shadokitty

Apparently you’re not alone. I haven’t seen it, but listening to radio shows in the morning, Solo was talked about a lot, and there was talk that it might be the first Star Wars film that didn’t recoup its budget.

LJG765

Thanks for letting me know! Especially about the pencil scene...I don't mind fast forwarding sometimes either, so I'll have to remember to keep the remote near when I watch it.

I'm hopeful that I'll get at least one more watch in for the challenge, but it'll likely be tomorrow night. Too tired tonight to focus on much. I do really wish that I could sort films by time on Vudu, because it'd make it a lot easier to find something when I have a certain time frame to fit something in if I could!

davidh777

I figured that was the case but couldn't resist answering anyway.

lisadoris

5.20 “The End” Gibson Praise is introduced in this episode and so is Diana Fowley. It’s been awhile since the writers brought us a female character for Duchovny to have absolutely no chemistry with. Praise is a chess prodigy who someone is trying to kill (some poor Russian dude took the L instead). This whole episode has Scully acting like a jealous partner which feels so out of character. Praise is clairvoyant and apparently is the missing link between humanity and alien intelligence. CSM is brought back to the Syndicate to deal with Praise and while he’s doing that, he comes out as Spendor’s dad and literally burns the X-Files down. Fowley gets shot and the Syndicate gets Praise.

Fight the Future so this was supposed to wrap up the mythology and lead to serialized films but the powers that be at FOX saw too many dollar signs and said no. Instead we get a bridge between seasons 5 and 6. The black oil virus has mutated and now grows a new alien entity in the host. This is news to the Syndicate and they’re a wee bit panicked. In TX the dynamic duo found the bee farm which is the delivery mechanism for the virus and Scully gets stung. Well-Manicured Man gives Mulder the vaccine and the coordinates to find Scully before he takes an L. In hindsight, the demonization of FEMA seems so misplaced. When headed by competent people, FEMA is literally a lifesaver; when helmed by incompetent people, you get New Orleans after Katrina. What I don’t understand is that Mulder and Scully were being blamed for the explosion in Dallas. Um, if Mulder hadn’t played his hunch to go to the building, it still would have exploded and there would have been hundreds of people inside. Their actions aren’t a fire-able offense for once, you pin medals on folks for what they did.

Surfinhank

All right, that wraps it up for me. Thanks Dimension X for hosting.

I managed to get in (just barely) at least one film of each year for the past 50 years of the ratings system... not my goal initially but once I started I thought it would be a good idea.

Dimension X

I'd never seen any of the Marvel TV shows. Now I have. I'll probably keep plugging through them in June.

Thanks to everyone who participated. I hope you all watched some stuff that you'd been meaning to watch, but hadn't gotten around to.

lisadoris

Thanks Dimension X for hosting this shindig. I had fun. Just to show you how much I enjoyed this challenge, I'm going to keep posting my X-Files thoughts here until I wrap things up (which honestly should take about 23 days).

6.1 “The Beginning” Welcome to Los Angeles! One of the science experiments from the film gets loose in AZ and kills a man. The Syndicate removes Praise from the hospital where they’re performing brain surgery so he can track our new friend. The X-Files have been reopened but Fowley and Spender are in charge. Turns out Praise has the same DNA as the alien virus and that we all have some of that DNA: it’s turned on in Praise but dormant in the rest of us. Fowley sells out Mulder and Scully tells him that but he won’t believe it. Our new friend has finds a home in the coolant tank of a nuclear power plant. We have the first appearance of AD Kersh a total jerk of a character played by the lovely James Pinkens Jr. Benito Martinez has a blink and you’ll miss it cameo in this episode too.

6.2 “Drive” This episode is the reason Bryan Cranston ended up on Breaking Bad. It’s an X-Files version of Speed where the person has to keep moving at top speed going west or else they’ll die but instead of a mad bomber it’s a sonic bug in his ear. Since our main character is an anti-Semitic ass, I was kinda wishing for his head to go boom which it eventually did. I love the ending with Kersh tallying how much their adventure cost. It feels like such a dick move but that’s tax payer money so it also feels like a justified dressing down.

6.3 “Triangle” The events of this episode could be the machinations of Mulder’s brain while he was unconscious or he traveled back in time to 1939 on a Nazi controlled boat. Did Mulder honestly believe that the folks on the Queen Anne would believe his time travel story especially given what was going on in the world in 1939? I sometimes wonder whether Mulder has any common sense.

6.4 “Dreamland Pt 1” Mulder switches bodies with a man in black; hilarity ensues. When Mulder meets with Scully, why not tell her something that only Mulder would know? At least Fletcher is making the most of his time in Mulder’s body. I’ve always wondered how Mulder dealt with the administrative assistant when he got his body back. Awkward.

wishbone

Thanks Dimension X for hosting the challenge, I was able to revisit some fun TV sitcoms and comedies.

Cardsfan111

That was similar to my goal of 50 films in 50 different years. I didn't quite make it, finishing in the low 40s. It was still enjoyable giving me a chance to hit a variety of things and make a dent in the unwatched pile.

Thanks for another fine challenge, everyone!

shadokitty

Thank you for hosting Dimension X. I didn’t talk much, but I had fun.

Trevor

Thanks Dx! One of my favorite Challenges as always, although I think I’ve created a monster. In closing things out last night, talking the next Challenge with Jen, she mentioned that she’s looking forward to “controlling me” again next May. I whimpered something like, “but May is the one month a year I do something different and have the freedom to branch out and be extra creative; so I’m looking forward to doing something different next May.” She just laughed maniacally.

BobO'Link

It's official... you're fully married now! Just be glad she doesn't want to help pick your films in July or October... I can see it now... a month full of Hallmark movies. After all... aren't most of them Fantasy - and surely it'd be a horror to have to watch those exclusively a full month!

omike

Many thanks to Dimension X! This was another good challenge for me (even if it had to be put aside a few times). I watched 108 short films totaling over 26.5 hours and watched fourteen discs of shorts that had been sitting around forever. I also got in five really long movies including the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings which I hadn't seen before. Darn, those are good movies! Four hours would fly by like no time at all.

From the times on IMDB it seems as if the Blu-ray LOTR extended editions (which I watched) were longer than the DVD extended editions, even accounting for the long fan club credits at the end of each film. Does anyone know if this is really the case?

BobO'Link

I can verify that the IMDB times for the DVD Extended Editions match what's on the discs and the "Standard" BR run times match the first run length (which has no format associated with it). I have the "Standard" WS DVD release somewhere but can't put my hands on them at the moment. I also have the BR Extended Editions but haven't yet opened them and the run times aren't on the outside of the box so I can't verify them - but since that's what you watched you should be able to check those. I'd be interested in what you find. I never knew the run times of each release version was different on different media.

**EDIT**
I did a bit of research and apparently the BR times include the "Fan Club credits" while the DVDs do not and just reflect the run time without the additional credits.

omike

Yes, that link you included makes it clear. The IMDB times are just what you said. I don't have the Extended Edition DVD's so I couldn't check to see if the fan club credits were on those and although IMDB does mention the fan credits in the Crazy Credits section it's not always clear which format they are talking about and of course I foolishly expected consistency in what was included in the times.

Thanks for the help!

lisadoris

6.5 “Dreamland II” The resolution of this two-parter is better than the first one. Scully, having learned her lesson in “Small Potatoes,” handcuffs the guy wearing Mulder’s body when she figures out what’s going on. Mulder cannot for the life of him pretend to be Fletcher and it becomes really clear why Fletcher doesn’t want to go back to his life. Fletcher does clean Mulder’s house and buy him a water bed with a mirror on the ceiling. That little detail will become important in a future episode. The Native American Woman who switched places with the pilot was freaking hilarious.

6.6 “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin play ghosts who psychoanalyze Mulder and Scully to get them to kill each other. I question Mulder wanting to investigate a haunted house on Christmas Eve but the ghosts were a hoot.

6.7 “Terms of Endearment” So a demon wants to have a normal child and he impregnates multiple women to achieve this goal. When the fetus shows demon-like abnormalities, the demon aborts the fetus and leaves the mom. Bruce Campbell plays our happy homemaking demon. The funny part is that the demon gets played by another demon who wants a demon-like child. She plays him good.

6.8 “The Rain King” This story is so cute. A man claims to control the weather but it turns out a different man is controlling the weather. The heart-shaped hale was a nice touch to show how love sick the weather man was. Causing a tornado because he saw the woman he loved having sex seems creepy. The best moment is when the flood warnings arrive and Mulder says: “I’ll build the ark, you gather the animals.” That moments just edges out the moment when a cow crashes into Mulder’s hotel room. Victoria Jackson's voice is a tad annoying but it’s forgivable.

6.9 “S.R. 819” Our annual Skinner-centric episode. This must have aired around the time of the Mike Tyson/Evander Holyfield fight because there was not one, but two ear-biting jokes in the episode. It’s a remake of the film DOA where Skinner is poisoned and given 24-hours to figure out what happened and why. Turns out Krycek injects Skinner with nanites and can control whether Skinner lives or dies. If this episode took place today, they would have used an EMP to kill the nanites. Krycek is like a bad penny: he just keeps popping up.

LJG765

My thanks to Dimension X for hosting!

I had a slower watch month, but of the ones I watched, all were first time watches for me. I was also able to cross off some films that have been on my to watch list for a very long time!

SterlingBen

Highly doubtful.

shadokitty

Film critics don’t know the power of the fanboys, right? 😉

BobO'Link

They had to be talking about recouping its budget on opening weekend or during the first week of exhibition. I'm positive it'll more than recoup its budget, even if it's the worst SW film ever produced.

lisadoris

I have no idea if anyone will read this but The X-Files journey continues

6.10 “Tithonus” In “Clyde Bruckman” Scully is told that she doesn’t die and here we get an explanation of what Bruckman means. We meet a photographer that can see death coming and he takes the pictures of it. It also turns out that he can’t die much to the disappointment of himself and at least one person who tries to kill him. I love the fact that Scully’s new partner is pissed because she doesn’t want to frame an innocent man and fabricate evidence. Fellig hypothesizes that the reason he can’t die is because someone took his place when he had yellow fever. He claims to have tried a bunch of times to commit suicide. Why didn’t it occur to him before Scully that taking someone else’s place would let him die? That’s Final Destination 101.

6.11 “Two Fathers” Cassandra Spender is back and Veronica Cartwright got an Emmy nomination for this episode. Spender gets slapped around by daddy for asking too many questions. Cassandra understands the aliens’ true purpose on earth and isn’t pleased about that. Mulder & Scully get reprimanded again and the alien resistance lays waste to all sorts of stuff. Spender has a come to Jesus moment when daddy sends him to kill an alien and Krycek has to save his butt when it goes sideways. Krycek spills all the tea to Spender who balks and CSM spills all the tea to Fowler who agrees to help. Cassandra begs Mulder to kill her and “to be continued” flashes across the screen.

6.12 “One Son” Fowler interrupts Cassandra’s suicide by cop attempt with an armed CDC raid. Scully makes sure Fowler knows that she isn’t happy. Cassandra is the first successful hybrid which means colonization can begin. Mulder finds the UN lady and she is in rough shape. Scully tries to tell Mulder that Fowler is dirty and he won’t listen so she bounces. CSM and Mulder have a come to Jesus discussion about what the Syndicate did and the fact that they sacrificed their wives and children to the aliens in hope that they would be returned one day and that they would be spared when colonization came. As Krycek says in the episode: “it’s all going to hell” and boy did it: the rebels took out Cassandra and the Syndicate’s entire operation and leadership structure minus CSM and Fowler. Spender makes a case to Kersh to reinstate Mulder and Scully to the X-Files and then he walks away and as he tries to pack his office, CSM shoots him.

ororama

Some more comments:

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is an animated view of the effects of growing up surrounded by people understandably obsessed with their horrific past experiences.
In Inch'Allah, a Canadian physician working for an UN agency is unable to avoid becoming involved in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. She feels complicit in repression if she remains neutral, but risks making things worse if she acts.
Labor on the Douro River is an early documentary about workers near Porto, Portugal, very nicely filmed.
Motorcycle is about a rural family in Thailand dealing with tragedy.
The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, about a law student who romances a sales clerk in bakery while seemingly getting nowhere with the woman that he is really interested in.
Under the Southern Cross is a drama set in the sheep ranches of New Zealand with some really beautiful scenery.
Leone XIII is a few brief scenes of the Pope, which doesn't seem out of the ordinary until you think about it being made in 1896.
Rana's Wedding is a funny look at the difficult situation of a Palestinian woman caught between Israeli military authority and the patriarchal nature of her society.
Suzanne's Career is Rohmer's second moral tale, with two friends pursuing the same woman with different methods and different goals.
Nadja à Paris is a delightful look at Paris from the viewpoint of a foreign student from Serbia (via the US), while A Modern Coed takes a rather dry look at the statistics and a few representative examples of the increasing number of female students in French colleges in the mid-1960s.
Reverón is an interesting documentary about a Venezuelan painter who I had not heard of, similar in style to Le Mystère Picasso, showing technique, influence and the end product.
On Pascal involves two philosophers, a priest and an atheist, discussing mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal. Interesting that French TV would broadcast something like this, but since I know next to nothing about Pascal it was of very limited interest for me.
Kasal is a pretty typical Filipino romantic melodrama.
In Walking on the Wild Side, office worker Dominique Abel mistakes cleaning woman Fiona Gordon for a prostitute and hires her with hilarious results.
Mediterranea seemed very timely, showing the dangerous conditions faced by African migrants to Europe and the squalid living conditions and hardships that they are likely to experience on arrival.

lisadoris

My afternoon plans got cancelled thanks to Mother Nature so I exceeded my daily viewing

6.13 “Agua Mala” Don’t all the nuts roll down to Florida? Arthur Dale is back and we have a sea creature living in the pluming during a hurricane. This episode is so much fun and I didn’t recognize Deputy Greer from Brooklyn Nin-Nine (thanks wikia). The looter with the TV who is trying to steal everything during a freaking hurricane. It boggles my mind that in the last episode, Mulder totally dismisses Scully’s concerns over Fowler but in this episode she follows him into a hurricane. That’s loyalty for you.

6.14 “Monday” our Groundhog Day episode. Mulder has had that water bed for a while now so why did he keep it? He doesn’t remember where it came from and I’m actually kinda shocked he actually sleeps in it. One of the major conceits of the episode wouldn’t happen if the episode took place now: Mulder wouldn’t be in the bank thanks to direct deposit and mobile banking. It’s still a really good episode with Pam trying to prevent the events of the episode and Mulder slowly catching on. I question why, in the third incarnation, where Mulder and Scully have their guns trained on Bernard, that Mulder doesn’t take the head shot after seeing the bomb. This episode also features Wayne Alexander droning on in what has to be the world’s most boring meeting.

6.15 “Arcadia” The one where Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple. I am never going to question my HOA’s rules again after this episode. An overly OCD homeowner’s association summons a creature to help preserve their American dream and this creature takes its job very seriously. If any rule is violated, down goes the homeowner. Mulder is exceedingly bad at this undercover assignment.

6.16 “Alpha” The presence of Garek isn’t enough to save this episode about a dog that hunts people. It’s kinda a werewolf story as the dog takes human form but it’s not clear if the dog started off as human or just developed the ability to shapeshift out of self-preservation. It’s a bad episode so I guess the explanation doesn’t really matter.

6.17 “Trevor” a sadistic sheriff sticks a dangerous criminal in a box during a hurricane. Said sociopath develops the ability to move through solid objects and goes on the hunt for what’s his. I’m not too mad at the sheriff getting got since he’s the one who caused this debacle in the first place but did he honestly think that the boy, who doesn’t know who he is, was going to willingly go with him after watching him terrorize his family? Let’s also mention that he’s a wanted criminal so being on the run probably isn’t the safest thing in the world for the kid.

6.18 “Milagro” a writer moves in next door to Mulder and can remove hearts with his hands, including his own. The structure of the episode is cool: you hear the writer’s voice narrating scenes of the episode and it makes sense that Padgett would be drawn to Scully and the case they’re investigating and that Scully would be drawn to him: we’ve seen her drawn to dangerous men in the past. You have to admit that Padgett reads Scully and Mulder extremely well. Here we get Mulder behaving like a jealous ass which is not a good look. This episode is equal parts sensual and creepy which is an interesting line to straddle and the episode was interesting until the character and the writer meet – then it’s all creepy. I also don’t buy Scully sobbing at the end. This wasn’t her first brush with death, hell it wasn’t her only brush this season!

6.19 “The Unnatural” This episode holds a special place in my heart: my first conference presentation and my first published article were written about this episode. Why did Mulder go to see Arthur Dales in DC when we saw he moved to Florida in “Agua Mala”? We get Arthur’s brother Arthur in this episode. Duchovny as a college graduate should have known that neither “black” nor “man of color” were in popular use as terms in the 1940s when this episode takes place. Jesse L. Martin is so pretty and so good in this episode. I love baseball and I clearly love The X-Files so I ignore the fact that the episode is a white liberal fantasy of race relations in the 1940s. It sucks that the aliens are racist too.

6.20 “Three of a Kind” the episode that led to The Lone Gunman getting their own show. I never watched the spinoff but I can understand why the FOX brass jumped on that bandwagon. The three stooges trick Scully into a trip to Vegas where she is drugged, Susanne Modeski, and Morris Fletcher show up, and John Billingsley turns out to be a government agent. Tipsy Scully is adorable only because Frohike comes along and keeps her from making a huge mistake. Her facial expressions are priceless.

lisadoris

After a collection of really good episodes, we get to the end of the 6th season

6.21 “Field Trip” Scully and Mulder go to North Carolina and get digested by a giant spore. There is a theory on the wikia that Scully and Mulder were never rescued and the remainder of the series are just a collection of their hallucinations. I can get behind that theory.

6.22 “Exogenesis” A` mysterious artifact is found in the waters off West Africa and the theory that life began elsewhere in the universe and was seeded here rears its head. A piece of paper is scrambling Mulder’s brain allowing him to hear people’s thoughts and make him behave more irrationally than usual. Albert Holsteen is dying of cancer and Krycek is exercising his authority over Skinner. I think it’s funny how Mulder can read minds but can’t read Fowley playing him like a drum and he ends up in the psych ward which is where we all kinda knew Mulder would end up eventually. The artifact contains the human genome and the scientist who found it gets got by Krycek so Scully heads to West Africa.

lisadoris

The beginning of the 7th season which I think might be my least favorite season

7.1 “The Sixth Extinction” this episode felt like filler. Mulder has moments of lucidness thanks to a drug provided by Kritschgau. Scully discovers that the space craft symbols translate to various religious texts. We also discover that the space craft can bring dead things back to life.

7.2 “The Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati” The last temptation of Fox Mulder and CSM outs himself as Mulder’s father. He has a fever dream where CSM offers him simple life where Deep Throat is alive and Fowley gives him a few babies. In the real world, CSM tells us that the black oil Mulder was exposed to, mixed with his exposure to the rubbings from the space craft have awakened alien genes that make him immune to the coming alien apocalypse. CSM decides to extract whatever from Mulder so he would be immune. Fowley develops a conscious and tips off Scully on the DL. Albert Holsteen visits Scully to prod her to find Mulder but it turns out he never regained consciousness before his death. Kritschgau gets got by Kryceck and Fowley is dead too.

7.3 “Hungry” A fast-food worker has a taste for brains but doesn’t want that taste. The episode is told mostly from his POV which is a change of pace. I couldn’t place the actor until I hit IMDB and remember he was on a few episodes of Scandal. I felt bad for the poor guy until he ate his neighbor. His other meals were jerks who deserved being munched on but the neighbor was a sweet lady who was kind to him. He commits suicide by cop in the end.

7.4 “Millennium” I’d probably like this episode more if I watched Millennium (though judging from the wikia comments, I might have liked the episode even less). It’s always nice to see Lance Hendricksen though. We see Scully and Mulder kiss and that’s the only memorable thing about the episode. Octavia Spencer has a cameo in this episode which makes me wonder how many other future Oscar winners have been on this show (Martin Landau already had his Oscar when he was in the film)? Felicity Huffman was nominated but didn’t win.

7.5 “Rush” I think there has been one episode so far where I didn’t remember the ending but this is the first episode that I didn’t remember at all. Kids can move faster than the speed of light and one of them is a sociopath who kills people. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. After watching it, I understood why I didn’t remember it.