Random movie and tv thoughts


JackFetch

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And yet it's still better than Man of Steel, IMO. Which is the sad thing.

Superman Returns is a horribly flawed superhero movie, but it is still a superhero movie in the end, unlike Man of Steel, which is a highly mediocre character drama that turns into a generic alien invasion movie. Sure, MOS doesn't have the bizarre stupid moments of SR, but it also has no real personality. It's just monotone seriousness all the time. SR has problems, but I can still watch that movie and recognize it as being Superman. Man of Steel is almost deliberately un-Superman, as if it's ashamed of what it is.

And in any case, the Superman Returns plane scene is easily one of the greatest movie superhero moments of all time. My personal favorite, in fact.

The bit where he stops the bullet, with his eye, is also cool.

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How I Met Your Mother spoilers:

So, the last episode of How I Met Your Mother is up there with Battlestar Galactica in that it's a great finale... up until the last five minutes. Robin/Ted is dumb and it should feel dumb! You kill the mom and divorce Barney and Robin just to bring up back to Robin/Ted. Yeah, no. Just... no.

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How I Met Your Mother spoilers:

So, the last episode of How I Met Your Mother is up there with Battlestar Galactica in that it's a great finale... up until the last five minutes. Robin/Ted is dumb and it should feel dumb! You kill the mom and divorce Barney and Robin just to bring up back to Robin/Ted. Yeah, no. Just... no.

I'm going to preface this by stating that I have always enjoyed this show. At its best it was incredibly clever and even when it was not as good as it could be, it was always a fun hangout comedy.The entire premise of the show that we were promised for nine years, though, was that this was Ted's journey towards his life with the Mother. Instead, he meets the Mother, she dies, and he winds up with Robin. The Mother is presented to us as a pit stop on the way to the woman that the show built up early on as the best thing Ted ever ran across, and that is HUGELY disrespectful to the very idea of what this show was meant to be.

That said, this will always remain a show that I really, really like, and the ending that rubbed me the wrong way is not going to ruin it.

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HIMYM finale reaction:

Holy shit.

1: This show went on for way too many seasons, and it's obvious that the last 4-ish years have just been spinning the wheels, so to speak.
2. This entire last season was sweet, but ultimately useless.
3: I never bought Barney/Robin at all as a romantic couple. Drinking buddies til the end, but never romantic. So I buy that they ultimately don't work out. But then they shouldn't have spent AN ENTIRE SEASON ON THEM.
4. I like the ending a lot. I don't think it belittles Tracy's importance, or that it says "Robin was the real 'one' for Ted." If anything, the finale says that life is complicated, and nothing is really that straightforward. In the pilot, Ted is convinced that the stereotypical true love life-completing romance is real, but by the finale he's grown. Yes, he finds the woman who will be the mother of his children, but life is ultimately a lot more complicated than that. And that's fine.

Robin/Ted is dumb and it should feel dumb! You kill the mom and divorce Barney and Robin just to bring up back to Robin/Ted. Yeah, no. Just... no.

See, I think Ted/Robin has been great since day one and Barney/Robin is really dumb. But they should have justified it in the story better. Like, for instance, not spending an entire season on Barney and Robin's wedding.

Also, am I the only one who got a Kingdom Come vibe? You know, Lois Lane is long dead, so Superman gets together with Wonder Woman in their old age?

The entire premise of the show that we were promised for nine years, though, was that this was Ted's journey towards his life with the Mother. Instead, he meets the Mother, she dies, and he winds up with Robin. The Mother is presented to us as a pit stop on the way to the woman that the show built up early on as the best thing Ted ever ran across, and that is HUGELY disrespectful to the very idea of what this show was meant to be.

I feel like that's a bit unfair. Yes, the show didn't behave exactly as expected to. But that doesn't make it wrong or in any way disrespectful. They pretty much laid it out in the finale: life is complicated, and sometimes it doesn't work out exactly the way you'd think, but that doesn't mean it can't still be wonderful.

And ultimately, Tracy still fulfilled her role, and then some. Not only did she meet Ted and be the mother to his children, but she taught him an important lesson about life. Basically, she taught Ted that meeting the perfect girl and making her the epicenter of his universe wasn't the only important thing in life. Which is the exact lesson that Ted needed to learn, going all the way back to the pilot.

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How I Met Your Mother is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. I didn't start watching it when it premiered, but with the fourth season in 2008. It was my first year of college, I had a history paper to write over a weekend, and I needed a way to procrastinate. Having heard of the show, I started watching it from the first season and was immediately hooked. I pretty much caught up over that weekend and from then on watched the show every week. I recommended it to my best friend and ever since, it's been a weekly topic of discussion and the source of endless references. I've re-watched the entire series at least five times. Basically, this show means as much to me as a TV show can. And I'm fine with the last five minutes. But let me say, I can't deny that there's a little cheapness in those last five minutes and that I completely understand why people would hate them. And with the context of the finale, they could have spent a lot more of Season 9 fleshing out Ted and Tracy's relationship rather than spending time on a wedding that would ultimately end in divorce. But I don't feel betrayed. In Season 1, Ted said he didn't want perfect, he wanted Robin. In a number of flash forwards, such as "The Exploding Meatball Sub," Robin was shown without her wedding ring. While I did buy Barney and Robin as a couple and I do think they loved each other, Robin herself said that they wouldn't work when he proposed. They didn't just save the ending in the drawer since Season 2, they did subtly hint towards it. And while I thought Cristin Milioti was fantastic and that Tracy was great, I personally wouldn't have found an ending with her and Ted together satisfying. She's too perfect a match. I do think that she was a match for Ted though, and that he loved her; Lily even says that Ted's reaction wasn't like his other relationships. And yes, I can't deny that those last five minutes make it seem like Tracy was just a stepping stone to a life with Robin. But after six years and nine seasons with Ted and Robin, seeing it come back again and again to the two of them after relationship after relationship, still feeling an emotional gut punch after all these years during their conversation last week, I can't see it ending any other way. But again, I admit that they could have done a much better job executing it and that I completely understand why people hate it.

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So while laying in bed with the flu, with nothing better to do, I've been thinking of how to keep the original ending. I did like the finale but I do agree that that was not the way to go. Here's a few of my thoughts as how to restructure the season to have that ending be more viable.
1. Have the wedding take place over the first 13 episodes. Get rid of the filler. Last scene of episode 14 is The Mother seeing Ted, as a callback to season 1 with Victoria, who you may know as the first choice for the Mother in the early days of the show.
2. The rest of the season will be the married life of Barney and Robin. Show why their marriage could fall apart. Parallel to that is the love story of Ted and the Mother. Tracy's illness will have a little more foreshadowing beyond having Ted cry at the mention of "a mother who won't be able to see her daughter's wedding"
3. Establish that at that point in their lives, Ted and Robin's feelings for each other is totally platonic. That's how I chose to interpret the end. They didn't want their best friend to end up alone.
I'm not 100% sure with this since the key moment is "and that's how I met your mother" but that's what I came up with.

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I like it EXCEPT I really hate when someone decides that the "Humans only use 10% of their brain" means that we would be psychic if we used more. It doesn't work like that. If that was true and someone were to somehow actively use 100% of their brain, then congrats, they better remember to make themselves breathe and beat their heart and any other number of involuntary actions that your brain is in control of. As is, you do use almost all of your brain at all times. If we didn't, evolution would have decreased the size of it by now considering how many resources go into. We're talking 20% of your energy for something that barely makes up 2% of your mass.

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I like it EXCEPT I really hate when someone decides that the "Humans only use 10% of their brain" means that we would be psychic if we used more. It doesn't work like that.

I agree with that, but for different reasons. There is literally no scientific basis for that statement; it is 100% an urban legend. We use all of our brain, as actual brain scans will show. Different portions gets used more or less at different times, but we are always essentially working at 100% efficiency, barring any unusual physical limitations.

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I like it EXCEPT I really hate when someone decides that the "Humans only use 10% of their brain" means that we would be psychic if we used more. It doesn't work like that.

I agree with that, but for different reasons. There is literally no scientific basis for that statement; it is 100% an urban legend. We use all of our brain, as actual brain scans will show. Different portions gets used more or less at different times, but we are always essentially working at 100% efficiency, barring any unusual physical limitations.

I was just coming in to post the sae, according to Neil Degrasse Tyson that notion was based on a works of fiction, I forget who it was attributed to but it's definitely false.

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