The Movie Thread Reloaded

[Thornhammer]

I watched the first ep of Reacher yesterday as well. Something is off, can't quite put my finger on it. Not off enough to stop watching since I have heard it improves.

Fight in the bathroom was absolutely brutal.

Raised By Wolves, season 1 went batshit crazy and not in a positive fashion. I don't think I have enough patience for season 2.

[oggsmash]

I watched the first ep of Reacher yesterday as well. Something is off, can't quite put my finger on it. Not off enough to stop watching since I have heard it improves.

Fight in the bathroom was absolutely brutal.

Raised By Wolves, season 1 went batshit crazy and not in a positive fashion. I don't think I have enough patience for season 2.

   It gets quite a bit better.  I do think the first episode sort of dove right in with not a whole lot of character development what so ever, and some really odd decisions from experienced detectives and putting a couple guys in a real prison on a very short turn around.  All of the fights scenes are pretty well done for what I expect from Hollywood.   

[Thornhammer]

Watched the second and third episodes, yep the story does improve.

Reacher says he wants a gun. Love interest pulls down box from closet. I pause. "She's going to give him a Desert Eagle, the big one."

HOLY SHIT I'M PSYCHIC.

Is it particularly popular with women? Because they spend an awful lot of time with Reacher shirtless and there hasn't been boob one.

Smartassery aside, I like it.

Also, as an item of note unrelated to Reacher - as of last Friday, 2/4, Ghostbusters: Afterlife has outearned Ghostbusters 2016 at the domestic box office. In 2/3 the time. During a pandemic.

[Bedrockbrendan]

Just saw the Many Saints of Newark. I have been waiting about 6 months after movies come out to see them so that the online cultural conversation around them isn't as much of an influence on my viewing. I had heard some negative reactions to it, so I wasn't expecting to like it. I do think people will have pretty different reactions to the movie, but I rather enjoyed it. A few things I might have done differently, but overall I liked the focus on Christopher's father. I enjoyed most of the performances (though I did think characters like Silvio felt a little too on the nose----he is supposed to be much younger so I thought they could have toned down that performance a bit). I did like the Harold character, and I thought the riots worked well as a back drop, but I think he would have been more interesting if his motives stemmed less from the politics and were more personal (he did have personal motivations though). It is kind of an odd movie. But for me it works as a Sopranos prequel and I think it sets up the possibility of a movie centered more around Tony.

I give my very sleep deprived thoughts on it for about 40 minutes here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-egig3-11c5cb2

[oggsmash]

Watched the second and third episodes, yep the story does improve.

Reacher says he wants a gun. Love interest pulls down box from closet. I pause. "She's going to give him a Desert Eagle, the big one."

HOLY SHIT I'M PSYCHIC.

Is it particularly popular with women? Because they spend an awful lot of time with Reacher shirtless and there hasn't been boob one.

Smartassery aside, I like it.

Also, as an item of note unrelated to Reacher - as of last Friday, 2/4, Ghostbusters: Afterlife has outearned Ghostbusters 2016 at the domestic box office. In 2/3 the time. During a pandemic.

   As much as Reacher gets naked, and even more shirtless....I started to wonder if there is a director or producer who really likes Alan Ritchson...maybe a little too much.   I think the DE was from the books?  I have not read them, BUT it does seem like the sort of pistol I would expect a British dude to think an American would want.

[Thornhammer]

   As much as Reacher gets naked, and even more shirtless....I started to wonder if there is a director or producer who really likes Alan Ritchson...maybe a little too much.   I think the DE was from the books?  I have not read them, BUT it does seem like the sort of pistol I would expect a British dude to think an American would want.

I have to imagine Ritchson said something akin to "hey, I didn't spend the effort turning myself into a damn Space Marine to not take my shirt off." And I cannot fault that logic.

Also. Watched the first episode of "Our Flag Means Death" with the wife. We enjoyed it, Rhys Darby is really entertaining. They start out by attacking a two-man fishing boat (more of an oversized canoe) and fire a "warning shot" by dropping one cannonball over the side of the ship near the canoe.

[Lurkndog]

   As much as Reacher gets naked, and even more shirtless....I started to wonder if there is a director or producer who really likes Alan Ritchson...maybe a little too much.   I think the DE was from the books?  I have not read them, BUT it does seem like the sort of pistol I would expect a British dude to think an American would want.

As an American, Desert Eagles are pretty goddamn useless. Not reliable enough to do 44 magnum things, and twice as heavy as they need to be for everything else. They're for poseurs, and being obnoxious at indoor ranges.

(PSA: When considering being obnoxious at indoor firing ranges, you should first consider that everyone around you will have a gun.)

Season 1 is taken from the first Jack Reacher book. It's broadly faithful. The book has additional amusement value due to the little mistakes Englishman Lee Child makes when writing about America. Things like making wide right turns and tight lefts coming out of a driveway, or a McMansion with a gravel driveway, or drinking hot coffee out of a red plastic cup. IMHO they lent the book a certain ramshackle charm.

I like Alan Ritchson as Reacher. He's supposed to be a big tough bastard. Tom Cruise was just Tom Cruise.

[oggsmash]

 Oh I know all about the sweet desert eagle.  It seems Brits, authors, hollywood, and all the other people who do not ever shoot guns seem to love them.  I think shooting one, .44 or .50 would quickly convince them otherwise.  But then again lots of them are the sorts of people who say they have PTSD after shooting an AR-15. 

   I would think Reacher, being in the actual military and actually shooting a lot, would have gone 9mm or .45.  Maybe .40.   

[Ghostmaker]

The 'go to' for a lot of pointy-end types has been the .45 because of its reliability as well as being less prone to overpenetrate (this is explicitly mentioned in Charlie Beckwith's book on founding Delta Force as to why they went with the .45).

The 9mm got a lot of bad press initially but loads and FPS have improved enough that it's a reliable round as well.

So yeah, why Reacher is using a .50AE Desert Eagle is beyond me unless it's the writers wanking off.

[oggsmash]

The 'go to' for a lot of pointy-end types has been the .45 because of its reliability as well as being less prone to overpenetrate (this is explicitly mentioned in Charlie Beckwith's book on founding Delta Force as to why they went with the .45).

The 9mm got a lot of bad press initially but loads and FPS have improved enough that it's a reliable round as well.

So yeah, why Reacher is using a .50AE Desert Eagle is beyond me unless it's the writers wanking off.

  Yeah the 9 got a lot of "bad press" after the FBI decided to have a shootout with mediocre loaded 9mms against the Alpha phase of Florida Man, who had brought a rifle and his zombie-ness to the party.

[Ghostmaker]

The 'go to' for a lot of pointy-end types has been the .45 because of its reliability as well as being less prone to overpenetrate (this is explicitly mentioned in Charlie Beckwith's book on founding Delta Force as to why they went with the .45).

The 9mm got a lot of bad press initially but loads and FPS have improved enough that it's a reliable round as well.

So yeah, why Reacher is using a .50AE Desert Eagle is beyond me unless it's the writers wanking off.

  Yeah the 9 got a lot of "bad press" after the FBI decided to have a shootout with mediocre loaded 9mms against the Alpha phase of Florida Man, who had brought a rifle and his zombie-ness to the party.

> The FBI

Somehow, I question how much of that was due to the 9mm, and how much was due to the people using it.

As Weaponsman, God rest his soul, would say: the tools only take you halfway.

[oggsmash]

The 'go to' for a lot of pointy-end types has been the .45 because of its reliability as well as being less prone to overpenetrate (this is explicitly mentioned in Charlie Beckwith's book on founding Delta Force as to why they went with the .45).

The 9mm got a lot of bad press initially but loads and FPS have improved enough that it's a reliable round as well.

So yeah, why Reacher is using a .50AE Desert Eagle is beyond me unless it's the writers wanking off.

  Yeah the 9 got a lot of "bad press" after the FBI decided to have a shootout with mediocre loaded 9mms against the Alpha phase of Florida Man, who had brought a rifle and his zombie-ness to the party.

> The FBI

Somehow, I question how much of that was due to the 9mm, and how much was due to the people using it.

As Weaponsman, God rest his soul, would say: the tools only take you halfway.

  Well, they shot him 12 times.  I think he was probably on something, and he was a military vet, and the FBI knew going in he was violent and crazy as hell.  From what I remember seeing a documentary about it and my father talking about it quite a bit (the FBI liked to show their fuck ups as technical issues with firepower in training documents for LEO's all around the country) their tactics for that stop, knowing he had a rifle and both guys were the ride or die sort, were horrible.  Shootouts where he has a rifle and you have a pistol are bad ideas out of the gate, and the guy literally would not quit till they shot him through the spinal cord.  They let the 9mm take most of the heat (and from memory, my father is a gun nut, those 9mm loads were really light in the ass) and called the guys heroes (though I feel for the guys injured and killed, I think they really expected these two crazy men to just give up when they stopped them) and not focus too much on bad assumptions.

[Thornhammer]

Anybody watch the first episode of Halo?

It wasn't bad, overall. They're doing their own thing with the lore.

Notes:

Five hundred years inna future, when we have FTL...colonists are still using modern day AKs and pickup trucks. Not "a futuristic take on an AK-47 and a pickup." Off the shelf stuff you can buy today.

The theme music sucked hard. Hard, hard, hard. "Hey, I know - let's take that iconic monk bit at the beginning, but fuck it up."

Covenant show up early, no grunts. The Elites looked okay to my eyes.

Master Chief and the other members of his team looked pretty good. He keeps his helmet on for most of the episode. I'm not happy with that and I'm less happy with the horseshit excuse Pablo Schreiber gave for it - "His helmet always had to come off for the audience to connect." Ass, no. Karl Urban made it work in Dredd, and Pedro Pascal made it work for a whole season in The Mandalorian and you know damned well how mindblowingly popular that was.

Cortana doesn't show up in this episode. She's mentioned once.

The plot wasn't bad. Acting wasn't awful. I'll watch episode two.

[Lurkndog]

So I finished Season 1 of Reacher. Overall a satisfactory ending.

I didn't like the denouement, though. After setting things aright, finding love and righting wrongs, Reacher just stomps off into the sunset.

It's the lone hero cliche, but it kind of doesn't make any sense. If he was the kind of person to just bail, IMHO he would have bailed when the trouble began.

I also question his abandoning clothes everywhere he goes. A real hobo keeps hold of a decent jacket at least, and probably some rain gear. He should at least have a backpack. And at 6'8" he's not going to find clothes that fit him everywhere he goes.

[oggsmash]

So I finished Season 1 of Reacher. Overall a satisfactory ending.

I didn't like the denouement, though. After setting things aright, finding love and righting wrongs, Reacher just stomps off into the sunset.

It's the lone hero cliche, but it kind of doesn't make any sense. If he was the kind of person to just bail, IMHO he would have bailed when the trouble began.

I also question his abandoning clothes everywhere he goes. A real hobo keeps hold of a decent jacket at least, and probably some rain gear. He should at least have a backpack. And at 6'8" he's not going to find clothes that fit him everywhere he goes.

   He is like Qui Chang Cain, and honestly at times I think the author may have watched Pulp Fiction and realized Julius had the best idea ever for a literary/movie concept.  Go off, and have adventures. 
   But yeah, his ignoring of all practicalities does beg some questions.  His pension however, will cover him on any needs he is ever going to have on clothing,  3-4k a month go a long ways when you have zero bills and do not mind sleeping just about any where.   

  I thought the ending was way corny, like texas ranger corny, where every character got a personalized "Boss Fight", but I get they were likely sticking to the book, and the book is cheesy.  Personally I like a little cheesy, the boss fights were a bit heavy on the cheese.   

  I was just impressed the people who adapted it were able to do a very good job with giving the supporting characters a nice arc and able to have a main character who checks the wrong boxes be highly competent....though I could use a few less naked/shirtless scenes in the 2nd season.   John Cena might want to be careful, I think he might get replaced in Hollywood (IMO he is the "budget" version of THE ROCK).