7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[erilaz]

I watched The Last Blockbuster on Netflix last night and it was a bit insane how I almost teared up over people being so nostalgic about their VHS tapes.

That's in My List. Early last year I saw a documentary called Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector, and it made me a bit jealous, because my collection of oddball videocassettes is nothing compared to those in the film! I was also pleasantly surprised to see an old friend and former co-worker of mine featured in the documentary. (I wasn't surprised to learn that he had such an impressive VHS collection, though. He's always been a big fan of psychotronic film, and he's been working at Amoeba Music in Hollywood for the past two decades.)

I was going to play my Checkicco and eX-Girl VHS tapes during shelter-in-place, but I discovered that my Philips VCR had given up the ghost, after 30 years of faithful service. I still need to buy a replacement.

[erilaz]

I just finished Season 2 of Good Morning Call and Season 3 of Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix. Which series shall I tackle next? Decisions, decisions. I have 26 unwatched series (43 seasons) in My List on Netflix, but maybe I'll hack away at some unwatched DVDs instead. I watched Season 1 of Dark Angel during lockdown and recently bought Season 2, so that would be a logical choice.

Now I just need a 20-year staycation to get through the rest of my video backlog....

[Celedam]

WandaVision ended badly, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is just barely surviving on the chemistry between its two leads. Let's hope the third time is the charm…



I like the Gilliam-esque touches. Another commentator said that it feels like Legion.

What else have I been watching? The lockdown-themed Staged, from BBC One by way of Hulu. It stars David Tennant and Michael Sheen as fictionalized versions of themselves; apparently they became close friends while doing Good Omens a few years ago, and this grew from that. The first season is great, although a bit maudlin towards the end. The second season is more… uneven, and whether you get it really depends on your view of the lockdowns themselves.

[erilaz]

I'm presently watching James Clavell's Shōgun from 1980 on DVD. Set in Japan in 1600, it stars Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne, the English pilot of a Dutch merchant ship (based on the historical William Adams), and the great Mifune Toshirō as Toranaga Yoshi (based on Tokugawa Ieyasu). John Rhys-Davies is enjoyable as always, playing a Portuguese pilot.

All the Europeans, whether English, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish, speak English in this series, but there's no real sense of which language(s) they're supposed to be using at any given time. Blackthorne is able to communicate with a Portuguese Jesuit priest right off the bat, and the Spanish Franciscan whom Blackthorne meets in prison seems to think that he's a Spaniard. That's typical for TV, of course. The Japanese, however, speak Japanese (without subtitles), and interpreters are necessary for communication.

Another thing that struck me was that this was considered a "miniseries" in its day. But with a total running time of 547 minutes, it's comparable to a full "season" of many (most?) streaming series nowadays.

[Amped]

trailer for Phase 4 of the MCU films. 4 of them in 2021.

tweet

[Nayoko-Kihara]

Pretty excited for 3 of the 2021 movies (Shang, Eternals, Spider). Will probably still watch the other (Widow) just for the sake of completion.

[Celedam]

A low-budget, Russian television adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, produced just before the fall of the Soviet Union…





The production quality is… not good. Think "early '70s BBC or PBS" and then slash the budget again. Very soviet. But it's still noteworthy for being a more complete adaptation than almost everything else done to date. It even includes the journey through the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs, which is usually cut; most adaptations jump straight from the eastern border of the Shire to the gates of Bree.

English subtitles are provided via CC.

(h/t Last Movie Outpost)

[Zunu]

^ Gandalf: "Bilbo, I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let The Ring go now that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.”

[erilaz]

A low-budget, Russian television adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, produced just before the fall of the Soviet Union…

Thanks for that. I have a pirate DVD-R of a similar Soviet TV version of The Hobbit, but I wasn't aware that this was available, too.

The Fellowship of the Ring was published in a heavily censored and modified Russian version by A. Kistyakovsky and V. Muravyov in 1982 and was the only volume of The Lord of the Rings available in an official Russian translation for most of that decade. Sure, there were illegal samizdat versions of the full LotR in circulation, but it wasn't until almost a decade later that it became legitimately and readily available in Russian. The three volumes of the unabridged Kistyakovsky-Muravyov translation are dated 1989, 1991, and 1992, but the Grigoryeva-Grushetsky translation and the Matorina translation of the full LotR were both published in 1991.

Similarly, The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring were the only books by Tolkien published in Soviet Armenia (in 1984 and 1989, respectively).

[Celedam]

It's been a while since I last mentioned Critical Role, "where a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons"…

viewtopic.php?p=254952#p254952

…and I assume I'm still the only one here who follows it, but I really want to share these videos I found.

The last few months of the campaign have had the party exploring an ancient city which — for reasons that can't be explained without spoilers — was destroyed and then buried under arctic tundra. A professional sound designer has been taking the audio from certain scenes and creating… just… wow…





I know, they're baffling without context. But just take them in as pure audiovisual experiences created from nothing more than the DM's descriptions and the players' dialogue.