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I feel like an opportunity was lost to complete the Saved by the Bell quadfecta by giving someone an episode of Good Morning, Miss Bliss. Anyway, here are some shows I like that you can use to give me my assignment: Pushing Daisies, X-Files, Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, Louie, Oz, Six Feet Under, Malcom in the Middle, Carnivale, Everybody Hates Chris. Deadpool posted:And for another fun game. Of the episodes below that I've assigned I've actually seen four of them. If you can name the correct four episodes I've seen I will assign you my personal favorite episode of television ever. You can do this even if you've already signed up. I'm going with Smallville, Teen Wolf, The Following, House of Lies.
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May 10, 2014 22:07
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:59 |
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Deadpool posted:Aye Doc: Lucky Louie Season 1 Episode 4 I have already seen all of Lucky Louie so I'll need to ask for another one.
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May 10, 2014 22:21
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Last Man Standing, season 2, episode 3: "HIGH EXPECTATIONS" So I watched this episode once to get a general feel for it, planning on a second viewing to capture the finer details. The first viewing killed off all fond memories I had of Tim Allen in Home Improvement, and made me realize that the show has no "fine" details. Every character, every scene, welcomes their blandness with the warmest touch. There are a few moments where it breaks free of that and manages to be funny, but every single moment that rises above is a one-liner, and it quickly tumbles back to that mediocrity afterwards. I didn't read Occupation's review, but I did see that he gave it a positive review, so I was surprisingly hopeful about it; in light of this, the episode title was rather fitting. Despite being the second season, the show starts off by clubbing me over the head with the stereotypes each character will be molded after for the episode: Tim Allen plays a hyperconservative dad, at odds with his eldest daughter who is excessively politically correct and very liberal. There's a new black family in town and the daughter stumbles over what to call them, winding up with "blaaa--frican-American;" Tim Allen complains about how he doesn't want to be friends with any neighbors; the daughter's car was egged, but oh no, so was the black family's! Racial tension is going to be the theme, but thankfully, the daughter gets pushed out after some bad Obama-based joke trading between her and daddy (surprisingly timely references, since this episode aired the week after the 2012 election) because the show at least respects itself enough to not do 22 minutes of family political feuding. Instead, focus shifts to the mother, whom I know best as "that lady from Becker." The mom was molded after the Sensitive Mediator that seems to exist in every sitcom - someone who is so desperate to not offend, not be in the way, not take a side, that she actually causes more problems than ever existed (note: no problems are actually solved). She comes up with a flimsy excuse to talk to the black neighbors, the Larabees, and in the entire conversation with the Larabee family, every sentence she says comes back to "well X and Y happened... but NOT BECAUSE YOU'RE BLACK!" without ever actually mentioning the race. The guest stars playing the Larabees actually did a great job here and gave me the first of few laughs, with this combo-stare towards Becker-lady:  It turns out that despite making the world's wirst first impression and coming off like a closet racist desperately trying to look above it, the Larabees accepted a dinner invitation! Tim Allen adheres to the sitcom standard of being a head of the household who loving Hates Neighbors. Dinner night itself starts off with a Michael Jackson joke (he had been dead for three years at the time), leading seamlessly into a brown bag + malt liquor joke... which is just the setup for when the Larabees show up with a brown paper bag shaped conspicuously like a 40. It turns out to be a candle and oh, the laughs are had. The Becker-lady is so eager to point out that equality exists in the world that she makes sure to correct that the two families have even-sized houses, and then tries to relate to the Larabees by providing a dictionary definition to the phrase "baby's daddy." Tim Allen calls the Larabee's child "lazy," the Larabee mother makes a joke about how their kid can't swim, and Becker-lady does everything she can to neutralize both of these statements to avoid the appearance of racism. It all comes together in perfect harmony when the Larabee father makes the same joke that Tim Allen did in the intro: "I don't think the KKK does much work with eggs!" See, it's all happy in the world of Last Man Standing and the white folks are getting along with the black folks. The scene even ends on a friendly, but terribly uninteresting and lame trading of racial jokes between the two, featuring "white people shoot black dudes" and an actual usage of the term "crackers." It felt insulting throughout, but at least the show avoided the most obvious route of making Tim Allen the awkward, awful part of the dinner and instead assigning that role to Becker-lady. The secondary plot focuses on the other two children of the family - some girl who thinks she is the best at everything and is incredibly confident, and Eve, the most beloved child of the family. You'll notice that is the first time I have mentioned any of these characters' first names. It isn't because Eve was such a brilliant character that I identified with and clung to, but because they say "Eve" probably thirty times in a 22 minute episode. The confident daughter spends the entire episode fighting for her parents' attention while Eve gets it all, despite not wanting it. These conflicts are weaved in the idea of Eve quitting soccer, which her father is incredibly opposed to for reasons that never become too apparent. The sections dealing with these younger daughters are more interesting than the Larabee story, but I still don't think it rises to anything decent. Eve skips soccer practice to get wasted on Tequila, whines about how much it blows to have your dad be confident about your ability at something, while Confident Daughter silently bemoans the fact that nobody cares about her success in choir and in being super pretty and whatever else. Despite this big disparity, Confident Daughter still loves Eve and comes to her aid to try to keep their parents from finding out she was drinking. Predictably, since no character who does wrong in a sitcom has ever gone without learning a moral lesson at episode's end, Eve gets caught and the blame for her inebriation falls squarely on Confident Daughter's shoulders, leading to Tim Allen yelling at and chastizing her for taking her sister drinking. Worry not, even dad is not immune to The Great Sitcom Comeuppance, as he apologizes to Confident Daughter for blaming her. All is well in the family, and things are neatly wrapped up so that the same conflicts can begin anew in different manifestations in episode four and beyond. I started this review off wanting to get some images to display my thoughts, wanting to be descriptive and informative about everything I saw and thought. These hopes were killed by the second viewing, which did nothing but make the holes deeper and do its best to flatten out the few moments that went above ground-level. I think what really drained some of the positive thoughts out of this was how stiff and stilted some of the deliveries were. I don't expect much from Tim Allen, but he can't even deliver the line "did you bring me... a big, pretzel?" without throwing in two random pauses, or how the Becker-lady lets "Everyone in the world named Mike... except, for... you" slowly drool out of her mouth. The primary plus I will give the show is this - I came in expecting to hate Tim Allen's character the most, and I did not. They did not find a way to write the most nuanced, appealing ultra-man conservative ever; they just found a way to make Becker-lady loving unbearable. If you would be so kind as to give me another episode of a steaming pile to watch, that would be just swell Deadpool.
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May 10, 2014 23:59
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Zaggitz posted:I just finished my second episode and uh, I'm gonna have to a)give myself some time to reflect on it. and b)rewatch it once or twice because drat. Just drat. This is how I felt, too! The difference is, you watched one of the greatest episodes of TV ever made, and I watched, well... METAL HURLANT CHRONICLES Season 1, Episode 7 Loyal Khondor "In legend and in fact, it is known as Metal Hurlant."  I had seen the ads for this show with Kelly Brook's boob window and the sleak outfits and the bad CGI. I had a rough idea in mind of what this show would be and it came out and shattered it in every conceivable way. I think that reviewing this as a serious sci-fi show is doing a disservice to the creators, when it is clearly a self-aware masterpiece that happens to feature music by Jesper Kyd. Here is the official Syfy synopsis of this episode: A loyal warrior seeks an elixir to cure his Princess from the dreaded “cold disease.” Already off to a good start, with a fatal illness just named "cold disease." They even go out of their way to call it "The Cold Disease" so that the viewer knows that nobody working on this gave a drat. I knew from the first words spoken that this review could only be properly done with plenty of audio-visual aid; it seems like they pulled someone off of Newgrounds' forums to both write and narrate this introduction. Here is the narration & introduction theme to get you properly in the mood: http://tindeck.com/listen/lrbz First off, I had to turn on closed captions to understand all but two of the actors in this; John Rhys-Davies and some stuttery guy pulled off the streets who somehow has more screen time than John Rhys-Davies. It sounded like everyone was French, in the bad kind of way such as what you see in any of David Cage's video games. What makes the French accents so insane is that these people are ACTUALLY FRENCH but sound nothing like French people! Marc Duret plays the role of King Targot, a leader of some undiscussed, unseen, irrelevant but supposedly large group of people. The King seems to switch between a French accent and a generic English accent from line to line. The title character is Khondor, who is some kind of mash-up of Star Trek beings with Pumpkinhead with a Jamaican male with a hissing grass snake. This actor, Karl E. Landler, is actually French but his accent was perhaps not appropriate for space, so he decided to blend in a not-at-all subtle hiss to go along with a Jamaican twinge to everything. Considering 90% of his lines are meant to be spoken in a menacing tone, it leads to some incredible results. If anyone can decipher what he is saying in this clip, I will be shocked: http://tindeck.com/listen/zjji  Marem Hassler plays the freshly ill Princess Alaria, who is introduced to us and given at most ten seconds of screen time before The Cold Disease infests her body and starts to turn her to ice. I was confused at how a seemingly healthy woman (minus whatever is going on with her eyes) could become so ill so quickly, but if there is one thing the Metal Hurlant writers are good at, it is excruciatingly detailed exposition. We can see that she is pale and trembling, but for those of us without such great eyes, the King is sure to point out his pale, trembling daughter. Instead of discussing the Princess and her disease, the King gives a speech about how the Lagyirhs (??????) have won the planet, but not the galaxy. I suppose parental priorities are a bit different when you rule over a set of people spread out over a variety of spaceships, but drat, that's cold. "Only the food the l'acimar which grows on our planet is the cure." That is a direct quote, telling us about this planet we will never see, which grows this food we will never see. The Cold Disease kills in one month; the Princess bemoans that she has never fallen in love or had sex with a man, and she throws a desirous eye at Khondor as she says this. Sadly, Khondor will not find himself getting some of that sweet frost booty, as the King makes sure to tell us that "if she was to be lost, Allaria's death would provoke a mass suicide." How miserable is this population's lives that their princess is their sole reason for being? Khondor sets off on his journey, finding the one guy who does not or is not trying to speak in a French accent in this population, asking him about the man with the cure, Holgarth. For some reason, this random soldier made sure to take notes about Holgarth's plans and activities - just in case someone would ever need to track down someone who appears to be a nutjob alchemist. These notes lead to a man named Xero Throbe, who has a "passion for games" amongst other things. Considering that Khondor's suit and the background graphics of this game are ripped directly from Mass Effect 3, he is probably not the only one with such a passion. Am I insane or is this a fleet of Reapers??  Once landing on Xero Throbe's third-rate Mos Eisley Cantina, Khondor finds a loving Jawa. Then he beats up some guy and heads off into his one-room spaceship, that looks like Boba Fett's Slave I. "It's far too quiet," says Khondor, sitting in a small tin can in the middle of space. His spacecraft hurtles towards Holgarth's location, firing volley missile "level okko," which saves him from two laser emitting defense devices.  In contrast to the gray, brown, and black of the previous locations, Holgarth's planet is vibrantly green and has had its contrast setting raised quite significantly, allowing us to see how cheaply made Khondor's costume is. Happening upon a greenhouse, Khondor steps in to confront The Alchemist, played by John-Rhys Davies. This is the only scene in this entire episode where the acting grade rises above an F; Khondor is still so poorly acted that he brings the scene down to a D+, though. Also funny to note is that Davies apparently has enough clout to go "nah, French accents are dumb" and is allowed to just go with his regular Welsh voice. "How can you have been waiting for me, when we have never met?" The twist is revealed! The Alchemist wants to preserve Khondor's race, has wanted to find him, has been WAITING for him... on an isolated planet, with defense drones set up that shoot out lasers at incoming ships, deterring them from approaching. So Holgarth offers an immortality potion to Khondor, as his race is apparently amazing (I mean, poo poo, he beat up a bald guy and has some weird facial features; gotta be a unique race). At this point, my thought process is - why not take the potion and give it to the princess, and she lives? Just say sure Holgarth, I'll drink your silly potion, a-heh-heh-heh, like a Scooby Doo villain trying to hide his intentions. Instead, he threatens to kill Holgarth and then take the cure... without knowing what or where the cure is! If Khondor's species is worth saving, how dumb are the rest of the species in this galaxy? Despite the constant exposition present in every other scene, Holgarth revealing to Khondor the cure for The Cold Disease is done via an unheard whisper. At this moment I am thinking oh my, I wonder what it could be, I can't wait to be surprised! And then dummy Khondor says that "if I take this potion, then the princess will die." All of the suspense ripped away in a moment, as Khondor reveals he must give his life for the Princess to life.  Upon returning to the Princess and telling them of the cure, the Princess implores him not to do it and saying that she must die. Khondor's loyalty knows no end, however, as he informs her of the mass suicide of her people if she dies. He then slits his throat. A short death scene later, it cuts to the dead Khondor crumbled on the floor, with the Princess kneeling over him and drinking of his blood like a vampire. Just listen to the sound effect of the now-unfrozen Allaria, drinking of Khondor's life-giving fluids. http://tindeck.com/listen/bddw  "I save you... you save them." The final words uttered by Loyal Khondor. It is a line that belongs in the Iron Giant, except Vin Diesel would have made it sound compelling instead of like a toddler trying to relay a thought. Holy poo poo, Deadpool, this was a winner and then some. There is one final thought I have about this episode that I feel perfectly summarizes the intended tone, the actual tone, and the quality of entertainment that I got from watching this: Holgarth is built up as this incredible villain, this monster, with such great power. He is instead a gardener, happily maintaing a private green house on a planet full of beautiful flora and fauna. Bonus feature:  He is diagnosing Allaria with The Cold Disease. Using what seems to be a stapler that he is holding upside down.
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May 11, 2014 02:47
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