As a big fan of both the games and the novels, I was quite disappointed in this attempt at adapting the world of the Witcher.
This is a world that is vast and filled with ancient history, which makes it a huge endeavor to make people care for it on a TV show. In that specific regard, I regard the show as a huge failure. We're thrown into the world knowing very little, which leaves us with characters emoting about places and events we have no emotional connection to.
It doesn't help that the chronology is a total bloody mess. Why the creators decided it was a good idea to tell three different stories stretched across 50+ years without clearly informing the viewer, I'll never know. I could follow because I read the novels, but as an introduction for someone unfamiliar with the world, it's an awful decision.
Compare this to two massive fantasy adaptations that succeeded at making us care:
Game of Thrones started small, showing us the people of Winterfell, then introducing the visiting Baratheons and Lannisters. It made us care about the world of Westeros by first showing us compelling characters, then slowly expanding the stakes to encompass the entire world.
Lord of the Rings had the most epic world-building in arguably the whole genre's history, but again it started small. It made us care about a quaint Hobbit village long before it was time to venture into the greater world.
The Witcher does nothing of this. As a result, when we're shown the massive battle for Cithra in the first episode, it's hard to care even if you're familiar with the setting. It's all just noise and pointless gore.
This tragic misfire carries on throughout the rest of the show. Before we get to experience how awesome Yennefer is, we get to experience her as a misfit whose only apparent redeeming quality is her hunger for power. Geralt himself is interesting from the get-go, but he's all too serious to be sympathetic, at least until Jaskier shows up.
And so, we're left with characters emoting and chewing scenery. It's pretty scenery, sure: the VFX is nice, and the fight scenes are pretty great. But none of this feels lived-in and compelling the way Lord of the Rings was from its very first minutes. The dialogues tend to be arch and clichéd, and the whole affair lacks the subtle realism of Game of Thrones.
And so, as much as I love the characters of the Witcher, I'll continue to look to the novels and the games as the more definitive versions. This is a brave attempt, but as much as it aspires to be top-shelf fantasy TV, it's second-rate at best.
There's one moment where the TV series shone bright: the striga fight. This had all the markings of what made the Witcher stories great, and it was genuinely terrifying and exhilarating. This makes me think that the first season would have been much, much better if it didn't try to build the entire world across a century of conflict, and instead focused on the adventures of Geralt of Rivia as he hunts monsters. Ciri and Yennefer could have been introduced a bit later, and their backgrounds explored in season 2, when we would all be on board for the ride.
As much as it deviates from the novels, I'd recommend The Witcher 3 as the ultimate interpretation of that world. surpsassing even the novels.
It's definitely a batshit-crazy story for our times, and I enjoyed the mad ride. However, the producers really had an agenda going into this, and I find myself resentful of their overall editorial approach. A few points:
Joe Exotic is a bad guy. He's charismatic and fascinating to watch, but the show does a lot to gloss over his actions. The series does its best to gloss over what he did and let him express his own side of the story, but come on. The guy was being harassed by Carole Baskin for legitimate reasons (exploiting and breeding exotic animals) and reacted in the most insane way. This is a guy who manipulated straight guys into marrying him in exchange for a steady supply of drugs.
The series does a huge disservice to Carole Baskin. Is she insane? Hell yeah she is. But crazy isn't a reason to send someone to prison. Yeah, she's as obsessed with big cats as the rest of the cast of crazies, but the huge difference is that she RESCUES exploited animals. She doesn't breed them. She doesn't sell them for profit. That the big takeaway of the series is "Well, she is as insane as the rest of them" really does a huge disservice to a significant difference between Baskin and the exotic pet breeders.
The series really overplays the "Baskin killed her husband" angle to prop up Joe Exotic and for the shock of it. It presents a lot of "facts" as-is to support this without exploring the arguments against them. For instance, Don's Power of Attorney included the activation clause for disappearance because Don Baskin was legitimately concerned he might disappear without a trace in Costa Rica.
So. A cool story, overall, and a crazy cast of characters, but it's unfortunate that people are taking this series as definitive documentary truth when it's a well-spun fiction with amplified craziness for the sake of shock value.
This is the first episode for me when the show has lost its shine. I adored the first three episodes and thought episodes 4 and 5 were okay, but man, this one was just terrible.
There are a few reasons I can think of:
The overarching plot has taken a backseat. Episodes 1-4 felt connected by the Mandalorian's quest for redemption through his care for the Child. Episode 4 still felt connected to that overarching goal, but with the last two episodes, we're just watching a "job of the week" conceit that neither moves the characters nor the plot forward. It's basically filler at this point.
Bad Western tropes. While I loved the initial "Western in space" feel of the early episodes, the show was still coming up with its own genre conventions and telling an original story. With episode 6, we're getting a pretty crappy heist gone bad story whose only claim to originality is being set in the Star Wars universe. All the turns were painfully predictable and dictated by the tropes of the genre rather than the characters themselves.
Bad acting. The Twi'leks and the horned guy were just awful. The dialogue was bad, but the way they hammed it up was just painful to watch. Watching the Twi'lek girl hiss at the horned guy felt like watching D&D players hamming it up on game night.
Bad writing. The whole thing was just so unbelievable, from the predictable turns to the way Mando eventually betrays his employer using the beacon to somehow trick a bunch of X-Wings from murdering the station. Not a lot of it made any sense. There's, like, six different shots of the droid hunting down Baby Yoda on the ship that add absolutely NOTHING to the story and just go on forever.
It's not that I don't still look forward to new episodes, but with episode 6, The Mandalorian has gone from "must-watch" to "flawed but watchable." It's the kind of drop you'd expect between seasons 1 and 4, not across a short self-contained season, and it's a damn shame.
Yeah... This is working for me.
It's got this cool focus on the food that the original Japanese show had, and it wastes no time with BS rivalries the way American reality TV shows usually does. It's fun, the chefs are respectful and crazy inventive, and the food is really out of this world in inventiveness and creativity. Some of the personalities (like Dominique Cress, my favorite) are big and boisterous in the most fun way possible.
My only complain, and it's a small one, is that I would have preferred to be a clearer underdog dynamic with the challengers and the Iron Chefs. Sometimes the contest just feels like two chefs going at it, instead of this basic idea of a contestant facing an impossible legend. This was most apparent with Samuelsson, who looks to be an amazing chef, but who played the underdog card by invoking how he came from humble beginnings. I know everyone in there is happy to be on the show, but I prefer the near-mythical contest of underdog versus legend that the original Iron Chef went for.
But that's a small quibble. The show is entertaining, Alton Brown and Kristen Kish are on point, the food looks amazing, and the rivalries are light-hearted and food-centric. This feels like a legitimate Iron Chef show.
(Plus, bonus, no Bobby Flay in sight...)
I was a big fan of The Good Wife and I loved the first two seasons of The Good Fight, but holy hell did it go to shit in the third season.
Let me preface by saying I'm a progressive and a staunch feminist. That being said, I still found season 3 unbearable. It's pandering, plain and simple: while The Good Wife regularly plundered the headlines and wore its politics on its sleeve, it still tried to tell a compelling story and presented its ideas in a nuanced manner. The character of Kurt, for instance, was created specifically to represent a more conservative point of view and present a foil for Diane's progressive views. In so doing, it gave us fantastic character drama.
Well, all that is gone in season 3. Now we get flashes of Eric and Don Junior as Diane throws axes to relieve her utter hatred of the Trump Administration. We get Diane arguing with a Trump-shaped bruise on her husband's shoulder, lamenting "Where did the men go wrong." We get Schoolhouse Rock-like interjections featuring shitty music that wink so hard at the audience that the writers must have sprained their eyelids writing them.
Again, my problem isn't with the show's political views. It's with the inane manner in which they've abandoned all objectivity and nuance to give us a bizarre, one-sided revenge fantasy where Diane rages on and on about Trump's existence. It's entertainment for the liberal echo chamber, not a clever discourse on modern politics.
And meanwhile, the characters have devolved into caricatures. If you liked how The Good Wife featured quasi-realistic courtroom drama, tough luck, the courtroom action no longer makes any damn sense.
And so I'm out. Although the first two seasons made it feel like The Good Wife could go on forever, I guess this is the moment I have to say goodbye. You folks had a good run, but somewhere along the way you bought your own cleverness and forgot to tell a gripping drama.
Others here have already addressed a lot of the issues I had with this episode, but I just wanna say:
This episode made me feel how I felt watching some classic Doctor Who episodes that were bad, but which I felt I had to get through to get to the good parts. I've never felt like this in the modern era (except perhaps a few bad episodes in Capaldi's first series), but this... The previous Chibnall series were bad, but this just takes the cake.
And can I say? I really don't care for Whittaker's Doctor. I've been watching some clips with the previous modern Doctors, and they all had that magical energy about them, like they were excited about life and wanted to take us on a grand tour of all time and space. Whittaker has nothing of this energy. The writing's largely to blame, but there is something about her performance, too, that lacks a certain depth and quality. I was hoping that, like Capaldi, she would find her footing after a season or two, but her character is actually regressing as we head out into her last appearance.
I like to think that in a few years, when RTD has steered the ship right again, I'll be thinking back to this episode as another one of the dark periods of Who fandom.
I do NOT get why this movie gets so much love.
I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.
This was... fine, I guess? I think I would have preferred more of a "Death of Stalin" treatment than outright satire, because when you see characters like the POTUS act like outright idiots, it takes away some of the bite. Although, the idea that they could have averted disaster but decided not to because there was a business opportunity was really excellent.
I thought the central moment of the "Don't Look Up" political movement, was sadly poorly executed. I think maybe because the idea was WAY too outrageous. It's one thing to hurt yourself and your country because you feel it will hurt the other side more, but it's another to, like, not look up at the sky.
Ultimately, with this film, either the satire doesn't land, or it lands with a crowd that already believes in climate change, and thus, people for whom the satire is facile. It also avoided very clearly exploring political lines (for instance, by making the POTUS some kind of female Clinton but with Trump-like nepotism) so it lost a lot of its verisimilitude by trying to not take political sides.
I don't know if there's a better way to explore this idea. Perhaps this was the best story possible for this exact idea.
I really tried to like this show because I like the idea behind it, but David Chang is absolutely insufferable. I gave up on the show at episode 3, where he kept bringing up old stories of his mom embarrassing him with her home cooking, then said, to the face of someone cooking a home dinner for him, "Doesn't matter if it doesn't taste good, it's the intent that's great."
Chang also has a weird superiority complex about Asian food, which is weird considering that, according to the way he talks about his mom's cooking, he evidently didn't like it growing up and considered it a source of embarrassment. This is such a pitiful contrast to someone like Roy Choi (from "The Chef Show") who embraces both his roots and his upbringing in LA in a way that is inclusive of all the cultures he meets.
What an ass. He clearly thinks highly of himself and thinks that the only real value of food is as seen through the prism of a Michelin-starred chef. You could see it in the Tacos episode, where, as always, Mexicans are folklorized as poor but honest cooks, while only American-trained chefs can truly coax the maximum out of their ingredients or comment on the greatness of Mexican cuisine.
This is also the guy who, while sitting with a famous NYC pizza chef in a historical Brooklyn institution, orders Domino's to prove some kind of bizarre point. It's all so weird and awkward because you can tell people want to stay polite for the camera.
It's all so sad and infuriating. I can't.
I really, REALLY liked it. It does something that's at the basis of my life-long enjoyment of giant monster movies really, really well, and some of the scenes had me bouncing in my seat with joy.
That being said... It's not a movie built along the lines of a modern blockbuster, at least not entirely, and for that I think it's not gonna be a huge tentpole success. People are gonna complain about character choices or dialogues or characterization. It's much more in line with the classic Godzilla formula, and THAT it does really well.
One of the big challenges of a monster movie is always to have a good balance of "monsters fighting" and "humans talking" in a way that builds tension and action, and this one, more than almost any other Godzilla movie, and more than 2014's take, was right on. Monster fights always had clear stakes, and the puny humans buzzing around had clear objectives (even if often it was just 'try and survive in the shitstorm of the century') and felt in their place as supporting characters in the monster drama.
So, in short... If you wanna see a pure, slick action movie, go see John Wick 3. If you want some of that designer-drug concentrated dose of entertainment you expect from a tentpole, you got Endgame. But if you ever felt a thrill watching Godzilla melt the rubber face off of another giant monster, you're in for a hell of a treat.
