I binged season 2 of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan this week (after watching season 1 back in 2018!). This season felt tighter than the first in terms of pacing and such.But I’m not happy with the way it promotes American interventionism and their easy willingness to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign nation (however justified it may be)
All entries tagged tv.
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May 2021
Apr 2021
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Invincible season 1 finale was pretty great, the fight was intense and afterwards I couldn’t believe there was still half an episode to go. It’s been a while since I read the books so I’m not sure, but I think they diverged a bit from the source material, but it’s fine.The series was developed well enough, decent pacing and enough to portray the major characters well. Looking forward to season 2!
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Falcon and Winter Soldier review (with some spoilers): more action-packed and straightforward compared to Wandavision, jumping straight into the action from the get go some great performances here, especially from Sebastian Stan (Bucky), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), and Daniel Bruhl (Zemo) Bucky and Sam have great chemistry, even though they start out annoyed at each other pacing is a bit odd at times; feels more like an extended movie than a weekly episodic series (especially compared to Wandavision, which took advantage of the weekly format really well) although a complete story by itself, this one felt more of a setup for future MCU storylines (again compared to Wandavision) while overall the season was good, I find Wandavision was the clearly better watch for me, though I suppose your mileage may vary if your preference is for action sequences Ending spoilers follow:
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A number of people I follow have been raving about Ted Lasso for a while, so I thought I’d give it a try. My thoughts: Season 1 is 10 episodes, each episode 30 minutes long. I finished all of the episodes over the span of one day! I didn’t know much coming in: I knew it was about sports, and I knew it was supposedly a comedy. For some reason I assumed it was about American football.
Mar 2021
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#WandaVision spoiler-free review: Overall, I really liked it, and I think they did well with the one-episode-per-week format. The show certainly would not have been this hyped if it all came in one drop Really difficult to not spoil. If you have somehow avoid being spoiled by the internet until it all dropped, good for you! A very emotional story of Wanda dealing with the aftermath of Infinity War/Endgame good usage of the sitcom tropes fantastic performance by Elisabeth Olsen lots of fan service for comic book fans to dig into.
Dec 2020
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While digging through some old stuff recently I found a copy of the late 80s/early 90s US sitcom Perfect Strangers and decided to binge through all 8 seasons of it (really more like 6 and a half, since seasons 1 and 8 were an abridged 6 episodes each). I grew up watching this series, on live tv even, before we had cable or Netflix or anything like that. During the binge-watch I remember a good number of the episodes from the first season all the way up to the end of season 7, which implies almost all of it was broadcast on local TV, kind of a rarity I think?
Sep 2020
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October is imminent! There are two distractions I’m looking forward to in the coming month. The first one is Inktober, which I’ve been doing since 2016. Basically it’s just to do 30 ink drawings in October, one per day. There are some official prompts, which I’ll probably follow. I haven’t really done any serious sketching in a while, maybe this will help me get back into the groove.
Aug 2020
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This last week was weird. I feel like I didn’t really get much done in terms of productivity, yet I don’t feel I was unproductive. A very relaxed and chill week. Once again a tiny bit of work done this past week, some fixes, including to side projects. I also spent some time preparing for some events next weekend. Although I wasn’t productive this week, I did outline a bit of a roadmap of new features for one of my side projects, hopefully I can get into that in the coming weeks!
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I had some complaints about the latter half of the season, but I liked how they resolved their timey-wimey business. Agents of SHIELD had a great run and a pretty good series finale
Apr 2020
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This week went by quickly, for some reason. And despite the fact that it’s summer, the rains have started coming in early, although only sporadically. inb4 “the world is healing” The COVID19 Diary is still being updated every few days. Actually went out 3 times this week, once for groceries, and twice for meds for the parental units (one would assume they would coordinate so I can just buy everything in one go, but nooooo.
Feb 2020
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2020 Movies update: 7 movies watched in Feb. Probably the best movie I’ve seen this month was Knives Out. (Jojo Rabbit close second.) The goal of 200 movies for the year is getting farther! As for TV, I think most of my watching time was spent rewatching Rick and Morty for quiz purposes lol. Well, Criminal Minds ended, so there’s that. Arrowverse has been meh, though I did enjoy Supergirl’s 100th episode.
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In 2010 I took a short work hiatus which meant I was often home for most of the day. Back then Netflix wasn’t really a thing, so I would often have local cable TV playing in the background of whatever I was doing. And it was because of this that I started regularly watching police procedurals. They’re not the cleverest or most highbrow of shows, but they’re more like a guilty pleasure.
Jan 2020
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I wasn’t sure if I should continue this watching-lately series since I already set up a separate page for listing my 2020 movies watched. It might have been more consistent to have a list for the 2020 TV shows also? But then again, TV shows are a much different beast, since each show/season is broken into an episode and sometimes you watch them all in one go or sometimes over the span of a few months.
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Arrow wasn’t a perfect show but that was a fantastic finale. They basically gave the fans everything they have ever asked for. EVERYTHING!
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So the back half of the CW Arrowverse’s epic Crisis on Infinite Earth’s crossover finally aired this week, and I promised more words about the Arrowverse and the crossover last month, so here we are. Spoilers abound! On 15 Jan 2020 5:05am I wrote: #CrisisOnInfiniteEarths spoiler free review: low budget, pacing and writing issues, but idc because all the dc comics fan service kept making me smile First the bad: as noted above, writing and pacing and budget issues plague the crossover, but this is typical of the Arrowverse as a whole.
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#CrisisOnInfiniteEarths spoiler free review: low budget, pacing and writing issues, but idc because all the dc comics fan service kept making me smile
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Apparently I’m not done looking back at the 2010s yet. I had some “top tens of 2010s” discussions with some friends recently, here are my personal lists, each in no particular order: My Top Ten Movies of the 2010s Avengers Endgame (2019).. I’m keeping only one slot per franchise, so I had to choose an MCU movies for this. Runner-ups for this slot were Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America Winter Soldier, and individually either one of those movies might be around the same or better than Endgame, but Endgame is the culmination of a decade’s worth of movies and gave me the most enjoyment as a comic book fan.
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Quick WITCHER S1 #spoiler-free-review:
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great season, but what a tease
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I like Henry Cavill in this role more than as Superman
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although he plays the titular Witcher, the season’s plot largely involves Ciri and Yennefer’s origins as well
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I wish I had watched this before playing the Witcher games, it’s the great backstory recap I never had
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looking forward to S2!
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Dec 2019
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Been watching a lot of things this December. I finally got back on The Expanse after finishing S1 more than a year ago. I only finished S2, but it was already a vast improvement over S1. S1 felt like a lot of meandering around until the characters actually ran into the plot. S2 was stronger, faster-paced, and there’s always a lot of things going on in each episode. I really like this series now, looking forward to S3 and S4 when I have the time.
Nov 2019
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Nothing in the cinema this month (going to the cinema is expensive!). I did watch a couple of animated movies this month: Dragonball Super: Broly. I have some vague recollection of watching the original Broly movie, and I believe this one is much better. DBS Broly is a slightly more nuanced character than just “random raging monster” from the previous non-canon movie. The animation was okay, you could tell the animators were having fun with some of the battle parts. -
Actually watched something in the cinema this month: Joker. I wasn’t originally sure if I wanted to see it, I wasn’t hyped for it at all in the months prior. But as the showing date came nearer, there was a lot of buzz around it so I decided to go anyway. I don’t feel like it lived up to the hype and the warnings about promoting incel stuff, but at least it’s one of the higher-grossing DC movies, so maybe we’ll have more to come in that vein.
Sep 2019
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I finally got around to watching X-Men Dark Phoenix which I skipped when it came out mainly because (a) poor reviews, and while normally I’d have watched it anyway since I have not missed any of the X-Men movies in the cinema, not even the horrendous Wolverine Origins, there was also to consider that (b) I was in the US at the time and was only willing to spend my precious dollars on one expensive American cinema and Spider-man Far From Home won out.
Aug 2019
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Hmm, surprisingly I haven’t watched too much stuff this month. Eigasai I watched a Japanese film at Eigasai in UP Diliman for the first time ever, upon the invite of some friends. We saw One Cut of the Dead a comedy zombie film. It was great and it was hilarious, although you must make sure not to lose patience with the first thirty minutes. I went in blind not knowing anything about it other than “Japanese comedy zombie movie”, so you should too!
Jul 2019
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I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven’t been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we’ll see. Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards.
May 2019
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The big TV thing of May 2019 was of course, the much maligned finale for Game of Thrones. I’ve written about that separately here. Most of the US TV series also ended their runs in May. Arrowverse show seasons were littered with poor writing as usual. I rank the seasons in this order: best is Legends of Tomorrow season 4. The reason Legends is the best is that they’re not afraid to be outrageous.
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After a much-maligned eighth and final season, HBO’s Game of Thrones is done. Unmarked spoilers follow. The eighth season was so notoriously bad, we got petitions asking for rewrites. Here’s how I explained it to a friend after the notorious episode 5: It’s not about characters being killed, it’s about bad writing because they’re cramming. The writers were determined to finish the show in 2 smaller seasons so they’re skipping a lot of necessary character development and characters just do stupid things because the plot demands it.
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Say what you will about the Big Bang Theory, but that was a pretty good series finale
Apr 2019
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I’ve already written extensively about Avengers Endgame, but there are other things I watched this month too. Shazam came out early this month, and while it was unfortunately sandwiched between MCU blockbusters, it was a fun adventure romp and surprised me in a few ways. I wrote a short spoiler-free review over on Tumblr. TV-wise, I’ve been on a rewatch binge of 30 Rock that unfortunately started with season 4 due to Amazon Prime’s weird way of presenting things.
Mar 2019
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The big one this month was Captain Marvel. I posted the usual spoiler-free review over on Tumblr, but I have some more spoiler-y thoughts over here: (Spoilers) While I thought the movie was ok, I was underwhelmed by the third act and specifically the lack of any serious threat for Carol to defeat towards the end of the movie. As this tumblr post explains more clearly than I ever could, perhaps the issue is that the narrative is not something targetted towards me as a man, who has not experienced the emotional gaslighting IRL that many women are exposed to.
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If you haven’t figured it out yet, I watch a lot of TV shows, rarely on TV itself though. I outgrew scheduled television maybe more than a decade ago. I’m reminded of this because I was going through some old disks and found burned episodes of stuff like Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons, various anime, and so on. Those were from the days before streaming though. These days an abundance of content is available online via the streaming services, no need to store all those episodes yourself.
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Star Trek fans: You’re probably already watching Discovery, but if you’re not also watching The Orville, you’re really missing out!
Feb 2019
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Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I watched Alita: Battle Angel, with the friend who introduced me to the series in the first place. The movie looked fantastic and the fight scenes were great. Plot was supercondensed, several books’ worth of story combined into one. Ended in a weird place, kinda? Easily the best western live action anime adaptation by far. On 7 Feb 2019 2:06pm I wrote: Watched Alita: Battle Angel earlier today.
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Interesting article on closed captioning, or as I like to call them, subtitles. My first exposure to subtitles was anime of course, but these days I vastly prefer having subtitles on any show, even if it’s dubbed in a language I do understand. From the article: “Why do you have captions on?” I asked. “It helps me with my ADHD: I can focus on the words, I catch things I missed, and I never have to go back,” she replied.
Jan 2019
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Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Bumblebee only came out over here in January (thanks to the usual MMFF shenanigans), and I decided to watch it on a whim. Pretty decent soft reboot, read my spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr The first half of Young Justice Outsiders is out, and it’s pretty good. Focus is back on a smaller group after the larger team in YJ season 2.
Dec 2018
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Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I very much enjoyed Elseworlds, the Arrowverse crossover this year. I mean sure, a lot of it didn’t make any sense, but it was like a love letter to DC fans. I actually consider myself more of a Marvel fan than DC, but I still loved it! I wrote a spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr.
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Arrowverse Elseworlds crossover spoiler-free review!
- if you’re not aware, episode 1 - Flash S05E09, episode 2 - Arrow S07E09, episode 3 - Supergirl S04E09
- I don’t usually review TV show crossovers but TBH I can’t recall any other any TV show crossovers and I just really, really enjoyed this one
- basically a love letter to DC comics fans, a celebration of dc comics/TV/movies from the past four decades, and apparently a prelude of things to come. Non-comicbook fans might not be as happy as me lol
- all three episodes were great (middle episode slightly worse because Arrow lol), I was smiling all the time and apploauding all the references- frankly not everything made sense, but I’ll forgive it (I mean, have you *read* crisis on infinite earths? lol
- bonus: for more zaniness, also watch this week’s Legend’s of Tomorrow, they didn’t want to be outdone!
- I also watched Aquaman today, and that was fine (review later) but I decided to write a review of this crossover first!
- tonight’s reading list (image attached)
Nov 2018
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Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: For some reason, I watched two biopics this month. The first one is Hidden Figures, about three black women who were instrumental during the early days of NASA leading up to the Friendship 7 mission piloted by John Glenn. The movie is fairly interesting if you are even remotely interested in either the challenges faced in black history or math and science or the early days of the space program competition between the USA and Russia.
Oct 2018
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Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (on Amazon Prime) – surprisingly good, even if I’m not too familiar with the Jack Ryan stuff. I only know John Krasinski from The Office, Spoilers for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: (Spoilers) The story starts with Ryan tracking down Suleiman’s network via financials, but they never follow-up on who was financing his group I’m not sure what was the point of the whole drone pilot side story (including the weird trip to the casino and the night with the couple), although it was admittedly kind of entertaining Daredevil season 3 (on Netflix) – I enjoyed the season a lot.
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Comic books and superheroes have always tended to skew towards liberal philosophies, given how writers and artists tend to support ideals like individualism and free expression. So it’s not surprising that the derivative shows tend to lean the same way. Not only do many of the shows promote diversity, but many are becoming overtly political as well. Some recent examples. (Spoilers for current seasons of Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and Daredevil follow)
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I’ve been re-watching The Office (US) lately (it’s a good show to leave running in the background while you’re doing other stuff), and I just find the character of Michael Scott fascinating. He’s funny and well-written and basically just a big bag of human flaws that somehow bumbles his way into managing an office. He’s self-centered, attention-hungry, easily distracted, and refuses to acknowledge any bad news, yet despite all of that he loves his workmates like a family.
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Daredevil Season 3 spoiler-free review
- This season is amazing. I was planning on watching the season over a period of 3-4 days. Instead I ended up finishing it all in one day, ending at 3 in the morning. The pacing was tight and there was no good place to stop as you always wanted to know what happens next
- The entire cast gave great performances
- Wilson Fisk comes out strong to carry the season, looming over Hell’s Kitchen and presenting a sinister, cunning, and apparently unstoppable criminal mastermind
- Wilson Bethel’s Ben Poindexter is seemingly unbeatable in combat and gives us some great fight scenes and a fantastic performance
- Ugh, I wish I could write spoilers lol
- I used to consider Daredevil S1 to be the best of the Marvel/Netflix seasons so far; I think I have to crown a new champion
May 2018
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When Game of Thrones entered its sixth season in 2016, it was true spoiler territory for those of us who had read the GRRM books before HBO’s TV adaptation turned the property into a worldwide phenomenon. Due to the author’s glacial writing pace, at this point the TV series went past the point that the novels had reached. Thus nobody – book readers or tv viewers – knew what events would unfold in the story.
Mar 2018
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Jessica Jones S2: In which dark things happen and everyone crosses lines they shouldn’t cross
Feb 2018
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Discovery had a great S1 ending, especially since I’m currently watching TOS as well
Jan 2018
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I had put off watching PUNISHER (on Netflix) since i wasn’t really too hyped about it. But now that I finally got around to it, I really like it.
The pacing was good throughout the season (which was one of the weakness of the recent MCU Netflix seasons such as Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Defenders) and it didn’t falter halfway through and stuck the landing.
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If you’re an X-Men fan and you’re not watching The Gifted, you’re really missing out. It’s a more serious, street-level take on “the mutant problem” than the movies could ever handle.
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Black Mirror S4 spoiler-free review! (episodes listed from most enjoyed to least):
4.6. Black Museum (reminds me of White Christmas)
4.1. USS Callister (fun, but I was annoyed by how infeasible the technical premise was)
4.4. Hang the DJ (kind of telegraphed the ending)
4.3. Crocodile (felt like a police procedural)
4.5. Metalhead (would have probably appreciated it more if it wasn’t a Black Mirror episode)
4.2. Arkangel (kinda boring and draggy)
Overall I liked S3 a lot more
Dec 2017
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RT @williamsmeatsix: Brooklyn Nine-Nine might get cancelled so here’s a few reasons why you should start watching this show (spoiler-free,…
Oct 2017
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(Watching Star Trek Discovery) Why are there no seat belts in the future?
Aug 2017
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DEFENDERS spoiler-free review and episode guide:
(Okay, maybe a teensy little spoiler in that image - but I couldn’t resist lol)
- this series moves forward each of the four protaganists
- you get to see most of the supporting cast come back and maybe even get a teeny bit of development in
- the plot is reasonably tight, i had a few minor nitpicks but now i can’t even remember most of them
- Maybe it’s just the fanboy in me, but I was really excited when they met each other for the first time
- Jessica Jones still the best character
- Iron Fist still the weakest point (see the image), but it’s not as bad as it was in his own series. It helps that he’s not surrounded by the weird Meachum family and has a better ensemble to work off of. I also really enjoyed how enthusiastic he was at getting a team together
- fight scenes are pretty good (at least better than in the Iron Fist series - also it’s still weird that Daredevil fights a lot better than Iron Fist. He must have been a real slacker during that decade in Kun’Lun)
- I suspect you can come in cold without watching any of the previous series, they do bring up their backstories a lot
- I’m disappointed that there was no title drop
Episode guide:
ep1 ok ep2 great ep3 great ep4 great ep5 draggy, this was the weakest ep for me ep6 ok ep7 good ep8 great. there’s a post-credits scene
