movies Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Recent Media Round-Up

July 3, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! I have been more or less taking the last several days off because I am technically on vacation. Due to the less-than-opportune placement of July 4th, I took off today and also largely checked out of doing blog posts late last week giving myself a bit of a vacation. This morning however I had to do some work really quickly and make sure that timecards were approved. So I thought that I might as well bang out a blog post because I have some things to talk about. More specifically I have watched quite a bit of movies and series of late, and thought I would give a bit of a round-up of some of my thoughts regarding them.

Nimona

I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona. It is available on Netflix, and if you don’t have access to Netflix… then pirate the fuck out of it because it is very good. If you are/were a fan of Lumberjanes or the most modern incarnation of She-Ra or pretty much anything else from ND Stevenson, then you are probably going to love this. If not… then you will probably still love this because it is exceptionally well-written. It is a story about trying to find your place in the world when that world often is diametrically opposed to your existence. It has a lot of things to say, but also… I want Nimona to be my sidekick. I had not been following the production mess that surrounded this property, but it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all.

Very much a good film for the entire family as well. I highly suggest you check it out.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

First I feel like I have to say that I don’t hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie had problems and I feel like the whole aliens thing was pretty divisive, but for me most of the problems with that movie came from the fact that it looked wrong. We were still in the era of CGI “all the things”, and it looked it… and now I feel like we realize what we lost during the CGI boom years… and folks go out of their way to make things feel like practical effects even when they may not be. Dial of Destiny harkens back to the era of Last Crusade, and while it is still maybe a bit busy and a little bit less about bringing the audience along for the hunt, it feels more grounded in at least imagined reality.

I think what I like the most about this movie is that it serves as a nice bookend for the entire series. Indy is still punching Nazis and still chasing objects of tremendous power but is very much a man out of time. He doesn’t really fit into the world of the moon landing, but no longer has the vim and vigor to really keep chasing forbidden treasure. Dial of Destiny serves as a great last hurrah for Indiana Jones and hopefully can put the character to bed on a good note. If this series continues, it needs to continue in the hands of someone other than Indy, and at most him serving as a supporting character. He has had his curtain call, and I feel satisfied with this movie being the last stanza.

The Flash

I am not going to spend much time talking about what a seeming shithole of a human being Ezra Miller has turned out to be. I don’t really care much about the current state of the DC Universe. I’ve watched the various movies, and enjoyed them enough to keep watching them… but also never really felt the love for them that I have in the MCU. I was mostly interested in this film as it serves to give a last hurrah to “my Batman” aka Michael Keaton. What I was not expecting was to enjoy the film as a whole anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve always sort of hated Ezra Miller’s version of Barry Allen. I found the character annoying as shit and extremely abrasive… and this movie goes a long way to resolving that problem and shows reach growth of the character.

Michael Keaton as Batman and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El were both phenomenal. The two different Barry Allens though… felt almost like watching two different actors in the same way as you do when Tatiana Maslany plays dozens of unique characters in Orphan Black. The only disappointment in the movie though is the fact that I expected something that just simply was not there. Knowing that the DCU is being rebooted… I expected this movie to play more into that fact. There were a lot of deep cuts showing alternate timelines like the Nick Cage Superman… but the entire thing wraps up in a very weird note that makes me question what this means for everything that comes forward. It doesn’t so much give the current DCU one last send-off as much as it just deeply muddies the waters. It is still a good film but I would probably suggest waiting for it to release on streaming before you watch it.

The Witcher Season 3 Part 1

Unfortunately, Netflix has realized the error of its ways when it comes to releasing episodes… and has begun awkwardly cleaving a series in half so that they can have two different epic premiere dates. This weekend the first part of The Witcher Season 3 dropped, and with it comes the first five episodes that end on a bit of a cliffhanger. I have a lot of issues with this show… not the least of which is the fact that Henry Cavil will be moving on from the series after this season. I get WHY he would want to leave however because the showrunners and writers are needlessly fucking with details constantly. The Witcher is one of those shows that is good… so long as you know nothing about the supporting material. It reminds me of my early experience with the Harry Dresden series prior to reading the novels. I thought it was pretty good… until I actually read the books and then suddenly got annoyed at the weird inconsistencies.

I think what bothers me the most about The Witcher series, is the fact that entire scenes have been lifted from whole cloth from either the books or the games… but little details have been fucked with for no apparent reason. The worst of this is the way that they are suddenly changing the entire personality and motivation of different characters. I am sorry folks… but they did Eskel dirty last season… and this season they are making some truly bizarre fucking choices with Radovid. The series version of Djikstra is fucking heinous as well and is nowhere near as compelling of a character. Basically, the show feels sloppy, and that is maybe the worst thing a show based off course material can be. The only reason why I kept watching is that they’ve at least nailed the pivotal characters of Geralt, Ciri, Yennifer, and Dandelion/Jaskier. The source material is so fucking strong… that it just infuriates me that the folks writing this show seem determined to sloppily copy the original homework.

Final Thoughts

I cannot understate how much I enjoyed seeing the Keaton Batman ride again. Have you seen any of the media that I talked about? What were your thoughts? What things did I completely miss? I’ve tried to keep everything spoiler free because I do think that everything was worth watching at least once. Again I highly suggest that everyone stream Nimona because it was so freaking good.

Magic Blue Smoke

February 24, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.

In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.

I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.

Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.

I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change.

I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one.

Media Consumption 11/28/2015

November 28, 2015 by Belghast

Rainy Morning

It’s been a good morning, albeit a cold and rainy one. I got up and made a beeline to the kitchen to fix some breakfast. We’ve recently had a renaissance with the little triangle sandwich maker thing that became popular during the 90s. Recently we started playing with making pancakes in it, and the resulting tiny triangles of pancake goodness are awesome. So I fixed pancakes and sausage and my wife and I nommed happily. From there I ended up popping into World of Warcraft for a bit to do some garrison stuff, and shortly thereafter found The Goonies on cable. Around about this point my wife and I decided it was a good idea to go lay down and snuggle with the cats. It was around this point where my wife asked me… if I had already done a blog post. It had quite honestly slipped my mind. I live my life based on a sequence of rituals, with each one kicking off the next ritual… and if any of them happen out of order all sorts of mayhem occurs.

So that folks is how one almost breaks a three year streak of daily posting… not with tragic circumstances… but just a charming morning that made me forget that the internet was a thing. As a result I am getting a really late start at the day, but have now officially had some coffee so I believe I can functional properly once more. I’m back on the sofa wrapped in my blanket cocoon and tapping away on my laptop. Generally speaking Thanksgiving is usually this difficult holiday filled with running around like crazy, but this year a bunch of things have happened ending up making it the most chill and relaxed time ever. Firstly we wrapped up the work on the house just before the extended weekend, and with that there was a flurry of cleaning to make the house feel “finished”. Then we were able to load all of our meals into an evening and a morning… giving us the rest of the break just to chill. At this point we are taking advantage of the constant rain and the cold temperatures to simply stay in doors and hibernate.

Jessica Jones

With the hibernation has come a lot of Netflix or equivalent digital streaming. Over the past week I have been watching the new Marvel Netflix series, Jessica Jones. I have to admit that this is a character that I only know of in relation to the other characters she surrounds. I went through my “Kung Fu” phase where I read a lot of Powerman and Iron Fist, and ever since have had a certain affinity for the characters in that chunk of the Marvel Universe. In truth… after the amazing results of the Daredevil series, I would have watched anything produced for Netflix feature Marvel characters. Jessica Jones however took a completely different tone, but one equally gritty. While Daredevil shows the clear physical toll of being a hero… Jessica Jones does a good job of showing the mental and emotional toll. Jones herself is completely walled off from the world in her own emotional bomb shelter, trying to keep as many people away from her… because she is convinced that is the only way she can actually keep them safe.

The show also digs into a lot of themes of violation and betrayal but does so in a slightly different way than we are used to seeing. The Purple Man has always been such a strange character in the comics, and I was not quite sure how they would end up making it work for the screen. David Tennant’s portrayal does this excellent job of walking this razor line between making him completely horrific and likable at the same time. There are times you think that maybe with the proper role model, he could change and be a force for good… only to get those hopes dashed when you realize that this is a person without any sense of a moral compass. The actor playing Luke Cage also does an amazing job of bringing that character to life, and I am hoping we see a significant big more of him in the future seasons and the supposed upcoming Luke Cage Hero for Hire show. My favorite insider moment in the show was when Rosario Dawson’s Clare Temple, and it is setting her up to be the Night Nurse taking care of all the supers in trouble. I could gush about Ritter, but really without her the show would have fallen apart completely. I highly suggest watching it… and I am trying really hard not to do any serious spoilers here.

Inside Out

Last night I also finally got around to watching Pixar’s Inside Out. I have to say that in all honesty there has yet to be a Pixar film that I have not loved, and that is saying something because in truth… I can’t say the same about Disney animated films in general. There is a certain magic that Pixar brings to the screen, and a certain timeless “realness” that they give their characters. This film was a bit of an emotional roller coaster but I guess that makes since as it is kinda the “Feelings Have Feelings Too” movie. There were so many moments where I laughed out loud, and several moments towards the end of the movie where I failed miserably to fight back tears. Maybe the whole nostalgic binge I have been on served to deepen the experience of this movie. There were so many profound messages like… you can’t really be happy without also feeling sad sometimes. There were moments I related to the dad, especially when he was straight up oblivious… because so often I get lost in my own head and forget that I am supposed to be paying attention to the world around me. One of my favorite bits came at the very end of the movie when it showed the inside of the cats head… I am pretty sure that is exactly how it works inside our cats at least. This morning while laying in bed… every so often one of them would go tearing through the house for no apparent reason… only to come back and snuggle a few minutes later.

Heroes Reborn

Another thing that I started last night was Heroes Reborn, which is the reboot of the much acclaimed Heroes television show from a few years back. I say much acclaimed… and by that I guess I really just mean the first season. The show as a whole went tragically downhill quickly after that, and I blame the writers strike on pretty much killing all hope of that show living up to its full potential. I mean I realize strikes have to happen, but that managed to kill a number of would be amazing televisions shows. This time around we have zoomed forward to several years after the events of the first series, to a time where the “Evos” as they are now calling folks with super powers are out in the open and an act of terrorism has turned the public against them. The show has shades of the Mutant Registration act from X-Men, and the first episode centers on the dad from the first series, who has apparently forgotten any knowledge from the event. The first episode was intriguing enough to get me to start watching it, and I figure at some point today I will continue on that process. Will be interesting to see where they go with this one, and I hope that maybe just maybe they can live up to the promise that the first season started.

Media Consumption 9/19/2015

September 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Thing

One of the things I have found myself doing a lot lately is hanging out downstairs on my laptop and watching a fairly steady feed of television and movies. Now some of this I am consuming from the On Demand service from cable and others from Netflix or Hulu. Over the last few years there is a ton of television content that I have wished I had seen, but never actually got around to seeing. With fall coming on, I tend to spend a lot more time snuggled on the couch, and as such I think I am going to start another weekly feature similar to my Sunday “what I have been playing” column to watch about the media content I have been consuming. One of the big things that has changed over the years is I tend to watch an entire television series over the course of a couple days, instead of letting it drag out over the course of a season. In fact I prefer this method of consumption so much that I will let an entire season of a show record on my DVR before starting in on watching it. I blame Netflix squarely for this tendency and right now quite literally the only shows I watch as they are airing are the Walking Dead series simply because most of my development group is hooked on the show and we discuss it Monday mornings. Hopefully folks will dig me going back and talking about what I have been up to.

iZombie

I started this show on my own a few days ago, but quickly realized that this would actually be something that my wife would enjoy. As a result last night we started in and managed to get about three episodes into the series. Essentially you take the smart and quirky writing of Veronica Mars, mix in a dash or True Calling and Crossing Jordan, and add a dash of Being Human and maybe a sprinkle of a show like Drop Dead Diva… and you end up with the weird mix that is iZombie. The premise is simple… she was a promising surgical resident until she went to a party on a boat… where a designer drug turned people into zombies. She got scratched and wound up as a member of the unliving… completely uprooting her promising career, her engagement and most of the relationships in her life. Instead she now works in the Morgue where she has a ready supply of brains, and a series of misadventures that spring around her ability to see flashes of memory from the brains she consumed. Flat out if you loved Veronia Mars as much as I did… you will love this show. It is more of the same sort of intelligent writing and snarky commentary mixed with crime solving… just of a different sort. I look forward to picking up and continuing watching this show over the weekend.

Black Mirror

This one is available on Netflix, and is a British show which means… short seasons. There are two seasons available currently, which only actually mean six total shows to watch. I tweeted that this show was weird, but there is something infectious about it. I like to think of it as Tales from the Crypt for Futurism and Technology. Essentially they take ideas that folks have always thought might be cool… and take them to really dark extremes. One of the episodes featured a device that you stuck behind your ear, that recorded every single moment in your life allowing you to review them later. But what happens when no one ever forgets anything… and can scrutinize every moment and everything you have ever said in full high definition color? The show makes up a series of disturbing what if’s that bring cautionary tales about our own lust for technology and innovation. I managed to make it through four episodes of the series before finally falling asleep the other night, so at some point I will pick up and finish it. The six episodes make it a quick watch and if you are into dark futurism…. it might be down your alley.

Chappie

This movie combines a bunch of weak spots for me… Artificial Intelligence, Die Antwoord, and Neill Blomkamp. I loved the movie District 9, so when I saw the trailer for Chappie I thought I would probably like it as well. The problem is it just took me a really long time to get around to watching it. The movie is really odd at times… because for most of it, it really just feels like a really long Die Antwoord video. Pretty much every piece of music found in the video is theirs, and it features all of the same odd visuals that you find in their videos. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it just makes the movie feel less “movie-like”. I am imagining there will be a Chappie 2, because they left a lot of things unresolved at the end of the movie. As far as Chappie itself… the robot was kinda adorable… and he is voiced by the same actor that played Wikus from District 9. The robot is vulnerable and childlike and extremely impressionable… but at the same time very loyal to its humans. The movie as a whole asks a bunch of trans-humanist questions about what exactly consciousness and sentience is. It will be interesting to see where this goes if there is a sequel.

Star Wars Prequels

Something that I did last weekend and over the course of this week was watch the Star Wars movies. I’ve talked a bit about how Phantom Menace was a massive let down for me… and how I have been afraid to get excited about Force Awakens because of it. In spite of all of my better judgement however… I am infected with full on hype mode when it comes to Force Awakens and Star Wars in general. I grew up loving this series… and in spite of the prequels I am once again in love with anything and everything Star Wars. As a result I thought to myself… maybe I was too hard on the Prequels, so in my rewatch of the movies attempted to go into them with an open mind. The end result is that I don’t necessarily “hate” them, but objectively they are really bad movies. The pacing feels off, and the characters feel forced to act out awkward dialog at every single turn. There is something however that bugs me even more about them. There are times in movies and television shows when the viewers know more about the movie than the characters on screen… and this can be interesting.

The problem with Phantom Menace is that it somehow pretends that we don’t know that Senator/Chancellor Palpatine is Darth Sidious. Like when we finally find out that he is the Dark Lord of the Sith… the movies act like we should be shocked. Additionally making these movies about Anakin Skywalker just feels wrong. We know from the moment this series starts that he is ultimately going to end up in a fight with Obi Wan and be damaged to the point of needing to go into the suit to survive and become the Darth Vadar we all know. The prequels should have focused on Obi Wan, and told his story… with his failure to steer Anakin away from the Dark Side as being a part of that story. Obi Wan is the interesting character here, not the whiny bullshit of Darth Teen Angst. There are awesome moments scattered among the three films, but I feel like you could make one really awesome movie if you just edited out the bad bits. In fact there is a fan edit that does just this and trims the movie into a 2 hour long epic. The only part of the first film that is shown is the “Duel of the Fates” sequence. I think this would be a much better way to jump start the awesome movies that follow… and really the original movies are awesome. I found myself thinking just how great they were as I watched “A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back”. I can still however take or leave “Return of the Jedi”, because I feel like it starts some of the bullshit that George Lucas tried to continue throughout the Prequels.

Fear the Walking Dead

Finally I wanted to talk a bit about Fear the Walking Dead, which this Sunday will show its fourth episode. Last week the shit finally started hitting the fan, as the Zombie infection began to finally get noticed. My wife happened to catch the first two episodes before watching the new episode last week because she happened to be downstairs grading. She made the same sort of comments that I had been making internally about how stupid the characters were acting. At one point she made the comment “Have none of these people ever seen Scream?” as another character put themselves in a really dumb position. Over the first two episodes the series played on the fact that we know how the Walking Dead unvierse works, and placed the characters in compromising positions…. only to have the Zombie NOT jump out of the shadows to get them. That however I think is changing, and this week I expect things to start to get really crazy. I love the way the series is playing on the modern riots as the way the public at large is dealing with the zombie epidemic. When the police put down a zombie, it is seen as police brutality and a huge riot breaks out downtown. The show keeps giving us little clues that things are heating up… like the first few zombies took awhile to turn, but now the virus is mutating and speeding up. In one sequence there is a cop being munched on by a zombie… and then a few scenes later that same police officer is munching on a protester. The only thing that really frustrates me is the fact that at no point do people seem to recognize what is happening. I mean are zombie films not a thing in this universe?