holy shit i forgot how awful episode 7 was.

its funny how season 1's eps 1-6 are basically a mini-season and then 7 on are clearly part of another mini-season.

ok a few things

im rewatching sandman. its still fucking great.

season 2 is well under way and should air in fall of 2024. they switched to a 'volume' style of production as opposed to seasons so expect like 5 to 6 episode volumes moving forward.

so season 2 rings of power already has a bodycount; a horse dropped dead on set. apparently was in full battle gear etc.

noteworthy because im old enough to remember hbo's "Luck".

yeah not enough has been said about how RoP really is a child of the lockdown. there was probably a literal single phone call where the lockdown was lifted, netflix stock started to wither, and bezos just exhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose and said 'you know what, fuck it, just do it' and that was that. there really is a point where so much money and so much ego have polluted a project that its unredeemable but if you have bezos money, you just let the chips fall where they may.

i think about bezos' only real comment on the state of the show being 'they ignored my suggestions' a lot.

I'll just throw random theories here.

I think a reason why a lot of shows suck today is because even when they've added more token characters, they're a still getting the same superficial treatment. It's just an ensemble cast where everyone has the depth of an extra plus. No one cares what happens to them and random external features that align with the viewer just aren't enough to create any kind of connection.

And then there's the part about shit arcs with nonexistent stakes. There's not that much growth when the starting point is omnipotent from the start to the end. You obv can work around the fact that the white hat isn't likely to die, but if that's given why waste everyone's time pretending like that's on the table. That's why traditional heroes are "punished" by going after their loved ones. It's how serialized shows functioned forever.

For random theories I don't know why AAA titles fall short with everything related to audiovisual media. The other side of the aisle believes some combination of propaganda and variation of coastal elite stuff. My best guess is just nepotism and lazy FOTM type of a thingie. Sort of access, virtue signaling, shit market research and the incompetence that follows when creatives only tick the first 3 boxes. Obv funding needs to believe that ticking few of those boxes is enough for profit. For the most part that's gone now. It takes a few years to get through the backlog, but after that once excess capital has evaporated, funding will return back to expecting returns.

To a degree pandemic was the perfect storm for this. Who would have guessed, that when more people are stuck indoors, more people would be interested in streaming services. Combine that with mildly retarded economic policy that mostly increases excess capital with limited non retarded investment opportunities and here we are. The positive spin being that maybe we got through this phase faster than it would have "naturally" taken?

Still no idea how RoP was released to the masses in the state it was. It's just weird to me when the source material is giving you everything that would appease fans, tards focused with diversity and enough things to attract toddlers, you would just decide to not do that and instead a studio would let you go for random virtue signaling with subpar community theater execution. $1b is just enough to cover maybe the first two seasons. Amazon paid for 5 seasons and it could be cost effective to do 3 seasons depending on the contracts, but the show is looking to towards breaking even or just taking a small loss. The first season was enough to paint it to a corner. I can't think of anything they could do to get to black.

how much do you want to bet Hooper quits the project or just walks away, gets her check, and bows out of season 3 due to 'commitments elsewhere'.

A curiously synergistic addition to this thread;

‘THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER’ Season 2 will have an all-female directing team. This includes returning director Charlotte Brändström as well as Sanaa Hamri (‘The Wheel of Time’) and Louise Hooper (‘The Sandman’).

its sad because that actress is going to need a _lifetime_ of therapy over these reviews which means shes going to be too busy to spit in my mouth.




​

like this feels like what would happen if someone was given a billion dollars to dedicate some random king james bible chapter to film and a dozen writers were like 'ok look job one is to make this weird ass hallucinatory wives tale make sense' and their boss leapt out of his chair and pounded his fist against the table and screamed "ABSOLUTELY NOT".

so far my favorite tidbit about this show by far is the actror playing giladriel having to seek out trauma therapy.

literally the screening audiences were probably just a handful of friends / celebrities / celebrifriends of bezos.

get them.

HoD just keeps getting better and I'll hazard a guess that the first season is very rewatchable, because they don't waste time. There's almost no filler in the show. They covered 20 years in the first 9 EPs with ease. I have no idea what happened with RoP. Sometimes it was few days and other times months. Erasing not hobbits and not Gandalf would've had no impact to the story. At best those were a shitty setup for S2 payoff.

The greatest merit of RoP is teaching how physics/biology work in the Middle-Earth. I didn't know that's how volcanoes work. I've learned a lot about genetics. Apparently multiculturalism is a the norm for every city/faction/race except orcs. Something that only happened in trade ports and/or a consequence of slavery/mercenaries in the olden times. How it applies to fantasy settings follows the logic that it was that way because it was practical. To this day were fairly tribal, but we have more reasons/benefits for multicultural cities/countries.

I think I originally rated RoP 4/10. 3 points for Tolkien adjacent and 1 point for not being a complete dumpster fire. At this point Tolkien points are at 1 and dumpster fire score is 0.5. So far they've ripped 100 odd lines/scenes from Jackson trilogies. Butchered most of them. What ever original content they've brought to the table has been hilariously retarded. Most of the shots are a combination of CGI/plastic and it shows. The best scenes are the ones where there's no dialogue and preferably no characters. They did ok with backgrounds. The score on it's own is ok.

The biggest mystery box is still how it got released. Someone must have read the scripts. There must have been screenings. How? Was it some random nepotism thing with a mix of emperor's new clothes? Blackmail/extortion? New drugs in the market? Variety of mental illnesses? All of the above?

Also what the fuck is up with using technicolor blue/red in otherwise desaturated scenes? It can't be the only way they know how to draw the eye to relevant characters/objects. Is it somehow possible they successfully assembled a team so consistently mediocre that they were all proud of the end product? Oh, why do they think they're the only ones that watched the Jackson trilogy? We know Celeborn and Isildur are alive.

hod is absolutely better than got. im sorry i just dont see what they can do in the next hour to fuck up its legacy. got's achilles heal was its inability to stay focused on anything for an entire episode, it always seemed to have half a dozen plates spinning at once. hod feels linear and patient and attentive and articulate where got was really never any of those things for longer than a few minutes.

im very curious to see what sort of decisions they make re how long the 'dance of dragons' will be. obviously there is a mountain of source material to work with but honestly things do get a little dry once we move past the current principles. there are abooooout id say 7 generations (super rough eyeball guestimate) between now and ned stark handing jon snow a direwolf puppy.

and just keeping it a hundo a lot of those kings are fucking boring. but id still like to see them somehow cover the whole 200 year stretch. like lets just do it, fuck it.

also next week is the season finale and i said it before and im saying it again; holy shit tv is a wasteland again after that and i might have to start posting more market oriented content again