On things I’ve watched lately

On April 7, 2016April 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

Let’s start with this bit of awesome:

You may recall that I wasn’t as enamored as I wanted to be with the first couple of FORCE AWAKENS trailers, worrying that it was going to hit the wrong tone and be too scary for my son– who, incidentally, I’m trying to watch FORCE AWAKENS with as I’m typing this.

This, on the other hand? This movie, which I would have told you yesterday was entirely unnecessary?

Super fucking psyched. I mean, there’s not a lot here– it’s a teaser, after all– but what’s in there is awesome. Maybe Forrest Whitaker is a little distracting, but he vanishes into roles so I’m sure it won’t be an issue in the movie. The two things I like the most? The music– we finally have a hint of what a post-John Williams STAR WARS might look like– and the fact that they apparently reached into the past to grab whoever is playing the younger Mon Mothma. But… yeah. Right now, I like everything about this.

Mild DAREDEVIL and WALKING DEAD spoilers in the next two parts. Nothing too huge.

I was not the world’s biggest fan of the first season of DAREDEVIL– roundly despising the portrayal of the season’s big villain will do that– but I was much, much happier with the second season. Jon Bernthal as the Punisher and Elodie Yung as Elektra were fantastic, the relationships between the three main characters (Matt, Foggy and Karen) made a lot more sense in Season 2 than in Season 1, and the show was just overall better than in the first season. I was hoping to get an entire season free of the Kingpin and didn’t, and he was no better in his brief appearance in Season 2 than in Season 1, but I have few if any other complaints other than occasional bouts of silliness here and there and there being way too many ninjas in New York. If you didn’t watch the first season, you’ll be fine without it (Kingpin was the bad guy. They got him. Done.) and if you liked the first season you really should have seen this already.

I think my feelings about the Season Six finale of THE WALKING DEAD can best be expressed with a panel from the comic:

Honestly, here’s the funny thing: I was really pissed about this when it happened, and now, a few days later, I just don’t care any longer. They can kill whoever the hell they want; it doesn’t really matter to me.

I suspect that’s not the emotional reaction the show was going for, honestly.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Spring Break Edition

On April 3, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Stories7 Comments

coffee2

If– if— we were having coffee, I would be ever so glad to be having coffee with you. So. Very. Glad. Because, presumably, having a weekend cup of coffee would mean that I was out in public and having a Conversation with an Adult, which is a thing that has been incredibly rare lately. Don’t get me wrong– I love my wife and my parents, but other than the three of them I think the last time I had a conversation with another grown-up who wasn’t some sort of employee at a place where I was buying something was last Saturday. If I restrict it to specifically social settings, I might have to go back to C2E2, which was, what, two weeks ago?

In other news, I’ve survived the first week of my son’s Spring Break, and there’s another week to go, and then a four-day period where my wife is in Boston for work stuff and I don’t even have her around. I’ve never been to Boston, and I’m insanely jealous. If I’m still remotely human come April 13, I want some sort of award. Also, I have jury duty on the 12th. So … yeah.

Anyway. Have you been watching Daredevil? I’ve liked the second season a hell of a lot more than the first, mostly because replacing the show’s terrible rendition of the Kingpin with Elektra and the Punisher has been an impressive upgrade. I won’t spoil anything just yet, but I am very much in the minority in that I think D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the Kingpin was/is awful, and the less of him around the better. We’ve watched through to the final episode, which we’ll watch tonight, and then I somehow have to spend the next 24 hours avoiding Walking Dead spoilers until we can watch the finale of that Monday night.

I’m showing signs of finally moving out of the Lexapro haze, too, which is good; I’m currently about six days ahead on the A to Z Challenge, and I hope to get much farther ahead today. It’s been about a month since I started taking it, which is supposedly about as long as you need to get used to the side effects. I’m very ready to be done with being unmotivated and exhausted all the time, so that’s all sorts of good news.

So, yeah. That’s me. How’re you?

REVIEW: DAREDEVIL, the series

On May 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television5 Comments

maxresdefault tl;dr version: More like Dare-MEH-vil, amirite???

My wife and I finished the last two episodes of the first season of Daredevil Friday night. It took, oh, two and a half, maybe three weeks from watching the first episode to get to the finale– which for us implies a fair amount of dedication, as no adult TV happens when the boy is awake and after that literally every single other thing we might wish to do with our lives competes with watching fictional white dudes punch each other on TV. So I can’t claim I roundly disliked the show or anything like that; I didn’t. But on the whole, having watched the whole season, I’m not super excited about watching more of this.

Let’s start with good stuff:

Casting, at least to a certain point. I don’t remember dude’s name and I’m in no mood to look things up, but I liked the dude they’ve got playing Daredevil, and the casting for Foggy Nelson and Karen worked for me too. Racebending Ben Urich was a good call, and Vincent D’Onofrio certainly looked the part of the Kingpin, but more on him later. I loved Rosario Dawson but we didn’t see enough of her. Madame Gao was also fantastic. In general the acting was effective.
Mood/Direction: Excellent, especially early on. Daredevil was a hard show to watch at times, and I mean that as a compliment; when the show wanted to fuck with your head, your head was gonna get fucked with, and the grit and grime of Hell’s Kitchen left me wanting a shower after a few of the episodes.
Fight scenes. At least early on; the hallway fight in the second or third episode was outstanding and the fight with Nobu later on was a standout as well. That said, all the flippy stuff got annoying after a bit and sometimes the fight scenes got a bit repetitive.
Stick. I loved Stick.
Matt and Foggy’s relationship. The highlight of the series to me, in a lot of ways.

All that said, I have some issues:

Kingpin. There’s lots of folks praising Vincent D’Onofrio’s take on the Kingpin to the high heavens; they didn’t watch the same show I watched. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t need Daredevil. It needed Zoloft. Supervillains shouldn’t be in need of antidepressants, and I expected this dude to end every single conversation with a sigh and the words “I’m sad.” There was also enough portentous speechifying to fill a Lord of the Rings film. I kept expecting to find out that Wilson’s middle name was actually Lenny, too.
Vanessa. Related to the Kingpin issues; Vanessa did not help. Their relationship made no Goddamn sense at all and just served to remind me repeatedly that this Wilson Fisk is a twelve-year-old in an oversized body, which could work with certain villains, but not with the Kingpin. And this show had Madame Gao in it! They didn’t even need to put Kingpin on screen in the first season. Make Gao the villain, keep Kingpin offscreen, and use Wesley, who was way more interesting, instead.
Karen. For the last two or three episodes, I kept yelling “You’ve known them for two weeks!” at the screen. No one could hear me. I know Karen’s a character from the comics and all and so she has to be there, but she’s totally passive-aggressively worming her way into both of the guys’ backstories by the end of the series, acting like they’ve all been friends for years and that their friendship as a group is The Most Important Thing Evar. No. You’ve known them for a month. You don’t get to pretend that you’re part of a we yet. Go ‘way. Also, I swear her hair was a different color in every scene, and for most of an episode it was green. Not actually a problem, but super distracting once I noticed it.

I dunno. If you’re interested in checking the show out and you haven’t yet, go ahead; it won’t kill you. But that’s about as excited as I can get about this show right now.

This post is mostly a test

On May 8, 2015May 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking14 Comments

I am conducting Blog Science! and in order to do so correctly it is essential that I post this at this godawfully early hour of the morning. Which actually means that I wrote it last night while watching Daredevil and trying to decide if I like the show or not, which is something you’d think I’d have figured out by the eleventh episode.