As far as Western stuff, Ford v Ferrari was pretty good. Just car porn and competitive guys pushing the state of the art forward. I feel bad for the real Leo Beebe's family though. They needed a corporate stooge to play the villain and made him one-dimensional. Generally positive regarding fatherhood as well.
Godzilla Minus One was kino, but I find it so rare that eastern productions are able to “bubble to the surface” of the discussions that I ever come across. Where do you even hear about eastern media worth checking out?
Train to Busan was great, and was one of the few eastern films that managed to hit my radar.
Tangentially, I’ll just add here: the Rebuild series of films for Neon Genesis, I thought were awesome in and of themselves, and managed the crazy hard task of both honoring the original while adding to the universe through the themes that Anno has grown to appreciate as he got older. I think true beauty is enhanced by context and subtext and imo he’s a master of using those tools to convey a story
Depends on what you like, eastern cinema does revenge thrillers and horror films very well. Oldboy, man from nowhere, and I saw the devil all stand out. Horror wise there’s a plethora, tale of two sisters, noroi, haunted asylum, three extremes, infected, incantation, on and on.
Minus One was good. For the most part I'm just a weeb. I watch the first couple episodes of anything with a synopsis on the seasonal chart that catches my eye and see what's decent enough to continue.
Any specific recommendations are really dependant on personal taste, comedy especially. The Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake and Frieren are the two that jump to my mind as being good watches recently, even if anime isn't your thing.
The ending of that movie pisses me off and nearly ruins the entire rest of it for me. Completely out of character for Christian Bale's character (or any man with a sense of honor) to react the way he does. And everyone else just goes along with it like "of course this is the way we expected the race to have ended!"
They're kind of stuck with the way real events unfolded? I guess they could have made Miles more pissed, but McLaren did win the 1966 LeMans and that's why he won. And the Miles really did die in a testing accident 2 months later.
They did take some artistic license in his favor. They put Enzo Ferrari there to give Miles a knowing nod of respect. In reality, Enzo didn't attend '66.
I would have expected him to be way more pissed given the way they they portrayed him in the rest of the film. At the start of the movie he's throwing wrenches at people, they don't really show any character development that would suggest he wouldn't be pissed, and then it's just "oh well: I went against my better judgment and got fucked over by my own team. I guess I'll let that slide."
I get that's generally the way it happened, but you still have to make the characters act/react consistent with how you portrayed them.
I’ll never understand why they didn’t see the massive reaction to Luke Skywalker at the end of the second season and at least try to figure out a way to retcon his character in last jedi
It's my understanding that The Mandalorian managed to evade the Disney Eye of Sauron for the first two seasons as it was a relatively low budget passion project, which allowed for a lot more creative control over the story and production (hence why it was actually good). Unfortunately it became too successful for its own good and attracted the attention of 'interested parties' from the rest of Disney's Star Wars slop, hence why season 3 saw a marked drop in quality.
The worst part about Guardians was the knock-on effects it had on all marbel mobie dialogue going forward, but it was definitely enjoyable enough on the first watch
Similarly with Venom, the general “ok, not the worst thing ever” reaction most people had seems to have sent the total wrong message to Sony, with them quadrupling down on this retarded idea of spider man movies without spider man lol
Last Nic Cage movie I saw was that “the unbearable weight of massive talent”, which I enjoyed. Is that the one you’re talking about? It was a bit crazy lol not too much horror though
You lucky bastard. The theater where I saw Long Legs, a place that has tampons in the men’s room, felt the need to place a segment before the movie which explained that THIS MOVIE IS TOTALLY ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY because the director, Osgood Perkins, is the son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins, WHO WAS A HOMOSEXUAL AND SUFFERED CONVERSION THERAPY TO UNDO HIS HOMOSEXALITY AND SO THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY.
The movie is fine. It’s just that, despite not having any overt agenda-pushing, I suffered seeing it in a theater which felt the need to shove agenda into it, anyway.
The Expanse had great world-building and the diversity actually made sense, but the supposed realism was undercut by that retarded protomolecule shit and the Martian woman action hero. Would have gone from good to great if they actually stuck with realism and simply focused on interplanetary military operations.
Vid related - my answer is the 3 season show Legion (2017). Normally when I recommend the show, I try to avoid giving too much away, because frankly “show based on obscure X-men comic books” can have the opposite effect on people these days than the intended one of sounding appealing. Lot of burnt bridges from the people putting out this media.
So much of today’s media sacrifices substance and style for THE MESSAGE. What I really enjoyed about Legion was that it had real substance, real style, and was willing to have messages, at least things it wanted to say without forcing them to contort to the monolithic MESSAGE enforced everywhere else. It addresses mental illness and it’s causes both personal and environmental, relationships and romance depicted realistically, abusive codependencies, oh yeah and it has mutants fighting one of the best X-Men villains of all time.
I enjoyed it so much I have trouble articulating exactly why, but the idea that it’s a classic comic character done well ends up being one of the more minor good parts about it. I suppose what I liked so much is just how it does exactly what I think a show should do - carry you away in the moment, with time flying by until it ends, and you’re left with some substantial idea(s) to chew on in every episode. I recommend people check out the first episode (wherever they get their media), and go into it with an open mind and not too many preconceived ideas about what an “X-men show” should look like.
ETA: Utopia (UK) is another 10/10 show, for many of the same reasons I praise Legion - though its first season came out in 2013 and it only ran two seasons, so this edit falls in a legal grey zone lol
How do you answer the question? Feel free to discuss any kind of media you’ve enjoyed recently, books games shows movies podcasts etc etc
Does HotD manage to salvage anything of value from GoT? I haven’t given it a second thought because the last few seasons of GoT were just such a total piss on the rug
I'd say that House of the Dragon is less bad actually than the last few seasons of GOT. The dialogue and storylines are better, but there's also more wokeness and perversion inserted.
To be specific, a lot revolves around "women being oppressioned", characters are bizarrely made black, and there's some unnecessary sexual perversion inserted.
As Dag says, there are no characters from GoT, and the 'fanservice' in terms of callbacks is limited.
Yeah man… the sunk cost fallacy and the fallacy of “a true GoT adaptation has never been tried!” kept me around too.
To be specific, a lot revolves around "women being oppressioned", there's some unnecessary sexual perversion inserted.
The only thing I know about HotD is the promotional images, where they have a platinum haired waif and a platinum haired african supposedly from “a family so inbred that madness has become a common and defining trait”. Since I don’t see them doing an ethnic cleansing subplot in a modern HBO show, I’m left to wonder, is this even addressed? Or just totally taken for granted like in the other show that inadvertently canonized ethnic cleansing (rangz of power that is)
I think the Proper Black guy is from a different family, while the white platinum hair is from the Targaeryen family. Now, supposedly these interbred with one another, but without changing the color of the black family. Just like in Dune, we had Fremen looking like Bedouins and Fremen looking like proper unadulterated black sub-Saharans - apparently, you're only allowed to marry someone of your own race among the Fremen.
It's so ridiculous. And no, it's not addressed. At least we don't get lectures about wacism - thank God for small mercies.
HotD is really good so far and it has none of the characters from GoT so there's no emotional baggage. I'm enjoying it immensely so far: there are some references to the GoT timeline, but for the most part you can treat it like its own separate universe.
I think nearly every single person here would be a liar if they tried to claim to not have some sort of guilty pleasure they still consume despite it being shit and/or woke.
Hmm. I’m going to ignore Japanese things,because I was new to that in the last five years and I don’t have a good enough handle on their timeframe. Also leaving video games out, I could find plenty.
Movies, well, idk maybe Dunkirk and The Mule. There’s not much. I used to take my friends teen kid to Saturday afternoon movies a ton in the 2012-14 timeframe, he was going thru some stuff and it was a nice break, so I saw a lot of the movies released around then. We realized after a while they all sucked. I still remember the supposed hype of Gravity and walking out wonder WTF was so special. It’s what kicked my exploration of old movies off really.
TV shows: Better Call Saul, Chernobyl (HBO), Narcos (Netflix), Clarkson’s Farm, The Grand Tour, another weird German series on Netflix called Dark. I didn’t like any of GoT that actually released in the last decade, so that’s out. I can’t think of much else.
I’m sure there’s things I liked that didn’t stick with me, or I liked the first season then it turned shit (Mandolorian) There’s probably also something wrong with all of what I listed because there’s Jews, women, leftists, trannies, Muslims, communists, or what not in them. I don’t need it rubbed in my face, I didn’t keep a notebook of wokeness, I just watched them and liked.
The “make the first season enjoyable then start forcing in the lame and gay ideas” trick is a really annoying one that’s become increasingly common over the last few years.
Regarding your final thoughts, I totally agree. I made the thread to hopefully inject a little positivity today
Yeah I like these posts occasionally to sift through for ideas. Particularly if I ever see things light hearted and actually funny. The most dead genre, since they can’t make fun of things anymore.
Honestly, in that case, I doubly recommend Legion to you. It walks the fine line of funny, lighthearted, and often leaving you with a big grin, while still dealing with the darker sides of reality in captivating ways. I like to describe it as “realer than real”, somehow its absurdity and its realism are intertwined. Each one facilitates and expresses the other, like Yin and Yang.
Hadn’t seen anything like it but I’ve already seen a few shows try to ape its style, while totally lacking its substance (namely umbrella academy and doom patrol, which were just pale imitations of this piece of art imo).
The HITMAN trilogy of games (at least the first 2 games which I've played) are a lot of fun.
Movies:
Interstellar
John Wick
Sicario (the ending in typical "good art can't lie" fashion has a very anti-feminist message).
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Going back 10 years is a lot easier than going back 5 though, because they were still making decent stuff (albeit less of it) up through around 2016 or so. My personal movie collection drops to near nothing after 2015.
There is a lot of stuff you could say I enjoy but that enjoyment is usually limited by some kind of shoehorned virtue signal. And if something is actually widespread popular you know that it will get a sequel and retconned into absolute faggotry - so I can't even be a fanboy of anything anymore.
I really liked Rogue One and Mission Impossible Rogue Nation + Fallout, my favorite movies of the past decade. I'm not much of a film fan so aside from more popular stuff I don't watch a lot. Pacific Rim is another one of my favorite films but it barely misses out on the timespan.
Rogue One was top notch, everything a franchise blockbuster should be. Beautifully shot, well acted, tight pacing, and an interesting plot that adds to the universe instead of taking away from it (Donnie Yen’s force monk was dope and the ending was 11/10 in terms of “respect for what came before”). What a huge letdown everything that came after (and Episode 7) was.
I thought that the first half of episode 7 was actually really good. It all falls apart after Starkiller Base is introduced. The way the movie is viewed and paced, it feels like two separate films spliced together, like they probably had a finished script that was all the first half of the film, then the Disney execs came in and said to add in a Death Star variant for nostalgia and it totally derailed the plot. Also the movie should have ended with Starkiller Base damaged but not destroyed in order to keep it as an overarching threat to the Resistance/New Republic, and basically have the next two movies occur as a race against the First Order engineering department to stop them from repairing the station and finding a way to defeat Snoke. That way, it doesn't feel like a super cheap gimmick that was forgotten about after the first film.
Honestly, I’m harsher on 7 than is deserved in a vacuum, because of how any potential it had was all squandered in 8 and especially 9. I even enjoyed parts of 8 purely for the visual spectacle it offered (krait and a lot of the space scenes especially the hyperdrive kamikaze)…hell I even enjoyed parts of Solo. I think the biggest problem was the lack of a single overarching vision for post Lucas SW. Well, that and that parasite Kathleen Kennedy
I agree wholeheartedly. 9 is a complete trainwreck of a story done way better in Dark Empire (and I'm not a huge fan of the comic, but they have a nice artstyle so it's fun for me to flip through my copy and read the trilogy once in a while). I like 8 more than your average Disney star wars hater for the beauty of the shots, but I agree the plot is a little silly, it feels like episode 8.5 not 8 (Ren killing Snoke followed by their fight with the guard before the kamikaze was a wonderfully made sequence and the peak of non Rogue One Disney star wars). I also really enjoyed Solo except for the Lando robot thing, but that's like maybe 5 minutes that I can go to the bathroom or something. Aside from that I haven't kept up with any of the shows, and aside from Mando season 1 I'm pretty happy about it. Never watched Andor, maybe I should since I hear such high praise over it.
Netflix Daredevil was great when it first came out and on re-watch even the weaker second half of the second season was miles better than anything we get today. The Punisher spinoff wasn't as strong but still watchable.
Terminal List came out recently was also good, so was Reacher but that had its issues, particularly season 2 with "super smart but oh-so quirky mixed negress nerd girl".
Old Henry was a pleasant surprise.
Bone Tomahawk from 2015 is arguably one of the best westerns ever made (trigger warning for squeamish, those who saw it know the scene).
Thanks. I still haven’t seen reacher. Have a number of the books that I have yet to read. Daredevil made me go out and get some of the 80s and 90s comics
I need to binge the last couple of seasons of Blue Bloods. My homebrew DVR doesn't seem to like my local CBS affiliate, and I have seen anything from the last few seasons.
Nobody. Recently watched it, and the flip of having a comedy actor do a serious role works. And he's shown as a positive father figure, and his dad is shown as a positive father figure.
Barf of the Wild was okay. My interest in all media has declined to such an extent that I hardly consume any of it. I completely stopped watching TV 15 years ago, unfortunately I am subject to goybox here and there while visiting family.
I'm frontloading my weakest picks here since they're the tougher choices.
Travelers, 2016. some soybeard shit in it. lots to recommend otherwise, decent sci fi.
Dirk Gently also 2016ish. YMMV. very reddit or very BBC-tier goofy depending on your perspective. some faggotry and black boss-grrlism. But I did enjoy it at the time.
Severance on HBO was all right, but considering that S2 hasn't come out yet and it's all hinging on weird cliffhangers, plus it's also quite faggoty, I don't hold out much hope.
Someone mentioned GotG 2014, that's in there. I enjoyed that and the sequel a bit less so. About the only MCU or capeshit I did genuinely enjoy.
Manchester by the Sea, 2016. Casey Affleck movie I liked a lot. It's all emotional and sheeit, but bretty gud.
Someone else mentioned The Expanse. I posted elsewhere how it was a guilty modern pleasure for me, but really the pleasure didn't extend much beyond the second season.
Hey Witcher 3 is technically the last 10 years and I shamelessly enjoyed that and both DLCs. On the same WRPG menu, I liked Pillars of Eternity (1) a lot. Kingdom Come: Deliverance almost gets a mention in the same breath here, but not quite - I'm a storyfag, see, and although I remember KCD fondly, I didn't finish or really care about the story at all. They're all 'entertainment media', though right.
But don;t you fuckin dare talk to me about Netflix Witcher.
Does Obra Dinn count? At this point we could get into the definition of 'entertainment media', but I'm too tired for that pedantry and right now I'm focussing on stuff that has a narrative element to get invested in, rather than just disposable game entertainment, so those WRPGs would qualify and Obra Dinn would at least squeeze in there.
Eggers movies - The Witch, Lighthouse and Northman (not so much that last one, but eih). I liked the Coens last oddball anthology, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018.
That's about it. There seems to be a fairly hard cutoff around 2014-2016 for stuff that is really worth a damn. There's multiple shows I really love (eg. Hannibal, the anime Uchouten Kazoku) which fall just outside that time frame. But within the last decade, I'm barrel scraping, hard.
Spy X Family was pretty good. And though I've only watched about a season and a half of it, the Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake is solid and is supposedly closer to the novels than the old series was.
The first couple of Dune adaptations are good, but not great. DEI shit isn't so blatant that it can't be ignored, and it really should have been a TV series since so much of the book has to be cut, even with it being a film trilogy. But I won't pretend like the second one wasn't visually spectacular, especially the depiction of the Harkonnens.
I recently binged the entire series of Tosh.0 and its still within the decade range before that show went to complete shit thanks to TDS being every third joke.
Its a real shame because plenty of videos and bits from the later seasons are just as enjoyable as ever, but lord does it just get old hearing about Trump related jabs (especially those from 2017-19).
But then most of my engagement with "entertainment media" outside video games is with standup comedy or conspiracy/crime podcasts. Both of which require a much higher ability to brush off random Leftie bullshit.
Man I used to love stand up, but it got crippled by the woke plague imo. Something about how direct it is maybe, it’s just jokes with a setup, a subject, and a punchline, made it so easy to subvert. Or maybe it has to do with the “pipeline” of up and coming comics, idk. But in the last decade I can count on one hand the acts I’ve enjoyed. Basically Sam Hyde, Shane Gillis, and Theo Von to an extent.
Who do you like in the conspiracy world? I quite like Whittney Webb, Ron Unz, Suspicious0bservers, the Carlson/Hancock ancient history gang, and James Corbett though I haven’t seen much from him recently
I'm lucky that most of the standup I listen to is either pre-Trump or has a decent pre-Trump catalogue, with the rare one who manages to have avoided much beyond an offhand line.
But yeah between the absurd levels of nepotism in the industry, the sheer level of Jewish overrepresentation (meaning only one type of edgy is usually allowed), and the complete destruction of things like Covid on the industry, its basically going to be a long time before we start getting a large amount of good options coming out.
Also, conspiracy might have been the wrong word as its more like history that was conspiratorial in its time. So government plots, criminal coverups, and the like. So not quite the political conspiracy type and still more of the true crime ones.
only thing is there's no story arc. it's all just a mismatch of a rapid descent into madness. I think the studio should be commended for its use of special effects and spectacle, but the writers really phoned it in.
Man are we watching the same show? By the end of the season the US President is going to be revealed as either a holy warrior of God or an agent of the anti-Christ and it’s legitimately up in the air which way they’re going to go. I heard they might have a text-your-vote thing to decide which way they take it
I still hold out hope that they end up tying things up positively before the show gets canceled. Read it with a hefty dose of suspension of disbelief, and if you make it to the end, tell me it doesn’t nicely tie up some things that otherwise seem like major plot holes.
I think that’s where all the writers with any “talent” went. Like you lay out, only real life can be stranger than fiction and still have people suspending their disbelief
Maybe like John Wick,.
I'll second you on that, it was also one of the few franchises where the sequels were all GOOD than get worse like a Resident Evil etc.
Yeah. I haven't gotten around to watching the latest one yet, but the rest were all fun to watch.
[Gestures Eastward]
As far as Western stuff, Ford v Ferrari was pretty good. Just car porn and competitive guys pushing the state of the art forward. I feel bad for the real Leo Beebe's family though. They needed a corporate stooge to play the villain and made him one-dimensional. Generally positive regarding fatherhood as well.
What do you recommend from the East?
Godzilla Minus One was kino, but I find it so rare that eastern productions are able to “bubble to the surface” of the discussions that I ever come across. Where do you even hear about eastern media worth checking out?
Train to Busan was excellent. It's like Dawn of the Dead crossed with Speed.
The unrelated sequel wasn't bad, but definitely didn't re-capture the excitement of the first.
Train to Busan was great, and was one of the few eastern films that managed to hit my radar.
Tangentially, I’ll just add here: the Rebuild series of films for Neon Genesis, I thought were awesome in and of themselves, and managed the crazy hard task of both honoring the original while adding to the universe through the themes that Anno has grown to appreciate as he got older. I think true beauty is enhanced by context and subtext and imo he’s a master of using those tools to convey a story
Depends on what you like, eastern cinema does revenge thrillers and horror films very well. Oldboy, man from nowhere, and I saw the devil all stand out. Horror wise there’s a plethora, tale of two sisters, noroi, haunted asylum, three extremes, infected, incantation, on and on.
Minus One was good. For the most part I'm just a weeb. I watch the first couple episodes of anything with a synopsis on the seasonal chart that catches my eye and see what's decent enough to continue.
Any specific recommendations are really dependant on personal taste, comedy especially. The Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake and Frieren are the two that jump to my mind as being good watches recently, even if anime isn't your thing.
Michael Mann's Ferrari was decent as well. I didn't see a single minority cast in the movie.
The ending of that movie pisses me off and nearly ruins the entire rest of it for me. Completely out of character for Christian Bale's character (or any man with a sense of honor) to react the way he does. And everyone else just goes along with it like "of course this is the way we expected the race to have ended!"
They're kind of stuck with the way real events unfolded? I guess they could have made Miles more pissed, but McLaren did win the 1966 LeMans and that's why he won. And the Miles really did die in a testing accident 2 months later.
They did take some artistic license in his favor. They put Enzo Ferrari there to give Miles a knowing nod of respect. In reality, Enzo didn't attend '66.
I would have expected him to be way more pissed given the way they they portrayed him in the rest of the film. At the start of the movie he's throwing wrenches at people, they don't really show any character development that would suggest he wouldn't be pissed, and then it's just "oh well: I went against my better judgment and got fucked over by my own team. I guess I'll let that slide."
I get that's generally the way it happened, but you still have to make the characters act/react consistent with how you portrayed them.
The first two seasons of The Mandalorian spring to mind.
I’ll never understand why they didn’t see the massive reaction to Luke Skywalker at the end of the second season and at least try to figure out a way to retcon his character in last jedi
It's my understanding that The Mandalorian managed to evade the Disney Eye of Sauron for the first two seasons as it was a relatively low budget passion project, which allowed for a lot more creative control over the story and production (hence why it was actually good). Unfortunately it became too successful for its own good and attracted the attention of 'interested parties' from the rest of Disney's Star Wars slop, hence why season 3 saw a marked drop in quality.
Venom was stupid but I enjoyed it. Guardians of the Galaxy was 2014. Nothing that I can call incredible or memorable. Those days are long gone.
I've recently seen that horror movie with Nicolas Cage, nothing epic but I enjoyed it.
The worst part about Guardians was the knock-on effects it had on all marbel mobie dialogue going forward, but it was definitely enjoyable enough on the first watch
Similarly with Venom, the general “ok, not the worst thing ever” reaction most people had seems to have sent the total wrong message to Sony, with them quadrupling down on this retarded idea of spider man movies without spider man lol
Last Nic Cage movie I saw was that “the unbearable weight of massive talent”, which I enjoyed. Is that the one you’re talking about? It was a bit crazy lol not too much horror though
Nic Cage makes about 3-4 horror movies a year. Which one?
Long legs I’m betting. It was nothing spectacular, but not preachy and an entertaining watch, I’d say 7/10.
I remember thinking Renfield from last year was surprisingly entertaining alongside the cringe. Although that's more black comedy than actual horror.
It's too bad they cast Awkwafina in that. It could have been so much better with a different co-star.
You lucky bastard. The theater where I saw Long Legs, a place that has tampons in the men’s room, felt the need to place a segment before the movie which explained that THIS MOVIE IS TOTALLY ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY because the director, Osgood Perkins, is the son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins, WHO WAS A HOMOSEXUAL AND SUFFERED CONVERSION THERAPY TO UNDO HIS HOMOSEXALITY AND SO THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY.
Really? I heard it was a good movie. WOW
The movie is fine. It’s just that, despite not having any overt agenda-pushing, I suffered seeing it in a theater which felt the need to shove agenda into it, anyway.
Dumb, popcorn munching entertainment I've managed genuinely to enjoy despite their baggage?
The Expanse, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, and Edge of Tomorrow (that one barely squeaks in under a decade though) come to me off the top of my head.
Edge of Tomorrow was excellent. I enjoyed his other sci-fi film from around the same time, Oblivion. That one might have been like 2012-ish though.
The Expanse had great world-building and the diversity actually made sense, but the supposed realism was undercut by that retarded protomolecule shit and the Martian woman action hero. Would have gone from good to great if they actually stuck with realism and simply focused on interplanetary military operations.
Vid related - my answer is the 3 season show Legion (2017). Normally when I recommend the show, I try to avoid giving too much away, because frankly “show based on obscure X-men comic books” can have the opposite effect on people these days than the intended one of sounding appealing. Lot of burnt bridges from the people putting out this media.
So much of today’s media sacrifices substance and style for THE MESSAGE. What I really enjoyed about Legion was that it had real substance, real style, and was willing to have messages, at least things it wanted to say without forcing them to contort to the monolithic MESSAGE enforced everywhere else. It addresses mental illness and it’s causes both personal and environmental, relationships and romance depicted realistically, abusive codependencies, oh yeah and it has mutants fighting one of the best X-Men villains of all time.
I enjoyed it so much I have trouble articulating exactly why, but the idea that it’s a classic comic character done well ends up being one of the more minor good parts about it. I suppose what I liked so much is just how it does exactly what I think a show should do - carry you away in the moment, with time flying by until it ends, and you’re left with some substantial idea(s) to chew on in every episode. I recommend people check out the first episode (wherever they get their media), and go into it with an open mind and not too many preconceived ideas about what an “X-men show” should look like.
ETA: Utopia (UK) is another 10/10 show, for many of the same reasons I praise Legion - though its first season came out in 2013 and it only ran two seasons, so this edit falls in a legal grey zone lol
How do you answer the question? Feel free to discuss any kind of media you’ve enjoyed recently, books games shows movies podcasts etc etc
Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.
I'm deeply ashamed, pls no bully.
Does HotD manage to salvage anything of value from GoT? I haven’t given it a second thought because the last few seasons of GoT were just such a total piss on the rug
They were awful, and yet I kept watching...
I'd say that House of the Dragon is less bad actually than the last few seasons of GOT. The dialogue and storylines are better, but there's also more wokeness and perversion inserted.
To be specific, a lot revolves around "women being oppressioned", characters are bizarrely made black, and there's some unnecessary sexual perversion inserted.
As Dag says, there are no characters from GoT, and the 'fanservice' in terms of callbacks is limited.
Yeah man… the sunk cost fallacy and the fallacy of “a true GoT adaptation has never been tried!” kept me around too.
The only thing I know about HotD is the promotional images, where they have a platinum haired waif and a platinum haired african supposedly from “a family so inbred that madness has become a common and defining trait”. Since I don’t see them doing an ethnic cleansing subplot in a modern HBO show, I’m left to wonder, is this even addressed? Or just totally taken for granted like in the other show that inadvertently canonized ethnic cleansing (rangz of power that is)
I think the Proper Black guy is from a different family, while the white platinum hair is from the Targaeryen family. Now, supposedly these interbred with one another, but without changing the color of the black family. Just like in Dune, we had Fremen looking like Bedouins and Fremen looking like proper unadulterated black sub-Saharans - apparently, you're only allowed to marry someone of your own race among the Fremen.
It's so ridiculous. And no, it's not addressed. At least we don't get lectures about wacism - thank God for small mercies.
HotD is really good so far and it has none of the characters from GoT so there's no emotional baggage. I'm enjoying it immensely so far: there are some references to the GoT timeline, but for the most part you can treat it like its own separate universe.
I think nearly every single person here would be a liar if they tried to claim to not have some sort of guilty pleasure they still consume despite it being shit and/or woke.
Hmm. I’m going to ignore Japanese things,because I was new to that in the last five years and I don’t have a good enough handle on their timeframe. Also leaving video games out, I could find plenty.
Movies, well, idk maybe Dunkirk and The Mule. There’s not much. I used to take my friends teen kid to Saturday afternoon movies a ton in the 2012-14 timeframe, he was going thru some stuff and it was a nice break, so I saw a lot of the movies released around then. We realized after a while they all sucked. I still remember the supposed hype of Gravity and walking out wonder WTF was so special. It’s what kicked my exploration of old movies off really.
TV shows: Better Call Saul, Chernobyl (HBO), Narcos (Netflix), Clarkson’s Farm, The Grand Tour, another weird German series on Netflix called Dark. I didn’t like any of GoT that actually released in the last decade, so that’s out. I can’t think of much else.
I’m sure there’s things I liked that didn’t stick with me, or I liked the first season then it turned shit (Mandolorian) There’s probably also something wrong with all of what I listed because there’s Jews, women, leftists, trannies, Muslims, communists, or what not in them. I don’t need it rubbed in my face, I didn’t keep a notebook of wokeness, I just watched them and liked.
The “make the first season enjoyable then start forcing in the lame and gay ideas” trick is a really annoying one that’s become increasingly common over the last few years.
Regarding your final thoughts, I totally agree. I made the thread to hopefully inject a little positivity today
Yeah I like these posts occasionally to sift through for ideas. Particularly if I ever see things light hearted and actually funny. The most dead genre, since they can’t make fun of things anymore.
Honestly, in that case, I doubly recommend Legion to you. It walks the fine line of funny, lighthearted, and often leaving you with a big grin, while still dealing with the darker sides of reality in captivating ways. I like to describe it as “realer than real”, somehow its absurdity and its realism are intertwined. Each one facilitates and expresses the other, like Yin and Yang.
Hadn’t seen anything like it but I’ve already seen a few shows try to ape its style, while totally lacking its substance (namely umbrella academy and doom patrol, which were just pale imitations of this piece of art imo).
I'll throw it on the list and see sometime. I did always tend to favor X-Men over the traditional Marvel stuff (or whatever you'd call it)
Better call Saul was great.
The HITMAN trilogy of games (at least the first 2 games which I've played) are a lot of fun.
Movies:
Going back 10 years is a lot easier than going back 5 though, because they were still making decent stuff (albeit less of it) up through around 2016 or so. My personal movie collection drops to near nothing after 2015.
There is a lot of stuff you could say I enjoy but that enjoyment is usually limited by some kind of shoehorned virtue signal. And if something is actually widespread popular you know that it will get a sequel and retconned into absolute faggotry - so I can't even be a fanboy of anything anymore.
I really liked Rogue One and Mission Impossible Rogue Nation + Fallout, my favorite movies of the past decade. I'm not much of a film fan so aside from more popular stuff I don't watch a lot. Pacific Rim is another one of my favorite films but it barely misses out on the timespan.
Rogue One was top notch, everything a franchise blockbuster should be. Beautifully shot, well acted, tight pacing, and an interesting plot that adds to the universe instead of taking away from it (Donnie Yen’s force monk was dope and the ending was 11/10 in terms of “respect for what came before”). What a huge letdown everything that came after (and Episode 7) was.
I thought that the first half of episode 7 was actually really good. It all falls apart after Starkiller Base is introduced. The way the movie is viewed and paced, it feels like two separate films spliced together, like they probably had a finished script that was all the first half of the film, then the Disney execs came in and said to add in a Death Star variant for nostalgia and it totally derailed the plot. Also the movie should have ended with Starkiller Base damaged but not destroyed in order to keep it as an overarching threat to the Resistance/New Republic, and basically have the next two movies occur as a race against the First Order engineering department to stop them from repairing the station and finding a way to defeat Snoke. That way, it doesn't feel like a super cheap gimmick that was forgotten about after the first film.
Honestly, I’m harsher on 7 than is deserved in a vacuum, because of how any potential it had was all squandered in 8 and especially 9. I even enjoyed parts of 8 purely for the visual spectacle it offered (krait and a lot of the space scenes especially the hyperdrive kamikaze)…hell I even enjoyed parts of Solo. I think the biggest problem was the lack of a single overarching vision for post Lucas SW. Well, that and that parasite Kathleen Kennedy
I agree wholeheartedly. 9 is a complete trainwreck of a story done way better in Dark Empire (and I'm not a huge fan of the comic, but they have a nice artstyle so it's fun for me to flip through my copy and read the trilogy once in a while). I like 8 more than your average Disney star wars hater for the beauty of the shots, but I agree the plot is a little silly, it feels like episode 8.5 not 8 (Ren killing Snoke followed by their fight with the guard before the kamikaze was a wonderfully made sequence and the peak of non Rogue One Disney star wars). I also really enjoyed Solo except for the Lando robot thing, but that's like maybe 5 minutes that I can go to the bathroom or something. Aside from that I haven't kept up with any of the shows, and aside from Mando season 1 I'm pretty happy about it. Never watched Andor, maybe I should since I hear such high praise over it.
Netflix Daredevil was great when it first came out and on re-watch even the weaker second half of the second season was miles better than anything we get today. The Punisher spinoff wasn't as strong but still watchable.
Terminal List came out recently was also good, so was Reacher but that had its issues, particularly season 2 with "super smart but oh-so quirky mixed negress nerd girl".
Old Henry was a pleasant surprise.
Bone Tomahawk from 2015 is arguably one of the best westerns ever made (trigger warning for squeamish, those who saw it know the scene).
Thanks. I still haven’t seen reacher. Have a number of the books that I have yet to read. Daredevil made me go out and get some of the 80s and 90s comics
Yellowstone, the Elvis movie , blue bloods
I need to binge the last couple of seasons of Blue Bloods. My homebrew DVR doesn't seem to like my local CBS affiliate, and I have seen anything from the last few seasons.
Good show. I love murder mystery/cop shows and stopped watching some during summer of love due to the pandering but Blue Bloods didn’t go crazy
Nobody. Recently watched it, and the flip of having a comedy actor do a serious role works. And he's shown as a positive father figure, and his dad is shown as a positive father figure.
Barf of the Wild was okay. My interest in all media has declined to such an extent that I hardly consume any of it. I completely stopped watching TV 15 years ago, unfortunately I am subject to goybox here and there while visiting family.
I saw He Never Died with Henry Rollins a while back. That was pretty decent.
They apparently made a follow-up with a black chick lead called She Never Died. I won't be seeing that one.
I'm frontloading my weakest picks here since they're the tougher choices.
Travelers, 2016. some soybeard shit in it. lots to recommend otherwise, decent sci fi.
Dirk Gently also 2016ish. YMMV. very reddit or very BBC-tier goofy depending on your perspective. some faggotry and black boss-grrlism. But I did enjoy it at the time.
Severance on HBO was all right, but considering that S2 hasn't come out yet and it's all hinging on weird cliffhangers, plus it's also quite faggoty, I don't hold out much hope.
Someone mentioned GotG 2014, that's in there. I enjoyed that and the sequel a bit less so. About the only MCU or capeshit I did genuinely enjoy.
Manchester by the Sea, 2016. Casey Affleck movie I liked a lot. It's all emotional and sheeit, but bretty gud.
Someone else mentioned The Expanse. I posted elsewhere how it was a guilty modern pleasure for me, but really the pleasure didn't extend much beyond the second season.
Hey Witcher 3 is technically the last 10 years and I shamelessly enjoyed that and both DLCs. On the same WRPG menu, I liked Pillars of Eternity (1) a lot. Kingdom Come: Deliverance almost gets a mention in the same breath here, but not quite - I'm a storyfag, see, and although I remember KCD fondly, I didn't finish or really care about the story at all. They're all 'entertainment media', though right. But don;t you fuckin dare talk to me about Netflix Witcher.
Does Obra Dinn count? At this point we could get into the definition of 'entertainment media', but I'm too tired for that pedantry and right now I'm focussing on stuff that has a narrative element to get invested in, rather than just disposable game entertainment, so those WRPGs would qualify and Obra Dinn would at least squeeze in there.
Eggers movies - The Witch, Lighthouse and Northman (not so much that last one, but eih). I liked the Coens last oddball anthology, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018.
That's about it. There seems to be a fairly hard cutoff around 2014-2016 for stuff that is really worth a damn. There's multiple shows I really love (eg. Hannibal, the anime Uchouten Kazoku) which fall just outside that time frame. But within the last decade, I'm barrel scraping, hard.
Star Ocean: The Second Story R. Not woke at all, and everything a remake should be.
I talked about it here.
Spy X Family was pretty good. And though I've only watched about a season and a half of it, the Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake is solid and is supposedly closer to the novels than the old series was.
The first couple of Dune adaptations are good, but not great. DEI shit isn't so blatant that it can't be ignored, and it really should have been a TV series since so much of the book has to be cut, even with it being a film trilogy. But I won't pretend like the second one wasn't visually spectacular, especially the depiction of the Harkonnens.
I recently binged the entire series of Tosh.0 and its still within the decade range before that show went to complete shit thanks to TDS being every third joke.
Its a real shame because plenty of videos and bits from the later seasons are just as enjoyable as ever, but lord does it just get old hearing about Trump related jabs (especially those from 2017-19).
But then most of my engagement with "entertainment media" outside video games is with standup comedy or conspiracy/crime podcasts. Both of which require a much higher ability to brush off random Leftie bullshit.
Man I used to love stand up, but it got crippled by the woke plague imo. Something about how direct it is maybe, it’s just jokes with a setup, a subject, and a punchline, made it so easy to subvert. Or maybe it has to do with the “pipeline” of up and coming comics, idk. But in the last decade I can count on one hand the acts I’ve enjoyed. Basically Sam Hyde, Shane Gillis, and Theo Von to an extent.
Who do you like in the conspiracy world? I quite like Whittney Webb, Ron Unz, Suspicious0bservers, the Carlson/Hancock ancient history gang, and James Corbett though I haven’t seen much from him recently
I'm lucky that most of the standup I listen to is either pre-Trump or has a decent pre-Trump catalogue, with the rare one who manages to have avoided much beyond an offhand line.
But yeah between the absurd levels of nepotism in the industry, the sheer level of Jewish overrepresentation (meaning only one type of edgy is usually allowed), and the complete destruction of things like Covid on the industry, its basically going to be a long time before we start getting a large amount of good options coming out.
Also, conspiracy might have been the wrong word as its more like history that was conspiratorial in its time. So government plots, criminal coverups, and the like. So not quite the political conspiracy type and still more of the true crime ones.
Do video games count? Aside from those it is mostly anime. Infinity War was a decent end.
Mostly indie stuff. Indie games, indie animations, etc. Anime as well.
I'm particularly excited for Lackadaisy.
Tom Cruise's Top Gun Maverick
only thing is there's no story arc. it's all just a mismatch of a rapid descent into madness. I think the studio should be commended for its use of special effects and spectacle, but the writers really phoned it in.
Man are we watching the same show? By the end of the season the US President is going to be revealed as either a holy warrior of God or an agent of the anti-Christ and it’s legitimately up in the air which way they’re going to go. I heard they might have a text-your-vote thing to decide which way they take it
You ever come across this leaked plot outline before?
https://www.wanttoknow.info/secret_societies/hidden_hand_081018
I still hold out hope that they end up tying things up positively before the show gets canceled. Read it with a hefty dose of suspension of disbelief, and if you make it to the end, tell me it doesn’t nicely tie up some things that otherwise seem like major plot holes.
I think that’s where all the writers with any “talent” went. Like you lay out, only real life can be stranger than fiction and still have people suspending their disbelief