Things What We Watched

Thing What We Watched over the Last Month

1) WKRP in Cincinnati (Season 1) =  From the great sitcom era of Barney Miller/M*A*S*H. The premise is the cultural divide between the Straights (news.sales.owners) and the Freaks (the DJs). The Straights want $$$ but it is the Freaks that bring the $$$ in - how can the young manger balance the two? Late 70s/Early 80sTopics covered: military dissertation, accusations of being gay,  British punk rock, Japaneses owners, the flight characteristics of turkeys. Watch for all the cool old music posters and snips of songs (some version have all the music edited out for copyright).



2) Thundarr the Barbarian - Imagine He-Man played by Space Ghost set in post-Apocalypse USA (well, 2000 years after apocalypse). How can anyone deny this retro-camp pulpy coolness. The animation is mercilessly recycled but the plots are imaginative, full of beastmen and techno-wizards enslaving the remaining humans. Thundarr hates wizards and he is joined by a Wookie and Princess Leia.

Here is the intro voice-over

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin! Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!

3) AI (2001), Automata (2014), WALL-E (2008), Chappie (2015)

Decided to watch some Android movies. The were all pretty stupid. STOP making overly-emotional, pain-feeling androids. All these android builders waste billions on stupid android functions like tap-dancing, acting cute, being neurotic, . Read my Frankenstein/Ex Machina review for my hatred of this stuff, hollywood writers are a bunch of 'human chauvinist' hacks. As RLM said about Star Trek "I like Data when he's Data - not some asshole clown." Perhaps watching this crap is what drove Skynet to kill....

Also we need a moratorium on Sex-Bots.

AI - The source material for the superior ‎'BI - Bartificial Intelligence' (from Treehouse of Horror XVI). Anohter movie that wants to make a robot capable of 'love' but never even begins vauglely defining the term. Fast-forward all the domestic stuff, plot is insane and the science is brain-damaging - i.e the robo-kid break because he eats food and the food is dumped by his esophagus straight onto his circuit boards! Gains points for the weird ending. Whatever sort of enamel they use on that Cooney Island statue is amazing as is the Teddy Bear's AI.

Automata - Good to see Antonio Banderas again, he's playing Harrison Ford's role in BladeRunner. This has least stupid plot of these four movies but everything is marred by an attempt to make the movie "dark and grim" like Se7ev. Self-repairing faceless androids is cool but the 'cop drama' parts prevent it from getting a full recommendation. Also Sex-Bot need flesh-coverings - the amount of people that want to **** a human-shaped Volvo is limited.

WALL-E - People kept recommending this but after the first 1/2 hour I had to shut if off. Wall-E was far, far too cute, cloying, clumsy and addicted to show tunes to create sympathy. Instead hate festered. Ten minutes in I wanted Wall-E dead or that cockroach to crawl into his brain and start piloting him or that lady-bot to fry him. I like the 'garbage planet' concept but the when the main character reminds me of Woody Allen doing endless slap-stick I'm out of there.

Chappie - Set your expectations low and switch-off your brain to enjoy this one. It has all the worst element on the previous stuff: the robot is a kid with mommy issues, the plot is nonsense, it dealing with policing...  but it is colorful, has Die Antevarrd as the main cast (for better and worse) and a well-acted jive-talking robot (for better and worse, it comes closes to a racist caricature), nice to see ED-209 again (I hadn't see him get work since 1998 in PlayStation's Future Cop: L.A.P.D.). If Chappie was so smart after he gained access to the internet (he build consciousness down-loading equipment soon afterwards) why couldn't he figure out that knifing people was not "making them sleepy" but injuring them? Take questions like that and multiple them by 100.


4) Saturn 3 (1980): Crazy that I never heard about this film until recently. It must have inspired James Cameron because some plots and shots show-up in Terminator and Aliens. Want to see Harvey Keitel as a cyberpunk unafraid to stare a dog in the ass? How about a pin-headed Terminator? A naked elderly man strangling Harvey Keitel? The worst possible safety net to prevent people from being sucked out into space?  This film is from the same year as Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture and I really enjoy theses arty SciFi films with long, slow shots of cool models. We will never see their kind again. This film is a re-make of 1950s Forbidden Planet which is based on The Tempest - except this time the two isolated people are not father and daughter but an elderly Kirk Douglas and his lover, Farrah Faucet - oh the 70s!