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TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Loki season 2
What a terrible and tragic waste of talent. This is one of those new types of shows that refuse to "sit down and tell the story", probably because there isn't any to tell. The screen is kept busy with timers and chase sequence and fighting and "new" crises, interspersed with unearned emotions and reaction shots.
Example: character A and B need to split up and do separate time urgent and dangerous tasks. There's a lot of screen "excitement": things explode, people are running, shouting, etc. Then character B stops running and slow walk reaction shot, deus ex, and his part mysterious becomes completed without explanation. Meanwhile character A has a 5 second countdown: 5, 4, 3 - pause - 3 , 2, 1, then many many seconds of nothing. He stands around for a very long reaction shot. Then another deus ex and he's saved as well.
I knew this is what it is going in and I'm not disappointed by the story, but I do lament the terrible waste of time that the folks who modelled or made props, costume and set designers, the CG manpower, and of Ke Huy Quan joining a sinking ship so late into the sunset of MCU.
I can only hope everyone involved was paid and treated well and go on to better things.
This is why I don't watch a lot of things anymore. The typical YouTube clip from folks I follow have more structure, coherency, and respect for viewers.
I could not agree with this more. I am (rather, was) a fairly avid MCU fan, keeping up with all their movies and TV shows. And I rage quit Loki about 2-3 episodes in. I honestly couldn't put my finger on it - it felt like the script was written by AI or the actors were all in isolated rooms acting on their own and not actually interacting with each other. It was absolute bizarre and I couldn't make heads or tails of the story or bring myself to care about it, honestly.
Really sad. I hope the MCU sees a renaissance - for example, I really enjoyed She-Hulk - but I don't hold out much hope, unfortunately.
My best friend and I pushed through, enjoying hearing each other's criticism throughout to make it to the end.
If you want the story to conclude in an okay fashion I can spoil it for you. And you can jump back in at the last episode without missing anything of importance at all.
I watched a bit of Disney's Wish, their supposed to be huge centennial princess movie that totally flopped, and I think both of these projects started filming after the writer managed to finish a first draft. Maybe there's tens of millions on the line and everything must be done "just in time", and there's no room or desire or money allowed for revision and writer room critique at all? Force a person to submit a skeleton outline with settings, then simultaneously have folks build a set and costumes and everything while the guy writes a first draft, then folks are hired and most things are shot and then the guy finishes writing the script or piece it all together while CG is added?
Oo, thanks for the summary! The movie you mentioned in the spoiler is one of my favorites of all time/to rewatch, a stark contrast in quality for sure :)
I watched the Pitch Meeting YouTube skit for Wish and was very glad I didn't bother with the whole thing. Same for the Pitch Meeting for Echo, that series also looked like a hot mess.
Disney putting out mediocre animated CGI films I'm mostly used to, MCU stings because they had a good run going with WandaVision and Loki S1 etc. Ah well, you live long enough to see yourself become the villain, I suppose.
Same, I was a day-1 best seat biggest screen kind of MCU fan. -..- "All good things" etc.
Before that, I was a Pixar fan.
Very glad smaller entities exist, and are publishing excellent films. A24 for example. If or when they go as well I'm sure our youth will come up with something else of quality. Name brands are just brands, but creativity and quality are a constant for our race (Hurrah!)
Haha, are we the same person? Yeah, Pixar's slow descent from grace was definitely one of the more disappointing ones for me, especially as someone who went to school for animation. I think Brave was my personal beginning of the end; I walked away from it thinking, "So the moral of the story is turn your mom into a bear and everything will be fine?..." Onward was also particularly frustrating to me as well: all the ingredients felt like they were there, but it turned out on the whole safe and predictable and very very forgettable.
I love your note of optimism and couldn't agree more! Works of art like The Lego Movie and Into the Spiderverse and even the latest animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will keep coming out (I hope!!) and stand out all the more in comparison to the dross.
Has anyone ever seen both of us together in the same room?
I gave up on going into arts for ADHD reasons and ended up in compsci, but I could have written that entire comment otherwise.
Have you watched an anime called Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! ? It's animation about animation, a love letter to the art.
There will always be "meh" commercialized products, but there will also be people quietly working away at a craft, and occasionally they clump together and create masterpieces.
I wish Spiderverse did not come with such a high human cost, though.
Ha, I think we are twins! I ended up not using my art degree at all and going into software engineering instead :)
I'll check out that anime, it sounds super cool! I hadn't heard about Spiderverse's problematic production, that's really unfortunate and sadly way too endemic in the entertainment and games industry (part of why I got out and switched to tech). Or if it's not that, then it's outsourcing animation to lesser paid animators in other countries (Korea, etc.). I know there's no ethical consumption under capitalism and so forth, but it's also why unionizing is so dang important :(