Hockey + TV

[schneefink]

Yesterday was not a productive day *sigh* But today I'm going swimming and to see Mad Max, and hopefully I'll manage to do some work too, even though I didn't have enough sleep.

Tampa Bay won 4-3 against Chicago! I told myself I would watch one game in this SCF and this one was the earliest, all others start at 8pm. It was a good game! Fast, entertaining, plenty of opportunities on both ends. Those two top lines, the triplets line and Saad-Toews-Kane (for most of the game), wow. Especially Kane sometimes looks like a magician on the ice. A game where many of the goals were "lucky" deflections, but that happens sometimes. (Chicago's 3rd goal was definitely goalie interference imo.) It was tense until the last second!
Series is at 1-1, now going to Chicago. I hope Bishop will be okay! I'm resigned to the fact that the Hawks are the favorites in this series and I'll be okay with it if they win, but I still hope Tampa can do it. I want an East Coast team to win the Cup again (Boston barely counts and that was four years ago.)

I started watching Sense8 yesterday. Because of the way the episodes were listed and I wasn't paying attention I watched episodes 1, 3, 5, and 7. That explains why certain scenes were missing! Though I didn't realize until after I finished 7, I thought the jumps in the storylines were deliberate and (almost) everything made sense. Hey so there should be a better explanation for what happened to Nomi at the beginning of episode 3, cool. I thought about going back to watch 2, 4, 6 now, but I'm so curious what happens next I might wait until I've finished the season.
I really like the show so far! I like the characters: Sun is probably my favorite, followed by Capheus, Nomi + Amanita, Kala, and Riley. I like how they discover what they can do and I'm looking forward to them figuring out how to communicate and use it better. Among them they have a pretty diverse skillset, should be useful.

On a friend's recommendation I watched the first episode of Hustle, but I didn't like it a lot. It was recommended to me as "similar to Leverage, only better", and I see the similarity but I thought it was worse. One big thing that annoyed me was that the show uses the smurfette principle: the main crew only has one woman, and she's "the lure", introduced as the seductress. No thank you. I want better, and I can get better. Plot-wise I didn't like the episode much either: the main con was pretty straightforward and not that interesting, and the surprise at the end wasn't that impressive because they hired an unrelated outsider to do it, who did a big part of the work, and that felt almost kinda like cheating. The only character I really liked was Mickey Stone, and probably a big part of that is that the actor is very attractive.
It did make me want to rewatch Leverage soon :) After I finish Sense8, of course.

Comments

[scintilla10]

I've watched a few seasons of Hustle! I also watched it after watching (and loving) Leverage. One of the things I liked about it was that the characters often had to deal with the fact that they didn't have All the Resources but still had to pull off a con anyway (unlike Leverage, where they seemed to mostly have unlimited resources/tech wizardry/etc). I also think that Hustle has more traditional cons, which were very interesting to me, whereas Leverage was a little more fantastical in its plots. (I do think that Hustle also tries to ~con the audience a bit more, like you were saying with the resolution to the episode feeling like it was a cheat.) But anyway, I LOVED the characters and relationships in Leverage, and ultimately enjoyed watching it so much more! Though I can see intellectually why other people consider Hustle "better," it just didn't grab my heart in the same way. (Although Mickey Stone is really attractive. As is Jamie Murray's character.)

And eee, I'm excited to start Sens8! :D

[schneefink]

Leverage managed a great combination of character focus and entertaining plots, it was great. They did have some plots that were more "out there", but it (almost) never bothered me because the character stuff was still good. My impression was that they embraced being an entertainment show instead of one that is supposed to be of "high artistic value", whatever that means, or particularly sophisticated, and it worked very well.

I'm still enjoying Sense8 (now up to ep9.) I'm not sure yet if it's a show I'll recommend, depends on the ending, but it's definitely worth checking out. The plot moves slowly, and imo there are several unnecessary flashbacks, but of course with 8 main characters it can be difficult to give all of them enough attention and imo they do that well.