At time of writing, TMDB has set this to "Final [sic] Parts Un & Deux" (including the typo) and locked it. Streaming apps, TVDB, & IMDB call it just "Finale Part Un" (or with "Finalé" instead, if they're trying to be fancy). In case TMDB goes even further and deletes "Finale Part Deux", eventually leading to Trakt also deleting the next episode, I've duplicated my season-ending perspective from https://trakt.tv/comments/589829 here, too.
As further insurance against future deletions, my rating & history for 2x24: 7/10, played 2023-08-14 11:54 UTC.
Reviewing this season-ender as if it was one episode seems to make sense, because the story clearly flows right from one into the other and they originally aired the same night. So, here goes.
In "Part Un", I was frustrated by having the restaurant scene cut short. Rory and Missy calling back to the fact that they "at least" had lobster wasn't nearly enough of a button on the whole thing with Jim and C.J. figuring out who was going to pay for what turned out to be a very expensive dinner.
And in "Part Deux", the whole subplot with C.J. and Sissy just disappeared without a trace. I suppose all the humor had been wrung from such a simplistic setup already, but… come on. Closure, people. It's the end of a season; don't leave loose threads hanging.
Speaking of loose threads, it's going to sound silly if I now go on to excuse what was set up between Cate and Ed Gibb, but that's different because it wasn't a forgotten plot line; it was a setup for season 3. Hoping we at least get a reference to the final frog-herding scene in 3x01, though.
The weirdest part of this whole season was that, once they adjusted to losing John Ritter so suddenly, the show's tone markedly improved. I was never a big fan of the cheesy "front door" intro, which wouldn't have worked with Jim or C.J. at the door instead of Paul. Losing that intro and jumping right into the story is the best change that came of the casting change, forced though it was.
Reviewing this season-ender as if it was one episode seems to make sense, because the story clearly flows right from one into the other and they originally aired the same night. So, here goes.
In "Part Un", I was frustrated by having the restaurant scene cut short. Rory and Missy calling back to the fact that they "at least" had lobster wasn't nearly enough of a button on the whole thing with Jim and C.J. figuring out who was going to pay for what turned out to be a very expensive dinner.
And in "Part Deux", the whole subplot with C.J. and Sissy just disappeared without a trace. I suppose all the humor had been wrung from such a simplistic setup already, but… come on. Closure, people. It's the end of a season; don't leave loose threads hanging.
Speaking of loose threads, it's going to sound silly if I now go on to excuse what was set up between Cate and Ed Gibb, but that's different because it wasn't a forgotten plot line; it was a setup for season 3. Hoping we at least get a reference to the final frog-herding scene in 3x01, though.
The weirdest part of this whole season was that, once they adjusted to losing John Ritter so suddenly, the show's tone markedly improved. I was never a big fan of the cheesy "front door" intro, which wouldn't have worked with Jim or C.J. at the door instead of Paul. Losing that intro and jumping right into the story is the best change that came of the casting change, forced though it was.
As of writing this, TMDB has both 2x23 "Final Parts Un & Deux" and 2x24 "Finalé Part Deux". The former is locked, which makes me wary that the latter—this episode—could be deleted. I'll therefore cross-post the thoughts above, plus my history & rating for this episode, to 2x23 just in case.
Maybe it's unfair to the cast and crew that I would say this, but: 8 Simple Rules was never better than it is in this series of episodes, right here, dealing with the loss of John Ritter. The whole team put together a perfect balance of sitcom humor and raw emotion—there's no way the remaining main cast members are "acting" grief-stricken.
Blessedly few shows ever have to deal with an unplanned main-character death, but 8 Simple Rules stands far above most of its peers in this department. Kudos to the writers for setting up the dominos, and bravo to the cast for harnessing everything they felt in the weeks following Ritter's sudden passing and pouring it into a series of heart-wrenching performances.
Today, both WGA (and SAG-AFTRA) members are on strike, in part, because TV and movie producers want to use more AI tools instead of relying on human creativity. Last-minute rewrites such as those needed at this point in the run of 8 Simple Rules clearly demonstrate what a team of humans can accomplish, under time pressure. Despite losing its headline star, the show was only off the air for a month while the production regrouped, which is pretty incredible. None of that could have happened without the WGA members responsible for creating a new storyline, and the SAG-AFTRA members who then brought it to life on-screen.
Support the human creators whose work you enjoy, people. I've seen ChatGPT's attempts to write a story, and they're not worth it.
Is the plot original? No, we've seen this before. Disney does stories like this all the time.
But I don't care. Sometimes they fall down on the execution—but other times, they knock it out of the park. There are head-scratching moments in here, yes, and you have to just go along with them. What's great is that the film's vibe makes it really easy.
Sometime in the past week I'm positive a perfect quote about this floated my way, either in a video interview or a quote published in one of numerous film- and television-related articles I've read over that period. I couldn't find it again tonight, so I'll have to write my own "quotable" and apologize for not crediting whoever said the original that inspired me:
Movies only need a plot to get from A to B, but it doesn't really matter. If the film creates a feeling, that's what the audience will remember, and that's why they'll want to share your movie: So others can feel the same feeling.
Radio Rebel does that quite well, in my humble opinion. Forget the sociopathic principal who single-mindedly exterminates joy. This movie has a great feeling, and a great message, to share.
Also, this should be on Disney+ instead of Pluto and other random FAST sites. It's much better than most of the other DCOMs that have taken me down memory lane these past few weeks.
I must have caught just the last part of this in a hotel somewhere as a kid. Finally watched the whole movie to see what led up to the hockey scene I remembered.
Genius was a fine watch until the script had Charlie not explain the real reason he'd pretended to be Chaz. His silence on the matter undermines the whole message of the film that he just leaves the Franklin kids to think he did it as a social experiment, or to make himself feel superior. There was a great opportunity for him to confide in his new friends about always being an outcast until now.
Controlling the hockey players' entire bodies with one "microchip" affixed to a single skate didn't help, either. The graviton-assisted shenanigans aren't even internally consistent; sometimes the affected Rumson players act as if only the chipped skate is being manipulated, but other times their whole bodies follow the actions of whoever's controlling them from the lab. (A gag where two Rumson players were forced to kiss in midair would have distracted from the plot, so I'm sure the opportunity was intentionally ignored.)
Surely my opinion would have been different all those years ago. But I'm older and a little wiser now, for better or worse.
And speaking of watching this well after its release, I now have the ability to see that Emmy Rossum as Claire looks a lot like Nico Parker as Sarah in HBO's The Last of Us adaptation. Most viewers of Genius up to now will have had no chance at all to make that association.
Eerie parallels between this fictional Flight 093 and the real-life UAL 93 seventeen years later:
While aircraft are pressurized, the cabin pressure aboard a Boeing 747 is generally equivalent to atmospheric pressure approximately one mile above sea level. Pressurization depends on a constant supply of air from outside the cabin, which obviously becomes unavailable if a plane is submerged (both because the intake vents will flood, and the engines can't power the pressurization system because they will also flood).
More importantly, aircraft door, hatch, and window seals are designed to hold pressure in, not out. Dialogue seems to put this aircraft at least 100 feet (30 meters) underwater, where the water would exert about 4 atmospheres of pressure on the plane. A three-atmosphere pressure differential is likely (based on my ten minutes of research, just now) would deform the fuselage pretty quickly. Hollywood likes to play this "underwater plane" game kind of a lot, but it's not based in real physics.
Even putting a 747 on this route (:airplane_departure: LAX, :airplane_arriving: DFW) is silly, even in the '80s. That model is suited for much longer, higher-volume routes. One wonders how a "small airline" (as described in dialogue at the airport, before boarding) even managed to buy one.
Less serious quibble: The jump from "String doing his taxes" to "String standing in air traffic control with Dom" made it feel like there was a scene missing. It was probably shot and then cut for time, but cutting the flight attendant's safety lecture before takeoff (which added nothing to the story) should have left enough slack for a quick "how did we get here" segment.
The thing is, I still liked the story thread of this episode. Caitlin needed some character building, and this gave it to her. I just wish the premise that enabled it could have been a little less laughable.
This series as a whole deserves its own score, instead of just taking the average of my season ratings, on account of serious wasted potential. Not-really-a-spoiler: This show was canceled just as it got good.
By my usual scoring system, Stargate Universe deserves a 7/10. That's the result of averaging my scores for S1 (6.65) and S2 (7.25), after rounding, and I normally score series by the average of their season ratings unless I have a good reason to deviate. I do this time.
Early in the show, almost no one is "a likeable character". People act selfishly. Factions form. Leadership is contested.
Out the other end, though, comes a pretty cohesive group of people with whom it would be an honor to serve. They have to fight, hard, for their unity in the end. In some ways, it comes at a heavy price, but the Destiny crew absolutely deserve the camaraderie they've built by the end of season two.
And unfortunately, that's where it ends.
I stalled out 70% of the way through the first season because it seemed like things weren't going anywhere. I was tired of the infighting, the coup attempts, the drama and general nastiness. I'm glad I picked up again a few months later. Most of the characters eventually became people I'd be honored to meet. (If you've seen even just the pilot, you'll probably guess the exception is Rush. You'd be right. No, he doesn't become less of a callous jerk.)
If SGU was guilty of anything, it was guilty of sluggish pacing. The show simply took too long to stop being about interpersonal squabbles and start being about exploring the universe—you know, that thing so important they put it in the title. Once it got there, about halfway through the second season, things got really good but it was already too late. Cancellation was announced mere days after that midpoint, just as the show went on midseason hiatus (for over three months) and just as it hit a story arc that took it back to territory more familiar to fans of SG-1, or at least Atlantis.
GateWorld can go on about how Syfy network stacked the deck against Universe all they want. Syfy has done a lot of disservices to the genre they misspelled (presumably for trademark reasons), but I believe the SGU concept needed more familiar elements from previous shows to hook existing fans, and better pacing with less focus on (as others have put it) soap-opera drama.
Having chosen this at random, seeing how far down (well, far to the right) it was on Hulu's list of movie recommendations for me, I was surprised to recognize anyone in the cast. Margo Harshman was really not on my list of people I'd expect to see in, well, anything. When I revisited Even Stevens a while back (in which she played the recurring role of Tawny Dean), it seems like I looked at her IMDB credits and didn't see a huge number of roles. Finding her in something purely at random was cool.
Harshman aside, I was supremely impressed by the pacing and delivery from the film's leading men, Nicholas D'Agosto (Shawn) and Eric Christian Olsen (Nick, who should have traded character names with his costar). The plot might be predictable, and the jokes often obvious, but they are woven together very well and there's hardly a dull moment to be found anywhere in the film.
Maybe I wouldn't go so far as to say it's "infinitely rewatchable", but as something entertaining to watch once it's hard to beat a movie like this. There's even some truly clever humor thrown in there to make you switch your brain on a few times!
I don't understand why the ratings for this are so low across the board. The satire is extremely well observed, and the application of parody nearly flawless. The only place NATM really lost me was at the idea that "Janey isn't attractive with her ponytail and glasses". Honestly, her normal self is much cuter than "the new and improved Janey Briggs" who goes to the party and the prom.
Well, OK, I also see where some other commenters are coming from about "toilet humor" and such; some very over-the-top gags did temper my overall rating a little. (For example: The peeping toms falling through the floor along with the girl they were spying on was hilarious; the toilet spraying an absolute crap-ton of excrement at them afterward was unnecessary.) But those were such small parts of an otherwise superbly executed film that it doesn't seem fair to tank its rating because of them.
Including background and bit parts, there are tons of connections to (sometimes future) teen sitcoms, movies, and other media: Even Stevens' Coach Tugnut as the football announcer; How I Met Your Mother's Ted Mosby as the guy who introduces us to the school; The A-Team's Mr. T as… well, best not spoil that one. There are so many actor connections, tiny prop/costume details, musical references, and miscellaneous touches included, it's impossible for me to list them all. I could rewatch the film five times, taking meticulous notes each time, and still miss half of them.
Clearly I'm not alone in thinking this was a hilarious movie. Based on reading other people's reviews, I guess it's just one of those things you either love or hate, and I'm in the camp that loved it.
Alita, the character, is marvelous for so many reasons: Her hybrid anime/photoreal design, Rosa Salazar's captivating performances, the sheer fluidity of how she integrates with the live actors… Cliché as the statement was, I agree 150% with what Hugo said: "You're the most human person I have ever met." Stick Alita into any script you like, and I'll watch that movie ten times.
That said, it would be nice if that script builds on the woefully underutilized world shown in this film. My rating is tempered by the one-dimensional side characters and overall lack of resolution at the end, because this was clearly set up for a sequel. There's a lot more source material left to adapt, if Cameron can tear himself away from Avatar movies long enough to at least help get a sequel off the ground (and if the Mouse gives the green light to do it, considering they now own the rights to this franchise… :weary:). Jon Landau mentioned a sequel just a few days ago (https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1600222727624790016), so that's a nice bit of news.
I will be very disappointed if there's no "Alita 2" coming, even if it takes another 20 years of development hell. (I say 20 years because the domain name battleangelmovie.com was registered way back in 2000. This project was clearly on James Cameron's mind for several years before anyone confirmed in 2003 that a script was being written.)
Average episode rating for this season: 6.6
I appreciate the more serious tone this show has taken since the beginning, but did often wish for the stories to be less predictable and, perhaps, a bit less overtly preachy. Writing a story about the thing in human society (even if the story is "about" an alien race) is easier than devising a clever metaphor that merely alludes to some human failing, though, and having the characters say exactly what you (the writers) mean is also much more likely to "land" with the viewers who you want to hear the message.
Unfortunately doing it this way also tends to make The Orville seem even more like "21st-century humans in the future", a problem it's had since day one due to the use of present-day slang and other conventions. The best sci-fi draws you into its own world, and often addresses social (or other) issues through creative reframing, rather than just straight-up pointing at aliens who do something we'd like to see less of in our own society and saying "aren't these people assholes?"
Somehow, despite all of this, the show still scratches my "classic Star Trek" itch like nothing else. I still hope it gets another season or two, ideally with even more focus on fleshing out the show's universe. Some big stuff happened in this season that would be a shame to just leave hanging.
Presented last month as part of the 2022 Chicago Japan Film Collective, one of their few in-person screenings. This film eked out an audience award win against The Takatsu River and was presented via online screening at the festival's end to celebrate.
Going into this film, the summary did not prepare me for the real music genre. Calling the Seppuku Pistols "a taiko music group that carry on the traditions of Japan's Edo era" is pretty misleading. As their music was presented here, it's not my cup of tea. I'm restricting my rating and review to consider only the film, however. It's not fair to judge a live performance based on its presentation in documentary form, plus I think the style of said film is unfairly coloring my opinion of the music.
All that said, The Seppuku Pistols falls pretty flat as a documentary, to me. Subjectively, too much time is spent hopping from show to show; one gets the impression that the Pistols have only one song, thanks to how frequently similar moments are shown across many different performances. My ears are still ringing from Iida-san's "conducting" with the kane.
In a word, what's shown is redundant. We don't need to see the Pistols go through the same motions at each of half a dozen performances. Just because a film is a "documentary", or "non-fiction", doesn't mean it can't have a narrative arc. That was missing from this one. It starts out by introducing some of the key players, somewhat abruptly jumping through a random assortment of interview questions, then gloms onto one answer as a segue into the group's New York tour. What follows quickly becomes repetitive.
Frustratingly, the side story about Matthew's connection to the group feels like it comes out of nowhere, but that theme feels like it should be the through-line of the whole film. Most of the sound bites from random people at their shows don't say much beyond "they rock" or "they're awesome", and that's too bad. Even once I realized this wasn't about quite the kind of taiko I expected, it still could have drawn me in with the kind of human-interest that makes great documentaries more than just the sum of the facts they present. Instead, so much of the film became an overwhelming wall of sound that I had to resist repeatedly checking the time.
Structurally, it would have been better to choose one seminal performance to feature. With that picked out, go in one of two directions: 1) build to the show through interviews and backstory, or 2) intersperse interviews and backstory through clips of the show. In either case, show the audience (most of) a single performance instead of many overlapping clips from all over. Communicating the experience of a live performance art like this is easier if the audience is allowed to experience it. You want the viewer to feel like they've somehow gone to the concert and stood in the crowd, without leaving their seat. That feeling is simply very difficult to evoke while skipping from one show to another every few minutes.
Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.
This almost feels like an alternate-universe version of Your Lie in April to me. At least, enough elements are similar: high school, music, chronic disease, possible love polygon. The tone, however, is completely different.
But before I go on about the script, let's talk performances. Choosing this film—the one that brought CJFC 2022 to my attention—based on its two leads turned out to be a smashing decision. Yuzumi and Marin sold every one of their scenes, showing off every bit of skill they learned from years in Amuse's Sakura Gakuin group. It's too bad that music wasn't a larger part of this story. There was a point where I thought it was about to turn into a musical, and got excited, but that's not where the story went.
Speaking of which… If I could make only one complaint about this film, it would be that the script throws us too many unexplained curve balls. Starting with a nebulous illness that made Yuki skip a year of school didn't give us a great foundation. I don't especially like beginning a movie with a "Just… okay?" (with apologies to Barney Stinson), but that wasn't the last. Between Yuki losing her voice, the doctor losing his job at that hospital, Maki getting amnesia, and the police getting a confession out of Yusuke all in the space of one cut, it's just too much of the unseen for me.
To me, the film's actual message got lost while I was asking "But what about…?" and "He did what?" along the way. Which is too bad.
Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.
When choosing films to watch, I'm really bad about looking at what other works I might have seen by the same director. It's much more likely that I would notice a common actor—of course, because (usually) their faces are visible. So it wasn't until after watching My House, while looking for more background and marking it as viewed on my various tracking sites (there's a universe outside Trakt?!), that the title of another Tsutsumi film caught my eye: The House Where the Mermaid Sleeps (2018).* I happened upon that one while unable to sleep on a transatlantic flight not too long after it came out, so it was loaded on the plane's entertainment system. Mermaid was a superb choice for keeping me awake.
My House didn't pack quite the same emotional punch for me, but it's anyone's guess whether that's because I'm different, because Tsutsumi's style improved in the six years between films, some combination of both, or something else entirely. Still, it makes for a surprisingly compelling watch. Having seen Motofumi Hasekawa's Arano (2020)^ just a day before, the contrast is striking. Both films run at a pretty leisurely pace; but where Hasekawa seemed to stretch a limited narrative to fit a feature film's runtime, Tsutsumi took a complex interplay of social dynamics and distilled it down to the essentials that could be shown in just 90 minutes.
I won't say that My House has a satisfying ending—plenty is left open—but it certainly does make a lingering point.
* — https://trakt.tv/movies/the-house-where-the-mermaid-sleeps-2018
^ — https://trakt.tv/movies/arano-2020
Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.
Sedate pacing is a staple of Japanese cinema, as are stunningly gorgeous visuals. Arano turns both of those up to 11—with mixed results.
I haven't the words to describe this film's beautiful landscape shots. They could easily replace any tourism advertisement.
This script, however, felt stretched to fill a feature-film runtime. In between those breathtaking landscapes are a number of moments that simply drag on. Presumably this is so the viewer can spend more time with the characters and get to know them, but it didn't seem to work in my case. However, if the intent was for the audience to have ample time to study every single piece of set dressing in the background while the characters disappear off screen, that was successful.
In the end, I'm trying not to be too hard on this film. It begins with an unusual premise, upon whose strength I chose this film as one of five to view from the CJFC 2022 slate. What's hard to get past is the disappointment of knowing so little about these characters despite spending just over an hour with them. That starting premise did not yield as deep and rich a story as I'd hoped.
All right, this third installment of the Kingsman series indeed did not feature Eggsy. I was correctly informed back in 2018, when I reviewed the second. (https://trakt.tv/comments/200749)
I was pleasantly surprised, then, that this prequel format worked as well as it did. My concerns then about dumping the whole core cast were unfounded. In fact, the whole Oxford family (and staff) were quite good together.
Four-letter words are again on prominent display throughout this script—though not nearly to the same degree as in The Golden Circle—which bothered me again. But this time, it was down to believability for various combinations of time period and character, rather than a sense of lazy writing. (I'm still not sure what they were going for with Rasputin, the sex-obsessed priest, because the obvious gag seems too obvious.)
Perhaps most impressively, the writers actually noticed that the final battle created a slight problem, and included dialogue about it. I was wondering, "How will they get down?" from the moment Shola grabbed the lift rope. Said problem was, of course, hand-waved away by a scene cut, but fine. Whatever. The characters at least mentioned it.
This film certainly does not belong in the "disappointment" bin alongside its predecessor. It's reasonably fun, if a bit slow at times, and gives us a nice backdrop to explain why things work the way they do way back in the first film. As a bonus, many of the events are based on true history—which is a very nice touch.*
* — Except for Hitler meeting Stalin in the mid-credits scene. That didn't really add anything.
What holds this one back from a perfect 10 is the nebulous, unexplained re-disappearance of Chet and Virna Hunter after Shawn moved into the apartment with Jack and Eric.
I could never put the timeline together in reruns on Disney Channel, but it's obvious now why: The show sometimes made quiet changes to the established status quo, without showing the events on screen. Chet leaving again was one such case; he was on the way to becoming a better father with his job at John Adams High and a life reunited with Shawn and Virna, but shortly after convincing Shawn to move out, Chet simply vanished from the scripts except for a few vague mentions.
Given how important it was for the show to, well, show us when he came back, it's disappointing for multiple reasons that we were left out of further developments on that front. I'd argue that at least one or two of the weirder (somewhat out-of-character) stories with Jealous Cory could have been replaced by much better, more meaningful scripts involving Chet and Virna (and Shawn)—which in turn would have made this episode even more powerful.
It's not like this episode needed more dramatic punch, but I still wish the producers had planned ahead a bit more.
Spoiler-free summary: The Prestige is a compellingly-told story about two deeply unlikable magicians.
For Angier's part, his obsession is clearly unhealthy. Cutter tells him as much, as does Tesla. He appeared to be friendly with Borden before the incident, and I'm not sure his transformation into a revenge-obsessed Lord is believable. Of course his anger is believable, but where did he get such vast amounts of money if his magic career was struggling due to Borden's continuing sabotage?
Then there's Borden: Whether or not he could remember which knot he tied that fateful night, I place at his feet all of the blame for Angier's self-destruction. Alfred never comes across as sorry in the least for his possible role in Julia's death. Presumably at that point in time, he wasn't living "half a life" yet, because The Transported Man wasn't yet being performed, so it can only have been him on that stage. In the aftermath, he didn't even need to help Angier. Simply not sabotaging the career of the man whose wife he might have killed would have been enough to satisfy me.
They're both complete jerks to each other, and one might reasonably expect Victorian men to have more honor than either displayed. It's frankly a bit disgusting how much intrigue Nolan wrung out of these two hotheaded pricks.
Sometimes a film turns me off and I can't explain why. This time, thought, the reason is easy to put into words: It's too much like Fargo, another so-called dark comedy that made me tune out within the first half-hour. So I guess a good tl;dr would be: Watch this if you liked Fargo, and skip it if you didn't.
I've now noticed that my rating of that other film is far too high, but there's no way I'm rewatching it to assign a more accurate score. Since I don't like changing my ratings if it's been a while since I saw something, it'll just have to stay.
But back to A Dog's Breakfast. Aside from the immediately obvious parallels to another film I couldn't stand, this is just such a disappointment for anyone who, like me, saw Stargate Atlantis and wanted to see David Hewlett play someone other than Rodney McKay. Unfortunately, Patrick is Rodney, but with more neuroses and less intelligence. And sure, in the first few minutes I grinned a little at how similar the characters were, but the amusement passed quickly.
One could argue that I shouldn't even rate this movie at all, because I spent about two-thirds of it playing games on my phone to alleviate the tedium. Even I used to think that way until I realized that such behavior is a very useful hint, to be used when rating.
Having never truly seen the full movie until now, I was unaware that Wil Wheaton played a role in this. Not that he had much to do, but it's still neat that genius-boy Wesley Crusher was in this mad-scientist adventure, I guess. (Too bad his role here is no genius.)
Robin Williams carries the script, as one might expect. Most scenes with him are pretty great, despite an inexplicable blue light reflected in his glasses in nearly every closeup.
Overall, however, I don't think the script holds up very well. It's hard to put my finger on why, though it might be largely thanks to a cast of one-dimensional characters. We don't actually get to see much of Philip's relationship with Sarah; it's thrust upon us as a plot device, to give him a reason for all the silly stunts with the flubber later in the movie. Even Hoenicker is a walking, talking plot device—an excuse for that flubber-boosted "battle" in the library.
I'll just blame the script's many shortcomings on its age and origins. This is ultimately a remake of an adaptation, following a 1961 film (The Absent-Minded Professor) that was itself based on a short story from 1943. I'm not surprised at all that a 90-minute film based on a story from a 1940s magazine would have trouble presenting a compelling narrative. Certainly, it's been done, but it's hard. And in this case, there's an obvious "Disney remake" factor, too. That ol' Disney, always trying to make another buck off its own past material…
This film might not blaze any new trails in the "Disney movie" genre, but it certainly puts a unique Spin on things.
While I admit that there were multiple points during the story that made me roll my eyes and mutter, "Could you not use that cliché?", there's a gravity to this picture. Unlike many Disney productions, the main characters are believable. Little tidbits that seem thrown in to feel current (such as "Tik-Tacos") can't hide Avantika's acting skills—nor Meera Syal's, nor Abhay Deol's.
Most importantly, though, I think this came out at perhaps the best possible time in history. We're living in an era of unprecedented creative tools, widely (and often freely) available. The one thing I would change about the script is its subtle emphasis on equipment. Just by spending a bit of time in her school's media lab (surely they have one, given everything else we see), Rhea could have digitized everything and created her mix entirely in an audio editor, on the computer she already had at home. I realize that doesn't fit with the DJ theme, but her friends bringing over a bunch of gear so she can get started sends the wrong message—to say nothing of the brand-new setup offered as a prize at the Beatmasters competition.
To mitigate the focus on equipment, I think this movie should have shown a bit more use of school/public resources. Maybe not every high school or library will have music-production gear, but many do. This story's strongest element is the push to try creating things. Its target audience should see that the tools might be easier to find than they think.
While it suffers from having to follow a stellar episode like "Passion", this episode isn't bad. We get some worldbuilding in the form of Buffy's cousin, plus a bit of badass Xander and a moment of Clever Cordy when she teases Xander about watching Buffy's butt.
Listening to David Boreanaz speak in vampire mode gives me a good idea just how much of Armin Shimerman's vocal affect (and all the other Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, really) must have come from the mouth prosthetics, rather than conscious choices to make the characters speak a certain way. Those fake teeth really change one's speech!
The doctor who tells the Scoobies they can't follow Buffy any further into the hospital (Juanita Jennings) has been in so many other one-off roles, from Sister, Sister and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Frasier and beyond.
Plus, seeing Willie Garson in anything these days is a bittersweet treat after his passing just three months ago. This episode of Buffy aired just a few months before his guest role on Star Trek: Voyager (5x09 "Thirty Days"), and I was just recovering from repeatedly seeing him in Stargate SG-1 too.
And speaking of Voyager, our friend Dr. Backer is played by none other than Admiral Owen Paris himself, Richard Herd. He and Garson were both on the show after this, so I'm sure it's just coincidence that the first demon Giles describes to Cordelia "extracts vital organs to replenish its own mutating cells" and not a reference to the Vidiians.
Others have already said pieces of this in older comments, but I'm still going to stitch together the parts that hit me while watching.
First and foremost, this felt like a "we have to talk about it" episode, to the point of looking like virtue signaling on the network's part. Yes, I realize that ignoring the events of the preceding year would have upset (some) viewers. But ironically, It felt like the episode did what it portrayed Boyle as doing, making a big deal of showing how much it cares about the issues while the characters who should have had the most to say about the topic (Holt and Jeffords) were sidelined to "B" plots with no connection to them.
And underneath all of that, there was the implication of both Rosa and Hitchcock dropping off the main cast. Looking ahead to the credits for future episodes in the season, I can see that both of them appear to remain involved, but I have no idea how. If Hitchcock stays in Brazil and we only see him on Scully's tablet, that's a big change. If Rosa isn't working at the precinct any more and we only see her out in the world, that's a big change too. I'm not a fan of big changes like that near the end of a series… certainly not after what happened to Stargate SG-1.
I guess you could say this season opener disappointed me. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has shown in the past that it can tackle serious subject matter without losing its spark of humor, but it failed to hit that mark this time.
Average season rating: 7.6
I can't help but think that Atlantis would have been better off if its continuation film(s) hadn't been canceled. That was a major advantage in SG-1's favor, beyond having double the episode count.
In some ways, though, it might have been the better decision not to continue. Atlantis never quite managed to capture the same feeling of adventure that SG-1 had in its heyday. It's telling that my favorite characters (except for Ronon) weren't even part of "the team" that went out on missions every week. There was actually a ton of potential for character dynamics that went undeveloped because we almost never got the kind of "home front" episodes that really showed who SG-1's members were outside of their jobs.
Atlantis also never developed the individual characters to the same degree as SG-1 had in the same amount of time—which, admittedly, is a reasonable prerequisite for developing dynamics between characters. Flat characters can't riff off each other nearly as well—and Atlantis is chock full of flat character archetypes:
They don't seem like real people, except for (maybe) Rodney. It's really hard to relate to them most of the time, which was not an issue I had with SG-1. (Anyone I've not listed above is because they were even more forgettable than these.)
In short, I can understand why the show's ratings declined enough that it got canceled. Still worth the ride, but probably not a rewatch.
Perhaps the most amusing part of this film is how we have, once again, a large (presumably underground) facility suspended in the middle of a deep hole in the rock with no safety rails. :joy_cat:
Honestly, this movie is great even though one could probably poke some gate-sized holes in parts of the story with a bit of determination. The only thing that could have made it better was more Teal'c, more O'Neill, and/or more Hammond (especially in light of Don S. Davis' passing shortly before release).
Well, I also would have liked to see the alternate timeline's Stargate Command facility at McMurdo before it was destroyed, but we can't have everything. That would have been a pretty major scenic construction expense for little story benefit.
For fun, I decided to see why Pluto TV's version showed up as 1h43m long, when IMDB and every other service (10 at time of writing) has a 1h38m cut. To do so, I put Pluto on a second monitor and muted it, starting both videos as close together as I could.
In doing so, I found the reason: Ads. While Roku Channel also has ads, Pluto is the only service to include the ads as part of the runtime. I've no idea why they do so, but maybe it means the ads are actually encoded into the video stream instead of being served separately. (Most ad-supported streaming services, including Roku's, fetch ads separately, presumably so they're easy to change depending on demographic targeting and/or which advertisers are willing to pay.) What an odd implementation decision…
Colonel Carter Count: 14/20 episodes this season. I guess 70% isn't bad, but it's still considerably lower than I'd expect for a star with main-cast billing like Amanda Tapping.
Despite the whole "ECH" shtick in one episode of Star Trek: Voyager, it's still weird to see Robert Picardo in a red uniform. :joy:
This might be the best "clip show" in Stargate history, and that's because the clips are new material. Structurally, though, it's pretty similar: Most of the episode is vignettes tied together with a few low-budget scenes on some redressed corridor sets. Probably the most expensive scene (other than the raid on Michael's compound in the last few minutes, setting up the season-ending cliffhanger) was Sheppard fighting through the sandstorm. I like this style of storytelling, really. I just don't like being fed old footage. :smirk:
Sheppard's quip about it not being his birthday got me thinking… Atlantis never addresses the issue of planetary rotational/orbital periods. Does the planet where Atlantis sits have exactly the same 24-hour day and 365-day year as Earth? Surely not? Surely it's also different from where the city rested at the beginning of the series. There must be some small variation on each world, so what do the Atlantis personnel do about date-keeping? (Probably quartz or atomic timekeeping devices for reference to Earth time, and the city's own systems for local time, or something like that. Still, odd that they never even mention it.)
Devlin Medical Technologies, huh? Cute little inside nod to one of the co-writers on Stargate's original film.
This episode contains one of the most conspicuous incorrect card swipes in the whole franchise. Rodney tries the card multiple times, and the fact that it doesn't work is a plot point. The obvious reason is that he's swiping it backwards.
Meanwhile, still trying to figure out why Amanda Tapping joined the main cast only to keep skipping episodes. So far this season, she's appeared in just 6 of the 9 episodes—and many of those featured her character in just a few short scenes. I would guess that the producers probably wanted to add a tie-in with SG-1 after its non-renewal to capture any audience that wasn't already watching Atlantis, but if that had been the reason I started watching this show after SG-1 ended then I'd be none too pleased with her repeated absences. It seems too early for her work on Sanctuary to be interfering with Tapping's appearances here (it didn't premiere until nearly a year later, in October 2008), but maybe the production lead time was greater than I'd expect.
Wallace was almost redeemable until he almost turned kidnapping into murder. I felt that the character crossed a line in that moment. If he hadn't injected Jeannie with the defective nanites, sacrificing himself so Todd the Wraith could finish reprogramming the nanites would have been a much more powerful gesture. As written, Wallace's death and Sheppard's "contribution" to it fell more than a little flat, like "of course that's the solution, duh".
Average season rating: 7.6
(Adding up my over 200 individual episode ratings by hand would be much too tedious.)
I'd give this show two different ratings if I could—one for the original cast, and another for the "shaken up" cast following Richard Dean Anderson's departure. While there were more casting changes, the big shift in SG-1's ninth season was the only one that really felt like it changed the show's core feel.
Putting mathematical averages aside, rated alone, I would give the first eight seasons a solid 8.5 or 9 (out of 10) just on the basis of the main characters and their interactions. That even includes the one season with Corin Nemec instead of Michael Shanks, because Jonas was just as delightful a character to watch as Dr. Jackson. Of course the early seasons had some growing pains in developing both characterizations and continuity, but taken as a whole the show was just fun to watch then.
As for the two seasons after the show's soft-reboot, I'd award maybe 6.5 on a good day. Season 9 in particular felt like the first season again, in that the writers had so much work to do building relationships between the old and new characters. It was growing pains all over again, only this time there was none of Jack's cheek to distract the viewer and no Daddy Hammond to watch over the team. While I did eventually come to appreciate Vala as a character—she came a long way from her flat, annoying, guest star role in the eighth season—neither General Landry nor Colonel Mitchell ever reached even the same galaxy of appeal as the characters they replaced.
Overall, I do still very much thing that SG-1 is worth watching in its entirety. Those last two seasons are fine if one approaches them as a new show (and I've seen bits and bobs about that being the original intent).
Oof, man. Like the original "Wormhole X-Treme!" episode this built on, a lot of the in-jokes and self-roasting worked really well.
Unlike that first installment, though, this one felt entirely too much like a bottle episode. The use of pre-existing sets was quite evident, and spending a majority of the runtime with the core cast sitting around the conference room table did nothing to counteract the "bottle" feeling. They were in fact bottled up in the conference room waiting for the gate to be fixed.
When the gate finally did work again, and everyone (even Walter) trooped through to what we were led to believe would be a surprise party for Mitchell's 200th gate trip, that turned out to be a bait and switch—the other end of the gate was the show-within-a-show cast finishing the final shot of their 200th episode, 10 years into the in-universe future. We, the audience, are denied the payoff. Instead, we get several minutes of not-very-funny fictional interviews (which I thought were the weakest part of "Wormhole X-Treme!").
That's all without even mentioning how different the chemistry of the cast is compared to 100 episode before, and ignoring those fantasy sequences of ideas for Marty's film-within-the-show that drag on much longer than is funny (especially the puppets).
Personally, I don't think the SG-1 crew should have tried to replicate the previous gag show, but plenty of fans seem to love this one just as much or more. For me, though, it did not work the second time.
Did SG-1 need to show some Jaffa women? Yes, definitely. The fact that we only ever see Jaffa men fighting for their respective system lords needed to be addressed somehow, and this story did cover it as far as Moloc is concerned.
However, I was deeply disappointed in the wardrobe choices made for this episode. Just like in every video game or action movie featuring women in fighting roles, the Hak'tyl warriors wore unrealistically skimpy outfits that would provide no real protection in battle. These costumes were no better than what Hathor wore* a few seasons ago—and in that case, "Hathor never expects to find herself in active combat" was a flimsy but valid excuse. Ishta and the others here go off to raid other Jaffa parties for symbiotes with no armor at all. It's no wonder they lose so many good warriors in trying to procure symbiotes for the children among them.
We also have to acknowledge that Teal'c's romance with Ishta makes no sense. Had Christopher Judge not written the script, I very much doubt that idea ever would have come up. Though I have no evidence to prove that it was indeed his idea, the lack of any co-writer credits for this script is about as damning as possible. To think that Jolene Blalock took a break from T'Pol's Bermanization on Star Trek: Enterprise to film this, where her character was arguably treated even worse… Sigh.
Honestly, I'm out of energy now to also complain about the huge gaping plot hole: there were at least three symbiotes available at the SGC for reimplantation into Neith, since their original Jaffa hosts had given them up in favor of Tretonin treatments.
In writing this down, I talked myself into revising my rating from 6/10 to 5/10. Whoops.
* — And at least Hathor's skimpy costume covered where her symbiote pouch should be; "Birthright" overlooked that detail a few times.
