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Sunday Grab Bag: Riot Women, Star Wars, & Patrick Boyle

A mixed bag of topics, something lighter for the weekend.

It's been a rather serious week of posts, so let's let our hair down and have some fun. In this, I will talk about a show on Britbox that I loved, I will rip on ther original Star Wars trilogy that my wife and I just finished last night (warning: I use my physics background to destroy the joy), and finally, I will leave you with a brilliant video by Patrick Boyle.

Let's get it on!

Series Review: Riot Women

I have long been a fan of British (and Australian) police procedurals, and thus I subscribe to several of those ankle-biting streaming services: Acorn, Britbox, and lately PBS Passport (to get access to Masterpiece).

One of the characteristics of British Police shows is that they often have a story arc that goes across either a full season, or in come cases across season (Hinterland is like this).

What it means though is that they often just do the episodes to cover the theme and "poof" they are retired.

This was a long way to say that I am constantly on the hunt for the next show, and a few months ago, I began the Britbox Original "Riot Women" which Wikipedia describes rather blandly as:

Five women come together in Hebden Bridge to create a makeshift punk-rock band to enter a local talent contest but, in writing their first song, soon discover that they are all very angry about the way society treats women and that they have a lot to say. As they juggle demanding jobs, menopause, grown-up children, ageing parents, absent husbands, and disastrous dates and relationships, the band becomes a catalyst for change in their lives.

(I promise, this isn't a spoiler, but I really couldn't write a tighter synopsis)

What caught my eye was one of the central members of the cast, Joanna Scanlan who was the focal character of a comedic police show called "No Offense" – also worth watching – so I did my usual scan.

The beginning of the first episode (and indeed all episodes) has a content warning, and I will also say that it isn't for vanity. Since it is at the start of the first act, what you are introduced to is Beth (played by Scanlan) is about to commit suicide. And I will tell you it is disturbing, but having completed the series (and I will admit that that start almost warned me off) it is central to the series.

Anyhow, I do recommend giving it a try, because the character development, the story, and the acting is just top notch.

And, for the men in my audience: If you see any men in your life behave like these chuds (if you watch, you will know) call those fuckers out. I just want to knee all of them in the groin, repeatedly.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

Originally released in theaters in 1983, it was the terminus of the initial trilogy, but as we all know that was the middle trilogy of the trilogy of trilogies. (George Lucas get your shit together, will ya?)

In 1997, Georgie-boy looked at all the new CGI goodies, and decided to fuck up the original masterpiece of cinematic art (the special effects of the original Star Wars were ground-breaking and unleashed a generation of new-SciFi). That is what my BD set has. Apparently, the original films are not available for us mere plebes.

Anyhow, having watched A New Beginning, The Empire Stikes Back, and finally Return of the Jedi, I can say that the joy of 12 year old me on seeing the original doesn't hold. The story is terrible, the acting – while it got better across the three episodes – is sub-mid, Georgie-boy really can't write dialog, and I swear his interpretation of interactions between the sexes was locked at the age of 13, and the gratuitous segments that really don't move the story (the whole Ewoks in the trees shit was about 30 minutes that could have been saved).

Then there's the fights, the Shootout at the OK Corral type scenes with energy bolts flying everywhere, none of the good-guys being hit, but plenty of the baddies taking flak.

And the space battle scenes are just ridiculous. Hint: in space there isn't any air, so flames, products of combustion, and gasoline bombs just aren't a thing, but I'll be damned if all the tricks of the Tropic Thunder toolkit weren't employed.

Then there was the density of rebel and empire hardware. In space, there's a lot of ...space. Things are never that dense, that packed. Sure, I know that a realistic space battle scene would be boring as fuck, but c'mon.

And then there's the Death Star. In fact, this is what bothers me about most space movies. The amount of refined ore, turned into precision metal parts, lifted into orbit, assembled, to make something of that scale is just not a thing that ever would happen. In fact you just have to understand economics at a very basic level to realize how this would never work. (sidebar: SpaceX dominates lifting payloads to space, and they do a hair less than $20B a year in revenue and that is more than 50 years of space exploration and commercial applications, IPO be damned)

And the Rebels? Have any rebels in our history ever been financed that well to have all those spaceships and hardware?

Ugh, my memories are dashed.

On Inflation

Patrick Boyle is back with one of his typical expositions (subscribe and you know that Saturday mornings are drops) this time he takes on the topic of inflation, and how central bank's have had an easy job as there was a seeming breaking of the Phillips curve.

Anyhow, I highly recommend watching this in its entirety.