ve got to now share what floated through my brain at the time or forever hold my peace. The fact that the spoiler tag seems to have returned to easy functionality (it was gone for a while after the big UBB update!?!?!?) makes it feel more reasonable to dump this out.
ep1
okay, so it makes sense for that to be a stormtrooper in the sarlaac’s belly (rather than, say, any among the various action figures presumably tossed in during the events of RotJ) because of the interrelationship between the two concepts. also, the breathing tube in both the dreaming memory and the dreaming self, of course.
the shots from Boba’s wavering POV as he’s being dragged on his feet behind the Tusken Raiders are obviously not a complete and total step outside the movies’ cinematic language (it’s happened before! in TPM! arguably, if you count the mediated gaze through the binoculars, all the way since the v. beginning!) but it still always feels to me like someone somewhere is colouring outside the lines
hah hah! that’s David Pasquesi (Andrew from Veep, he’s the psychiatrist in Groundhog Day, the editor in Boss, was on Lodge 49) as the Twi’lek! On the one hand, great, on the other hand — sometimes this makes it all feel like an MTV Movie Awards skit.
is that Matt Berry? Omigosh, was this before or after Toast of Tinseltown!?!?
Boba Fett asking for Ming-Na Wen to take these parkour-ing rejects from a McQuarrie concept art sketch alive immediately after he blasts one of them to smithereens is an odd moment
there’s obviously something there in the subtext of what this episode is about about but I can’t be bothered cogitating it out of my poor dumb brain
[the helmet dialogue as a worthy successor to a long established tradition of filthy SW one-liners]
ep2
oh hey it is that guy from the comics. and, y’know, re: Aayla Secura, etc.
love the little train driving droid with the multiple hands! respect how rather than following Boba’s instructions he just peaced outta there! hopes he scuttles off somewhere new and we see him again!
in general, I feel so far that the strand of narrative about Boba Fett having fun desert adventures with Sand People is more enjoyable to watch than him gallivanting about Mos Espa as a wannabe crimelord
wait, if the credits are to believed were those Luke’s friends from scenes cut from ANH!? Camie and Fixer? Wait, was that supposed to be Anchorhead? Was that Tosche Station!?!? I thought that bar was just the Tatooine equivalent of a gas station truckstop but it seems like maybe it was meant to be a larger place.
Daniel Logan credited as ‘Young Boba Fett’ despite no longer himself being young! Fair enough!
ep3
oh boy Stephen Root!!!11!!!
the monster outside Jabba’s Palace eating up a creature that had ITSELF just eaten something up, then burping! gotta give it up for the classics!
Danny Trejo!!!
the little furry creature that one of the Hutts is always using to wipe away his sweat!
“Rancor are emotionally complex creatures.” Wait, the plural of rancor is rancor!? Neat!
rancor pov shot
the mouse droids scrambling out of their way during the speeder chase
I do not care for the music during this action sequence! no sir! not one bit! nor for how the shot was edited of her on her speederbike screeching to a halt! (Wait, was that the Akira slide?)
hey, though, boba did use his jetpack! doesn’t use the jetpack enough! gotta make more use of the jetpack!
ep4
So, like, the whole thing with the end credits scene where he found Ming-Na Wen way back when was that he was identifiable to the audience by his trademark Boba Fett cowboy style spurs. But by this point we’ve established that he doesn’t actually have them. Timothy Olyphant has them! Kind of respect them just throwing their hands up and going with “Well, that’s not the way it was.” once they’ve decided to revisit this material.
don’t really care for the (diegetic?) music during the body-modification scene. Wait, is the reason that Tatooine youth are so into cyborgifying themselves is that there was murmured news of what the fate of Luke (and his father before him!) was and it’s sort of filtered down the chain back to them and they’re all like, “Wow! Cutting off your limbs is cool! We should all be cool like the only cool people to ever get off this dustball! We gotta cut ourselves up!”. Is that what happened? Maybe. Could’ve been worse. They could all be following the path of local legend Biggs Darklighter instead and tragically dying — hah hah, wait, I just checked the wiki and Biggs was killed by Vader. in my memory it’s always just a random TIE Fighter pilot but it was Vader himself! No wonder Luke wants to go and fight this guy so bad! “Dear Abby, some guy killed my father and then he got my aunt and uncle killed and then he killed my karate instructor and then he killed my best friend and now he’s torturing my remaining friends. I want to go beat him up but this swamp creature says I shouldn’t because I’m not yet strong enough. I can literally lift up rocks with my mind powers and also perform kickass flips while the aforementioned swamp creature is strapped to my back. So, what do?”
lol it takes until now for them to deal with his spaceship. wait, how does he know where it is!? they’ve had hours upon hours to establish this! there are repeated scenes where people say things we’ve already heard before, over and over, but THIS they decide to let slide!
Ming-Na Wen’s little spy device
the kitchen droids in Jabba’s palace. both the choppy one and the repurposed torturer. and the little froggy thing it hit back into the soup!
the ratcatcher droid (also a repurposed design from one of the animated shows, right?) which kills itself rather than continue to face Boba Fett! [I remember there being some discourse around the time of TLJ over the topic of suicide in the GFFA. I feel like it’s been in there from the start, baked into the beginning from the moment Ben Kenobi let Vader strike him down, and that it’s a narratively convenient method of dispensing with the plot as necessity demands in a fantasy-fiction context where life and death don’t have quite the gravity they would in other makebelieve circumstances. but I kind of get why people don’t like it, I suppose it’s on the opposite side of a line, for me that line is drawn just behind the spousal abuse but for those people the line is somewhere else.]
dropping in a Gonk droid there on the big reveal of Slave I; that’s proper SW for you, not letting the emotional impact detract from the need to have something recognizable or neat-o going on elsewhere too. fill the screen! [wait, the Gonk droid has four legs!? and it’s actually part of the plot!? Ming-Na Wen shoots it to help take out some of the guards!]
love to hear that twang!
“Relax. The mods are combing the streets of Mos Espa.” Okay, I just got that! Hah!
“Powers hates a vacuum.” Did they ... did they think they’d lose the audience with the word ‘abhors’!?
tearing off that arm! gotta love the classics!
“We make many credits from the sale of spice in our territories.” “But, Black Dynamite, I sell drugs to the community!”
oh boy, the ratcatcher lives!
“They may be stubborn but they are not foolish enough to see that the Pykes would eventually take over the whole planet.” Come on! Boba! Daimyo! Buddy! Think before you speak!
ep5
“They are not foolish enough to see that the Pykes would eventually take over the whole planet.” Okay, is it me!? This should be “They are not foolish enough to NOT see that the Pykes would eventually take over the whole planet”, right!?!? Boba Fett means to say that these local crimelords right here are fools, yeah, but their foolishness — their medifoolians — there’s not enough foolishness in them for them to be totally oblivious to what’s happening!?!? Going to need to call in a grammar expert! Going to need to call in Mr. T!
love these pugdog aliens with their little hats and SW-y butchers’ overralls!
love the music in the club! [wait, was that a one-r!? yeah, I went back and checked. It was!]
“Then he will be executed for his crimes by the New Republic tribunal.” Wait, the good guys have the death penalty!?!?!?!? Well, if so, then that doesn’t seem all that different from Darth Vader killing every Imperial uniform functionary who fails him. Is there a substantial difference between the legal finding of fact and the insight gained from the power of the Force!? One’s just quicker!
Poor Mandamamalorian! Can’t go to the mikveh!
his gift for Bébé Yoda being tied in a peckeleh shape reminiscient of the outline of his face & ears
is that little droid the droid from the video game where you’re Archie!? the one where you’re Jedi Archie!? I think the droid was called BD1?
Amy Sedaris drops the h-word twice
the little dragon rooster! shouldn’t it crow twice for the twin sunrises!? or, wait, is this one of those things like there not being two shadows!?!?
ep6
The Mandamalorian calling R2 (a droid!) “friend”. You love to see it! We can all change!
these oddball ant droids assembling a stone temple/shelter. Neat!
the little cyclops frog the Bébé Yoda is about to eat before the CGI Luke abomination makes him let the poor thing live, [and then tortures a whole flock of frogs with a wave of his mechanical hand!]
opening up the episode with a scene where we get the comfort of a familiar place and a familiar face [Tatooine and Timothy Olyphant!] only to have that sense of comfort besmirched by the unheimlich sight of Luke Skywalker, CGI Abomination is one way to go with it, sure
okay, I didn’t notice the little green visor on the droid from the Disney ride up until now. Cute!
wait, Yoda lost his lightsaber in the big fight with Ian McDiarmid at the end of RotS!? And that’s a short tiny saber, too, for instance. Guess it’s probably one of the many training sabers that he was seen teaching the kids with in AotC.
so, uh, was Mark Hamill involved at all aside from credit!? seems like he wasn’t! I don’t really have more than half an eye on the Twitterverse, the Twittersphere, but it seems like he was goofing off more about this for his big surprise reveal in The Mandamalorian season finale whereas now it’s just a little teensy tinsy piece of maaaaybe passive aggressive goofing off. Is it outside of his control, kind of, and he’s just going with the flow, not rocking the boat, is it a mutually agreed decision that serves both parties for a supercorporation to use computers to imitate the work he did as a young man forever and ever to its own ends!? [I mean, not that he’d even necessarily want to be on set for this or whatever. covid! covid!]
ep7
Amy Sedaris saying “Grogu!? That’s a terrible name. No way am I calling you that.”
Cad Bane calling it a “speed bike gang” instead of a “swoop gang”. Awful!
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May as well post my short-but-filled-with-spoilers review of the movie!
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
★¾
The villain of this movie is Robert Zemeckis! This is both text and subtext! Same as Ready Player One (2018)! The filmmakers know, they know the audience knows, it’s front and centre throughout the movie. It’s not just something they get out of the way early (although, of course, they do! ~6 minutes in!) they go through the trouble of pointing it out explicitly. Will Arnett’s Peter Pan’s henchman played by Seth Rogen is referenced as being from one Robert Zemeckis film even though he’s clearly from an entirely different Robert Zemeckis film! Will Arnett’s Peter Pan’s hand slides past the bottle of DIP! They hate Robert Zemeckis! They love Robert Zemeckis! They could’ve just held up a sign saying “NOTICE ME SENPAI” for an hour and a half instead!
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Omigosh! Amazing!
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On 5/20/2022 at 8:14 PM, Spider-Man said:
I don’t think M’Benga was talking to his daughter while she was in the buffer. He explained you can keep a person in the buffer indefinitely if you rematerialized them for a period between stasis. As such I think the indication here is that he rematerialized her, for a story and chat, then puts her back in stasis.
I missed that! In my defence, the actor’s accent is fairly thick and also the explanation itself raises a lot of questions — he’s routinely rematerializing somebody with a degenerative disease? won’t that just mean the disease will continue to progress forward during the time the patient is rematerialized? like, if someone is dying of space cancer and you keep popping them out of the transporter buffer won’t the cancer continue to grow during those periods you’ve rematerialized their body? He’s not buying time to save her life! He’s just killing her slowly-er on his own personal schedule! — but I definitely missed that bit. That’s not on them. That one’s on me!
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I saw the third episode!
I still don’t like how there’s no identification of the character’s names and ranks in the title credits. And no episode titles in the upper left hand corner of the screen after the credits, too! But I guess those days are over — LD excepted for the latter, though.
Episode is ... about as good as a fairly crummy VOY or ENT episode!? But that is now, in and of itself, a pretty high level of quality for Star Trek to reach? Like, the premise is pretty awful (“Oh no! We’ve been infected with a disease!? But perhaps the TRUE disease is p-p-p-p-prejudice?”) and the execution isn’t up to snuff but because of how good the SFX are nowadays and of course the always attendant truth of how this is the Enterprise the whole thing feels way better than it would’ve otherwise. Loved to see the detailed diagram of the ship’s interior on a screen! Loved to see all its external running lights blink out!
I appreciated the craftsmanship of having that scene with the Andorian engineer guy doing his thing with the transporter beaming up a piece of the planet’s mantle in a way that it wasn’t actually there there yet in order to set up the bizarre ending scene where Dr. M’Benga can ... talk to his daughter while she’s in the transporter buffer!? That’s not how the transporter works! Scotty didn’t spend decades just waiting around on the transporter pad of the USS Jenolen for the Enterprise-D to show up! My point is this : the show understood that it had to make it clear to the audience that the transporter works in a way it doesn’t work BEFORE it decided to show the audience the transporter working in a way it doesn’t work. Gotta give them credit for that.
Oh, and I liked Spock’s line pointing out the oxymoronishness of the phrase “Looks like they’re gone.” Kind of more of a Data thing than a Spock thing (there’s a lot of overlap there, yeah, I know) but still pretty good.
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I don’t have a Tik Tok account (is that how it works?) but sometimes I see individual Tik Toks out there on the wider Internet or wherever.
Here are some of them :
- the one where the girl is hornt for General Grievous (here!)
- the one about the critical reactions to TLJ and RotS (here!)
- a (deliberately???) cheesy/corny rap about how to make cereal on שבת (here!)
- I can’t find this and it might not even have been a TikTok but it was a scene from IasiP where Charlie sings a song and the characters on the show were labelled as various political factions in the Democratic Party and Danny DeVito was labelled as Danny DeVito
- a bit where Kylo Ren’s dialogue in TLJ is a line Adam Driver said on Girls, I think (here!)
- can’t find this one but it’s a guy chasing his duck around his attic and screaming “GO TO BED JERRY” at his duck!?
- can’t find this one but it’s a guy sitting in his parked car while it’s raining and saying something like “Communism is a lot like rain. At first it seems like it’s going to be okay but then you go outside” and he gets out of his car and screams “AND THEN IT’S EVEN BETTER!”
- can’t find this one but it’s a girl in class playing with her glasses synced up to part of this song
- a garden hose spraying water set to Elton John’s Rocket Man; uch, can’t find this one either
- a teacher in a classroom telling her students that the Earth is flat and the North Pole doesn’t exist
- a guy saying the name Kyle three times into a mirror and a Kyle appears out of nowhere and says “¡Ay mami! What’s popping?” and the guy screams
- just a bunch of kids dancing in their basement to Toto’s Africa
- just a bunch of guys clapping for their very very very very pleased dog
- a girl singing but her camera uses facial recognition to automatically focus in on part of her t-shirt and she bowls over laughing at the mistake, pretty sure the song was a Tenacious D song
- girls pranking a girl named Allison with that thing where you tell them to put their feet flush up against the wall and then stand on one foot so they fall over, classic, wish I could find it!
- really mad I can’t find this one! A woman with her sheep and she’s singing to them in Arabic (???) and they’re baaing at correct times with the song. Translated, from memory, it was something like : “Oh my sheep – baaa! baaa! - you are my life – baa! baa! - walk with me – baa! baa! - sing with me – baa! baa!”.
- okay, found one that I actually have a working link to; it’s the one where General Grievous and Threepio and ... .... .... the droid voiced by Alan Tudyk in R1 are dancing to ... The Killers? Idk? (here!)
- cats! oh, wait, this might not actually be a Tik Tok though. (here!)
- “Boromir. sword.” (here!)
- there’s something I can’t find any specific examples for at the moment but that’s absolutely commonplace and I like it lots and lots. It’s the thing where a user can match or synchronize or stitch (don’t know the exact terminology!) their video with other user’s videos so you can make your video a part of their video. Almost like it’s a panel on a comics page. But it also makes use of certain kinds of cinematic language : so, sometimes it’s like you’re showing what’s just outside the range of their camera or whatever. But sometimes it’s like you’re showing the opposite perspective of their camera!? I wish I had examples on hand to explain this better.
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Yeah, it’s great!!! Haven’t seen the documentary --- I think it’s actually not even out yet, coming out the day after tomorrow, maybe!?
Favourite bits : 60 On The Pole (I think this is the one that just demonstrates the sheer ridiculousness of what they’re doing, it’s a note they hit a lot over the course of the season of course but still, still, still!), the one with the slippery babies, Ambublamce, when they brought back “I’m CRUSHING your head!”, oh, the cops, love the cops, there’s this thing where Mark talks about being unable to find his friends in a crowd and then they all have flags that I think is maybe a parody of Guy Maddin, in general I just love it when Bruce McCulloch gets very serious and earnest in his demeanour, oh wait the sketch where Dave Foley is a post-apocalyptic morning show DJ who only has one song to play!, they brought back the waiters (I think the waiters were on the old show, right? There’s a sketch — looked it up, “Dipping Areas” — where everyone in a restaurant’s kitchen is just incredibly nice and kind and patient with each other while the customers wait. They do it again this time with the Employees Must Wash Hair Before Pooping sketch and I think maybe another one earlier in the season?). [edit : okay, yeah, I remembered! The one about the pie/tart!]
I’m undecided on whether or not I want them to do a Season 7 right away or wait ANOTHER THIRTY YEARS and do it when they’re all ninety!?
Star Trek Strange New Worlds
in Entertainment
Posted
season finale
That opener is absolutely heaving w/metatextual resonances. Pike turning leftovers into a new meal. The base commander happy to get what he’s been asking for five years. Yeah!!!1!
Wait, doesn’t this happen in a comic book???? Have a pretty strong memory of seeing Pike in a TOS-movie uniform from somewhere someplace.
They already announced Paul Wesley as the new Kirk for Season 2 so having his name show up in the opening credits as a Special Guest Star kind of gives the game away.
Omigosh they’re going full nerd w/this! They opened the episodes with the specific outposts from that episode! Pike is in command instead of Kirk during the episode where this all happened! Hah! Gotta give ‘em credit for this!
Split diopter! Beautiful!
Kind of hilarious they’re redoing one of the few episodes that guy, Kyle, is memorable in and they just decided to give all his lines to Ortega. Why even bring that guy back!? (Wait, was it Kyle or Stiles? Can’t remember off hand.)
Not casting James M. Frain as the Romulan Commander??? Whyyyyyy???
Wait, if Doctor M’Benga is still the CMO of Enterprise then why did they phrase Spock’s line about Pike being examined as “the doctor”? I took that as a tease for McCoy, guess it wasn’t, gotta assume he’s on the Farragut instead or whatever.
Wait, is this the same guy as played Stonn??? Are they going Lawrence Montaigne with it???
Hah! Referencing Nemesis (2002)??? Come on now!
doing the Spike Lee shot? Hah!
referencing Star Trek (2008)??? Come on now!
Verdict: well, I liked it! I do think its slavish devotion to a sort of box-ticking reenactment of a specific episode kind of burdens the whole thing with a heavy load it can’t adequately maintain while moving at the pace it needs in order to function. The episode’s got no speed, no drive, no zip. I’m just constantly being tripped up while watching it wondering about things I wouldn’t be wondering about if they’d made a better choice. But that’s no fair! Gotta accept the episode we’re given and not theorize about how much better a hypothetical other episode could’ve been. This is the choice they made, this is the show we got, and I think it’s pretty good for what it is. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve had a dumb season finale all about Lt. Khan dealing with her idiot brother’s Gorn henchmen, y’know!? (Wait, now I’m complimenting the episode because of a hypothetical other worse one!? Uh oh!)
Best first season of a Trek spin-off, I suppose. Might be more accurate to call it least worst, maybe. There is no one single stand out the way there usually is amidst the sea of drek which comprises most Trek spin-off’s first seasons but it never ever wallows in tedium the way all the others do, y’know? Most other first seasons are pretty bad with one or two good ones sprinkled in. This first season was never too bad, never sunk to any depths, just because there weren’t any strike-outs doesn’t mean the pitcher never threw any heaters. Baseball metaphor!? I don’t know. I liked it! Hope next year opens up with a proper courtroom episode for Number 1!
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They gave Sisko the Christopher Pike Medal of Valour because he too likes to cook for his crew!!1!!
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It kind of avoids the pitfalls of the Enterprise (‘01-’05) series finale through two things. 1, it’s just a straightforward retelling of its particular source material rather than dancing around the periphery like the series finale did. 2, its about the actual characters of the show itself rather than the guest-stars in a way the series finale wasn’t.
But, yet, still, nevertheless, it’s still a lot like that series finale! Can’t have Kirk show up on Star Trek and not have the audience’s attention peeled away from everyone else, sorry. I mean, the episode does do a lot to make it be about Pike and Spock and Number 1. The straightforward story of the episode from soup to nuts, from the opener to the cliffhanger ending, is basically just “Pike teaches himself how important Spock is to himself, how willing he ought to be to sacrifice for him, by telling us all a story where Pike is in Kirk’s place so therefore Spock is in Number 1’s place so the eventual absence of Number 1 hits the hardest”, the episode is a kind of game of Yankee Swap. But the season so far has been about more than just those particular people — it’s been about Lt. Hemmer! he just died last week and he never even gets a mention! it’s been about Doctor M’Benga and his daughter, y’know? it’s been about the whole genetic dealio between Number 1 and Khan’s Kid! — and dropping in a new very particular and very important person into the mix rather than dealing with everything there is to deal with leaves me feeling kinda cheated. Why all this arc plotting, why all this prestige TV nonsense, if they’re just going to toss that out of the nearest airlock for the finale? I don’t know. Again, I don’t think that’d have been better per se. It’d just have been more fitting on the level of craftsmanship. Can’t fault them for wanting to deliver a big shebang for the season finale!