Good call. I just watched this a few days ago. Average decently well done action movie. Might have been great if they made any effort to build the mythos at all.
Another good call. It’s my go to for watching at night when I’m not ready to go to sleep but I don’t want to put in the effort on something new that I have to pay attention to. Doesn’t matter which season or which cast I can drop in and watch until I doze off.
Law And Order. Criminal Minds. FBI. Chicago PD. Anything that has been on forever with a huge cast (replaced now and then by a new huge cast) - I used to watch this stuff with an elderly housebound neighbor who breathlessly filled me in on who had dated who, who was the bad guy, who lost the biggest case. Poor lady had no life, no family, and watching these passed the time. But I found them mind-numbing and dull and so similar. The gruff no-nonsense chief. The troubled new hire with a secret past. The comic relief f’-up. The impossibly glamorous token female who could kick ass like Bruce Lee. It had all been done so many times. The big reveal at the end could be seen a mile away.
As long as I’ve known them, my in-laws have had one of those houses where the TV is always on, even if nobody is really paying attention. For the last season or so of TV when we’re over there I see Chicage Fire, Chicago Medical, Tracker, or The Equalizer. The point of that isn’t any kind of “I don’t even watch TV” snark, but that these aren’t shows I’m seeking out, just ones I encounter in my environment.
These are all fine, but it’s rare I ever even see a full episode. I can come in during the middle and immediately figure out what is happening, I can leave in the middle and not care to find out how it ended. I don’t know the names of any of the characters.
Yet, if I do watch for a period of time, I’m entertained.
I can’t agree strongly enough. It was so horribly disappointing after the brilliant LOTR trilogy.
Almost anything put out by Netflix like The diplomat. It’s fine and echoes better, more nuanced shows. It’s the golden age of meh.
There was a good column in The NY Times about the golden age of meh TV.
“What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.”
MID IS NOT the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse”renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.”
I came here to list that show. I always thought the brief sketches were the (only) low point of the Carol Burnett Show, so I couldn’t believe it when they made it into a series.
For a while some channel was running “The Best of Carol Burnett” which I would record on my DVR. Whenever one of the Mama’s Family sketches would start I couldn’t hit the fast forward button fast enough.
I actually thought those sketches were pretty good with the one exception being that Carol Burnett’s character was always over-acting. She did that a lot, and it worked for comedic value a lot, too. But she was frequently playing a serious role in those skits. As a result, I actually came to like the TV show.
Oh, and Tim Conway’s elephant story is legendary.
I’m actually watching the Carol Burnett series on Amazon currently, and I’ve come to find that I would pay to listen to Tim Conway recite the encyclopedia. But the rest of the show has more low points than high points.
Heh, one that I had not thought about in a long time, but I was reminded of it by an article about it turning 30: Species (1995).
It’s not a terrible movie, but it surely isn’t a good movie. Some of the actors are pretty great in other movies, most are at least OK in this one. Decent special effects, with a Giger creature. Derivative predictable plot, bad dialogue, but a workable script that mostly makes some sort of sense once you buy into its idea.
But did I really enjoy watching it the first time? Nope, I had seen too many truly good and truly bad sci-fi movies already. It was basically inoffensive room temperature goo.
ETA: But I also kind of feel that way about The Matrix, too. That one can be summed up as: Looks sexy, but damn it’s dumb.
The actors cracking up is priceless, and frequent.
There was some great music too. Mel Torme, “Take a Letter Miss Jones”.
Maybe my favorite Carol Burnett Show sketch (or at least the last one I watched): a talk show sendup with Carol as Charo and Lyle as Mark Spitz.
Agreed on Tim Conway.
I think they edited out a lot of the music on the Amazon streams. Most of the shows are only 20 minutes long.
But my all time favorite line was at the end of the elephant skit where Mama says something like “is that little asshole through”. It’s almost like Conway set that up, and Vickey Lawrence had the precise timing and the precise line to bring it home.
My favorite Tim Conway line is when he appeared on Johnny Carson for the first time, and after Johnny asks why he hadn’t been on the show yet, he replied “I didn’t know you did this.”
The actors involved have said often that none of what Conway did was in the rehearsal. He would tell the director and cameraman so there would be proper coverage but for everyone else it was the first time they saw it. Rehearsal for the dentist sketch had to be very short.
I’ve heard a lot on this as well. They used to do two takes of most skits, and if the first skit went well, they’d tell Conway. And not the rest of the cast.
Most of the actors of the time who were commonly unscripted, like Jonathon Winters and Don Rickles, were decidedly not funny. But Conway was something else.
I’d say My Life is Murder fits. Lucy Lawless is a consultant for the police and solves mysteries. Entertaining, but slight. The characters are ok, but not outstanding.
Another mystery series, Agatha Raisin, also fits.
This made me think of “Murder by Death”, and a very similar movie “Clue”. In both cases, I felt the storyline was rather dull, but I was propelled along by outstanding performances by about a hundred different humorous actors and actresses. It was kind of like those old Bob Hope specials that were never really any good, but they were worth watching for a zinger or two somewhere along the line by someone like Dean Martin or Don Knotts.
Hehe, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but my wife and I will quote “Clue” all the time.
Agree 100%. Peter Jackson and all the actors and scenery artists for LOTR captured the look and atmosphere of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, if not all of the narrative and plot points (film adaptations simply have to make certain cuts for production/budget reasons.)
But except for the 1st one, all the Hobbit movies were pumped up with extraneous and totally unnecessary fluff, like they took the basics of Tolkien’s Hobbit and then filtered it through Game of Thrones and a cheap video game; I felt it just showed a lot of disrespect to the source material so the studio/etc. could make a bunch of $.
It’s a very quotable movie. That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie. 
You know, I think I am the only person on the planet who didn’t like the LOTR movies. Most of the common criticisms are ones i don’t agree with, though. Tom Bombadil’s parts are downright boring, and The Scouring of the Shire would have been too anti-climactic at the end.
But the conclusion was pretty terrible.
While I enjoyed the books immensely, I kind of agree the Clerks version of the movie where it was essentially about them walking for, what, nine hours?
And they missed most important line, and revelation, in the book when Frodo openly states that Gandalf was right about sparing Gollum, as he did have a role in everything.
And the Hobbits dancing on the bed scene was very awkward. By that point, I just wanted it to end.
I’d give the trilogy as a whole a 5 on a 10 scale, perfect for this thread.
I’m confused; your comments are about the Hobbit movies, not LOTR.