Category Archives: Movies
I’m starting to feel a bit repetitious with the several TV Tuesday posts lately, not to mention the monthly Friday Notes. It’s starting to feel a little obligatory. They both serve a useful purpose for me, which is why I write them, but sometimes I chaff under the regularity.
Perhaps what feels especially repetitious is ranting about so many modern TV shows and films. That gets as old for me as I’m sure it does for readers. But venting also serves a purpose according to some studies.
Consider that a forewarning, for this one too has a bit of ranting…
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6 Comments | tags: adaptations, Antimatter Blues, Claudia Black, Cowboys & Aliens, Deus (2022), Edward Ashton, Keanu Reeves, Mikey7, Replicas (2018), Rick and Morty, Sisu (2002), Solar Opposites, Star Trek, Upload (TV series) | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
This is a continuation of last week’s post. The list of shows I have is too long for one post, so this picks up where it left off (even so, that one ran long, and so may this one). As mentioned last time, I hadn’t written a TV Tuesday post in a while, so there’s a bit of a backlog.
Watching baseball takes up a lot of the TV viewing time during the summer, and I can only watch a few hours of TV in any given day (and not too many days in a row). Many of the shows in my watch lists are old shows that I nibble on for the memories.
The nostalgia is strong but often so is the cringe factor.
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5 Comments | tags: Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery, Futurama, Keanu Reeves, Rick and Morty, Solar Opposites, time travel, Upload (TV series) | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
It’s funny, sometimes, the twists and turns of life. When I first heard of The Three Body Problem (2006), a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, it didn’t grab my attention because I’m a little weary of “alien invasion” stories. But I’d read and enjoyed Ball Lightning (2004), so I watched Three Body, the Chinese adaptation of the first novel.
I posted last year about how much I liked it. So much so that I recently watched and posted about it again. And re-read the first novel (I read the trilogy last year). I even watched the first season of the Netflix adaptation.
To my eyes, it demonstrated everything that’s gone wrong with modern writing for TV and movies. The contrast between the Chinese adaptation and the Netflix one is stark and revealing.
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1 Comment | tags: 3 Body Problem, adaptations, Barbie, Liu Cixin, Netflix, three-body problem | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
Until now, I haven’t posted here all month, and I’m not sure I’ll post anything before the end of the year. My attention definitely is more towards Substack these days, and I increasingly ask myself why to bother with WordPress anymore?
For one, their technology continues to depress me. This week it’s because the notifications bell icon can’t clear the little dot that means messages pending. It’s on all the time, but there are no messages pending. Basically, at this point, I’m pretty disgusted and done with WP.
But first let’s have at least one more edition of Friday Notes.
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9 Comments | tags: Apple Corporation, art, Bentley, stats, Substack, The Jazz Avengers, WordPress | posted in Friday Notes, Movies
I’ve written many times here about my issues with TV and movie adaptations of existing stories. Short synopsis: I usually find them lacking. Especially the more recent attempts. Extra especially the live-action adaptations of animated stories. So many are just plain awful.
I don’t mean they fill me with awe, at least not the good kind. Sometimes I am a bit in awe that the people involved all thought it was a good thing. Emperor’s New Clothes, perhaps? No one wanted (or dared) to say anything?
Recently, I got to thinking about the worst adaptations I’ve seen…
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14 Comments | tags: adaptations, Agatha Christie, Cowboy Bebop, Preacher (TV series), Sandman, storytelling, The Andromeda Strain, Tony Hillerman | posted in Books, Movies, TV
I’m not posting about the 1997 sci-fi-ish action thriller John Woo movie with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage (which was titled Face/Off). As much as I like John Woo films, parts of that movie really bother me, so I have mixed feelings.
No, today’s post is about an obscure Vietnamese comedy-action series of movies (up to six now, as far as I can tell). It’s so obscure that Wikipedia has never heard of the films or the director. Even IMDb doesn’t have much detail on these.
Which is a shame, because they’re delightful fun, and of the three I’ve seen so far, they’ve gotten better each time. The third one was really touching and memorable.
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7 Comments | tags: A Chinese Odyssey, comedy, Ly Hai, Netflix, The Great Magician, Tony Leung, Vietnamese Movies | posted in Movies
Whatever you think about Tom Cruise the person, it’s hard to dispute that Tom Cruise the actor has turned out a lot of very worthwhile films. It’s hard to find many duds in his filmography but easy to spot noteworthy titles. Ever since Risky Business (1983) and Top Gun (1986), Tom Cruise has starred in movies so memorable that they became part of our cultural lingo.
More importantly for this Sci-Fi Saturday post, Tom Cruise has appeared in a perhaps surprising number of science fiction movies. Even more importantly, nearly all of them are good science fiction movies. Some of them are even really good.
Unfortunately, one of his rare duds is among them.
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10 Comments | tags: Edge of Tomorrow, Humphrey Bogart, Minority Report, science fiction, science fiction movies, SF, SF Movies, Tom Cruise | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
Last Saturday, thanks to Amazon Prime, I screened a theme-related science fiction double-feature: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) and Arrival (2016). Both are fairly recent films about aliens visiting the Earth on mysterious missions.
The former, of course, is a remake of the 1951 same-named classic — a film good enough to have stood the test of time. Which, for science fiction films, is saying something. The remake suffers in comparison (and because it’s a remake) but considered on its own is an okay SF movie.
Arrival is generally a better film, but I do have a few issues with it.
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15 Comments | tags: adaptations, Arrival (film), Denis Villeneuve, Keanu Reeves, remakes, science fiction, science fiction movies, SF Movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
Back in March I posted about the Japanese media franchise Lupin the Third. The main character is the grandson of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin from the stories by French author Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941). Last month, I posted about a Japanese live-action series that isn’t connected with the franchise and only implies the fictional French thief.
For TV Tuesday this month, I’m posting about the French standalone live-action series Lupin. Here the references are explicit. When he was young, the main character fell in love with the stories of Leblanc and based his own life (as a thief) on the fictional Arsène Lupin.
And, as usual lately, I’ll mention some movies I watched on television.
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4 Comments | tags: Donnie Yen, French TV shows, Ip Man, Lupin (TV series), Lupin the Third, Sammo Hung, thieves | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
This post’s title is a bit vague. Someone familiar with my interests might suppose it has something to do with the Well World series by Jack L. Chalker — I’ve posted about it before. I won’t draw out whatever suspense you might have — the well in question is humanity’s wellspring of stories.
The revisiting is our love of nostalgia in all the sequels, serials, remakes, reboots, adaptations, borrowings, homages, parodies, and pastiches. To name but some. And make no mistake, all stories have elements of other stories. Boil stories down enough and the reductions begin to look similar (the infamous seven plots).
But I find myself bemused by how obsessed we get about drinking from the same well over and over when there are so many other interesting wells.
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22 Comments | tags: adaptations, reboots, remakes, sequels, storytelling | posted in Books, Movies, TV
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