“Marketing research says that’s the movie that our tween demographic is most likely to be familiar with!”

This is one of the ones I always wanted to get around to watching, but never did.

I immediately went to Crunchyroll to add it to my watch list.

Then I came back, dejected, and saw you already pointed it out. Salt in the wound.

To be completely honest, many of these films took me a second viewing to really appreciate. Blade Runner 2049 is not a good sequel to the original, imo, but if you let it stand on it’s own a bit, it’s got some real interesting ideas at play, and of course, all of Denis’ movies are just visually beautiful. Similarly with his Dune, I’m a huge fan of the Lynch version, so it’s hard not to let that color my perception, but if you let it, it’s a visually stunning movie with amazing world design and it just nails the vibes I got reading the book.

Tarantino, too, I would have mostly shared your opinion two years ago. The first time I watched Basterds, Django, and Eight, I was pretty unimpressed, but I think I was letting my love of his earlier works color my opinions too much. Then, I got a copy of “Taratino: A Retrospective” for xmas, and that got me to go back through his entire filmography: I’d watch a movie, then read up on it in the book afterward. Even absence the additional stories and details from the book, I found all of those films really hit much better for me the second time around: no, they’re not doing that same effortlessly cool “Tarantino” style from the earlier works, but it’s clear that the man was interested in building on his own writing tropes and slowly branching them into different stories, and I really loved watching that evolution.

Fury Road: Fair enough, though at this point, Mel was probably a bit too old for the types of stunts they wanted to put Tom Hardy through.

Peele, I’ll just have to disagree, but mostly because I don’t see them as horror movies, but dark comedies. They’re not scary, not really, but boy did I laugh my ass off watching them. Nope, especially, manages to tell a funny, dramatic story with real stakes, imagination, and literally inventing a new way to do night filming that’s probably going to be mimicked by the entire industry going forward.

Jump Street: you’re not wrong about Jonah Hill, but in this case, the surprise is how funny Channing Tatum can be, and how expertly Lord and Miller bounce the two of them off each other. The standard Hill schtick just works in this screwball set of movies, and plays a perfect complement to Tatum. Oh, and that clip is amazing.

The Apes trilogy is criminally overlooked, again, probably because of “CGI Monkeys” and cultural memory of the old films, but they’re really amazingly good. Well, the first is just regular good, but the second two are great. A lot of it comes down to just how great Serkis is at working within the CGI character space: he plays the lead ape, Ceasar, but also does a lot of the motion capture for the rest of the apes, and nails it in movement and manerisms. All in all, the movies are able to create an epic about the decline of one civilization and the rise of a replacement, not because “apes good humans bad”, but because at every point, every character makes choices displaying their innate “humanity”, and have to deal with the consequences of those choices, good or bad.

Anyway, Dredd was awesome, Karl Urban is my husbando, and his DOOM movie is the best video game movie of all time. Thanks for coming to my TEDx talk!

That, and it was slightly more justifiable when these companies were first setting up and operating networks for the services and matchmaking. Economies of scale should have nullified that by now, though.

The other big one I don’t see people mentioning, but that I remember clearly, was that if you wanted to use Netflix on 360, you had to pay for Live. I think that, above anything else in my friend group, was the move that normalized paying for online services on a console.

That’s a pretty good list you’ve got, my friend; at least those I’ve seen from it. Allow me to make some suggestions from the last 11 years:

• All three of Jordan Peele’s movies: Get Out (2017), Us (2019), but especially Nope (2022).
• Denis Villaneuve’s work, specifically Siciario (2015), Arrival (2016, one of the best sci-fi book to screen adaptations I’ve ever seen), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Dune pt1 (2021).
• Edgar Wright had both Baby Driver (2017) and Last Night in Soho (2021).
• Rian Johnson did both Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022).
• George Miller gave us Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and the practical effects alone are worth a viewing.
• Shane Black’s The Nice Guys (2016) was amazing.
• Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) had me grinning from ear to ear all the way through.
• Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018) is not only the best looking animated movie of all time, but one of the best superhero movies ever made.
• And while we’re on the subject of Lord and Miller projects, both 21 Jump Street (2012) and 22 Jump Street (2014) just squeeze in. Honestly, anything these two touch seems to be gold.
• Both of the Matt Reeves directed Apes movies, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) are in the window, though honestly the whole trilogy is fantastic and Andy Serkis needs a fucking CGI Ape Oscar already.

That’s off the top of my head, at least.

Even Tarantino has dropped the ball IMO.

Man, how you gonna do Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) dirty like that? Django is pure revenge fantasy good times, Eight is beautiful and tense with some amazing character acting, and Hollywood just revels in being part of a mythological time and place in movie history.

Heh, fair 'nuff. I’m pretty agnostic most of the time, unless a particular show has a known “better” version. For example, IMO, Cowboy Bebop (of course), Trigun, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners are all fantastic English dubs, but as counter examples I can’t stand the English dubs of Naruto or FLCL, off the top of my head.

But which is better for this show (in your opinion)?

Added to my watchlist, which is getting very long, lol.

Veeeeeeery interesting! I haven’t kept up on Warframe, but this looks to me like a big nod to Dark Sector, the studio’s first attempt at a “Warframe” style game that ended up getting scoped down into a weird single-player game. But, most of the design language and ideas of Warframe came from Dark Sector first. I wonder if this is them finally making some explicit in-universe connections to the two games, as opposed to spiritual nods and references?

Oh, and anyone who hasn’t seen it, NoClip’s documentary series on Warframe is a great watch, even if you have no interest in the game itself: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-THgg8QnvU7Weo1mCM9H2AXljC7UrDm8

That’s right, they cancelled The Peripheral but we’re getting more Upload.

Pretty sure Upload filmed quite some time ago, it was probably better calculus to just finish editing and SFX work and release it, vs Peripheral being to early in production and delayed indefinitely by the strikes.

I mean, I’d rather have both, but I can see the potential logic.

Per Wikipedia:

According to reports at the time of the production and interviews with some members of the cast and crew, the original version of the movie had a disastrous test screening, so producer Ronald Shusett was brought in to re-shoot around 40% of the movie and add more character scenes and humor. Emilio Estevez also mentioned how director Geoff Murphy let them down by focusing too much on action in his original cut of the film. Geoff Murphy claims that there was interference from production company Morgan Creek and that he asked for his possessory credit to be removed.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freejack#Production

I always liked it as a kid, but yeah, it’s clearly a movie that had a lot of trouble and the results speak for themselves. It’s a neat idea, at least.

My thoughts exactly. What am I supposed to do now, read the books?

(I may, tv’s just so much easier than finding time to read, lol)

You know, I’m pretty sure that I watched this movie, forgot all about it, watched it a second time, turned to my wife halfway through and asked, “Have we seen this before?”, and we eventually decided we had, but finished watching it again anyway.

And right now, I can’t tell you a GD thing about it other than Clive Owen was in it.

Huh. I was watching that one when it aired, and I didn’t even notice, due to the mostly episodic nature of it. Not surprised, given Fox’s history (Browncoats will never forgive and never forget), but somehow it snuck by me.

Way more upset it didn’t get renewed. I’m a bit of an Urban fanboy and was really enjoying the show.

…guess I’ll go watch Doom again.

I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.

You’re not wrong, lol.

'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit’s so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That’s also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it’s really good at that. There’s always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn’t care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.

After setup, though, it’s not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug

I have nothing to add buy my upvote. It’s not the traditional cyberpunk aesthetic, but it’s absolutely cyberpunk themes.

I largely agree with this. It’s a shame that S2 ended on a cliffhanger where they were finally getting into the sci-fi questions.

Light Spoilers, though they may make the show more interesting if you’re on the fence:

That’s all from memory, so I may have mucked up a detail or two, but by the end I was really interested to see where it was all going. The show could be really smart when it wanted to, which is why it’s a shame that it mostly wants to meander through a slow-paced will-they-won’t-they for two seasons instead of getting into the meat of things. Maybe they felt they had to make it more “accessible” and sneak the cyberpunk in?

I dunno.

It was greenlit for a third season, and recent news reports indicate it was still coming (all prior to the current strikes), so maybe we’ll get a conclusion? I’ll certainly watch it when it drops.

People have been arguing about the definition of “Cyberpunk” pretty much from the moment the term was coined. I think, for the vast majority of people, it seems they focus on the aesthetic more than anything else: neon lights, megatowers, rain, tech, crime, etc.

Personally, I like to see some hints of the “punk” half of the phrase shining through. Rebels and misfits, either by choice or by circumstance, using technology to fight oppressive systems enabled by technology. Neuromancer remains the measuring stick that I’ve always used, but I’m not going to turn my nose up on a good story if it’s only “cyberpunk adjacent”.

High tech, low life, as Bruce Sterling put it (apocryphally). And, that works well enough most of the time.

So, given the above, as an example, no, I wouldn’t call The Fifth Element cyberpunk. It has lots of aesthetic similarities, but very little “punk”: the heroes are working with the governments to preserve the status quo after all, but I still love it, as it’s a damn great film.

Legit, the only character I could beat the last boss with back in the day. She’s too short for the boss to hit when you’re point blank, so you get these awesome matches with the final boss constantly backing away from a tiny chicken.

Form and function are inextricably linked: one will inform the other. A lot of the ergo-split community focuses on the use case where you move your hands as little as possible, and the designs tend to revolve around maximizing that ideal. And they are damn good at it. The drawback, as you note, is that it’s a design that expects you not to move your hands around: it encourages keyboard navigation and shortcuts in place of using the mouse as much as possible.

That said, you can get around it. You can use layers to move common shortcuts to the left hand, so you don’t have to do the whole “Stretch my hand across two units” dance. Or, you can look into something like a macro pad.

Me, I just deal. The comfort when typing is well worth the tradeoff, to me. I’ll favor avoiding the mouse when possible, and just dance my one hand across both halves when needed. It’s not a huge deal to me, but the whole point is personalization: find what works best for you!

I mean, I’m definitely being nicer to it because I have a soft spot for the film, for sure. I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt in that, if the first movie showed us what it might look like when normal users interact with a computer in normal ways, and write programs based on what they want them to do/output, then the second movie is showing us what it might look like if programs were created for the sake of them existing, and they don’t necessarily “do” anything for a user on the outside. Like, if I code up program to be a calculator on the terminal, it might look at behave a certain way on the grid. But, if I go into the grid, and create a program that’s good at math, would it still be a calculator on the terminal? Or would it more likely do nothing when called, because it wasn’t written to take input and produce output on the terminal?

It’s an interesting question, and I think it can go a long way to excusing the breakdown of the computer metaphors in Legacy, but again, this is mostly my interpretation, it’s not explicitly confirmed by the text itself.

Sadly, I doubt we’ll get any more movies exploring these concepts any time soon. Legacy was supposed to be the start of a trilogy, but it didn’t make enough money, so the rest of it was canned by Disney. I think it’d me more likely to see some animated/live action Disney+ exclusive series in a few years, when they get tired of churning out Star Wars everything.

In any event, to bring this back around to the original question, I’ve added Tron 2.0 to my steam wishlist for the next sale, lol.