[Weekly Update] When do you give up on a show/movie?

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CHANNEL UPDATE

Our next video will be releasing in a few days. It'll be a 20 minute long video in which I recommend 8 different Chinese movies from 2023. They aren't necessary the best movies of the year, but all of them are worth checking out.

Work on the Steven Seagal video has begun. And oh boy, the outline itself is long enough to be a 10 minute video. The more I read about him, the crazier things get. Thanks for voting for the topic. My eyeballs have never been this clean because I have to wash them every two hours after staring at the grease ball for too long.

We have nothing new to the schedule yet. I'm still planning on doing a poll in the near future. And I have not decided what to talk about for our bonus video. As a reminder, I'll also be taking January off. I hope you all have a great winter and a nice break as well!

MEDIA TALK

Last week, while editing our video, I attempted to catch up with a few shows and movies that I missed. These are all stuffs that requires minimal attention from me, so I can have them in the background while I work. And it just so happened that nearly everything I watched made me want to give up on them.

Let's start with a movie: Blue Beetle. While I have no interests in the film, I heard good things about it. The movie sits at an impressive 78 critic score and 91 audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Once again, RT is the odd one out like it always does, because every other website puts it at a mediocre 60%.

I can see why this film is entertaining to some. Critics say that the focus on family is the highlight, which I supposed is true. The banter between family members sound real. And I can see people from a large family find it relatable. However, I will say the banter only feels real in its words, but not its emotions. The protagonist is in mortal danger, and the uncle or mom or sister would make light of the situation, rather than express any kind of realistic concern. Every character reacts like a filmgoer who is way too familiar with the superhero genre. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think The Flash expresses more believable familial love. And that is damning

It is the safest form of superhero entertainment with a tried-true-and-expired formula. If you are a casual filmgoer, the film may be solidly entertaining. But if you watched all of the superhero movies released in the past 20 years, then you can understand why I gave up and stopped watching when the bug robot farted sometime around the beginning of act 3.

I also finally watched season 3 of The Boys, in anticipation of season 4. I did finish the entire season, but only just.

The satirical commentary in S3 feels... off. I think the main reason is that much of its jokes are making fun of specific real life people or events. This is in contrast to the first two season, where it mostly satirizes long term cultural trends and political shifts in the US. Put it in another way, the first two season feels very much like classic satires that make you rethink a problem from a different perspective. S3 on the other hand, feels about as sharp-witted as a Saturday Night Live sketch. It's mostly just about caricatures. It is merely copying reality without copying the discussion surrounding it.

By this point, The Boys also became kinda routine and low risk. Characters die and come back. People loses their power and gets it again. McMuffin jr. loves you for an episode and then hates you and then loves you again. The introduction of temp-V also robs the series half of its hook and premise. Clearly, it doesn't plan on going anywhere drastic. If we are not going, I 'm not following.

The opposite problem applies to Invincible, sort of. I only watched a few episodes of season 2, and I might come back to finish it later.

Anyway, Invincible takes a big risk by giving its pacifist protagonist a violent saiyan side. Yeah that's probably where the inspiration came from. No doubt, the series want to explore the topic of nature vs nurture, and have Invincible redeem himself later. Which is fair.

But the problem is Invincible never handled violence all that well, especially compared to The Boys. The train scene from the first season is a good example of this. It was a big emotional moment where we should be feeling the pain of a young hero, yet the animation clearly wants us to enjoy the spectacle of violence. This tonal mismatch ruins the supposedly shock of Invincible having a dark side. The tension deflates.

Invincible has a lot of potential, so I hope it picks back up again.

Well, that was a lot more rambling than I originally planned. I still have a few other shows I gave up on that I can talk about, but I think I'll save those for another time. Here is my question for you: Have you given up on a show, or stopped watching a movie half way through? I'm curious to know your experience!

See you in a few days with a new video!