Prouvaire

The only major quibble that I have with the film is a design decision. When it came to the costumes, sets, and even ships the film takes a minimalistic approach - probably to highlight how far in the future the story takes place. The books describe the noble houses living in much more opulence.

I actually preferred some of the production design of the Lynch film for this reason. Overall of course, the Villeneuve version is superior.

I wonder what the value proposition is for actors taking on these movies anymore.

A decent pay cheque I imagine. Also, if you’ve ever dreamed of being able to fly or punch a bad guy through a wall or what have you, you’ll be able to live our those fantasies (and getting paid for it). In other words, it might just be a fun experience. Not everything has to be a calculated career move.

Surely she has the pull to land something better right now?

I dunno. House of the Dragon was her big break, no doubt, but she was only in a handful of episodes. She didn’t break out in the way that, say, Emilia Clarke did on Game of Thrones.

The mainstream posters for tentpoles are almost floating headshots these days, but there are more interesting variations around. I quite like the IMAX poster for Dune Part 2, just as I liked the IMAX poster for Part 1.

I think the fact that Anson Mount nailed it as Pike helped. (He followed in the footsteps of Jeffrey Hunter and Bruce Greenwood - all three Pikes have been really good.) Personally, I suspect that the more SNW edges towards being TOS the less I’ll enjoy - or, more accurately, the less I’ll respect - it.

Franchises have always struggled to reconcile the need to reinvent themselves on the one hand, and the need to retain those elements that attract fans to the franchise on the other. As a long-time Star Trek fan I also want the franchise to push forward and try new things (and in some ways recent shows have done so - eg Lower Decks being Trek’s first sitcom), but at the same time many fans just want to see the characters that they know and love, hence the obsession with bringing back - or tying new characters to - legacy characters (ala Strange New Worlds or Picard’s third season). I wish they’d kept Kirk to the very last episode of Strange New World, and was even a bit disappointed to see the TOS Enterprise appear at the end of the first season of Discovery.

I thought it was a well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s. Give it a go and see if you like it.

Even though musicals are my life, I don’t see every movie or TV musical in the same obsessive way that I see every stage musical that I can. To me musicals usually work so much better as live theatre. Also, I have a bias against jukebox show - I prefer original songs written specifically for the story. So it’s taken me almost 12 years to catch up with Pitch Perfect. But I have to say I really enjoyed it. In some ways it’s a standard, very predictable underdog story. (I think I was surprised by only one small thing - that the girl everyone thought was a lesbian actually did turn out to be a lesbian - I thought the twist would be that she was straight). But that predictability didn’t spoil my enjoyment. Definitely a case of “it’s not where you end up, but how you got there”. I was most impressed by Anna Camp as the primary antagonist. She could have played the role in a very straight-forward, bitchy. even over-the-top way (much like Adam Devine played the secondary antagonist), but she gave her line readings an earnestness and undercurrent of insecurity that made her interesting and not unlikeable.

Also watched the fourth season finale of For All Mankind. Overall a better season than season 3 (because of less family soap opera) but not as good as the first two seasons. Still one of my favourite shows currently in production and I hope it gets a fifth season.

It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

I can’t imagine US audiences taking kindly to a movie with “Messiah” in the title, so imagine that it’ll be called Dune: Part 3.

I don’t understand why there wasn’t a spinoff.

There were actually two spin-off shows: The Lone Gunmen and Millennium. Granted, I think Millennium was retconned into being an X-Files spinoff show after it was cancelled so that the storyline could be wrapped up in an X-Files episode.

• For All Mankind season 4 - along with House of the Dragon my favourite show currently in production
• Downton Abbey New York season 2 - comfort food of sorts, populated with amazing theatre and musical theatre talent
• New Frasier about the old Frasier Crane - still finding its feet, but it took the old Frasier about the younger Frasier Crane a year or so to do the same
• Gen V - decent spin off
• Loki season 2 - satisfying finale
• The Creator - not as good as I was hoping it would be

I’m a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I’ve only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the “had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn’t get out of Bronze league” sense of suck.

But I love it. It’s my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

I honestly believe Captain Marvel was the start of the downfall of Marvel. Not because of the cast, sex, or anything along those lines. I believe they over did the character. They made her way to damn strong which made all the other characters pointless. Remember when a literal god, the most advanced mech, and the super soldier with all the stats struggled with Thanos? Then Cpt Marvel swoops in destroys a couple of ships and takes one on the chin like nothing, that was the moment.

I don’t understand this criticism at all.

First of all, it was Wanda who had Thanos almost beaten, which is why he had his ship fire on the ground. So Wanda presented a greater threat to him than Captain Marvel did; so great a threat that he was willing to sacrifice his entire army to try to take her out. I think it was Feige who said, around the time of Endgame or maybe shortly thereafter, that Wanda was the most powerful character in the MCU. But people don’t criticise Wanda for being overpowered and making all the other characters pointless.

Second of all, while Danvers did take down one ship (not two, not that it makes a difference), they could have found ways for several other characters to do the same (eg Doctor Strange via illusions, Wanda or Thor through sheer power, Iron Man through nanotech magic) - they just wanted Captain Marvel to make a big entrance because she had been teased at the end of Infinity War (and then also in her own movie prior to Endgame), and we hadn’t really seen her manifest her full power earlier in Endgame.

But the whole point of that her late intervention in the final fight was that Captain Marvel was NOT the overpowered deus ex machina that many fans falsely deride her to be. Because in a one-on-one fight with Thanos, Thanos disposes of her easily - they trade a few punches, he throws her into the ground. She comes back, and he punches her out of frame and out of the film (until the epilogue). The final fight came down to Captain America, Thor and of course Iron Man, which it was always going to - those being the three keystone Avengers of the MCU.

That’s also why all the founding members of the Avengers went unsnapped at the end of Infinity War. Markus and McFeely and the Russos knew they were making an Avengers movie, not a Captain Marvel movie. Markus and McFeely knew that fans would have felt rightfully betrayed if a character, who had only been introduced to the MCU a year or so before, had swooped in and saved the day after a decade-long build up. So they made sure she didn’t. But more fool them - they still cop the same criticism.

And I say all this as someone who thinks that both Captain Marvel movies (and most of Larson’s performances in the MCU) have been decidedly mediocre, though not for any reasons related to her power level.

Mine’s more like slash fiction.

I’ve never given the distinction much thought, but as I recall (and it’s been many years since I’ve read the Ender books) in Speaker for the Dead Jane was pretty much an AI, an evolved form of the fantasy game in Ender’s Game. In later books Card may have more explicitly applied his Mormon-influenced concept of a soul that exists prior to, and after, inhabiting a physical form, to the character of Jane. But when I think of Jane, it’s the Jane of Speaker for the Dead, as that’s the book in the series (along with Ender’s Game) that I read most often.

Exactly. Marvel benefited from a ten-year build up to the Infinity War / Endgame double (two movies which were very good), and also benefited from other well-received instalments towards the end of Phase 3, such as Spider-Man Homecoming, Ragnarok and Black Panther. But there were plenty of movies in the first three phases which hovered around the average mark - sometimes a bit better than mediocre and sometimes a bit worse. These included (IMO) The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, The Dark World, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Guardians Vol 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Captain Marvel. It’s just that Phases 1-3 ended on such a high note that it set unrealistic expectations for Phase 4, 5 and 6.

I imagine that if they can build up to, and execute, Kang Dynasty / Secret Wars as well as they did Infinity War / Endgame, and not stuff up the introduction of the Fantastic Four (and the X-Men if that’s on the cards for Phase 4-6), people will mostly forget about the current wave of mediocre movies and TV shows, and remember the Multiverse Saga as fondly as they do the Infinity Saga.

When I was younger I had a crush on Jane from Speaker for the Dead, so I wouldn’t be weirded out by that person, cause I’d probably be that person. 😅

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?