Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Thad]

Nice:

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is like doing a Lord of the Rings TV show where the characters are not allowed to mention Frodo, orcs, the ring, Sauron, elves, dwarves, Aragon, Gandalf or magic; and every episode, the main characters fight a different gang of human bandits

That would be a good analogy if the very first fucking shot of the show in question was kids looking at Gandalf and Frodo action figures.

And then the week after the new movie came out did an episode that may as well just be 44 straight minutes of a giant billboard flashing "GO SEE THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG!  NOW IN THEATERS!"

[Mothra]

Yeah, the HEY FOR THE REAL STORY HERE COME ON DOWN TO YOUR LOCAL THEATER AND SEE TV'S "THE THOR" IN HIS NEW FEATURE-LENGTH FEATURE, "THE THOR: TWO“ NOW IN THEATERS AND I M A X thing has readily made it so I can probably never take this show even remotely seriously ever again. I mean I knew something like this was coming but this is a freaking 25 minute commercial.

God dammit, Joss Weadon.

[Büge]

Wow, so they've taken one of the most obnoxious problems with comics and transplanted it into the moving pictures.

[Niku]

I probably could have forgiven it more if they had actually done a AND HERE'S OUR BUDDY, THOR!  THANKS FOR HELPING US FOR 10 MINUTES, THOR! or something.

It's hard to be too mad at Peter MacNicol being in an episode though.

Also given that the next time this can happen will be during Captain America 2 which looks to be entirely about WELL, FUCK SHIELD at least that will probably be more interesting.

[Bal]

Maybe I read so many comics I'm numb to shameless cross-promotion, but I liked the episode. I liked MacNicol, I liked the Berserker Staff and how it effected humans. For all the complaints you guys had about this not being comic booky enough, this is pretty god damned comic booky, and I enjoyed it.

[Thad]

Wow, so they've taken one of the most obnoxious problems with comics and transplanted it into the moving pictures.

Yeah, it really did remind me of that old '60's-era Spider-Man Annual where he keeps just running into people like Daredevil, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Dr. Strange while going around New York, and each time a footnote shows up and tells you to read their book.

It's hard to be too mad at Peter MacNicol being in an episode though.

MacNicol was definitely the highlight.  He makes everything better.

Maybe I read so many comics I'm numb to shameless cross-promotion, but I liked the episode. I liked MacNicol, I liked the Berserker Staff and how it effected humans. For all the complaints you guys had about this not being comic booky enough, this is pretty god damned comic booky, and I enjoyed it.

And it's nice that they finally hung a lampshade on the show's resemblance to Alphas by just having one of the actors from that show show up.

And speaking of lampshades, I remarked on the similarity betwen "It's a magical place" and [spoiler]"Did I fall asleep?" - "For a little while."[/spoiler] weeks ago.

[Mothra]

Welp. Think I'm done with Shield.

This latest one brought back one of the most bland, charmless characters in the show's history and revolved an impossibly cliche story around him, then cut off on a cliffhanger and previewed another two or three episodes of the same arc. I reeeeally could not care less about a rogue group making their own super soldiers.

I guess the big thing is that I don't see any surprises here, or in the foreseeable future.

[Royal☭]

Yeah, I was keeping tabs on the show by reading reviews at the AVClub and ComicsAlliance to see if anything developed, now I don't even have the energy to do that. Blandness just seeps into the skin of the show, so deep that it's even wrecking Gregg Clark's Agent Coulson. Unless this show can someone turn itself around, it'll be remember as how to take a good premise from a popular series of movies with a good production team and just ruin it. They seemed afraid of sticking many actual Marvel elements, except for occasional set-dressing and to do promotional work for Big Movie Event X or whatever. Such promise, scuttled by tepid commitment.

[Thad]

And that's without even getting into the strong fascist undertones.

Who would have figured Arrow would be a better show than SHIELD?

Arrow's biggest problem at the moment is it seems to be suffering from an identity crisis (joke about Jean Loring joining the cast goes here, I don't have the energy).  The mandate for the season, as set up in the new opening narration, is that Ollie's not supposed to be the grim-'n'-gritty murdering vigilante he was in season 1, he's turning into more of a traditional superhero.  And while they've stopped short of boxing gloves, they have actually used the phrase "trick arrows".  There's a real sense here that they're trying to make superheroes aspirational instead of grimdark again.

The trouble is that half the writers seem not to have gotten the memo, and he still keeps straight-up murdering dudes like every other episode, in-between talking about how he's not actually a murderer.  And last week he just straight-up put an arrow through Roy's leg, to "protect" him.


I sure did like Barry, though; when they weren't walking through his stupid new Geoff Johns Batman MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEEEEEEEAD (and/or incarcerated) Origin Story they tended to remember that he's actually supposed to be a lot of fun.  So I'm actually starting to get my hopes up for the Flash spinoff.

Now, giving Jim Gordon his own series set before Batman comes to Gotham is a dumb idea, for reasons already covered by Chris Sims (tl;dr you either have a real downer of a show where Gordon gets his ass kicked every week and constantly loses, or you depict a Gotham PD that can take care of the problems in the city all by itself and UNDERMINE THE ENTIRE PREMISE OF BATMAN).  But it still might be better than SHIELD.

[Niku]

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/exclusive-early-test-footage-of-paul-rudd-in-the-ant-man-suit.php

this is really happening

[jsnlxndrlv]

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/exclusive-early-test-footage-of-paul-rudd-in-the-ant-man-suit.php

this is really happening

Man, ever since the battle at the end of Role Models, I've been waiting for Rudd to get the recognition and the quality parts he deserves. This is a good step in that direction.

[Mothra]

Finally saw Captain America the other day, on my friend's new Netflix subscription.

I love, love, loved that movie. I wasn't expecting to like it, but oh god, it was a delight.

[Niku]

Captain America feels like Joe Johnston finally got a second shot at making The Rocketeer a success.  Because the only thing better than having The Rocketeer in this world is having two of them.

[Healy]

So who here is (still) watching Agents of SHIELD? Because I don't, not really, but my family is a big fan, so I catch an ep over dinner every now and then. Anyway, what did y'all think about this week's reveal? Or should I say, "reveal", given that the show didn't actually reveal SPOILER WARNING SPOILER ALERT SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER that Coulson is now an Asgardian robot OKAY SPOILERS ARE OVER YOU CAN GO HOME NOW

I personally think the show suffers too much from being bland. (wow, what a new thought!) I mean, I guess I'm not the best judge here, since I don't really pay attention re: dinner, but isn't that kind of the problem here? Let me list the things I remember from last night's episode:

• That one dude talking to that one Asian lady
• I guess the guys with the British and Irish accents said stuff as well
• The top brass doesn't like the team's plan for figuring out where Coulson was, but tough beans, cuz they're right!
• This one chick who works for the bad guys convincing Coulson to let her look at his brain with amazing brain technology. He goes with her because who wouldn't want to know the mystery that's been doled out in tiny patches so far
• The show becomes a car commercial for a while, and then Skye walks out of it into a creepy landscape full of burnt-out houses and mannequins and shit. I think she gets ganked here? Or possibly someone else gets ganked, I don't recall
• Coulson has some zany hallucinations
• Oh yeah, and [spoiler]turns out he was BRAIN-ZAPPED! In a regular ol' (well actually it looked pretty high-tech) medical lab, not Taihiti.[/spoiler] I'm spoilering this because it's the most interesting thing in this episode
• After that last bit, I sorta figured they revealed Coulson was a Robot/LMD/Alien/Zombie/Teenage Frankenstein/Doombot at the end, but from the reviews I've read, I'm guessing they didn't. Shame.

I was frankly more captivated by the fifteen minutes I caught of Psych this evening than anything in this episode, even the [spoiler]BRAIN-ZAPPAGE[/SPOILER]. It feels like the writers are flippin' terrified of doing anything that could be considered even the least bit weird or not exactly "normal" television, and I mostly got into superheroes for the weird junk, sooooo... Come to think of it, that's probably why that spoilered bit sticks out so much for me. Really the show resembles nothing so much as the boring junk I imagined all superhero comics to be before I actually read some superhero comics. It's too bad that ABC's big comic book show is afraid to be really comic-booky, but I enjoy reading reviews and reactions online more than the show itself, really, so I guess it works out for me in the end.

[Thad]

Shit, I watched SHIELD when I could have been watching a new Psych instead?

[Mongrel]

On another board there's an obnoxious guy who posted about that episode's reveal and was all "I waited for this?".

Everybody else who replied answered on some variation of "Oh. I just realized I'd already forgotten that show existed."

[Healy]

Shit, I watched SHIELD when I could have been watching a new Psych instead?

Psych was on Wednesday! SHIELD and Psych are on two different nights. So you could have watched both! Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

[Thad]

No, I understand.  But I had both of them downloaded and clearly chose the wrong one to prioritize.

Psych was pretty good!  It had Vinny Jones.