• Tag Archives Romance

  • TRUE DETECTIVE

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    I’ve heard quite a number of good things about True Detective‘s premiere season, and the first 4.5 episodes absolutely live up to the hype. However… once it abandons the past narrative to focus on a current day case, alluded to by the interview framing device, it deteriorates quite quickly. Genre-wise it’s a mix of thrillerish dramatic elements combined with familial/relationship drama and a bit of action here and there, all of which fit together remarkably well.

    The second season switches up the cast, location, and structure; no framing gimmicks here (though there is a time skip). The genre composition remains more or less the same while the character personalities/goals are quite different and it has more of an ensemble cast sort of thing going on. Overall I’d say this season ends up significantly better than the first. Oh sure it starts out shaky and a bit difficult to follow, which can be damning if compared directly to the first season’s beginning, but the connection between the pre- and post-timeskip plotlines is far stronger and the work as a whole is noticeably more consistent.

    The third season goes back to the style and structure of the first in pretty much every way (no, adding a second interview timeline does not count as an innovation), even directly referencing it. Why? Why would you retread old ground like this? Was all the criticism of the second season really so influential or did the creator simply run out of ideas? Just re-watch the first season rather than bother with this pointless rehash.

    In summary: The first is good, the second is great, and the third is a waste of time (unless you like shows featuring alzheimer’s sufferers I guess).

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  • ALTERED CARBON

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The first season of this series starts off great, only to noticeably deteriorate about halfway through when it does that thing ‘prestige’ television seems so fond of: Pull out a plot twist that completely changes the show’s focus/themes. I’d still say it’s worth watching, lot of similarities to Bladerunner, The Expanse, and even a bit of Fifth Element (probably some Westworld there too… but I haven’t seen that), it’s just that it ends up merely watchable instead of a must see.

    Fitting in between the first and second seasons is an Anime movie. It’s a side story (meaning it can be watched as a stand alone or completely ignored) done in what appears to be a cell-shaded 3DCGI style, and I would not suggest watching it as an extension of the series since it reminds me of Souten no Ken Regenesis more than any sci-fi work (except perhaps GitS). What is it with shows featuring inexplicable ninja armies? Am I just unlucky?

    Then there’s the second season, which is quite a bit different from the first… and not only because the actor playing the MC has changed (one ‘benefit’ of having a setting centered on body swapping is the ability to shuffle performers at will). While that’s more of a conspiracy drama this instead focuses on an amnesia-themed and somewhat aimless personal quest, trading the police/detective elements for military/political ones. It comes across as pretty forced and lacks any of the pop present in the first season (though the finale’s pretty good).

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    This entry was posted in 2020 - Winter Anime Related Movie & TV Related and tagged

  • Batman & Lucifer

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The Batman prequel Gotham starts off remarkably good, basically a crime drama with some action elements and a moderate streak of eccentricity, but as it progresses events become increasingly unhinged. So while there are a few good bits in the second season (the third is garbage), ultimately I can’t recommend watching beyond the first.

    I specifically avoided watching The Dark Knight Rises when it was released mainly due to a review that said it was more a Bruce Wayne movie than a Batman movie. That review ended up being spot on. More problematic though is Bane; why does he sound like an English aristocrat? His voice is beyond disconcerting. Overall I’d say Batman vs. Superman tells this sort of ‘aging Batman’ story far more competently, with a far more believable villain, and a much bigger payoff.

    Lucifer meanwhile turned out to be a hybrid of buddy cop police procedural and urban fantasy familial drama. In quite a few ways it’s reminiscent of Castle, and so far it’s the only DC TV series I’ve seen that manages to avoid deteriorating over time: What you get in the first episode is what you get in the 40th.

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  • ARROW – Seasons 4-8

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Let’s just get the remaining Arrow seasons out of the way all at once:

      Season 4 – Fantasy elements take center stage this season. Both the present and past main villains are sorcerers, there’s a couple Constantine cameos, a bit more Lazarus Pool fuckery, and a crossover special heavy with Egyptian mythology. It’s not very good… and whomever thought that airing halves of a plot-driven crossover event in different series was a good idea should’ve been fired. Also: Netspeak should never, ever be spoken aloud.

      Season 5 – This season introduces a (mostly) new team, trades the boardroom for the mayor’s office, and retreads some of the same ground the first season covered adversary-wise. The fantasy elements are gone, which is a positive, but the new team is worse than the old and once again we have orphaned cross-over episodes (two this time, one featuring a brief creepily perky Supergirl appearance).

      Season 6 – Hey, remember that annoying secret identity drama from the first season? Guess what? That just so happens to be the central focus here. The series really should’ve just ended after the first season.

      Season 7 – Events here don’t start off very Arrow-like at all. Lot of focus on the police, FBI, and prison side of things… not so much the vigilante side. If this is what you wanted to do, why not just go work on one of the quadrillion existing police procedurals floating around instead? While it does gets more Arrow-y toward the halfway point, it does so in the bad arbitrary way that’s been par for the course in recent seasons and doesn’t drop the police-side perspective until the last quarter or so.

      Season 8 – This is more like a miniseries than a proper season. With less than half the length it mainly focuses on a single extremely comicbook plotline (alongside continued flash-forwards and an episode to wrap up the Guild of Assassins subplot). It’s amazing how they could so thoroughly squander the opportunity to finally tell a concise, focused story.

    Well, that was an impressive waste of time. On the positive side of things, at least the crossover episodes cured me of any desire to check out Supergirl or Batwoman (never had any plans of watching Flash).

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  • ARROW – Season 3

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Arrow’s third season starts off decent enough. Rather than unfocused it instead comes across as… unhurried? It knows what it wants to do and does it without any particular fanfare or expository explanations.

    While preferable to the ‘pick ideas out of a hat’ methodology the second season had going on, I can’t say the end result is particularly engaging since ‘what it wants to do’ is explicitly contradict its own core premise. Not only is Oliver now ‘poor’ (though functionally there’s no difference) but he was no longer trapped on a island for 5 years; the survivalism flashbacks get replaced by secret agent flashbacks. What’s even the point of this retcon? What does it add besides extreme incredulity? Then there’s the last quarter.

    The League of Assassins plotline is dumb. Real dumb. So of course the show has to focus on it 100% for the climax while tossing in some fantasy elements (which appear to become more pronounced in later seasons) and bizarre character behavior. Just because a work is inspired by a comic doesn’t mean it’s required to feature the same sort of nonsense plot developments and schizophrenic characterizations endemic to the medium.

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  • ARROW – Season 2

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    This season picks up from where the first left off following a short time skip.

    It’s nowhere near as focused and mostly just comes across as a random assortment of ideas thrown at a wall: Arbitrary resurrections, sudden sci-fi elements (though some might consider those a positive considering the series didn’t start off very superhero-like), some questionable costume choices, and the appearance of a ninja army (not quite as bad as Daredevil‘s, but still pretty bad).

    I’m generally not one to mourn a loss of realism, but here that was in a sense the show’s defining trait. The corporate elements don’t work well either. As for positives… well, I guess Laurel’s arc is solid enough and I’m certainly not sad to see the (apparent) end of Thea’s questionable romance.

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  • ARROW – Season 1

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The first season of the CW’s Arrow TV series combines an assortment of themes/genres.

    It starts off quite good as a mixture of action-focused revenge story and courtroom drama, eventually adding police procedural elements, military survivalism flashbacks, thrillerish conspiracy-related developments, assorted familial/relationship drama, and a fairly large number of romantic subplots. Some parts work better than others.

    The action scenes are solid throughout and I have no complaints regarding the acting or casting (though some characters seem overly similar to one another). The justice-themed monologues however pretty much universally fall flat, him working alone initially plays better than him working with employees (once the tech expert joins it evens out), the background conspiracy is pretty sketchy, and I don’t buy that simply wearing a hood magically makes someone completely unrecognizable.

    It’s a good show, but perhaps just a bit too meandering. I think this season would’ve been better at about half the length with most of the secondary subplots, particularly the ‘crisis of faith’ and re-occurring secret identity drama, cut out to focus entirely on the main revenge/conspiracy.

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  • THE BOYS, WATCHMEN

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The Boys is an adaptation of an ~adult~ comic of the same name, which is to say it features graphic violence, sex, cursing, and dark themes. It’s not a 1:1 adaptation though, making a number of changes which (after having read the original’s synopsis) I think end up significant improvements. Homelander and Butcher are fantastic, the majority of the other characters are solid, and only Hughie seems miscast. His acting is perfectly on point, it’s just that its highly visually discordant to see him grouped with everyone else.

    Considering how the first season ended, with a massive departure from the source material, I’m not sure how things can be believably resolved considering that Homelander is not altruistic in the slightest. At the very least I hope they have a different ending in mind for Butcher, since the way the original story plays out is incredibly dumb.

    The Watchmen TV series is also related to a comic, though in this case it’s a sequel rather than an adaptation. With the earlier Watchmen movie being my only previous experience with this franchise I didn’t really have any expectations going in, yet considering the bizarre combination of rural anachronisms and dystopian cosplay on display it doesn’t seem familiarity would’ve helped. It’s strange. Very strange, skipping between being a period piece, a murder mystery, a police procedural, a psychological thriller, and a romantic drama. Heavy on violence, both physical and otherwise, with little counterbalance.

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  • Assorted, Mostly DC, Movies

    Posted on by Offkorn

    Went on a brief movie kick recently in a fit of boredom (though I watched the first two on the list below at the time they were released):

    • Detective Pikachu: Reynolds and the pokémon are good; the humans are all extremely cringe.
    • Avengers: Endgame: Does a fantastic job wrapping up all the disparate plotlines featured across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Surprisingly, a good chunk of it leans strongly toward comedy.
    • Mad Max: Fury Road: Most of it is quite strong… if a little odd in places. The third act however (revisiting the citadel) is a disaster.
    • Suicide Squad: The prologue bits (before they’re captured) are pretty good and the visuals are stellar throughout, but the rest is pretty meh and I wasn’t feeling the ‘forced to fight for the government’ angle.
    • Wonder Woman: Eh. The first two Captain America movies do something similar far more competently.
    • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: This is a very strange movie which plays out like a TV miniseries for the first two-thirds, featuring more thriller elements than action. But then Doomsday appears and holy shit. It’s like night and day; an insanely strong finish worth the price of entry alone (and Wonder Woman is better here than she is in her own movie).
    • Justice League: Not sure what this was supposed to be. An imitation Infinity War? It doesn’t succeed. It’s closer to the first Avengers movie… which is not a good thing.

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  • Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    Normal highschool student by day Maron Kusakabe’s true identity is that of Kaitou Jeanne, the reincarnation of Jeanne d’Arc who spends her nights tracking down and stealing demon-possessed paintings with the help of her guardian angel Fin Fish. She’s not the only one after the paintings however, and in addition to police interference and hostile demons she also has to contended with rival thief Kaitou Sinbad.

    A multi-genre magical girl phantom thief hybrid. Primarily focused on comedy and action, it periodically dips into drama and romance as well.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading → Post ID 8087

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    This entry was posted in 1999 - Autumn 1999 - Spring 1999 - Summer 1999 - Winter Anime Related and tagged