OT TV and Movies (Please use spoiler tags)

[ReasonablySober]

Watch on YouTube

Liked but didn't love the first season. Looking forward to this, though.

[emunney]

Watch on YouTube

Liked but didn't love the first season. Looking forward to this, though.

Looking forward to it, too. Have come to accept that I will watch pretty much anything if it's well-photographed. Not that this doesn't have more going for it. I never played the games but am aware of what happens early in the 2nd one and

Spoiler:

I'll be curious to see if they stretch it out so he's killed at the end of the season, if it happens early and the trailer is misdirection, or if they decide to change it entirely (gamers would go **** insane, and even as a hardcore adaptation apologist, I'd understand it). Also, historically, it's always been an un-survivable thing for a TV show to lose its clear star, which Pascal obviously is, to an extent far greater than Sean Bean was to GoT (in case people are waiting to throw out that example). I think it can be navigated, but history disagrees with me.

[ReasonablySober]

Watch on YouTube

Eh.

[MoreTrife]

Rebel Ridge was very good. I didn't know much about it and then the credits rolled and I saw Jeremy Saulnier wrote and directed it. He did Blue Ruin and Green Room. So yeah.... watch the hell out of Rebel Ridge.

And if you haven't seen Blue Ruin or Green Room watch those too.

Green Room, woof, battering ram of a movie. Quite brutal.

[HaroldinGMinor]

Rebel Ridge was very good. I didn't know much about it and then the credits rolled and I saw Jeremy Saulnier wrote and directed it. He did Blue Ruin and Green Room. So yeah.... watch the hell out of Rebel Ridge.

And if you haven't seen Blue Ruin or Green Room watch those too.

Green Room, woof, battering ram of a movie. Quite brutal.

Not for the faint of heart.

[ReasonablySober]

If any of you are into film production, you might like Director's Commentary with Mike Flanagan. He watches horror movies along with their directors in one episode then interviews them the next. I watched You're Next along with the pod last night. Kinda interesting, though I discovered I'm not overly into in shot framing and set design. I mostly spent the 90 minutes thinking I'd rather just watch the movie instead.

But some of you might enjoy it.

[RiotPunch]

As a hopeless Tolkien romantic, I've suffered through Rings of Power and am glad that I did.

Season 1 was a slog of insulting writing, bad acting and plot holes. Season 2 has been much better. There are still plenty of cringe moments and bad acting, but overall I am enjoying it.

Spoiler:

Charlie Vickers is a perfect Annatar/Sauron. Elrond and Durin are great. Galadriel can be annoying, but is mostly great. Young Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, I am nerding out hard and enjoying it. This last episode was pretty awesome.

[MickeyDavis]

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[emunney]

As a hopeless Tolkien romantic, I've suffered through Rings of Power and am glad that I did.

Season 1 was a slog of insulting writing, bad acting and plot holes. Season 2 has been much better. There are still plenty of cringe moments and bad acting, but overall I am enjoying it.

Spoiler:

Charlie Vickers is a perfect Annatar/Sauron. Elrond and Durin are great. Galadriel can be annoying, but is mostly great. Young Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, I am nerding out hard and enjoying it. This last episode was pretty awesome.

I'm reading Tolkein for the first time cover to cover with my 11 y.o. son. Here's my report card so far, 2/3 of the way through Fellowship after having read The Hobbit:

Story: B
Languid descriptions of geography: A+
Characters: A-
Creativity: A
Detail/"World depth": A+
Storytelling: D-

Comments: The point of view in these books (so far) is cruel to the reader. Completely missing the battle of the five armies at the end of the Hobbit because Bilbo gets conked on the head is indefensible. Having it recounted back after the fact, with all the danger and immediacy sucked out of it, is an insane choice. And that kind of thing happens again and again. Where's Gandalf been for the past 20 years? Could we have just been with Gandalf at some key moments? Don't be silly. But don't worry, Gandalf will let you know all at once while smoking a pipe in some anti-perilous setting.

Getting bogged down by extremely small and largely irrelevant details and explanations of minutiae and deep historical anecdotes is forgivable to me. That's a key part of the allure as I understand it, the impressiveness and care and attention paid. It's not really my bag, but I get it. It's seriously impressive even if I often groan while reading it. Missing important things contemporaneously and then having them summarized later is absolutely maddening and I do NOT get it.

[MickeyDavis]

Watch on YouTube

Liked but didn't love the first season. Looking forward to this, though.

Looking forward to it, too. Have come to accept that I will watch pretty much anything if it's well-photographed. Not that this doesn't have more going for it. I never played the games but am aware of what happens early in the 2nd one and

Spoiler:

I'll be curious to see if they stretch it out so he's killed at the end of the season, if it happens early and the trailer is misdirection, or if they decide to change it entirely (gamers would go **** insane, and even as a hardcore adaptation apologist, I'd understand it). Also, historically, it's always been an un-survivable thing for a TV show to lose its clear star, which Pascal obviously is, to an extent far greater than Sean Bean was to GoT (in case people are waiting to throw out that example). I think it can be navigated, but history disagrees with me.

I don't play video games and knew nothing about this but enjoyed season 1 a lot. Looking forward to S2.

[RiotPunch]

As a hopeless Tolkien romantic, I've suffered through Rings of Power and am glad that I did.

Season 1 was a slog of insulting writing, bad acting and plot holes. Season 2 has been much better. There are still plenty of cringe moments and bad acting, but overall I am enjoying it.

Spoiler:

Charlie Vickers is a perfect Annatar/Sauron. Elrond and Durin are great. Galadriel can be annoying, but is mostly great. Young Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, I am nerding out hard and enjoying it. This last episode was pretty awesome.

I'm reading Tolkein for the first time cover to cover with my 11 y.o. son. Here's my report card so far, 2/3 of the way through Fellowship after having read The Hobbit:

Story: B
Languid descriptions of geography: A+
Characters: A-
Creativity: A
Detail/"World depth": A+
Storytelling: D-

Comments: The point of view in these books (so far) is cruel to the reader. Completely missing the battle of the five armies at the end of the Hobbit because Bilbo gets conked on the head is indefensible. Having it recounted back after the fact, with all the danger and immediacy sucked out of it, is an insane choice. And that kind of thing happens again and again. Where's Gandalf been for the past 20 years? Could we have just been with Gandalf at some key moments? Don't be silly. But don't worry, Gandalf will let you know all at once while smoking a pipe in some anti-perilous setting.

Getting bogged down by extremely small and largely irrelevant details and explanations of minutiae and deep historical anecdotes is forgivable to me. That's a key part of the allure as I understand it, the impressiveness and care and attention paid. It's not really my bag, but I get it. It's seriously impressive even if I often groan while reading it. Missing important things contemporaneously and then having them summarized later is absolutely maddening and I do NOT get it.

These are all extremely valid criticisms. I was pretty forgiving as a 12-year-old reading The Hobbit for the first time, but it was one of Tolkien's most botched works. I agree, very frustrating storytelling, but the world-building drew me in hard. Fellowship gets better, Two Towers is IMO the best of The Trilogy and Return of the King is also quite good. It warms my heart that an 11-year-old boy in 2024 is taking this journey for the first time. My dad wouldn't be caught dead reading fantasy novels.

Far and away Tolkien's greatest work is The Silmarillion, IMO. The detailing of the universe he created and the storytelling are top-notch. The Fall of Gondolin is also wildly enjoyable if you take a liking to the lore he imagined.

EDIT: Also, it goes without saying, but Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of The Rings is an absolute masterpiece and 10/10 recommend. He takes several liberties, but he made the story better and more palatable.

[HaroldinGMinor]

Land of Bad was pretty good. It was a bit formulaic and had some cheesy and unnecessary slo mo shots but the action sequences generally were well done. If you want a sort of mindless action flick that takes you back to the 80s and 90s (albeit with far superior cinematography) this might be for you Also Russell Crowe is really fat.

[Licensed to Il]

As a hopeless Tolkien romantic, I've suffered through Rings of Power and am glad that I did.

Season 1 was a slog of insulting writing, bad acting and plot holes. Season 2 has been much better. There are still plenty of cringe moments and bad acting, but overall I am enjoying it.

Spoiler:

Charlie Vickers is a perfect Annatar/Sauron. Elrond and Durin are great. Galadriel can be annoying, but is mostly great. Young Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, I am nerding out hard and enjoying it. This last episode was pretty awesome.

I'm reading Tolkein for the first time cover to cover with my 11 y.o. son. Here's my report card so far, 2/3 of the way through Fellowship after having read The Hobbit:

Story: B
Languid descriptions of geography: A+
Characters: A-
Creativity: A
Detail/"World depth": A+
Storytelling: D-

Comments: The point of view in these books (so far) is cruel to the reader. Completely missing the battle of the five armies at the end of the Hobbit because Bilbo gets conked on the head is indefensible. Having it recounted back after the fact, with all the danger and immediacy sucked out of it, is an insane choice. And that kind of thing happens again and again. Where's Gandalf been for the past 20 years? Could we have just been with Gandalf at some key moments? Don't be silly. But don't worry, Gandalf will let you know all at once while smoking a pipe in some anti-perilous setting.

Getting bogged down by extremely small and largely irrelevant details and explanations of minutiae and deep historical anecdotes is forgivable to me. That's a key part of the allure as I understand it, the impressiveness and care and attention paid. It's not really my bag, but I get it. It's seriously impressive even if I often groan while reading it. Missing important things contemporaneously and then having them summarized later is absolutely maddening and I do NOT get it.

First off, very accurate summary of his writing. I don’t know Tolkien well enough to explain why he wrote the way he did, I can’t even defend it as a conscious choice. It worked for me as a reader, because it felt like how my brain would work if I was learning about the history of another realm “wait, why did this thing happen? Stop and give me details about that battle. Ok, now tell me more about the other thing you were previously describing.”

You made me laugh, because Tolkien’s writing style is particularly maddening when you read to a young child. “Wait, I thought they were in barrels escaping the bad elves. Why are you talking about what the bad elf king did ten thousand years earlier?”

[ReasonablySober]

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Borderlands is off the hook.

[ReasonablySober]

Read on Twitter

Read on Twitter

Lost some legends today.

[humanrefutation]

As a hopeless Tolkien romantic, I've suffered through Rings of Power and am glad that I did.

Season 1 was a slog of insulting writing, bad acting and plot holes. Season 2 has been much better. There are still plenty of cringe moments and bad acting, but overall I am enjoying it.

Spoiler:

Charlie Vickers is a perfect Annatar/Sauron. Elrond and Durin are great. Galadriel can be annoying, but is mostly great. Young Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, I am nerding out hard and enjoying it. This last episode was pretty awesome.

Glad I stuck with it, too. These last couple episodes, in particular, have been excellent.

Spoiler:

The seige of Eregion has been handled excellently, IMO. Gave me some Helms Deep vibes. The whole dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor has been really well done.

The story has gotten better the less we've seen from Numenor, Poppy/Nori, and Galadriel. Those storylines have been a bit of a slog. I'm also a bit bored with the Stranger plot because of how little has seemed to happen with him over the two season arc, but I'm hoping for a big pay off.

[Siefer]

I'm just finishing up season 2 of Industry, and it's both transcending a common HBO snag for me (watch horrible people do horrible things horribly), and also has maybe the scariest character I've seen in a while. Excited to start S3.

Spoiler:

Harper is an absolute whirlwind of destruction, and she strikes a particular chord with me due to her similarities to a few people I know at the high ends of competitive gaming. Volatile, charming, narcissistic, low empathy, and pathological liars.

[Matches Malone]

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[emunney]

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Borderlands is off the hook.

That's ok, Coppola is ahead of his time and made this film for people who won't be born for another 30 years. Just like he did with Dracula.

[FrieAaron]

Liked it, didn't love it, but "Megalopolis" is worth watching for anyone who enjoys wild swing-for-the-fences types of films. Reminded me of Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy," strange as that sounds.