That it’s a classic that everyone need to see and revolutionized the Super Robot genre, that it’s unspeakably bizarre and will make you want to slap the annoying protagonist silly, or both, or some third reputation?
(I haven’t actually seen it, but you can’t swing a cat in some areas without hitting a bunch of people talking about it so there’s been some osmosis.)
Evangelion is… Evangelion. It’s the kind of work that is very hard to apply adjectives to. That said, it’s very good.
Just be sure that you watch The End of Evangelion after watching all the episodes. I have a friend who watched all the episodes of Evangelion, then went around for quite some time thinking he had finished watching the whole show. Only months later did he find out that there was more, and that he had in fact missed out on the entire climax of the show.
While I have to applaud Steven Moffat for his ambition in creating such a complicated time travel plot over 3 years, I can only be disappointed in the overall resolution to the Eleventh Doctor’s story arc. Even though you can spend days listing the plot holes, I’d be okay with them if the interactions between the characters actually made much sense or if we were given reason to care about them. River is annoying and Clara is boring. That’s not to say it was all bad—the Doctor is a consistently great character and the Amy/Rory arc was satisfying, and watching Tennant, Smith and Hurt’s Doctor’s play off each other in the 50th Anniversary episode was amazing.
If you didn’t spend time drawing diagrams to figure out where exactly in each other’s timelines everyone is, you’ll be consistently confused from the beginning of Series 6 onwards. If you do spend the time to figure out what’s going on, the payoff isn’t worth it.
I’d be more likely to applaud his ambition in creating a 3 year time travel plot if it looked like it had actually been designed like that as opposed to taking the collection of disjointed loose ends that accumulated over the years and smushing them together any old how.
Yeah, 11th Doctor was a rip off of the previous one, with added Mr. Fanservice (I won’t put the tvtropes page in). However… Capaldi? The most incredible improvisational actor in one of Lukeprog’s favourite film’s of 2009 “In The Loop” based on the tv show “The Thick Of It”—find lots of him here (warning, lots of swearing) and also watch this. Can’t wait.
The good news is that Moffat seems to have intentionally wrapped up all those story lines in order to start fresh with the new Doctor, and has also promised (unspecified) stylistic changes. I feel like the show was getting stale so I’m interested to see how it changes.
For those of you who haven’t watched Sherlock and don’t feel like committing to the whole miniseries, I recommend A Scandal in Belgravia as the only episode you need watch, as it’s by far the best of them. It’s a good adventure story, has a very entertaining romance wrapped in, and it plays like a self-contained film.
Horrendous quantities of BBC CBeebies Bedtime Stories. My daughter demands one every night before bed. The books are generally well-written for children’s stories; some have dreadful readers, but the interesting bit is when they get a high-powered actor in to do one. (’Cos are you going to say no to the gig reading stories to kids? Of course you’re not.) Patrick Stewart is a regular.
Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn’t stand the rotoscoping
A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.
FWIW I very much enjoyed Aku No Hana; I felt it captured the experience of disaffected youth better than anything else I’ve seen. It was everything Catcher in the Rye is reputed to be. Gwern mentioned the rotoscoping; it’s also paced very slowly (extreme but indicative example: several minute shot of the characters walking home, saying nothing).
I felt it captured the experience of disaffected youth better than anything else I’ve seen.
I could believe that based on what I managed to sit through. It’s definitely a series I had a strong impression that, if not for a fatal flaw (in this case, rotoscoping), I would have liked it a lot.
it’s also paced very slowly
Not actually a problem for me except that it forced me to look at lots of low-res rotoscoping which only exacerbated the problem for me...
I began reading the manga on the recommendation of a friend before the first episode of the anime adaptation aired but after the promising PV for it dropped. I keenly remember not enjoying the plot at all to begin with, and the art is initially horrible, probably even worse than the rotoscoping in the anime.
I persevered with it, however, since this particular friend is yet to supply me with a poor rec, and gradually, the art has become quite pretty, and the story has also developed into an entertaining rollercoaster of events and emotion. I think it improves so much that of currently running manga, AnH is the title I anticipate new chapters of the most out of 50+ I’m following, and it has been consistently so since I first caught up, with each new monthly chapter delivering drama and excitement in spades.
Since the anime’s sales were amazingly poor, there will never be a second season, and imo the story only really becomes enjoyable a fair while past where the anime stopped, so I would recommend reading the manga if you ever plan on revisiting the franchise, or for anyone else who wants to pick it up.
As it isn’t finished, it could still turn to shit, but it’s pretty great right now.
-
Edit made months later: It turned to shit. No longer recommended.
All the more reason to try to only consume finished works.
I agree with the sentiment because it’s frustrating not being able to complete something right away, but with AnH I really did enjoy following it month by month. I think that some pieces of entertainment are suited to that style of consumption and are fun to follow, even if they don’t turn out to be very good in the end and aren’t worth it for those who would go back and consume it all at once.
When I saw the film I enjoyed it for being very pretty. And was pleasantly surprised (and surprised by my surprise) at how the plot led toward the original film.
Saw the first two episodes of Intelligence. The show is of average quality, but the idea of having a chip like that in my brain makes me drool. I want my augmentations, dammit.
Television and Movies Thread
I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven’t seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.
Which one?
That it’s a classic that everyone need to see and revolutionized the Super Robot genre, that it’s unspeakably bizarre and will make you want to slap the annoying protagonist silly, or both, or some third reputation?
(I haven’t actually seen it, but you can’t swing a cat in some areas without hitting a bunch of people talking about it so there’s been some osmosis.)
Ha, both. I really enjoyed it though.
If you thought NGE was too light-hearted and hopeful, move on to Bokurano. If you want more of the same, but coherent, move on to RahXephon.
Evangelion is… Evangelion. It’s the kind of work that is very hard to apply adjectives to. That said, it’s very good.
Just be sure that you watch The End of Evangelion after watching all the episodes. I have a friend who watched all the episodes of Evangelion, then went around for quite some time thinking he had finished watching the whole show. Only months later did he find out that there was more, and that he had in fact missed out on the entire climax of the show.
I watched several Charlie Chaplin films. They’re so old that you can watch them for free on youtube, and they’re hilarious.
In descending order of enjoyment:
The Gold Rush
Modern Times
The Great Dictator
The Kid
City Lights
While I have to applaud Steven Moffat for his ambition in creating such a complicated time travel plot over 3 years, I can only be disappointed in the overall resolution to the Eleventh Doctor’s story arc. Even though you can spend days listing the plot holes, I’d be okay with them if the interactions between the characters actually made much sense or if we were given reason to care about them. River is annoying and Clara is boring. That’s not to say it was all bad—the Doctor is a consistently great character and the Amy/Rory arc was satisfying, and watching Tennant, Smith and Hurt’s Doctor’s play off each other in the 50th Anniversary episode was amazing.
If you didn’t spend time drawing diagrams to figure out where exactly in each other’s timelines everyone is, you’ll be consistently confused from the beginning of Series 6 onwards. If you do spend the time to figure out what’s going on, the payoff isn’t worth it.
I’d be more likely to applaud his ambition in creating a 3 year time travel plot if it looked like it had actually been designed like that as opposed to taking the collection of disjointed loose ends that accumulated over the years and smushing them together any old how.
Yeah, 11th Doctor was a rip off of the previous one, with added Mr. Fanservice (I won’t put the tvtropes page in). However… Capaldi? The most incredible improvisational actor in one of Lukeprog’s favourite film’s of 2009 “In The Loop” based on the tv show “The Thick Of It”—find lots of him here (warning, lots of swearing) and also watch this. Can’t wait.
Nah I liked Eleven a lot, and I don’t know how one could call him a copy of the Tenth. They’re very different.
Agreed on Capaldi though, he’s been a wonderful actor in everything I’ve seen him in.
The good news is that Moffat seems to have intentionally wrapped up all those story lines in order to start fresh with the new Doctor, and has also promised (unspecified) stylistic changes. I feel like the show was getting stale so I’m interested to see how it changes.
This topic is for recommending media, not for random criticism...
I’d rather have some sort of discussion than just people posting the names of things.
For those of you who haven’t watched Sherlock and don’t feel like committing to the whole miniseries, I recommend A Scandal in Belgravia as the only episode you need watch, as it’s by far the best of them. It’s a good adventure story, has a very entertaining romance wrapped in, and it plays like a self-contained film.
Horrendous quantities of BBC CBeebies Bedtime Stories. My daughter demands one every night before bed. The books are generally well-written for children’s stories; some have dreadful readers, but the interesting bit is when they get a high-powered actor in to do one. (’Cos are you going to say no to the gig reading stories to kids? Of course you’re not.) Patrick Stewart is a regular.
Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn’t stand the rotoscoping
A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.
FWIW I very much enjoyed Aku No Hana; I felt it captured the experience of disaffected youth better than anything else I’ve seen. It was everything Catcher in the Rye is reputed to be. Gwern mentioned the rotoscoping; it’s also paced very slowly (extreme but indicative example: several minute shot of the characters walking home, saying nothing).
I could believe that based on what I managed to sit through. It’s definitely a series I had a strong impression that, if not for a fatal flaw (in this case, rotoscoping), I would have liked it a lot.
Not actually a problem for me except that it forced me to look at lots of low-res rotoscoping which only exacerbated the problem for me...
I began reading the manga on the recommendation of a friend before the first episode of the anime adaptation aired but after the promising PV for it dropped. I keenly remember not enjoying the plot at all to begin with, and the art is initially horrible, probably even worse than the rotoscoping in the anime.
I persevered with it, however, since this particular friend is yet to supply me with a poor rec, and gradually, the art has become quite pretty, and the story has also developed into an entertaining rollercoaster of events and emotion. I think it improves so much that of currently running manga, AnH is the title I anticipate new chapters of the most out of 50+ I’m following, and it has been consistently so since I first caught up, with each new monthly chapter delivering drama and excitement in spades.
Since the anime’s sales were amazingly poor, there will never be a second season, and imo the story only really becomes enjoyable a fair while past where the anime stopped, so I would recommend reading the manga if you ever plan on revisiting the franchise, or for anyone else who wants to pick it up.
As it isn’t finished, it could still turn to shit, but it’s pretty great right now.
-
Edit made months later: It turned to shit. No longer recommended.
All the more reason to try to only consume finished works. In-progress recommendations are treacherous.
I agree with the sentiment because it’s frustrating not being able to complete something right away, but with AnH I really did enjoy following it month by month. I think that some pieces of entertainment are suited to that style of consumption and are fun to follow, even if they don’t turn out to be very good in the end and aren’t worth it for those who would go back and consume it all at once.
I watched ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.
Looking back, so did I.
When I saw the film I enjoyed it for being very pretty. And was pleasantly surprised (and surprised by my surprise) at how the plot led toward the original film.
Saw the first two episodes of Intelligence. The show is of average quality, but the idea of having a chip like that in my brain makes me drool. I want my augmentations, dammit.