Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Somehow I didn’t review LOVM seasons 1 or 2 so I’m going to do all three seasons at once. The Legend of Vox Machina is an adaptation of campaign one of Critical Role, an Actual Play streamed D&D game with a bunch of self-proclaimed nerdy-assed voice actors that started as a birthday present for one of them, grew into a regular home game, then a steamed AP, then a creative and gaming giant in its own right. Next March will be their tenth anniversary as a streamed game. By the end of season three we’ve had 36 episodes and a bit under 18 hours of animation. We’re also, depending on how you look at it, either at episode 85 or 100 of the show. That’s over 350-400 hours of content compressed into Blindspot for a lot of campaign 1 and the start of campaign 2 and was frequently away. But she’s available throughout the filming of this, and present a lot more. She does have a bit of season 1 where she goes away and comes back through astral projection at a critical moment - that mirrors ...

To start, some caveats. First, the amount I know about making a TV show could comfortably be written on a postcard, possibly a stamp. If I paraphrased that advice to writers and “made what I know” it might turn into a TV show shaped thing, but what works for me is not necessarily mainstream enough to be a success. Second, I’m a self-confessed rugby tragic. I’ll routinely watch five, and sometimes up to eight games of rugby over a weekend. There are people who watch more, absolutely, but this show could be terrible and I’m still going to keep watching rugby. Bearing those things in mind, I have to wonder who the target audience for this show is. It’s hard for me to judge the show as a casual fan or someone who doesn’t know anything about rugby but I struggle to see how what we see here translates into enough of an understanding of the game to let you watch the forthcoming Men’s Six Nations (that starts on Friday as I post this) and appreciate the game. As a tragic, while I appreciate so...

In case you’ve missed The Traitors (and I didn’t watch season 1, there are other versions around the world, this is about the UK version) the essential format is a game of Werewolf, Blink Murder, or Among Us - there’s a bunch of traitors who try to murder the others, the faithful, while the faithful try to work out who the traitors are. There is a big cash prize, all the players have to work together to win build the prize pot up. If any traitors are left standing, they take it all home, otherwise it’s shared among the faithful. Apparently in Season 1 of the UK show the faithful won, in all the previously aired shows across the UK, Australia and the US, this is the only time this has happened. What makes this a bit different, apart from the chance to win a chunk of up to £120,000 (they actually played for £95,150 in the end), is that the players go to a nice remote bit of Scotland and live and play together for a up to a fortnight. It’s not playing with your friends, several rounds in...

Trigger Warning This story deals with a clearly fictional world: there’s no British Air Force, it’s the Royal Air Force, the country the story is partially set in doesn’t exist - but it doesn’t take more than a cursory knowledge of geopolitics to work out who it is meant to be. The story also questions how nation states decide organisations are terrorists and what that means. It didn’t bother me at the time but it did make me think afterwards and it’s quite a live discussion right now, so it might be more of an issue for you. Vigil season two is a clear follow-up to season one, but instead of the closed world of a nuclear submarine, we have an RAF squadron that flies drones, attack drones with an AI element as part of a late stage equipment trial. Amy and Kirsten are still happily together. Kirsten is pregnant, Amy is massively overprotective and exactly how you react to that will vary I’m sure. I have sufficiently complicated feelings about it that I strongly suspect it’s based on s...

Lupin is back and getting up to his old tricks. It’s been a year since the end of part two within the show, two years on Netflix, possibly more in France, courtesy of Covid. Assane has spent most of that time in hiding and comes up with a plan to get his wife and son away from the ridiculous pressure they’re under as he remains one of France’s most wanted criminals. In terms of format, we have very much the same structure as in the previous parts: a daring caper and then a Leverage style explanation of the more unlikely components. It felt to me for most of the season that we were missing the social commentary that Lupin had sprinkled throughout the previous parts, but it does rear up with a vengeance in a few episodes. The episodes feel oddly structured, both for Netflix and anglophone TV. Stories spill from one episode into the next, then finish part way through it. Not every time, but often enough it feels jarring and sets an expectation of odd pacing. You get what ought to be ac...

I bet you thought I’d forgotten you! I have been reading a lot and half paying attention to random videos on YouTube, or rewatching all of Sense8 which I’m not going to review beyond “it still makes me smile and is a balm to my psyche.” On to the real review. In season one, Stupid Wife pushed my limits with its amnesia trope that certainly up there in my list of story lines I hate that still this side of the nope-line stories. On the other side of the line you have all the yucky things like incest and so on. I can imagine shows around most of the yucky topics I might watch, but they’re not going to be pitched as sexy, fun shows. To be honest, if not for lesbian YouTube raving about it, I’d have probably bounced, which would have been a shame but I liked season one despite the central premise. Season two picks up a bit after the end of season one. Luiza is a bit battered, but ok, and things between her and Valentina are not perfect but are in a much better, and generally improving,...

The very short review of this film is “gorgeous but WTF was that?” I have read, although a long time ago, a translation of the book (which was the first complete release of the story) and, like a lot of fairy stories, the original is a LOT darker than the Disney movie for example (although some of the weird bits of the Disney film come from the book more or less intact), and some of that darkness comes through clearly. The scene where Pinocchio first comes to life felt pretty familiar for example and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 19th century Italian story, the heavy Catholicism in this adaptation felt familiar too. However, I’m pretty sure Collodi didn’t predict the first and second world wars, the rise of Mussolini and the like, but Il Duce is a character we see as del Toro's obsession with fascism coming through. This takes the story into almost pure del Toro, I say almost pure because there are easter eggs from the original thrown in. Why is the boy Pinocchio befriends calle...

There’s a totally spoiler-free review which is facile, and a mostly spoiler free review that still gives plenty to enjoy but gives some more context. First up, spoiler-free: Hot Brazilian lesbians. Enjoy. We’re left on a cliffhanger so I hope there will be another season (they made a Christmas special, which is officially listed as a second season) but I’m not sure. This is a tiny web show and whether they can make another season or they’ll move on to another project remains to be seen. Also, a friendly warning: you’ll be using subtitles unless your conversational Brazilian Portuguese is really up to speed. I speak just enough classical Portuguese to recognise a tiny amount of what they’re saying and, now, to recognise more words that have deviated from what I learnt. But there’s absolutely no way I can follow what’s going on here, it really is odd words, and I probably wouldn’t have started to catch them without the subtitles. Mild Spoilers from here on We start with a group of f...

Hot Skull is, obviously, a Turkish TV dystopian drama. Couldn’t you tell from the title? One of the things I love about Netflix is that they bring shows from other cultures to us. Squid Game, Dark, Lupin, Cracow Monsters, Biohackers, Sexify, Dark Desires, the Rain, Queen of the South, 3% and more are all shows I’ve seen and largely enjoyed from around the world courtesy of Netflix. Even when they haven’t necessarily been great TV (I’m not going to name names here), it’s usually great to see how other cultures create their stories. In particular, four of those, along with Hot Skull are dystopian series (I might have a type, and Netflix might make good predictions of that) but once you strip away the “this is our disaster, this is how we’re coping” there is still a chunk of “and this is how (in the case of Hot Skull ) Turks view a dystopia that is different to Germans, Poles, Danes, Koreans and, of course, Brits (and in cases not listed Americans). To me those differences are fascina...

Let’s start this review with the three big elephants in the room. Avatar was fairly criticised for its white saviour dialogue. While I’m not the best one to judge all the ins and outs of that trope (I’m a lousy saviour but I’m certain white), it certainly feels like they tried to both correct that and address it to some extent. People are boycotting ATWOW for the sins of the past, which is up to them, but it doesn’t seem like this film deserves to bd boycotted on its own merits. The wait for “the technology to be good enough.” There is a lot of water and a lot of CGI and water in CGI has been janky for a long time but that has improved recently - more computing power and tied to that better CGI around animating water have come along in the last five years or so. Here we have the Reef Na'vi and their marine animals that they interact with in the way the Forest Na'vi of the original interacted with the “dragons” and land animals of the forest. Of course that means both underwa...

This is Korean rom com that takes, as the rather unlikely basis for its romance, BDSM. A young career woman has never found romance. When the hot new man with the remarkably similar name transfers into her department she’s as interested as all the other women, but figures she has no chance. That similarity in names gives us the delayed meet-cute - a package for him is given to her by a lazy guy in the post room, she doesn’t check properly and opens it to find… a heavily studded collar. He tries to pass it off as a dog collar, and might have got away with it, but the box spills and a flyer for the BDSM place comes out. After some miscommunication, she realises she’s interested, he admits he would very much like to submit to her and they sign a temporary D/s contract. Although she’s a n00b, she’s diligent in her research. His level of experience is unclear - he’s clearly got more of a clue but while he’s shown at times to be what I’d consider to be a pretty heavy pain slut, deeply ...

This show deserves multiple trigger warnings for bullying, bullying of a sexual nature, sexual blackmail and extreme body horror. I expected the last one of those, it’s a zombie TV series, the others I will discuss relatively shortly but I need to say they almost made me stop watching and they’re not super-strong triggers for me, so if they are for you, I’d seriously steer clear. Relatively hot on the heels of Squid Game Korea and Netflix gives us All Of Us Are Dead a zombie drama set, in part, in a high school but spreading into the wider city as well. We have fast, smart zombies, always a lethal combination and the transformation is combined with spectacular body horror level contortions after someone is infected. The transformations en masse tick all the horror tropes, and impact, you’d want. But because the transformation takes a while from infection to turning into zombie it has moments of massive pathos as characters we’ve grown to like slowly change before our eyes. The hig...