Just finished season 5 of Justified. Quality really improved after the first two seasons. Love the dialogue and atmosphere this series is drenched in. After I finish S6, I’ll probably go with HotD…
Loved that show, probably going to re-watch it at some point, but its a bit to fresh in my mind still 
I caught part of season 5 and all of 6 as I recall, when originally broadcast. I remembered a little, but all the considerable back story was new to me. Now, I just want the ability to speak like Boyd Crowder for a day…
today? nothing yet…but come lunch break, probably some Clone Wars.
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It was decent, not up to GoT seasons 1-6 spec, but still decent. I found myself being kind of meh at first, but more hyped for it as the season progressed. But again the last episode was kind of mediocre. I too would give it an 8, maybe 8.5 when I’m feeling generous. It still has room to grow, but better than GoT last seasons and a lot better than Rings of Power.
Last week I watched Rings of Power, which I would give a 3/10. It’s mostly badly written, there are some high points, but there isn’t much else besides the world. I might be talking out of my ass, but I heard that they don’t have the rights to the second age. Still that doesn’t excuse the fact that I’ve seen sitcoms with better plotlines and character arcs than this show.
Anyway after RoP, I kind of wanted to see Tolkien, but competently written, so I rewatched the original LoTR trilogy
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Coudnt focus on rings tried multi views. End up shopping for gear on the phone. Looked at it for picture quality and started picking at the fakeness of the backdrops and set pieces, plastic shrubbery on hobbit girls birds rats nest.
Anyone taking in andor or she-hulk ?
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I’m finally watching through House of the Dragon - it got the thumbs up from reviewers I trust, so it’s time to watch season 1.
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Andor is boring, I wouldn’t bother - it’s not bad, so much as it’s just not good. It’s entirely average television at best…
She-Hulk is packed full of new age political messaging, and is just terrible as well.
Sadly Rings of Power is also horrible - it’s boring, new-age, agenda pushing, drivel. Definitely not worthy of being even slightly related to Tolkien. Word on the street is, it was going to be entirely different, but when Christopher Tolkien died (J.R.R. Tolkien’s son - he was the executor of the Tolkien Estate) anyway, when he died Amazon basically re-wrote the entire show and turned it into modern new-age garbage - which is why it’s so bad. Avoid it like the plague it will taint your memories of Tolkien’s works.
Instead - I suggest House of the Dragon, or The Terminal List, or the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime, or Better Call Saul, or Cobra Kai, or even Reacher. Those are all pretty good.
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If you ignore the fact that it’s tied to The Lord of the Rings and you ignore the politics, it’s still at it’s core below average show and it’s abhorrently boring, the first three episodes were so boring that it made my brain hurt. For the money they are spending, I would at least expect them to get good writers, but they can’t even manage that. They wanted it to be the new GoT, but it’s far FAR away from that show, it’s not even in the same league
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Rings of Power is even internally inconsistent! It’s like the writers had the memory of a goldfish and couldn’t even keep their own world straight from episode to episode, even some of the individual episodes are not consistent with the rules they made up for themselves! So even if you turn off your brain entirely while watching, it will still make you scratch your head in wonder at how much it screws up.
And it commits the cardinal sin of being terminally boring. It’s got to be the most expensive flop i’ve ever seen. And it’s sad because I wanted it to be good… and it was on track to be decent, then Christopher Tolkien died and everything changed. (at least that’s the rumor). I heard that people who worked on the show originally said that.
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House of the dragon looks better on an OLED score is great not overbearing . Only chink in the armor is the RGB everything table, the light mastering (HDTVtest explained the mistake) and not enough episodes/seasons for my viewing pleasure. Seems to have won the fans back so what do i know.
The two shows couldnt in more stark contrast of one another (HOT-D/ROP) literally down to the lighting.
The other show shouldve stuck with the book purists.
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Yep! this seems to be a very common theme with shows these days - these new-age screen writers think they know better than the original author that wrote the masterpieces everyone loves, so they muddle around with the original stories until it’s entirely wrecked, and then put it out, thinking they have created gold, when really all they’ve got is hot-garbage on their hands.
Then the audience tells them it’s hot-garbage, and then Hollywood proceeds to try to blame everything on internet trolls and starts calling the fans of the original works all sorts of nasty names. And then the cycle repeats until the property in question is well and truly buried, and nobody cares anymore.
The big difference is, this time they tried to do it to Tolkien - and Tolkien is incredibly widespread and people love it all around the world, and they aren’t having it. So it’s no wonder it’s failing so hard. Between Rings of Power being actual hot-garbage on it’s own, and Tolkien fans crying bloody murder as amazon dumps all over Tolkien’s world.
Watched this same pattern with Star Wars, the Marvel franchise, the Wheel of Time (the books for Wheel of Time are great! the show… not so much, for the same reasons…), and now they are trying to do it to Tolkien.
- at this point even this semi-evolved ape man (me) can figure the pattern out.
I think the reason House of the Dragon is doing well is because George has his hands directly on it’s creation.
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She-Hulk? GTFOH! 
At first, I thought it was just a parity. Then I realized they were trying to be serious. Couldn’t get past the virtue signaling. Stan Lee would spit on that shit.
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I miss Stan Lee - that man was a treasure. But i’m sort of glad he isn’t around to see them wreck his world too. Better for him to leave this world when things were riding high. We all gotta go sometime, might as well be on a high note.
Must have been really painful for the original crew who created Ghost Busters to see what happened with the Ghost Busters movie that shall-not-be-named came out.
Did you watch the New ‘ish’ Ghost Busters Afterlife movie? That one was actually good I thought. a good tribute to the series.
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I did not. I wrote Ghostbusters off, to be honest. Perhaps I’ll give this “Afterlife” installment a shot.
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With Afterlife I think they realized they sort of messed things up with the one before it. Kept the themes rather simple, it’s basically a re-creation of the original story from movie 1 with young folks, they work in the original cast from the first Ghostbusters. And it has a few good emotional moments, even if it’s a tad predictable at times. And the humor lands often enough to be entertaining.
I’d say it’s a good ‘passing of the torch’ movie. You’ll see - I don’t want to spoil it any so i’ll stop there. Angry Video Game Nerd did a good review of it, but don’t watch his review until after you’ve seen the movie - he goes into detail and it would definitely spoil the plot.
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How much are we allowed to spaculate on the big Aprime around here. Please give me a warning when i get up to the line.
cant get my head around why would the people that own hollywood want to change the formula of classic coke? Dont make sense, only thing i can think of it is movies are making a profit.
Im not steep in this culture war thing. Staying wealthy and in charge trumps ideology everytime.
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It’s an old problem coming back home to roost.
There’s an interview I watched from way back in 1977 that Stallone did after his first Rocky movie that explains how things work.
Basically culture and the movie industry goes in cycles. And right now we are in a downturn cycle.
- The past generations worked their tails off and lived through hard times, my mom was born during the great depression, so she knew what bad times were, and she taught her kids that work ethic - but the next generation raised the current generation and didn’t pass that on. - So the current generation that is new to the workforce had it too easy and became a bunch of whiny pansies with no purpose. So they are hunting for a purpose but don’t know how bad things can really be.
It’s really bad this time because we are also in the extreme end of a downturn for what is known as “Strauss Howe Generational Theory”.
https://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/the-four-turnings.html
So the next step is the ‘hard times’ we are getting into the thick of that right now. - things are about to get really rough.
The people that live through this next cycle will be burned out by how hard things are, and they will have to work their tails off to make it through. This will put us back into a ‘spring’ cycle, and it will repeat, ever onwards through the generations.
Here’s a link to the base page if you want more detail.
https://www.fourthturning.com/
The big problem is multiple countries are going through these same phases, when two world powers hit the fourth turning at the same time, usually major conflict happens. So if we get out of this without a world war, it will be a miracle.
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Ok ill take alook. Off the top of my head is the comicbook genre coming to a point of disco, will there be a point when it gets dated ?
Thing is we now have the internet and streaming. The interesting stuff im finding is foreign film and music. Its always been but now more accessible, hollywood less dominate . Internet, biggest social experiment in human history.
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Sort of, yeah, that factors in. but of course there is a LOT more to it.
I’m not entirely sure how the internet will affect things, I expect it will be like the advent of the printing press in many ways, just more extreme and a whole lot faster to push changes.