Note that this "special" is also listed as a movie, separately, with all the metadata you could want.
Available for free on Google Play (limited time offer, valid as of writing).
How does this qualify as E/I programming???
Saw a fair chunk of this at the Art Car Museum in Houston just now. They closed before the end of the movie (hell, I thought it was just a typical 15-minute museum piece), but this and the director's other art car film are both on Amazon Prime Video.
As this episode did not air the US, and is not available on any of the services where I can get the rest of season 2, I've had to skip it and rate season 2 as if it doesn't exist.
I watched this on PBS like 20 years ago. One of those shows that earned a warm, fuzzy place in my nostalgic memories of childhood.
Maybe I'll start occasionally watching an episode to see if I can remember any of them.
If you're working off of MyAnimeList, this is not the episode 15 you're looking for. This is considered to be "Episode 14.5": https://myanimelist.net/anime/2589/Black_Cat__Toozakaru_Neko (Kind of a note for my own future benefit, whenever I get around to finishing this show, as much as for anyone else who happens to see it.)
Even though The TVDB claims to enforce original broadcast order, always, examples like this prove that that isn't really the case. Original broadcast order would have this listed as a special, not in the middle of the season.
Only 2 minutes long. TVDB/TMDB need to get their acts together and support overriding runtime for specific episodes, and/or Trakt needs to start matching anime to AniDB as well.
20.5 minutes long, instead of the (almost) full 24 of a main series episode.
TVDB/TMDB get on this problem, please. Add support for per-episode runtimes before I go insane…
Since I loved the Japanese version of this (https://trakt.tv/movies/you-are-the-apple-of-my-eye-2018), I should put this older Chinese telling of the same story on my list of films to watch, eh?
Watchlisting, in large part, because this is early work for Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and Elyse Levesque (Stargate Universe, and also a bit of Orphan Black). I can only hope to find the show somewhere.
As of writing (October 2022), this half-hour documentary is available to watch on YouTube, uploaded officially by its creators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE
Life After Pi was supposed to be "the first chapter" of a feature-length documentary called Hollywood Ending, but there has been no word from the project's social media accounts since the short won a jury award at the 2016 Cleveland International Film Festival, and the feature film's website no longer exists.
TMDB has deleted this as a duplicate of the other entry, despite this one being for the blu-ray and the other being for a WOWOW broadcast that was cut down slightly.
At time of writing, this is freely available from the Hagerty Drivers Foundation channel on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fgOb22gz_TY
As of this writing, not available on any "normal" streaming services, but is available from the PlayStation channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5MgEbBOps
Note to self, and anyone who's interested: It looks like this is available on YouTube at time of writing.
I made it about 30 seconds into the first episode before deciding I couldn't bear the awful deinterlacing job Crackle did. Yes, it's available for free (at time of writing), but that's no excuse. Combing looks terrible. Deinterlacing video isn't a difficult art or science; it only requires applying the correct filter when converting the video from source to streaming-ready encode.
We'll see if anything comes of the support request I just sent in about this. I'll certainly return to the show sooner if I can view a decombed copy instead of the mess that's currently the only legal option.
Bit of a let-down that we saw four battles in the first episode, and four battles in this one, but only short snippets of the remaining four (which still knocked out four bots that we never even really got to see in action). Why couldn't they just take three weeks for the qualifiers? For that matter, why did we only get to meet a fraction of the builders this time? Second episode is much weaker than the first, and hopefully the trend will reverse…
Lots of good action here, much more interesting fights than a lot of the qualifiers. Docked my episode rating by 2 because there was NO post-fight interview of the loser in Plan X vs Bronco when there were very obvious questions that IMO needed to be asked.
"An officer will escort you both to CIC," he said. And then Quincy turns up wandering around belowdecks about to pull a halon control lever? Come on, Cpt. Chandler. True to your word or the whole crew gets screwed.
Oh, yes, and then Quincy just pops up in CIC a couple scenes later like nothing happened. Wow.
Should have stopped at the nicknames. The whole homage was really overdone.
Last week, Ferris Bueller. This week, Babymetal's ギミチョコ！！ as an insert song.
What's next?
Touches all the important Peanuts mythology. Mildly amusing. Needed a few more frames of animation in parts, especially when characters handle props (apparently this was a creative choice—ill advised, IMO). Soundtrack is jarringly un-Peanuts in multiple scenes, and at the end.
As others (notably Simon Massey [1]) pointed out, the chemistry wasn't there. The two lead actors didn't click.
I'd go as far as to say that I didn't like Guy Ritchie's style. The chaotic sequences where 3, 4, or more camera views went sliding and gyrating all over the place to show simultaneous action were really hard to follow. Some of the edits were questionable, and a couple shots held for FAR too long (did we really need 20 seconds of slow zoom-out on Gaby sitting on her hotel bed?) dragged down the pace.
Yeah, something seemed off. I love watching the original TV series, and still want to finish it—but as for 2015 spy movies, between this and Spectre: I'll take Spectre, hands down. (Now I have to watch Mission Impossible and compare…)
I said in my review of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) that I'd have to watch and compare this with that and Spectre… Well, here we are.
The 2015 Mission: Impossible installment roundly beats out The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in writing, production, and on-screen chemistry. Rebecca Ferguson is no Alicia Vikander (LOVED her in Ex Machina), but the interactions between both leading men worked much, MUCH better in this film. It helps that Christopher McQuarrie let this film have a much calmer editing style—it's a hell of a lot easier to follow than Guy Ritchie's chaotic simul-action sequences with 2-5 camera views on screen at once.
I'm still undecided whether I like Spectre or M:I better for my top 2015 spy film, but I'm officially knocking U.N.C.L.E. out of the running. MI-6 and the IMF can duke it out.
(It's entirely possible that I'm being easier on this film because I lack a solid background with the franchise; I've seen very little M:I compared to U.N.C.L.E. But I don't think that's why I like this one so MUCH more.)
Are these characters humans or robots? The only acting worth watching came from Reg E. Cathey and maybe Michael B. Jordan.
Not digging the schtick with the dinosaur dude. Not at all.
And who are "the calvary"? Someone should have caught that on set. (While we're on the subject of mangling the English language, apparently Brian "Recoreded" an NFL game?)
They held a certain headbutt shot waaaaaay too long—long enough to see Kara's head reverse direction. Someone needs to relearn editing.
Meh. The tone feels wrong for a spin-off of that particular film. And it's so incredibly obvious that Vega's tits are being shoved in our faces to attract male viewers—ironically that turns me off, because it doesn't fit. We CAN see through you, Hollywood.
45 minutes in, I still have almost no idea what's happening. But I've had my fill of bad foley, bad editing, obvious splices where part of a shot was replaced with a different take, poor dialogue sync, a scene where half the French dialogue wasn't even subtitled, poor dialogue replacement (including some places where characters continued talking even though their lips weren't moving)… This film might be brilliant, but I just see a lump of coal. The technical flaws could be excused if it had been made a few decades earlier, at least. But unless something drastically changes in the next 58 minutes I won't have anything to say but: "Don't bother."
Edit: It did not get better, except for about ten minutes just after the halfway mark. Oh well.
