(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Someone is setting off illegal fireworks behind me, every once and a while the sky lights up with explosions of color. (No, it's not the fireworks over the East River -- I'm too far away, plus why bother -- I get to see explosions every once and a while light up the sky outside my living room window from the comfort of my armchair. Also with the fireflies.) I've seen the big fireworks display in NYC several times, it's okay. I liked the one in Martha's Vineyard better. Location is 98% of it.
And comfort.

2. John Scalzi recommended The Hollow on his blog -- so I tried it out. It's okay. Kid's cartoon about three kids who find themselves in a sealed room with just an old fashioned type-writer. No clue who they are, how they got there, or why. Nor do they have any idea where they came from. One white boy, one black boy, and one Asian girl. So..all bases covered, I guess. For once, I'd like to see two girls and one guy in these things. You can tell men wrote it.

Anyhow after a bit of whining, worrying, and freaking out -- someone finally decides to try the type-writer, sort of by accident actually, and clue arises on how to escape the room. They do eventually, only to run into one dangerous trap after another.

Each kid has special skills, one is super-strong, one can talk to animals, and one is mechanical (can fix anything mechanical -- so a born engineer, and he's incredibly annoying, so apparently the writers have had experiences with mechanical engineers? Think Howard from Big Bang Theory to the third power, with no memory).

I feel like I've seen it before...but can't quite place where. (I've admittedly watched a lot of cartoons and anime in my life time.)

I do however agree with Scalzi...cartoons and anime have really evolved since I was a kid. It's sort of annoying. The best we could hope for back in the 1970s and 80s was well Scooby Doo Where Are You and all it's rip-offs of which there were many, and the Looney Tunes Cartoons (which were heavily edited for content). No, that's not true -- there were a few bright spots, but you had to know where to find them -- such as School House Rock, Kimba : the White Lion, Battle of the Planets...and well, Voltron (which was formerly Battle of the Planets), also Speed Racer (But this was "early" anime and nowhere near the quality of the stuff that came out in the 1990s.) We also got reruns of a Beatles Cartoon (which was sort a precursor to the Monkeeys (not a cartoon), Jackson 5 cartoon, and Superfriends (a precursor to Justice League and nowhere near the quality of Justice League on any level.) My favorite was actually the short-lived Drac Pack -- about three friends who fought crime by turning into monsters, because they were the sons of monsters so had it in their DNA with the Drac Mobile. I thought it was clever and entertaining.

Kids today are spoiled on content. Actually, I thought they were spoiled in the 1990s.

I mean I remember in the 1980s hunting for anime, and not finding it. Didn't find it until the 1990s and even then I had to hunt through the racks of independent video stores. Occasionally I'd find something in Blockbusters (which was decimated by Netflix -- I foresaw that.) Oh, prior to Netflix, I took an advertising/marketing course and we had to come up with a good idea. This was way back in 1990 or thereabouts. And I pitched that you send movies to people in the mail and they send them back. Nobody saw it as a viable idea -- because how were you going to ship a VHS tape to and from someone in the mail without it getting damaged? VHS tapes were easy to screw up. Also what would keep them from copying the tape and stealing the content. (You could copy VHS tapes back then.) I remember thinking...well if we could come up with something smaller say the size of a floppy disk, it would not be a problem. Or better yet just download from the TV.

I admittedly read a lot of sci-fi back then, including Ray Bradbury, who predicted huge flat screen television screens and downloadable content.

25-30 years later....guess what? VHS is defunct. We have DVDs which are rapidly becoming defunct, and you can download everything and store it in the cloud.

We live in Ray Bradbury's universe. Not sure this is a good thing. He didn't exactly write positive stories.

3. Speaking of dark sci-fi...I tried to watch BladeRunner 2049 -- I'll say this much for it, it's pretty. But everyone in it is expressionless and it's told through a white straight guy's perspective, so of course, there's a lot of fetishing of women and/or objectifying of women. Which I've grown weary of. The first film was so much better, not as pretty, but gritter, and pulled you in from the get go. I don't care about Ryan Gosling's character in this nor do I have the faintest idea what his name was after watching thirty minutes of it. (I'm wondering if the film would have pulled me in faster if I found Ryan Gosling appealing -- I don't. The actor does nothing for me. His appeal is completely lost on me for some reason.) It's also incredibly slow pacing wise. Like watching something underwater.

While the first film, BladeRunner, was amazing. It gripped me from start to finish. And ranks as one of my all time favorite sci-fi films. Which may be another problem with the sequel -- BladeRunner 2049, I loved the original.

As far as special effects go...it's hard to be that impressed by BladeRunner 2049...after watching an episode of Altered Carbon or The Expanse. I mean..it's no better, if anything those two have better special effects. And storywise? Ditto.

While the original came out before all that...it was ground-breaking in its special effects, it had done new things, and looked different. Now, the look the first film created has been copied across various sci-fi films and television shows.

Add to all of this...Rutger Hauer was the best thing in the first film. Not Harrison Ford. Not Scean Young. But Hauer, Daryl Hannah, and various others -- who did not get to come back in the sequel.
An older Harrison Ford (much older, he wasn't exactly young in the first one) and Ryan Gosling just don't cut it.

I was bored and slightly annoyed by the blatant fetishing of women, and gave up after thirty minutes.
I'll probably watch Altered Carbon and The Expanse instead.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I feel like I've seen it before...but can't quite place where.

I watched very little kid TV and what it immediately made me think of was a video game, both in character and structure. But yeah, once they got their own network things had definitely changed.

And by coincidence I saw about half of Blade Runner 2049 as well during my trip. I didn't find it very interesting either.

[cactuswatcher]

Yep, the premise sounds like a 1980s 'adventure' video game. Myst from the early 1990s is a famous example. The same idea has been done in the 2000s as a live-action, adult, escape-the-room game , with the adults knowing they were signing up for solving puzzles.

[shadowkat]

Yep, it feels like an adaptation of a video game. The animation is rather rudimentary (I'm picky about animation). Also it is very similar to the escape the room games...or you're in this horrible place, figure out the puzzle, help someone, survive. Each time you pass a test, something is added or another hurdle.

It's okay, seen about seven episodes so far -- each are 22 minutes in duration with no commercials. But I don't understand why John Scalzi loves it -- enough to tell everyone they should be watching it.

[shadowkat]

Yep, after six episodes..it even tells you it's a video game. And not a very good video game. Video games actually have good animation from what I understand.

[ETA: Having watched all of it now - the kids minds are placed inside a video game. They get to select their powers. And there are two team. They forget everything about their lives, who they are, etc. Go through a series of tests...and then if they win, they can exit the game. Although the game develops glitches along the way. The creator of the game, an annoying game-show host can jump in and help them by throwing them through a portal. Which isn't that helpful. Each time he helps, it weakens their powers. Since they can't remember anything or the rules, they don't know this. It reminded me a little of Ready Player Now, but more annoying.]

[yourlibrarian]

I can see why it would get people's attention though as that's a fairly complex plot for a kid's show.

[shadowkat]

Yep. And they can have new kids each time. The end is live-action with real teens, and host is real - not animated.

[cactuswatcher]

I have to say that as the 1970s went on I felt sorry for kids. Earlier we had all kinds of cartoons that were originally short subjects to be shown in movie theaters. Yep, a few of them now would now be considered racist and otherwise insensitive. But they were made for a general audience not just kids. Then along about the middle of the 1960s and most theaters stopped showing shorts before the main attraction, and things went to pot. There was a cartoon show designed for kids called Johny Quest on TV in 1963 that was just garbage. Horrible graphics compared to everything we'd seen and stories suitable for only the youngest kids. About 1961 there was a pre-manga import of a feature length Japanese cartoon called "Alakazam the Great" which is widely known as one of the worst movies ever to hit theaters: Incomprehensible, unsure of who it's target audience was, and lousy graphics. I don't know anyone who saw it in a theater, but it was shown over and over on local TV. Going into the 1970s cartoons were stripped of their intelligence and occasional biting humor and just churned out with quality somewhere between Johny Quest and Alakazam. Imports from Japan were the worst. Even the old standby, Looney Tunes, were pretty bad toward the end of their production.

Yeah, I was too old to be watching cartoons, but a lot of guys my age watched some while waiting for the college football games to start in the 1970s. In its time Scooby Doo was about the only cartoon I could stand, and its graphics were sadly lacking compared to the old stuff. I did quit watching cartoons then but happened to catch Duck Tales about 1990 (Scrooge McDuck was my comic book favorite as a kid!) and they seemed like a definite upswing from the worst of the 1970s.

[shadowkat]

Weirdly Johnny Quest was one of the better ones. The Live-Action stuff from Marty Kroft was worse. (Although I'm still partial to HnR Puff n'Stuff, which starred the incredibly talented Jack Wild. He played the Artful Dodger in the film version of the Musical Oliver!).

Scooby Doo gave birth to Jabber Jaw (a bunch of kids and their talking shark solve mysteries), Josie and the Pussycats, Jen and the Holgrams (better than Josie and the Pussycats but not by much).

I liked Drak Pack -- which was three kids that turned into monsters and solved mysteries with their drak mobile. That was hilarious, because you had a werewolf, a vampire and Frankenstein scared of well monsters. LOL! Every once and a while their parents would pop in and help.

The anime wasn't that bad...it's nothing near to what you see now, or even in the 1990s. In the 70s and 80s, it was notable for being better than Hanna Barbara.

In the 70s, Disney reigned as the king of animation. Although...Ralph Baski did a great job with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I actually like Baski's version better than Peter Jackson's.

But you had to hunt for the good stuff back then.

[ETA: Some cartoons are not for children - see South Park, The Family Guy, Felix the Cat, Ghost in the Shell, American Dad, The Simpsons...not for kids. Actually I think they are well over kids heads, and in some cases the humor...eh, not for kids.]

[wendelah1]

We live in Ray Bradbury's universe. Not sure this is a good thing. He didn't exactly write positive stories.

This is so true.

[trepkos]

I had the same complaint about Gosling - dull as dishwater. I loved all the protagonists in the original, and none apart from Harrison Ford, the dog, and the virtual PA.

[shadowkat]

Him and Jared Leto...just did not hold my interest at all. Not long enough for me to get to Harrison Ford, the dog and the PA (who I got a snippet of).