Tag: observations

Netflix’s greatest accomplishment

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

They made Iron Fist cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those nerds who automatically assume Iron Fist to be the worst show out of the Netflix Marvel Comics Universe solely because it’s about Iron Fist, one of the lamest heroes in the history of Marvel Comics.  Frankly, I thought season one wasn’t terrible, and I maintain my unpopular stance that it was stronger than either season of Jessica Jones. 

In the grand spectrum of the Netflix MCU, both are still at the bottom of the barrel in comparison to Daredevil, Luke Cage and the Punisher, but we all know that they all had to exist and be created in order for there to even be a The Defenders in the first place.  But if you ask me, Iron Fist stands above Jessica Jones, and it’s not really that much of a contest.

But I just finished season 2 of Iron Fist, and my general reaction isn’t one of relief that I ground through it and that I’m up-to-date on Netflix MCU programming (like I did after Jessica Jones S2), but one of a general satisfaction, and reason to be optimistic that the series could continue in a positive direction in the upcoming season(s) that I genuinely hope come to existence someday.

Frankly, unending kudos go to Netflix, the writers and the showrunners for taking such a weak property and molding and shaping a halfway decent program out of it.  It was undoubtedly better than the first season, and the performances from the crew were all pretty decent in their capacities.  I can’t say that I really followed the comics at all, but from what I understand the season has been a somewhat fair portrayal of source materials while seeming fresh enough to adapt to live performances.

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Another Dragon*Con in the books, another year of future uncertainty

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By now, I’m pretty sure I’ve written the same post a few times over, over the last few years, as another Dragon*Con is now in the rearview mirror, and I’m left pondering on whether or not I want to go the next year, if the con is still something for a person like me, and wondering just what the heck is different between myself from absolutely everyone else who also goes, but still thinks it’s the greatest event in the world.

This isn’t to say that I thought Dragon*Con 2018 was terrible or bad by any stretch of the imagination; quite the contrary, I did enjoy myself several times throughout the weekend, I treasure the time spent with the friends that I saw, have remorse for the idea of not seeing other friends swept away in different waves amongst the alleged 75,000-82,000 attendees throughout the weekend, and I took some pictures here and there.

As we know, Dragon*Con is by no means an economical event, and if the whole experience weren’t over $700 a year, it’s kind of a no-brainer that there’s still merit to going year-in, year-out.  One of the things I often pondered if simply getting older and having life priorities shifting around has something to do with my perpetually declining enjoyment of the convention, but seeing as how there are plenty of people who are older than me, with children and/or much later stages in their lives who still think it’s the best event in the world, this is a theory that holds no weight and alternatively points at the notion that my brain the one with the hang-ups, not my age.

But as I stand now, a day removed from the convention, and having had some time to decompress and try and gather my thoughts, I’m once again left in the position on wondering if I want to bother going again next year, and teetering on that seesaw of leaning towards no.  Granted, that’s pretty much been the case every year for the last like 2-3 Dragon*Cons I’d been to, including the one before the one I took off to go cruising in Europe alternatively, but the fact of the matter is that I keep having these thoughts, because I keep seeing this pattern of wanting to go to this event that costs a lot of money and I’m not having nearly as much enjoyment out of it as I hoped I would versus the fear of missing out and letting that be one of my primary impulses to going regardless.

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Being unsatisfied is what being a wrestling fan is all about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since I don’t have cable television anymore, I can’t watch RAW or Smackdown anymore.  I keep up with storylines primarily by the convenient litany of condensed highlight packages that YouTube channels generate that have extremely short shelf lives before the WWE Internet Police™ gets them all taken down.  But by the good graces of a close friend, I have WWE Network access, and I’m still able to enjoy NXT on a weekly basis, as well as the monthly pay-per-view shows, that are the culmination of each month’s storylines.

There are lots of weekends where during the evenings, I find myself with a dearth of things to do, and I think to myself, “man, I wish this were [name of WWE ppv] weekend.  Now would be the best time to sit back and enjoy some wrestling.”  But because it isn’t, I ultimately end up laying on the couch and playing Fire Emblem Heroes on my phone, and wonder why it’s suddenly 11 p.m. and that I should probably get ready to get some rest for work or a Sunday morning jog.

And then there are weekends like this past one, where it was in fact, SummerSlam weekend, where wrestling fans not only were privy to watching the annual SummerSlam, but by virtue of being a big show, also NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn 4, on Saturday night.

It goes without saying that fans like me look forward to the NXT show more than the main roster show, but frankly, there were reasons to be optimistic for SummerSlam as well.  Smarks probably looked forward to matches like AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe, based on their history of solid matches in Ring of Honor and ironically, TNA, and the Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler match seemed like a sleeper show stealer, since both guys are obsessed with trying to steal the show.  Personally, I was looking forward to the Daniel Bryan vs. the Miz match, since it was clearly one of the storylines that has been slowly built for years, and could have been one of the more entertaining matches on the card.

Smarks also probably bemoaned the presence of matches like Brock vs. Roman #68, Jeff Hardy vs. Shinsuke Nakamura because Jeff Hardy is old and busted now, and personally I didn’t want to see the inevitable squashing of Alexa Bliss at the hands of Ronda Rousey.  But maybe that one is just me.

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The sociological entertainment of Crazy Rich Asians

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As someone who agrees that Hollywood is whiter than a Republican national fundraiser, I knew it was something of a social obligation that I should go out and watch Crazy Rich Asians.  I never read the book, nor did I have any inkling of an idea of what the plot was about going into it, but I still figured it would be a good idea to support any progression for Asians in a white-dominated industry, if we want to have any modicum of a chance of earning any respect up in this motherfucker.

The movie itself was fine.  Fairly predictable and extremely formulaic, but refreshing in the simple sense that every face didn’t look like Finn Wittrock or Balakey Lively.  Constance Wu carries the film brilliantly, and it’s super gratifying to hear her speak in her actual voice and not as over-the-top tiger mom from Fresh Off the Boat.  I didn’t even realize it was her until seeing her name in the credits although I thought she looked familiar, but Michelle Yeoh’s presence as a cunningly savage rich Asian mom is like an anime where you can feel an aura emanating from her whenever she comes on screen.

It kind of goes without saying that I rolled my eyes at the casting of some hafu named “Henry Golding” as the male lead of the flim, when surely it most certainly could have been cast to an actual Chinese or other Asian guy that didn’t look like a cross between Lawrence from Westworld and a young Ralph Macchio.  But seeing as how this film was being released in white Hollywood (oxymoron?), there had to be some compromise to make sure white power had some degree of a tether to their oppressive natures.  But it’s okay, because as bland and useless of a character Nick Young was, the film had no intention of being carried by him in the first place.

There’s one character in the film whose storyline carries almost zero correlation with the main plot at all, and could presumably not been needed at all whatsoever.  I’m going to assume it’s vastly different in the book and has more of a connection, but for the film’s sake, I’m going to assume it was included probably solely because the actress involved in it is somewhat known, extremely pretty, and needs to have requisite screen time in order to justify her casting.

As for the rest of the film, it had some fun characters and was moderately enjoyable, even with the obnoxious people in the theater, to where I couldn’t decide which was worse between the incessant commentary in Mandarin from the girls next to me, or the incessant commentary from the stereotypical black women who felt the need to very loudly opinionate on everything.

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I wonder what Korean moms think about Mina Kimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever I see Mina Kimes on ESPN, I often stop and watch for a minute or two, before I realize that I’m always another minute or two from being bombarded by Stephen A. Smith and then regret my decision and walk away.  The thing is, I’m intrigued by Mina Kimes and I guess it could be interpreted as like an innocuous celebrity crush.  She is after all pretty, however she’s also really well-versed in sports, but where I know her the most from is her long-form writing for ESPN Magazine that’s one of the few things about the glorified NFL Ocho brand that I actually stop and enjoy.

I’ve actually met Mina Kimes briefly before; more like said a few words to her, while she was interviewing mythical gf back in 2015 when we were at the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational in Florida.  I had no idea who she was then and I kind of didn’t believe her when she identified herself as an ESPN writer because it was a little unbelievable that they actually had female employees that weren’t Erin Andrews or Rachel Nichols since their own bro-culture is very well documented, but she claimed to be gathering interviews and information about SK Telecom fans and eSports in general, and mythical gf being dressed as SKT-skin Zyra was an easy target to interview.

Months later, the article dropped, primarily centered around SK Telecom’s superstar player, Faker.  Although mythical gf’s contributions are merged into the context of the story, it’s abundantly clear that Mina Kimes was in fact a real ESPN writer, and the article itself was an enjoyable read, especially as someone who loves long-form storytelling.

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Cloak & Dagger is obviously Marvel’s C-squad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not going to pretend like I’ve ever read any of the comics, but given the track record of decent television shows, I looked forward to Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, and figured I could figure out what was going on from just the show with no prior familiarity of them from comic books.

However, there were some red flags for me that I kind of knew of going into the show, and although I did make it through the first season, I have to say that I’m not really that impressed as a whole, and if I had to rank the show it is a definitive last place behind most all other Marvel television shows out there.

For starters, the show aired on the Freeform network.  I didn’t even know that that network even still existed; I knew it did at one point, because there must’ve been one show that I saw while channel surfing in the past when I used to have cable television, but for the most part, it’s a no-name cable channel, and it should have been some sort of indication of the quality of the programming, even if it did have the Marvel name printed in front of it.

Going blind into this show worked against me in this instance, because I lacked any “Oh! That’s so-and-so” moments that tended to keep me engaged and interested in just about any other Marvel property show previously seen.  That being said, the first two episodes of the show were a complete slog, and I was wholly uninterested in the characters and plot. 

I stopped watching after the first two episodes, citing a poor mood to be watching new television, and told myself to give it one more episode before giving it the Legion treatment AKA walking away before feeling like I’m wasting my time.  The third episode was on the verge of making me throw in the towel, but then the plot started to get interesting in the final eight minutes of the episode, which saved it from abandonment, and then the fourth episode finally started to get somewhere and kept it watchable.  But with a ten-episode season, it literally takes 40% of the season for it to become watchable.

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This will probably be the best ppv of the year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the thought that crossed my mind when Stephanie McMahon announced the women-only Evolution special, set to air in October.  I get that such isn’t saying that much since the ppvs of the year have been kind of lackluster, but I state such acknowledging the genuine importance and historical significance of the WWE embarking on a women-only special.

A friend of mine and I discussed what it would be like if the WWE had a women-only show, and my first thought was that it would be the kiss of death for the women’s division.  Despite the fact that a show featuring solely cruiserweight probably would have been the hottest shit on the planet back in like 1999, 205 Live is kind of proof that good ideas don’t always translate into good results.  Much like it, and Main Event (if that’s even still around) are good indicators that a show solely dedicated to women would probably not be a good idea, and the women’s division doesn’t need anything like such to derail the equity that they’ve been building over the last few years.

Stuff like the Mae Young Classic and the women’s Royal Rumble have proven that there’s a demand and appreciation for the women’s division, but it’s far too early to let them stand alone and throw them into the deep end on their own.  For true equality to exist, the women need to be on the same shows and booked by the same people that all the men perform on.

A stand-alone special show is absolutely the right call for this idea, and regardless of the fact that 2018’s ppv lineup has been kind of mediocre, Evolution very much has the chance to be the best special of the year.

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