DVD and TV Logging
Aug. 17th, 2020 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckAssassin's Creed - This movie was visually striking and better than I expected it to be. I had very low expectations, though, and I spent a lot of time wondering about the methodology of both sides. I was clear on the motivations; I just couldn't figure out why each faction approached the fight over the McGuffin in the particular way they did. Was the Apple indestructible? Was it like the One Ring and wanting to be found? Did the assassins have some other reason not to hide the damned thing better? My inclination would have been to enclose it in a cannonball sized chunk of lead and dump it in the deep Atlantic. Sure, it'd come back again eventually, but it would be on a geological time scale rather than human.
Beyond the Mask - This was, quite frankly, bad. I have no idea how it ended up on my list of library DVDs to try. John Rhys Davies chews scenery admirably as the villain of the story, but his plots and motivations were a bit muddled. The movie didn't deserve him. The hero is an assassin who wants to be worthy of the love of a young lady who believes he's a parson. Sadly, she's the villain's niece. The villain has been trying to murder the assassin (very inefficiently), his former employee, for reasons that I never quite understood (beyond the idea that the hero became more dangerous each time a murder attempt failed). At any rate, the entire circus goes from England to the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin shows up. It's dull.
Hamilton - Okay, so I cried. More than once. I expected to cry when Hamilton's son died, and I did, but I thought that would be it. I'm vastly amused by the idea that 'Jeffersonian' applied to politicians and ideologies is likely to be less of a ringing endorsement than it used to be. That is, this play is extremely effective at showing Jefferson as a terrible person. Whether or not that's entirely historically accurate isn't actually relevant for most people. I spent a lot of my watching time considering the costumes and the lighting and the blocking. I suppose that three decades isn't enough to remove my inner theater nerd.
iZombie season 1 DVD 2-3 - We're still enjoying this show. I expect we'll continue to progress slowly through it via Netflix DVD rental, though. We're bad at watching long series streaming, and getting a season set from the library is just overwhelming.
Jumanji: The Next Level - Like Welcome to the Jungle, I kept thinking what a blast this movie must be for the actors. I have very mixed feelings about the choice Danny Glover's character made at the end of the movie. I understand it, but I'd seriously have held out for opposable thumbs. Still, I had a lot of fun watching this movie and will likely buy it eventually.
Knives Out - First off, I wanted the detective to go off and die in a fire. I understand his purpose in the plot, but I don't think that the character worked particularly well. When he was on screen, I really, really wanted him gone. Apart from that, I quite liked the movie. The various reveals made narrative sense, and the acting was excellent. I liked the fact that the protagonist was fundamentally a decent human being.
The Lady Vanishes (2013) - I have very fond memories of the 1933 version of this but haven't rewatched it in quite some time. I suspect some aspects of it won't have aged well. This remake contrasts with my memories by emphasizing the psychological horror of the protagonist's situation. It's not just that people are telling her that she's hysterical, delirious, hallucinating; it's also the brutality of everyone letting her know that, if she doesn't accept their version of reality as truth, she'll be locked up with no hope of escaping. The supporting characters, the ones who disbelieve her or who lie for reasons of convenience (as opposed to with intention to make the missing lady of the title remain missing), aren't played for laughs as stock types. The espionage plot of the 1933 version (which never made any sense at all) disappears in this version in favor of Miss Froy being an inconvenient, alibi breaking witness who doesn't realize that she is any such thing. It's still not entirely clear why her kidnappers don't simply kill her, but it is much clearer why they would want people not to realize she'd been on the train.
The Last Kids on Earth (movie and season 1) - This is a Netflix cartoon based on a series of middle grade graphic novels. I enjoyed it but also really wanted to pick holes in the worldbuilding. The plot centers on four middle school students who are the last humans in a city overrun by zombies (the zombies are relatively easily avoided in all of the scenes when the kids are supposedly at risk. It all felt Scooby-Doo chase scene adjacent) and by massive monsters that don't belong on Earth. Certain scenes make it clear that other people fled or were evacuated, but there's no sign in any of this of outsiders coming in to investigate. The kids don't question that, and they don't go looking for other survivors. There's a certain amount of repetition in terms of the primary protagonist having to learn the same emotional lessons more than once (and in terms of the second protagonists learning similar lessons). The primary protagonist was, to me, the least interesting of the quartet of kids.
Many Lupin III movies
I kind of want to look at Commedia dell'Arte and figure out how the Lupin characters map onto established Commedia types. It would be cat waxing, though, and I doubt they're exactly one for one. They're just clearly in the style of being types rather than three dimensional characters.
Lupin III: Alcatraz Connection - This movie was new to me, but when I finished it, all I could say was, "That sure was a Lupin movie." There was a vast criminal conspiracy and a lost treasure and car chases and explosions and disguises. It was a perfectly good Lupin movie. It was just the eleventh Lupin movie I watched in a three week period. I think I need them spaced out rather more. Then again, they're excellent popcorn movies. None of the members of the main cast are likely to do anything surprising. There's no angst to speak of. Just general animated ridiculousness.
Lupin III: Bye Bye, Lady Liberty - I had not seen this one before. The movie came across as the writers having smashed together a couple of smaller stories, and I kept waiting for the kid to be revealed as a criminal mastermind which he doesn't actually seem to have been. I must have missed the part that made stealing the Statue of Liberty seem like a rewarding undertaking on the financial side, but it made for some fun scenes during the theft and, later, concealment.
Lupin III: Crisis in Tokyo - The plot involved something handwavy with DNA and crime, but most of the focus was on a photographer following Zenigata around. She was trying to find out what happened to her father, and she had some degree of precognition.
Lupin III: Dead or Alive - I started this one with a suspicion that I'd seen it before and was certain of it by the time I was a quarter of the way through. The deadly island confirmed it; the nanotech tentacle spears are memorable. This is one where Lupin and his team get to be relatively clever at enough different points that I didn't finish it wondering how they manage to feed themselves. At the end, when Fujiko was rhapsodizing about sleeping in a pile of gold sand, all I could think of was the very uncomfortable places that sand was going to end up.
Lupin III: Dragon of Doom - I need to remember that part of this movie takes place under water with Lupin coming near to drowning. It's not enough to set off my phobia, but it's also not something comfortable for me.
Lupin III: Episode 0: The First Contact - This is a story of how Lupin met Jigen and how the two of them met Goemon. How true it is depends on how much the viewer trusts the narrator. I suppose that it says something about the franchise that the bits I found most plausible as in-story truth were the bits that broke the laws of physics.
Lupin III: Island of Assassins - A criminal organization poisons its recruits with a toxin that's neutralized by something in the air of their island base. Those sent off-island have to complete their missions in order to be allowed to return (and thus avoid painful death).
Lupin III: Missed by a Dollar - The subtitles for this one differed considerably from the dialogue of the English dub. The dub lost humor and character moments in places. Clever insults and bits of persuasive deception got dropped in ways that warped the interactions between Lupin and the female antagonist into dullness. I'm not sure if I'd ever watched this one before. The McGuffin never made any sense to me (possibly my attention wandered at a point when it got explained properly), but a number of the scams along the way were fun.
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro - This was the first Lupin movie I ever saw, and I remembered it pretty clearly. For that reason, I put it near the end of my viewing this time around. Watching it again was kind of weird because I expect very different visuals from a Lupin movie and a very different sort of plot from Miyazaki visuals. I think that having watched this one first gave me much softer edges for the Lupin gang.
Lupin III: The Fuma Conspiracy - The box and the subtitles and the dubbed dialogue all call 'Lupin' 'Rupan,' but I wanted to list this with the other Lupin III movies. I'm quite certain that I had seen this one before, but I don't remember exactly when and couldn't recall the plot.
Lupin III: Voyage to Danger - The gang steals a nuclear submarine in this one. There's an arms dealing criminal organization, and there's a Russian nuclear scientist named, of all things, Karen.
Mrs. Bradley Murders complete series - I'm seriously torn about this show. The first episode was both well performed and deeply-- I hate to use the word problematic, but it was on several fronts. The show aired in 1998 and is set between the World Wars. The murderer was a young woman pretending to be unable to walk because her father only started giving her attention after her initial injury. The victim was a trans man or a crossdressing woman or otherwise genderqueer person who was murdered in the bath. The victim had been engaged to marry the murderer. Some genderqueer viewers may find the portrayal and the reactions of the other characters (and implied views of the creators) upsetting/triggering. The faked disability thing was pretty terrible, too. I can't really tell how the second and third stories are (I was distracted while watching). I suspect that there's a lot of 'normal for the time it was made' stuff, text and subtext, that would (I hope) be less likely to fly now. On the plus side, Diana Rigg plays the title character with great style; I was reminded of Essie Davis in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. This show is older, so possibly this performance inspired hers. This one clearly has a smaller budget for costumes, though, and Adela Bradley is much older than Phryne Fisher. The version I watched has captions, but they're different from the spoken dialogue in ways that changes emphasis and loses nuance.
Slavery and the Making of America - This PBS DVD contains a four episode documentary that is very much what the title says (with the caveat that 'America' means 'United States'). I found a lot of concrete details I didn't know in the first and second parts. All sections worked well in communicating the humanity of those enslaved and the mundane evil of those doing the enslaving. It's very clear how all of it was people behaving like normal people always did and still do-- Those with power holding it tight even while aware of the harm they're doing and while terrified of the justified retaliation that will come when that control slips. The real horror for me is that history is filled with things like this, not necessarily on the same scale, not necessarily as well documented, but no less cases of people choosing harm to other people because it gives them profit, luxury, power, etc. I'm not sure there's a way to alter that behavior without violence which really only shifts who's powerful enough to be evil. That's not a reason to stop trying, just that the odds don't favor Sisyphus in any particular case.
Strangers on a Train - This is an old Hitchcock movie. I hadn't seen it before, and I kind of wish I had. Because it was new to me, I noticed things that might not have been flaws if I'd seen it in the 1970s or the 1980s. The narrative went out of its way to remove audience sympathy for the protagonist's wife. I disliked the way that the antagonist's relationship with his mother was framed because it came across to me as drawing causal connections between his mental problems and his relationship with his mother. All of the scenes with the antagonist inserting himself into the protagonist's social circle worked well at ratcheting up the tension, though, and he came across as genuinely terrifying. I thought that that worked better than the final set piece with the merry-go-round spinning out of control and extremely fast.
3Below: Tales of Arcadia - I enjoyed this Netflix animated show more than I expected to. Nick Offerman's performance was excellent and memorable. The teen characters were engaging. The plots balanced silliness with a sense of risk. I was sure the teen characters would survive and, eventually, thrive, but I felt that the adult and AI characters were genuinely at risk. I was mostly able to follow the visuals; that glowing blue that these animators enjoy so much helps my eyes track details.
White Collar season 3 - I was startled by the end of this season, not so much be the events as by how short the season was. I could tell that the arc was drawing to a close, but I was quite certain there was still another DVD in season 3. I can see why fans were so set on the OT3 of El, Neal, and Peter at this point in the series. I don't think the show was heading there, but I can see why the threesome seemed feasible. I still like the mix of humor and action quite a lot.
The Witcher season 1 episode 1-2 - I found this too grim and violent for my enjoyment. I didn't get the impression that anything good ever happened to anyone in this world, not even small moments of joy unless they're going to be betrayed later. I think this is part of what puts me off of a lot of shows. I find it dreary in the short term and enraging in the long. That makes it hard for me to see the qualities in a show or book that other viewers or readers find compelling.
Beyond the Mask - This was, quite frankly, bad. I have no idea how it ended up on my list of library DVDs to try. John Rhys Davies chews scenery admirably as the villain of the story, but his plots and motivations were a bit muddled. The movie didn't deserve him. The hero is an assassin who wants to be worthy of the love of a young lady who believes he's a parson. Sadly, she's the villain's niece. The villain has been trying to murder the assassin (very inefficiently), his former employee, for reasons that I never quite understood (beyond the idea that the hero became more dangerous each time a murder attempt failed). At any rate, the entire circus goes from England to the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin shows up. It's dull.
Hamilton - Okay, so I cried. More than once. I expected to cry when Hamilton's son died, and I did, but I thought that would be it. I'm vastly amused by the idea that 'Jeffersonian' applied to politicians and ideologies is likely to be less of a ringing endorsement than it used to be. That is, this play is extremely effective at showing Jefferson as a terrible person. Whether or not that's entirely historically accurate isn't actually relevant for most people. I spent a lot of my watching time considering the costumes and the lighting and the blocking. I suppose that three decades isn't enough to remove my inner theater nerd.
iZombie season 1 DVD 2-3 - We're still enjoying this show. I expect we'll continue to progress slowly through it via Netflix DVD rental, though. We're bad at watching long series streaming, and getting a season set from the library is just overwhelming.
Jumanji: The Next Level - Like Welcome to the Jungle, I kept thinking what a blast this movie must be for the actors. I have very mixed feelings about the choice Danny Glover's character made at the end of the movie. I understand it, but I'd seriously have held out for opposable thumbs. Still, I had a lot of fun watching this movie and will likely buy it eventually.
Knives Out - First off, I wanted the detective to go off and die in a fire. I understand his purpose in the plot, but I don't think that the character worked particularly well. When he was on screen, I really, really wanted him gone. Apart from that, I quite liked the movie. The various reveals made narrative sense, and the acting was excellent. I liked the fact that the protagonist was fundamentally a decent human being.
The Lady Vanishes (2013) - I have very fond memories of the 1933 version of this but haven't rewatched it in quite some time. I suspect some aspects of it won't have aged well. This remake contrasts with my memories by emphasizing the psychological horror of the protagonist's situation. It's not just that people are telling her that she's hysterical, delirious, hallucinating; it's also the brutality of everyone letting her know that, if she doesn't accept their version of reality as truth, she'll be locked up with no hope of escaping. The supporting characters, the ones who disbelieve her or who lie for reasons of convenience (as opposed to with intention to make the missing lady of the title remain missing), aren't played for laughs as stock types. The espionage plot of the 1933 version (which never made any sense at all) disappears in this version in favor of Miss Froy being an inconvenient, alibi breaking witness who doesn't realize that she is any such thing. It's still not entirely clear why her kidnappers don't simply kill her, but it is much clearer why they would want people not to realize she'd been on the train.
The Last Kids on Earth (movie and season 1) - This is a Netflix cartoon based on a series of middle grade graphic novels. I enjoyed it but also really wanted to pick holes in the worldbuilding. The plot centers on four middle school students who are the last humans in a city overrun by zombies (the zombies are relatively easily avoided in all of the scenes when the kids are supposedly at risk. It all felt Scooby-Doo chase scene adjacent) and by massive monsters that don't belong on Earth. Certain scenes make it clear that other people fled or were evacuated, but there's no sign in any of this of outsiders coming in to investigate. The kids don't question that, and they don't go looking for other survivors. There's a certain amount of repetition in terms of the primary protagonist having to learn the same emotional lessons more than once (and in terms of the second protagonists learning similar lessons). The primary protagonist was, to me, the least interesting of the quartet of kids.
Many Lupin III movies
I kind of want to look at Commedia dell'Arte and figure out how the Lupin characters map onto established Commedia types. It would be cat waxing, though, and I doubt they're exactly one for one. They're just clearly in the style of being types rather than three dimensional characters.
Lupin III: Alcatraz Connection - This movie was new to me, but when I finished it, all I could say was, "That sure was a Lupin movie." There was a vast criminal conspiracy and a lost treasure and car chases and explosions and disguises. It was a perfectly good Lupin movie. It was just the eleventh Lupin movie I watched in a three week period. I think I need them spaced out rather more. Then again, they're excellent popcorn movies. None of the members of the main cast are likely to do anything surprising. There's no angst to speak of. Just general animated ridiculousness.
Lupin III: Bye Bye, Lady Liberty - I had not seen this one before. The movie came across as the writers having smashed together a couple of smaller stories, and I kept waiting for the kid to be revealed as a criminal mastermind which he doesn't actually seem to have been. I must have missed the part that made stealing the Statue of Liberty seem like a rewarding undertaking on the financial side, but it made for some fun scenes during the theft and, later, concealment.
Lupin III: Crisis in Tokyo - The plot involved something handwavy with DNA and crime, but most of the focus was on a photographer following Zenigata around. She was trying to find out what happened to her father, and she had some degree of precognition.
Lupin III: Dead or Alive - I started this one with a suspicion that I'd seen it before and was certain of it by the time I was a quarter of the way through. The deadly island confirmed it; the nanotech tentacle spears are memorable. This is one where Lupin and his team get to be relatively clever at enough different points that I didn't finish it wondering how they manage to feed themselves. At the end, when Fujiko was rhapsodizing about sleeping in a pile of gold sand, all I could think of was the very uncomfortable places that sand was going to end up.
Lupin III: Dragon of Doom - I need to remember that part of this movie takes place under water with Lupin coming near to drowning. It's not enough to set off my phobia, but it's also not something comfortable for me.
Lupin III: Episode 0: The First Contact - This is a story of how Lupin met Jigen and how the two of them met Goemon. How true it is depends on how much the viewer trusts the narrator. I suppose that it says something about the franchise that the bits I found most plausible as in-story truth were the bits that broke the laws of physics.
Lupin III: Island of Assassins - A criminal organization poisons its recruits with a toxin that's neutralized by something in the air of their island base. Those sent off-island have to complete their missions in order to be allowed to return (and thus avoid painful death).
Lupin III: Missed by a Dollar - The subtitles for this one differed considerably from the dialogue of the English dub. The dub lost humor and character moments in places. Clever insults and bits of persuasive deception got dropped in ways that warped the interactions between Lupin and the female antagonist into dullness. I'm not sure if I'd ever watched this one before. The McGuffin never made any sense to me (possibly my attention wandered at a point when it got explained properly), but a number of the scams along the way were fun.
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro - This was the first Lupin movie I ever saw, and I remembered it pretty clearly. For that reason, I put it near the end of my viewing this time around. Watching it again was kind of weird because I expect very different visuals from a Lupin movie and a very different sort of plot from Miyazaki visuals. I think that having watched this one first gave me much softer edges for the Lupin gang.
Lupin III: The Fuma Conspiracy - The box and the subtitles and the dubbed dialogue all call 'Lupin' 'Rupan,' but I wanted to list this with the other Lupin III movies. I'm quite certain that I had seen this one before, but I don't remember exactly when and couldn't recall the plot.
Lupin III: Voyage to Danger - The gang steals a nuclear submarine in this one. There's an arms dealing criminal organization, and there's a Russian nuclear scientist named, of all things, Karen.
Mrs. Bradley Murders complete series - I'm seriously torn about this show. The first episode was both well performed and deeply-- I hate to use the word problematic, but it was on several fronts. The show aired in 1998 and is set between the World Wars. The murderer was a young woman pretending to be unable to walk because her father only started giving her attention after her initial injury. The victim was a trans man or a crossdressing woman or otherwise genderqueer person who was murdered in the bath. The victim had been engaged to marry the murderer. Some genderqueer viewers may find the portrayal and the reactions of the other characters (and implied views of the creators) upsetting/triggering. The faked disability thing was pretty terrible, too. I can't really tell how the second and third stories are (I was distracted while watching). I suspect that there's a lot of 'normal for the time it was made' stuff, text and subtext, that would (I hope) be less likely to fly now. On the plus side, Diana Rigg plays the title character with great style; I was reminded of Essie Davis in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. This show is older, so possibly this performance inspired hers. This one clearly has a smaller budget for costumes, though, and Adela Bradley is much older than Phryne Fisher. The version I watched has captions, but they're different from the spoken dialogue in ways that changes emphasis and loses nuance.
Slavery and the Making of America - This PBS DVD contains a four episode documentary that is very much what the title says (with the caveat that 'America' means 'United States'). I found a lot of concrete details I didn't know in the first and second parts. All sections worked well in communicating the humanity of those enslaved and the mundane evil of those doing the enslaving. It's very clear how all of it was people behaving like normal people always did and still do-- Those with power holding it tight even while aware of the harm they're doing and while terrified of the justified retaliation that will come when that control slips. The real horror for me is that history is filled with things like this, not necessarily on the same scale, not necessarily as well documented, but no less cases of people choosing harm to other people because it gives them profit, luxury, power, etc. I'm not sure there's a way to alter that behavior without violence which really only shifts who's powerful enough to be evil. That's not a reason to stop trying, just that the odds don't favor Sisyphus in any particular case.
Strangers on a Train - This is an old Hitchcock movie. I hadn't seen it before, and I kind of wish I had. Because it was new to me, I noticed things that might not have been flaws if I'd seen it in the 1970s or the 1980s. The narrative went out of its way to remove audience sympathy for the protagonist's wife. I disliked the way that the antagonist's relationship with his mother was framed because it came across to me as drawing causal connections between his mental problems and his relationship with his mother. All of the scenes with the antagonist inserting himself into the protagonist's social circle worked well at ratcheting up the tension, though, and he came across as genuinely terrifying. I thought that that worked better than the final set piece with the merry-go-round spinning out of control and extremely fast.
3Below: Tales of Arcadia - I enjoyed this Netflix animated show more than I expected to. Nick Offerman's performance was excellent and memorable. The teen characters were engaging. The plots balanced silliness with a sense of risk. I was sure the teen characters would survive and, eventually, thrive, but I felt that the adult and AI characters were genuinely at risk. I was mostly able to follow the visuals; that glowing blue that these animators enjoy so much helps my eyes track details.
White Collar season 3 - I was startled by the end of this season, not so much be the events as by how short the season was. I could tell that the arc was drawing to a close, but I was quite certain there was still another DVD in season 3. I can see why fans were so set on the OT3 of El, Neal, and Peter at this point in the series. I don't think the show was heading there, but I can see why the threesome seemed feasible. I still like the mix of humor and action quite a lot.
The Witcher season 1 episode 1-2 - I found this too grim and violent for my enjoyment. I didn't get the impression that anything good ever happened to anyone in this world, not even small moments of joy unless they're going to be betrayed later. I think this is part of what puts me off of a lot of shows. I find it dreary in the short term and enraging in the long. That makes it hard for me to see the qualities in a show or book that other viewers or readers find compelling.
