Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-11-14 (Thursday)

On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 11:36:41 -0800, Arthur Lipscomb
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

On 11/15/2024 9:04 AM, shawn wrote:

On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:19:41 -0800, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
wrote:
 

On 11/15/24 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
>

What did you watch?

>
On the day I woke up at 3:30am and couldn't get back to sleep, I finally
managed to get through "Deadpool & Wolverine", and also a Lifetime flick.
>
So I watched:
>
Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney+) - Going in, I expected this - but this
was definitely less funny than the first two "Deadpool" flicks,
especially "2" (which is my favorite).
    And the recurring characters from the first two flicks, even Morena
Baccarin, get little more than cameos here (and T.J. Miller's character
is completely memory-holed without reference;

>
Well, that's not a surprise!  Given his recent legal issues, if they did
reference him it probably wouldn't have been in a good way.
>
 Brad Pitt's "character"

from "2" is also inexplicably absent,

>
I don't remember seeing much of him in the last movie either.  ;-)
>
though this one may have gotten an

oblique reference!).
    In short, this flick suffered a lot of the same problems as "Ant-Man
3" - generally ignoring cast/characters from the first two films; being
less funny (pretty much *un*funny in the case of "Ant-Man 3"!);
launching into a new "quest" with a new "big bad" that we don't
particularly care about - though this one is admittedly a lot better
than "Ant-Man 3"!
    The other problem I had with this one was its deliberately much
closer integration with the rest of the "MCU" (and especially in the
recent "Multiverse" stuff) - the first two films worked as well as they
did, I believe, exactly *because* they were nowhere near the MCU, and
only had ties to 20th Century Fox's "X-Men" flicks. This one explicitly
*forces* both Deadpool, and Wolverine, into the MCU, and the film wasn't
the better for it, IMO.
    What does work here are the cameos. I don't want to spoil it, but
some of the cameos actually wowed me, because I didn't see them coming,
and they tie this film in with some earlier franchise stuff that was
pre-MCU as well.
    That said, I was disappointed that Channing Tatum was playing Gambit
here (yes, I know he's wanted the role for years!), and that poor Taylor
Kitsch was once again ignored.
    Sidenote: I had totally - I mean totally! - forgotten that Chris
Evans was in the original "Fantastic Four" flicks!
    Anyway, some of this does work - I really like the montage where
Deadpool tries to find himself a "Wolverine" in the Multiverse and keeps
getting brutally beaten by various versions (including by "The
Cavillrine"! Ha!!). And the creepy looking dog with the mutant tongue
("Dogpool") is a great bit too.
    But it almost feels like it takes way too long before they give Hugh
Jackman something to do. And placing this in the retreads of the "Loki"
TV series just felt... off.
    Sidenote: Emma Corrin is scary skinny and, like, not in a good way.
    All the archive footage from the earlier "X-Men", etc. flicks does
seem to imply that this is in fact the end of the road for both Jackman
and Reynolds (both are probably getting too old to keep doing this).
    I did like the post-credits scene - like the other "Deadpool"
flicks, this post-credits scene doesn't set something up in an upcoming
film, but it does prove a claim Deadpool makes earlier in this film!
    Overall, I guess I liked this. I just didn't like it nearly as much
as the first two "Deadpool" films.

 
I haven't gotten around to watching this yet even though I also had a
somewhat sleepless night thanks to a car alarm that kept going off
every 30 minutes or so. I tried to watch the all female GHOSTBUSTERS
from 2016 (I think) but couldn't last more than about ten minutes. It
just felt so forced with the attempts at humor. While I've liked the
actresses in other movies they just never had the same chemistry as
the original Ghostbusters.
 

>
I like all the Ghostbuster movies, including this one.  It gets better
as it goes IMO.  It cameos all the original surviving Ghostbusters and
implies it could be set in the original Ghostbuster universe.  It makes
since if you watch.  They hint it's the same universe but are also
intentionally vague about it.

Maybe I'll give it another shot. I know that they referenced the past
with the shot of the fire house.

Not having a number of the original characters from the first two
Deadpool movies wasn't going to  help. As for Jackman I've recently
seen discussion that said he wants to keep playing the role so he
seems likely to show up in future movies and maybe some of the shows.
Haven't heard anything about Ryan other than he loves the character
but having to fight Disney all the time over what he wants versus what
they want has to get old.
 
Ryan wants to be true to the character so plenty of violence and
offensive language but that's not what Disney likes. (For instance
Reynolds really wanted a long segment of Wolverine back in the Nazi
days that would have been very bloody but Disney didn't want that.)

>
I hadn't heard that, but I don't see how they could have worked that
into the existing plot outside of a brief multiverse scene.
>
As

for Disney they kept wanting to add things to their movies that either
go along with female empowerment or adding in bits that are just ads
for upcoming movies. Neither of which have anything to do with the
original concepts for the movies.
 
 

soaps: Y&R - Fri's thru Wed's(?) ep's. Phyllis sets a good trap for
Sharon, and still no one will believe her that Sharon is EVOL?!!! At the
end, it looks like we will finally learn who is behind all of this, as
both Phyllis and Sharon look to have been "summoned" by a third party...
Meanwhile, Victor reveals to Nikki, family and friends that he has
rebuilt the Newman ranch. And both Jill and Ashley return to town for
Abby's and Devon's wedding (at the ranch), which takes up most of the
Tues & Wed episodes.
>
The Woman With My Face (LMN) - For the second time on Lifetime, Nicole
Marie Johnson stars as identical twin sisters.
    In this one, Johnson plays a single-mom journalist who moves to the
town she was apparently born in to discover... that she has a married
identical twin sister (a librarian?) she didn't know existed!
    Being a journalist, she soon keys into the fact that the
circumstances of both twin sisters' original adoptions is shady, and
starts investigating. As does another obnoxiously ambitious local
reporter (Brey Noelle).
    Soon enough, our heroine reporter(tm) is getting threatening notes
to drop it, and is possibly being followed... Will her dogged
investigation get her, her sister, or her teen daughter killed?!
    Honestly, this one was very convoluted and the revealed motive was
almost like something out of a comic book.
    Of Johnson's two "identical twin" Lifetime movies, I vastly prefer
"Lies My Sister Told Me".
>
>
What did you watch?

 
I got in the latest episode of SURVIVOR last night which was great.
Only thing I didn't like was the tribal council where there was much
confusion but yet ended up with essentially a unanimous vote but we
never saw why they came together to vote out Sol when so many names
were being floated.
 

>
One of the things I really liked this season is the reasoning for the
tribal council votes weren't hidden from the viewer.  This episode felt
a little like they were hiding the ball again.
>

What did you watch?

>
>
I watched:
>
>
Matlock - "Claws" - Episode from last week.  The case of the week
involved a case against prison guards (and the prison?) for assaulting
female inmates.
>
>
Law & Order - "Truth and Consequences" - A judge's husband is murdered
and then for reasons I didn't fully follow the judge decides not to help
with the case.
>
>
Law & Order: SVU - "Tenfold" - I have *no* idea what was going on!
There were two completely unrelated cases and that's about all I know.
>
>
Silo (AppleTV+) - "The Engineer" Season 2 premier.  Season 1 ended with
Juliette leaving the Silo.  Season 2 picks up with lots and lots of
stupid flashbacks.  So instead of giving the viewer what they want and
exploring the world outside the Silo, we spend most of the time with
unfamiliar characters in flashbacks.  And the second something
interesting finally happens, they fade to black and roll the credits.  :-/