Tag Archives: Keanu Reeves

TV Tuesday 12/9/25

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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TV Tuesday 10/14/25

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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Movies: Alien Visitors

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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John Wick

This weekend I had the immense pleasure of watching all three extant John Wick movies. Part of the pleasure was watching them over the course of only two evenings. While the first film, in multiple ways, stands alone, the latter two (and presumably chapter four coming out next year) tell a single story.

If you like gun fu action thrillers and somehow haven’t seen these, you’ve missed something rather special. The attention to detail, the tactical reality of the fight scenes, and a whole lot more, place these movies, especially the first, among the best of their kind.

They’re a wonderful contrast to what movies seem to have turned into.

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Remaking the Classics

The Day the Earth Stood StillIt started out as conversation about how Edge of Tomorrow is the best big screen SF movie to come along in a good long while. That led to a ranking of recent SF movies with very high marks going to Elysium and Ender’s Game. It also touched on that Tom Cruise has made four — no, five! — SF films, at least two of which are very good.

Of course that led to talk of actors and how Jodie Foster and Matt Damon seem (unlike, for example, poor Sandra Bullock) to have excellent taste in what scripts they accept. If either of those two — let alone both — is in a movie, it’s probably pretty decent. Talk of actors in SF films naturally lead to Keanu Reeves whose ancestry and acting style make him such a perfect choice in certain roles.

And that lead to what a damn shame it is they tried to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still.

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