The Gaming Den

erik wrote:So why is Dark Phoenix so bad? I'm probably going to eventually watch it because it's x-men and I really enjoyed the other reboots. I know the series did a horrible job with the last Dark Phoenix, just curious how they failed this time.

There are things. These things happen. Why do they happen? I don't know.


X-Men 3 had two movies of decent setup and was then killed by the existence of Superman Returns, which poached their director and Cyclops and forced them to scrap most of that setup.

Dark Phoenix doesn't have that setup going for it. And doesn't make the effort to replace it. Instead of building up Scott and Jean's relationship, it goes for actions scenes. The emotional core of the arc isn't exactly there.

Technically speaking, I know that it's a cobbled together mess of 3 different shootings, so probably it will be bad because of why those things are usually bad.

The wolverine/phoenix/cyclops love triangle sure gets creepy when 2/3 of them are teenagers. Hope they didn't do that anyway.

I do think that Dark Phoenix is lacking enough buildup in the previous movies to be the capstone here, and I am très disappoint that they are going back to that poisoned well when there's so many other storylines they could play with - Brood, Genosha, Marauders, whatever.

I'll still watch it, maybe even in theatre, but maybe not. Movie time is hard to come by.

Well, at least they don't do what X-Men 3 did with Jean Grey's personal agency.

The original Dark Phoenix Saga ended with Jean recognising she was too dangerous to live and taking her own life against the pleading of Scott.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which adapted the earlier version of the Phoenix storyline before they introduced the cosmic stuff, decided to strip Jean of this moment of agency by instead having Wolverine murder her and be painted as the tragic victim for doing so.

According to synopses the new Dark Phoenix film with Sansa Stark instead has her fly off into space still alive, so I'm not going to get up in arms since it's already a box office flop that I don't intend to watch

Omegonthesane wrote:Well, at least they don't do what X-Men 3 did with Jean Grey's personal agency.

The original Dark Phoenix Saga ended with Jean recognising she was too dangerous to live and taking her own life against the pleading of Scott.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which adapted the earlier version of the Phoenix storyline before they introduced the cosmic stuff, decided to strip Jean of this moment of agency by instead having Wolverine murder her and be painted as the tragic victim for doing so.

According to synopses the new Dark Phoenix film with Sansa Stark instead has her fly off into space still alive, so I'm not going to get up in arms since it's already a box office flop that I don't intend to watch

Was that Jean, or the pod people version of her?

Was that Jean, or the pod people version of her?

Both.

As originally written it was Jean. Years later they wanted to bring the original five X-men together to launch X-Factor, so they needed a resurrection for Jean that also absolved her of guilt for destroying the D'bari homeworld - because you can't encourage your impressionable young readers to go devour star systems - and thus it was retconned to be the Pod Phoenix version of Jean.

Later still Jean and several other characters got to wield the Phoenix Force as heroes and the Phoenix Force got lightly personified. So apparently eating stars is just fine and we should encourage kids to do it.

I went to the Boston Early Music Festival's production of Orlando Generoso, and it was wtf. Orlando Generoso is 'based on' part of Orlando Furioso. Orlando Furioso is a poem about a lunatic superhero who goes on a transcontinental murder spree until someone flies to the moon in a biblical reference and brings back the superhero's sanity in a bottle. Orlando Generoso is some characters from that poem singing about how sad they are for four hours. They aren't even sad about a super-murder spree, they're sad about high-school-level romantic drama.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I went to the Boston Early Music Festival's production of Orlando Generoso, and it was wtf. Orlando Generoso is 'based on' part of Orlando Furioso. Orlando Furioso is a poem about a lunatic superhero who goes on a transcontinental murder spree until someone flies to the moon in a biblical reference and brings back the superhero's sanity in a bottle. Orlando Generoso is some characters from that poem singing about how sad they are for four hours. They aren't even sad about a super-murder spree, they're sad about high-school-level romantic drama.

They were sad for 4 hours, or they sang for 4 hours, making us sad?

Iduno wrote:They were sad for 4 hours, or they sang for 4 hours, making us sad?

Yes!

Excellent. I should find a way to watch that.

"Lost me" is a strong phrase but season 2 of Dragon Prince is really slowing down and I'm not into it. In season one I felt it was a strong show that took a little too long to get going. It literally takes 3 episodes to leave the castle they all start in which in a 9 episode season of what is fundamentally a show about a journey is too long. Still things picked up and a lot of distance was made and adventures happened in the rest of the season. In season 2 it literally takes 4 episodes for them to leave the campsite they're at, then the next 3 episodes center around the main characters sitting on a boat doing literally nothing and not being involved in the plot while a history lesson is told. I'm 8 episodes in and I think you could have put everything into 3 episodes and missed nothing.

It still seems like a high quality show that the people creating it care about and their active efforts to show characters who are POC/lgbtq/deaf/other things are very cool. I think the deaf general is one of the coolest characters I've seen lately. Still the quickest way I can imagine to make an audience lose interest in your story is not to tell it. If Bilbo Baggins spends 4 full episodes in the shire then 3 more on his donkey on the way to the entrance to Mirkwood I'm gonna check out.

I like to watch a lot of trash TV, and so I'm not surprised when I encounter something that's total garbage.

I started watching a show called Blood & Treasure that's trying to be an Indiana Jones type show, crossed with Romancing the Stone, and updated to account for iPhones.

I have no fucking clue what's going on. I'm on the ninth episode and I literally couldn't explain what is happening in the show. The overplot is that the main characters are looking for Cleopatra's mummy, and that the Nazi's supposedly had it during WWII. But it's like the makers of the show realized they only had a plot that could run three hours max, so they threw in a few secret societies and threw some more darts at a map so they could add a few stops and thus fill out six more episodes. Throw in some pseudo-science-mystic shit and bam! I mean, the dialogue is so bad that the characters are explaining their own terrible jokes and somehow they ended up in Quebec.

Sunk cost fallacy for the win.

Edit: I made it halfway through episode ten, and as I was listening to the main chick bitch about the fact that she didn't shoot the BBEG (?) in the face in front of his totally innocent niece, I turned it off. It's literally not worth having on in the background while I do other things.

I made it through 1.5 seasons of Wynonna Earp before it got too far up its own ass for me.

It started out as a "shoot undead cowboy of the week in the face" show with a far-off curse plot, then decided to be about relationships and ever-more-powerful monsters. It's like they distilled the worst parts of Supernatural.

Also, they couldn't have tried to do a worse job with Doc Holliday. I think his mustache was taped on. And he had a lot of modern knowledge for a guy who spent the last 200 years at the bottom of a well.

Nightflyers, half of episode one.

I like spaceships. I like telepaths. I liked the specific telepath. But what the show promised me was horror on a haunted ship... that is, people walking around in darkly lit corridors making scared-faces at the noises they hear.

Finally saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

While the visual effects, giant monster personality animation and cinematography were top notch, the bit where Godzilla is killed due to betrayal, then resurrected from his tomb after three days so that he can be the savior of humanity and claim his place as the rightful king goes too damned far when this is the image used to mark the impact of Godzilla's death:

Wow, that wraps around straight back to profound.

Iunno. I didn't catch that when I saw it, but... I'm kinda here for radioactive lizard Jesus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeIANOyximo

New Doom: Annihilation Trailer




still trash.

Leress wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeIANOyximo

New Doom: Annihilation Trailer




still trash.

They could make the Doom comic book frame-by-frame into a movie, and it would be better than whatever that is.

The Doom comic would make an awesome movie and you know it.

Use this as a comparing point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LKadZ4LFU

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was mentioned recently in IMHO, and reminded me of when I ragequit that game due to plot hole bullshit.

Details spoilered:

There were a number of elements in various cases that didn't add up. For example, one case involves a pair of lions, specifically described as being manageable only by one person and life-threatening to anyone else, being managed by a different person with no relevant skill set. This was irritating, but it wasn't a deal-breaker until...

There's one case where we are supposed to conclude that the motive for one man killing another is that they both wanted the same girl. The evidence we are supposed to base this conclusion on is that the murdered man wrote 'beautiful' next to her name on a playbill and the murderer owns a framed photo of her. That's so thin that it has only two dimensions and no physical existence.

It's a shame, because there were many things in the various cases that were very clever. But it was a mystery-solving game that absolutely did not play fair.

Went to my local Gamestop and saw there was a new Contra coming out soon. I love Contra, then I saw the gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KFX4nY4cLw

I'm pretty sure the successor to Contra is Broforce.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I'm pretty sure the successor to Contra is Broforce.

More like Blazing Chrome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7lAZExM21k

So, Bladerunner 2049.

I was pleasantly surprised by Ryan Gosling, who I otherwise can't stand. Then again, the main character could probably be played by an inanimate carbon rod. But it's fine, I like the movie.

OK, time to drag Old Harrison Ford around for a while. I didn't enjoy it in The Force Awakens, I'm not enjoying it here. But it's ok.

Aircars being shot out of the sky? Now we're talking.

......aaaaaand it's "fistfight for the fate of the world". Fucking bullshit. And of course the nominal hero, who has displayed average fighting prowess, defeats the absolute stone-cold bad-ass who has been built up over the entire movie, with nothing else but "i'm the hero LOL". The entire movie reduced to bargain bin scifi schlock. God i hate that trope.

It's like they even managed to piss all over the nding of Original Bladerunner.