For quite a number of years now I have had television and movie-themed calendars on my walls. Mostly about TV shows I enjoyed at the…
Tag: Veronica Mars
The Good Place
The Good Place Website
The Good Place @ Wikipedia
The Good Place @ IMDb
Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) just died. And now she is in a multiplayer role-playing game on one of the infinite game servers that somewhat resembles the idea of the good version of the afterlife, like the Greek Elysian Fields or the Christian Heaven.
There’s only one catch: They are extremely (and I mean: extremely) picky on who gets in there. Everyone else from Joe(sephine) Average to Adolf Hitler gets send to the “bad place”. And Eleanor does not belong in the “good place”.
She’s just there by accident. Like it or not: The bureaucracy in the afterlife apparently has the accuracy of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. Eleanor is only in the good place because she shares her name with a really good person.
She’s the glitch in the matrix. The fly in the ointment. The butterfly that causes the storm. Shortly after her arrival, the perfect balance of the good place is shattered and weird things start to happen. And the only way to stop it is for Eleanor to actually become a good person.
Purchase Diary 2015 – September to December
Butter (2011)
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Sep 19th – €3.99 @ Media Markt
Collection no. 1218
Auf Achse: The Complete Series (1980 – 1996)
(Auf Achse: Die komplette Serie)
Sep 19th – €29.99 @ Media Markt
Collection no. 13014 – 13025
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
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Sep 19th – €12.90 @ Media Markt
Collection no. 1219
Two Night Stand (2014)
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Sep 19th – €9.99 @ Media Markt
Collection no. 1220
Dumb and Dumber To (2014)
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Sep 24th – €9.99 @ Drogerie Müller
Collection no. 1221
Purchase Diary 2014 – July
Escape Plan (2013)
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Jul 1st – €11.00 @ Amazon.de
Collection no. 1143
Office Space (1999)
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Jul 2nd – €0.00 ($4.99) @ Amazon.com (paid via gift certificate)
Collection no. 1144
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)
Jul 2nd – €0.00 ($12.99) @ Amazon.com (paid via gift certificate)
Collection no. 1145 – 1146
2 Guns (2013)
Jul 3rd – €11.96 (£7.44) @ Amazon.co.uk
Collection no. 1147
I love Trouble (1994)
Jul 3rd – €8.17 (£4.58) @ Amazon.co.uk
Collection no. 1148
Purchase Diary 2014 – May / June
Friends: The Complete Series (1994 – 2004)
May 2nd – €53.20 (CA$84.99) @ Amazon.ca (paid partially via gift certificate)
Collection no. 12686 – 12705
But I’m a bit disappointed. It’s really my fault because I didn’t check this beforehand (I just didn’t expect it): It’s only the broadcast version. As someone who knows the key episodes in their extended version basically by heart, it’s like an audio CD with a few scratches and the music suddenly jumps in the middle of the track.
I bet they pull a Lucas and in a few months / years there will be a Blu-ray Extended Edition…
Cottage Country (2013)
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May 3rd – €7.99 @ Drogerie Müller
Collection no. 1114
You Again (2010)
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May 3rd – €7.99 @ Drogerie Müller
Collection no. 1115
Pretty Woman (1990)
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May 3rd – €7.99 @ Drogerie Müller
Collection no. 1116
The Proposal (2009)
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May 3rd – €7.99 @ Drogerie Müller
Collection no. 1117
Purchase Diary 2014 – March
Gravity (2013)
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Mar 1st – €12.90 @ Media Markt
Collection no. 1116
Big (1988)
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Mar 4th – €9.99 @ Amazon.de
Collection no. 1117
The Final Countdown (1980)
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Mar 4th – €9.97 @ Amazon.de
Collection no. 1118
Veronica Mars (2014)
Mar 14th – €46.03 ($60.00) @ Kickstarter*
Collection no. 1119
*I pledged $60 for the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. In return I got a VM T-Shirt, a PDF version of the movie script, a digital download of the movie on release day (the one above, my first actual entry of a Digital Download into my DVD Profiler database) and I’m also going to get a DVD version of the movie.
Cliffhanger (1993)
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Mar 18th – €9.04 (£6.31) @ Amazon.co.uk
Collection no. 1122
TV Junkie: A History
I watched a lot of TV shows over the years. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. And I watched accross the board.
Keep in mind that I’m only 35 years old.
I watched The Guiding Light for two years straight (it’s a soap opera whose German title was the Springfield Story). I watched medical shows like Trapper John M.D. and lawyer shows like L.A. Law. I watched the 80s action shows from MacGuyver to Riptide. I even watched Love Boat every weekday on one of the first private channels in Germany: Sat.1. I got up at 6am on every Saturday morning to watch Rawhide (Tausend Meilen Staub, lit. “A Thousand Miles of Dust”) with a very young and pre-Fistful Clint Eastwood. I knew who Daniel Boone was around the same time I met the Cartwrights as well as the men from the Shiloh Ranch.
And last weekend I binge-watched the first Netflix show House of Cards (Big recommendation! Kevin Spacey is a brilliant Magnificent Bastard!) and I got curious as to how many shows I watched intently over the past two and a half decades.
With the help of the list on the German site Wunschliste.de I created a list of “my” shows.
I only counted live-action fiction shows, no animated shows may they be Saturday morning cartoons like Yogi Bear or Scooby-Doo or evening shows like The Simpsons or South Park. No scripted reality (which I’m avoiding to 99% anyway with the exception of Comic Book Men). In this list are only shows which I followed for more than a year unless the show itself didn’t last that long.
And the answer was: 244 246 247. Two hundred and fourty four six seven different shows I watched with active interest since I’ve started watching television. And the worst thing is: Of most of these shows I watched 90% or more episodes at least once.
TV Season 2009/2010 Diary, CW 13-19
Deutsche Version | CW 18 | CW 19-20
Chuck 3×16 Chuck vs the Tooth
I already like this new mini-arc (there are only three episodes left). My guess for the end is something like this: Ellie and Orion get caught by the Ring and Chuck and Sarah have to burst in to save them and thus revealing themselves.
I loved to see Christopher Lloyd in this episode and while I only know him as “elderly person” I was a bit surprised how old he actually looked now (he’s 71 after all…). On TV Tropes there’s a trope called “Running the Asylum”. It has a different meaning but I loved the idea that an inmate of the Cuckoo’s Nest is now the chief psychiatrist for an asylum full of spies. 😉
Spoiler (mark to read):
Since I’ve read that they introduce yet another game-changer into the finale my guess would be that Orion removes the Intersect from Chuck’s head for good. Except for the Karate they didn’t make much use of it this season anyway (or at least I have that feeling). I think Chuck is ready to be a spy in his own right and they don’t actually need the Intersect as plot device anymore.
The Big Bang Theory 3×21 The Plimpton Stimulation
“You are my landlord and you are my movers. And I can’t pay any of you.” Great episode. It was a great fun in itself.
I’m still somewhat troubled over that whole break-up thing. I don’t have the feeling that they’ve actually explained why they’ve broken up. Penny just ran out on him and that was it. No real aftermath or real explanation. For me that makes it a bit unreal.
10 Things I Hate About You 1×16 Too Much Information
The first episode was a bit anvilicious (modelling & eating disorders…) but I liked that Kat tried to help Patrick open up.
10 Things I Hate About You 1×17 Just One Kiss
I liked the second episode better, especially with bringing Blank/William back.
Bones 5×21 The Boy with the Answer
I liked it that they brought the Gravedigger case again. I also liked that the writers and actors made me really hate her for attacking “my people” by questioning their integrity.
I also smell change coming. When characters start to question their own purpose and goals right before the season ends, most of the time they are going to change the concept of the show (at least for a while).
TV Shows – A Decade in Retrospect
Since everybody seems to be starting to count at zero instead of one the first decade of this century and millennium is now over. So it’s time to recap these past ten years and take a look at the TV Shows it has given us.
Let me give my résumé at the beginning: Of the four decades I know TV Shows from (70s – 00s) this was without question the best decade for us TV junkies. When you read my review you might say in the end “Hey what about <insert your favourite here>?” (e.g. The Sopranos, Dexter, The Wire, Six Feet Under, …) but that’s exactly my point. This decade has given us so many outstanding shows that it was impossible to watch them all. Also, everybody has a different set of favourite genres but I’d say that every genre got their fair share of excellent series in the last years.
But let’s face it: There’s rarely any series (if there’s one at all) that could keep up the quality and its appeal for its entire run. Some had a bad year in between, some fell short at the end. But even in these “bad years” they had more quality episodes in it than entire shows from previous decades. So all the shows I am going to name have of course aspects that can be criticized and I invite you to do so.
For me the most outstanding characteristic of this past decade’s shows is that they are more often than not more about the “journey” of the character(s) than the actual events. It’s not the character who shines a light upon the unfolding events but it’s the events that shine a light upon the character and his development. I have to say that shows (hereby excluding comedy shows that work with stereo- and archetypes) that don’t have a real character development don’t interest me at all. But if the character development is interesting I might even watch shows from genres that usually don’t interest me at all.
If the character development is interesting enough I might even set the fact aside that my second favourite characteristic is missing: A real story-arc. The first TV Show in my TV universe that had a real story-arc, was Babylon 5. Later Star Trek: DS9 did the same albeit not in that quality and complexity. But these shows were two of the rare exception in the 90s (another famous exception would be Twin Peaks, but I never watched it). It seemed that viewers weren’t interested in either developing characters or story-arcs.
Buffy: Season 3: Disc 5
Deutsche Version | Season 3: Disc 4 3×16 Doppelgangland Synopsis: Anyanka/Anya wants to have her power center back that was destroyed by Giles in the…