Lord of the Rings is always cited for this, far more movies have done the back-to-back filming thing and been awful disappointments.

I think they had good production value up and down, including things like fight choreography—there were some banger fights in Daredevil, especially. The real weakness was writing and/or trying stretch out season arcs into much more screen time than they required. There was subpar filler cluttering I think every single …

I never said her behaviour was inconsistent with her situation, my point is that she lacks the agency necessary to make her a compelling protagonist. She’s like a helpless ragdoll being dragged from place to place, and with only rare exceptions is clueless to what’s going on. Her map puzzle solving was a nice flash of…

When I say her being on the ship was part of a “plan”, I’m more specifically referring to the fact that Raych certainly wanted her on the ship, he gives her that dagger that we’re shown multiple times is working like a key, and he turns to camera to talk to her mid-execution. You’re probably right she was an improvised…

The direction of Avengers was superb. Maybe some credit goes to the Marvel machine, and in particular their pre-vis, but that movie did a dozen things well that no movie of its kind had pulled off previously, and which several subsequent movies failed miserably in their attempts to imitate.

I don’t find this show particularly enjoyable, but I eagerly watch every episode because of how much it fascinates me as a case study in what distinguishes good TV from bad TV. The show is a remarkable mix of things done exceptionally well (most noticeably, the special effects, set design and cinematography) with…

I agree with Dowd in the sense that she’s integrated into the story in a way that feels like an afterthought, she doesn’t contribute anything essential (she’s just an extra pair of fists/heels for the fight) and then she vanishes from the story like she was never there. Whereas usually Bond’s CIA counterpart (Felix in…

I found this retrospective on Brosnan’s Bond quite interesting to read.

That’s a pretty good comparison, I must admit. It’s my hindsight bias that all the actors are famous now, but a good number of them have elevated to A- or B-list exclusively because of Game of Thrones. Emelia Clarke’s and Kit Harrington’s resumes were quite scant, on par with the actress who plays Gaal, and those were…

I don’t know that there’s another example of a show where the impressiveness of the looks (cinematography, special effects, sets and costumes) was so out of proportion to the quality of everything else. The casting (post Jarred Harris death) is as cheap as it could be. The writing and storyline criss-crossing is…

The demand is not for the fury art, the demand is for making a quick buck on an investment. The fury art is incidental, just as the ability to “buy things” is incidental to most people buying cryptocurrency.

As I understand it, the concept of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity, and scarcity paired with demand = value. That’s how it can work as investment, if you can find someone else (stupider than you) who will pay more, you can turn a profit on the resale.

This says the auction bids are in Etherium, so at least this shitty imaginary property is only being sold for shitty imaginary money. As far as I’m concerned it’s a victimless crime.

Geez, they’re white as a sheet in these photos, you’d think they could at least add a cast member with a tan. I guess they are also replacing white cast members, so it’s not a net loss of colour, but it’s a missed opportunity to inject some much needed diversity into the cast.

Encouraged by the positive review score, here, I’ve watched the first two episodes over the weekend. I am very impressed by the production value (it looks gorgeous) but a bit frustrated with the weakness of the cast.

I think it’s just that they built a really cool pool set, and wanted to get their money’s worth. They seemingly didn’t build that many ship sets (which would make sense if this was the only episode on the ship), and it was a versatile space to film in.

My take is that I’d like to see Doctor Who put more energy into episodic storytelling, or to the extent its serialized have it be focused around the companions, and take a breather on the world building / mythology stuff that relates to The Doctor and the Time Lords. The ambition is welcome in theory, and it can have…

Disqus worked flawlessly, this is a very good example of “it ain’t broke”. I know they had their reasons for switching the central content management system to integrate with the full Gawker network, and there were some limitations of the old system that were resolved by going in-House. But that shouldn’t have…

Any time you try and keep a franchise alive by bringing in a new actor to play an existing character, there is a tremendous risk of alienating your fan base. I think it’s wrong to think of this as like a women’s equality / girl power thing, it’s a question of how you tap into the sentimentality and affection for an…

Very few people are attached to the book version of the character. The version of the character defined by the movies, and especially by Sean Connery, is the one that people have a pretty strong attachment to.