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.
I don’t think many people will care about this series but Phantasy Star Online 2. I absolutely loved the first ones on Dreamcast, GameCube, Blue Burst on PC. It was my first foray into mmorpgs and shaped my teenage years. I was so excited that they were making a sequel and, of course, Sega fucked it all up as they always do.
I hate the way they made it all animu bullshit aesthetics and weird concepts like fighting tanks in modern day Tokyo or dinosaurs in the past. And so many micro transactions and weird credits to buy. Why couldn’t they just keep expanding the story on Ragol?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“<Actress> isn’t my girlfriend.” - CinemaSins
Almost everything JJ Abrams has touched.
I would agree but with the caveat- everything jj Abrams has touched that he didn’t make originally
His original works are fine. Super 8 is up there with some of the better modern scifi movies, his work on lost is legendary. But then you have both star trek and star wars… what a failure to both.
Aw. I actually liked his Star Treks…pretty much in the same way I like remixes of my favorite songs, anyway.
Abrams made two amusing Star Trek fanfics.
I liked Lost for the most part, but he is way too fond of throwing out too many unresolved mystery boxes.
Bill Mahar has had prime television slots since 1993.
That ignorant asshole has been pretending to represent the “left” for 33 years while being a smug reactionary idiot.
he pretends to be “Aethiest” but he really isnt, since he subscribes to judiasm/zionism just not out loud as right now.
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?
i dont think he was ever left.
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.
The Sci-Fi channel canceling Farscape.
seems like it was coming to an end though? syfy(or whatever the channel its called) cancelling resident alien, with alan tudyk, the actor just can catch a break.
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.
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.
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
It’s strongly in the no go category of, “Don’t ruin by reexperiencing it.”
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 a few decades later. Wife 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 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.
I mean, I didn’t like the book either… and looking on goodreads we’re not alone. It doesn’t even have 4 stars.
LoL
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I thought it was pretty clear that Bob Dylan was God. Did I just read too much into it?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
How different and vastly inferior Ready: Player One the movie was compared to the book.
I’ve never been so confused and upset at a movie.
I have to disagree.
Ready Player One the movie is a dumb 5/10 flick I can throw on my second monitor while I get stoned and play video games while looking over and going “hehe” every now and then as I LOOK AT popular things doing stuff.
Ready Player One the book is an infuriating grind where each scene starts with Wil Wheaton (the audiobook narrator) listing off names of popular things for a few minutes before the incel-adjacent main character reveals that he actually spent months practicing the one specific popular thing he needed to succeed right now.
It did prompt me to try Joust when I came across it at a barcade though, and that was fun.
The movie completely skipped over 2112. Total disservice to the young people who could use these tools from the Ancient Race to fight back against Earthly authoritarian governments.
I didn’t think it was vastly inferior, but I had to split the two pieces of media in my mind. They’re fine individually, just not when compared to each other.
That’s saying something, since the book was pretty bad to begin with.
I love how long the hobbit movies were, all movies that are adaptations of books (not short stories) should be that long so they don’t have to leave out anything that the books contained, otherwise they all feel rushed
The Hobbit movies jammed a ton of things not from the books in to pad the run time on top of completely changing the tone of the story from a light hearted adventure where violence is glossed over into a lesser version of LotR.
One egregious example of this is the battle near the end of the book. My memory is a bit fuzzy, so please forgive if I slightly botch the details.
Bilbo has no reason to care about the fight. The audience has no reason to care. So Tolkien doesn’t write the fight, and just knocks Bilbo unconscious at the start. One of the movies devotes a significant amount of runtime to the battle, despite the fact that audiences still have no reason to care. But you gotta have the big setpiece, right?
The battle of the five armies is like Gandalf fighting the balrog, a huge and epic battle that was important to the story but not something that needed a lengthy description so both happen off screen. Bilbo, who was in way over his head in the Hobbit, gerting knocked out was the perfect way to handle it!
Yeah, they kept it in for audiences expecting a big battle like in LotR. It was such a boring slog, although we did get Beorn doing an arial assault off an eagle which was hilarious!
They jammed in a freaking elf and dwarf love interest angle somewhere in the movies.
In the entire Middle-Earth Legendarium, Elves and Dwarves were bitter rivals to eachother to the point where the idea of A elf and A dwarf would never work together in a conceivable fashion that constitutes a relationship to that extent. Legolas and Gimli I was okay with because they developed as functioning partners for the sake of the Fellowship when the call was heeded.
But what happened in the Hobbit, was once again a shining example as to how stupidly obsessed Hollywood is, with cramming romance into everything.
Agreed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why Amazon bought rights to the Lord of The Rings for their 5-season epic instead of something like Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which offers a much richer text and history.
I don’t remember the timeline, but perhaps they jumped on the bandwagon while LotR was still fresh in everyone’s mind, thinking they’d get rights to touch other Tolkien sources, and then were told “hell no” so had to use a few scraps and make it up as they went.
Nope. They paid a shitton of money for the appendices of Lord of the Rings, but nothing from the Simarilion. As far as canon goes, it’s fan fiction.
Some words from Tolkien about adaptations:
I haven’t forgiven the fact that the Star Wars sequel trilogy doesn’t include more of Anakin
I haven’t forgiven the fact that the star wars prequels included him!
Everything star wars since disney has touched it. Mostly making the books non cannon.
I hate watching Mexican telenovelas because they are not color graded yellow. Because there is no color grading and the cast is almost entirely white, I keep thinking everything is set in the United States. Super confusing.
I want to shoot a movie in like, Portland Maine, and then some characters decide to go to Mexico, and “Mexico” is just Portland, Oregon with a heavy sand colored filter over the lens.
Honestly, it gets real yellow outside in Texas. I imagine it must in Mexico too.
That’s from the wildfires because Texas, well, sucks at that.
The invention and continued allowance of advertising-supported media. It has done nothing but harm.
They changed the original ending of LOTR (books), but included the ghost warrior shit in no. 3. They simply could not be killed and just ran through the enemies with zero friction and killed them all. It was such a let down. It ruined the epic battle for me.
I have not read the books btw
I loved watching the hobbit in the cinema, but i was a kid and I don’t think I will ever sit down to watch it all again.
The first one felt okay to have as one long film, i.e natural, but it’s weird that it would end with the eagle rescue after Goblin town.
If i think about it off the top of my head, some scenes they stretched out in film 1 (“An Unexpected Journey”) were:
- The “prelude” scenes of E r e b o r, which were very beautiful and cinematic, but most movies would convey in one or two scenes.
- confrontations such as with the trolls and the goblins
- CGI sequences like Radagast leading the wargs away from the dwarves
I’ve not thought about it before but it really is a shame because as soon as a shorter version comes along, people will prioritise that film instead.
