I'm too tired to be depressed

 

OCTOBER 10th - CREEPSHOW is total garbage.  I gather it's actually well-regarded by horror fans, but as I have mentioned on many occasions, I am not a horror fan, and as time goes on and I discover more about the joys of living with previously-undiagnosed neurodivergence, I understand that people of my disposition generally tend not to get along with the genre, which is something I probably could have done with knowing well before now.  Anyhoo, this is an anthology by the late George Romero, who even I like because of that time he just flat-out said he never put any social commentary into Day Of The Dead and people had just read what they wanted into it over the years, which is probably biting the hand that feeds you - there's a zombie joke in there somewhere - but it's still treated as some kind of anti-capitalist cinematic masterwork anyway, even though George kept trying to make people see that he just wanted to make blood-spattered nonsense in peace and not have smelly nerds asking him about capitalism at DISMEMBERFEST '97 when he's just there as a thank-you to the legions of 13 year olds who kept him in business.  Bless him, I do hope he's not in Hell.
I didn't really like this anthology thing he did, though.  Some nice creature effects, but to be honest, I'm on the side of the dad who throws the comic book in the trash at the start of the movie, as if this was the quality of stories in that comic, he's doing his kid a favor.

OCTOBER 11th - OLD is M Night Shama Lama Ding Dong's latest film, and it's... kinda okay?  I gather there were lots of objections to it at the time of release and it certainly isn't perfect, but I enjoyed it as a Twilight Zone style romp, possibly because I don't remember his other films too much, so don't have that lingering disappointment that many other critics of his work seem to use as a lens through which to view everything he does.  I recall his tv thing with Matt Dillon or whoever it was - I am not kidding when I say I can't remember his stuff - was entertaining, especially when it throws in curveballs like killing off the protagonists halfway through a season or spelling out its central mystery halfway through the first season rather than teasing it out forever, but apart from that, I'm drawing a blank.  I think I liked The Village, and I can remember Last Airbender being pretty poor, even for a kung-fu movie - and I like kung-fu movies.
Anyway, back to OLD, which I thought was alright.  Some decent gross-out moments, and I'm willing to overlook problematic depictions of mental illness given the latter reveal of the film - which isn't great, but is at least self-contained and doesn't require constant unpacking and nitpicking long after the credits have rolled.  I've seen worse.  The recent Twilight Zone reboot, for example.

OCTOBER 12th - PANIC, an 8-part teen drama - so you know this day was well spent - on Amazon Prime about a motley crew of very horny small town "high school students" who are clearly in their 20s and 30s competing against each other in an illegal and high-stakes version of Truth Or Dare in which participants face individually-tailored scenarios meant to frighten them into dropping out of the game - so kind of like a backyard version of Fear Factor.
It's okay, I guess.  No big shakes, but for a show whose narrative arcs hinge on the negatives of small town wealth inequality, there's surprisingly little in the way of seeing how this manifests for the various participants in the titular game, so it's unclear what their stakes actually are.  It does that usual teen drama thing where we're told that poverty has impacted a character, but we don't really see how it does so, it's just implied that they don't have access to some of the benefits of a capitalist society, even though when the plot demands it, a top of the range smartphone just drops out of the sky for them, or when they're painted into the plot corner of being homeless after one of the many soap opera threads padding out the running time, a character lets them move into their spare room on a massive farm, or when someone needs hospital treatment, they just get it, which is something that doesn't even happen now in the UK where healthcare is free, let alone a dystopian third world shithole like America.  The obvious joke here is "I expected a more substantial critique of capitalism from Amazon", but apparently they're killing that over on The Boys, so... eh.  What do I know.
Diverting enough, and not so long it outstays its welcome, but it felt like some of the "stunning plot reveals" could have had a bit more thought put into them, as there's at least one revelation that happens because a character finds a random bit of paper with a criminal mastermind's name on it just laying around.

OCTOBER 13th - ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER - is what I imagine could happen if someone gave the Asylum enough money or creative talent to actually make good on one of the shit-meets-wall pitches for their awful films instead of just knocking something out as quickly as they can with whatever ex-wrestler really needs a paycheck that week.  It's actually pretty entertaining, even if it does that usual "this ain't your granny's vampires!" thing where it cherry-picks from the various versions of vampire lore which rules are or aren't applicable to its particular strain of bloodsucker, but that just helps underscore the feeling that what you're watching is a kind of live-action superhero anime, and that your expectations regarding acting and dialogue quality should be adjusted downwards accordingly.  Fun while it lasted.

OCTOBER 14th - HALLOWEEN ENDS is another garbage sequel to another garbage reboot of a garbage string of sequels to an effective but bafflingly-influential pair of slasher movies from the late 1970s.  I hadn't seen any of the Halloween movies until recently, but I had seen people say with a straight face that the Rob Zombie reboot and its sequel weren't the worst in the series, and then I saw those movies and thought "I never need to see any more Halloween movies if these are considered "not the worst" by the series' own fans" but I did anyway and honestly, I now couldn't name the worst Halloween movie if you asked me to, because at some point they all blur together into a sludge and even the notorious Halloween 3 isn't that bad anymore because at least it tried.  I liked that Michael Myers was just a sad old man living in a hobbit hole, with barely any murder left in him, but even that gets abandoned rapidly in the final reel as he just becomes a supernatural killing monster again.
Anyway, this sucked.  There were themes and visual callbacks in the film that illustrate there was a lot of talent and creative thought involved in the production, but that just means this movie is interesting as well as terrible.

OCTOBER 15th - VAMPIRE ACADEMY is yet another Superhero Hogwarts teen drama, this time about a school for Nosferatus instead of whatever the last bunch of these things have been about - magic or witches, usually.  I dunno.  I am happy to say that Vampire Academy is at least a good addition to this crowded field, but sadly that doesn't mean it is true.
Vampire Academy is terrible, terrible television, and if you told me someone made it for a bet after being told that there is no such thing as a show so bad that someone won't at least watch it ironically, I would believe you.  It starts - as all of these YA shows do - with breathy voicovers infodumping, and it doesn't get any more original from there.  It's an "apart from that, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?" kind of deal, as the show is good apart from the acting, the script, the effects, the worldbuilding, the plot, and the central premise - fix all of those, and you might at least have had something that was merely tosh.  As it is, though?  Unwatchable.

OCTOBER 16th - HELLRAISER (2022) is the FLIPPING HECK eleventh entry in the increasingly-ropey series based on Clive Barker's short story/novella The Hellbound Heart, and while I liked that first and second movie, I feel that if anything brought forth from the mind of Barker onto the big screen should have spawned endless sequels of diminishing returns, it should have been NIGHTBREED.  This franchise?  I am not so keen, to be honest, but a reboot might invigorate things with fresh perspective on the concepts.

Except not so much.  I did like the conceit of the main character turning down their heart's desire purely because they've seen enough Twilight Zone episodes to know that if someone offering to fix it so you "never feel pain again" also happens to be an avatar of an eldritch abomination made of clockwork parts and rotting flesh, they may have a different interpretation of that seemingly straightforward brief than you - someone who prefers their skin attached to their body - would, but otherwise we're in familiar Hellraiser territory: someone opens the box, the Cenobites come, people get torn apart with rusty chains arrgh arrgh my eyes please don't take my eyes arrgh my eyes they've taken my eyes arrgh god help me I can still see arrgh, then someone closes or destroys the box, the end, "or is it?", the end.  It's well-made if nothing else, and while that alone sets it apart from all the films in the series that came after Hellraiser 3, it's otherwise by-the-numbers in terms of plot, and the whole thing is pretty much just cruising on brand recognition.  Given cinema has entered the age of the Franchise, I suppose that will be enough to bring it success.

SOME people are starting to complain about all the hugging and I don't want to name names but it was definately me

Even though it is a horrible website run by terrible people and has a comments section choking with pedophiles and fascists, I kinda love Youtube now - just in time for it to have been arguably replaced by Twitch or God knows what else is out there I am unaware of as a grown adult with other things to do, but hey I got there in the end.
It's pretty much solely responsible for my falling disastrously behind in my tv watching lately, as sometimes you just don't want to watch the biceps in human form of the Hawaii Five-0 cast pummel their lips around whatever random collection of vowel sounds the script algorithm has spat out for them this week and instead want to hear the dulcet tones of your man-crush explain the philosophical basis of democracy, or your woman crush explain the erotic appeal of lobster-fetishist Jordan Peterson, or the Donkey Kong trans rights activist what shit Graham Linehan right up to the point he's still moaning about it on Twitter a month later man talk for FUCK ME 1 hour and 49 minutes about why the BBC's Sherlock is a load of old cobblers - I mean he's absolutely right and it's good he took the time to articulate his reasoning and issues with it in words and all, but 109 minutes is... 
Anyway I like Youtube is what I am saying, it is a great place to find content even before you get to the fact they have live performance videos of Alvin Stardust.

I've had it with you and your successful methods

The makers of Manifest try very hard to make a memorably terrible television series, but sadly it's just quite banal.  The concept is a hodge-podge of lazy tropes (the show is essentially a remake of The 4400), but it's with the use of the still-recent tragedy of  Flight 370 as a story engine that they betray the real lack of ideas or faith in their own creation, gambling as they are on free publicity from social media outrage - but for that to have materialised, the show would need to be significant, well-made or popular enough to justify confronting its opportunistic intrusion into the grief of those affected by the real-life tragedy it stripmines, but the show is none of those things.  Often-appalling dialogue aside, there's nothing worth noting, not even to single out for criticism, it's just a big dollop of tv landfill wherein nobody does their best.
Magnum PI may be familiar to anyone of a certain vintage, but to me it came far too early and it was only relatively recently I got to play catch-up.  While patchy in places, it's easy to see why it made a household name of lead actor Tom Selleck: the series follows the (mostly) neo-noir adventures of an ex-marine-turned private investigator employed as a live-in security consultant by a constantly-absent globetrotting pulp novelist, Magnum being a freeloading mooch of the kind beloved of 1980s popular culture, enjoying the trappings of a billionaire's private Hawaii estate without having to do very much in return, thus constantly enraging the estate's majordomo, Johnathan Higgins, an upright Englishman*.  The relationship between the pair was antagonistic on the surface, but they shared cross-generational experiences of national service to their respective countries, a commonality nuanced in how Magnum was a frontline veteran of Vietnam while Higgins was an advisor to the French during the Indochina War, their experiences overlapping but not identical.  This created an interesting dynamic that added to the eventually paternal relationship that formed between the two, but the new Magnum PI is... not as interesting.
Virtually identical to the producers' other contemporary action tv series such as MacGyver and Hawaii 5-0, there's little doubt that these series were made based on nothing but their branding, retaining the theme tunes**, character names and basic setups from the originals, but otherwise being the same anodyne mix of drama, comedy, and - for some reason - homophobia in every episode, so that creating the occasional off-the-reservation genre-straddling episode becomes all but impossible because every episode is the comedy episode, every episode is the pathos episode, every episode has some toxically-masculine over-muscled goon uncritically saluting the flag.  The new Magnum PI is offensively unchallenging, its scripts generated by some kind of algorithm wherein all elements for each episode are present and correct but Skynet is simply incapable of replicating human emotion or ever springing an actual surprise upon you.
Actually, tell a lie: I was genuinely surprised in one episode when Magnum and Rick inflicted homophobic taunting on TC for attending dance classes as a child that made me quite uncomfortable, but... well, I don't really want that kind of surprise, thanks.  Plus, aren't these war buddies or something?  Even the thick-as-pigshit Hawaii Five-0 has the male leads uncritically hugging each other in bromance moments.
Anyway, Magnum PI is not very good, so that must mean I'm sexist or racist because Magnum is played by an Eskimo and Higgins is Welsh now and there can be no other reason for me to be critical of something with a diverse cast.


* fun fact: John Hillerman, who played Higgins, also played Higgins' many siblings on the show, one of whom was a Texan whom Hillerman played with a broad cowboy twang, an Irishman played with a twee brogue - another brother was mentioned yet never portrayed in the show and was named Soo Ling.  I don't suppose we shall ever know why Hillerman declined to portray that one onscreen...
** albeit in drastically truncated form - such is the belief in the audience's attention span that Magnum's them tune is a mere 19 seconds long

You and I need to be alone in the woods so I can download all this man knowledge

I really wish I'd seen Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets back when it was doing the rounds in the cinemas, as the last couple of weeks have kind of put a damper on the material.  Where - a mere four weeks ago - I might have chalked up the lead's aggressive overtures towards his female colleague as the actions of a letch with misplaced enthusiasm, these days Valerian can be viewed as nothing less than a persistent sex pest and serial molester.  A string of female co-workers is plastered along the walls of his and Laureline's starship seemingly as a joke about his womanising ways, but it's plain from the off that his mating patois is severely lacking and that when it fails him, he is quick to resort to physical aggression towards women, leading the mind to ponder on what kind of horrors have gone on in this isolated starship far from any witnesses, and why these countless women have disappeared from Valerian's workplace never to be seen again after he has "conquered" them.  I know there's a trend out there in that there social medias for dark takes on seemingly bright and colourful material, like, I dunno, "what if the computer in Jem And The Holograms is actually Jerrica Benton's dead mother trapped in a digital purgatory by Satan to tempt Jerrica into a rock 'n' roll life of sin while being doomed to dispassionately view her descent - or worse, to actively seek to cause it that she might bargain a way out of her own torment at the cost of her only child's immortal soul?" but trust me, there's not a lot of mental gymnastics involved in getting to the dark take here, Valerian is one creepy motherfucker right from the first moments we meet him, and through the lens of the film, we are supposed to see Valerian as he sees himself - heroic and determined, rather than seedy and unthinking.
The rest of the film isn't that great, either - some good setpieces, but a lot of the FX are surprisingly poor - well, as "poor" as they can be when they still clearly look like several million bucks' worth of effort - especially a blue blob-like alien that seems to be voiced and intermittently played by some American lady who I suspect I am supposed to recognise and who probably ends up with more screen time than any other character apart from the two leads despite... let us say "less acting ability than those who surround her" in a very even and non-judgmental manner, if only because I am now worried that she might be some sort of Make A Wish winner who got to star in the film as a last request.
I do recall trying out the Valerian and Laureline books a few years ago, and can't really say my memory of them aligns much with what I saw here, the pacing seems really slow for something so episodic and which covers so much ground, and it's flashy and bang-y and sees a welcome return to the fantasy end of the sci-fi spectrum, but ultimately, it's just an expensive-looking curiosity with the odd memorable moment and a wildly inconsistent tone.  Mainly, though, it's just hampered by how much of its creepy lead's behavior you may or may not be willing to look past in order to enjoy the rest of the film.

All our problems are solved apart from food, money, and somewhere to sleep

Welcome to what is apparently now my blog dedicated to posts about canceled comics from the 1980s, as today I am speaking about Marvel's Power Pack #63, a tie-in to whatever "Legacy" is - maybe it's a crossover, maybe it's a one-off event where Marvel drag their limbo properties out of the drawer to publish a copyright/trademark-affirming issue so they don't get sniped like Marvel sniped DC Comics on the Captain Marvel brand, who can really say?  I wasn't planning to buy this one as I've been repeatedly burned by the underwhelming modern appearances of the various characters, but my brother, bless his little cotton socks, took matters into his own hands and bought a copy for me, kind of like if an elderly relative hears you like Batman and buys you "that Hush comic", in that the sentiment is greatly appreciated regardless of the quality of the gift.
Power Pack, should you be unaware, are a kid superhero team pretty unique to Western comics in that they experienced largely straight-faced adventures in the dour and grimy Manhattan of the 1980s before Rudolf Guilliani cleaned the place up (not that this cleanup would stop the likes of Daredevil living in this specific time and place well into the 2000s), and weren't the bubbly, self-aware iconoclastic superhero youths we're more used to seeing in popular culture via the anime-inspired Teen Titans, the Franco-riffic Ladybug, or even other Marvel titles like Ms Marvel or Gwenpool: Power Pack were grim-faced poverty-line protagonists right out of a Steinbeck novel, though they were viewed with some bemusement by the comics-buying public of the time, who - unlike the tolerant, racially and gender-diverse open-minded metrosexual comic book readership of 2017 - were older straight white males who were a bit entitled about their hobby and didn't like characters who weren't straight white males, and preferably teenagers.  No, I don't understand that last bit, either.
Anyway, Power Pack weren't really a priority for a relaunch after their title folded with its 62nd issue, especially with their paltry hundred thousand readers (yes, I know), so apart from a miniseries in the early 2000s that was ignored by almost everyone (especially Marvel writers) they languished in comics limbo before the inevitable death blow for any comic book superteam: having the characters split off into co-starring/backing cast roles in other team books like New Warriors, Runaways, Loners, Fantastic Four, and Future Foundation.  This is a blow that comic book superteams can rarely recover from because now the characters are off acquiring continuity baggage that most editors and fans psychopathically resist disregarding, so if there's ever a reunion story down the line, all that baggage has to be incorporated or acknowledged and God help the poor comics writer who considers such things a trifling matter and not important in the greater scheme of telling an interesting or entertaining story - this is comics continuity, dammit and...
Ah, who am I kidding?  The dang thing has a big old #63 on the flipping cover, it's not like anyone can pretend continuity isn't an anchor dragging on this endevour and the story has any kind of mandate to hold up objectively AND YET... for some reason, the framing makes it clear that this is the doomed intention of writer Devin Greyson, here crafting an admittedly neat getaround for the continuity mess she's been saddled with by making the story an unreliable flashback related by Katie Power, one of the only characters from the original comic whose timeline isn't now a car crash of half-assed never-finished ideas and aimless sexual objectification.
As a fan of the comic, I of course realise that Katie is unreliable almost immediately through my encyclopedic knowledge of Power Pack, but mainly because a character in the story explicitly states she is an unreliable narrator.  Continuity-wise, she's unreliable because she seems to look up to her older brother Alex as a good superhero rather than one of the worst and most ineffective superheroes in the history of comics to the extent that his finest comics moment was when Doctor Doom backhand-slapped him until he bawled like a child, which was very, very funny to read, but, you know, probably not something you put in the scrapbook.
As an objective exercise in storytelling, I felt it suffered from none of the characters being distinctive, and even if you allow that this is because it's a tale told by a single character from their POV, we never actually establish what that narrator's character is.  What we get here is essentially an above-average inventory strip expanded to a full issue, and while there's plenty to recommend it between Marika Cresta's crisp art and Devin Greyson keeping things straight-faced and largely devoid of winks to the audience (though the aforementioned character talking about unreliable narrators briefly brings things into lampshade-hanging territory), I was ultimately disappointed in it as an addition to the characters' ongoing saga more than as a standalone.  In Greyson's defence, I totally rambled on about continuity for a few paragraphs for a reason: you need to have read a couple of dozen books just to have the full background on what's happening in this one ("Alex hasn't been seen since the reformation of the multiverse" is an actual line of exposition in this), and Marvel needed to have some confidence that someone with Greyson's experience could have told a tale worth reading that featured all the characters and could have springboarded the property into an ongoing series.
As it is, this feels like filler, and though if they ever get to a full reboot I am totally there, this has probably exhausted any lingering curiosity I might have had about where a contemporary take on the property might have gone.

I hate to sound all lovey-dovey, but you're giving me a boner

I used to watch films with actual wolfses in them - usually werewolfses - but then I joined Twitter to promote a graphic novel and talk shit about b-movies and five years later I'm a communist and every film I watch - even if it has giant robots in it - is some critique of its age instead of just some amusing stuff that happens while I drink beer in a mostly futile attempt to stave off the terrors that come with my dreams, so maybe that's why The Wolf Of Wall Street strikes me as a critique of late-stage capitalism masquerading as a catalogue of the excesses that unearned affluence can bestow to those of minimal skill and/or an inflated sense of self-worth.  One thing it is not is a sequel to that Jack Nicholson film where he is a werewolf or possibly he actually wasn't and it was just a mid life crisis or something - I wasn't woke at the time I saw it and just liked that he pulled someone's fingers off and then peed on a man's trousers.
The Wolf Of Wall Street's masterstroke is that for all the close-ups of drug-addled characters writhing in their own fluids and crippled by irrational paranoia, the vulgarity of the nouveau riche is catalogued seemingly uncritically, and the only clue as to Scorcese's true intent is when the camera pans slowly back to reveal line after line of complete fucking rubes lining up to learn how to extract unearned wealth from an unapologetic alpha male prick who makes no bones about the fact he's fleecing each and every person in the room and to a man and woman they're too thick to comprehend it.

Lady Bloodfight is basically Bloodsport, but with attractive ladies.  Some knowing winks at Western kung-fu cliches hide behind corny dialogue and occasionally-ropy delivery, while the script buries a potential antagonism between the blonde lead and a goth street thug in favor of exploring sympathetic rivalries among the fighters, which is not terribly common to the death sport genre - on account of the whole "death" part - and so has novelty on its side, though it does rob the film of a firm central arc.  There are some traditional antagonists in play, but they're not pivotal enough to the story to become narrative lynchpins, and I would argue they feel tacked-on to give a coming of age plot more appeal to the traditional action b-movie crowd, much as the left field appearance of a Force Ghost in the final stretch objectively seems out of place to all but avid watchers of head-punching cinema like myself.
I couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd seen the lead actor before, but The Internet thankfully provided the answer: she is stuntwoman/cosplayer Amy Johnson, AKA "the live action version of Harley Quinn you can watch without wanting to peel your eyes out and stab yourself in the ears" though her day job is also to make Scarlett Johannson look good - by which I mean that she is Scarlett Johannson's fight double in the Marvel movies, and not that she fabricates stories in the media to make it seem like Scarlett Johannson actually gives two fucks about Palestinian rights or international law.
I was lucky to see this as it was intended to be viewed (while quite drunk), though, so narrative shortcomings didn't bug me as much as not seeing more slow-motion kicks to the face.  Ultimately, I enjoyed it plenty. 

Well, if there's not gonna be any guys here I'm gonna go smoke a jay and do my jigsaw

My HOT TAKE on The Handmaid's Tale is less "Well I love dystopian sci-fi so this is a no-brainer" and more "oh fuck not more misery porn".  A whole series of this?  Really?
I don't know why live-action misery porn gets me down so much.  I mean, the removal of a protagonist's agency is storytelling 101, and was more or less the foundation of every comic story published in the UK during the 1960s-1980s period that I personally love a great deal, so what sets this television series apart from something appearing in the likes of Misty or Jinty?  I mean, obviously there are stylistic differences in the dystopias envisaged by comics creators in the 1970s and those working in the television industry of the late 2010s, but if I had to guess... yeah, it's probably the rape.  Once again it's rape o'clock on tv just to let you know how gnarly and For The Realz the story is and I don't know - this is just so tiring.  And I say that as someone who has had the good fortune to have been born comfortable in the gender which doesn't get to be pelted with depictions of weaponised sexual assault upon it like every day.
Well, whatever.  As a card-carrying owner of a functioning penis, perhaps I just don't understand the appeal of watching dramas that explore what would happen if one of my greatest fears was something turned into a non-consensual ritual by Donald Trump's administration, but Lady types on that there internet seem to be lapping this horrible nightmare up, so I'm willing to just let this one go as I don't feel intellectually equipped to tackle this bizarre crossroads of love and hate for the subject matter.  Fuckin America - what is up with you lately?

In all the rush we never got a chance to talk about my balls

Re-watching Rogue One, it's hard to know how much of it is an actual mess and how much I am reading as a mess because I know that a lot of behind-the-scenes shenanigans went on as the producers inexplicably panicked at the last minute that they would not make a cubic fuckton of money from a film with the words "Star Wars" in the title even when it has Darth F Vader in it.
But Rogue One is certainly episodic - in a manner reminiscent of that wave of cheap space operas churned out across the world in the wake of the first Star Wars trilogy that concentrated on the escapades of a group of adventurers in various sci-fi locales before they regrouped for the final battle against the movie's central protagonist, a formulae seen in the likes of Space Raiders, Star Crash and Ice Pirates, and a bit more carefree than the typical 3-act structure usually seen in sci-fi and action movies of the time.  The Force Awakens attempted to channel that same kind of narrative structure, best seen in the hentai monster sequence that doesn't actually serve much storytelling purpose beyond distracting you from the lazy coincidences used to weld Han Solo and Chewbacca into a story in which they don't really have any place, but Rogue One excels at recreating this kind of cheap-ass, anything-goes adventure - it's just really hard to see it because the film is so damned well-made and everything is filtered through the post-millenial grimdark lens of uber-seriousness to the point that not even the clumsy slapstick and catty wisecracks of a comedy robot breaks through - seriously, it is a film that has a wisecracking comedy robot front and center and yet the big takeaway from it is likely how grim and portentous it all is.
After the The Force Awakens' cherry-picking of elements limited to the original trilogy of movies and - given the anti-Prequel /anti-Lucas slant of some marketing and subsequent de-canonising of decades' worth of spin-off media - calculated effort to convince a generation that this film and this alone continued the adventures of their heroes, the Star Wars universe (by design) felt a lot smaller and more empty than it ever had, but Rogue One reverses that.  It adds Easter egg after Easter egg, from cameos of Original Trilogy stalwarts and backing characters to the cast of tv's Rebels without discriminating against the non-movie sections of the canon - this universe feels lived-in again for the first time in a long while, and I am thankful to Rogue One for that, even if I suspect I'll never rewatch it half as many times as I have other Star Warses.
...and so to The Last Jedi trailer, which dropped today.

I am genuinely struggling with how underwhelmed I am, although that could just be my general disappointment with The Force Awakens coupled with an inescapable feeling that much as I thought these new characters were okay in one movie, they've already had their chance to tell their story and now it's done.  I mean, Rey's character arc so focused on "the Call To Adventure" - the first step of the Hero's Journey (AKA "Screenwriting For Dummies: Chapter 1") - to the point that it became the entirety of her arc and when she accepted that call she completed her journey as a character.  I'd prefer to move on from Rey, but obviously Star Wars producers - as we learned with Rogue One - are cautious when it comes to spending 300 million dollars, so I guess we're getting a "white people learn them some mystic arts" movie now, which I guess is as good a mid-80s genre to plunder as the sci-fi romp is.  Even so, I think my hopes are more pinned on the next Star Wars Anthology movie than the latest entry in the increasingly tired Skywalker Dynasty.

I'm on my knees in an alley and nothing fun is happening

I wanted Monster Trucks to be as bad as everyone was telling me it was, but it isn't.  The picture being painted was one of a truly terrible box-office bomb, flawed from conception to execution and bleeding failure and embarrassment from every pore, but the Monster Trucks I saw was a well-made, good-natured film whose only real problem was its clearly mid-20s teenage leads, and I am reasonably certain that the actors cannot be blamed for the bitter and unstoppable specter of time that stalks our brief material forms, but, you know, they're probably being blamed for that on IMDB boards anyway.
Not a reductive enough review for you?  Okay then, try this: Monster Trucks is not even remotely the worst film I have seen this year.  La La Land was a far more terrible film - you know who the best actor in La La Land is?  The black guy who sits beside Ryan Gosling and doesn't laugh right in Gosling's pasty face when he says he's "going to save Jazz" despite showing no understanding of what Jazz is or what it sounds like.  Life is also not as good as Monster Trucks, though as has been established, Monster Trucks is not terrible, and neither is Life, it's just not very good, either.  "Alien for idiots" was one of the more unkind but probably accurate epithets bandied about, and compared to other summer blockbusters, Life does have brevity on its side if nothing else.

Go back underground and stay there until you're ready to die

WHEESHT - looks like I'm really letting the old blog go to pot in 2017.  Nearly two weeks in the bag and only on my third post. 
Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare is no better to play or less frustratingly limited in ambition than any of the other COD games of the last decade. Not that it matters, since opinions on it formed the moment the first trailer dropped and ever since then it's just been a matter of justifying and reinforcing those first opinions by any means and never once ever considering the possibility of being in error - so basically having an opinion on Infinite Warfare is the same as having an opinion on Jeremy Corbyn.

The big changes are the use of a hub where you can decide the order in which all but the initial and final missions are carried out, alongside the introduction of mostly-optional starfighter missions where you fly a remarkably easy-to-handle craft in some basic but fun dogfights, the best of which has you chasing and boarding a fleeing ship through the upper atmosphere of Urectum.
The game excels at set-pieces like this because the controls are so uncomplicated that you can enjoy the spectacle for what it is without being too annoyed by the bafflingly ubiquitous QTE sequences that no-one I've encountered seems to enjoy.  For some reason game makers still think they can fool you into thinking you're involved with scripted on-rail sequences by including arbitrary button-mashing like the stick-twiddling and clicking you need to go through every time you launch a solo fighter - although the loud WHOOSH and the whizzing launch tubes going past as you take off is fun to watch.

 That bit is shamelessly lifted from the original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the kind of sci-fi influence that sadly doesn't extend to the rest of the game, which is alien-free and features an aesthetic and backstory that will be familiar to fans of the Killzone games, though most critics will probably cite the Battlestar Galactica remake as the main influence, rather than Space: Above and Beyond, a tv series with which the game setting and backstory has far more in common, right down to the more familiar tropes of heroic fantasy that NuBSG seemed to think itself above - although there is a fun sequence where you and a bunch of thick-eared marines in beach buggies storm what is clearly Moonbase Alpha.

The story - as ever - is dripping in homoerotic machismo and an almost sexual fetishism of overly-earnest male bonding standing in for any character development, while the main villain is basically "what if Jon Snow was The Mandarin from Iron Man 3, only in space" and is just as stupid and ludicrous in practice as that sounds, but effectively comes off as the panto villain the series relies upon in order to justify the war crimes the player regularly commits.

It's great fun when it isn't too challenging, but when it forces you to go back and replay bits - most likely because the method of taking out a particular enemy hasn't been explained to you yet - it gets very grind-y and borderline frustrating having to go through it all over again before the enemy in question shows up, and then possibly tops you almost immediately and prompts a repeat of the same boring sequence of events all over again.  The first time this happens is barely five minutes into the game and nearly made me stop playing altogether, until I realised that the game was forcing me to do something COD rarely does: stop, slow down, and think things through from cover - possibly the single most ludicrous conceit of the entire enterprise.  This is COD, dammit, an I wanna just do a shooting!
Ignore the haters: it's mostly good fun, uncomplicated to play, and lush to look at.

Now we can drink Diet Coke as a family

I am sure I had seen Treasure Planet before, but none of it seemed familiar this time around... well, that's not entirely accurate, because ho-lee shytt, JJ Abrams was clearly a huge fan, as there are numerous sequences, plot elements, scenes, and even action sequences that are lifted in their entirety that appear in JJA's sci-fi films, and not just a treasure map sequence which will be familiar to viewers of The Force Awakens, there's also Jack Hawkins' introduction where he's chased down by visor-faced robotic-voiced coppers on speeders for his joyriding through a dusty backwater and a scene where the Hispaniola escapes a black hole by riding a shockwave - recreated almost shot-for-shot in Star Trek's finale where the Enterprise does the same thing.  Once the Star Trek comparison was in my head, it was impossible not to see other similarities, especially Benn Gunn/Future Spock, Hawkins' absentee father narrative which formed the basis of Kirk's character in ST, the "random pipes = spaceship interior" aesthetic, and even after JJA left the NuTrek director's chair, the comparisons continue with Spaceport/Yorktown and an anti-gravity fight finding their way from Treasure Planet into Star Trek Beyond without as much change as one might expect, while - more tenuously - both films also feature terrible theme songs, though Treasure Planet's soft rawk monstrosity at least serves to highlight that animated film directors from 2002 at least understand how to initiate, stick with, and then actually resolve a Daddy Issue theme.
Desperate to fill a blog post?  You betcha.

Stand firm for what you believe in until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong

I won't lie, I am currently watching the Blue Thunder spin-off tv series, and really, where can I possibly go from that statement - "it was not as good as I had expected"?
It stars Dana Carvey, you guys.  On purpose.
Sometimes I wonder what people make of the blog, apart from perhaps that I live in some sort of pop-cultural third world of old shit films and old shit tv shows and - latterly - old sci-fi novels that are actually quite good, occasionally popping in to the blog to screen grab pics of whatever random thing I'm doodling at that day and tell you you all how great that episode of Street Hawk is where he does the turbo hyper jump to spin 360 degrees in mid-air because of course I'm watching Street hawk, too - and I am 70 percent certain I am not imagining the sexual undercurrent of the voice-over man saying "to RRRRRIIIIIDE Street Hawk!"  I don't imagine today's post will do much to shake the impression I've worked hard to give.

The monkey is unpredictable - you never know when he's going to demand intercourse

For some reason I decided to watch the Dirty Harry series and it was largely a good decision as some of them are good action films - especially Magnum Force's inventive chases - though my main takeaway was the fantastic Lalo Schifrin scores, even if they were a diminishing returns kind of thing as synth music became more permissible between 1972 and 1988 and the snazzy, jazzy, dirty guitar riffs phased out to be replaced with an array of other contemporary sounds.
Also decided to start watching Rizzoli & Isles, which was a terrible decision.  Stupid, hateful, and often sadistic, it's the kind of show a 13 year-old would create if they found themselves in a writer's room by accident and decided to roll with it like that Guy who wandered into the wrong interview on the BBC that time, only that was fun and didn't leave you hating the world and yourself in that order like Rizzoli & Isles does.  The show also describes the theory that criminal behavior is genetic as "scientific", so there's that, too.

I don't care about your vampire politics!

Just in case future historians perusing the blog archives - presumably trying to understand the terrible things I did to all those people - wonder why I suddenly started giving my impressions of books without pictures in them, I am attempting to read what are considered the 100 best sci-fi books of all time, but such a list is obviously a malleable and fluid thing, prone to late entries from fly-by-night flavors of the week, so I typed "100 greatest science fiction novels" into Google and picked a list from a random website - because there are a lot of top 100 lists and they don't all agree - and pasted it into a text file on my desktop and never looked back.
Although I probably should have looked back after reading the dreadfully dull Starship Troopers, though a rewatch of the film adaptation convinced me that science fiction was worth giving another go and I got stuck into the Foundation Trilogy and now A Princess of Mars, which is the tale of the enigmatic John Carter, whose first person account of his interplanetary travels never gets tired of telling you how awesomely manly he is - though to be fair he goes on to recount how he beat up the planet Mars, so I can sort of understand why the man would have a high opinion of himself.  He's a bit of an imperialist scumbag, too, smiting his way through the natives like a walking smallpox until he finds himself a bit of posh Martian tottie to lay some eggs with - but his tale is an enjoyable romp with some good world-building along the way, even if the politics of the text don't bear up to modern scrutiny.

Should you be wondering, the full list is as follows, with books I have managed to read so far being bolded - yeah I know there's only 12 of them so far, but I am reasonably sure I have actually read one or two of the others:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
Douglas Adams - Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Robert A Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
George Orwell - 1984
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Arthur C Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
William Gibson - Neuromancer
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot
Robert A Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Larry Niven - Ringworld
Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
H G Wells - The Time Machine
Arthur C Clarke - Childhood's End
Robert A Heinlein - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
H G Wells - The War of the Worlds
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles 
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
Ursula K Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Niven & Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Shadow
Orson Scott Card - Speaker for the Dead
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle   
Isaac Asimov - The Caves of Steel   
Frederik Pohl - Gateway   
Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light   
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris   
Jules Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea   
Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Strain   
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle   
Philip K Dick - Ubik   
Carl Sagan - Contact   
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time   
Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves   
John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids   
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep 
Walter M Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz   
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars 
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange   
Robert A Heinlein - Time Enough For Love   
Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed   
Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity   
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein   
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon   
L Ron Hubbard - Battlefield Earth   
Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth   
Philip Jose Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go   
Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction 
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age   
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly   
David Brin - Startide Rising
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan   
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Greg Bear - Eon
Iain M Banks - Use of Weapons 
John Scalzi - Old Man's War 
Arthur C Clarke - The City and the Stars   
Michael Crichton - Sphere
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Robert A Heinlein - The Door Into Summer
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space
Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat
Iain M Banks - Player of Games
Edgar Rice Burroughs - A Princess of Mars
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Robert A Heinlein - Citizen of the Galaxy
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
C S Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet
Dan Simmons - Ilium
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
Niven & Pournelle - Lucifer's Hammer   
Robert A Heinlein - Have Space-Suit - Will Travel   
Edwin A Abbott - Flatland   
Clifford Simak - Way Station   
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games   
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic   
Ursula K Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven   
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar    
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend    
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad    
Neal Stephenson - Anathem    
Clifford Simak - City   
Julian May - The Many-Colored Land
Robert Louis Stevenson - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde   
Philip K Dick - VALIS    
Orson Scott Card - Xenocide 
David Brin - The Postman   
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human   
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

I'm speaking loudly so you can hear me over the gap in our status

Having nothing better to do with my time, I am trawling through yet another mammoth series I barely understand on account of I am always at best one step ahead of my own ignorance and inability to grasp nuance.  Thus the charms of Second Foundation, the third or fifth novel in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series are probably largely beyond me, devoid as the book is of fart jokes or swordfights.  A game of two halves, the first part of the novel is about some telepaths second-guessing each other until one of them declares victory but then "HAHA FALSE MEMORIES" and it turns out they didn't win at all.  This continues for some time, even into the second part of the book, which is about a precocious teen searching for the titular Second Foundation and thinks she's found it until "HAHA FALSE MEMORIES" again.  To be fair, this is actually appropriate to the themes of the book, which explores the idea of a colony of telepaths manipulating events on a grand scale via obsessive long-term micromanagement of seemingly unimportant people, which creates a nice juxtaposition between the great conceit at the heart of the Foundation novels - that a macroscopic overview of history past and future called The Seldon Plan has been constructed - and the given caveat that the vagaries of individual lives and choices are largely irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.  There's an inference - through the pivotal importance of the actions of individuals followed by the book and how they interact with each other - that this is possibly not true, and that the Seldon Plan is a long con on the wider galaxy, its creator's true work being the creation of telepaths who would manipulate events into something arguably better than the cyclic rise and fall of empires that leads to lengthy eras of depression.
I'm probably missing loads in the text as usual, but I enjoyed the overall experience.  I thought the change to proto-YA novel territory was an interesting swerve for a series that - three books in - has been pretty consistent (though not exclusive) in front-and-centering older males in its overarching story, and thought that the mix of chases and twists probably make it the most film-friendly of the Foundation books so far.
Now in the public domain and available for free download to your tablet or smartphone, The Scarlet Plague by Jack London is a post-apocalyptic tale that I checked out on account of its seeming similarity to A Canticle For Liebowitz.  There's some overlap in the basic premise, but unlike Miller's eons-spanning tale, London's work concentrates on a single group of characters in the year 2072.  Originally published over a century ago (in 1912), it's obviously dated a bit, but still holds up surprisingly well to a contemporary reading, with London's version of the future seeming to retroactively fall into steampunk territory.  A good - if brief - read.

He's 70 but with proper medication he can still pleasure a woman

Jem and the Holograms is a film about some girls in a band called Jem and the Holograms, but it is also about one of the girls - called Jem - who looks at some holograms, so you know, this thing's got some layers.
The plot is that a video of teenage girl in her pajamas is put on Youtube and it gets loads of hits "for some reason" (one of the movie's most unrealistic moments is when we get a glimpse of the comments section of the video only to see it isn't full of men asking to see the girl's toes), and instead of being offered a job at a fetish website or taken into protective care as would happen in any properly-functioning democracy - America, you are a circus - she gets a music deal instead, and while she's in the big city feeling bad about having a music deal she makes friends with a miniature BB8 invented by her dead dad and after she solves some National Treasure-style clues (if the plot of National Treasure was engineered around places that could be shot within walking distance of the movie studio) BB8 shows her some holograms (because the film is about JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS - do you see?) and this makes her feel less sad about having a record deal, so she gives a lecture about not letting life experiences grind you down to a venue full of people at least twice her age and then plays one of those songs that isn't quite pop music and isn't quite rock music and then the film ends apart from a mid-credits sequence clearly shot much later after the makers realised that their preview material was - to put it mildly - not going down well with their intended audience and they needed to be able to say they'd actually included something that linked back to the trashy camp of the source material, so in what must surely be the dictionary definition of "too little too late", they go to the source material only after the film is over and even then only because they have been forced to do so.
I usually like bad films, and to be fair to it, this is a well-made film with many competently-realised individual components such as make up, acting, and editing - but a shiny turd is still a turd, and I really didn't enjoy this very much.  What stuck with me was the concert at the end where Jem unloads about her white girl problems on a bunch of strangers, as all I could think was that those people had come to see something camp and silly and fun and be distracted for maybe an hour or so and they have to sit through this crap - no, I'm not going to say this is a paradigm for the film itself, what gets me is: what did those people think at that point?  They weren't in on the backstage dramas of the film's main plot, so what did that speech mean to them, exactly?  Statistically speaking, a lot of the women - and some of the men - in that room had been sexually assaulted in the past, possibly by family members, and they came to see a Youtube-famous girl do some pop music so they could get out of their heads for a while but instead of that they get "life experiences aren't so bad, really, you, like, can't complain and stuff?"  Anyway, the mid-credits sequence would objectively be someone in that crowd rushing the stage with a knife is what I took away from this, and for a film based on a cartoon, these are not the ideal post-movie thoughts that should go through your audience members' minds.
Anyway, the acting is good apart from Juliette Lewis - although I hasten to add that I am not actually criticising her, I just have literally no idea what she is doing when she's onscreen - there's a nice line of editing where they splice Youtube videos throughout the film without also doing that thing they have now where they overload the screen with information and text because internet or pause buttons or whatever, the music is good, and the whole thing looks nice, it's just that the actual script is a hot mess of stuff that really needed focus and to be one thing or the other.  In closing, they may have made an awful film this time out, but I would be really interested in seeing this production crew would come up with if they one day decided to make a Jem and the Holograms movie.

Reading is for morons what can't understand pictures

You know, I think people don't give Donald Trump the credit he deserves for being genuinely good at what he does - it isn't acting, business, or politics, it's selling the fantasy that he isn't the punchline to capitalism, and that his crazy, unworkable pipe-dreams aren't the mad delusions of a racist idiot.  America is looking like it might get interesting again, or at the very least it looks like it's gearing up to give fascism or socialism a punt in the next few years, which I imagine will be great for its creative industries if the younger types (mid-30s to early 50s) finally have something to rail against.

My memories are a roadmap that leads to pain and boredom

God help me but I simply cannot stop watching The Mysteries Of Laura.
The clues - OH MY GOD THE CLUES - that the characters uncover and follow are amazing, like something from the old Batman show where they'd go "Who could be behind this dastardly deed?  Wait... this diabolical trap was sprung at sea... AND CATWOMAN BEGINS WITH A C!"  There's a hacker terrorising the precinct and they track him down by noticing that he spells things in a different way (IE: color/colour) as a foreign national might, so they go on "the internet" to look for someone making spelling mistakes and track down the hacker almost immediately - I mean literally within seconds of announcing this is their plan.  It is UHMAZING that anyone writes in such broad and, well... patronising strokes in this day and age when half of tv shows contain self-aware treatises on the craft of writing or at the very least commentary upon their own lack of originality.  There are actual cartoons for babies with better writing than The Mysteries Of Laura, so why can't I stop watching it?

In my defence, I just don't care

It's probably a bad sign when I laugh at the introduction of every character on a show, be it hunky white boys with impossible hairstyles that retain that stiff, erect and proud profile no matter what gymnastics are undertaken by their stunt doubles, or laconic, complicated black guys who smolder their way through the scene of a homicide while explaining to their captain - who looks like she's twenty and a model - that women cannot understand him and he can never be close to them.  Then a geeky spectacles-wearing dude is introduced as the "best friend" of the hot redhead (black eyebrows) lead character and really, at that point you're not waiting to see how this relationship unfolds, you're just waiting to see how the show explains to you that he has the hots for her but it is not reciprocated because you have seen this in every other show and you are getting it now, too.  She says "how can you not notice that someone so close to you has the hots for you?" and the guy strokes his chin and looks her in the eye and says "HOW INDEED" okay maybe that is not exactly how it plays out but believe me, I am not paraphrasing things quite as much as you may suspect.
Also, in a show that is clearly populated by twenty-somethings (and their thirty-something parents), much is made of the fact that the lead character is just turning 18 (an actual line from the character: "I'm turning 18, it's not like I'm setting off on some epic journey"), which for some reason struck me as odd that the forces of evil and magic in general would have the age requirement for giving legal consent to sexual intercourse in North America as their barometer of whether someone had "come of age" or not.  There's actually a deep and rich mythology surrounding the ascent to womanhood in magical cultures... I'm sure some of that will come up in the course of later episodes.
"Sorry I'm late, the captain has got me on those demonic murders" "literally my brain is about to explode!" - actual lines of dialogue from this show, FYI.
This all might give the impression that Shadowhunters is some kind of metatextual hoot at the very least, but that would be a misleading impression to give you as such a thing would require a level of self-awareness the show doesn't have.  Shadowhunters is not self-aware - if it was, at some point a character would stop and announce "the world I am in is a load of turgid shit" - no, Shadowhunters is just shit.  Shit that I honestly believe has had creative input from 12 year old girls, because it is like something my niece would create during that strange period where she stopped drawing her graphic novel opus Poo Robots and started saying "I like Gerard Way's music" unironically while plastering her bedroom wall with pictures of hairless androgynes she insisted had deep creative insights to impart to the culture.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not being hostile towards Shadowhunters here, I totally understand there are many demands placed upon a creative  production from various quarters over a relatively short space of time.  Buffy was a great show in its day, but there's no law or anything that says that a show has to have a coherent creative vision and tangible purpose or themes, that was just something Joss Whedon brought to the table after years of honing his craft and learning to work within the demands and confines of television production to deliver the best possible product - it's unfair to expect the same dedication to storytelling and the inherent belief that the audience is not composed of drooling simpletons of a modern production team who construct their narratives purely by stringing scenes from other tv shows and films together and who maybe get genuine input from the higher-ups a few times a day along the lines of "more twenty-something models taking their shirts off" or "less talk" or "something from the Billboard charts from a month ago" or "he talks for a long time in this scene, can he have his shirt off?"  The demands of television are different now than they were in the late 1990s when kids could pay attention for 40 minutes, as now kids have one eye on their phones while they're watching stuff, so they probably won't notice your clever use of sound or your inventive nonlinear plot structure or your subtle character study, so you're better off if a song they might like suddenly plays or someone takes their shirt off as that way there's a good chance you'll get their attention away from the Twitter and the Instagrams for a minute - of course, if you've abandoned all pretense of substance as Shadowhunters does quite early in proceedings, there's the obvious question of what they're actually going to see when they do look away from the Twitter and the Instagrams for a moment and what great insight or original turn you have to offer, but there's probably a good chance they're on the Twitter and the Instagrams in the first place because they're a moron, so all they need is the music and the shirt coming off and you can call it a day knowing you did your best as a creative entity and your audience likely got the show they deserved - the dumb fuckers.
Strange but true: like Buffy, Shadowhunters is based on a movie that did a major belly-flop in cinemas, and I recall this only because I thought it was funny that I couldn't even make it to the end of the trailer, never mind watching the actual film.  I made it to the end of the first episode of Shadowhunters, though, and if you don't fancy your chances of doing the same, someone has handily done a supercut of all the plot scenes of the episode on Youtube that clocks in at just over 19 minutes - for some reason they've animated it, made it in 1998 and called it Invasion America, but trust me, apart from a gender-swapped lead character it's the exact same fucking story.

I used to work at a book store and I read a sentence from every single one of those books

Watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and I have scattered and unfocused opinions and impressions taken from it, so bear with me for a blog post that probably reads like a Twitter feed more than it does a coherent overview of a - FACK ME - 10 year-old film.
During the great opening half hour action sequence, I love how General Grievous announces "Fire ze emergency poofter engines!" - I'm not sure what Poofter Engines are, but they sound fabulous - and then uses something called "Race Shields" to trap the Caucasian characters.  There is some odd stuff going on in these movies.
I do like that it's just a bunch of mad fights, but they also highlight that the weakest part of the film is Anakin's Face/Heel turn in the slower moments - Hayden Christiansen gets a lot of flak for this, but that's unfair, as the dialogue is pretty weak and doesn't tie the disparate strands of his character arc  together.  There's some nice touches like Anakin's humility and magnanimity possibly being his reflecting those emotions from those around him, suggesting a functioning sociopath who's simply faking it and using the Jedi's teachings to help him do so, but I suppose if Anakin is a sociopath, it makes his eventual redemption in Return of the Jedi impossible, and the whole point of Return of the Jedi is arguably that Anakin the Jedi... erm... "Returns" when given a similar moral choice to the one he makes here.
Another nice touch is that his fall comes not from the Sith but from the Jedi - through Mace Windu (shortly before before Mace goes through a windu) - failing to live up to the standards of the Jedi order and the justice system of the Republic, implying that Vader was never inevitable, simply a long game of Sidious' that the Jedi could have thwarted if they'd stayed the distance and held true to their code.  There's probably a great What If? story waiting to be told, stemming from Mace Windu not losing faith in the way of the Jedi and thus never prompting Anakin's impulsive decision that leads to his turn to the Dark Side, but I suspect it would still be told against a background of an empire in decay, as one thing Lucas does well is use colour and scale to show that we're seeing the large-scale widescreen final days of a once-proud and great power in decline - an honest-to-God culture, corrupted from within and seized by an antagonist who's an opportunist as much as a schemer, and I don't help but notice it's a capitalist system that's going tits-up, and that the igniting incident of the war was corporate greed.  Usually in these space operas - Star Wars imitators, admittedly - they center on dynastic skulduggery usually involving a Bad Old Dude making a power grab from his poorly-lit  throne room set, and what we see of "the galaxy" is some corridors and maybe an outdoor shoot near an old fort or something, but here we see an actual sprawling civilisation at stake.
The Prequels are about the fall of an empire, not the rise of one, and in retrospect, Lucas made the right decision to tell this story rather than the more obvious and lucrative one, because when people bitch and whine about how the Prequels don't feel like Star Wars, what those people actually mean is that they aren't 8 years old anymore, and they're likely more angry that they will never be young again than they are angry that some guy didn't make the movie they wanted.
"It's just a toy advertisement" - I never really understood this argument, as so was the original Star Wars, because obviously toy companies - having just bought the toy rights - made toys out of anything they could.  It seems to me that what people are complaining about in the context of the Prequels is not potential toys but the act of world-building Lucas undertakes.

What a prick C3P0 is - he walks in on padme watching the Jedi temple in flames and announces that Anakin just went there "but I'm sure he'll be alright" and then he fucks off and Padme breaks down in tears.  Dick move.

I like when Palpatine says the Empire will make the galaxy "safe and secure" and everyone believes him and claps like the morons they are.  HAHA GEORGE LUCAS' DIALOGUE IS SO UNREALISTIC.
"Into exile I must go.  Failed I have."  Erm... what?
Padme dies of a broken heart.  I unironically love the romanticism of this notion.

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  I think its main flaw is that it's too ambitious and set out to do too much, to the point that no matter how neatly it ties up the threads it weaves, the best case scenario was always to be that it leaves the story just as it's getting started.  Unlike, say, The Force Awakens, Revenge of the Sith at least tries, and if I had to identify its single biggest problem, it wouldn't be the acting - not even that Jedi kid that approaches Anakin in the temple - it would be that for a movie so full of inventive fight scenes and madcap chases, it's a real bummer to watch because of where it all goes in the end, so you can't take as much joy from it as you otherwise would.  Also the pacing is really odd, with multiple scenes playing out alongside each other and slowing things down in those scenes - although I really liked that Padme dies just as Anakin becomes Vader, even if it doesn't actually make that much sense because he's already Vader, and doesn't actually become the proper for-real evil Vader until after the Frankenstein's Monster riff near the end - but still, full marks for soppiness, with the callback to the charm Anakin carved for Padme in The Phantom Menace being an especially good example of same, and as much as Jar-Jar was a terrible idea, seeing him sad at Padme's funeral is heartbreaking.

I liked the little callbacks to the original trilogy, like Anakin's choice between helping Mace Windu or Chancellor Palpitine being the exact same choice he would be presented with in Return of the Jedi (with the Emperor and Luke), Obi Wan picking up Anakin's lightsaber before leaving him to die, and the way Owen (Luke's uncle) is standing looking out at the suns of Tatooine in exactly the same way Luke would.