BROKEN ARROW

Nice plot but juggling nuclear weapons quickly becomes ridiculous

I finished up a couple of more things I'd never seen.

Arrested Development Season 1. This was a comedy serious that combines the dysfunctional family and dysfunctional office. I didn't watch it when it first aired; it binges well. It's filling the gap for a ~20 minute comedy.

Rush Hour Date. This is film from less than 10 years ago. It begins with a women trying to sneak away from a one-night stand, and the premise is that she needs a ride from the guy to get to her car but the couple ends up stuck in dead-stop traffic. It is a clever film with a cast that can clearly pull of both big-and-small "d" drama. The writer/director does several tricks to "show off" both of his skill sets. He pulls off one too many camera tricks for my taste; I found somewhat immersion breaking when he does this, but they are cool tricks. If they were slightly less cool, I would have thought he was doing this specifically to change *my* focus, but he provides counter-evidence to this line of analysis.

The script is also clever. He employs a variety of the Memento play book to explore how the couple got to where they are. Most important is that neither member of the headline couple is more "likeable" or "important" than the other.

STEPHEN KING'S A GOOD MARRIAGE

If you like good serial killer suspense, this is a good one.

SHOCKWAVE: SURVIVING NORTH AMERICA'S WORST DISASTER

Typical disaster movie fare. Not unentertaining.

20th CENTURY MAN

Short time travel film. Worth watching. Once.

LITHIUM-ION

Short animated. Great concept but not well executed.

I watched Bill & Ted Face the Music this weekend. I can't say that it held my attention. The best part IMO was Bill & Ted serving as their own foils for part of the movie. The movie has its moments, but there is quite a bit of it that I felt was really forced. Recommended for fans of the property, otherwise pass.

I finished Season 1 of The Boys. I was impressed with the changes made to the source material, both in terms of story and characters. The source material is the only work of Garth Ennis' that I actually like; as he matured (as a man) he (at least) added human interaction to go with his penchant for Alex Delarge-inspired bits of the ultra-violence with an over-reliance on heavy drinking and blue language. Kripke's adaptation of the material for television has whittled away a lot of the source comics' absurdity, and remolded the core themes and then polished them into something new.

It may be a bit before I jump into Season 2, as I have a few other things I want to explore. For example, I have a morbid curiosity about Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. I was very disappointed by the way the initial three seasons played out (for many reasons, see earlier in this thread) and I have zero faith that the creative team will do much better by transplanting the story to 1930s southern California. There are a lot of different ways this can go wrong, so to try to have some sense of excitement I'm going into this as a hate-watch.

I did watch the complete run of WandaVision on a weekly basis. I thought it was a good vehicle for some of the under-used actors from the MCU franchise, and it was a reasonable way to put some pieces (back) on the table for the film franchise. Ultimately I don't think it was as deep as it wanted to be, but for a weekly show I was entertained. That I was entertained surprised me, as I have no great affection for either of the title characters.

The series definitely felt as if it had a better chemistry (dare I write... "magic"?) than the previous generation of MCU (and MCU-adjacent) TV shows. Despite the initial "sitcom" formula, I didn't get the sense that this series was playing up the "come back next week" aspect too much (ehem Agents of SHIELD, FreeForm/Hulu) nor that it was inflated to too many episodes (ehem Netflix). There were a couple of folks involved/credited with the previous generation of Marvel TV shows that are gone (Loeb et al.)... and while I was no great fan of most of that production team, I can't say for certain that moving those producers out has made this series better, but I definitely can say that it didn't fall into the traps that most of the earlier series did.

I watched the 2020 New Mutants film. For the life of me, I can't figure out why this was so delayed. I am no fan of horror films, and this one didn't strike me as particularly gross or scary, so maybe it wasn't scary enough? There was some creepy factor, but ultimately with such a small cast and the "big bad" being The Demon Bear, I can't see how this could have made much of a horror story.

Minor Spoilers: there isn't much of a body count.

I kinda like that this was essentially a "bottle" episode of a franchise featuring all new characters. It didn't knock my socks off, but it didn't embarrass itself either.

Let's see... I've had somewhat scattershot viewing habits, so I'm trying to remember to "close out" some of my "watches"...

I finished watching the first ~60 Popeye cartoons from the Fleischer Studios. The collection I was watching covers the first 59 from this list (1933 - 1938). With the exception of two Native American-focused cartoons (Ironically, the first and the last episodes in the collection), there really shouldn't be any content (besides cartoon fisticuffs) for anyone to be upset by. Almost every cartoon made me crack a smile and many of them made me laugh out loud.

I was typically watching one of these shorts before/after watching something else rather than binging through them. They are roughly 7 minutes in length (except for a couple of the "2-reel" full color ones) so they were pretty easy to watch alongside other content stripped of commercials from Network TV.

I'm half-way through Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, and it has both surprised and disappointed me so far.

First: This show has nothing to do with the narrative of the first three seasons of Penny Dreadful. I feel like there was a tiny thread that could have linked them, but ultimately it is a completely new story. This is a good thing, as the first three episodes ended up being a terrible disappointment to me.

Unfortunately for "branding", it makes no sense to even call this a "Penny Dreadful", as it is firmly set in the Pulp era. The fact that the series wasn't renamed gives you some idea of just how superficial and un-clever the creative team remains. As I wrote in another post, the writing of this (both) series is extremely weak. The original three seasons relied on a collage of well-known fictional characters to draw us in, and then proceeded to waste almost all potential drama. Penny Dreadful: City of Angels is following the same playbook, except that instead of specific fictional characters it is relying on tropey storylines: mass media religion, LAPD corruption, LA construction shenanigans, racial tensions, and, of course, Nazis!

The program couldn't precisely use era-appropriate characters as was done in the earlier season because of trademark and copyright issues, so I recognize this specific dilemma faced by the writing team. However, one important aspect of Pulp Magazine was that the specific characters could be interchangeable they all had to fill recognizable roles within a given pulp... but almost all pulp (and more modern adaptations of the genre) rely on a PoV character. The problem this production has is that rather than trying to leverage pulp storytelling they simply thrown everything into the pot which has made a very muddled mess.

The good: The acting is fine, although it is painful to watch good actors suffer through such weak material. There has got to be a writer out there that can better leverage the acting talents of Natalie Dormer. She pours herself into her role(s), and clearly has range, but this material is so bad. I want to give her credit for attaching herself to such diverse projects, I just wish that many of them were better! Is it too much to ask that somebody develop a project for her and Ruth Wilson (who is not in this series) that allows these two actresses to showcase their presence?

There are two other good things that I don't want to dismiss: Production design (sets/props/costumes) is for the most part very good. Also, the various pieces of dance choreography are well done and fun to watch.

I plan to finish the series, but I don't have high hopes for it.

I watched Assassins, Ryan White's documentary film about the assassination of Kim Jong-nam. I highly recommend it as an introduction to Americans who may be unfamiliar with economic circumstances in Southeast Asia, as well as for those interested in a brief introduction to North Korean politics.

DEVIL'S OWN

Good Harrison Ford vehichle. A lot of expected twists and turns but fairly well done.
Can't say I would watch it again, but not sorry I watched it once.

I finished Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and my ultimate opinion is that this was a wasted mess of resources. Ending at episode 9 (of 10) might have improved my opinion... but that is unlikely. Allow me to spill some words about just how I think this story went wrong. Essentially, I found this to be a show about nothing, except possibly hollow appeal to emotion.

I can't imagine why the show would be predicated on some sort of supernatural being's inclination to malevolence and then deliver what it did. There was literally no reason for the supernatural element except to (a) showcase Natalie Dormer in different make-up, and (b) a very short bit of "spooky horror" extremely late in the season. I should add this: the series concludes with a weak, blunt swing at Trump-era politics and attitudes. This comes out of nowhere, and really soured my opinion of the writing.

I'll write what I would have done differently, in order to leverage the "supernatural" element, as introduced... with no appeals to more period-appropriate fantasy elements like Lovecraft, or pulp comics/radio characters.

First: I would have picked two elements to set up as the diametrically opposed forces, and maneuver the characters around those two poles. From opening scene of the series, these poles should have been: The base (animal) nature of man and the unifying concept of family. I would have completely dropped the threads of technology, futurism, and manufacturing-in-the-service-of-war. I'm not saying that some of those ideas couldn't still be worked into the story... but so much of them just made the story a muddied mess.

Second: Every character journey would emphasize the tension between those two elements. I felt like most of the characters were so one-dimensional that it was pretty trivial to split the deck into red and black... that is, practically every character could be summarized by a single adjective, or by some trivial phrasing like "_____, but ____". By the time the (no big surprise) it was revealed who was responsible for the initial family murder... and what the motivations were... it was basically a cardstock character reading margin notes... whereas that character clearly could have been staking out territory on the axis I described.

Finally: I would have explicitly established that "Magda" has an actual weakness, and that there actually was something actively working against her. I don't think that any such weakness would have to be Kryptonite, it's just that if she she was essentially going to be a cartoon villain, she needs an Achilles' heel. Some of her actions were so petty, while others were bizarrely complicated.. I definitely don't think that she saw mankind as a "base animal clawing in the dirt".

BTW: The "base animal clawing in the dirt" line from the opening ought to have held more weight in the story. Consider that we saw farmers, construction equipment, a day at the beach, a cemetery and a grave dug for a pet... yet none of these elements called back to that initial criticism. This was an unforgivable waste on the part of the writing team.

Frankly: I would have dropped the whole Nazi storyline, as well as the Dr. Peter Craft / German-American Bund story... as these either didn't contribute or contributed in the most cartoonish way to the story. Sorry Rory Kinnear, we love you, but we didn't need you. Also... I felt the supernatural elements were completely wasted. Since literally none of the characters can recognize "Magda", I don't think it would have been out of line for one of the actors NOT played by Natalie Dormer to have been revealed (late in the game) to have been another aspect of the same character. TWIST AWAY TV WRITERS!

OK enough about my rando wishes to improve the writing! I'll summarize my thoughts on Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.

Don't waste your time, unless you want a master-class on bad TV writing and missed opportunities. You could come for the dancing, I suppose, but get out quick. There are far better period pieces that cover similar material in more enjoyable ways. You could watch Chinatown (for the schemes and sexual abuse), The Rocketeer (for the Nazis), HBO's Perry Mason (season 1, for the radio evangelism), LA Confidential (for the police corruption), HBO's Carnivàle (for the spooky spooky), or any one of many other period pieces to cover the same broad strokes as this production... each of the ones I listed is better written than what I just watched.

I sat through the Snyder Cut, and discussed it in its own thread.

As a sort of palate cleanser for Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, I started (re)watching the individual (as broadcast) episodes of Doctor Who Season 16. This may be better known as Tom Baker's Key to Time season. It is fair to say that Tom Baker is my Doctor. I was exposed to his serials in (for all purposes, randomized) syndication years before public television stations offered a more structured viewing, along with my next favorites Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison.

Rather than trying to relive a purely chronological re-watching, I opted to drop into the Key to Time season, and to watch the episodes as 25-minute segments. I will admit, I found it difficult to adjust my attention to the mid-1970s BBC approach to television production... but by the second episode I was fully engaged. The individual cliffhangers at the end of each episode also add a bit of uneven tension that I find charming.

The first four episodes of the season are The Ribos Operation. I found this to be very well written, with a lot of elements that the more melancholic modern series could learn from. The core of the story is essentially a confidence game, but incorporated within this story is some brutal politics, an aside about the pitfalls of heresy and spiritualism, and no small amount of camp.

The various collections of pre-2000 Doctor Who include an assortment of extras and specials that provide some extra insight into the production of the serials. Many of the best of these extras were included on the releases in the 2000-2010 era, and most have been recycled for use on even more modern blu-ray collections. Mileage varies of course, I should note that the random recycling makes it possible that the specials from one serial end up being reused on a different serial's re-release.

I have some more modern TV series I intend to start watching, but I think I will be keeping the individual Doctor Who episodes as my followup for times when I'm not ready to break from the TV. As noted above, I was originally exposed to Doctor Who (in the USA) through weekly single-episode installments before the more typical "sit through an entire serial" experience became the dominant way to experience the long-running program.

My previous 'palate cleansing' had been done by watching some of the Columbia shorts featuring Shemp Howard that are included in the Ultimate Three Stooges collection... but quite frankly some of these appear to date from prior to the era when it wasn't known how to translate comedic timing to film. The most amazing thing about those shorts was seeing a young Noah Beery Jr. playing the part of a kind-hearted 'dumb palooka' in Glove Slingers. Some of the stories are surprisingly good, and a few of the comedic bits still resonate, but much of the material falls flat.

FEAR AND DESIRE

Early Stanley Kubrick effort. Lot of nice stuff, but a lot of stuff seemed amateurish. Remember I said early effort.

The Killing is the earliest of his I think I've seen and really enjoyed.