I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
Bill Maher has had a prime television slot since 1993.
That ignorant asshole has been pretending to represent the “left” for 33 years while being a smug reactionary idiot.
Podcast recommend: I Hate Bill Maher.
and now he went through the full maga-ficaiton of his personality and hangs out with TRUMP, and fetterman.
Another podcast that ruined me If Books Could Kill. It is increasingly clear to me that being popular and established are two enormous red flags. And, comically, “being a rebel” is part of the armor all these people wear. The podcast covered an economist who labelled himself, “the bad boy of economics” despite being an established professor and having won a ton of prestigious awards… it’s all an act because just coming out as an obvious bootlicker is disqualifying, you have to camouflage yourself with trivial rebellions (Maher smokes pot! omg!) or against people not in the power structure (in Maher’s case, most often women, trans, and gays).
I’m super ignorant about celebrities’ self-marketing but i thought Maher was a libertarian only pretending he wasn’t racist. he actually claimed to be on the leftish region of politics?
In the skewed US scale, yes. He has usually described himself as a liberal, which is as close as anyone on mainstream TV got to being on the left until Bernie Sanders made waves in the 2016 campaign.
He recently had dinner with Trump while kissing his ass and said that he may vote for JD Vance next time because of the woke.
i dont think he was ever left.
he pretends to be “Aethiest” but he really isnt, since he subscribes to judiasm/zionism just not out loud as right now.
Every time a company does a tax write off and trashes the film. If they’re canning it, it’s ours. It’s public domain. Take it as a loss, we subsidize it, then it’s ours. Coyote vs Acme is the unicorn that got released. It should never have been thrown away.
I’ve felt this for a long time. Taxes are for public benefit, if you’re writing off an intellectual property to avoid taxes that property is now for public use.
Fox screwing Firefly with that stupid broadcast schedule (although it was cancelled before Joss could make it weird)
Star Wars: A LOT of things, but I’ll focus on Episode 9 being absolute dog shit
Game of Thrones, I don’t think I need to expand on it
Probably the most unforgivable thing is the legacy and ongoing sexual exploitation of minors in the entertainment industry, but I don’t think that’s what OP had in mind
It would have gotten so weird with Joss! Now it gets to live in my brain where it only gets mildly weird!
On the other hand, a drinking game based on how often there’s a close-up of bare feet would have developed
The graphic novel sequels were actually pretty rad though…but those were sequels to Serenity, to be fair.
Thewhat
Are these generally available for download?
Possibly! Although know what? I got mine from the local library. Many libraries have digital editions too. Worth checking to support your local one if you can. :)
Here’s the most non-reddit, non-amazon-related list of them I could find if that helps!
They do try to do a lot, but I appreciate the effort toward closure and like to imagine how it would have played out on screen.
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/2258/Serenity-Graphic-Novels
I didn’t even bother with Episode 9 after the slap in the face that Episode 8 was. Ugh.
The end of Battlestar Galactica.
They literally tied up all the loose threads into a bundle labeled “God did it” and then refused to speculate about God because that’s distasteful.
It’s sci-fi. You speculate. It’s what the genre does.
Not a fan of the ending myself but c’mon, it’s been a religious sci-fi since season one, dealing with prophecies, visions and existential questions. God was always going to be a part of the equation. Unless they revealed the nature of god being some machine or a more developed civilization, at which point they would never be able to finish the show because that wouldn’t be an answer but a whole new set of questions.
You are 100% correct.
I have rewatched the series and come to some peace about it, but it is still the first one to come to mind for this thread.
Religion was always woven into the series, and the original was somewhat Mormon inspired.
But that last bit, the evolving nature of god and the whole new set of questions was what I was hoping it would touch on.
I had a Classics professor call it a sci-fi version of The Odyssey. It does have some aspects of it. I’m not sure how intentional it is. It would make the god stuff all the more appropriate though.
I can’t tell if this is about the original or the remake. Didn’t the original end with them getting to Earth?
It’s about the remake.
We don’t talk about that season.
I love/hated BSG ever since they expanded the number of Cylons for like the 3rd time. It was around that time it leaked that they didn’t have any plan and Ron Moore had been lying to the fans for years.
After it was over he said, (paraphrased) “LOL, There was no plan. If someone suggested more hidden cylons and it sounded dramatic we would go with it and figure out what that would mean in the next writing session.”
Yeah, if you put in the opening the line “They have a plan,” you better damned well know what that plan is.
In the end the plan was “We’re gonna kill 'em all!!”
Their plan was to scam the fans into believing there was a plan so they’d watch.
also the humanoid cylon, shouldve got more origin arc in thier creation. by the time of the series they were fully there already. also kinda ignoring the og series too.
I thought it was pretty clear that Bob Dylan was God. Did I just read too much into it?
My interpretation is that they landed on earth. The godS did it and the survivors would be the Greek population, hence all the mythological names (Apollo, Trace. Adama, Aghathon) The monotheistic plotline is a froreshadowing for what would happen on earth.
In a way they themselves become the gods, as knowledge of spaceflight dilutes and the old stories got retold. Eventually monotheims would rear it’s head again. with a Gaius like person to kindle it.
But somehow some fear of foreign tricksters persist, it there in philosophy and in myth. The cylons keep a certain base level of fear untill humanity will develop them again, against it’s knowing better.
I guess it’s how you interpret it? I thought it was a good ending and spoke to an endless loop of humanity and meaninglessness.
it was terrible, because the showrunner was also religious thats why the god stuff was all in there in the first place. he hated the sci-fi aspects of it, to “Trek-kie” so he removed all the material form the og series, lasers,etc. other alien races.
I agree the ending was lame, and really for a while leading up to it was too. However, I can’t see it ever having a payoff that it deserves for how good it started. I don’t think there’s any conclusion that would satisfy fans. It could have been better, but I think it always would have been viewed as not as good as the start.
It’s happening right now.
The oligarch’s buying out the US mass media is fucking criminal and truly unforgivable.
Social media, print, video and television is all owned by a few elites that have been manipulating the minds of society, gaslighting and outright lying to our faces.
It’s why we have a fascist pedophile as president, our social support systems being dismantled and the right of women, minorities and immigrants being taken away.
oh yea they had to make all these movies/shows to include more “wide audiences” which you know what it means. the new sg was cancelled for this very reason, they dint want to make it too broad and turn it into a slop/drama like SGU.
Disney ruined the Star Wars sequels. All the money, all the talent, so much potential, and they pushed out those turds.
Disney didn’t ruin the Star Wars sequels. They were a terrible idea to begin with. They were built from the ground up as focus-grouped corporate slop built to sell merchandise.
They also had access to a galaxy worth of new york times best sellers, and instead of taking the best ideas from already loved stories, they declared them as non cannon.
Okay then who ran those focus groups?
Disney I guess
They were part of George Lucas’s original intent. What Lucas had in mind, I think we’ll never know, but what we got was certainly not that.
Is that true? I’ve never read that. I also think George Lucas shouldn’t have made sequels either.
Apparently. Didn’t sound better, either…
“The next three movies were going to go into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”
— George Lucas
Then Darth Maul becomes the new Jabba the Hut. It sounds… Like ideas I guess. Maybe a weird dream he had one night.
https://shapes.inc/fandom/star-wars-sequel-trilogy-george-lucas-plans/quotes
Edit: also, now we know that Luke wasn’t special after all.
“By the end of the trilogy, Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she was [the Chosen One].”
— George Lucas
Many years ago I read the George’s first draft of the original Star Wars, and boy-howdy was it a load of old nonsense. He works best when he has an editor prepared to tell him ‘no’.
George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he’d been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.
Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like “how many movies,” or “who’s the central core to the narrative” or “exactly WTF are Whills” can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I’ve made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it’s his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it’s your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn’t understand his own creation.
I feel for Lucas. I don’t think he’s fundamentally any different from most creative people, he just made a hugely successful franchise and had a habit of excitedly discussing whatever ideas he had in the moment.
Yeah, most of them sounded VERY ridiculous, but if we could see the ideas of any successful project’s initial stages we’d be losing our minds over it too lol.
Any one of us would be the same way, but we weren’t trying to keep the hyperdrive running on an already ultra-successful forever-money-printing cultural touchstone.
So, I dunno, I’d like some recognition and success but I never wanna be in his position…
For sure. I don’t mean to say he didn’t understand his creation, but rather he hadn’t settled on a final version enough to shoot. It’s Whills and microscopic world and crime boss adventure tale and Leia and politica and Luke with Jedi legacy and its… Whatever the last thing he was thinking about.
Which doesn’t guarantee it would be better than the hot, festering shitpile we got. But it would be hard to do worse.
I assumed that’s what the comment above meant. It was just corporate slop that no one wanted, and there was no passion behind it. They had the IP and all the money in the world to make them good, but they squandered it making total garbage.
I think the subtle difference of opinion is that I don’t think having having a franchise and money is a good enough excuse to make a movie. That’s how corporations make decisions. Tbh that “expand the franchise” mentality is what’s wrong with modern media. I think franchises should die. We don’t need more Star Wars movies. We need new ideas.
I mostly agree with you, but I have no issue with more in a franchise if it’s also bringing new ideas. Andor, for example, did something totally different, and it was great. If they’re willing to do more things like that, and push the boundaries, it’d be fine. Andor was a fluke though. Disney wants to play in their safe little sandbox where they just make shitty products with cute things to sell as merchandise.
They gave the star trek movie reboots to a director that didn’t like or watch star trek.
I was rather excited when I heard about the reboots. And for the most part, I did enjoy the different takes on things. But I couldn’t stand how small they made the galaxy. Few hours to get to Vulcan, a transwarp system that sent a man to Klingon space in a matter of days. No scale at all. But it took me years to watch the third one, and didn’t like it at all.
Even in Star Wars, the one he claims to like more, he sort of broke the fuzzy-time that Hyperspace travel seemed to take.
They were never explicit about travel times (and fair enough, Star Wars is what it is), but clearly in ANH they had time to come down from the adrenaline-dump of escaping the Imperials at Tattooine and settle in, such that Chewy was playing board games with the passengers and Ben thought it was going to be leisurely enough to kick off history lessons and lightsaber drills. Everything about that screams hours-long flight at an absolute minimum, and to my mind more like a few days on a tramp steamer. JJ turned it into “HERP DERP INSTANT LOLZ! The implied passage of time is BORRRRRING!”
(Love the meme)
The worst part was if I wore any of my many Flash or Green Lantern shirts people would assume it was a Big Bang reference. I had to explain, that no, I was just a nerd.
They just released yet another spinoff last month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Fails_to_Save_the_Universe
I watched a review of all the BBT series and their spin-offs recently, and they had pretty positive feelings about that. It sounds pretty fun, and how bad can it be if Brian Posehn is in it?
I was wondering that myself. I hate big bang theory with such a seething passion that I’m not sure I can give this a chance 😩
another one? young sheldon wasnt enough.
My first girlfriend loved that shit. It didnt make it past a few months, because she constantly braught me in comparison to one character due to me having autism. Go figure
I forgot that they made multiple The Hobbit films.
After watching the first one, I mentally erased their existence.
There’s a fan edit that’s pretty good that cuts all 3 into one 3-4 hour movie and removes the cgi orc
I actually enjoyed the beginning of the movie, but halfway through that stupid barrels down the river scene, I was over it.
As a young person, I loved A Wrinkle in Time and the entire set of sequels.
And so I say a heartfelt FUCK YOU to Ava DuVernay, who crappified this masterpiece into vapid pap film that felt like it was written by Kellogg’s marketing team in conjunction with the Ad Council of America.
Apparently the film lost $130 million. Thank God there is little chance of a sequel.
My wife loved the book in her tween years and encouraged me to read it… I’m not the intended audience for sure and some of the ideas were cool but that book sucks lol
I had a crush in middle school. Back then you signed your name on a physical card to remove a book from the library. I saw that she had rented A Wind in the Door just before me. I was so thrilled to ask her about it. She vaguely remembered losing interest and hadn’t read Wrinkle. Heartbreak.
I got married to a completely different woman a few decades later. She had a long commute, was looking for audiobooks, ofc I suggested Wrinkle . Her take-away? “Couldn’t get past what a whiny bitch Meg Murray is. Had to stop.”
Jesus fuck what is with you people
I mean, I didn’t like the book either… and looking on goodreads we’re not alone. It doesn’t even have 4 stars.
I haven’t read them, so I can’t give my opinion. We’re all allowed to enjoy (what others may call) garbage though. There’s no need to justify it. Hell, I will fully agree some things I like are total trash, and that’s alright! Art isn’t objective, and all kinds of emotions can make what could be a totally underwhelming thing something special.
LoL
It’s strongly in the no go category of, “Don’t ruin by reexperiencing it.”
I really enjoyed the books as a kid too, and was disappointed with how bad the movie was. But–from what I remember of the book–it was pretty faithful. I think the book doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of adulthood.
did not know a movie had ever been made.
See the low-budget Canadian one from 2003. It’s much more true to the books and is objectively better storytelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time_(2003_film)
The proper movie of these novels has not yet been made.
LotR should have been 6 movies and The Hobbit should have been 1
There was enough material for 3 if you include the long part of mirkwood wandering around and then sneaking around the elf camp and Beorn.
Creating consent for the Gaza genocide
I guess a decade of slop media where nothing is sacred and everything must be exploited has hardened my heart from caring about anything anymore. A younger me cared about why the Star Wars sequels are bad or that they cancelled Firefly too quickly or that Community fired Dan Harmon. But all these properties are just tools of corpo oppression at this point. Art doesn’t have the same impact if they are just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them.
I firmly believe that there are real artists trying to say things and tell cool stories in these companies, and real shit does somehow sneak out on occasion (see Andor, perfectly imperfect jewel), but the utter financialization and commoditization of media means there’s so many filters a work has to push through before it’s allowed to survive. Like mass marketability etc — stuff that non artists make up to justify their salary.
PS not hating on non-artists (kind of don’t believe the category exists, but as a role) it’s just that when the share of people expecting to get paid from a work is mostly admin, marketing, logistics, rather than the people actually making the thing, incentives and culture get warped.
Yeah tbh there’s actually been a bit of a revival in the movie space ever since the Marvel universe had its final moment. Everything Everywhere All At Once is actually legitimately one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. One Battle After Another, Eddington, even smaller movies like Mickey 17. So clearly creativity isn’t dead.
I never watched Andor, not because I don’t think it’s probably good, but because it probably didn’t need the Star Wars license to be good. I’ve heard there anti capitalist themes in there and I just have a hard time seeing anti capitalist themes in mass market media as being genuine. It’s like buying a Che Guevara shirt from Urban Outfitters.
It definitely transcends its IP, which is why I feel it snuck through. If it wasn’t actually rock solid on top of being obviously subversive it would never have seen the light of day. It’s basically a manual on the dos and don’ts of rebelling.
I loved the early internet, where people were doing art for arts sake and funslop for funslops sake.
Then there was a tiny tiny period where people started making money doing it, and I was young and naive enough to truly believe we could have a kind of content-utopia where creative types would flourish etc etc.
The trend-chasing algorithm-humping stifling any chance of financial success for creativity and inventiveness was pretty inevitable in hindsight, but still.
The feelings gone and we’ll never get it back.
I loved the early internet, where people were doing art for arts sake and funslop for funslops sake.
I affectionately call this the “Peak Newgrounds Era.”
Aside: Kudos that the place is still up and people are still embodying that spirit.
Have you heard of dropout.tv?
It’s College Humor reborn under Sam Reich (the former Secretary of a Labor’s son) and it’s incredibly unique. They have a bunch of shows (go watch some Game Changer clips on YouTube) that are all hosted by and starring comedians and they profit share with all their talent, and their ToS service says you can share your account with anyone, etc.
They are very much the new media that is springing up while the old giants collapse.
If you’re at all interested in genuinely creative content, do yourself a favor and check them out.
thier the OG youtubers that adapted to the times, most other ytubers fade into irrelevance after a while, often times with the worst possible pivot like being maga, or zionist.
You remember Highlander 2?
Yeah, me neither.
Editing to add: Eragon. The only, one singular, thing that film got right was the opening scene. The rest of the film was an epic, blot-out-the-sun middle finger to the book and the fans.
And Highlander 2 isn’t even the worst Highlander movie. Hell, I’d argue that on a ranking list of all Highlander movies and shows it would be right in the middle.
To be clear, I’m not saying Highlander 2 isn’t bad. I’m just saying that the franchise has somehow managed to produce things that are far worse. There’s a reason that basically every entry in the series is a reboot of one kind or another.
Highlander 2 was so bad you can’t even find it anymore. All you can find is the Renegade cut, which is also very bad.
What on Earth is everyone talking about? There’s only one Highlander movie.
My biggest gripe with Eragon… It’s Dragon, with the first letter switched out.
To the very next letter, no less.
Could have had Bragon and Cragon as prequel’s and Fragon and Gragon as sequels
… goddammit, it’s been 20 years and I never caught that.
I read the series as a child so I didn’t know any better, but Inheritance came out when I was in high school and it made me realize Paolini really isn’t a great author. It was the sword forging, where he basically copy-pasted a step by step of how to make a katana that took MANY PAGES and I realized I really didn’t give a shit.
That’s hardly the worst Highlander movie, at least it had Michael Ironside. The Source was garbage.
To be fair, the book was a middle finger to the book and fans.
ROTJ was the first movie I recall having seen in a theatre; I loved it, and I still have a very soft spot for it. I can slough off criticisms of Ewoks without completely disagreeing that they were the beginning of the end and a backslide from ESB. I think I’m on the other side of the same cohort as Simon Pegg. He would have been 7 when ANH (aka just Star Wars) came out, and would only have been 13 when ROTJ came out. Unless you got into your teen ennui and “cooler than thou” mindset a bit early, 13 is still young enough to take it in with no judgment. Add another 16 years of livin’, and George pushing things even a bit farther, and yeah, JarJar is not getting the same leeway.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I love the Ewoks myself. Never really had a problem with them :-)
