What was the last TV Show or Movie you saw, and did you like it?

[Erik]

I liked Gray Man quite a lot for what it was. A script beyond what they had would have been a distraction. Chris Evans absolutely stole the show.

If you want to get really, righteously, mad about a script, though, try Persuasion. Ugh. I wanted this one to be good. I'm a sucker for a period rom-com/rom-dram and for Jane Austen too. This movie had a lot of good ingredients. It had beautiful people in beautiful settings and I liked the way it was shot. There were some great performances from supporting actors and the female lead had it in her too, maybe...I think (the male lead just seemed constipated most of the way through). But my God that script was an awful, ham-fisted, insult to Jane Austen and to viewers. To the writers I would say, as the principal said to Billy Madison, "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." But Jane Austen should haunt those fuckers until He does.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

I've been watching sumo for the July Tournment. I've also been wandering around cruchyroll.com and watching some of the free ones with ads. There are streaming shows I might watch but I'm not subscribing just for one show or two. They should come up with a way just to pick out a show - I understand they want subscriptions but I don't. I'd watch ads instead.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Decided to watch some Yancy Derringer. Always like the show. In this episode, an evil woman and a man masquerading as a US Marshall decide to steal US money being shipped on Yancy's riverboat. They get the drop on Yancy and Pahoo. One problem is the Marshall draws a Colt SAA, perhaps from that time traveling steam locomotive of Doc Brown.

Did have my favorite Sharps and what looked like a single shot Colt derringer but I couldn't really see in 25 cal. Good gal saved the day with a double barrel Remington derringer. Those folks really could point shoot with those little guns. Bad gal did miss with the Sharps.

[Bucky]

Talk about a low bar... Who Killed Captain Alex is a better movie than Matrix 4.

Yeah, I needed to add a winkie to that.

[idahojess]

I finished The Offer on Paramount +.

Pretty interesting series about the making of The Godfather. I think they probably could have done it in 9 episodes rather than 10, but it was particularly interesting to see the portrayal of all the different real life characters.

Slow at times, and a lot of inside Hollywood stuff, but not a bad series.

It's sort of like Once upon a Time in Hollywood, without the Manson Family and the flamethrower.

Honestly I've gotten weary of a lot of the sadistic violence in film and television these days, so this is probably more my speed anyway. Plus, there is a bit of mafia violence thrown in to keep things moving.

[Stephanie B]

Personally, I felt downright offended by the complete lack of any sense or logic in that movie. (Haven't really watched a whole lot of Marvel films, I read superhero comics as a kid but can't say the genre holds that much appeal to me anymore. The Iron Man movies were pretty good though.)

I read from somewhere that it cost 200 million US dollars to make that film. All that money and they couldn't afford a fucking script?!? And from somewhere a long time ago - what has it been now, a decade? - I read that Hollywood had created, or at the time the article was written were creating a computer program that can write movie scripts. Seeing the quality of modern film making, I can believe that. But until I saw The Gray Man I had no idea that it was physically possible to force feed Adderall to a computer program all the way until the program overdoses and vomits out an incoherent rambling mockery of a script.

Which is not to say that the 200 million doesn't show. The movie has all the prettiest people pretending to be someone else in a dizzying variety of cinematic locations with a huge amount of stunts and pyrotechnics going off. A whole lot of people deserve a pat on their back for doing a great job. The technical people for getting all that to work, the pretty pretenders for saying their lines as best they could... But in a world with any justice in it, several highly paid people would have committed seppuku after seeing this turd released into the world. Despite all that money spent, the movie just doesn't have any content. There's just nothing there, aside from the most superficial of eye candy. The Gray Man is a $200 million shiny wrapper containing absolutely nothing. Like the worlds prettiest empty cardboard box. Which, I suppose, is an apt metaphor for the modern Western world?

We stopped watching after the bad guy’s kill teams had laid waste to the center of Prague.

[feudist]

Tenet
Director Christopher Nolan swings for the fences with his take on a Time War. The future is at war with our present and a group of agents, recruited from operators who suicided to avoid betraying their units, desperately fight mind bending battles with opponents who are armed with foreknowledge of the events.
Completely non linear in concept and execution, fascinating and confusing at the same time, with cleverly conceived effects and representations of people moving in different temporal directions.
I watched it, read explanations to clear up confusions, and just watched it again. Excellent performances by John Washington as The Protagonist, Robert Pattinson as his partner and Kenneth Branagh as the antagonist.
Washington was actually a pro football running back with the Rams and in the USFL, and the extraordinary difference in his physicality versus other actors really sells his portrayal as a deadly opponent.
I've become quite the Pattinson fan from his roles after(gag) Twilight and he does a great job as a very affable 2IC here. One of the better depictions of male friendship put to film.
Recommended if you like very committed, cerebral science fiction that respects and expects a lot from its audience.

[rob_s]

We just began watching the Paramount+ episodes of As the Grenade Turns (aka Seal Team). Based on only one episode, the only change from the network version has been that the language is saltier.

I’ve been watching (ok, bingeing) this while the family has been out of town.

I’ve only watched on Paramount+. Wasn’t aware there was previous seasons. The ones on P+ seem to start at… the beginning? Perhaps they are carrying the network ones too?

Any idea when they switched over? As in, how many seasons on broadcast?

[Stephanie B]

I’ve been watching (ok, bingeing) this while the family has been out of town.

I’ve only watched on Paramount+. Wasn’t aware there was previous seasons. The ones on P+ seem to start at… the beginning? Perhaps they are carrying the network ones too?

Any idea when they switched over? As in, how many seasons on broadcast?

I think S5, Ep 4 was the last one on broadcast TV.

[feudist]

I recently rewatched the entire Terminator film series and the TV show.
I saw the original as a theatrical release and was entranced by the universe it portrayed. A lifelong fan of SciFi I was immediately reminded of the Berserker stories by Saberhagen.
I consider The Terminator the best of the series for its tight direction, the cast, the music and the desperate story. The reveal of the origin of Sarah's picture at the end just hit.
T2 was good and, unlike many people I didn't hate T3
Salvation, Genisys and Dark Fate were all mixed bags, but none were as bad as they're made out to be.

Then comes Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Doomed by the writer's strike of 2008 and ending on a giant cliffhanger, it had enormous potential.
It had a stellar cast, a soundtrack by Bear McCreary, a very dark tone getting darker and a very imaginative take on the war in the future after Judgement Day. It's set as the sequel to the events of T2, picking up a couple of years later.
The characterizations are excellent. Skynet is supremely creepy as it keeps trying to rewrite history both future and past.
Sarah is a woman flogged to the edge of madness and hung there by her awful knowledge of the future. John Connor grows from whiny kid who thinks he's dodged his fate to a serious young man who is determined to master it.
Derek Reese is Kyle's brother, one of many resistance fighters sent back with various missions to fight the Future. He is a capable and hardened soldier. Jessie is a female Resistance fighter on a separate mission from Reese, though they were lovers in the future. A future. She's intelligent, ruthless and utterly vicious.
Then Cameron. Ah...Cameron, the female Terminator who is sent back and protects John. The thing about Cameron is that she's a liar. She is on a mission, and she protects John and fights other Terminators, but her actual mission is not known. She engages in a lot of extracurricular activity that is unrelated to bodyguarding John, and kept from him.
Future John hangs over the story like a shadow, influencing events, possibly sending back Cameron, playing dozens of simultaneous chess games with Skynet. Each move and countermove alters the future, and the various timelines are braiding into each other and coexisting. The various characters have slightly different memories of the future giving motives and decision added uncertainty.
The storyline is brutal and merciless. Many innocents are sacrificed to necessity, and every character suffers a lot of "moral injury".
The overall tone of the series is like a very grim Twilight Zone story, with even the series cliffhanger serving as a sort of shock ending.