Reviews

So I watched 2. Monte Cassino and Malta. Both contain about 15 minutes of content, stretched over an hour and constantly repeated. Lots of stock footage of planes flying and bombs being dropped. A few surprisingly explicit death images - they usually leave those out of this level of documentary. I learned a few details I didn't already know, but none of them had anything to do with new information gleaned from the new perspective. No depth at all to the analysis, and essentially nothing contributed by the 3D drone reconstructions. There are some shows that use 3D CGI reconstructions to show things normally invisible, and do a good job of orienting the viewer and letting them get inside the location. This isn't one of them.

If you're completely unfamiliar with these topics it passes as a brief introduction. If you're already at all familiar with the subject matter, it's thin gruel indeed.

So, at about the 18:30 mark, on the topic of how delivering fuel to the motor was developed and refined, they give us this:

Travis Taylor: Engineer and Author

"(the float) floats up and allows fuel to flow into the combustion chamber, and boom that's how you get the power."

Complete gibberish. Nobody who has the faintest understanding of how a carburetor works could write or deliver that line. It skips past "simplified", blows by "oversimplified to the point of being incorrect", and barrels headlong into "absurdly flat out wrong". The carburetor float was a stroke of genius breakthrough, but its job is nothing like this description suggests. Once you start getting the basic facts wrong, your credibility drops to zero, and any sort of educational value is lost.

I knew going in that this series was going to be weak on facts. I just didn't know how weak. But History/Learning/Discovery Channel lost any sort of serious educational value a long time ago, and have diminished themselves into a thin gruel of low standards and sensationalism. They're pretty much the video equivalent of the National Enquirer.

The historical recreations can have some entertainment value, and they mostly get the facts in the neighborhood of "right", but if you have any genuine interest in learning history or discovering things, they are not a source for anything but suggestions for topics to go learn about from a legitimate source. Wikipedia has better fact checkers.

With a healthy serving of Jodie Foster's Hotel Artemis. A fairly "by the numbers" mayhem movie, no more or less original than most others. Which is not a bad thing. It didn't disappoint. Just keep in mind that the storyline is only there to support the fabulously executed fight choreography. You're there to watch them dance. The thinness of the plot is a feature, not a bug.

My only complaint is addressed to the mixing balance of the soundtrack. When the score is bearable the dialog is unintelligible, and when the volume is high enough to understand the spoken lines the music becomes uncomfortably loud during the frequent fight scenes. I spent the whole movie with the remote in hand, going up and down on the volume buttons depending on what was happening. If I'd been in a theatre I'd have walked out and demanded [E: a refund]. No movie is worth permanent hearing damage.

When this show started, it was about the Plunkett family, with Christy as the center of gravity. Pregnant Violet was hilariously snarky and defiant. Alternately resentful and protective of her mom and family. The intergenerational squabbles up and down the age ranges were funny. The characters and power dynamics at the restaurant were funny. Christy's father being brought into the mix was funny. The dating lives of Christy and Christy's ex were funny. The AA group was just one of a variety of settings available to the writers. All of these situations introduced perspectives to tell some particular slice of the story.

Sometime during season 2, a deliberate decision was made to transition the show from one about a family to one about a women's AA group. The children were rapidly phased out, the restaurant was rapidly phased out, even the original home was phased out. All of the original male cast and regular recurring characters were phased out. And with them went most of the hooks to hang stories onto. Not necessarily a bad premise, and not a show I'd decline to watch, but most definitely not the show I was sold.

With the introduction of Bonnie's therapist in season 6, and the expansion of the role in season 8, I was finally actually laughing while watching again, for the first time in years. The tension from the mix of resentment and dependence between them is not unlike the relationship between the teenage Violet and Christy in the first two seasons. And Rainn Wilson's delivery as the character is spot on.

If you're watching reruns in syndication, watch S1, S2, and S3, and then skip to S8. You'll get almost all of the funny parts, (Octavia Spencer attempting to flee to Mexico on a tricycle is a highlight), miss the unfunny interregnum, and save yourself a lot of viewing hours for shows with a better return on the investment of viewing time.

I stumbled across this recently, and the '34 Olds dump truck project sounded interesting. So I went ahead and recorded all 5 episodes that were on the schedule.

The Cadillac roadster build turned out far better than I expected, although there were some crude looking details and awkwardly proportioned shapes.

The dump truck build was like a bad joke. He wanted it to look like a toy. Great. But he also built it like a toy, and that's pathetic. A hand-cranked dump mechanism, built with rusty scavenged motorcycle parts? Seriously? They've never heard of electric motors? No openable tailgate? A wooden slat park bench in place of a real seat?What could have been an actual useful tool styled to look like a toy was instead simply rendered as a mostly useless toy. Fun to look at, pose with, and play around, but not much utility.

Way too many minutes spent standing around pointlessly yakking, and not nearly enough showing actual work being done, or how the engineering challenges of adapting things to do something they were never meant to do were solved. If you want a show that actually teaches you something, Full Custom Garage is great for metalwork, and (sadly cancelled) Fantomworks will give some useful mechanical tips and hints. Even Wheeler Dealers dispenses useful knowledge about the mechanical inner workings in most episodes.

I realize that abuse, derision, and fear are widely seen as valid training methods. And if your sole concern is the end product then they might even be deemed effective. If you're actually aware that you're interacting with a person otoh, it's just a toxic and damaging work environment. I've worked for ash holes like him. Briefly. Life's too short to put up with hating having to go to work, and constantly second-guessing if you're going to get yelled at.

Bottom line, I watched the Cadillac episode. And then forced myself to sit through the Oldsmobile pickup episode to see what the final result looked like and for any tiny build clues I could see in the background while somebody was standing around droning inanities. Skimmed to the end of the remaining 3 episodes to see the end product, erased them, and cancelled the DVR program.

Title aside, this is not a "build" show. It's a stand around and sit around talking about building show. And then bring in the customer board of directors, and sit around a conference table congratulating each other on how awesome the build is going to be. Cut to some one on one sound bites from the crew talking about how they're going to build something. Throw in a few seconds of generic cutting or screw driving shots, and then go back to talking about how awesome the build is going to be. Add in at least one nasty "prank".

Never mind not bothering to show how the build proceeds. They can't even manage to completely display the finished product or give any meaningful exposition about what the build entailed or how it will be used.

First, create a reasonably entertaining episodic show with self-contained story lines.

Second, have your third-rate writers run out of ideas after two seasons, and convert to a lame serialized format, substituting an idiotic "perpetual omnipotent enemy" to fill in for the paucity of new story ideas.

Third, relentlessly run the series into the ground. See Burn Notice for an example of how all the good parts get drained away, and an endless obsession with an unobtainable goal take their place.

Used to be they chose vehicles which could see large improvements with carefully targeted small fixes and upgrades. (The Audi TT shifter fix was brilliant in illustrating how a seemingly catastrophic failure could be a small, albeit deeply buried, part.) This episode marks the moment when they pivoted to simply throwing cubic dollars into routine "by the numbers" refurb and flip jobs. Six grand for the car. Two grand to replace an age-deteriorated interior. Four grand to replace perfectly serviceable wheels, lights, and bumpers, solely because the stock ones weren't the right kind of flashy. (And the primary contribution of the vaunted "Euro" front bumper is to highlight the poor job Mercedes did integrating the bottom shape of the grille with the front valence. I'd never noticed that until they went out of their way to show me.) Nothing special, no contributed knowledge, and nothing there that anybody with a wallet and a set of wrenches couldn't do. No clever fixes, and no unexpectedly economical alternatives. Just hours and dollars. Blegh. The only info useful to a hobbyist was how horrifyingly labor-intensive AC ducting repair will be, should they be faced with that themselves.

And minus an extra star for patting themselves on the back over how superior their personal taste is to other people's.

The declared premise of the show is Wade's desirability as a stable single man with children and no negative divorce baggage. As "The Unicorn", the show was claimed to be about his attempts to re-enter and succeed in the dating world.

The actual show revolves around his intrusive, manipulative, passive-aggressive, unpleasant "friends", and how they relentlessly second-guess his decisions, and undercut each other. It's supposed to be a story about a nice guy. It's actually a constant argument for staying single for your entire life. Wade and his daughters are the only likeable characters. The rest of them are unbearable. I'll finish out season one (3 more eps), mostly out of inertia. But if it comes back for a season two, I'm unlikely to come with it.

I'll admit it had very funny moments. Stuff that made me laugh out loud, and often caught me by surprise.

But at the end of the day, and the end of the season, it's a discouraging story, with a discouraging ending. Generally, dark comedies show a humorous and sustaining message that hope is always possible, even when things seem their worst. This just says that it's all pointless and hopeless.

This episode is awesome. No contrived limits, no arbitrary time constraints, no obvious penny pinching, no bs. Just enthusiastic experts, and a straightforward depiction of transforming an extraterrestrial iron-nickel asteroid meteorite into a legitimate accurate 10th century sword.

(Note - if your cable/satellite provider's description has nonsense about a "true replica" of Excalibur and extraterrestrial aliens, ignore it. If was written by someone utterly clueless, and bears no resemblance to the actual content of the show.)

The central assumption is that atheists are actually sincere believers who are mad at god.

May as well make a series "exploring" the idea of sexual orientation cure, and tell "both sides"