erik wrote:So why is Dark Phoenix so bad? I'm probably going to eventually watch it because it's x-men and I really enjoyed the other reboots. I know the series did a horrible job with the last Dark Phoenix, just curious how they failed this time.
There are things. These things happen. Why do they happen? I don't know.
X-Men 3 had two movies of decent setup and was then killed by the existence of Superman Returns, which poached their director and Cyclops and forced them to scrap most of that setup.
Dark Phoenix doesn't have that setup going for it. And doesn't make the effort to replace it. Instead of building up Scott and Jean's relationship, it goes for actions scenes. The emotional core of the arc isn't exactly there.
Technically speaking, I know that it's a cobbled together mess of 3 different shootings, so probably it will be bad because of why those things are usually bad.
The wolverine/phoenix/cyclops love triangle sure gets creepy when 2/3 of them are teenagers. Hope they didn't do that anyway.
I do think that Dark Phoenix is lacking enough buildup in the previous movies to be the capstone here, and I am très disappoint that they are going back to that poisoned well when there's so many other storylines they could play with - Brood, Genosha, Marauders, whatever.
I'll still watch it, maybe even in theatre, but maybe not. Movie time is hard to come by.
Well, at least they don't do what X-Men 3 did with Jean Grey's personal agency.
The original Dark Phoenix Saga ended with Jean recognising she was too dangerous to live and taking her own life against the pleading of Scott.
X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which adapted the earlier version of the Phoenix storyline before they introduced the cosmic stuff, decided to strip Jean of this moment of agency by instead having Wolverine murder her and be painted as the tragic victim for doing so.
According to synopses the new Dark Phoenix film with Sansa Stark instead has her fly off into space still alive, so I'm not going to get up in arms since it's already a box office flop that I don't intend to watch
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Omegonthesane wrote:Well, at least they don't do what X-Men 3 did with Jean Grey's personal agency.
The original Dark Phoenix Saga ended with Jean recognising she was too dangerous to live and taking her own life against the pleading of Scott.
X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which adapted the earlier version of the Phoenix storyline before they introduced the cosmic stuff, decided to strip Jean of this moment of agency by instead having Wolverine murder her and be painted as the tragic victim for doing so.
According to synopses the new Dark Phoenix film with Sansa Stark instead has her fly off into space still alive, so I'm not going to get up in arms since it's already a box office flop that I don't intend to watch
As originally written it was Jean. Years later they wanted to bring the original five X-men together to launch X-Factor, so they needed a resurrection for Jean that also absolved her of guilt for destroying the D'bari homeworld - because you can't encourage your impressionable young readers to go devour star systems - and thus it was retconned to be the Pod Phoenix version of Jean.
Later still Jean and several other characters got to wield the Phoenix Force as heroes and the Phoenix Force got lightly personified. So apparently eating stars is just fine and we should encourage kids to do it.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Mon Jun 10, 2019 3:49 pm, edited 3 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
I went to the Boston Early Music Festival's production of Orlando Generoso, and it was wtf. Orlando Generoso is 'based on' part of Orlando Furioso. Orlando Furioso is a poem about a lunatic superhero who goes on a transcontinental murder spree until someone flies to the moon in a biblical reference and brings back the superhero's sanity in a bottle. Orlando Generoso is some characters from that poem singing about how sad they are for four hours. They aren't even sad about a super-murder spree, they're sad about high-school-level romantic drama.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:I went to the Boston Early Music Festival's production of Orlando Generoso, and it was wtf. Orlando Generoso is 'based on' part of Orlando Furioso. Orlando Furioso is a poem about a lunatic superhero who goes on a transcontinental murder spree until someone flies to the moon in a biblical reference and brings back the superhero's sanity in a bottle. Orlando Generoso is some characters from that poem singing about how sad they are for four hours. They aren't even sad about a super-murder spree, they're sad about high-school-level romantic drama.
They were sad for 4 hours, or they sang for 4 hours, making us sad?
"Lost me" is a strong phrase but season 2 of Dragon Prince is really slowing down and I'm not into it. In season one I felt it was a strong show that took a little too long to get going. It literally takes 3 episodes to leave the castle they all start in which in a 9 episode season of what is fundamentally a show about a journey is too long. Still things picked up and a lot of distance was made and adventures happened in the rest of the season. In season 2 it literally takes 4 episodes for them to leave the campsite they're at, then the next 3 episodes center around the main characters sitting on a boat doing literally nothing and not being involved in the plot while a history lesson is told. I'm 8 episodes in and I think you could have put everything into 3 episodes and missed nothing.
It still seems like a high quality show that the people creating it care about and their active efforts to show characters who are POC/lgbtq/deaf/other things are very cool. I think the deaf general is one of the coolest characters I've seen lately. Still the quickest way I can imagine to make an audience lose interest in your story is not to tell it. If Bilbo Baggins spends 4 full episodes in the shire then 3 more on his donkey on the way to the entrance to Mirkwood I'm gonna check out.
DSMatticus wrote:Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I am filled with an unfathomable hatred.
I like to watch a lot of trash TV, and so I'm not surprised when I encounter something that's total garbage.
I started watching a show called Blood & Treasure that's trying to be an Indiana Jones type show, crossed with Romancing the Stone, and updated to account for iPhones.
I have no fucking clue what's going on. I'm on the ninth episode and I literally couldn't explain what is happening in the show. The overplot is that the main characters are looking for Cleopatra's mummy, and that the Nazi's supposedly had it during WWII. But it's like the makers of the show realized they only had a plot that could run three hours max, so they threw in a few secret societies and threw some more darts at a map so they could add a few stops and thus fill out six more episodes. Throw in some pseudo-science-mystic shit and bam! I mean, the dialogue is so bad that the characters are explaining their own terrible jokes and somehow they ended up in Quebec.
Sunk cost fallacy for the win.
Edit: I made it halfway through episode ten, and as I was listening to the main chick bitch about the fact that she didn't shoot the BBEG (?) in the face in front of his totally innocent niece, I turned it off. It's literally not worth having on in the background while I do other things.
Last edited by Maj on Sat Jul 20, 2019 5:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
I made it through 1.5 seasons of Wynonna Earp before it got too far up its own ass for me.
It started out as a "shoot undead cowboy of the week in the face" show with a far-off curse plot, then decided to be about relationships and ever-more-powerful monsters. It's like they distilled the worst parts of Supernatural.
Also, they couldn't have tried to do a worse job with Doc Holliday. I think his mustache was taped on. And he had a lot of modern knowledge for a guy who spent the last 200 years at the bottom of a well.
I like spaceships. I like telepaths. I liked the specific telepath. But what the show promised me was horror on a haunted ship... that is, people walking around in darkly lit corridors making scared-faces at the noises they hear.
Every time you play in a "low magic world" with D&D rules (or derivates), a unicorn steps on a kitten and an orphan drops his ice cream cone.
While the visual effects, giant monster personality animation and cinematography were top notch, the bit where Godzilla is killed due to betrayal, then resurrected from his tomb after three days so that he can be the savior of humanity and claim his place as the rightful king goes too damned far when this is the image used to mark the impact of Godzilla's death:
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Thu Aug 15, 2019 7:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Iunno. I didn't catch that when I saw it, but... I'm kinda here for radioactive lizard Jesus...
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was mentioned recently in IMHO, and reminded me of when I ragequit that game due to plot hole bullshit.
Details spoilered:
There were a number of elements in various cases that didn't add up. For example, one case involves a pair of lions, specifically described as being manageable only by one person and life-threatening to anyone else, being managed by a different person with no relevant skill set. This was irritating, but it wasn't a deal-breaker until...
There's one case where we are supposed to conclude that the motive for one man killing another is that they both wanted the same girl. The evidence we are supposed to base this conclusion on is that the murdered man wrote 'beautiful' next to her name on a playbill and the murderer owns a framed photo of her. That's so thin that it has only two dimensions and no physical existence.
It's a shame, because there were many things in the various cases that were very clever. But it was a mystery-solving game that absolutely did not play fair.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
I want him to tongue-punch my box.
]
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
I was pleasantly surprised by Ryan Gosling, who I otherwise can't stand. Then again, the main character could probably be played by an inanimate carbon rod. But it's fine, I like the movie.
OK, time to drag Old Harrison Ford around for a while. I didn't enjoy it in The Force Awakens, I'm not enjoying it here. But it's ok.
Aircars being shot out of the sky? Now we're talking.
......aaaaaand it's "fistfight for the fate of the world". Fucking bullshit. And of course the nominal hero, who has displayed average fighting prowess, defeats the absolute stone-cold bad-ass who has been built up over the entire movie, with nothing else but "i'm the hero LOL". The entire movie reduced to bargain bin scifi schlock. God i hate that trope.
It's like they even managed to piss all over the nding of Original Bladerunner.
Last edited by rasmuswagner on Sat Aug 24, 2019 5:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
Every time you play in a "low magic world" with D&D rules (or derivates), a unicorn steps on a kitten and an orphan drops his ice cream cone.
