Category Archives: Television / Movies

Dungeons & Dragons – The Series?

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There has been some recent (well, relatively recent but I’ve been slow to post) buzz around a television series based on Dungeons & Dragons.

In theory, this makes me happy. The issue is that being too excited to see something like this frequently leads to a big let down or massive disappointment. I’ve been burned in that department before (looking at you D&D movie from 2000). Sure, the latest film Honor Among Thieves did really well and was a lot of fun to watch. It had some great moments and an enjoyable story. There were big name actors involved who actually took on the story, rather than taking on the roll as a… diversion or escape from some other engagement they didn’t want to deal with. I liked it and I’ve watched it more than once. I went and bought a DVD (yes, hard copies personally owned are still a thing) to support the idea that they should make more.

So, why am I not more excited about this?

Fantasy is a very easy genre to do badly. It’s also super easy to mock when it all goes wrong. It’s also maddening when the ‘fantasy’ aspect is wrecked in order to shoe horn in some standard Hollyweird bullshit that some executive who’s never liked that “geeky stuff” anyway thinks it needs. “Where’s the lovers triangle and who’s playing the handsome but misunderstood hero”? Insert vomit noises here.

The good – D&D is now socially mainstream enough that shows and movies are not immediately shelved. There’s hope that this new TV show (streaming show likely) will actually show D&D related things. Real actors, quality effects and a decent story. One article I read (like here) also gives some “geek cred” to the creators behind the process.

The bad – It’s a series, so there’s likely less in the effects budget and that’s kind of a big deal when it comes to magic spells and mythical creatures. It’s being set in the Forgotten Realms, but nothing more specific than that. That’s kind of like saying I’m making a TV show about the police and it’s being set in America. Thanks. Way to narrow it down. There’s an absolute mountain of material there, but that’s where the trouble always begins. The mountain of material falls into the trap of trying to mention it all. We even saw a peek of that in the movie. How many little ‘nod to the fans’ things were spliced between the scenes that moved the story? Can we use any of the things they used in the movie if this show isn’t attached to it? IF we can’t, does that mean we’ll never see anything else from the Red Wizards of Thay?

The worrisome – It’s being set up on Netflix as of right now. I like them as a streaming service generally. They are, however, notorious for giving a show five to eight episodes, letting it start to generate some buzz, then just killing it altogether. That would just make me more mad if all of the stuff above was actually navigated successfully and I was actually a fan of a good show and they axed it.

It’s a lot of unanswered questions. I’ll keep watching for more, but my hope is… guarded.

Worthy Advertising

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I was listening to an opinion piece the other day that said Hollywood doesn’t know how to deal with cutting through the noise to get the attention of their audience. To a small degree, I can agree with that. People, generally, stay away from the big theater experience except for a handful of really big productions. Theater attendance struggles, and they’ve lost the purity of the pre-movie trailer.

I used to LOVE to watch trailers. I was always excited to see what was coming to the big screen.

Then, somehow, the story tellers of the movie world forgot how to make people excited about a story without giving everything away. Trailers became events and had ‘previews’ and then the internet had leaks and versions…

It has only become worse. Now, AI generated, fan based fakes are very difficult to spot. There’s no clear and easy way to track down what’s coming up. I might have missed it altogether if not for a site I track with a newsfeed aggregator hadn’t pointed it out. The original article caught my eye because there’s a movie listed that I *really* would like to see. Check out the article here.

Individual streaming services have started to find the key I think. The “trailer” was not for an individual film, as in the past but instead for a number of movies and shows that are slated to be released this year. I think this sort of trailer, with a host of individual clues will be the way to go in the future. I will probably watch this one again, just to try to pick up on the visual cues I missed the first time through. Then I’ll be sure to track down those shows or movies on their channel. I am also pumped to hear that “Old Guard 2” is on the list… now I just have to see what part of this trailer shows that to me.

Watch List – Digital Circus

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Animation has always been part of my media world. As far back as I can remember, there has always been some form of ‘cartoon’ that I was watching. They were classified or cataloged or somehow figured as a child’s demographic for a very long time. Then, somewhere along the way a bright person realized they’d never really been for kids, or at least not exclusively so and started to market things as ‘adult animation’.

There have been any number of shows I’ve become a big fan of that are stashed into that category.

Lately, it feels like the creators of animated shows have been abusing that demographic box. Putting in the kind of gore, violence or ludicrous situations that would never make the cut if there were actors that needed to create a physical display of those things.

Then there are things like Digital Circus.

The company behind this animated series says they create animated shows that are fun, colorful with occasional violence and existential breakdowns. What they should have included is a story with some kind of plot line to keep me interested.

Is Digital Circus colorful? Yes, absolutely. It is bright and filled with primary colors almost constantly. Is it fun? That’s debatable. I don’t think so really – and that’s all based on the ‘existential breakdowns’ part.

The main character in the 4 episode series I watched on Netflix is named Pomni. She’s a jester like person who is dropped into an insane place with other oddly compiled characters. None of them know what’s going on. None of them can explain why they’re there. Nobody has any sense of where things are going or why. Not even the person watching the show, and that’s a problem for me. There’s got to be something if you want me to stay interested. Do we know there’s a secret lurking? Is there something in common between all the oddball personalities roaming this circus tent? Anything?

Each of the four episodes had a loose storyline of what the characters did, but it wasn’t compelling. It took me a month to get through these short episodes because I kept nodding off. By the end I was starting to feel a little manic, like Gangle in the Food Masquerade (and that episode isn’t existential, it’s an indictment of the fast food business).

In all, I’m going to put the digital circus down as ‘the bad’ that will be used in comparison to other, better shows. There are better things to watch out there.

Side note: This site has information about the series. There are things they say there that make sense upon reading it, but were in absolutely no way clear by simply watching the show.

The Watch List

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For a while I was writing a monthly review of viewing suggestions and reviews of various science fiction media. I got away from writing that after a number of posts for a couple of reasons. First, writing on a schedule like that, while great for keeping the writing muscles strong was not allowing me to focus on my fiction. Second, the article series felt like it had run its course and Watch The Skies needed something different to keep things fresh.

Lastly, and I think most importantly to me, there was a need to keep things more positive than I was feeling at the time. It’s a much more challenging prospect to find something that’s actually good (in one’s own opinion) and then clearly lay out all the positive aspects of it. It’s important to work on positive things – tearing another person’s work down is easy – finding all the good things to say is the bigger challenge. This actually ties in to the reason I bring all of my genuinely negative reviews of books I read here. If I’m going to be negative about something I’m going to own it. I don’t want to be the troll that just tosses garbage out on whatever site I happen to be on at the time. I understand how difficult it is to create something and send it out to the world. I’ve had negative feedback and I don’t particularly like it, so I try not to be that kind of jerk to others.

Having said all that, here’s where I’m going. I’ve posted one recently (last week’s ‘not a secret’) and I plan to continue to post commentary on the things I’m watching – good, bad or indifferent. As I go forward, I’m just going to put all the thoughts out there. I know that has worked for me for other reviewers in the past… even when I disagreed. If they hated it, I would consider that a solid recommendation.

I hope that my ones of fans will appreciate the honest reviews and use those to fine tune the things on the watch list – even if it means watching the exact opposite of the things I recommend.

Not a Secret

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Let me tell you something that isn’t a secret: people like good stories.

Somehow, people that create entertainment media tend to forget that. Sometimes the reviewers do too. A couple of years ago I wrote up a post about what you should be watching. The show in question is called “Love, Death & Robots”. It burst onto the scene with stunning visuals and garnered a massive response. New, short animations with crazy good stories from a list of authors known for their stories. I watched them all, then I re-watched them all, then I spent some writing time reacting to them and telling others about it. There are fantastic stories and mind blowing art in there. I still recommend watching them.

Last month Amazon dropped a series called “Secret Level”. It seems to me that this series is a direct reaction to, or perhaps decedent of Love, Death and Robots. I watched them all, despite Amazon being the terrible corporation that it is (I despise that we paid for no commercials and then they basically said, yes but pay more of live with them). As I watched them I could clearly and easily see how this series followed (mimicked?) the other. Thing is, it felt hollow. There was something missing. OH, that’s right. Story. All the episodes were meant to showcase a video game and the star studded voice actor line up. The episodes did that with gusto. The artwork and animation were amazing… but honestly, I expect that from companies that literally create the computer renders for the games they’re using as the basis for the episodes. OF COURSE they’re going to look good. I’d actually bet the people behind the scenes were able to save some amount of work by getting already created computer models from the game companies and/or using the same model software to create the shots for the series. Genuinely screen capture worthy shots. Fantastic looking, mesmerizing color. Very shiny… and kind of boring. If you’re not completely invested in the video games already, there’s almost nothing there beyond that.

To be entirely fair, I haven’t played video games in a very long time. I started in 8-bit land and never really progressed much further. Perhaps there are gamers out there who think this series is the quintessential embodiment of their favorite intellectual property. I don’t know. I clearly don’t get it. Some of the voices were recognizable. Some of the shows moved faster than others, some had more pull than others, but they all felt incomplete. The story just lacked. One in particular – the one with Arnold as the main voice actor – was absolutely unwatchable. I shut that one off and skipped to the next one.

I was going back through the site I use to track websites I want to read but can’t keep up with every day and found two old posts about this show. One touted the A-list cast and moving imagery. The other was about the series getting green lit for a second season before the entire first season was finished airing. Both of those short articles said the very same thing. Great voice talent. Great video game franchises that you will recognize. Neither one said anything about story. Not a word about it.

Before anyone tries to say I’m just a video game hater, that is not true. I understand there is, in fact, a great deal of story built into these game franchises. Stories in these games have fascinating ideas and can have massive, ever changing worlds involved with them. It’s a constantly changing field that offers up an immersive form of entertainment for all sorts of folks. It’s also a massive industry. I understand why show runners would try to take a video game property and create a show or movie from that.

Not every show can be a hit. Not every story moves you on a deep and meaningful level. A show really does need a story! There’s no two ways about it, this secret level can remain locked in my opinion. If you want to make it better, get an actual story to fit into these short episodes.

All The Discs

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There’s a meme out there with a picture of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan saying, “why of course, it’s me…”

I know that’s a hash of a misquote, but you get the idea.

Found it~

Using a physical DVD to watch a film. Yep, I know that guy, because it’s me. I’ve been one of the red envelope people subscribed to the Netflix DVD service for the past 12 years. It was an easy choice for me. Advertising and unreliable connection speeds meant I could watch what I had on hand without any fear of it failing to work or having the feel of a film wrecked by mid scene advertising… almost all the time. Yes, physical media does have issues. Yes, from time to time there would be a problem, but for the most part it was a fantastic albeit slow system. In all those years I can only think of a handful of times when either the disc was broken or didn’t work, and only once in all that time when I got frustrated enough to just digitally rent a movie when the disc failed – and that was because it failed about 60% of the way through a really good movie.

Now that system is gone.

Yesterday, Netflix DVD made their last shipment. After 25 years (for them) they’re done, and I am feeling a bit nostalgic about the whole thing. The discs have been one of a very few constant things over the years. I was able to pull down a PDF file, created by the Netflix folks, that has my history all packaged up and presented in a report. I haven’t crunched numbers for averages or anything like that, but I have looked at the list of more than 250 rentals I’ve had over that time (quick math, 250/12 = about 20 discs a year or just under 2 per month). I looked at the stats they’ve stacked up for me and wandered down the list of discs we’ve watched, remembering the stories and characters from all those movies.

It’s going to be a minute for me to process the whole thing, but I will miss it. That probably sounds weird, but it has been part of my life for more than a decade. It became something that was just there when I needed it. Recently the streaming services available to us, combined with a more stable internet experience and less available time, in general, have made streaming services far more convenient and my rental rate has fallen off. Sometimes it would be weeks before I could put together the time to sit with a friend or a family member to watch whatever it was we ordered up. Sometimes the streaming service would add the movie before we got to the disc. I’d package up the disc and send it back, eagerly waiting for the next one to arrive. It was there, and it happened when I wanted it to. My viewing experience was not subject to some vague streaming contract a studio made, nor allowed to change based on some other, unknown reason.

The best example I can think of to illustrate that off hand is Monsters, Inc. and how it’s shown on Disney+. My daughter and I sat to re-watch it the other day because it had been a very long time since we watched it originally and we were in just the right mood. We pulled it up on Disney+ and let it roll. When we got to the end we wanted to see the extra bit at the end where the company is putting on the play Mike and Sully improvised during the movie… and it wasn’t there. It was just gone. I was a bit sad, but she was downright outraged. “How dare they? This is unacceptable and look it up on YouTube right now so we can watch it!”. I think that encapsulates the whole thing. The nutshell version – streaming decided to revise history a la 1984 and the modern viewer simply slid over to another streaming service and looked up the part they knew should be there (legality of it all be damned).

So the service is gone, but physical media still exist. I’ll still be watching those, and definitely picking up my favorites in physical form so I don’t need to depend on some company deciding if Ponyo should be available or not. Yes, it takes up space on the shelf. Yes, it’s an outdated method for watching things, but it’s mine and I’ll do with it as I please.

Apparently the folks at Netflix were feeling a bit nostalgic as well. They captured the whole feeling in a quick video… now available from a streaming service.

Unexpected Pairing

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I realized this morning when asked about how my Friday night went that there was an unexpected (possible) connection to the whole evening.

In the next town over there was a really fantastic Chinese restaurant. We ordered food from them for years and years. We would go and pick up food in person. We presumed the kids that were always at the restaurant, and eventually running the front counter interfacing with the public were the children of the owners. They had the best General Tso’s in the area and were frequently voted to the top of local ‘best of’ lists.

One day, they closed. Zero public explanation, just gone. A sign hanging on the door ~ “CLOSED”. A lot of people I know felt we were owed some kind of reason after years of dedication to the business. (We’re not, but you can’t tell people how to feel.)

Last night my wife and I went to the new diner that opened using the same building the Chinese place used for so many years. It’s new, so it was going to draw attention. A friend went and recommended the burgers. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but when we got there I was surprised at how… not busy it was. Friday evening at 6 a new place around here tends to have lines and waiting. We walked in and were seated immediately.

The place was clean and refreshed. The interior layout was slightly modified (not a lot of space for change really) and it was brighter than I recall it ever being.

The staff was new and it was clear there were one or two little things still being figured out. The food was… good, but not so amazing that I’m rushing to tell everyone I know. I will say, the onion rings were amazingly light and wonderful. I’m going to have to go back and try them with a burger. All in all, a solid “good” for going out to eat.

When we got home we sat down and dialed up the latest Pixar release streaming at home. The movie “Elemental“. As with so many films like this – anthropomorphic – it’s a land where the elements (air, water, earth and fire) all live in a city together. Without spoilers, at the core, this is a love story. The love story is set in / wrapped around an immigration story. An immigration story of a kid that may or may not actually want to take over the family business…

Once it clicked, it made me both content to not know the disposition of the former take-out restaurant and hopeful that the family involved got to a place equal to the happy ending of the movie.

You Should Be Watching – RETRO REVIEW

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This post was originally published in Watch The Skies June 2023 edition.

Andromeda Strain (1971)

I’ve been going back and re-watching some older science fiction films, or in some cases watching them for the first time. I had never seen The Andromeda Strain so I grabbed some popcorn and hit play.

There are a number of things I noticed while viewing this 50+ year old film.

There are aspects of the film style that place it squarely in the era of the late 60s / early 70s. Unavoidable things like changes in film making, the quality of the picture (at least compared to modern, high definition sets), special effects without CGI and updates to sound. There are minor turns of phrase that might raise eyebrows today. Some things the characters say or how they respond to things can be very different than a viewer of today would expect.

Beyond simple style or dated cultural issues there is technology. Some tech you simply can’t avoid seeing changes in. Cars, helicopters and planes are all mechanical items that we have contact with or at least passing familiarity with, so those are easy things to spot. Interestingly, the computer technology has made an unexpected change. In part, the attempts to be ‘futuristic’ have made of the tech in the movie actually look spot on to things we have today. Using a stylus on a computer screen in 1971 was so far in the future as to seem unreachable or at least something movie goers wouldn’t expect. These days we have a stylus for our personal tablets and phones that are so common we barely think twice about losing them. The computers themselves were a surprise to me. The ‘main frame’ driven tech is very old in the way the movie makers were likely thinking of it, but to those outside the computer industry it’s almost passable as an AI or super computer, so it would still fit the bill as ‘science fiction’.

Certain special effects make me wonder if the film makers actually killed lab rats and monkeys to get this movie made. Those scenes were definitely not for the squeamish. Any scene like that today would require disclaimers at the start of the film and would be ruthlessly scrutinized. I didn’t see the note at the end of the credits stating that no animals were harmed in the making of the film. Perhaps I missed it.

The version I watched had an interview with Michael Chriton. I was fascinated to hear about his drive and sense of humor (one of his pseudonyms meant dwarf when he was actually 6′-9” tall). The scope was broad for this movie but still had a tight run time. There’s a more modern (2008) remake that was broken into two 90 minute films, but I suspect it won’t land on my watch list. If there’s such a thing as a spoiler alert for a 50 year old movie, this film is a bit of a downer. The biological space thing escapes into the world at large. It is mutated and non-lethal, but it’s out there and there’s a secret science department in the government working constantly to stop it from mutating and killing people again. That part was a lot less entertaining after living through the pandemic and seeing how people reacted.

In the end, I’m glad I went back and checked out this classic. It’s good to have a sense of where things come from, knowing the roots of thing. If you’ve got the chance, you should watch this version of the film.

Check out the trailer HERE

You Should Be Watching

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Jung_E

This was originally published in Watch The Skies April 2023 edition.

In another dystopian future entry, the Korean film Jung_e presents some very real questions about what developing A.I. means and presents a picture of how that can effect the people most closely related to any project connected to that development.

The earth has warmed, the waters have risen. Humans have moved off the earth to various space platforms. Three of these platforms band together and declare war on the other platforms. In an attempt to create a winning edge, the allied forces take an elite soldier and attempt to clone her brain. This cloning is intended to create a soldier with all the skills, subtlety and loyalty of the original soldier in an easily replicated way. These clones will turn the tide and win the war for the allies. The experiments continue to run into an unknown obstacle, frustrating their attempts to complete this new A.I. soldier.

There are a number of pieces that are drawn into the film. I see a little bit of Robocop in there. I see a little bit of Ex Machina. There’s a touch of Ghost In The Shell. These are the things I see mixing and swirling around the story of the soldier and the doctor working on creating this new brand of soldier. It brings up a number of questions, but doesn’t necessarily answer them. This is a movie worth watching for the discussions it will give you after watching, along with a couple of very exciting action sequences. You should be watching Jung_E.


You should check out the trailer here:

You Should Be Watching

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Hot Skull

This was originally published in Watch The Skies March 2023 edition.

The main character

I didn’t go looking for this show, but then when I found it I was in. I don’t find shows about deadly plagues nearly as interesting these days, but this show managed to bring me in.

Hot Skull is a dystopian story involving a new, terrifying pandemic called ‘Jabber’. It’s called this because the first symptom is the victim speaking gibberish. This pandemic has caused panic and an authoritarian agency has taken control, herding people into various locked communities and using armed troops to enforce curfews and quarantines. The antagonist is a man named Murat who struggles against this agency, as he seems to be immune to the effects of the disease. Everyone wears noise canceling headphones and eye each other with suspicion while out in public.

The story is dark. The characters are very real. There aren’t Hollywood stereotypes at play here… this is a Turkish language series. Yes, subtitles but worth it. Looking at a pandemic from a non-American point of view is just one aspect of this show that makes it worth the effort.


You should check out the trailer here: