Watching Tom Hank’s Confederate return the white girl abducted by the INdians movie. It’s ok. He’s just so likeable,
News of the World is closest I could find to your description.
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It’s like the halcyon days of illiterate Americans.
oh the shame…but I started Doom Patrol, which also is, and it’s good!
Is it a different TV series than the Korean TV series I posted that looks really good?
I have no idea, but it doesn’t belong in this thread. 
Ohhhh…
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the TV thread sucks this year, i don’t know who started that…
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Rock Gods wannabes fight the devil Dave Grohl.
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
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Excellent indie gem. Expands on a controversial play. Small-town US masculinity at play. Shea Wigham once again excellent, must be on his top 3 of performances. 8/10.
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Saw Dune last night; give it a B or maybe B+.
Settings were great- Brutalist architecture on Arrakis really well done. And ornithopters- yay! Liked the Mandarin! Didn’t worry about it too much- just represented a strange foreign language that most people didn’t speak.
Thought it could have done with a bit more Basil Exposition explaining the background- “As you know, Paul…”. Some people I was with who hadn’t read the book missed what was so important about the spice. The movie only mentioned it briefly at the beginning, and and then only its importance to the Spacer’s Guild, not the longevity aspect.
Thought they fell down especially with the explanation of the shields, and why they rendered guns useless, and why you couldn’t use the shields on Dune- it’s going to be important in the second half. Again, they mentioned it briefly, but unless you knew the book, it wasn’t clear.
Didn’t like Lady Jessica- spent all her time weeping about Paul an Leto. and was basically the Load in the second half. Even in the book she was more of an Action Girl (and that’s saying something, given Frank Herbert’s, uh, problematic attitudes toward women in his writings.)
And it was looong. I had to pee in the first half, and finally shrugged and figured I’d miss the transfer from Caladan to Arrakis- after leaving the theatre, weaving my way through all the walkways set up because of Covid, finding the restroom, and making my way back, they were still on Caladan packing the damn bull horns. They also could have done the whole Paul/Jessica post-Harkonnen/Sardukar flight to the sietch in ten minutes.
Still, very enjoyable.
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Yeah, that part puzzled me too. “Wait, we’re still doing this?! I mean, it’s really obvious what’s going to happen - why drag it out?” Especially the last bit with the Fremen had some rather pointless phases. I suppose Jason Momoa / Duncan Idaho needed his [first!] death scene, the scene that Gurney Halleck didn’t get (did he?)
And for the spice, yeah, that didn’t occur to me, but I can definitely see how people missed its importance. With the shields the “red bad, blue safe” coloring worked fairly well, but you’re right - it’s never really explained why it’s bad. And even half-remembering the book, big stretches of the combat tactics still made no sense to me. You’re going to deal with a starship gun barrage by charging across a courtyard in a mob wielding clubs?!
Spoiler: I also missed an explanation for why the Harkonnens changed their mind on letting Jessica & Paul die by the desert, vs actively at Harkonnen hands - something they’d been trying hard to avoid. Was the Baron just that much angrier after the poisoning attempt? I assume I’d know if I could better remember the book, or if I’d caught more of the dialogue.
Yea, that’s why the attack on the Atreides looked so bad- artillery firing, rockets exploding- and in the melee a bunch of guys running around with swords. The book made it clear that any attempt to fire a gun at a shield would disastrously channel the effect back to the gun- laser pistol to cannon- so swords were the only weapons that could be used, but audiences have to have explosions, I guess.
Also a minor bit at the end, when Paul is fighting the duel to be accepted by the Fremen. Stilgar accuses Paul of just toying with his opponent; Jessica says it’s because he has never killed anyone before. The book makes it clear that the reason is that he is used to fighting opponents wearing shields. You go in fast , but you have to slow down before contact, otherwise your attack won’t penetrate. Fremen don’t use shields (they piss off sandworms) so go for all out attack- from their point of view it looks like Paul is attacking but holding back at the last minute.
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Interesting re: the duel. In that scene, I wasn’t sure if the film had either forgotten or was being too subtle about how Paul has presumably no experience dueling without shields, so this should be a totally different fighting style for him. Even with my zero memory of what was apparently a scene in the book, when Jessica provided a bit of an exposition dump to “explain” what Paul was doing, my reaction was “Wait, what? Movie, you’ve spent two hours telling me one thing about shields and how Paul fights, and now you’re telling me something else?”
Thanks for the shield explanations. I remembered “slow gets through, fast doesn’t”, but had no memory of the backlash effect. At least there were those two dozen Atreides soldiers who remembered some kind of training, unlike Halleck’s mob. And I remain unclear on why treachery was even necessary in the movie plot - the armies seemed to get in pretty easily anyway, unless I missed a bringing-the-shields-down moment.
I will say the scene of a mob of tiny, tiny soldiers next to a giant exploding ship looked amazing, even if it further reinforced my sense of “No, seriously, what on earth are they even trying to do!?”
1 This just floated by on youtube:
Did Cena refer to Taiwan as a country, or just forget to call it a province?
2 How and where did you two watch the movie already, a month ahead :<
Weird release schedule. It came out in Taiwan and a bunch of other places (Europe?) last week.
Watched Killing of a Sacred Deer yesterday, Wind River before that. Both movies are great, and both just kind of sat on me after watching them.
Of the two I’d pick Wind River over Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Also saw Dune last Monday. Struggled through that one. I walked in super excited for it (seen the movie, TV series and read all of Frank Herbert’s original series), but there just wasn’t enough story in that movie for 2.5 hours. I’m hoping it all comes together in the sequel if that ever gets made.
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Yeah, this was critical. It sets up the Harkonnen invasion, and without this crucial explanation the attack on the Arrakis colony is just a lot of loud noises.
While watching it I kept thinking of David Lynch’s version. A lot of people complain about the exposition (voice overs) in that movie, but I think they set up the story a lot better. I watched Lynch’s version before reading Herbert’s book and had no trouble understanding it.
I’ve also struggled with Herbert’s portrayals of women. I’ve read everything he wrote (including those two early novels published after his death), and he does tend to paint women in insect-like terms. It works in books like Hellstrom’s Hive and - to some extent - the early Dune novels - but it really rubbed me the wrong way in other books.
Then again, it’s not like you see a lot of fully formed female characters in most other science fiction novels from the late 60s and early 70s.
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Or before!
Or before!