stuff about stuff

[domarzione]

* Olympics! I am watching next to nothing of them, partially by choice -- I hate the format of 25 minutes of talking heads and sob stories, 15 minutes of competition, and 20 minutes of commercials per hour -- and mostly because I get no television reception. I have gotten to see some of the hockey games, although not the starts of most of them because I'm not getting up at 7:30am on a weekend for any non-medal game. But today was full of excitement, with Team USA winning handily and Team Canada winning not-handily -- that strong cold breeze from the north mid-afternoon was all of Canada exhaling after Weber scored -- and Team Russia imploding while Vlad Putin watched and then turning on each other like sharks in a swimming pool. The Finns are sneaky good, yo. They do this every single Olympics and then four years later, nobody remembers and we're all surprised again.

Thursday is USA-Canada in the women's gold medal game and Friday is USA-Canada in the men's semis and Canada is heavily favored on both sides and they are going to be so unbearably smug if they live up to those expectations. Everyone says that the Canadians are the nicest people and, by and large, they are. But they are also the sorest winners in hockey you will ever see. Which is why everyone not Canadian was rooting for the little Latvian engine that almost did.


* Pitchers and catchers have reported, which means it's the annual reminder that my baseball team looks incredibly promising... until the position players show up. Ah, Mets, what would we do if you were a real baseball team again?


* Watched a bunch of first episodes because there's no NHL:

1) House of Cards. Holy crap, was that good. Everyone is awful, but it the best ways. It's vicious and cold-blooded and I don't even mind Kevin Spacey breaking the fourth wall. I'm not going to stay up all night to watch the rest in one sitting, but I look forward to finishing it at a more stately pace.
2) Political Animals... I didn't really need to see Hillary Clinton fanfic and it was far too soapy for me and I didn't even finish the first episode. It's really well acted, I will admit, but that just makes it a really well cast soap.
3) Black Sails: Apparently, this series is boring all of the critics to tears because it's a pirate show set on land and has board meetings and ship-cleaning as plots. The pilot has pirate-y action and Toby Stephens -- who looks more and more like his mother every year and I don't mean that as a compliment -- but it also has Luke Arnold's John Silver and he bores me to tears and he's not pretty enough to counteract that, although clearly I am supposed to think so. I was hoping this could be Deadwood: the Pirate Years or the flip side of the Master and Commander universe, but it's really, really not.
4) Luther: been meaning to watch this forever and finally did and like it so far, two episodes in.


* Guardians of the Galaxy trailer looked good. They had to take a somewhat different tack with this than the other Marvel movies because nobody knows who they are, but that's fine and it worked. (They might have had me at "Oooga Chaka," but I'm Gen X.) And, as I said in another forum, Marvel will make a couple hundred million dollars over costs with a movie featuring a talking tree and an uncouth raccoon while DC thinks Wonder Woman is too difficult to film.


* Apparently Loki/Winter Soldier is trying to become a thing as a pairing and... good christ, why?

Comments

[kerithwyn]

Could have told you PA wouldn't be your thing. If I watch it again, it's going to be fast-forwarding to the SebStan scenes. (Typically cliche storyline, but he rocks it.)

GotA fills me with glee.

[domarzione]

Yes, well where were you, then? :)

I would watch the Ellen Burstyn scenes again, though. She's awesome. And I really liked how they wrote Bud's narcissism. But... Douglas is boring and his wife is boring with her eating disorder and they lost me a lot when the reporter finally gets leverage to do WHATEVER SHE WANTS and all she wants is to ask some stupid outdated questions. I can't care about someone without either the ambition or the intelligence to do more than that.

[ravurian]

Loved House of Cards, but then again, I was terribly fond of the original back in the day (it has not aged well, though). I agree with you about both Political Animals and Black Sails, the latter of which was so very tedious that not even my somewhat sporadic personal acquaintance with TS could persuade me to give it a chance. I've been meaning to look into Luther. Worth a shot?

A propos of nothing, I've just finished reading your Captain America back catalogue, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to the new movie, if only to see how it compares... Have you seen that gif-set floating around that has Peggy as the Winter Soldier?

[domarzione]

I remember the original House of Cards, although I didn't watch it. It's on streaming at Netflix, too, but I'll take your word about its not faring well with the years.

Luther is... it's not innovative within its universe. Meta, of course, you've got a black DCI protagonist and a woman head of section (although Lewis crossed that last frontier first). It's a police procedural of average excitement made more interesting by the fact that, unlike most of the others these days, our protagonist isn't Quirky and is not trailed around by a put-upon sidekick who rolls his eyes at each fresh indignity. His personality flaws are not adorable and he suffers -- and others suffer -- for them. He committed a real crime that everyone else suspects him of and for which there might possibly be future proof. There is also the blossoming relationship with the psychopathic Alice Morgan, the villain from the first episode, which is presumably where the series will mark itself because Luther is completely self-destructive enough to push this as far as it goes. I like it, but I also like police procedurals. It can fill the Lewis-shaped hole in my viewing habits.

Thank you for the kind words regarding the Freezer Burn epic. I have seen gif sets with both Peggy and Steve as the Winter Soldier and I've read fics with both of those scenarios (I've yet to read a good one, though). I'm trying to temper my expectations for the film, but... this was one of my all-time favorite comics arcs (and Bucky/Natasha is possible the only pairing I ever OTPed) and I don't want to be disappointed by the differences and be able to take it for its own merits.