Pirates could be respected leaders of their people.
Check out Grainne ní Mhaille (Or Grace O’Malley) the Pirate Queen of Mayo.
3 Likes
Well I mean she knew that Elizabeth across the water was also a pirate queen. Same deal, she just had more ships.
3 Likes
She did meet personally with Elizabeth as more or less equals (at least, that’s how she seems to have approached it). And given how Ireland and the Irish were being treated at the time, that’s especially astounding.
1 Like
4 Likes
is anyone else watching Cowboy Bebop on Netflix? I caught the first 3 eps last night and I am totally onboard. Cho is great as Spike and Mustafa Shakir is perfect as Jet! I mean he nails it for me. lots of Viscious/Julia backstory hinted at that never got fleshed out in the original material… good production, pacing and enough call-out to stories and characters in the original to keep a hard core fan of the anime happy, IMO.
but I was going to be sucked in, no matter what. I am just very happy with the effort so far.
like to know what y’all think about it. 
10 Likes
I think I like it? It isn’t the anime and most of the complaints I’ve seen have been exactly that. It’s fun, funny and exciting and it looks amazing.
6 Likes
Just finished Midnight Mass:
It was a nice meditation on morality, religion, and the authoritarian mindset…
9 Likes
I am really enjoying it so far. I subscribe to the Douglas Adams school of thought about all the different versions of Hitchhiker’s Guide. Each exists in its own layer of the multiverse. Many things are the same, others different but each stands on their own.
The differences from the anime are so far pleasant and logical. But the show has managed to capture the tone perfectly.
Kanno and the Seatbelts definitely help:
5 Likes
awesome clip! thanks for sharing that.
I love, Love, LOVE the OST and it is the music that I listen to when working in the shop. I find it calming, yet with energy and a vibe that gets me in an easy contemplation of the task at hand.
Kanno and Seatbelts, their music, ARE Cowboy Bebop and any production that does not include that key element is just not!
3 Likes
I’ve only seen the first one and i enjoyed it for what it is, it’s not the anime but i was expecting something really terrible based on some things i read about it. You can see it desperately wants to be the anime rather than being its own thang because there are moments when it gets very kitsch and kinda naff i have to say. The reviews about the tasteless humour already sound very off-putting so it remains to be seen if i’m still favourable toward it. On the plus side i did really like the look of the space scenes but no balletic spaceship battles in the entire series? I am disappoint.
1 Like
JFF, or Japanese Film Festival, is a project of the Japan Foundation created with the aim to share the excitement of Japanese cinema with the world. As one portion of JFF, the JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL ONLINE 2022, will be held in 25 countries simultaneously for two weeks in February of 2022.
For its second year, the festival will expand to 25 countries , focusing on areas where access to Japanese cinema is limited. Nepal, Bangladesh, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru have been added to the festival’s scope. Viewers located in the countries where the online festival will take place will be able to watch 20 films presented with subtitles in 15 languages for free.
7 Likes
My annoyances were almost all technical.
I mean, THEY COULDN"T CRAWL IN A CULVERT, something?!?! Wrap up in a tarp under a car?
I mean, I get they are very inexperienced in the whole vampiring thing, but still, the idea that just because the houses burned nobody could find a bit of shade to weather the day is crazy. We had lots of time with Father Paul in a pretty well lit room with the curtains drawn. He didn’t burn til he put his hand in direct sunlight.
I think it would have been easy just to avoid direct sunlight til nightfall and work their way back from there. Bev Keane was a survivor, that was not a believable death for her.
Anyhoo, just little things like that. I really enjoyed the story. I just don’t think it would have ended where it did in any believable way.
2 Likes
4 Likes
Maybe with Bev, but everyone else was ready to go after the night they’d had, I think. Father Paul had broken the spell that Bev had over them.
Me too!
3 Likes
Is there such a thing as fantasy universe fatigue? It seems to have two sides for me.
a) seeing the same tropes over and over
b) learning the differences between the universes.
The fatigue I am feeling is actually a combination of the two. One or the other I think I could stand, but the familiarity of the tropes (the prophesy of the one who will… yadda yadda, rising of the ancient evil who must be stopped… yadda yadda ) seems to clash with the unfamiliarity of the magical systems, the politics, the society, in such a way that it is just effin tiring.
With Wheel of Time, I think we are pounded immediately with the whole magical prophesied learning to be special thing, and have basically nothing else. The ordinary world we need to acclimate to is trod over so quickly that there really isn’t time to feel “there”. Given the situations of the main characters, I think that is kind of a problem, since we don’t really feel the loss that they are feeling.
Maybe it is just me. I am on episode 2 and I couldn’t finish it. I will give it a try again later.
1 Like
I am.
My expectations have been met; it’s pretty good.
4 Likes
Agreed on fantasy series being derivative… They often split up a group and group A goes somewhere and something bad happens while group B goes somewhere else and something else bad happens.
This is a series that will be canceled long before they finish the story. While everyone is looking for the next game of thrones, This won’t be it. Streaming services should look to the works of Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny.
1 Like
That seems to be what everyone is saying. A bit like Carnival Row, which I also never watched because the world had decided it was a turkey and, well it didn’t seem like I’d want to.
On the plus side Jeff Bezos is absolutely raging. Hopping mad. Probably having a toddler tantrum as we speak.
And that’s good isn’t it?
I watched the whole of Foundation. The last two episodes I hate watched.
They certainly got the excessively relished cruelty from GoT, just with lasciviously relished descriptive pornography because Apple seems to be rather prudish with both violence and sex. So much of the drama was ersatz plottiness and silly TV tropes that I got enraged. O look. A baddie that just won’t die. Still. And this time the pew pew guns which were infinite until they needed to kill the baddie the “drama” needed to make not die suddenly ran out of pew pew.
There was some good stuff in there and I am absolutely there for some high end visuals space opera. They also managed the different timeframes well and gave the drama both a sense of cart space and long time. Lot of good actors, they made a stab at diversity (though the Atlantic article above points out where they tripped themselves up, did they have diverse writers?), The Atlantic article also pointed out a fundamental flaw, one that the recent Dune body swerved. Who gives a fuck if you destroy the empire if you make another one in it’s place? It’s right there in the source material, Gibbon couldn’t see the flaws in the US (like Burke, he seems to have been cool with them) and Asimov obviously couldn’t. It’s forever since I read the books so I’m taking other people’s word on that. Dune clearly saw that a liberal imperialist like the Atreides was the same old shit for the Fremen and that the ersatz, fake prophesy, white saviour was going to, and going to enjoy, killing billions in his name
1 Like
I have never read the Foundation books, but to me it seemed like Cliff’s Notes, or like when they took the entire miniseries of Shogun and made it a two hour movie. The whole season seemed like a beginning-of-season recap of a previous season, just showing the high points. We covered, what, 200 years in 10 episodes?
Oddly enough, the storylines I started off liking and disliking totally reversed about 75% of the way into it. I will probably start season 2 when it comes out, but to me it it just wasn’t satisfying.
1 Like
I can’t predict whether I will watch. I’m shocked I made it to the end. I normally don’t have that tolerance for TV so who knows?
I wouldn’t recommend though.
1 Like
