7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[Zunu]

Don't see it mentioned on other threads but apparently Crunchyroll is transitioning to subs only and FunimationNow is changing over to dubs only and lowering its price. Crunchyroll will over time be getting Funimation's existing and future subbed catalog in return for giving up dubs, so their service will still be priced the same. The two services will be cross licensing from now on.

[esm]

Watched the 1st season of "Stranger Things" on netflix. new favorite show. recommend giving it a try.

Watched the entire season in the past few days. I liked it a lot.

[Celedam]

Two things that bother me about Stranger Things: the music is wrong, and the slang is wrong.

The music is always a few years off, in one direction or the other. The series is supposed to be set in 1983, but much of the music is from either the late '70s or the late '80s. It seems like each song was chosen more for how its title or lyrics relate to a scene, rather than for how the song might help set the tone of the period.

And the slang… well, for one thing, no one ever said "douche" or "douchebag" back then. That's relatively new, as slang goes. Back then, it was "dork", "dweeb", "spazz", "retard", and so on. Also, there's not nearly enough "righteous" or "awesome".

These things bother me because I was pretty much the same age as those kids at that time and I actually remember what it was like. So as I'm watching, I simply don't have any feelings of nostalgia. It feels like the creators are giving nods to specific movies like E.T., Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Thing, but the series itself is still very much a modern production and not really an homage to the 1980s.

Waitaminute…

*googling*

Of course. The Duffer Brothers were born in 1984, which means they're children of the '90s, not of the '80s. And that's what feels wrong to me about Stranger Things: it's a '90s view of the '80s, through the lens of video rentals and TV reruns. In the '90s, those movies were firmly established in pop culture history, but they were no longer actually part of pop culture.

[erilaz]

And the slang… well, for one thing, no one ever said "douche" or "douchebag" back then. That's relatively new, as slang goes. Back then, it was "dork", "dweeb", "spazz", "retard", and so on.

"Douche" and "douchebag" aren't actually all that new as insults, though they certainly weren't nearly as common in the '80s as they are now:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... sult_.html
http://dialectblog.com/2011/07/01/on-th ... douchebag/

Also, there's not nearly enough "righteous" or "awesome".

True. It's hard for me to say what would be appropriate for a small town in Indiana as opposed to what was current during my teenage years in Central California, but we would have had more "rad" and "dude", too. One of my high school friends even addressed his grandma as "dude".

[Celedam]

"Douche" and "douchebag" aren't actually all that new as insults, though they certainly weren't nearly as common in the '80s as they are now:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... sult_.html
http://dialectblog.com/2011/07/01/on-th ... douchebag/

That's a good case study of the difference between creative insults/epithets and common slang, and how the former can evolve into the latter.

But I'm specifically talking about the latter and how it helps to set the tone of what is ostensibly a period piece. And if anything, those articles confirm what I'm saying.

[Celedam]

Oh. My. God.



(if you don't already know who Mr. Plinkett is, you should probably skip this.)

[Zunu]

^ Downloading now...Honestly I might feel as much hype for this as for the actual film.

[Celedam]

Three words…

Spoiler: show

"Pizza phone sex."

[Zunu]

It was...good but not great...much like the film. I would've preferred the extensive "ring theory" stuff, the documentary stuff, and the actual review separated into their own clips. Also,

Spoiler: show

Plinkett complained that nobody wanted sex in the film, but my impression was that Finn was genuinely smitten with Rey (but was rebuffed) and that Kylo Ren, while not outright interested, was inchoately intrigued.

[Celedam]

It was...good but not great...much like the film. […]

I think that was the point: there's nothing egregious about the film itself, so instead you have to examine how and why the film was made. Plinkett is complaining about how the takeover by Disney has made Star Wars just another franchise in a world of safe, crowd-pleasing, but ultimately soulless entertainment produced by corporate committee. Lucas got spoiled and lazy, Plinkett is saying, but at least he had some personal vision for Star Wars and genuinely tried new things. Episodes I–III included thematic callbacks to Episodes IV–VI, but they weren't scene-for-scene remakes. Or a "soft reboot". Thus the extensive analysis of the "ring theory" stuff, in order to show how misguided it is compared to the real issue.

Also…

Spoiler: show

Plinkett complained that nobody wanted sex in the film, but my impression was that Finn was genuinely smitten with Rey (but was rebuffed) and that Kylo Ren, while not outright interested, was inchoately intrigued.

But it is impotent, beta-male, felt-but-never-expressed interest. As if it is "predatory" or "chauvinistic" for the man to act first, rather than wait and desperately hope for the woman to notice him. Finn was particularly bad, with regards to that.

In A New Hope, Han and Luke made their interest pretty clear and even butted heads over it a couple times. It was Leia, with her strength and authority, who put them both in their places. And then from that point forward, through the rest of the original trilogy, they felt like three equals.

As opposed to a single Mary Sue surrounded by a bunch of fuckbois.

Who knows, maybe things will improve in the upcoming episodes. I think it's a bit unfair to give the Plinkett treatment to just the first part of a planned trilogy, in a trilogy of trilogies no less.

(mmm, member berries!)