What’s bad about it? You go first.
The Get Down is amazing stuff. As a mostly reformed fiend for graffiti I really loved how it opened and it’s holding my interest so far (am on ep 3) and it escalates so damn well. It’s wild how few shows play with the origin of hip hop like this. It’s so tight.
Also in 2016, talk about how 100F temperatures in New York are unheard of seems kind of weird
Yeah, I think the only thing that irks me about The Get Down is how bad the big disco song is.
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Why are there pirate ships in the pacific northwest. Corey Feldman is the most annoying. But really, every character was annoying. Token Asian’s personality could be summed up as plot-useful gadgets.
Kids are annoying. Data’s depiction is def racist and is pretty much 80’s baggage, but he’s not just a plot device. He has as much of a (one-dimensional, adolescent, archetypical) personality as the rest of the cast.
my biggest complaint about The Get Down is that it’s so packed with wonderful details and every frame is so fucking beautiful that i have to watch all the scenes twice
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yeah I just watched the first episode on a whim a few nights ago and it sure was blistering
am i the only person who is interested in Luke Cage? I put it off for awhile because of other stuff, but finally got around to it a few days ago. Unfortunately I don’t like it as much as I hoped I would, at about three episodes in, even though all the music is great and most of the actors are likable enough, there is something weird about the pacing that is throwing me off. I can’t decide if it is a writing problem or an editing problem, but every conversation seems to drag just a liiiitle too much. I also admire them for not ending every episode on a stupid cliffhanger, it feels way less binge-driven than the other marvel shows, but in terms of the narrative movement that is also kind of a negative. Can’t really comment on anything specific to the characters or plot yet, but they earn points for introducing asian characters that are highly unlikely to end up being ninjas or magical triads or whatever (I hope)
Watched a couple episodes at a friend’s house and I think I agree with your post. It’s slower and maybe too grounded for a super hero show?
It’s probably hard to compete with Jessica Jones, though. Her villain was unusually compelling.
A lot of it felt really dated to me, like Pops going on about “these kids don’t got fathers anymore” might have been relevant in 1992 but in 2016 black men are the least likely to be neglectful parents compared to whites, hispanic and asian-americans. That was the main thing but a lot of the show felt like the writers were drawing a lot on how things were when they were young instead of today.
Sort of like how Daredevil’s Hell’s Kitchen is a neighborhood defined by the squabbles of various immigrant gangs the way it was back in Jack Kirby’s day
Holy shit I missed a chance to shit on the Goonies!
@Father.Torque the Goonies is the most obnoxious movie ever made I hated it when I was a kid and I was right. I was the right kid. The Goonies is trash. It is just kids screaming and everyone who was involved should be killed painfully today!
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Forget Hitler. If I had a time machine I’d go back to kill Richard Donner before he could make The Goonies.
I love you Lethal Weapon but sorry, it’s worth it.
ok so i’m about halfway through luke cage and basically the show finally did something unexpected and interesting, except that unexpectedly interesting thing is also pretty horrible. i am kind of curious to keep watching just to see if they are able to recover from shooting themselves in the foot this badly. spoiler text even though i’m the only person who cares:
[spoiler]So Mahershala Ali plays Cornell/Cottonmouth, he is hands down the most interesting actor on the show and is arguably so good that conflicts with how stupidly the character is written, e.g. he really sells every line and wants you to believe he’s a pretty clever dude with serious pathos. Not coincidentally Ali is also in Moonlight and is probably going to blow up after that. The problem is he’s so charismatic and likable, combined with the fact that his character never really does anything all that sinister beyond killing his own dudes for fucking up, that I never really bought him as a villain. But, when it comes to interacting with Cage, they treat him like some totally idiotic random supervillain, who does absurd shit like firing RPGs at him while cackling like a maniac. It’s a totally uneven character.
At the beginning of this episode, it seems like all that is going to come to a head through flashbacks (that are way too similar to the Fisk flashbacks from DD season 1) explaining how he was fucked up as a kid, misdirecting you to think that this is all supposed to make him a more sympathetic character. Except it actually ends up setting the stage for an almost totally-left field reveal that Alfre Woodard’s character Mariah, his cousin, was molested by her step father (? I think? Not exactly sure on the relationship, nevertheless he’s a surrogate father figure), this comes to a head in an argument they have where Cornell accuses Mariah of basically ‘asking for it’ and flirting with the dude, which sends her into a blind rage in which she murders Cornell (in spite of just seconds before insisting on the mantra “family first”) and then basically immediately after that inherits the mantle of True Crime Lord of Harlem or whatever.
I don’t have a problem with Mariah being the true evil all along, this is basically insinuated at several points throughout the show, but the way they did it is just horrible. The ambiguity about her history as a child abuse victim is just abysmal–I really don’t want to believe they want the audience to accept that she truly was ‘asking for it,’ but that possibility is certainly left out there in the open. Again, I think part of this is because we are supposed to hate Cornell at this point, but I really just couldn’t. He goes back and forth between absurd cartoon supervillainy and genuinely sympathetic but flawed character, there’s nothing in the character up to this point to make us believe he’d make such a vile insinuation, so the inclination is to assume there is some merit to his claim… which is just gross? Plus, I mean, childhood sexual abuse as a catalyst for super villainy is really just an atrocious plot line and can be horribly offensive even when it is handled carefully. In this case it’s just exploitative. At any rate, I have absolutely no faith that they are able to bring this character back around to something that is genuinely interesting, because the writing on this show is so clunky, and the female characters especially are horribly written.
Showrunners deserve some credit for having so many prominent female characters (rare for the Marvel film/tv world outside of Agents of Shield, which I still think is their best non-theatrical thing), but Luke Cage is written like he’s some kind of irresistible sex god and it is just ugh.
Honestly, I didn’t really read many Luke Cage hot takes so I might have missed it, but I am very surprised this moment didn’t inspire more anger from fandom. It is really just appalling. I mean, they go from 0 to 60 on making Cornell a reprehensible creep, which would have made sense if he was actually, you know, allowed to be the villain, but then kill him off immediately, taking out the show’s best actor and transforming a victim of child abuse into a nefarious criminal mastermind in the span of about 30 seconds. It’s got to be one of the worst plot twists I’ve ever witnessed.[/spoiler]
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This is way too close to how I reacted. I dont know why its so much more noticeable here that the writing in marvel shows is dogshit but it definitely is. Maybe its because there arent any glaring flaws in the cinematography or acting whereas in past marvel netflix shows those parts were also often bad so the fact that the writing sucked wasnt as stark a contrast when everything is kind of crap anyway.
They got the entire Star Trek TNG series on Amazon Prime now, so does that count? Well I am counting. It’s the best. I haven’t dipped into Voyager yet, but I am planning on it after finishing a few two-parter tng episodes.
my hot take on Luke Cage was more of a surface level thing about how the promotion of this is supposed to tie this character to Black Lives Matter and make him the superhero for the movement, but if you are doing that it seems really poorly considered for his origin story be all “what about the good cops? Our man here, he was one of the good cops but none of you had his back” and then he comes to Harlem to ask “what about black on black crime?”
that and the fixation on dads not being there for their kids felt like it was a couple decades out of date with deadbeat dads being much less of a phenomenon in 2016, and black parents being more involved in their kids’ lives on average than white or hispanic parents.
and finally, the whole matter of Luke working cash jobs did not feel accurate to life sin papel, where a bar who pays dishwashers off the books and doesn’t square up with them at the end of their shift each night would find themselves having a reputation for not paying and would not be able to get anyone in there.
The shave scene though was pretty much gold. I got the impression that Cottonmouth knew Pops was sheltering the kid and that he did not want to kill him, but he was signalling to Pops that he knew. And the entire not paying for the shave was setting himself up as owing Pops so that he could repay him by sparing the kids without losing face as being soft. And Pops had some sort of idea but was unsure and that’s why he was willing to let Colton walk out of there without paying. But then Luke fucked it all up.
Meh. Yeah. Luke cage was great for the first three episodes and then turns into horseshit appallingly quickly. The only thing that that holds the show up post-twist is the uniformly high level acting (diamondback notwithstanding: there’s nothing any actor could have done to make that writing hackjob work.)
It is the shame. Marvel flufftown doesn’t deserve alfre woodard
i liked luke cage but it has plenty of dumb moments one of the dumbest of which is when in a black lives matter ass show he literally says out loud i don’t want a lawyer because if i’m honest the i have nothing to worry about 
Fuck.