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Zeroisanumber
Oct 23, 2010

Nap Ghost

Some Guy TT posted:

final report on stranger things season two yeah that went downhill fast less a matter of the show being bad so much as it just being weirdly anticlimactic with everyone converging on a final boss fight that had gently caress all to do with anyones story arc up until that point

Season 3 is better, if for no other reason than it goes completely gonzo.

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Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

Zeroisanumber posted:

Season 3 is better, if for no other reason than it goes completely gonzo.

Yeah stuff is actually happening in Season 3.

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747
The new Joe Abercrombie book whips rear end and hates capital

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

Ad Astra looks like another generic "A-list celebrity in space" movie like Gravity or The Martian

Giga Gaia posted:

all seemingly to promote his version of the something awful front page
i deeply appreciate that Culkin has no interest in going back into anything related to show business and just wants to gently caress around doing incredibly weird vanity things, like this and that Velvet Underground pizza-themed cover band. he's out there living his best life

Echo Chamber posted:

While there's nothing particularly new or mind-blowing in Renegade Cut's new SNL video, I think it's a fairly comprehensive SNL takedown for the Trump era.
it's worth mentioning that SNL during the George W Bush era was the least political the show has ever been, although The Daily Show (and later The Colbert Report) scratched that political humor itch for audiences. then Tina Fey did the Sarah Palin impression and there was no turning back

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

BENGHAZI 2 posted:

The new Joe Abercrombie book whips rear end and hates capital


On the blood-soaked borders of Angland, Leo dan Brock struggles to win fame on the battlefield, and defeat the marauding armies of Stour Nightfall. He hopes for help from the crown. But King Jezal's son, the feckless Prince Orso, is a man who specializes in disappointments.

Serf
May 5, 2011


ad astra is a clear case where the studio looked at a rough cut of the film was realized it wasn't what they paid for, but decided to just sell it as an action-adventure movie and ignore the fact that its not that

it has my favorite line and delivery of 2019 movies so far

roy spends the whole movie slowly coming to terms with the understanding that his father was not a hero but was in fact an obsessive rear end in a top hat who most likely killed a bunch of people to satisfy his deranged dream of discovering sapient life outside the solar system. and when he finally gets to his ship near the rings of neptune he comes face to face with his father who he hasn't seen in almost 30 years amid the floating corpses of the people he killed. they have a short bit of tense conversation and seemingly without prompting his father says "i never cared about you, or your mother or your small ideas." and roy sheds a single tear but its cathartic for him to know that his dad was a big piece of poo poo all along and he shouldn't worry about him anymore. it was a great moment, and made the rest of the movie worth it

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

On the blood-soaked borders of Angland, Leo dan Brock struggles to win fame on the battlefield, and defeat the marauding armies of Stour Nightfall. He hopes for help from the crown. But King Jezal's son, the feckless Prince Orso, is a man who specializes in disappointments.

the jacket copy is fuckin terrible at selling what this book is really about, which is two failsons struggling to live up to the legacies of their fathers and the poor rising up against capital*

theres a three chapter stretch that is just rotating POVs of different people in this city where the workers are dragging the rich out of their homes and hanging them and its fuckin rad

he even manages to go "killing the rich is fun but wont actually solve anything long term" and also humanizes the rich just enough to make them caricatures without being a both sides dickhead or making you think that their outrage, while maybe not directed in the best way, is anything less than justified

*capital is explicitly the ultimate enemy in these books as the character who puppets a lot of whats going on does so largely by means of owning the world's largest bank

also its mostly about the capital bit, the two failsons have been in like six chapters total and im halfway through the book

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

I'm sure it's cool but it's really funny to me how lazy English and American fantasy authors are when it comes to place names and proper nouns. Gee, I wonder what Angland is supposed to be. Doi.

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747
oh definitely but angland is very much supposed to be the british empire in every sense, along with its marginally more cleverly named neighbors

like its a horrible expansionist empire with a bullshit monarchy propped up by capital who semi-arbitrarily decided who it would be

im wwaiting for hiis next trilogy too be about thatcherr

Squizzle
Apr 24, 2008




angland is the first colony established by flatland

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

Squizzle posted:

angland is the first colony established by flatland

The weird troglodyte monstermen in the northern Scottish/viking country are called flatheads

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

Sounds like it's carrying on the venerable English tradition of being socialist but still racist.

Terror Sweat
Mar 15, 2009

It's cool how in the first trilogy bayaz was a corrupt evil wizard exerting power over others through magic, and now he's a banker doing the same thing but with capital. He even wears a suit instead of wizard robes now lmao

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

i tried getting through that Renegade Cut SNL video, but i had to stop watching. that rundown of Trump's appearance in 2015 was just painful to hear him go through in detail. it's insultingly bad (the whole SNL episode with Trump, not the video)

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

Terror Sweat posted:

It's cool how in the first trilogy bayaz was a corrupt evil wizard exerting power over others through magic, and now he's a banker doing the same thing but with capital. He even wears a suit instead of wizard robes now lmao

He was doing the bank thing in the first trilogy too

BENGHAZI 2
Oct 13, 2007

by Cyrano4747

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Sounds like it's carrying on the venerable English tradition of being socialist but still racist.

There's regular northeners those are explicitly the creation of an evil wizard

Angland is definitely super racist against the not Africans tho

Terror Sweat
Mar 15, 2009

BENGHAZI 2 posted:

He was doing the bank thing in the first trilogy too

He was but it was pretty much just starting, glotka had never even heard of them. It really expanded in the next books and by a little hatred he’s an institution

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:

hot take: kutcher and milas were the only good 'teenage' characters on that 70s show

Mila Kunis was an actual teenager when she started In that 70s show.

Echo Chamber
Oct 16, 2008

best username/post combo

get that OUT of my face posted:

it's worth mentioning that SNL during the George W Bush era was the least political the show has ever been, although The Daily Show (and later The Colbert Report) scratched that political humor itch for audiences. then Tina Fey did the Sarah Palin impression and there was no turning back
And Bush and Rove liked the SNL persona and called their political planning "strategery".

Also, here's my edgy opinion on Fey's Palin. It sucked. Not just in a "it softened Palin's image" kind of way. It just wasn't funny. I distinctly remembered every liberal hack back in 2008 deciding it was funny even before it premiered. It premiered alongside an appearance of Amy Phoeler's Hillary, so I think it had way more to do with liberals' parasocial relationship with Tina Fey as the standard bearer of White Feminism before a conversation (and backlash) about White Feminism really started rolling in liberal spaces.

Echo Chamber has issued a correction as of 06:36 on Oct 1, 2019

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

huh i didnt remember that amy poehler was hillary back in 2008 strictly speaking shes too young for the role too but its telling that even portraying hillary as a woman in her mid forties held too much risk of making her look unattractive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_BFfCpH8E

and as if to drive the point home both of them side by side and also next to tina fey to further call attention to it

lets also take a moment to appreciate how even snl could tell that bernie ratfucking was going on back in 2015 even though liberals are now trying to gaslight us into thinking we imagined it

Echo Chamber
Oct 16, 2008

best username/post combo
Another SNL 2008 story.

They did a skit that was essentially "the media is biased against Hillary" and because it was media criticism that didn't threaten anyone meaningful, CNN and MSNBC ran with the "Are we biased against Hillary" narrative for like a week or two after Clinton gave that skit a shoutout.

I watched less than two full SNL skits that year, but I feel like I have an encyclopedic knowledge of how SNL processed the election narrative that year because of osmosis.

SNL is forced on us, whether we watch the show or not.

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1178709599941251078

bob iger somehow becoming a hero of good corporate governance has got to be the weirdest talking point of the entertainment press the dude is literally just a rebranded eisner whose strategy for the most part has just been a more extreme version of all the poo poo eisner got canned for

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1178809864270864385

mandatory lesbian
Dec 18, 2012

Some Guy TT posted:

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1178709599941251078

bob iger somehow becoming a hero of good corporate governance has got to be the weirdest talking point of the entertainment press the dude is literally just a rebranded eisner whose strategy for the most part has just been a more extreme version of all the poo poo eisner got canned for

Disney already owns all media it would not surprise me at all if they break down the subtext and just start openly owning the government too

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

Echo Chamber posted:

And Bush and Rove liked the SNL persona and called their political planning "strategery".

Also, here's my edgy opinion on Fey's Palin. It sucked. Not just in a "it softened Palin's image" kind of way. It just wasn't funny. I distinctly remembered every liberal hack back in 2008 deciding it was funny even before it premiered. It premiered alongside an appearance of Amy Phoeler's Hillary, so I think it had way more to do with liberals' parasocial relationship with Tina Fey as the standard bearer of White Feminism before a conversation (and backlash) about White Feminism really started rolling in liberal spaces.
nah, i wouldn't call your opinion edgy at all. i was bewildered by the amount of traction it got on news at the time, it was just Fey acting dumb and not funny. and yet i'd take it over the negative comedic value of everything else on today's SNL

i read this interview she did with Reader's Digest at that time where she said it felt better to do comedy for laughter than applause. notwithstanding her own contribution to "clapter" (as Seth Meyers, of all people, called it) as the dominant form of mainstream liberal comedy today, people would do well to remember that

Echo Chamber
Oct 16, 2008

best username/post combo
sort of effort post, I guess?

I kind of think Tina Fey (and a lesser extent, Amy Poehler) is the last of a breed of Funny American White Feminist Women™ who benefited from political timing.

There were certainly plenty liberal WOC and leftists who criticized her at the height of her relevance, but they were still in the fringes of mainstream progressive discourse. And complaints were also drowned out by misogyny, obviously.

The early Obama years signaled the rise of acceptable critiques of liberalism from "inside the house", and we likewise seen Funny White Feminist Women getting questioned by liberal intersectionism.

Amy Schumer is seen as a way less "universal" figure than Tina Fey. And people definitely (and rightfully) dragged Lena Dunham when the Relevance Comedy Gatekeepers™ tried to make her the center of millennial feminism. And at this point Fey and Poehler were already pivoting to the "Elder Stateswoman" phase of their comedy careers, as criticisms of them became more accepted. (See Tina Fey's gross takedown of Kim Kardashian for example.)

The liberal WOC Funny Women that rose to prominence during the Obama years never had the ability to posture themselves as universally as Tina Fey did. They weren't white after all.

And then 2016 election also signaled the start of a wave of more defensive Funny White Feminist Women™ like Samantha Bee and Jen Kirkman, who are fully aware of the tensions from the left but can only manage them by doubling down on the Left-punching. Notice how neither are millennials. If any millennial White Feminist Woman comedians rise to prominence with a similar political orientation, they're going to awkwardly be outliers of their generation politically.

A perverted brand of intersectionism started being weaponized against the Left. The brief Golden Age of intersectionism being used to challenge the White Feminist monopoly was over. It's going to be a while before prominent cultural voices redeem intersectionism from neoliberalsm.

As an Asian American male in his early 30s who went through a great rift with American liberalism since the 2016 election, I'm living in a confused state when it comes to liberal WOC comedians. Their cultural signals are unambiguously liberal (and not left wing), so it's not like I'm fully on board; but they seem to be smart enough to not blatantly punch left. I have trouble constructing some way of understanding how I feel about Lilly Singh being a network late night talk show host; since I kind of grew up being really fascinated with Late Night talk shows but understood them being white dudes. I hate to idpol in a liberal way, but an Asian woman (who is also bi) hosting a late night talk show is unthinkable to my younger self... and despite intensely disliking liberalism now, I kind of feel invested in her not loving up as long as she doesn't Punch Left. But at the same time, I feel a sense of emptiness when I watch clips of the show. It's sort of a feeling of "This is it? Of course this is it. You're not a liberal anymore. NBC and GE should just be dismantled at this point. Also, your life sucks under late capitalism."

Echo Chamber has issued a correction as of 18:49 on Oct 1, 2019

Reverend Dr
Feb 9, 2005

Thanks Reverend

Echo Chamber posted:

Another SNL 2008 story.

They did a skit that was essentially "the media is biased against Hillary" and because it was media criticism that didn't threaten anyone meaningful, CNN and MSNBC ran with the "Are we biased against Hillary" narrative for like a week or two after Clinton gave that skit a shoutout.

I watched less than two full SNL skits that year, but I feel like I have an encyclopedic knowledge of how SNL processed the election narrative that year because of osmosis.

SNL is forced on us, whether we watch the show or not.

i'd guess that snl writers just follow dumbfucks on twitter and make skits out of bad takes

cuz if they aren't, then they are spending far more effort than they need to reach that [low] quality of entertainment

get that OUT of my face
Feb 10, 2007

i understand your skepticism. maybe millennial comedians think like we do, but they're willing to shut up in exchange for money. and i bet the funniest ones aren't taking the traditional route of seguing a standup career into an entertainment career, so you're not hearing about them unless you're going to where they are, which is increasingly podcasts

this is probably just my pessimism talking, but i feel like this liberal grip on mainstream comedy is not going away any time soon because it fills a niche among prominent libs in entertainment and politics. the same people who celebrated people like Jon Stewart and Dave Chappelle speaking truth to power 15 years ago have corrupted that view of comedy to reinforce their own beliefs. this wasn't even a Trump thing, i noticed it in 2014

basically, if sites like Vulture tell you that some special is "important," steer clear

KomradeX
Oct 29, 2011

So it looks like HBO is getting ready to do a TV version of the DMZ comic from the late Bush/ early Obama years. And while im interested because I did enjoy the comic, I'm not sure how much of it stands the test of time being extremely steeped in the culture of the 2000s.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


is there even a point to watching HBO's watchmen fan fiction after the boys on amazon turned out to be really good? because now i just want to watch more of the boys as filtered through eric kripke and i feel like the boys did such a decent job with "what if super heroes but evil" that the watchmen stuff is just going to be redundant.

coathat
May 21, 2007

First of all there was never a point in watching watchmen and second of all the boys was bad.

Taintrunner
Apr 10, 2017

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

coathat posted:

First of all there was never a point in watching watchmen and second of all the boys was bad.

the boys was fantastic

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

The show was pretty good even if it did have a bit too much residual Ennis but I cannot imagine a watchmen tv show being good at all

Serf
May 5, 2011


i'm definitely gonna watch the watchmen show. it'll probably be bad, in which case its great for content. and if somehow lindelof pulls it off and its good, that'll be fun too

Pener Kropoopkin
Jan 30, 2013

it’s pretty pitiful that most reviewers don’t even consider that stories are set in a certain time period to inform its historical context, and not just because they want to produce cool costumes and vintage cars.

KomradeX
Oct 29, 2011

It's something I've talked about a lot with people that you know is mostly seen in Batman, where the high crime of the 70s and 80s really informed, Batman, Daredevil, The Punisher, and well it doesn't ring true living in era with a near total collapse in the threat of street crime, not that you're local news would ever give you that impression. This was really blatant in Netflix's Daredevil where you have to assume that the events of The Avengers completely reversed the Gentrification of Hell's Kitchen. Hell you couldn't do The Dark Knight Returns unless it was a period piece because The Cold War looms in that story. But no one ever really wants to go in on that abs instead just focus on the spectacle

Taintrunner
Apr 10, 2017

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS


lol SPOILER!

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


StashAugustine posted:

The show was pretty good even if it did have a bit too much residual Ennis but I cannot imagine a watchmen tv show being good at all

OTOH they managed to take a source comic that would have been unwatchable in a 1:1 reproduction and managed to harvest enough of the themes and cool ideas without literally including cannibalism, necrophilia, etc.

the boys was ennis trying to out-ennis himself after preacher, and the fact that they were able to produce something watchable out of that is incredible

Probably Magic
Oct 9, 2012

Looking cute, feeling cute.
This is gonna be a dumb rant, but here goes: I've been struggling a bit with reading habits for awhile, well before Trump came into office, but the advent of Russiagate and seeing how the literary sphere and even literary spaces like bookstores completely cave to this alternate universe where Trump is a singularity has really depressed me and my ability to accept any author's authority. Watching writers I used to read use their blogs to say Hillary would never have launched missiles at Syria even as Hillary did the day before, or even just trying to read something like The Nix just puts me in this lovely mood where I feel like I'm interacting with a culture completely out of touch with reality. I even enjoyed an Asimov's story awhile back even though I cringed because it was obviously all about fearing those nasty Putin bots on the social media (through the frame of pretending they're aliens, of course), and it's so frustrating. There's good poo poo and good essays, of course, but it's difficult to enjoy fiction as a whole and I don't feel like just devoting myself to ideology and reading only China Mieville or whatever. There just seems like heavy gatekeeping of writers in general because they're generally college educated and generally been trained to shy away from outright hating the rich and I just feel like poo poo half the time when I peruse a literary journal. At least Kelly Link's "The White Cat's Divorce" was good in SF&F recently. But poo poo.

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vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011
realtalk i will always appreciate tina fey to some extent bc mean girls is a cultural treasure

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