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agentnico · 3 years

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The Mandalorian - Season 2 (2020) Review

People are all going crazy wondering when the PS5 will finally come back to stock, and I’m here like “when are Hasbro releasing that Mando helmet?”. What, I’m no geek, I simply want to walk around in my helmet saying “this is the way” to random strangers, okay? Nothing weird or geeky about that. Nothing at all.

Plot: Bounty hunter is on a search through the galaxy to return The Child (who happens to have an uncanny resemblance to a certain Yoda, only it’s an adorable baby!!) to his kind - the Jedi.

Recently the father of my lovely never-gonna-stop-gushing-about-her girlfriend has allowed me to take advantage of his Disney+ account, so I immediately went and watched all of The Mandalorian series following such rave reviews from both critics and fans of the Star Wars franchise. Okay, that’s a lie, upon gaining access to Disney+ my immediate course of action was to binge through all of Phineas and Ferb because that show is amazing and Perry the Platypus is a badass and what, I’m allowed to like a kids show, its called nostalgia!! Anyway, following that, I did go and watch The Mandalorian...well, I did after also rewatching some Marvel films and checking out other things that Disney+ had to offer first and yes, okay, I didn’t immediately watch The Mandalorian, and when I finally did get to it I took my sweet butt-cheek time with it, but here we are, I finished it, so let’s talk about it now before I move onto WandaVision that’s coming out soon!

Easily put, The Mandalorian is the best thing to come out from the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired the rights to Lucasfilm. Yes, the new trilogy is divisive and many can argue that it’s both good and bad, but in reality let’s face it - Disney botched those films completely by not having a clear cut plan and as such making up things as they went along and the result is a mess with so many plot holes it actually makes Tenet make sense! Okay, not true, I still don’t get what in the heavens Tenet was about, look, Christopher Nolan is a cool guy and I’ll happily have a coffee with him on some random Saturday morning one day in the future at his villa overseeing his million dollar Warner Bros fortune as we discuss his antics on Interstellar and acting like I know just as much about science and astronomy as he does, but when it comes to Tenet, I have no clue what was going on! So I take it back, at least the new Star Wars trilogy makes more sense than Tenet, but is good? Not really. And The Rise of Skywalker is prime example of that, as it emphasised how disorganised the writing and ideas for these new films have been, by forcing in Palpatine for the sake of it and also Rey and Kylo having a very very VERY awkward smooch at the end of the movie, which I guess meant they became girlfriend and boyfriend momentarily before Kylo went and snuffed it. What a way to get out of a relationship! But I digress, my point is that the new trilogy overall is a mess, even though there are good parts to those films respectively.

With The Mandalorian Disney took a different approach, by stepping away from the main Skywalker plot-line, and simply making a show that happens to be set in the same universe as the films, but that tells its own self contained story, however still with enough fan service and cameos to make the show feel like it is Star Wars. The first season I enjoyed overall, though I did feel like it dragged a bit and there were a few episodes were you could tell were filler and the writers were wasting a bit of time to fill up the episode count for the season. Now in season 2, that’s where things really picked up!

Season 2 still suffers from a couple of episodes that are obvious filler, and in those episodes you sit slightly frustrated as you await the story to actually make any kind of sufficient progression, however for the most part season 2 is an absolute joy for any Star Wars fan to watch. Central to this of course is the performance of Pedro Pascal as the titular character himself, and taking into account you don’t see his face for the most part, though this season they did really try to accommodate Pascal by showing off his dashing handsome Prince Charming face a bit too often even though it went against what the Mandalorian code stood for. But nevertheless, for the most part you don’t see his face, and so it comes to both great directing and Pascal’s superb voice work to make the Mandalorian character show so much emotion without actually seeing the emotion. In this season we get to see him become even more of a father figure to Baby Yoda, and their relationship is at the heart of this show, so much so that I kept wanting to hear Cat Stevens at the end of each episode! To be honest, it is indeed the well written characters that make this show work. Giancarlo Esposito is really menacing as Moff Gideon whilst still sticking to his signature soft-spoken tone, however I do also wish they made his villain feel more powerful. It never really proves too major of a challenge to beat him, so I wish the writers allowed the character to have more power in a way to fit in with Esposito’s performance. Gina Carano (regardless of her controversial social media presence) works really well as the Rebel side-kick to Mando and as a character in the series is quite empowering for women. There are also special appearances from characters from other Star Wars shows/films that make surprising appearances in this season (that will lead into their own spin-offs naturally) and everyone is extremely well cast!

From a technical aspect the show looks great, and we need to talk about Ludwig Goransson’s music score! The show never really uses the original John Williams’ tunes, yet Goransson manages to make his soundtrack feel both really different yet still befit to the Star Wars lore, with the addition of a cowboy western tang to it. I’d also suggest looking up the behind-the-scenes featurette to how Goransson scored the show, as it’s really cool to see all the random equipment and instruments he used to create such unique sounds.

Also, I typically do not spoil and films or TV shows in my reviews, so I won’t here either, but by holy Moses I wish I could tell you about the season finale! It’s every Star Wars fan’s wet dream! I just imagine when THAT moment happened in the finale the entire Star Wars fan base pissed their pants in orgasmic unison, and I’m sure it made quite a mess, but that again that’s not the point, the point is that the finale is epic. From the cameos to the action to a certain very emotional goodbye, it felt so wholesome and was so fitting to what this season was building up towards. However the ending does make me question where the writers are planning to take this series next season seeing as how this one ended, but nevertheless that’s a talk for another time. All I have to say is that though The Mandalorian is not perfect and has its rough edges, it is still really pretty darn awesome and is easily the best thing to come out of Star Wars in a long while This is, indeed, the way!

Overall score: 7/10

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sometimesiwritetoo · 4 years

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So I talked a little bit on twitter about this, but I thought I’d go in more depth here because I had a big interest in the fitness community for a long time even though I don’t really participate in most parts of it.

Anyway, I’ve seen people complain about Tifa’s muscles. Some of these complaints are pretty blatantly not in good faith, but I’ll try and focus on the ones that are.

So the complaint is that she’s not buff enough. She doesn’t have enough muscle, etc, etc. And I think there is something to be said about Square choosing a more conventionally attractive design when they could have referenced many, many women competing in ufc or judo. Hell it’s not as if Gina Carano was too far off from the final design. People are saying that since she’s been training as a fighter for so long then shouldn’t she have a lot of muscle?

And, imo, I’d say not necessarily.

When these complaints come up I often see her compared to bodybuilders or ufc fighters. The fighters comparison is kinda fair, the bodybuilders are not. Because bodybuilding especially is cosmetic. Their goal is to build muscle. But you can’t perfectly build muscle and not gain a bit of fat. So about a few months before competition they’ll go into what is called a cut where they drastically reduce their carbs in order to drop fat, which often takes a bit of muscle with it as well. Basically the goal is to cycle between a bulk, where you try to gain as much muscle as possible, and a cut, where you try to lose as much fat as possible.

The classes have been rearranged over the years but basically you have a bikini class for women. This is, I guess, the most conventional class. You’re not looking for a lot of muscle in this class. It then goes up to physique and figure competitions. Which are looking for more and more muscle. Technically there isn’t female bodybuilding anymore (at least, not at the arnold which is one of the bigger competitions) but there are classes that get close.

Bikini is considered the “easier” level to enter because you don’t have to build as much muscle. But it’s not really easy. Here’s an article that goes into just how much women have to train to achieve these looks. I bring this up because building muscle is ultimately something that doesn’t really happen on accident. You have to purposefully train to build muscle. Plus in the heavier categories you start seeing a lot of drug use. Building and maintaining muscle is a lot of work. It’s basically a subset of diet culture, but everyone thinks it’s healthier for some reason. So, as much as it would thrill me to have Tifa show up with arms as big as my head, it’s not “realistic”. It’s just as unrealistic as arms that are too skinny. And as someone who’s seen women take a lot of drugs to get these looks it just looks like people are promoting a different, equally unhealthy body type.

Fighting isn’t as bad as bodybuilding. I think bodybuilding is pretty legendary for how normalized drug use is to build muscle. In fighting you don’t necessarily have to build muscle in order to be a good good at the sport. Granted it happens naturally. But there’s still a cycle of bulking and cutting in order to compete. Because the ufc has a lot of weight classes with the lowest, strawweight, going /up/ to 115 pounds. I know less about fighting then I do about the weight lifting sports. But it seems similar to competition weight lifting. You want to be as heavy as possible, but within your weight class. In fighting especially you want to be as heavy as possible because then you hit harder. So fighters also bulk and cut to get as much lean muscle as they can while avoiding accidentally ending up in a higher weight class. They just typically don’t have to cut as much because they’re just looking to stay under a certain number.

And I bring all of this up because while a lot of people who pick up a sport do build muscle it often isn’t obvious. It’s a /lot/ of work to build muscle and Tifa probably doesn’t have the resources to focus on something like that. It takes access to supplements, the money for food, you need to plan your meals out (a lot of bodybuilders eat seven meals), and then you often have to work with a trainer and a nutritionist. Most people only really build about a pound or two of muscle a month. So it can take a long time of constant work to build a decent amount of muscle naturally. It takes a diet with a calorie surplus and a lot of protein. And again I’m not against more buff girls in media, but I think people need to realize that this really is a lot of work. It is, again, a subset of diet culture.

To be frank I don’t think any of these characters necessarily have a “realistic” body type. Barret would need muscle to carry that gun arm (and would likely need reinforcement so the thing doesn’t rip his arm off) but he probably doesn’t have access to any more or less food then Tifa or Aerith would have so at best he probably would look more like Maui. In game he looks more like Shaw who has made grocery haul videos and yes, he did spend over 300 dollars on food at costco for a week of food. Poorer people tend to gain weight, which means that Aerith probably shouldn’t be as skinny as she is. Cloud should probably be significantly skinnier then he is considering he spent five years in a mako bath and hasn’t really had to move. People should have fat or loose skin on their upper arms or blemishes on their skin. And exactly how good is dental care in the slums?

This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t want more buff girls. But it’s not necessarily a “realistic” ask. I think most media makes characters more buff then they would realistically be. And it’s more realistic for people to have a little bit of fat on their stomach, on their thighs, or their upper arms even if they are supposed to be strong. I’m all for more diverse body types for women in media, but I don’t like the framing of certain ones as more realistic for a certain lifestyle. But it takes more then a certain exercise to massively change your body. You probably pass bodybuilders, long distance runners, power lifters, swimmers, etc. every day and you wouldn’t be able to tell what they do just by their body.

#tifa lockhart #Lukas says stuff #I don't want people to think you shouldn't want buff girls #just as someone who tried living that fitness life it's difficult #and more often people who don't compete don't bother

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thefilmsimps · 3 years

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Furious 7 (James Wan)

“So close to a perfect score”, is all I could think towards the end of this one.

This is a movie where so much is at its absolute best: the characters are in their final forms, there are enough of them that the weaker actors can take a backseat (car jargon, sorry) to stronger performances, and the action is absolutely astounding and nearly nonstop (also they hired Ronda Rousey but gave her way less dialog than Gina Carano in the last one, a lesson learned). This comes so close to being the ultimate Fast & Furious movie. It at least is the best one of the Computer-Doodad-as-MacGuffin era, I must say.

I’ll start with the negatives: I will always wonder what this movie would have looked like without the passing of Paul Walker (Brian O’Conner). Brian is, kind of, the heart of the series, since he was the protagonist (or at least audience surrogate) of the first movie, stuck with it for a sequel and was a co-lead with Vin Diesel for all but the third. Here, because of his death during filming (but unrelated to filming), the “co-“ is emphasized, but I get the sense that the series was Vin Diesel lifting it out of love and carrying it across each finish line even before that. Still, Walker gets a tacked-on feeling coda for his character that is beautiful, while the rest of the movie plays hide and seek with his face.

It makes me wonder if a different arc for the characters was in store before that untimely tragedy: the movie opens with Letty, still affected by amnesia, telling Dom that she has to find herself and leaving. A few scenes, she rejoins the team unceremoniously. Was this thread going to be the primary character arc? I don’t know, but it leaves these awkward bumps in the road for her character. For his part, Brian’s arc is that domestic life doesn’t fit him, and these scenes feel more organic than Letty’s. It’s weird and ungainly.

One thing that probably didn’t change: Djimon Hounsou, whose career seems built on generic roles across the spectrum of modern mainstream movies (underservedly; he’s great), continues apace here. In Furious 7, he’s a terrorist out for the same MacGuffin as The Family. What does he want? What is his background? The movie does not care. His voice sounds cool yelling “Fire!” And “find them!” While he sits in the cockpit of a helicopter. That’s all that matters.

But characters aside, the action is what matters with this one, and these are some of the series’ best. There are parachutes attached to cars, hand-to-hand fight scenes with Tony Jaa and Jason Statham (not at the same time, though, unfortunately. An insane missed opportunity if there ever was one). There’s an ambitious chase scene with a helicopter chasing cars around LA. And there are a dozen or so incredible stunts/conceptually cool ideas that they just pull off. The stunt work, too, seems largely dependent on practical effects (Wikipedia estimates 90%). The pacing is incredible. Like Fast Five, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, it just leaps from setpiece to setpiece and never stops for more than a minute or two except to ask “Where do we go next?”

I’m especially a fan of the Dom (Diesel) vs. Deckard Shaw (Statham) rivalry here, which gives every scene a NOS switch it can hit to escalate every the stakes instantly. But as a lifelong fan of pro wrestling, I’m also a fan of masculinity as camp, and every scene between them is this concept exactly. How do you not laugh at all the times in this movie where these two men are staring furious(7)ly at each other through windshields, driving their gigantic-engine-equipped muscle cars directly at each other, somehow finding ways to make two men driving cars at each other more dramatic every time it happens? It’s hilarious in every way, and that’s not even counting that most of the comedy works pretty well, too.

I can’t say more without spoiling the action scenes, but when I first saw this movie in theaters when it came out, I said to my friends “I don’t know if that was the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it was definitely the most movie I have ever seen.” And I stand by that. This is not high art, deep philosophical pondering about the damage living does to the soul, but it’s in some ways a pinnacle of a certain kind of film-based audacity. It’s a movie where creatives behind it think of some absurd scenario and ask “how do we do that” and then drop a bunch of cars out of an airplane. And I hold both those things in equal esteem in film. The flaws are there, and it’s going to hang over this movie forever how many of them might have been unavoidable. But in some ways, they compensated. Maybe too much. That’s the Fast and the Furious way.

9/10

#fast and furious #Vaxxed and the furious #vin diesel #Paul walker #James wan #movie review

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newspapper99 · 3 years

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Express Recipes: How to make Creamy Papaya Raita

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banjodanger · 3 years

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Deadpool(2016) The Thoughts That Come After

I usually finish up these afterhtoughts by discussing how the movie was, and if the movie was worth watching. There’s no point with Deadpool. If you haven’t, go watch it. There’s an reason he’s one of the few characters that was expected to make the transfer from Fox to MCU. People who have never watched one of the X-Men movies went to see this multiple times. If all you look for in movie reviews is a simple yes or no, recommend or skip, well, here you go. Recommended. Sit down and watch it.

I’m not joking. If that’s all you’re concerned about, go watch some Deadpool. It’s not just a great X-Men film, it’s a pretty entertaining film. There’s a lot of good reasons why, after Disney bought Fox, they pretty quickly confirmed that Deadpool would be continuing. Which is pretty impressive for a movie series that started with an entertaining but kind of standard origin story.

One of the smartest things this movie does is it’s mostly nonlinear storytelling, because it allows to the movie to more effectively split up the first of it’s only two big action sequences. It’s hard to notice unless you think about it, but the only two effects-heavy sequences are the highway fight and the helicarrier fight at the end. But splitting up the highway fight, giving some distance between different beats, all of that helps the one big fight feel much longer. It also manages to humanize and endear us to a character that is murdering a lot of people seemingly unprompted.

Another great thing about this film is the relatively small cast of characters and low stakes of the central conflict fit the smaller scale of the movie. Deadpool isn’t trying to save the world, he just wants his face fixed. He’s not even interested in Colossus’ repeated attempts to recruit him into the X-Men, which ends up leading to one’s the film’s best lines. These low stakes allow the movie to focus on working as a joke delivery system, and this movie accomplishes that well. This movie is funnier than a superhero movie needs to be and gorier than most had attempted to be, and it manages both successfully.

Is this movie problematic, the way every previous X-Men has been? In retrospect, yes. The first mutterings of TJ Miller’s awful behavior surfaced around the time this movie came out, which suggests that it was an open secret around the industry well before this movie was casting. His part in the movie is the kind of supporting smart-aleck that isn’t a huge stretch of acting so it’s hard to imagine TJ Miller being necessary. He’s good in the role but it’s easy to think of a half-dozen or so comics that could have performed the same role.

Which leads us to our other Questionable Casting Choice; Gina Carano. She’s only recently become outwardly problematic but it casts a shadow over the film nevertheless. Firstly because Deadpool is queer representation, however slight that might be, but also because, much like Miller, she doesn’t add a whole lot. Haywire used her effectively, here she has even less characterization than Ed Skrien’s Ajax. It’s bothersome because her presence is distracting when it isn’t even necessary. They could have another cgi character without losing anything from the movie.

Leading back to queer representation, it’s a stretch to say this movie counts as such. Deadpool’s flirtatious with Colossus but it’s intentionally vague if he’s serious or just making the Russian uncomfortable. The International Women’s Day scene is great but it’s a pretty reductive stance to say a man getting pegged automatically equals queer. Deadpool is great but I wouldn’t list it as queer representation. Though, I can’t picture DC being ballsy enough to try something like that in the next Batman movie.

What are you waiting for? Go watch Deadpool.

Up Next: X-Men: Apocalypse asks us how unrecognizable you can make an actor before it becomes cheaper to just have a stunt person play them.

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gossipnetwork-blog · 7 years

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'The Snowman': This Serial-Killer Thriller Is Even WTF Worse Than You've Heard

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/the-snowman-this-serial-killer-thriller-is-even-wtf-worse-than-youve-heard/

'The Snowman': This Serial-Killer Thriller Is Even WTF Worse Than You've Heard

Dear Michael,

Can we call you Michael? Mike? No? Mr. Fassbender it is. So, we’ve seen your new movie The Snowman, and we should start off by saying we’re big fans of your work. The political prisoner on a hunger strike, the sex addict in a downward spiral, the slave owner that’s emblematic of a whole 360-degree dehumanizing institution, the mutant guy, the android guy, the guy who gets the shit kicked out of him by Gina Carano, the shirtless sword-and-sandal dude, the other shirtless sword-and-sandal dude – it’s a solid resumé, man. You’re so good you even made a musician who wears a giant paper mâché on his head for 99-percent of a film’s running time seem remarkably moving. We’re not acting coaches or anything, but that could not have been easy.

And because we’ve read the articles on Scandi-noir and have visited airport bookstores, we were aware of Jo Nesbø and his series of bestsellers about Harry Hole, the Norwegian police detective who solves grisly homicides in between vodka benders. Frankly, we were stoked to hear you’d signed up to play the character in the movie adaptation – tortured protagonists whose personal lives are a shambles but who are really good at their jobs, they’re not just for TV anymore! And crime-lit–wise, this guy is like the Philip Marlowe of Oslo, even if his name reflexively turns grown men into tittering 12-year-old boys.

(Plus, if we’re being honest, we were curious to hear you do a Norwegian accent, although you don’t do one here, no one really does, which is probably for the best, though someone should have maybe mentioned this to J.K. Simmons, who seems to be doing some sort of attempt at a Scandinavian lilt-meets-evil-industrialist voice thing, unless that’s just him with a bad cold, in which case all apologies, we realize it’s below freezing over there. Sorry, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)

Anywhoo, this seemed like a good fit, especially because you deserve your own franchise thing that does not involve you lifting cars into the air or kissing yourself. You do tormented well. Bring on the Holeverse! Then we heard that Rebecca Ferguson, whose turn in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is something we still think of with great fondness, was also going to be in it, playing a fellow investigator, and that Swedish director Tomas Alfredson was behind the camera. You undoubtedly saw his 2011 version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – you were one of the very few U.K.-based actors who wasn’t in that movie, come to think of it – and have likely checked out Let the Right One In, which is one of the best horror flicks of the last 10 years. Pedigree? Solid. This had to have seemed like a slam dunk.

So like we said, we saw the film, and …

It’s …

Well, it’s a little confusing. And slightly incoherent in terms of how it lays out the book’s narrative about a serial killer who is targeting mothers and whose calling card is a snowman. And sort of not very good overall. It’s bad. A bit of a full-on Nesbøner, in fact. The bleached-out, blue-gray-is-the-coldest-color cinematography looks cool at first, but after a while, it feels less about painting the Norwegian city as a morally conflicted metropolis or turning it into a metaphor for its hero’s mental state – forget it, Harry, it’s Oslo – and more like someone found a fun new filter to use. We’re sure that you and Ferguson have great screen chemistry, although given the truncated and often arrhythmic way your scenes together play out, maybe some of the exchanges or longer, more rapport-driven moments you guys shot ended up on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of Cutting Room Floor Part 1: Thelma Schoonmaker, one of the single greatest living editors, is credited as the woman behind the splice-and-dicing, which makes us wonder exactly what she had to work with when you sat down at her AVID. We’re hearing that she was brought in to bat clean-up, which still doesn’t explain the mess we’re seeing. Some folks have said it feels kind of avant-garde, which we’re pretty sure is not meant as a compliment. Speaking of Cutting Room Floor Part 2: We’re also hearing that Alfredson found himself in a tight spot and that approximately “10-15%” of the script ended up being dropped, and that does help explain the constant insert-scene-here vibe. You know what did make the final cut, though? A lost-looking Val Kilmer wandering through a subplot. Chloe Sevigny as identical twins. That “love” scene in which a fully clothed Charlotte Gainsbourg mounts you momentarily and then very calmly dismounts you. Roughly 600 shots of a snowman, accompanied by ominous blaring music, because like we said, this means the killer is nearby or was recently somewhere in the vicinity.

Look, we don’t know if you’ve seen the film, or if you have Internet access wherever you’re at, or which stage of the Actor’s Kübler-Ross model you may be at. Hopefully it’s acceptance; probably it’s anger. We’re here to tell you: It’s not your fault. You’re going to get through this. Sure, some critics may try to be cute and write high-concept pans to prove how clever they are. People will turn that ridiculous marketing campaign into memes. And Alfredson may have to spend some time in directors’ jail, though hopefully not so long he can’t bounce back and make Smiley’s People. Barring someone showing up with a time machine and whisking you back to that “Do you want to build The Snowman?” moment and this time, you answer, “Hard pass, but thanks,” you’ve got to live with this.

But everybody still has your back. We want you to succeed. We just ask that you keep going. Maybe stay away from films with lots of snow for a while. And should someone present you with a script for another Hole-centric project like The Bat or The Leopard, you sprint in the other direction ASAP.

Love, The Moviegoing Public

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