LazBro
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Post by LazBro on Apr 22, 2024 7:20:43 GMT -5
Top Chef Season 21 I started watching Top Chef in season three: I was amazed by Hung's chicken chopping in the mise en place relay and I've been a loyal fan ever since. I feel like it's been the most consistent and the least bullshit cooking competition out there since day one, and I'll be watching until the formula dies. It's actually the only one I watch anymore. And Kristen Kish is a brilliant choice for new host - she's lovely and smart and weird, like some kind of swan-necked alien gourmet. So I'm happy to say that I'm officially on board with this new season. The chefs (minus the first part of the season riff raff) seem fully engaged and interesting, and some of them even pull on my heartstrings - looking at you, guy who made that relish tray who won't win but what if he did? I would love it if the supper club challenge served as a replacement to restaurant week, which has never been a favorite of mine and, 20+ seasons on, has grown really tiresome to me. I doubt I'll be that lucky, though.
I've watched Top Chef since the beginning, all the way back in 2006, and it really never has lost a step. Preferences for certain locations or contestants aside, the core of the competition has remained remarkably steady. Kristen is a terrific replacement for Padma, and I think as long as Tom and Gail are available to keep making it, I'll keep being happy with it. The only other show I watch, in full, that was also around in 2006 is Saturday Night Live. All of the other pillars, like the late night shows, have changed hosts since then and I fell off.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 22, 2024 18:39:58 GMT -5
Recovering from oral surgery and have been spending a lot of time with an ice pack watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus—I think I’ve probably seen most of these two or three times before, but that’s two or three times over nearly twenty years so I’m obviously not a major fan even if I like them.
With an exception of one or two, most of these I saw, most recently, when Zack Handlen was doing his Flying Circus reviews at the AV Club, so more than ten years ago, and they seem so much older now. They’re 25% older now, and that’s not nothing, but aspects of the humor and aesthetic are already a bit atavistic, reaching back into Edwardiana (obviously the inspiration runs the other way—really there’s some stuff that seems almost carried over—but The Mupper Show and vaudeville come to mind) and Monty Python has been a classic, something firmly from the past, my entire life. I think a lot of that, though, is that when I last watched it there was a broader environment for rewatching old TV—witness the AV Club doing reviews of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I ended up doing a bit of reading on the status of the show now and it turns out it was released on blu ray (I wonder how it looked, the Netflix “print” really shows its video origins and I don’t think that’s really fixable) but the release failed to make its money back. That’s hardly unqiue (Handlen did Flying Circus seasons between his main gig, reviewing Trek series, and there won’t be any more Trek series remasters after TNG’s likewise failed to make any money). The writing was on the wall for physical media sales back then though, probably—if I’d had Monty Python’s Flying Circus on DVD it would have been probably been bought for something like $10-20 used, which was pretty much everyone bought old TV series back then. Even if complete series sets are even better deals today, physical media’s increasingly passé and there’s just less inclination to look. As a fraction of my total TV watching I probably watch more old TV than most but Monty Python’s Flying Circus is older than all that stuff.
There are definitely more references to stuff of the time than I noticed in the past (often by recognizing stuff with the cadences of pop culture references without recognizing anything in them) so much of the humor’s based in…not even very Oxbridgey stuff, just “you took all your 101 level courses and there’s some bonus stuff for you who went further.” That’s not an insult at all, it’s just nice to have a broader base of knowledge for your humor, it provides more opportunities. It’s probably a big part of why Monty Python survived in a way its predecessors didn’t. It’s also just feels less hollow than a lot of more recent comedies where an exapansive knowledge of pop culture history takes the place that history and geography do in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The idea of some kind of broad-based intellectual common ground, though, feels quite old.
Reading on the background of the show Monty Python seems like it was just an interative step—they had antecedents who were doing similar things, even structurally, and they’d all more-or-less worked with one another before in different contexts too. Whatever that final step was definitely meant something, though, for Monty Python to have such a global effect beyond its predecessors. Maybe we’re at enough distance now that Monty Python is finally more similar than what came before.
That part of history is really part of what makes the show interesting to me now—the image of the then still self-contained China in the west (and Chinese propaganda to the west at the time played into China’s otherness) is something that fascinates me, and it’s interesting to see that plays out in Flying Circus, even when it crosses some lines (“The Cycling Tour” is one of my favorites but man I wish “BINGO!” were performed a bit differently; Mao knowing his Eurovision is one of my favorite understated Flying Circus moments, though). It definitely helps knowing that the Pythons were usually in on the joke (I’m not usually one to think about media this but there’s a region Graham Chapman’s saying so many of those “problematic” lines), though without that context I think the show would seem even over.
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Baron von Costume
TI Forumite
Like an iron maiden made of pillows... the punishment is decadence!
Posts: 4,659
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Post by Baron von Costume on Apr 24, 2024 9:32:43 GMT -5
The one thing I'll comment on the TNG remastered releases not selling super well is that I think part of the problem is just how much they'd soaked trek fans for for the original DVDs.
Yeah the super serious fans were going to pick it up but as someone who'd slowly collected the original dvds of that and ds9 as the occasion treat since the sets were sometimes 4x what a set of something else would cost there's no way I was replacing them, especially as my tv at the time was only giving me half the blu-ray experience anyway.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 24, 2024 21:32:03 GMT -5
The one thing I'll comment on the TNG remastered releases not selling super well is that I think part of the problem is just how much they'd soaked trek fans for for the original DVDs. Yeah the super serious fans were going to pick it up but as someone who'd slowly collected the original dvds of that and ds9 as the occasion treat since the sets were sometimes 4x what a set of something else would cost there's no way I was replacing them, especially as my tv at the time was only giving me half the blu-ray experience anyway. I didn't buy any of the sets originally. It was always too expensive. The Blu-Rays of TNG were crazy expensive. I own the TNG Seasons 3 Blu-Ray set, but that is because I won a copy from the Mission Log podcast. Good thing it is one of my favorite seasons of TNG!
Edited to add: That said, I would definitely pay for a Blu-Ry copy of DS9. That is something I'd save up money to get. I'd want that one much more than any other TNG seasons.
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Apr 24, 2024 21:50:41 GMT -5
I hit a couple of yard sales today, and among some other DVD's I picked up, I got a copy of the TV movie kickoff to the original 70's Battlestar Galactia series. It wasn't something I was looking for, but it was only a dollar, and I had never even seen it on DVD before.
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LazBro
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Post by LazBro on Apr 25, 2024 8:02:22 GMT -5
Finished our latest binge, which was the original run of Leverage. Definitely strong enough to add to the admittedly low-stakes canon of "procedurals to watch." I wonder if the show plays even better now than it did on first release, given its high-level concept of "con artists punish rich people." All the characters grew on me, especially Christian Kane as Elliot, the "hitter" with the running gag that he's secretly good at everything, and Timothy Hutton as Nate, the mastermind. I like that while Nate was driven to do good, it never forgets that for him, despite his own wishes, he's really doing it not out of a desire to do good, but out of a desire to punish. He's fueled by rage. It's a light show, but he's a dark character.
We're going to watch the follow-up series Leverage: Redemption as well, but we're going to feather the brake a little and keep it to one episode a night so we can watch other things. Things like...
Fallout! Really enjoyed the (over-long) first episode. The world is immediately compelling, and the show looks great. I think I agree with William Hughes over on TOC, that introducing the Maximus storyline before Lucy left the vault was a mistake. Her first steps into the wasteland should have been our first steps, too. I think they could have pulled off an all-Lucy first episode, then start the second episode with Maximus. Getting the tone right when adapting Fallout is basically impossible, because the games themselves are inconsistent in tone, especially between Interplay and Bethesda titles. Obviously they are more inspired by Bethesda here, no surprise, and that's fine. It feels like Fallout to me.
Bona fides: I've played Fallouts 1, 2, 3, 4, and New Vegas, but none of them is sacred to me. Not really my type of game.
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Apr 25, 2024 8:45:35 GMT -5
Watched Deadwood season 2, episode 9 last night and then immediately had to watch episode 10. And then I had to sit on my living room sofa and stare at the wall for a while while I tried not to cry myself into a coma. Jesus. They really fucking did it. This show actually killed a kid. And it was the SHERIFF's kid. Fuck. I didn't think it was going to swerve like that.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 25, 2024 9:51:16 GMT -5
I saw that Severance has wrapped filming on S2 and I am jazzed, that was such a great, weird show.
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Apr 25, 2024 11:45:59 GMT -5
Watched Deadwood season 2, episode 9 last night and then immediately had to watch episode 10. And then I had to sit on my living room sofa and stare at the wall for a while while I tried not to cry myself into a coma. Jesus. They really fucking did it. This show actually killed a kid. And it was the SHERIFF's kid. Fuck. I didn't think it was going to swerve like that. Nobody expected that twist, as it wasn't in the plot outline. Apparently, while the cast and crew liked the child actor, his stage mom was very difficult and caused disruption on the set. I read an interview with Timothy Olyphant where he said Milch came to his trailer and said " Ok, we're going to kill off the kid. But don't worry, it'll be great for you."
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Post by Prole Hole on Apr 26, 2024 4:23:34 GMT -5
The one thing I'll comment on the TNG remastered releases not selling super well is that I think part of the problem is just how much they'd soaked trek fans for for the original DVDs. Yeah the super serious fans were going to pick it up but as someone who'd slowly collected the original dvds of that and ds9 as the occasion treat since the sets were sometimes 4x what a set of something else would cost there's no way I was replacing them, especially as my tv at the time was only giving me half the blu-ray experience anyway. I believe that Paramount used the TNG experience as much as a technical test for what was possible as much as they were intending it make money off it. IIRC it lost them about $50 million, which is a big hit for what amounts to a testbed but they received universal acclaim for it and the results are spectacular. But since it was never "designed" as a money-making scheme, they were never going to spring for DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. Many of the DS9 reruns I see these days look like absolute dogshit because they're being broadcast in SD rather than anything better (usually on free channels with adverts) and I must imagine it's doing damage to the show. The Netflix versions looks fine (ditto Voyager) but urgh when I come across an episode of either DS9 or Voyager in the wild the just look so terrible I can't even really watch them (and that's before we even get into the whole aspect-ratio debate).
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Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 26, 2024 12:17:26 GMT -5
The one thing I'll comment on the TNG remastered releases not selling super well is that I think part of the problem is just how much they'd soaked trek fans for for the original DVDs. Yeah the super serious fans were going to pick it up but as someone who'd slowly collected the original dvds of that and ds9 as the occasion treat since the sets were sometimes 4x what a set of something else would cost there's no way I was replacing them, especially as my tv at the time was only giving me half the blu-ray experience anyway. I believe that Paramount used the TNG experience as much as a technical test for what was possible as much as they were intending it make money off it. IIRC it lost them about $50 million, which is a big hit for what amounts to a testbed but they received universal acclaim for it and the results are spectacular. But since it was never "designed" as a money-making scheme, they were never going to spring for DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. Many of the DS9 reruns I see these days look like absolute dogshit because they're being broadcast in SD rather than anything better (usually on free channels with adverts) and I must imagine it's doing damage to the show. The Netflix versions looks fine (ditto Voyager) but urgh when I come across an episode of either DS9 or Voyager in the wild the just look so terrible I can't even really watch them (and that's before we even get into the whole aspect-ratio debate). There's got to be a way to use AI to do at least some of the upscaling now? It will not be able to bring it to true Hi-Def, but you'd think that an AI sweep would be beneficial, and an improvement over the SD versions that are streaming now.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 26, 2024 19:14:05 GMT -5
Desert Dweller I don’t know if it’s been done at scale but the issue with an AI remaster is that it’s not really a remaster but a new (photorealistic) animated film. I don’t know if it matters to most people, but to me the approach increases the distance from the original material while good remasters reduce that feeling of distance.
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Post by Mrs David Tennant on Apr 26, 2024 19:27:50 GMT -5
I'm watching an episode of The Carol Burnett Show that I don't recall ever seeing and I'm just dying. Tim Conway and Harvey Korman are just never not hysterical.
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Post by liebkartoffel on Apr 27, 2024 12:31:08 GMT -5
This week was the first dud of an otherwise stellar Top Chef season. Open-ended challenges can be a lot of fun, but not when no one, including the judges, has any idea what the challenge is or what they want out of it. It's always frustrating when the judges invent criteria on the fly to justify why the love/hate a dish. "Maybe simplicity is the true chaos!" Nah, dude, you just liked how it tasted. The producers themselves seemed to know this episode was a clunker, what with those weird interstitial scenes seemingly designed to distract us from the incomprehensibleness of the brief. I've also been frustrated with the Last Chance Kitchen shenanigans. Soo seems like a good guy and a great chef, but introducing him as the super special secret 16th contestant meant that narratively it made zero sense for him not to make it into the competition, so they're just introducing this suspicion that Tom/the producers were putting their thumb on the scale throughout the first batch of LCK episodes.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 27, 2024 18:45:16 GMT -5
Desert Dweller I don’t know if it’s been done at scale but the issue with an AI remaster is that it’s not really a remaster but a new (photorealistic) animated film. I don’t know if it matters to most people, but to me the approach increases the distance from the original material while good remasters reduce that feeling of distance. Ah, that is a good point. I hadn't really considered it that way.
The problem is that a real remaster of DS9 would be outrageously expensive. I think the TNG remaster cost something like $10-$15 million.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Ira Steven Behr attempted a crowdfunding effort just for this. He got over $500K for the DS9 documentary. He was able to remaster around 30 minutes of footage for that. The VOY doc crowdfunded $1.2 million, I think. I think Paramount underestimates audience desire for a DS9 remaster.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 27, 2024 18:50:37 GMT -5
I watched Episode 5 of Sugar. It's a lot darker than the previous episodes. Fantastic directing by Fernando Meirelles. Colin Farrell is great in it. It's apparently the next episode, Episode 6, that reveals the big twist. On the one hand, I can see why critics were so upset when this happened, because by Episode 5, this show is a dark look a human trafficking and the way Hollywood preys on young actresses. Which legitimately is good fodder for a modern Los Angeles Noir story. On the other hand, clearly this show is not going to be this in depth examination of human trafficking of vulnerable immigrant young women, nor a Hollywood drama about exploitation of young actresses. The entire style of the show would not tonally fit with that kind of story. Honestly the one scene in this episode that depicted the sex trafficking was almost jarring in how it felt like it came out of another show. And frankly this subject matter is too depressing to form the basis of an ongoing tv series. Like, it is obvious that this series isn't going to become about John Sugar rescuing vulnerable immigrant women from sex trafficking, or solve Hollywood's problem with the exploitation of young women.
The actual Missing Persons case that Sugar is investigating is just spinning its wheels. None of this stuff has any narrative momentum, or even any real story direction.
So, I am looking forward to whatever this crazy twist is that is coming next week. Hopefully it is something that can provide a narrative boost. Or, judging by the reviews, turn the show into another show entirely.
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Post by rjamielanga on Apr 28, 2024 3:15:54 GMT -5
Dead Boy Detectives on Netflix. I suspect this is going to be the new obsession of weird teenage girls, kind of like Supernatural was.
I've only seen the first episode, but it's pretty fun so far.
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Post by Ben Grimm on Apr 28, 2024 13:10:05 GMT -5
Dead Boy Detectives on Netflix. I suspect this is going to be the new obsession of weird teenage girls, kind of like Supernatural was.
I've only seen the first episode, but it's pretty fun so far.
We watched the first episode as well, and enjoyed it. I had remembered the two lead characters show up on Doom Patrol with different actors, but had forgotten that Ruth Connell was on it as well, playing the same character. And since we've also got Sandman's Death making an appearance, this links up two of my favorite DC shows to date.
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Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Apr 29, 2024 14:24:38 GMT -5
I finished watching Frasier yesterday. I think I had fallen off watching it by the second-to-last season, so I didn't really remember any of the final two. When it was done, Hulu decided to auto-play Cheers. I've seen a few episodes here and there, mostly due to staying up late for Nick at Nite when staying at my grandparents' house as a kid, and I remembered enjoying it so I figured why not. (I also remembered the hoopla around its series finale, which I was not allowed to watch because it was on too late at night for a second-grader.) Damn, it's just as funny as I recall, if not more. I'll probably watch until Kirstie Alley shows up. I remember not liking those episodes much.
Harry Anderson just showed up early in the first season as a con man, mostly as an excuse to let him do magic tricks. It's a small thing, but it made me really happy.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 29, 2024 21:00:55 GMT -5
Desert Dweller One great thing about the remastered clips in the DS9 doc was they found the old CGI—or at least some of the old CGI—was basically in a best case scenario in terms of preservation. The old models rendered and they old script still moved them right—worries about degradation and lost data were unrealized (of course there’ll always be some lost stuff—that was even the case with the model work on TNG, where they had to replace shots bits with new CGI). Being able to basically just re-run all that space CGI would be a huge relief. I bet Odo’s morphing from the early seasons would have to be totally redone, though I’m not sure how much of a hassle that would be—certainly less of one than in the 90s, and since any remaster would try to keep the nineties look it shouldn’t be so taxing.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 29, 2024 22:14:09 GMT -5
With an exception of one or two, most of these I saw, most recently, when Zack Handlen was doing his Flying Circus reviews at the AV Club, so more than ten years ago, and they seem so much older now. On Sunday I had time to kill and stopped in a bookstore. I saw David Stubb’s Different Times: A History of British Comedy and decided to see what it said about Monty Python and he actually addressed this—I knew US culture was squarer than popular memory (the youth voted for Nixon!) but that was also true in the UK, with a vengeance. He described it as seeming to come from a “culture before rock & roll” and a large chunk of Britain still was. He gives a couple of reasons for it being a signpost outside Monty Python’s Flying Circus’s content, too: it was the first or one of the first sketch shows broadcast in color and it Terry Jones arranged the tapes to be saved before they could be wiped, allowing for reruns and export. The content, though, Stubbs does not like a lot of it. I’d say about ⅔-¾ of section on Monty Python is dedicated to its problematic elements. He does not see the camp as sympathetic, judging Chapman too butch and Palin a latent homophobe. He’s not a fan of the pepperpots or other drag roles, either, describing them both making the joke the de-mascing of the actors (yeah true some of the time) and kind of seeing it as a sort of “womanface,” though I don’t think he used the word. Cleveland definitely deserved better roles, but she also wasn’t a writer, which seems like an important nuance. It really reminds me of the problematica-style criticism one gets from Americans—I had no idea it crossed the pond. Culture victory for the US, I guess. It’s not that I don’t agree that there’s a fair amount sexist—I think this is a blind spot of Gilliam in particular, and one of the reasons I singled him out in the “change a director” thread, though I have a higher threshold than Stubbs. The big issue for me, though, is that this doesn’t really give any insight into the show, its composition, and its place in television history, which is my problem with this style of criticism since forever. I looked up reviews of Stubbs’s book and saw one of the main criticisms, even in positive reviews, was that he kind of went so far to verge into a sort of exclusion himself, outright saying he was not discussing a lot of female comics because he didn’t want to mansplain their work. You’d think the author of a book on comedy would know how to avoid self-parody (Stubbs is mainly a music critic, too, which makes his emphasis on problematica even funnier given music’s the ultimate “you need to separate art from the artist” medium). Class—what I do expect from a British writer—does come in a bit, as do politics. A lot of his defense of the show is a defense of Cleese’s writing, going into a discussion of the class dynamics of the Ministry of Silly Walks, a sketch Cleese apparently doesn’t like because it doesn’t have deeper satire. I’m also not sure if class is the thing to discuss there, given that we’re dealing with a civil servant and someone giving a grant proposal. It resonates to me more as someone who’s done a lot of grant proposals, and the way the Pythons found humor in bureaucracy. He has high praise for Cleese in Life of Brian, too, reminding me to rewatch it given Easter’s coming up, and his plea for solidarity despite not being particularly on the left (he doesn’t make a point of it, but Cleese himself would become a splitter in the 80s by abandoning Labour for the Social Democratic Party—hell given his recent evolution he might support the new party of the same name too). I paged through the rest a bit—to my surprise he was a fan of French & Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous (some women make the cut). The enjoyment of French & Saunders coming from the close rapport between the two more than anything else seems right to me from what I remember of the show (and I remember liking the earlier ones—where I had no clue of what they were parodying—more), as well as my mother and sister’s enjoyment of them (my sister, who doesn’t go to the theater that often, went to one of the Branagh Poirot films essentially just for them). He’s right about Ab Fab being essentially one long sketch, albeit a very good one (at least until a point). A Bit of Fry & Laurie—the only sketch comedy I really love, American, British, or otherwise—gets a brief mention, which doesn’t surprise me because I don’t think it was very important per se. He notes that Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie made a departure from most Cambridge comedy graduates in doing commercials, which was seen as a declassé and capitalistic (the dynamics of most comedy going through a public broadcaster must have been weird). Based on that, Stubbs rights, you’d expect the show to be “smart” but of noxious middle class politics (not me, I’m an American, people do commercials for cash, who cares) and seems surprised it turned out quite good. He mentions its smart use of postmodern concepts and willingess to dive into niche topics, which seems to me like the thing to spend more precious time on, but what really makes Strubbs happy is that the Rupert Murdoch sketch. It is one of their funniest sketches, but they also did a bunch about the broader deregulation of British TV (the only reason I know anything about it), many of which were more inventive. Even in brief snippets it’s really kind of a tiresome book to read—I don’t know how it plays with other British comedy (I’ve seen enough to know there’s a lot I wouldn’t like) but with the good stuff Stubb’s approach really constitutes a shallow, formulaic mode of interpretation even if there are some decent nuggets and unexpected takes. Just like with the Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World podcast with Rife it is frustrating to be an unimaginative center left dude (more Michael Palin than Terry Jones, who did not just play Marx on TV to their mutual sometimes-consternation) with a more structurally critical view of this stuff than people ostensibly more progressive than me.
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repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,557
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Post by repulsionist on Apr 30, 2024 2:29:31 GMT -5
Digging the new 50s Super Panavision AI blend from Abandoned Films.
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Post by Lurky McLurk on May 1, 2024 4:33:27 GMT -5
Random thought for a TV show concept. A modern update of Knight Rider, but KITT does all the absurd shit that technology does now. Like Michael Knight will be chasing down criminals and KITT will helpfully suggest "a minute of mindfulness."
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LazBro
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Post by LazBro on May 1, 2024 7:20:54 GMT -5
Random thought for a TV show concept. A modern update of Knight Rider, but KITT does all the absurd shit that technology does now. Like Michael Knight will be chasing down criminals and KITT will helpfully suggest "a minute of mindfulness." KITT is now a Cybertruck.
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Post by Prole Hole on May 1, 2024 7:29:28 GMT -5
Random thought for a TV show concept. A modern update of Knight Rider, but KITT does all the absurd shit that technology does now. Like Michael Knight will be chasing down criminals and KITT will helpfully suggest "a minute of mindfulness." Late Afternoon Rider.
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ABz B👹anaz
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on May 1, 2024 8:36:51 GMT -5
Random thought for a TV show concept. A modern update of Knight Rider, but KITT does all the absurd shit that technology does now. Like Michael Knight will be chasing down criminals and KITT will helpfully suggest "a minute of mindfulness." KITT is now a Cybertruck. Someone yesterday suggested that a Back to the Future reboot should use a fucking Cybertrukkk. I guess it is about as reputable as a DeLorean was, but still...don't give e-Lon any more free publicity please.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on May 1, 2024 8:37:29 GMT -5
KITT is now a Cybertruck. Someone yesterday suggested that a Back to the Future reboot should use a fucking Cybertrukkk. I guess it is about as reputable as a DeLorean was, but still...don't give e-Lon any more free publicity please. DeLoreans seem like marvels of engineering comparatively!
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Post by Ben Grimm on May 1, 2024 9:31:04 GMT -5
Someone yesterday suggested that a Back to the Future reboot should use a fucking Cybertrukkk. I guess it is about as reputable as a DeLorean was, but still...don't give e-Lon any more free publicity please. DeLoreans seem like marvels of engineering comparatively! Could a DeLorean survive a carwash? That puts it up a few tiers, at least.
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on May 1, 2024 21:19:31 GMT -5
Someone yesterday suggested that a Back to the Future reboot should use a fucking Cybertrukkk. I guess it is about as reputable as a DeLorean was, but still...don't give e-Lon any more free publicity please. DeLoreans seem like marvels of engineering comparatively! The suspension’s supposedly pretty great, designed by Colin Chapman of Lotus. The issue was that (unlike Lotuses) the car was quite heavy and consequently underpowered. The long time to production made the styling, despite its futuristic touches, seemed out of style when introduced (e.g. cubed tail lamps)—in a lotmof ways it just missed out on being cool. That’s in the rear view mirror now, and even without BTTF I think it would have had a following. That’s before the notoriety around the company also really hurt (Chapman would have probably ended up in prison if he hadn’t died first). Further irony is that John DeLorean first described the project as “the ethical sports car,” meant to be against Detroit’s excesses only to fall to a different set of excesses. I don’t know what the equivalent would be today. There aren’t really independent car companies anymore—it’s very hard to make a profit as an automaker (there’s a reason DeLorean and Chapman reaorted to blatantly illegal financing strategies and pretty questionable subsidies from the government of Northern Island). This difficulty means that automakers are pretty conservative, especially in the US market where transaction prices are lower. I’m kind of straining to think of a cool-but-not car recently sold in America—stretching back to the aughts, maybe the Malibu Maxx? Anyway this is all kind of a moot point because Zemeckis won’t allow a reboot so long as he’s alive, and will probably direct his estate not to allow one either (though I doubt heirs or trustees would be able to resist). Beyond a beyond “no more reboots” sentiment I also don’t know how one could be effective—society really underwent a sort of phase change in the sixties, so thirty year differences don’t lead to the same culture shock.
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Post by Desert Dweller on May 1, 2024 23:59:35 GMT -5
Anyway this is all kind of a moot point because Zemeckis won’t allow a reboot so long as he’s alive, and will probably direct his estate not to allow one either (though I doubt heirs or trustees would be able to resist). Beyond a beyond “no more reboots” sentiment I also don’t know how one could be effective—society really underwent a sort of phase change in the sixties, so thirty year differences don’t lead to the same culture shock.
There's a new Broadway musical of BTTF that premiered this year. That's the best you're going to get, I think.
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