Tag: television

Raymond Lee ≠ Randall Park

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Kevin Can Go F*** Himself – pretty good show.  Very creative execution, surprisingly deep plot.  Annie Murphy is still a snack, even as New England white trash.  Kind of feels like a show that should be on FX and not AMC, but whatever.  Probably because it has a very Wilfred-like feel and pace, and that basically no matter what the main characters do, it ends up blowing up in their face.

But anyway, I’m not writing this to analyze the show, I wanted to talk about something that has popped up a surprisingly high number of times to people I’ve spoken with about the show.  Whenever the character Sam comes up, an alarming (to me) amount of people seem to all think that he’s played by Randall Park.  No, it’s an actor named Raymond Lee.

Yes, they’re both of Korean heritage, and there are some broad physical similarities, but the fact of the matter is that there’s like a 12-13 year age difference and all you motherfuckers who make this error are 100% arr rook same-ing them.

The world and America might think they’re progressing and making some strides when it comes to tolerance, acceptance and more respect for Asians in general, but people still can’t seem to keep their mouths shut when it comes to using better judgment and not trying to compare Asians even when they’re not 100% certain.

Maybe in the near future, Raymond Lee can basically start filling in all the roles that would’ve been meant for a younger Randall Park, kind of how like Mahershala Ali is basically picking up all of Wesley Snipes’ old roles, but until then none of these motherfuckers are the same guy and white people need to stop making assumptions about minorities rooking the same.

I get why people abandon The Walking Dead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been churning my way through two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead to try and catch up.  Naturally, as I’m nearing the finish line, unbeknownst to me, I was days away from the premiere of season 11, and just as I’d be finishing up, there’s already more fucking TWD available to me.

But fuck that.  After finishing season 10, I’m fucking done for a little bit with TWD, and I need a god damn break from TWD.  I fully understand and get why the show, regardless of its actual ratings, seems to feel like it’s being abandoned by those in my peer groups and those people I communicate with.

Because it’s basically a live-action version of Dragon Ball Z, in the sense that the cadence of the show is basically the very definition of the meme shown above of most shonen anime.  The residents of planet Rick come across some shitty people bent on killing them, they band together and overcome them, and without missing a beat, the next episode, and sometimes in the very same episode as the penultimate finale, the next big bad shows up and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Over the span of ten seasons of TWD, we’ve had the Governor, twice actually threaten the cast and be repelled.  Then they traveled north and ran into Negan.  Then came Alpha and the Whisperers.  And not even one episode after them, they introduce the seeds of some new groups of bads, with the people hunting Maggie’s crew and the people in West Virginia.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that season 11 is just going to be more of the same, except that it’s branching off into separate storylines, like it were a season of Game of Thrones.  It’s like the sacred timeline has been deviated from because the group has branched out, but either way it’s going to be basically two sets of the meme up above, until the paths of the characters eventually reunite, only to take on the next greatest evil ever.

Either way, the last few episodes of season 10 were a definite weird way to end a season, and by doing so, they really did put a stamp on the cadence of the show to where I have no qualms with taking a fucking break from TWD, crossing it off my list, and moving onto some other show(s) to watch in my very limited time of television.  I’ll let the episode queue build back up, so I can marathon it, because frankly I couldn’t imagine watching TWD episode by episode again anymore, after running through as much of it as I have over the last few months.

The Shishio Effect

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally written for July 27, 2021

Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot of The Walking Dead.  A long time ago, I stopped at the season 7 mid-season finale where AMC stops running episodes because they don’t want to compete against late-season NFL and the playoffs, as well as to milk out the ratings, which honestly isn’t a bad idea.  However, when they stopped midway through season 7, is when I basically embarked on the process of selling my own home, moving, lots of changes in life, and so forth.  I never watched again, regardless of how compelling and interested I was in the Negan storyline.

Prior to the arrival of #2, both mythical wife and I had the same idea to watch a bunch of television and movies that we’d been sitting on, because we knew that once we were dealing with two kids, our television time would evaporate like rain in the desert.  Amidst my list of things to watch was to finally, catch up on The Walking Dead.  It was a daunting task to embark on two and a half seasons, and naturally midway through my journey, Netflix dropped season 10, and at the time I’m writing this, season 11 is knocking on the door for its eventually premiere.  But it was a show that I never didn’t enjoy, so I figured while I still had time left, I should try and catch back up.

Anyway, without spoilers despite the fact that this show is old as fuck now, I got through the Negan arc, and I have soldered onto to the arc of the Whisperers.  And as diabolical and nefarious things said Whisperers have done so far, I can’t help but get this feeling that they just aren’t as good of antagonists as Negan was.  Which is often times a common pattern in all sorts of long-term stories, to which I would like to officially coin as the Shishio Effect, which is defined as a series that has at one point and antagonist that is leaps and bounds superior than any other antagonist prior to them, and unfortunately more importantly, after them, which leads to a quality bell curve in the overall timeline of said series.

Named after the antagonist Shishio from the Rurouni Kenshin anime television series, which is probably one of my earliest observations of said effect, plus the fact that naming it after him makes it way more unique and memorable for all zero of my readers.  But throughout the 95 episodes of the television series, Shishio and the Kyoto storyline was somewhere in season 2, went for about 30 or so episodes, it was some of the most compelling and marathon bingeable anime in history, but after the story arc was over, the show struggled tremendously to get back to that level and instead began this slow decline until the plug was inevitably pulled on the series.

Other good examples of the Shishio Effect would be the Trinity Killer in Dexter season 4, Gus Fring in seasons 2-4 of Breaking Bad, and in the case of The Walking Dead, Negan.  These guys were unmistakably the baddest motherfuckers in their respective properties, and all of the shows struggle to get back to the levels of intensity and interest once their respective storylines conclude.

I mean seriously, the guy who played zerocool in Hackers was the guy that followed the Trinity Killer in Dexter, some generic white supremacists followed Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, and now we have the Whisperers following Negan and the Saviors after like two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead?  All of them are weak successors to the mantle of big bad that their predecessors had laid down, but it can’t really be their faults, entirely.

High potential properties at high risk for future Shishio Effect-ing would be just about every Marvel Cinematic Universe property that is moving onto the next phase; after working with Thanos, everyone else is going to seem kind of pathetic in comparison.  And after a guy like Killmonger, the Black Panther franchise is going to have double the difficulty, especially after the passing of Chadwick Boseman.  But still high risk for Shishio-ing, all the same.

Regardless, I will solder through, because while my second child doesn’t sleep at night, I’ve been gradually chipping away at the remaining episodes of The Walking Dead at night, as I am determined to clear this fucking series out of my queue, so that I can feel liberated to move onto something else.  But make no mistake, the series has been feeling like it’s been sputtering since the story has moved on from the Negan arc, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was watching Rurouni Kenshin all over again.

Black Widow: Just because it could be made, doesn’t mean it should be made

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let’s just get this out of the way: Black Widow is probably the worst film in the entire MCU.  Down there with the various Hulk films, but at least still better than other non-MCU turds like Ghost Rider and all attempts at The Fantastic Four.  But that’s not saying that much. 

The point is, Black Widow was not that great of a film, and probably should not have been made.  Its existence serves no benefit to the equity that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has built, and has in fact added unnecessary weight to the cash-printing spaceship the MCU franchise has been throughout the last decade, having produced and actually released such a turd.

Needless to say, before I proceed with this post, in the event that any of my zero readers have not been privy to the happenings of the MCU, I will put the rest of this behind the cut, because that’s just the kind of guy I am, act as if the whole world is reading, even if I know that nobody is.

Continue reading “Black Widow: Just because it could be made, doesn’t mean it should be made” →

Do people watch Amazon Prime Video?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously the answer to the question is yes, otherwise people aren’t seeing things like The Boys, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or Invincible, but I feel like just in general, you don’t often hear people really talking about the things they watch on Amazon Prime Video.

Sure, people talk about the aforementioned titles, but it’s not often (at least in my little world) where I’m hearing people talking about the random things they’ve caught on APV, nowhere near the clip in which people are randomly perusing Netflix and discovering all sorts of random, obscure and out-of-the-mainstream things.

It’s like Netflix is the Coca-Cola of video streaming platforms, where people associate all streaming content to maybe be associated to Netflix first, and then when corrected, they’re more like “oh, okay,” like when a customer sits down at a restaurant and orders a Coke, but is corrected by the server that they serve Pepsi products.

I recently watched through Solos on APV, and I found it to be a fairly refreshing and short seven-standalone-episode anthology at around 30 minutes per episode, which is kind of perfect for my needs and wants these days.  It was sort of an anti-Black Mirror, in that the stories were more emotionally heartfelt and uplifting as opposed to dreading and pessimistic, but from what I understand, this series was entirely shot during the pandemic, so it was kind of perfect that the format was almost entirely solo actors performing a clinic of monologues.

FYI, if you’re a fan of monologues, then this is the series for you.  It’s also very thought-provoking, doesn’t dumb things down for the viewer, and all pretty well written in my opinion.

The thing is, it was a series that I had never heard of before, and just happened to stumble across it, because I didn’t feel like getting drowned in content paralysis from Netflix or Plex, and decided to drown in APV instead.  It makes me wonder how a series like this can go so unnoticed (at least to me) considering it had some pretty high-tier star power, between featuring performers like Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Helen Mirren and Anthony Mackie among others.

And even after finishing Solos, and perusing through APV’s general library, there are all sorts of interesting sounding titles that I’ll probably explore in the future, which got me wondering why nobody in my little world talks about any of these.  It’s not like everyone these days doesn’t have a Prime account and wouldn’t have access to any of this, but it’s just that APV among other non-Netflix streaming services must clearly face this constant uphill battle that, if you not Netflix, then you not a player, but if people would just become aware and just give them a chance, then it seems like there’s even more oceans of content to drown in choice paralysis alternatively.

But as far as I’m concerned, APV really is a legitimate player, but I’m curious to know if it’s just me, or if other people out there also realize that or not.

Who cares more: black people or white guilters?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I heard that Netflix’s upcoming rendition of Resident Evil cast a black guy to play the role of historically white Albert Wesker, my knee-jerk reaction was that of eyes rolling.  I have nothing against Lance Reddick, and think he’s an otherwise fantastic actor, but this reminds me of when Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as the Kingpin in that one shitty Daredevil film with Ben Affleck.  It doesn’t matter how physically convincing or how good of actors guys like Reddick and Duncan should portray these characters, but there are just some intellectual properties that come with some visual expectations based on the historical lineage of said IPs.

But whereas Daredevil stunk, Netflix inherently has the ability to make palatable chicken salad of out of chicken shit, so perhaps they’ll be able to take a black Wesker and make everyone watching forget about the color of his skin in their rendition of Resident Evil.  Lance Reddick has played a ton of dirty cops in his career, and he’s otherwise a very good match in age, physical stature and behavioral charisma that I’d expect someone to portray as Albert Wesker, so I’m hopeful he’ll do well being the baddest bad in the series.

Afterward, I began to think about how the black community would digest this casting, of a black man being given the role of said baddest bad, and wondering if there were those that took objection to a black man being a villain, to a society where way too large segments of it are far too easily convinced that fiction is reality, and that it’s doing the community no favors.

I posed this hypothetical to one of those friends of mine that we sounding board our random thoughts off of each other, but getting this train of thought out of the station, I came to realize that no matter what negative opinions the black community could have about the casting of a black Wesker, they’ll probably pale (no pun intended) in comparison to the raging objection of a black Wesker, from the white-guilt white community.

Frankly when the day is over, black people are probably just relieved to see a black actor getting a shake at a popular franchise like Resident Evil, and as long as they’re not a token black guy that gets killed and devoured in the first 15 minutes, they probably won’t care if they’re a protagonist or antagonist, and most anyone who’s ever played a Resident Evil game knows that few are as sheerly unkillable than Albert Wesker.

But white guilters, my god, they must be up in arms at the perceived insult to the black community that a black man is being cast as the main villain of a series.  There’s probably at least 23 SurveyMonkeys out their collating data of racism and unfair prejudice towards the black community, from like-minded white people.  And if Wesker is inevitably going to be played by a black guy, that absolutely means that no white people can portray the protagonists of the series, and dare stand up to further oppress blacks like their forefathers once did.

If they do choose to implement characters like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, they most certainly have to be portrayed by Henry Golding and Eiza Gonzalez.  Rebecca Chambers can be played by Zazie Beetz, and I would be over the fucking moon if Barry Burton were played by Erik King AKA Doakes.  That way, Wesker would only be opposed by other minorities, and it wouldn’t create the intolerable conflict of white heroes versus a black villain.

The bottom line is that the answer to the original question is that without any doubt, white people are going to have a way bigger cow over the casting of a black Wesker than any black people.  But wait until they realize that all currently cast roles also feature no white people at all; this might just set out to be the most successful series on Netflix in history, to white folks.

Master of None S3 – the title is now accurate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw that Netflix’s Master of None was coming back for a third season, my reaction was like “oh shit, more Master of None,” and a general sense of excitement and anticipation.  I was a fan of the first two seasons and held the show in above average regard, even after the revelation of Aziz Ansari’s unfortunate extracurricular tendencies.  The show had incredible writing, a fantastic wit, and some beautiful cinematography, and by the way the second season ended, I could only imagine just how the show was going to progress in season 3.

So, having watched season 3 now, instead of a feeling of satisfaction, I’m just left scratching my head and feeling conflicted on just how I really feel having watched it.  The writing was still outstanding, and the plot and how the season unfolds definitely has some really heavy-handed scenarios that really elicits some strong emotional reactions, and the cinematography continues to showcase a lot of visually compelling scene shots and landscapes.

But my overall feeling with the season as a whole is that the plot was stretched out over five episodes with maybe one episode’s worth of actual plot.  And instead of even artificially injecting a lot of fluff and filler plot and dialogue, the show burns an inordinate amount of time on random shots of landscapes, nature, or characters doing mundane things.  Seriously, episode 2 has about a two-minute stretch where it’s just Lena Waithe’s character, Denise, sitting in her car eating a hamburger while listening to the radio.  There’s another two-minute sequence in episode four where Naomi Ackie’s character, Alicia, is sitting in a laundromat, looking bored as shit while Latin rap is blasting, and when the scenes changes, I’m scrunching my brow wondering what the whole point of some of these scenes even were.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the season is a far departure from the core story that was established in season 2, and Aziz Ansari himself is hardly in the show he created, having perhaps a total of maybe 15 total minutes on screen combined throughout the five-episode season.  However, that’s more than enough time for them to establish that the plot that unfolded throughout season 2 was flushed completely down the toilet, which has some quite unpleasant implications if you think about it, which as a fan, deflates my general anticipation of knowing what might have happened.

Frankly, when the day is over, this entire season felt like something of a story that Lena Waithe wanted to tell, but in order to most effectively get it off the ground and have it backed by Netflix, was to shoehorn the Master of None name into it, and modify the story to where the characters are ones established in the series.  I feel like the show might have been a little bit more successful if it were not associated to Master of None and were just some heart-tugging mini-series independently named, starring Lena Waithe and Naomi Ackie; but because they called it Master of None, it just leads to kind of this confusing and puzzling season that put way too much focus on cinematography and dragged a 35-minute storyline throughout nearly three hours.

And by doing so, the show’s title becomes accurate, because it was neither a master of storytelling nor was it a master of music or cinematography, and if that was the goal then mission accomplished, I guess?