Good times.

I just saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

This isn't exactly spoilery, but it is better to be safe...

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Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)

Aside from some asides, I felt that its pacing was better and I wasn't jarred out of it nearly as easily as I was with the first one.  Also, Smaug is beautiful.

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Ooh, is that out already? 'kimi and I are definitely going to see it at some point. Maybe over New Years since I've got a day off then…

It doesn't open until Friday around here.

It doesn't open 'til Friday here either.  I went to an early screening.

I'm going to go see it in D-Box.  ;)

You lucky koala. I am jealous of your furry self.

Who isn't?

So I'm catching up on all my TV series from the past couple of weeks.

Does anyone else watch Once Upon a Time? Because seriously. That show. THAT SHOW. I don't even know what to think about it anymore. It does mood whiplash better than anything in the history of ever. I have all the feels about it. ALL THE FEELS.

I saw Desolation of Smaug last week (in D-Box).  It was better than the first, better pacing as mentioned above.  The love story with the elf archer was a good add in, I thought.  The dwarf rolling in the barrel taking out orcs was pretty funny, as well as the quote from the child, "Why are there dwarves coming out of our toilet?"  The questions "Who is that ugly man?" and "Who is the mutant goblin?" when referring to the portrait of a wife and the child Gimli was also pretty funny.

Overall, I'd give the first Hobbit a "B+" rating, but this one was more of an "A" rating.

Yeah, I thought it did nicely for a "middle" movie. 'kimi really liked Smaug. But then, she's got this weird obsession with dragons.

I loved the Legolas bits, even if he and Tauriel didn't actually happen to be in the book. Orlando Bloom has really grown into that role from the fresh-out-of-acting-school kid that he was for LotR… so much so that it's almost like elves have regressive aging going on since he looks older in the "past" than he does in the "future" since they filmed things backwards, timeline-wise.

I thought Tauriel was a very good addition, and true to the tone of Tolkien in an otherwise male dominated cast.  The love triangle was a nice surprise, and I liked how they resolved it -- through Legolas' father's looking down on the Sylvan elf and finding her unworthy rather than based on love.  She added a fresh dimension to otherwise one-sided elven culture seen in the movies to date.

I really need to watch more LoTR apparently

I don't really have any spoilers for anything.

I am looking forward to the last episode of True Blood.  Maybe I should go and watch the rest of this season first.

The True Blood series is based on a series of books, I know that much.

No. It deviated from the Sookie Stackhouse books about 20 minutes into the first episode, and just kept going from there. As it stands, it basically only shares character names and some of the settings with the books.

Oh, then I've no idea about any of it at all.

Does anyone else think Orphan Black has really gone downhill?  Does anyone else here watch Orphan Black?

Anyone else watch Community?  Season 6 was surprisingly good with it being on Yahoo and all, and the last episode was a great ending for a great show.  All we need now is a movie!

This message was deleted by the player at 03:03, Fri 24 July 2015.

REgarding Sense8 again,

Kagura, were you at all frustrated by how the show portrayed no applications of the main characters' new abilities until the end of the third episode?

Not especially. The thing that frustrated me the most was actually the way that Will, Nomi, Lido and Riley got the most screen time early on, and Wolf, Kala, Sun and Caephus kept getting ignored. I'm hoping if there's a second season that we'll get to see more of the latter four.

It bothered me.

Perhaps this is the new normal. Maybe the assumption was made when plotting out this show that people would binge watch it on Netflix, sitting through at minimum of three episodes at a time. If so, I might have to give up television altogether.

Why did it bother you? I personally didn't mind because the time was spent developing who the characters are on their own. Their sensate abilities don't define them. For a show where the lines between characters will inevitably become blurred, I feel it's better to carefully delineate early on where one character's personality and abilities end and the next begins. Especially since we've got so many shows out there about people with special powers that don't take the time to tell us who these people are without their powers, and once they get them, their lives become defined by them. I'm glad Sense8 didn't do that.

If we hadn't had those first few episodes setting up the world, the characters, and the plot, I think the show would have been very boring indeed. We'd basically have one flat, amorphous main character that is the "pod" and just so happens to be represented by eight people around the world doing... things that we're not really sure about the background or motivation behind while being chased by a mysterious antagonist and assisted(?) by a similarly mysterious mentor-figure.

Bottom line: Sense8 isn't about eight people with a superpower. It's about eight people. Full stop.