TV Reviews - Assorted
Oct. 21st, 2013 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWe watched a couple of episodes of How I Met Your Mother (8x24 and 9x01, because Jethrien went to high school with the woman introduced as “the mother”). I’ve seen a bunch of random episodes of this show before, either via Edgehopper or because they happened to be on when I was at the Laundromat over the winter, and I think if I feel the urge to watch more sitcom TV, it’s going to be the one I hunt up DVD sets of.
We also watched a bunch of third-season episodes of The Big Bang Theory that had been recommended by my dad. It’s…okay. It’s better than the early first season stuff we’d seen before; it certainly has witty moments and the occasional fun reference. But I can’t get over the idea that they’re laughing at geeks for being geeky, and I don’t particularly like most of the characters. (I will admit to loving the guest appearance of evil Wil Wheaton, both his character and the fact that he wore a collection of Diesel Sweeties t-shirts.) We’re going to make one more try with some Season 6 material, particularly stuff that focuses on the girlfriends as a group, but I don’t have high hopes at this point.
Many of the DC animated movies have been available for free streaming via Amazon Prime, so I’ve watched Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, Superman: Doomsday and All-Star Superman in the past couple of weeks. All of them are attempts to distill comic storylines into 1.5 hour movies, and they’re of varying quality.
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights has a framing story about Krona trying to come through from the antimatter universe and the corps fighting him back; with what amounts to a “Greatest Green Lantern Stories Ever Told” being recounted to the rookies while they wait for the battle to start. I though Captain Tightpants did a great job voicing Hal Jordan, but honestly, Hal is the most boring member of the corps. If they need a GL to be headstrong, stupid and cocky, they use Guy. If they need someone to make a hard choice, they use John. If they need someone to be unsure and emotional, they use Kyle. Hal is left being “generically heroic”, and there isn’t enough to that to make him interesting with.
Superman: Doomsday was a cramming down of the six-month death and return of Superman story into a single movie, which meant a LOT of streamlining. Only one fake Superman (with elements of the original four), one primary villain (Luthor), and because Superman is out of commission for half the film and mostly in fight scenes for the rest, hyper-competent Lois Lane is the real protagonist.
All-Star Superman was Dwayne McDuffie’s attempt to shoehorn a Grant Morrison 12-issue maxiseries into a single movie. Pros: It made more sense than the original, worked vaguely well as a single story, and was fun to watch. Cons: It still has too many rapidly-resolved side plots (particularly the two new Kryptonians who are defeated by deus ex machina), Lois is practically used as a prop (but so is almost everyone else, because they don’t have the screen time to develop characters), and there’s never any real sense of tension.
We also watched a bunch of third-season episodes of The Big Bang Theory that had been recommended by my dad. It’s…okay. It’s better than the early first season stuff we’d seen before; it certainly has witty moments and the occasional fun reference. But I can’t get over the idea that they’re laughing at geeks for being geeky, and I don’t particularly like most of the characters. (I will admit to loving the guest appearance of evil Wil Wheaton, both his character and the fact that he wore a collection of Diesel Sweeties t-shirts.) We’re going to make one more try with some Season 6 material, particularly stuff that focuses on the girlfriends as a group, but I don’t have high hopes at this point.
Many of the DC animated movies have been available for free streaming via Amazon Prime, so I’ve watched Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, Superman: Doomsday and All-Star Superman in the past couple of weeks. All of them are attempts to distill comic storylines into 1.5 hour movies, and they’re of varying quality.
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights has a framing story about Krona trying to come through from the antimatter universe and the corps fighting him back; with what amounts to a “Greatest Green Lantern Stories Ever Told” being recounted to the rookies while they wait for the battle to start. I though Captain Tightpants did a great job voicing Hal Jordan, but honestly, Hal is the most boring member of the corps. If they need a GL to be headstrong, stupid and cocky, they use Guy. If they need someone to make a hard choice, they use John. If they need someone to be unsure and emotional, they use Kyle. Hal is left being “generically heroic”, and there isn’t enough to that to make him interesting with.
Superman: Doomsday was a cramming down of the six-month death and return of Superman story into a single movie, which meant a LOT of streamlining. Only one fake Superman (with elements of the original four), one primary villain (Luthor), and because Superman is out of commission for half the film and mostly in fight scenes for the rest, hyper-competent Lois Lane is the real protagonist.
All-Star Superman was Dwayne McDuffie’s attempt to shoehorn a Grant Morrison 12-issue maxiseries into a single movie. Pros: It made more sense than the original, worked vaguely well as a single story, and was fun to watch. Cons: It still has too many rapidly-resolved side plots (particularly the two new Kryptonians who are defeated by deus ex machina), Lois is practically used as a prop (but so is almost everyone else, because they don’t have the screen time to develop characters), and there’s never any real sense of tension.
