Nick R

[Nick R]

Right wingers like the aesthetic of the militaries and hierarchies in things like Star Wars and Star Trek and don’t actually pay attention to anything beyond that level. How anybody could watch the fall of Darth Vader and think hmm yes this is obviously a good thing that is happening is beyond me.

I liked the joke about this in Wake Up Dead Man, where a right-winger quotes a villain from the Empire, and then in the next line immediately compares himself to the Rebels. It was a funny joke on its own, and then I got a second laugh out of it when I realised that it was in a film by Rian Johnson – a man who knows a thing or two about Star Wars becoming a culture war cause célèbre.

[Nick R]

@Rushy – Is this viewing of the Psycho series going to include Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake? I’ve always been mildly curious about seeing it, to see how different – and how much worse – an almost shot-for-shot remake (plus a few surreal inserts) can really be.

I mean, I’m not interested enough to actually seek it out and watch it myself. But I’m curious enough to let you do it and then read your thoughts on it!

[Nick R]

2001 is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Self-indulgent nonsense.

Who would want to watch a story about a guy called Dave stuck alone in space with a computer that doesn’t seem to be very good at keeping its crew alive?

[Nick R]

Smegadrive reference shot:

Someone please edit Squiffy Kryten (Squiten?) into it!

[Nick R]

I finally watched the recent He-Man movie.

I haven’t seen that, but today I went to the cinema to watch the other film that Travis Knight directed this year: Wildwood.

If he’s going to spend that sweet Nike money on a vanity project, there are worse things he could spend it on than making what’s probably my favourite animated film since Wolfwalkers.

That’s not light praise, since the last few years have had loads of animated films I’ve loved. (Across the Spider-Verse, Memoir of a Snail, The Boy and the Heron, Inu-oh, Del Toro’s Pinocchio, Robot Dreams, Flow, The Mitchells vs the Machines, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Vengeance Most Fowl, The Bob’s Burgers Movie, Zootopia 2, and The Day the Earth Blew Up…)

Wildwood might not be as pretty as Kubo and the Two Strings, and I don’t think it has any individual character designs as striking as those of Del Toro’s Pinocchio or as weird as those of Memoir of a Snail. But the sheer scale is astonishing. I remember on the commentary and making of features for Missing Link, Chris Butler was very open that Laika makes “hybrid” films, not purely stop-motion ones, and Wildwood must tip the scale further toward CG enhancements than anything they’ve done before, but I don’t think that should take away from what they’ve achieved here. It is spectacular.

I realise this could end up like Kubo and the Two Strings, which I utterly adored at the cinema and still really like, but which started to show some cracks upon rewatching it at home.

But for now: HOLY FUCK JUST LOOK AT IT!!! 5 stars out of 5, best film of 2026.

[Nick R]

Doug probabaly sold his plasma to pay for Howard and they don’t use a bunch of it! 

Luckily I’ve still got my plasma.

It’s a Panasonic that I got in 2014 just before they stopped selling them.

[Nick R]

Seriously, I watched SPACE JAM in the last year just out of curiosity.

Did you watch it on DVD?

[Nick R]

Triple posting, but I also tend to rate things in their own context rather than globally, for example, how good is this as an episode of Doctor Who, how good is this as a Star Wars movie. This gets rid of silly thoughts like “am I really about to rate Claws of Axos higher than The Godfather?

I haven’t seen Claws of Axos, but I can see myself rating it higher than The Godfather purely because it doesn’t have Brando mumbling and wheezing in a stupid stuffed-cheek voice that everyone seems to love but I’ve always found immensely irritating, and which has lost whatever impact it might originally have had thanks to being parodied to death. (That’s the surface-level thing I can easily point to whenever I’ve tried to understand why I Do Not Care For The Godfather.) I’ve always wondered if the fact that he gets shot in the neck halfway through the film and then wheezes even more inaudibly was intended to be a joke about how silly his voice was in the first place.

My list of gangster films I like more than The Godfather includes The Long Good Friday, The Untouchables, Road to Perdition, Miller’s Crossing, Dick Tracy and Mickey Blue Eyes. (Guess among yourselves how serious I am about those last two.)

The second Godfather is great, though! At least the De Niro flashback bits are excellent; so good that I was always disappointed whenever it jumped out of the flashbacks to go back to boring Michael and his boring family.

[Nick R]

If they allow .5 star ratings then why not just make it a mark out of 10?

You mean do the same as – ugh! – IMDb?

[Nick R]

Also, here’s a question for the room:
Do you watch through the credits of a movie, or are you an adult who still doesn’t eat the pizza crusts?

I always sit through all the credits at the cinema, even if it’s not a film that has any chance of having a post-credit scene, or doesn’t have other specific things I’m curious about (like the music credits towards the end). I even sat through all the credits of The Odyssey, even though my local cinema projected that darker than it should have been so that the dark blue credits text was almost unreadably dim. Which was weird, because I didn’t struggle too much to make out the dark scenes in the movie itself.

Bonus points whenever a film has a full length title sequence and theme music.

I think the James Bond films – as rare as they are nowadays – are some of the few major films that still stubbornly insist on putting a proper opening credits sequence at (or at least near) the start.

[Nick R]

@Warbodog:

Some of my favourite films seen in recent years, not from recent years, and why I’m not on Letterboxd:

If you did join Letterboxd, you could post reviews as short as that if you wanted to! Your comments in that post are more insightful than a lot of the one-liner meme jokes that end up at the top of the Popular Reviews section.

As for the talk about 5 star ratings:

I am generous with giving out 3, 3.5, and 4 star scores, with very few of 2.5 stars or less. That’s mostly because I don’t seek out things I doubt I’ll like in the first place, so my ratings curve is never going to be perfectly distributed over the full rating scale. I often feel like I should try to fix that by forcing myself to give out more low scores, so that I can make use of more of the full range, and have more gradations to measure how much I like something. But I’m always hesitant to give out low scores, because being able to point out just a few of things that I liked about a movie is often enough to make me bump up my rating from 2 to 2.5, or from 2.5 to 3. (Especially when I see a review or hear an audio commentary that explains what other people see in them.) So it takes something really bad for me to give out scores of ★ or ★½ – and I’ve never sat all the way through anything terrible enough to get half a star!

But at the top end of the scale, I am quite strict about giving things ★★★★½ stars, and even more rigorous about giving things full marks. I think the only two things of the 2020s that I’ve given five stars on Letterboxd are Wolfwalkers and The Beatles: Get Back.

[Nick R]

The Smega-Drive has has acquired an extra “to” in the Psirens line “I get it. You’re trying to make me drown in my own drool.”

(I’m just glad it’s not using the iPlayer subtitles, which say: “You want me to drown in my own drool.”)

[Nick R]

My brother, six years older than me, liked stuff like Buffy and Charmed, but I never got the impression that it was very popular. It must have been, though, perhaps I’m just a little young for it. 

“It wasn’t popular! Entertainment Weekly said it was popular, but it wasn’t!”

Yeah, and for me being a longtime comics fan you could clearly see the DNA of Spider-Man and X-Men in it.

Joss Whedon was very open about Kitty Pryde being very influential on Buffy. So it wasn’t surprising that when he wrote Astonishing X-Men, he made Kitty the main character.

[Nick R]

At least we got Class. Did anyone watch Class?

[Nick R]

This is not a smooth loop but I like Kryten’s funny little dance, while Lister attempts some kind of strange version of the worm:

[Nick R]

Searching for “hes right” without the apostrophe brings up both results with that exact phrase (“He’s right. I’m just a huge green blob”) and those where those characters appear within other words, separated by other characters (“But she’s a bright, good-looking, intelligent, witty, upwardly mobile officer”).

[Nick R]

I had to google it too!

Before Google displayed the links to this forum, it asked if I meant “MARMOT FLATHEAD”. As well as being a pretty good name for a band, apparently that’s a brand of sleeping bag.

[Nick R]

Ghosts (the US version) season 4 ep 3:

[Nick R]

Future Echoes starts with the title “Future Echoes”, foreshadowing the fact that the phrase “future echoes” will be spoken in the episode’s dialogue.

You might say that the title “Future Echoes” is, itself, a future echo.

[Nick R]

This seems like an appropriate juncture to mention that, seeing as how in America Cluedo is simply called Clue, in my younger years I always interpreted this line as:

America took the “-do” off Cluedo and added it to Where’s Wally.

Hence the name: Where’s Wallydo.

[Nick R]

[Nick R]

Red Dwarf lines that sound like they came from Christopher Nolan’s filmography:

Larceny

Doodlebug

Following

Memento

Insomnia

Batman Begins

The Prestige

The Dark Knight

Inception

The Dark Knight Rises

Interstellar

Dunkirk

Tenet

I think we’ve experienced this period of time before.

Oppenheimer

The Odyssey

or alternatively:

If anyone has some ripped copies of the episodes and video editing skills, feel free to turn these into one of those Every X Described by Y YouTube videos.

[Nick R]

I have no idea what’s going on

If you have to ask, you’re streaks behind.

[Nick R]

 I prefer Walker to Mulhern, but Mulhern is streaks ahead of Weir and Curry.

Pierce, stop trying to coin the phrase “streaks ahead”.

[Nick R]

I guess Doug had the Marx brothers on his mind with two references in VII.

It occurs to me that this:

And this:

Are, in a way, variations on this:

[Nick R]

Saturn? (Sad ten)

[Nick R]

Is it a moon shaped like Felicity Kendal’s bottle?

… Except it can’t be that because she was Rosemary, not Thyme.

[Nick R]

[Nick R]

GUNMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

In an attempt to remove a Simulant computer virus from Starbug’s Navicomp, the crew uses the AR unit to enter Kryten’s dreams and battle the virus’s avatar: the Four-Poster Bed of the Apocalypse.

[Nick R]

[Nick R]

WAITING FOR TOG

The Cat Priest freezes to death because he hasn’t got a warm enough duvet.

TOGLYMORPH

The polymorph disguises itself by transforming into various types of sheets, blankets, duvets, and quilts.

THE INQUISITOG

A bedsheet that’s survived until the end of time travels through eternity, judging whether those who sleep under it have led worthy lives.

BACK TOG REALITY

Lister wakes up and finds out that all of his experiences on Red Dwarf were just a dream he was having asleep under a particularly snug quilt.

MECHTOGRACY

All of the sentient sheets, blankets, duvets, and quilts go on strike, in order to get Kryten to wash them more often.

[Nick R]

Not exactly on topic for the thread, but Ian’s connecting wall inspired me to have a go at making my own, so…
CONNECTIONS IN THE RED PART 2 – CHARACTERS BY SINGLE NAMES (OR TITLES)

I only got one group correct on this, and I was on the right lines for one of the others. Rot13:

V tbg gur onq thlf tebhc.

V gubhtug nabgure tebhc zvtug or “punenpgref Yvfgre unf xvffrq” – fb V xrcg vapyhqvat Crgr Genagre’f Fvfgre (be ng yrnfg ure Cfvera irefvba) naq Xbpunafxv.

One that might be guessable even if you didn’t know what it was doing. Even better, there was no fourth episode for one of the categories, so I left it “N/A.” They must sometimes have a “sorry, we couldn’t think of four” placeholder on the show, right?

Got all four groups on this!

At first I thought one of the connections might be rcvfbqrf gung tnir gurve anzrf gb Olgrf ba gur ivqrb eryrnfrf, so I spent some time trying to remember those.

[Nick R]

Avatar checks out.

[Nick R]

[Nick R]

[Nick R]

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[Nick R]

[Nick R]

Gerry just has his own code.

£50 -> “No.”
300%! -> “I’ll think about it.”
(7 + 8) -> “Yes, please.”
#@JONKD -> “Excuse me, I’m foreign. Could you point me in the direction of the nearest Wagamama?”

That’s Numberwang!

[Nick R]

Gilliamesque.

[Nick R]

Is it too late to have Hattie play the Doctor?

[Nick R]

It was an accident. Robert was wearing a bulletproof vest and Danny was supposed to shoot him in the back, but he missed and the bullet flew off on that crazy trajectory. They decided to keep it because it looked funnier that way.

It was improvised, like the Alien chestburster scene, the Joker fiddling with the detonator while the hospital blows up, and Robert Downey Jr telling the reporters “I am Iron Man.”

[Nick R]

I think animation would be unnecessary expense and effort when we could have audio or novel and our imaginations, which would also likely look better. 

Or maybe we don’t even need audio or novel and we use just our imaginations.
That can only end well.

Indeed.

[Nick R]

The first specific episode I remember seeing was Confidence and Paranoia, in the 1994 repeat run. I remember other episodes being on TV, but only remember that one in particular because was scared by the bit where Confidence tells Lister to take off his helmet in space and then explodes.

After that, I don’t remember seeing any more of the 1994 repeat run. Next, I did see the early 1996 repeats of series VI, from Legion onwards. This also means that the subsequent stand-alone repeat of Dimension Jump was the first episode I saw of series IV – I remember thinking that it was going to resolve the Out of Time cliffhanger, and being disappointed that it didn’t.

I saw all of VII in order on broadcast.

The End (remastered) in February 1998, when it was shown before Red Dwarf Night.

Then the remastered broadcasts of series I and II. (Except I missed Thanks For the Memory.)

Around this time I also read the novels, the Soup script books, and the Programme Guide, giving me spoilers aplenty for episodes I hadn’t seen!

Then series VIII on broadcast, followed by the 1999 broadcasts of series III remastered.

Also around this time, a friend at school lent me his videos of series IV and V. But I can’t remember which Bytes I saw in which order! But for the purposes of this thread, I’m going to assume I saw IV in order, and V with the Quarantine byte first.

—

So, adding all that up:

Episodes I saw first from each series: s1e1 + s2e1 + s3e1 + s4e5 + s5e4 + s6e2 + s7e1 + s8e1 + BTEe1 + s10e1 + s11e1 + s12e1 + TPEe1 = 21 pts

Series I saw first: I’m going to say 6 because even though it wasn’t home to the first episode I saw, it was the first series where I watched multiple episodes.

Total = 27 pts

[Nick R]

I thought the decision to recast was made after the experience they had working with Grogan again on VI.

Oh, I thought it was just cause Clare didn’t want to commit to doing the role full time. If it was for age reasons, that’d be pretty disappointing. 

Clare Grogan’s appearance in Psirens is covered in Joe Nazzaro’s Comedy, Chaos – and Cowboys! book. From what I can remember she was nervous and struggled a bit with the dialogue, for example pronouncing ‘stasis’ with a short ‘a’. 

Here’s what some other sources say about the reason Kochanski was recast for VII:

The Programme Guide says: “When the decision was taken to include Kochanski as a regular, Doug Naylor chose to give the part to a more experienced actress, and to alter the character so she would fit more neatly into the established team.”

The VII DVD booklet says it was because Grogan “had since moved on to TV presenting. She also represented an ‘iconic’ Kochanski, one to be talked about rather than to, and it was felt that she wouldn’t slot easily into a more filled-out role.”

TOS’s Complete Guide says: “It was felt that Clare Grogan was more of a ‘presenter’ now, and perhaps wasn’t right to play the part as a regular character.“

[Nick R]

Inspired by this and its many replies…

[Nick R]

Who has had a Ganymede.tv dream?

Me! And a few other people on that page.

[Nick R]

(DRAMATIC “2001”-TYPE MUSIC) # TO GANYMEDE AND TITAN, YES, SIR, I’VE BEEN AROUND… # LISTER, HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH A WELDING MALLET? NO? THEN SHUT UP AND PUSH THE TROLLEY. YES, SIR, RIMMER! RIGHT. CORRIDOR 159. (LISTER HUMS THE SAME TUNE) LISTER, SHUT UP! I’M ONLY HUMMING! WELL, DON’T. DON’T HUM AND DON’T MAKE ANY STUPID SOUNDS WITH YOUR CHEEKS. (CLICKS TUNE WITH HIS THROAT) LISTER, ONE MORE SOUND, ANYTHING, AND YOU’RE ON REPORT, MILADDO. WHAT JOB NUMBER’S THIS? (LISTER MIMES HIS ANSWER) RIGHT! THAT’S IT! “LISTER, D, THIRD TECHNICIAN. OFFENCE: OBSTRUCTING A SUPERIOR TECHNICIAN BY HUMMING, CLICKING AND BEING QUIET.” WHEN THE CAPTAIN SEES THIS, YOU’RE DEAD. RIMMER, I’M BORED! BORED?! THIS IS ESSENTIAL ROUTINE MAINTENANCE. IT’S ABSOLUTELY VITAL FOR THE WELL-BEING OF THIS CREW, THIS MISSION AND THIS SHIP. “DISPENSER 172: CHICKEN SOUP NOZZLE CLOGGED.” PASS ME A 14B, LISTER. LISTER, IS THIS A 14B? DOES IT LOOK EVEN REMOTELY LIKE A 14B? THIS IS A 14B, LISTER. THIS IS A 14F. ARE YOU BLIND?

— SHOUTED POSTS THAT SOUND LIKE THEY’RE FROM RED DWARF

[Nick R]

SMEGA-DRIVE FRAMES THAT COME FROM EPISODES OF RED DWARF

[Nick R]

I speak the Queen’s English, American, where raw and roar sound nothing alike but merry, marry and Mary are all homophones.

And if you’re from Baltimore…

[Author]

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