Okay, I found the Man of Steel disc I alluded to in the last interlude, so I gave it another shot, as promised. I hate it a little less.
“Wait… there’s a building I haven’t knocked over yet.”
There are still some things I will not get over, no matter how much Internet urging washes over me. The fact that apparently, the one time Ma and Pa Kent joined the Smallville Library Book Club the selection was Atlas Shrugged; Kal has several opportunities to carry the fight to less populated areas, but doesn’t (how else are we going to get our spectacle, our 9/11 as performed by aliens?); and, of course, the killing of Zod. The script, at least, probably felt like it did a good job justifying that – but, as I’ve kvetched before, it is such a blatant, lazy shock tactic, the negating of 80 years of character development and mythos.
In Man of Steel‘s favor was my recent watching of the Extended Edition of Batman v Superman. The former movie now feels like an extremely focused and serious entry. And this time, forearmed and able to ignore these points I listed above, I was at least able to appreciate the hard work that went into all those visual FX.
And Michael Shannon’s voice really annoys me, which I realize is totally unfair to him.
Also pretty amazed they manage to rebuild Metropolis so quickly. I’d say Superman probably helped, except that this Randian version wouldn’t; he probably used that time to read The Fountainhead. Yes, I went for the low-hanging fruit concerning Zack Snyder’s next announced project.
Now, back to The Great Experiment in the Land of TV.
S2E2 of Legion has me asking some hard questions and not liking the answers. It felt largely like some poorly motivated filler. We finally meet Amahl Farouk face-to-face (and wonder of wonders, is an actual Middle Eastern actor, Iranian Navid Negahban). I am concerned that there seems to be some “Oh yeah, we’re expected to be weird” going on here when it’s not, strictly speaking, necessary.
S3E2 of The Expanse continues to impress with a space chase and battle that’s almost episode-length. The series has done sequences before about the stress of extended high-g travel on the human body, and this time uses some poorly-secured tools during battle maneuvers for nice suspense. The non-space sequences mainly center on a new character played by Elizabeth Mitchell (talk about your sudden Lost flashbacks!), the Reverend Anna Volovodov, whom I really like, a contentious moral compass in the events Earthside. It also ends with a cliffhanger that sorely tested my plan to just do one episode of each series a week.
And I was warned:
Great. Actually, I suppose that’s a good problem to have.
Westworld S1E2 continues to play the long game, and I’m really appreciating that. Also appreciated is more insight into Delos’ day-to-day, as we are introduced to who I guess are our equivalent characters to 1973’s James Brolin and Richard Benjamin – Simon Quarterman and Jimmi Simpson, I believe. Anthony Hopkins is up to something because Anthony Hopkins is always up to something. Ed Harris’ Man in Black is still being a complete bastard in search of something deep within Westworld, and his quest demonstrates that there are remote sections of Westworld that the clients have probably never yet encountered, yet the androids perform their story duties, day in and day out. Intriguing.
Westworld is another series that’s sorely testing my no-binge vow.
But I stood my ground, so I deserved a reward. And that reward was adding on to my task. In other words, I added another series. But that series was Ash vs Evil Dead.
Yeah, you’re probably saying, “What do you mean you haven’t been watching Ash vs Evil Dead?” Well, having cut the cable long ago, seeking out shows like this is something of a process (usually involving Amazon Prime or Netflix or even – how primitive! – physical media). That, and – much as I love Evil Dead 2, a top 10 horror movie for me – I didn’t care for Army of Darkness. There, sue me.
Anyway, age has not rendered Ash any less of a horse’s ass than he was in that movie, and for some reason he is toting around a copy of Necronomicon ex Mortis (isn’t that “Book of the Dead of the Dead?”), gets stoned while trying to make time with a poetry-loving hippie chick and reads the incantation. Because, remember, Ash is an idiot. Luckily, he is an idiot who still has his shotgun and chainsaw because his trailer park is about to become wall-to-wall demons.
Sam Raimi directed the first episode, so it’s got a fair amount of hyperkinetic gore. So far Ash has two assistants from the knock-off Best Buy he worked at, and there’s a compelling parallel storyline with a cop who encountered that earlier hippie chick, now in full demon mode.
Seemingly, Raimi only directed this first hour-long episode, but the rest are all a half-hour. This will be a nice cool-down from the other, more thoughtful series. It’s been cancelled after its third season, and it seems that was a bit of a relief for Bruce Campbell. Really, there’s not much left for him to do with the character, and I’m sure the desire to just do something else for a while is pretty strong.
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