Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 13, 2019 20:42:19 GMT -8
I’m doing a free 7-day trial of the Disney+ streaming service. There is a main screen and five subsections you can click into: Disney / Pixar / Star Wars / Marvel / National Geographic.
Frankly, the Marvel stuff is a wasteland. I tried watching Captain Marvel. It’s awful. Ant-Man had better reviews. But it could be even worse. If you have children, the Pixar section could be useful but I’ve seen most of that stuff. It does have most of the Star Wars movies. You’d think with a service such as this, they’d might do something like offer some of the versions before George Lucas started fiddling with them, maybe offering several versions. They don’t.
The Disney section has some good stuff. But it’s not a very large catalog. None of the sections have a large selection. Like it or hate it, Netflix has gazillions of stuff, as does Amazon Prime. Even humble little BritBox has a pretty wide selection.
I’d love to hang around and see more episodes of The Mandalorian but they’re likely going to dribble those out once a month. And I’m pretty sure this will soon devolve into girl-power, political correctness, and wall-to-wall funny androids (funny if you’re four years old). I don’t think I’ll be sticking around past the free trial.
The interface is rather amateurish as well. There is no “resume” button to resume a movie. But if you hit “play” again, it will pick up from where you started. But there is no hint that you have something in progress. Most mature services will give you the “resume” button so you know that this is something you left off from. Many will also allow you to “start from the beginning.”
And there is no list of recently watched programs. This is all pretty rookie for a company that has zillions of dollars.
Final verdict: The content is too thin. I could blow through most of this in a month. Yes, they’ll likely rotate stuff in and out. I’m okay with a curated service to some extent. But I expected more, even for just seven bucks a month.
I did watch a couple groovy National Geographic documentaries: one on king cobras and one on birds of paradise. Amazingly, neither was a de facto non-stop warning about global warming. There’s a couple more on there that look good that I’ll check out before a I go away. I think this service is aimed at children and 20-year-old juveniles.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 16, 2019 8:59:33 GMT -8
I may stick one more month with Disney+ to catch another episode of The Mandalorian. If you have kids, this is a rather safe streaming service to use as a virtual baby sitter. But the content is a little thin. Pixar had its day, but now I just find this stuff unwatchable. The Marvel section is almost all junk. The National Geographic section is surprisingly thin and I think I’ve watched nearly all the good documentaries they have. The rest are sort of pseudo-science or reality-show tilted. Stuff that is dressed up to be something it is not. For instance, I watched a documentary that what supposed to unravel the mysteries of Stonehenge. There was lots of talk and almost zero unraveling. The History Channel devolved into this sort of pap and I stopped watching that long ago. So now I’m just skimming the cream off the top. I did find one movie on Disney+ (on the home screen….or maybe it was inside the Disney tab) called The Finest Hours. Skimming the reviews, this sounded like it was the typical love-story thrust to the forefront, boring you to death until you get to the action. But having now watched this, I realize those were opinions from the juvenile Marvel movie crowd — those grown adolescence who have no cinematic soul left. This is based on a true story, although how closely they follow the true story, I don’t know. Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber who works for the Coast Guard. A gigantic storm hits New England in 1952. Two (not one, two) oil tankers snap in half in 70 foot waves. What a horrible coincidence and adds to the complication of finding everyone. At the beginning of the movie, and after what is apparently a lot of long-distance communication between Bernie Webber and Miriam (Holliday Grainger), Bernie and Miriam meet, dance, and Miriam abruptly asks Bernie to marry him. He’s not sure. She gets pissed off. Then he finds he is more sure but has to ask his boss at the Coast Guard for permission. This is just a formality but he interprets the rule book and supposes it is mandatory. Meanwhile, Bernie and three others are called out to come to the aid of one of the tankers in trouble. We spend part of the movie from the point of view of those who survive their tanker splitting in half. In terms of realism, this is every bit as good as Cameron’s Titanic in this regard. They do a great job making this look real without overdoing the special effects. In fact, I expected this movie to be the typical goofball movie where everything is overdone, including the romance, the CGI, and the acting. I expected each member of the crew (both on the tanker and the Coast Guard rescue vessel) to be so full of juvenile and overbearing personality that you’d want to puke. But, surprisingly, this is not the case. And I hand it to Chris Pine for playing an understated and subtle character. I was frankly astonished by this. This movie is set in the early 1950’s and that could as well been Glenn Ford standing in for Chris Pine. The vibe was the same. No f-bombs. No larger-than-life bravado. No Marvel Universe goofballdom. You do get a little girl-power our of Holliday Grainger as Webber’s girlfriend on shore who is worried about her man. And yet a New England woman worrying about her man at sea is as old as New England. She’s a bit of a pushy broad here and there, but if that’s what happened, that’s what happened. If not, it’s still not too over-the-top. I think the story fumbles a few moments that could have been more dramatic. But Chris Pine thoroughly anchors the Coast Guard portion of the film. And a good performance is turned in by Casey Affleck as the man who must take charge on the broken tanker if they are to have any chance of rescue. His performance is also surprisingly understated. You expect these days that if you have more than two males together in a film who are under 30 that it will be an excuse for an explosion of Marvel-like goofballdom. But Affleck, as Ray Sybert, is another refreshingly understated character. He comes from the days of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. This guy could have been played by Jimmy Stewart, just an average Joe keeping his head in the midst of disaster and rallying his men to do the necessary thing but without a lot of shouting. He basically led by example, not by an explosion of goofy and unrealistic one-liners. He was a man, not a boy. Rare thing indeed in today's cinema. One reviewer writes: I am so sensitive to the overbearing you-go-girl in cinema that little gets past me. But men and women do fall in love and do worry about each other. And not every man performing heroic duty looks like a goofball Marvel Universe manic gorilla. Nothing in the Miriam character seems out of place. Nor is it out of place even in an action picture for the men at sea to have attachments at land. This attachment provided strong context for these men in the Coast Guard risking it all to save others. Why do such a thing? Maybe because those men out at sea also have loved ones who would miss them. Like I said, I think more than a few reviews I’ve read of this movie come from the stunted adolescent male Marvel Universe spectrum of goofballdom. I certainly think anyone with the emotional maturity beyond that of a twelve-year-old will like this film.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 16, 2019 9:51:50 GMT -8
I checked on wikipedia, and the book the movie is based on seems to be a straight account No doubt they fictionalized some details, but even the romance was real -- they married shortly afterward, literally "till death do us part" 58 years later. Webber had been in the Merchant Marine, which may have increased his interest in performing the rescue even as most of the local Coast Guard were rescuing crew from the other tanker. He saved all but one.
The only surprise is that it took so long to make a movie out of this. This sounds like Disney as it used to be.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 16, 2019 19:32:32 GMT -8
The movie definitely gets my seal of approval. (Spoiler alert). I’m not sure that the back half of the tanker floated off the rocks at about the exact moment that they loaded the last man. But maybe it did happen that way. But I sort of doubt it. But they did note that they lost one man while trying to load the quite small Coast Guard vessel.
The back half of the tanker stayed afloat and it had working engines. You wouldn’t think you could snap a tanker like that in half and have anything working. But I guess the engines were self-contained in that half.
But they were taking on water faster than they could get rid of it so they had limited time before they would all go into the sea. Some wanted to take off in lifeboats. But Ray Sybert disagreed and said that would get them all killed. At the climax of this particularly conflict, Ray goes on deck with an axe and cuts the empty lifeboat free in front of those who wanted to leave on it. The lifeboat finds the water and is quickly smashed against the hull which is almost certainly what would have happened if it had been lowered into the ocean with men it it.
Sybert figures their only choice if to find a shoal and ground themselves on it and wait for rescue. But they have no rudder. Luckily Sybert is a bit of a MacGyver and they rig one up.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 16, 2019 19:44:18 GMT -8
Ahh, jury-rigged rudders. They tried to do that on the Bismarck after one of Ark Royal's Swordfish torpedo planes got a lucky hit and jammed the rudder -- heading back toward the British forces. Apparently they had discovered this flaw in its testing, but prsumably decided it was rather unlikely to happen. This was much like the Scharnhorst having a thin spot of its armor leading into an engine room. Pure luck that as the ship was outrunning the much more powerful Duke of York, the latter put a shell there, and after that the German ship was no longer outrunning it.
Murphy's Law was most unkind to the Nazis. But then, I understand that it was originally intended not as a comment on the perversity of life, but a cautionary note: If you leave a weakness on the assumption that it's very unlikely an enemy will happen to hit it . . . Good thing Murphy wasn't a Nazi.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 17, 2019 8:10:46 GMT -8
One movie you can avoid on Disney+ is BFG (supposedly stands for “Big Friendly Giant”). It’s a Spielberg film. Visually it’s interesting. But the content, even for a children’s film, is as digestible as cardboard. One of the reviewers said something like “And it’s not just because I’m an adult that I didn’t like it. The kids I saw in the theatres were bored.” I turned it off about two-fifths of the way in.
They should make a film about the soul of a once-good director being sucked out by Progressivism. It’s not that the movie was politically correct. It’s just that it was so devoid of soul and content. And Progressivism tends to turn all creative endeavors into tasteless mush.
The one and only reason I would extend my free subscription to a paid one is to see the next episode the The Mandalorian. And since I’m fairly sure that will go downhill fast, I don’t see the point.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 29, 2019 12:41:10 GMT -8
I check out the first 15 minutes of an original series on Apple TV+: For All MankindI can’t think of a more succinct way of putting it than this Russian reviewer did: In this alternate reality, white men are failures, women suddenly gain prominence they never had in the space race (for better or for worse), and it’s terribly important what a nameless Mexican family think while sitting in front of the TV watching the moon landing. That it was Russians who landed first is somewhat beside the point. We are obviously supposed to lament this fact. But you this is the kind of fare that the liberal, homosexual-led Apple would love. Do what does the great Deke Slayton tell his men the day after the Russians are the first to land on the moon? Take the day off and go get drunk. It’s hard to imagine who this series is meant for other than America-hating yutes indoctrinated in Marvel comic book movies and Gloria Steinem. Can yours truly gauge a series after only 12 (or so) minutes? Well, another reviewer wrote: And Apple wants us to pay for this kind of crappy programming? Another reviewer writes: Remember: this is not at all a rightwing crowd of reviewers at IMDB. They tend to be the most accepting of crap and mediocrity. But give a few of these reviewers credit for calling a spade a spade. And, yes, I could in fact divine the gist of this series in just 12 minutes. Another reviewer writes: For what it’s worth, they do apparently allow you to watch at least one episode of their original junk on Apple TV+ without actually having to sign up for a free trial. When I tried to watch an episode of another one of their original series, I would have had to sign up for the free trial. Even though Netflix is packed full of junk, they have little to fear from Apple TV+ or Disney+.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 29, 2019 15:11:01 GMT -8
You’re right. But given the hype that their homosexual leader gave for the supposed “family-friendly” content of Apple TV+, I have to ask “Whose family? Karl Marx’s?”
I do hope people come to this site for real opinions. Save your money. Don’t get either Apple TV+ or Disney+. You get a lot more content on either Amazon Prime Video or the increasingly mediocre Netflix. But, good god, Apple has a real failure on their hands.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 29, 2019 15:34:20 GMT -8
I suspect it's more like Pete Battygeek's family. Or maybe the lesbian equivalent. (There's a reason the island of Lesbos is now generally named after its chief city, Mytilene.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 29, 2019 15:45:14 GMT -8
Nowhere else on the internet can you read stuff like this.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 31, 2023 8:33:43 GMT -8
This is both frightening and hilarious. I understand Attenborough's voice was done with AI.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 2, 2023 8:48:27 GMT -8
However they did it, Attenborough's voice was fairly well done.
Glad to see that this video (it finally gets around to it) mentions how feminism has destroyed the brand. The pro-homosexual aspect is just part of that (but, of course, derives from feminism).
What would be the quickest way to (eventually) destroy the affinity that 13-44-year-olds have for vapidly light masculine escapism movies? That's right, turn all the "heroes" into man-hating feminazis and make all the men weak and pussy-like.
Does anyone really want to pay to watch that? Well, yes. I have it on very good authority that this is exactly what "men" were doing. They were still being fed, and for years, what was already at heart vapid content (even without the you-go-girl feminism, comic book movies are extremely juvenile). And they chose to ignore the feminist and anti-male aspects that began filtering in. After all, anyone who works a job in this culture has been long acclimated to putting a thumb on the scale so that women can achieve the same as men.
So Disney (and others) were rubbing these goofballs' noses in this crap for years before anyone really objected. But, yes, it became so thick that even the well-indoctrinated yute who was used to putting the thumb on the scale for women could take no more.
That said, there are still plenty of pussy-boys out there gobbling this stuff up. But it does seem to have reached saturation point, even for the juvenile tattooed crowd. And that's saying something. But something tells me there are plenty of people at Disney still laughing at how much the supposedly red-blooded American male was willing to lap up before getting a tummy ache. They lapped up plenty.
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