"We are going to WAR!"

"How cute!"

Billions < Game of Thrones

The Time Traveler’s wife follows Rachel McAdams’ Clare through several different phases of her life. And what a perfect life it is. 

She’s married to her longtime sweetheart Henry. They live in a palatial house. Complete with a detached garage where she can do her art. She muddles through her relationship with this relationship as best she can.     

Henry is a time traveler. A fact that way too many people seem far too willing to accept. But I’m just going to leave that alone. (No. No, I’m not. World-building, learn what it is.) Ok, moving right along…

Um, I’m just going to come out and say it. Clare has issues! Think about it! She’s in love with the same man since she was 6! Lordy! She’s even confused! The younger Henry leaves, the older Henry comes back. Is she more in love with old Henry or young Henry?!

I think I got abandonment issues watching that! Why does she put up with potentially being left forever?! Know what? We’ll never know. The movie just glosses right over these issues. Nope, major character depth. Not. Plummed. At. All.

The whole entire time, I kept thinking about Cersei. She’s got issues!     

A Dark Tale about OCD (and Murder)

Hollywood loves to make movies about obsession so much they made a movie about the Zodiac killings that happened in California about obsession, and not really about murder.

Don’t get me wrong. They have murder, but what they really have is obsession. Robert Greysmith was a young(ish) reporter sitting in the boardroom of the San Francisco Chronicle when a letter containing a fragment of a bloody shirt falls out of an envelope.

This event touches off an obsession that ends up unfurling over decades, as well as a somewhat incidental series of murder investigations. But we came to watch the train wreck looming as both Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Jake Gyllenhaal’s characters crash and burn their lives.

It’s always a treat to watch Robert Downey, Jr. play himself. Hollywood loves to let us do that, and we should be grateful. Americans love to ogle self-destructive behavior. 

Why not pay to watch a movie that’s the better part of three hours to do it?      

Who is Titus Welliver, and what does he do?

Why are Americans obsessed with cop shows? Why must we cover every possible nook and cranny of our particular criminal justice problems?

Hollywood is so desperate for warm bodies that they got Titus Welliver(!?) (WHO?) to play Harry Bosch in Bosch. Available on Amazon. They set the show in LA. I guess so they could show the grit and the glamour.

America’s fetish with cop shows is an outgrowth of the fetish for workplace drama. It feels like a very paint-by-numbers as cop shows go. Harry Bosch plays a work-obsessed homicide cop who lives in a very nice home because he sold a story to Hollywood.

The show has an over-arching case which it finally arrives at, nearly halfway through the pilot.

Bosch seems as though it’s dialoging with Law & Order. Why?! Why can’t it talk with The Wire instead? It certainly has enough of the actors to do that!

Disgruntled civil servants is so overplayed as a TV trope that it seeped its way onto the internet like toxic slime. 

Can’t we use Dawn to clean this up?

Can we get some celebrities to sing and dance to raise awareness and money to pay for the government to airlift other tropes to Hollywood?

What are Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears doing? They’re not too busy, right?  

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams: Episode 1 "Real Life"

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams is a series of one-off worlds. Amazon's pilot episode called Real Life centers around 2 different somewhat perfect lives. One is that of a billionaire played by Terrance Howard, the other is a supercop played by Anna Paquin. Both are using virtual reality to escape into the other's world. Neither the main characters nor the audience can tell which is real. You won't find out until the very end, and then, it feels hollow somehow. 

The episode spent far to much time world building and nowhere close to enough time building the characters for me to care about the twist which was that both protagonists went crazy.

I won't even tell you how much better Game of Thrones is. What I will say is that Hollywood needs to step up their game. This thing was flogged everywhere. I thought it was going to be worth watching at least. God, I was wrong. 

I'm not linking to this. Save yourself.   

Dragon Review Revisits The Sopranos pt 1.: Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood

The Sopranos debuted this week twenty years ago. 

I thought I would take some time and examine what made it the prestige drama of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was certainly not the first look into the mob, however it ended up being the most in-depth due to the show’s longevity. Law-enforcement is a heavy theme throughout the run of the show as we watch the dance between Tony Soprano’s New Jersey organized crime family and the FBI.

“Mr. Rugerio’s Neighborhood” was the first episode of season 3.

 We see lunch.

Overworked civil servants sitting in cars.  

Failed attempts at wiretapping.

More failed attempts at wiretapping than The Wire!

 The Wire!

A show about Wiretapping!

I don’t wanna see your Doritos. 

People don’t pay for HBO to watch people eat in a conference room!

Arrg! Look at Game of Thrones!

Why can’t The Sopranos be this good?!

Lord Varys barely mentions his spy network, the little birds! And then when we see that they are little children, such power! Such impact!

Don’t forget to follow #dragonreview on Twitter.

Nothing is as good as Game of Thrones.

Rogue One: (An Apocalypse Now take on) a Star Wars Story

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes its inspiration from a Disney cash grab and a line in Episode IV: A New Hope. The line has to do with the fact that people died to get the plans for the Death Star. SPOILER ALERT!  EVERYBODY DIES! GEORGE LUCAS ALREADY TOLD YOU!

TRY TO ACT SURPRISED BY THE ENDING! DO IT FOR THE KIDS IN THE AUDIENCE.

But, srsly, the end is a shocker.

This is an excellent love letter to Star Wars' Generation X fans. Except for one thing. The dialog. The dialog was clunky. Very George Lucas-y. And another thing, it didn't feel like a Star Wars movie. I swear it felt more like an Apocalypse Now reboot. Even the characters had more of a war movie feel. But, why did the dialog need to sound so soaring? Why did I need to feel inspired? Which mall focus group said it needed to feel more inspiring? Why!? It made it corny! War movies aren't corny!

And, with that, I managed to get through an entire Dragon Review without a Game of Thrones reference! YEAH!!!

     

antacid

Tums

For the time you accidentally ate your children.

Lady in the Water is easily one of the most bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. It makes absolutely no sense, and seems so unbelievable that I can hardly understand how it got through the studio process and onto the big screen.

The plot is that a teenaged girl (Bryce Dallas Howard) 

has come into this world through an inter-dimensional hole in an apartment swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia to fulfill a prophecy laid out in a children’s story from Asia.

(Yes, really.)

Ok, wait. That’s not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is more or less the world in which this story inhabits. Much of this PG-13 story involves a girl following the maintenance man around the apartment complex. She is wearing nothing but a man’s shirt, and no one finds this even a little odd. He tries to help her figure out how she is supposed to save humanity. You see, her instructions were so mixed up she could barely even figure them out. A group of people living in the apartment seemed, at least to the apartment manager, to be the key to a very confusing puzzle solved at last by a child looking at the backs of cereal boxes. (Yes, really.)

I should say that I spent the vast majority of the film waiting for the monster I was certain was around the next turn. Even the girl’s first appearance was cast as something out of a horror film. Alas, nothing of the kind happens for much of the film.

Here’s why this is so odd and infuriating: Why did any of this happen? Why do the adults believe a children’s story? Why does no one question why this young woman is following this man around? Why do adults take the word of a child reading cereal boxes? 

What world has M. Night Shyamalan landed us in? Surely not ours.

Game of Thrones is so much better at showing why grown men follow a teenaged girl. 

Not being burned will tend to do that. I hate this movie so much, I refuse to link to it.

The Matrix was a huge hit. But, has it aged well?

Allow me to take you back to a simpler time. A time when movies were better than television. A time when people weren't chained to their computers. A time when their phones didn't spy on them. I'm talking of course of the 90s.  

Yes, a time when Keano Reeves was thought to be a bad actor. A time when dial-up was just about as fast as you could cruise the information superhighway. And computers were these sleek, sexy

er, white boxes? 

Hardly frightening.


Dragons are far scarier. Dragons don't seem as out of date as a flip phone.

Danaerys and her dragons are never out of date. The fear of being burned and then eaten will outlive any notion of what AI will look like.

#HuntSafety

Don't Drink and Hunt

#HuntSafety

A tale of a tectonic struggle between two empires grounded heavily in history adapted from a best-selling book. 

Gratuitous nudity and sexual scenes clearly designed to spice things up in between dry the historical parts.  

Many cameos by people famous for other things. Baby-faced stars at the beginning of very long, glittering and award-winning careers.

Of course I’m talking about

THE RIGHT STUFF

It’s kind of a lame Game of Thrones. It has no dragons. The nudity is from a distance.

The ending is also a voiceover. A voiceover!

But no, srsly, if you can power through a long movie that’s essentially a lame Game of Thrones, do it. You might learn something.

The Walking Dead, or how not to sustain a great TV show

The Walking Dead has been a great big 

Boom!!!

But the adaptation hasn't been 

the best.

Know What I mean?

????

Game of Thrones is just 

BETTER!

Dexter Season 1 / GoT Season 1

A Clean-cut, good family-man….

….can still have secrets.

DON'T FORGET to visit our sister blog at 
dragonreview.net. Same great content, but you'll help me with clicks and outbound links.

Sons' of The Harpy (Fight) Club

Sons' of The Harpy, ambushing.

Son's of the Harpy: Revolutionaries, Terrorists, or Ultra-Conservatives?

The Son’s of the Harpy are part of a long history coalitions of rich and poor men reacting badly to change.

Fight Club’s Tyler Durden is a continuation of this.

They were everywhere!