GoGo Yubari

I'm not sure I agree with that, because I don't think there are more side characters here than there were in season two. I think it's more been an allocation of time/how they use their time thing, and maybe being a little less effective at setting characters up to make the decisions they make. The core of the season's really strong but I don't think the minor characters are as strong as the first two seasons, maybe not even season three. Like, Lars Olmstead might be my least-favorite character the show's ever put out. I'm supposed to hate him, and I do, but he's so cartoonishly worthless (and not in a fun way, like the typewriter salesman from S2) that I don't even buy that he wouldn't have been kicked out of his own house ages ago. (In spite of all of that I'd still say there's a really strong case for this being my third-favorite season behind S2 and S1. The actual core of what's going on is good stuff, and the main actors are all knocking it out of the park.)

As I've tended to do for the last few years, I made myself a little playlist of some songs from this year that I really liked, enough to properly lodge themselves in my brain in a lasting way (and this was a really hard year for songs from this year to do that), and I'm gonna post it on here, so here's the link on YouTube and Spotify And if you'd rather just read what the tracklist is, here it is behind a cut:

I would agree that answer songs are not sequels, yes. Thought of a sequel that's only depressing because the artist meant it to be depressing, so an improvement of the other one. "Fred Jones, Pt. 2" by Ben Folds is a sequel to "Cigarette" by Ben Folds Five.

Extremely funny that Zack Snyder's big original IP play seems to basically be "Seven Samurai in space." Original!

If you want a truly bad one, Jeannie C. Riley eventually put out a sequel to "Harper Valley PTA" in the '80s called "Return to Harper Valley." In it she sings from the perspective of the mother who spoke out against the titular PTA for their hypocrisy, and it turns out now that she's older and has seen what kids these days have become she thinks the PTA actually had the right idea all along. It's Reagan's America, baby!

Don't really see the High Evolutionary as a character that would make sense to pin that much on, regardless. IMO the point of him is that he's kind of small and petty and unimpressive.

From behind the spoiler cut of my Scott Pilgrim Takes Off thoughts:

Colman Domingo would be my pick.

I'd take SA's radio stations over Vice City's but it's a 1a and 1b situation. I'm worried it'll basically just be GTAV all over again, just a bunch of actual famous people/musicians playing themselves and barely telling jokes. Pretty much the only station I got anything out of last time was Non-Stop Pop. anyway, fuck, that looks incredible. Really really really good.

*FARGO INTENSIFIES*

Yeah, I got a message from The Beths because I listened to their last album in full on there in Spotify once or twice, and that was enough to be my most-listened Spotify artist since I almost exclusively use it for working on collaborative playlists otherwise. I'd love to track down what some of the others look line, thusfar my favorite I've seen is the one from Weird Al Yankovic. Once I try to remember what my Apple password is I'll probably post my Apple Music Wrapped on here.

I don't really have any issue with the Silver Surfer being a woman, if that happens. I don't really know why they'd go that route but I also don't think there's anything intrinsically male about that character, like nothing about the Silver Surfer as I engage with that character really changes if it's a woman instead. Sue makes sense as the point-of-view character. She's the heart of that team. Reed's too aloof, Johnny's too rash, so it's basically Sue or Ben and I think you get a better intersection of the human elements and the science/fantastical elements if the movie spends more time through her eyes than the others.

Was gonna wait to finish it before I gave my thoughts as I'm only three episodes in, but, eh. Before going into the plot stuff, I'd say the biggest strength is the animation on stuff like fight scenes is exceptional, and I really like the way they handle extended music-only sequences and also giving sort of a sense of depth. There's a pretty wonderful sense of style, placing it somewhere between the comic and the video game. The biggest weakness, meanwhile, is that all of that is undermined a little by the fact that the animation and the voiceover come off like they were done in complete isolation and then stitched together. I'm not saying that's how they did it, just that's how it feels like as a viewer. Some of that might just be that they brought back the entire cast that had speaking lines from the movie, regardless of how experienced or good they are at voice acting but there are multiple times where, say, Mary Elizabeth Winstead or Kieran Culkin will deliver a line in a way that would sound good in live action but doesn't actually match what Ramona or Wallace are actually doing on-screen. As for the plot:

Pumaman is currently on. I kiss my frog in your honor, EWB.

Midway through episode 2. Jennifer Jason Leigh just dusting off her Mid-Atlantic accent from Hudsucker Proxy and talking slow with it instead of talking fast is one of my favorite acting choices anyone has made in this entire series.

"Turns out we can't get this fundraising level we set for ourselves so let's move the goalposts closer" feels like an until-now unspoken reason for why they moved from Kickstarter to this new thing. Turkey Day schedule: Apparently all the host segments were pretaped, which means that it's not going to have any of the cast members and not going to be live and that pretty much seals the deal to me that they're not gonna get to the goal and are going to just have to lick their wounds and figure something else out. Still, looking forward to seeing what the "Surgically Enhanced" versions look like.

Yeah, I haven't watched 2 yet because I needed to get up a little earlier to do some Thanksgiving shopping but 1 was a hell of a start. They also did a good job starting to inform you which flavor of Coen Brothers this is going to be by...

Final three movies if season 14 gets funded: Ballistica (2009 low-budget action movie. Only actor I recognize from it is Martin Kove, aka Sensei John Kreese) Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe (sci-fi movie from 1991 starring Jesse "The Body, not yet The Mind" Ventura) BattleTruck (we have Mad Max at home, Johnny)

Oh hey, been a minute. Season 5 starts tonight! Reviews are pretty favorable! Trailer's here:

For me the humor in Love and Thunder a) almost never landed and b) felt like it basically overwhelmed everything else. Like, the Gorr origin scene that opens the movie sums up the entire movie for me, because Christian Bale is doing great acting but opposite him is basically a goofy-ass sitcom character, like a What We Do in the Shadows version of an evil god, completely undercutting the drama. So I'm also basically in the "oh, I don't know how excited I am about this" camp but if his movie is a totally new set of characters in a relatively unexplored part of the galaxy it could be pretty good.

I saw someone say yesterday that it looks like it was meant to come out in 2005 and then just got stuck on a detour for eighteen years. Real Elektra vibes off that movie, right down to the lead who doesn't seem especially well-suited to playing a comic book hero.

Huh! Sure?

Friday Night Lights, albeit because their second season was a) cut off by a writer's strike and b) almost completely disregarded when they came back for season 3. For the most part I agreed with that decision, though I thought the choice to basically act like Santiago (a perfectly fine character!) never existed had some incredibly unfortunate implications.

Overall my feeling was it was a mid-to-lower-mid tier MCU movie but at least everyone in it seemed like they wanted to be there, which I can't say for Quantumania. There were occasional moments of inspiration and Iman Vellani remains one of the best finds they've made. Was a very light crowd at the theater I went to but pretty much everything they audibly reacted to (until SPOILER shows up in the mid-credits) was either the stuff with Kamala and her family or the stuff with Kamala and Carol. Was nice to see Brie Larson actually get to have some fun in one of these things for once, too. For me it was a bit like... I don't think I could adequately explain the actual mechanics of what happened to anyone. I could tell the broad strokes of the plot and why the villain (who in grand lower-mid tier MCU film fashion is not a character but rather a character motivation and nothing else. This was the one area where I thought the movie was outright inferior to the first Captain Marvel, at least Yon-Rogg had a personality trait) wants to do what she's doing, but that's about it. There's at least one really good idea for a setting but they don't really stick around in it long enough to make the most of it.