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DVD logging
Alice - This is the SyFy channel miniseries. Scott and I enjoyed it, but we both felt that it was lacking something. I rather think it would have been better if there'd been more world building for Wonderland and more development for the supporting characters. It would have had to run longer than three hours, but I'd have watched it. As it was, Wonderland seemed kind of mundane. There were brief flashes of something surreal and outside of the normal world, but they weren't common. I did like that the lead actress, while pretty, wasn't conventionally so. Her face has character.
Brave - Scott and Cordelia saw this in the theater, so neither of them were as eager as I to get this from Netflix (they did conclude that it wasn't quite good enough to buy immediately). I can tell that I'm an adult. I had a lot more sympathy for Merida's parents than I had for Merida. Not that I felt that it was a good thing Merida was being pressured to marry. It was just that I felt that she didn't think through her actions. I suppose that's realistic for a teenager. I did like the mother-daughter relationship quite a bit.
Doctor Who: The Seeds of Death - This is a second Doctor story. That means really bad monster costumes and special effects. The ice warriors look like they have a lot of trouble moving (and most likely seeing). That aside, the story was actually pretty good. The ice warriors were trying to take over the Earth, and the Doctor and his companions stopped them. I had trouble with a couple of the underlying concepts-- All of Earth, in this story, has become dependent on a transportation technology with a single point of failure. That is, everything has to go through the moonbase in order to get to anywhere else. Nobody uses any other type of transportation. There appears to be one expert who really understands the system. Other people say, repeatedly, that the project would be lost without her. I was interested to see the Doctor being quite ruthless in eliminating the ice warriors and their fleet. I've seen much made of the Doctor's hesitation to kill, but that's not obvious here.
Fate/Stay Night 1-24 - Scott and I have concluded that the hero of this series is decidedly too stupid to live. He didn't quite seem to grasp how serious what he was involved in was, that it was a matter of life and death. Because this was fiction, his decisions never actually got him killed. The Grail War intrigued me-- mages teamed with heroes of legend and fighting it out for the power to alter reality with a wish. I did want to see more of Archer. I have theories about who he was, but there are things that don't make sense. We started watching this series with a friend who owned it years ago (long enough ago that, when we managed to get it from Netflix, we started over), but Netflix was missing one of the DVDs for the longest time.
The Flash DVD 2-6 - I skipped one episode on the final DVD. Internal Affairs was getting involved, and I simply didn't want to watch that play out, not even knowing it would be resolved by episode's end. These were a pleasant enough diversion. I couldn't take any part of them seriously-- The villains tended to be so far over the top that I wanted to laugh at them. I enjoy superhero stories in general, but I can't say that this one was spectacular. It was competent. I did have to keep reminding myself of when it was made. All of the state of the art technology looked dreadfully primitive. I had to remind myself that I knew a time when that was cutting edge.
Once Upon a Time season 1 episodes 1-3 - I'm a little peeved-- After deciding that we shouldn't watch the first DVD to the end, Scott went on to watch all of season 1 streaming. I'm unlikely to do that. I never remember to do anything with Netflix streaming in spite of being interested in shows they've got. If I don't have the DVD hanging around, I don't watch it (and even with the DVD, I'm slow to get around to it). At any rate, the premise of this show seems like something that would make an interesting mini-series. Scott says the rest of the season was interesting. Maybe I'll put the rest of this in my personal queue. I need stuff in English for watching while I write.
Ushio and Tora 1-10 - Wikipedia informs me that there's one more episode of this but that it's never been released in the US. Wikipedia also says that the episodes I watched were two OAV series, one consisting of the first six episodes and the other made up of the remaining four. There's definitely a noticeable disconnect between the two series. The first series covers Ushio finding Tora and coming to terms with what Tora and the Beast Spear mean (Tora's a monster. The Beast Spear is for killing monsters). There's a monster every episode. The second series involves a gigantic sea monster for the first two episodes, and a homicidal yokai for the second two. I originally got interested in this series when I read some fanfic for it. I wonder if I could find those stories again and if they'd be richer for having seen the anime.
Wild, Wild West season 1 DVD 1-4 - I'm not sure why I'm continuing to watch this. The sexism and racism make me cringe, and there's no continuity from episode to episode. Still, the library has all of it, and there's no competition for it, so I can keep the DVDs for two, three weeks, as long as it takes me to finish watching them. I am amused by the fact that every episode finds an excuse to get the hero shirtless for a little while. The Science! makes me laugh a bit.
Zoom: Academy for Superheroes - In this movie, a washed up and now powerless superhero is called back into service to help train a new generation of heroes when the US government has reason to believe that a threat from a decade or so before is coming back. There wasn't anything unpredictable about this one, but that wasn't necessarily a drawback. I was amused, and I liked the characters. I didn't entirely understand what happened to the main character's old team. I'm not sure it was ever fully explained. I mean, it was mostly explained, just not completely.
Brave - Scott and Cordelia saw this in the theater, so neither of them were as eager as I to get this from Netflix (they did conclude that it wasn't quite good enough to buy immediately). I can tell that I'm an adult. I had a lot more sympathy for Merida's parents than I had for Merida. Not that I felt that it was a good thing Merida was being pressured to marry. It was just that I felt that she didn't think through her actions. I suppose that's realistic for a teenager. I did like the mother-daughter relationship quite a bit.
Doctor Who: The Seeds of Death - This is a second Doctor story. That means really bad monster costumes and special effects. The ice warriors look like they have a lot of trouble moving (and most likely seeing). That aside, the story was actually pretty good. The ice warriors were trying to take over the Earth, and the Doctor and his companions stopped them. I had trouble with a couple of the underlying concepts-- All of Earth, in this story, has become dependent on a transportation technology with a single point of failure. That is, everything has to go through the moonbase in order to get to anywhere else. Nobody uses any other type of transportation. There appears to be one expert who really understands the system. Other people say, repeatedly, that the project would be lost without her. I was interested to see the Doctor being quite ruthless in eliminating the ice warriors and their fleet. I've seen much made of the Doctor's hesitation to kill, but that's not obvious here.
Fate/Stay Night 1-24 - Scott and I have concluded that the hero of this series is decidedly too stupid to live. He didn't quite seem to grasp how serious what he was involved in was, that it was a matter of life and death. Because this was fiction, his decisions never actually got him killed. The Grail War intrigued me-- mages teamed with heroes of legend and fighting it out for the power to alter reality with a wish. I did want to see more of Archer. I have theories about who he was, but there are things that don't make sense. We started watching this series with a friend who owned it years ago (long enough ago that, when we managed to get it from Netflix, we started over), but Netflix was missing one of the DVDs for the longest time.
The Flash DVD 2-6 - I skipped one episode on the final DVD. Internal Affairs was getting involved, and I simply didn't want to watch that play out, not even knowing it would be resolved by episode's end. These were a pleasant enough diversion. I couldn't take any part of them seriously-- The villains tended to be so far over the top that I wanted to laugh at them. I enjoy superhero stories in general, but I can't say that this one was spectacular. It was competent. I did have to keep reminding myself of when it was made. All of the state of the art technology looked dreadfully primitive. I had to remind myself that I knew a time when that was cutting edge.
Once Upon a Time season 1 episodes 1-3 - I'm a little peeved-- After deciding that we shouldn't watch the first DVD to the end, Scott went on to watch all of season 1 streaming. I'm unlikely to do that. I never remember to do anything with Netflix streaming in spite of being interested in shows they've got. If I don't have the DVD hanging around, I don't watch it (and even with the DVD, I'm slow to get around to it). At any rate, the premise of this show seems like something that would make an interesting mini-series. Scott says the rest of the season was interesting. Maybe I'll put the rest of this in my personal queue. I need stuff in English for watching while I write.
Ushio and Tora 1-10 - Wikipedia informs me that there's one more episode of this but that it's never been released in the US. Wikipedia also says that the episodes I watched were two OAV series, one consisting of the first six episodes and the other made up of the remaining four. There's definitely a noticeable disconnect between the two series. The first series covers Ushio finding Tora and coming to terms with what Tora and the Beast Spear mean (Tora's a monster. The Beast Spear is for killing monsters). There's a monster every episode. The second series involves a gigantic sea monster for the first two episodes, and a homicidal yokai for the second two. I originally got interested in this series when I read some fanfic for it. I wonder if I could find those stories again and if they'd be richer for having seen the anime.
Wild, Wild West season 1 DVD 1-4 - I'm not sure why I'm continuing to watch this. The sexism and racism make me cringe, and there's no continuity from episode to episode. Still, the library has all of it, and there's no competition for it, so I can keep the DVDs for two, three weeks, as long as it takes me to finish watching them. I am amused by the fact that every episode finds an excuse to get the hero shirtless for a little while. The Science! makes me laugh a bit.
Zoom: Academy for Superheroes - In this movie, a washed up and now powerless superhero is called back into service to help train a new generation of heroes when the US government has reason to believe that a threat from a decade or so before is coming back. There wasn't anything unpredictable about this one, but that wasn't necessarily a drawback. I was amused, and I liked the characters. I didn't entirely understand what happened to the main character's old team. I'm not sure it was ever fully explained. I mean, it was mostly explained, just not completely.