What I Watched: The Book of Boba Fett. I really liked it – and was rather surprised by the dislike for the show from both fans and reviewers. I’m not an invested Star Wars fan; I like the familiarity of the characters and plot lines (I saw the original upon its release in the theater, when the speed lines were revolutionary special effects). The most recent news says that there will not be a season two.
Here is the Guardian review from January of last year:
The Book of Boba Fett has resurrected the badass bounty hunter, only to destroy everything that once made him so great. It’s a fate worse than being eaten alive.
Boba Fett was definitely dead. We all saw it: a partially blinded Han Solo unknowingly whacked him with a stick in Return of the Jedi, his jetpack malfunctioned, and then he fell into the mouth of a massive sand monster. You could tell by the way it swallowed and belched.
Yet in The Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian spin-off series currently streaming on Disney+, we’re expected to believe that the iconic bounty hunter (now played by Temuera Morrison) actually survived in the acid-filled belly of the sarlacc, having siphoned oxygen from a stormtrooper’s helmet, before burning his way out with the flamethrower on his wrist, then blindly clawing through several metres of sand. Improbable, you might think, but then no one ever really dies in Star Wars. There are action figures and sequels to sell.
There’s a precedent for Boba’s unlikely resurrection: plenty of non-canonical novels, comics and short stories have already depicted his escape from the sarlacc. But little did we know that this show was bringing him back only to kill him all over again. And by kill him I mean systematically take apart everything that ever made him the coolest and most mysterious character in a galaxy far, far away.
What I Read: I like to think that I’m not pushy in my book recommendations. That said, read this book: Witch King by Martha Wells. I stayed up way too late on a few nights because I couldn’t put it down. Many of you are fans of Ms. Wells and her Murderbot series (as am I). I liked this story and world even better than Murderbot and am in awe of her ability to create complex characters, timelines, geographies, and plots. Here’s hoping that Witch King is the start of a new series. Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
“I didn’t know you were a… demon.” “You idiot. I’m the demon.”
Kai’s having a long day in Martha Wells’ WITCH KING….
After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.
But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?
Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.
He’s not going to like the answers.
WITCH KING is Martha Wells’s first new fantasy in over a decade, drawing together her signature ability to create characters we adore and identify with, alongside breathtaking action and adventure, and the wit and charm we’ve come to expect from one of the leading writers of her generation.
What I Listened To: BC Camplight – Kicking Up A Fuss; BC Camplight – She’s Gone Cold; and Yo La Tengo – Until It Happens.
If you like BC Camplight, here is a good interview with him.
Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, darlings? Dearest DeadSplinterites, what is up with you? Please do share with us!
I liked the Book of Boba Fett, too. I’m not a hardcore Star Wars fan, because I’m old enough to realize that movies are just…movies and not to be taken seriously in any way.
Watched: Still, the Michael J Fox documentary. This is really, really well done and I highly recommend it.
Listened: Eric Gales
#TeamBobaFett!
I watched most of S2 of The Bear. This show is so good but so anxiety inducing. Great cameos by Jamie Lee Curtis and Bob Odenkirk.
I read All’s Well by Mona Awad. An actor loses her career after a serious stage injury. A botched surgery leaves her in chronic pain and eventually destroys her marriage and friendships. While teaching theatre at a small New England college she decides to stage All’s Well That Ends Well against the wishes of her colleagues and students who would prefer to do McBeth. Things get very weird. It was a slow starter but I’m glad I stuck with it. This is the second novel of Awad’s I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading more of her.
I’m listening to Hania Rani
Hello
Well isn’t that just a beautiful song! Added to my play list. It feels like summer, or a background sound to a delightful day.
I really like her long pieces but didn’t want to post a 15 minute song. 🙂
Yeah, The Bear is really really good, but it has added being a chef and food service generally to the growing list of professions I will never ever do. However, it is too late for me to have not grown up in a crazy Italian family.
I’m guessing you could relate at least in part to the Christmas Eve episode. I did, lol.
Oh dear Lord. I had a relatively normal and sane family, but I could still relate to that Christmas Eve episode. Especially how the mother kept outright refusing help and then lost her shit because nobody helped her. Italian moms have that passive-aggressive thing down pat.
Lol, that was my mother too. And like Carm I’ve made the mistake of saying, “this is why I don’t want to come home for the holidays
I’ve been watching Mrs. Davis. It’s a trippy borderline absurd sci-fi dramedy about an unconventional nun (harharhar see what I did there?) who is out to kill Mrs. Davis the AI who rules the world by giving everyone what they want.
I’m reading Yellowface. Did a fellow DeadsplinterReader recommend it? It’s about a failed white author who steals and publishes a successful Asian author’s work under her own name after the latter dies. The plot is used to explore racism, the value of own voices stories, the publishing industry, and social media.
Putting it on my reading list.
Wishing you safe and smooth travels tomorrow. Traveling with an infant is a positive testament to your skills at planning, coordination, and execution of said plans!
I liked Boba Fett just fine. I don’t know how the character was “ruined” and don’t care to check. I find it reasonable to assume that people grow and change, particularly after being eaten by a Sarlacc.
I struggled through “West Side Story” and was utterly unimpressed. Then I checked Rotten Tomatoes and found it had a 91% rating. Those people did not see the same movie I did.
1. Rachel Zegler – excellent.
2. Ariana Debose – excellent.
3. Ansel Elgort – what? How did this guy get cast? He sings well, but had zero charisma. His chemistry with Zegler was so nonexistent that I Googled to see if he was gay, whereupon I found out he was accused of assault. I mean, the kid in Shazam acts properly impressed by Ms. Zegler. I’m supposed to believe that this guy is head over heels? Nope. So that completely gutted the main point of the movie.
4. Sharks and Jets. I’ve seen scarier middle school students.
5. Rita Moreno. She’s a national treasure and I have no objection to her role. What I do object to is her solo. It’s supposed to be the emotional climax of the movie, and a 90-year-old, despite her skill, doesn’t convey that at all. She’s 90. There’s only so much you can ask her to do vocally, and this went way beyond that limit. Maybe they slotted her in because Elgort and Zegler couldn’t stand each other?
6. Backstory changes – Tony is a convict? Who nearly killed someone? What’s wrong with a kid who got a job and thinks maybe there’s a better life out there? He meets Maria behind the bleachers? I think by that point I’d Googled the actor’s story, and the whole thing comes across as WAY more creepy than romantic. Typically the things that went on behind bleachers when I was a kid were not the stuff of fairy tales. But Prince Charming was already a convict with murderous rages, so, eh, maybe they thought it worked.
7. The backstory stuff was, I think, intended to make everything seem less dated, but oddly, to me, it seemed far more dated because of the changes. I don’t know why that is.
8. I did find delivering lines in Spanish to be interesting, once I realize they weren’t going to drop any subtitles in there. I had no real trouble following it and I don’t speak Spanish. But I’m familiar with the show, too, so that may come into play.
Bottom line: I’ve seen high school productions with more heart. I’m still dumbfounded by the 91% rating. One person I know said, eh, the critics were just kissing Speilberg’s ass.
Comment of the day: “I find it reasonable to assume that people grow and change, particularly after being eaten by a Sarlacc.”
Re: Ansel Elgort. I only know of him because there was one Jezebel writer who proclaimed that he was her nemesis and she would constantly mock him in her celebrity news roundups. He has a punchable lizard face devoid of warmth. I can see why the Babydriver role worked in his favor and not West Side Story.
I watched like the first 30 minutes of West Side Story and my takeaway was the Spielberg fucking loves seeing it performed in theaters but always believed he could do it theatrically better than Jerome Robbins.
Might as well just watch the 1961 version and call it a day.
I should get that Martha Wells book. I agree she’s great.
I took the plunge and made Succession my exercise bike show. It’s well acted and generally entertaining, although after a number of episodes it’s feeling a bit stretched thin and repetitive.
One of the facts of life of show biz is bigger casts cost more money, so there’s constant pressure to shrink the cast. The problem with a show about a giant business enterprise is it means giant complicated issues keep getting resolved by huddles of the same few people in mostly the same ways.
The cast is very strong, but they can only keep spreading the same amount of peanut butter over more and more slices of bread before you feel like there’s no sandwich.
How long/frequently do you ride your exercise bike? Any tips or tricks for making it a habit? Ours is crammed in an inaccessible corner, but we are going to reconfigure the space to make it usable.
Just sticking it next to the couch by the TV does wonders. I found propping a phone or tablet for distraction tends to lead me fiddle too much, but letting a show run on the TV encourages me to just bike.
The other thing is I gave up on any kind of programmed ride. I can’t do that and watch TV, so I just do a steady level to burn calories and raise my pulse and call it a win.
…I think based on what I made of the first couple of episodes of marvel’s secret invasion that @brightersideoflife pretty much summed that up
…I forget if the fate of mariah hill went the same way in the comics (it was a long mutiple-title-spanning “event” that employed a bunch of escher-like narrative paths with people turning out to have been being impersonated by shape shifters “all along” (or at least from points well before it “started”) as well as “dead” characters turning out to have been on ice while their stand-ins went about their business until meeting a variety of ends…but I’m mostly sure that she remained a long-standing character well beyond that arc & I don’t see what they think they gained by going the way they did
…I guess it’ll take a whole panoply of upcoming attractions before it all plays out…& maybe along the way more elements of the context for that arc will be pulled from the page to the screen…but I won’t nerd out about a redemption arc for the elektra character they did so dirty back when affleck made an attempt at daredevil…or speculate about the thunderbolts…or the “dark reign” arc it all segued into
…but it’s hard to be mad at samuel l jackson getting to cut loose so I imagine I’ll be along for the ride
…&…sort of similarly…I think the boba fett show had some great aspects/elements…& some weak ones…with the mod squad being an example of the latter off the top of my head…but that it was always going to meet a harsh reception even from people who don’t take fandom altogether too seriously simply because the character as far as people who’d only seen the movies were concerned was sketched out so lightly that most people’s “take” on him was predominantly what is often referred to as “head-canon” in certain circles…so…I think it would have made more sense if he seemed to have learned a few more of the lessons ming-na wen’s character obviously had during a similar sort of career in a similar sort of orbit…rather than seeming to be groping blindly for the rules of the gangster boss game…but it didn’t stop me enjoying what we got?
Oh, good point re the mod squad. As I am not a Stars Wars expert, the show was, for me, taken at face value with a soupçon of nostalgia.
…any delusions I might have entertained about my chances of achieving expert status in star wars fan terms were put firmly in their place by a sibling growing up who burned through a lot of the stuff disney de-canon-ized & “knew” all manner of things about all manner of places & people I hadn’t been aware even had names, let alone history
…& these days by friends’ kids…who have time for a lot more cartoons than I can make excuses for watching…not to mention that weird memory thing where they can recite chapter & verse about things like dinosaurs despite all the polysyllabic hurdles involved
…so…what with running a bit hot & cold on the prequels, sequels & innumerable spin offs…I don’t know if I properly ought to have turned in my fan card
…but if the ahsoka show goes as well as I hope it does
…& the names mara jade or dr aphra appear anywhere on the upcoming slate…I’ll most likely try to keep my hand in?
Ohhhhh – that looks very, very good!
The only way Secret Invasion makes sense is if the plot writers hadn’t seen anything since Avengers: Infinity Wars. Just like how the writers for Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness clearly never fucking watched (or read the scripts or even asked for a plot summary of WandaVision.
Seriously, episode 2 … when Fury is like “waah waah you know Earth can’t handle any aliens living here” umm okay are we supposed to forget about New Asgard???
You want me to accept that nobody wants to call Wong and the other wizards and see if they have any spells that can make a skrull show their actual form? I guess we’re supposed to forget the wizards exist.
…yup…I think (based on about two lines when he was talking to rhodey) that what passes for the logic is that if they impersonate a person with powers they’d somehow have the powers…so the big guns are liabilities…which I’m not at all persuaded there’s been a basis for thinking…& which at least one strand of the plot seems to suggest wouldn’t naturally be the case…& that for *reasons* fury thinks he’s the only one who can do anything about
…which is pretty thin…& unconvincing to boot…but kind of par for the comics course, I suppose…in that despite all the fuss about continuity characters tend to be in this silo or that depending on their title unless there’s a crossover involved…but it’s an odd way to go when the whole secret invasion thing was very much a crossover…so unless they’re going to do something really odd & fast forward through a truncated arc in the one show…it could be that this bit is sort of the intro & the main event will play out over successive properties
…precisely none of which provides a satisfactory answer for ignoring the asgardians…even if presumably carol danvers is out there looking for a suitable candidate for a new skrull homeworld?
I’m not convinced they take on the powers, I think it’s just optics of like Hawkeye blowing up something.
If they could take on powers by simming someone, they would have simmed Carol Danvers and the other powerful folks years ago.
I get that Disney didn’t want to pay the headliners to show up, but they needed a better excuse for “LOL no don’t call the Avengers.”
And you know what a better excuse would be? “It’s unfortunate we don’t have the Avengers anymore to call, they could have fixed this.”
Ironman? Dead. Black Widow? Dead. Steve Rogers? Old as fuck/maybe dead by then. Vision? Dead/gone. Wanda? Dead/gone. Spiderman? Errybody forgot he exists, literally. All they fucking got left really is Hawkeye (retired and his show indicated just how beat to fuck his body was from all the avenging), Rhodey (working that fancy govt job now), and Sam Wilson. Sam is off being new Captain America and going to sympathize way more with the skrulls than the “good guys” in this plot.
…yeah…I don’t want to blunder into spoiler territory but (although the thing I have in mind existed in the comics prior to the secret invasion) they did pretty solidly lampshade something that they’re treating like it hasn’t been done before which is how they made body-swapped supes a potential thing
…but…like you say…it wouldn’t take much just to get it out of the way…they’re gone/busy/otherwise unavailable is one thing…but “well, akshully I think you’ll find it’s really a job for me & my clandestine bag of tricks” is kinda idiot-ball territory
…even admitting that the nature of the threat means you have some pretty extreme op-sec requirements to keep the ones fighting the good fight to bona fide good guys would have been enough for me…but what they went with was just…weak sauce?
I watched the entire series “Muscles and Mayhem” which is about the TV show American Gladiators from the early 90s to mid 90s.
I watched all five episodes which is strange considering recently it takes me a couple of weeks thanks to all the damn overtime I’ve been working.
I’m tired and miserable but it is (mildly) better to have some money and a little time than no money and lots of time.
Anyway, enough personal economic philosophy.
I liked American Gladiators despite calling it Running Man Light after the Ahnold movie/Stephen King story. It was actually compelling watching amateur athletes take on bronzed steroided musclehead gladiators. Even in my scrawny 20s I knew I would have been killed trying to deal with the physical challenge while fighting off someone who was in way better shape.
The show was my first noticeable encounter with Dunning Kruger in other people. I remember a friend’s housemate who was about 40lb overweight and never lifted anything (including garbage or dishes) proclaim that he could kick the shit out of Nitro who was a big fucking tank/ex football player. My friend and I looked at each and tried not to laugh. We thought he was joking. Apparently he was not. He didn’t appreciate my comment that he couldn’t beat any of the females let alone the men (to be honest, the females would have kicked the shit out of me too.) He got insulted and left in a huff.
My fave challenge was the tennis ball cannon where a gladiator was shooting a tennis ball cannon at you while you’re running for cover and weapons. Partially because it was the only one I had a chance to win…
Anyway, it was interesting to hear the back stories of the steroided gladitors I liked. The job would have been tough to do. Also the infighting with producers who cut the gladiators who demanded increased pay. It explains why I gradually lost interest after the 3rd season (the other gladiators had no charisma or held no charm.)
Gonna disagree with you there, my friend. It’s infinitely better to have money and little time. Time is largely useless if you can’t do anything with it other than try to figure out how to pay your bills. Source: I’ve been on both sides of that equation, too many times to count.
I, too, have known a few couch potatoes who see themselves as triathlon winners.
i just felt the need to chime in and say i havent watched or read anything
been indulging my nostalgia for the gabber days tho
todays flavour is charlie lownoise & mental theo
Hi Farcy! Always glad to hear from you!
you know…i was going to post youre welcome in reply
the song
coz i love torturing parents……
but then i found this
what in the actual fuck disney?
find some new ideas
touch fucking aristocats and you will find out theres no power in the world like a farscy scorned…
i will cut you
Isn’t Questlove touching Aristocrats?
huh? the fuck is a questlove?
*googles*
well thats a problem……if i murder him everyones gonna think im racist
…we might luck out…he’s a pretty decent sort so maybe you won’t be forced to end him?
i do not see how you change the aristocats without me wanting to end you
……
but im willing to wait to see the end result before i do anything i guess
after all….judgement comes after the fact…not before
I don’t think that is a real trailer for it. Auli’i Cravalho has stated she isn’t playing Moana in the live action one because she was 14 when the animated was made and she’s 20 now and too old to play the character.
well…fuck…did i get fake newsed?
me?
the paragon of knowing whats what….got fake newsed?
im surprised it took this long…..
I hate the fake shit like that because it’s so well done that it’s plausible. Like Dwayne Johnson is going to be in the live action version. They announced it in mid June.
kind of annoyed i apparently need to fact check my entertainment too now…
thought that shit was reserved for just the news and propaganda
i dont like fact checking shit….stop ruining everything people!