Bartimaeus

Studio Ghibli's Earwig and the Witch (2020). I watched this a couple of weeks back, but I'm pretty sure I forgot to ever mention it? Really weirdly constructed film. There are actually stretches of it that are well-made and flow together rather nicely, and so you think the film has finally settled into a nice rhythm where everything is starting to make sense...only for it to all suddenly go down in the drain due to some jarringly bad film-making and/or writing choices that take you right out of it. The conclusion of the film especially is incomprehensible pants that just suddenly happens for reasons I cannot understand even upon rewinding and watching it again, and like retroactively soured me on what I thought had a mostly decent second half. Really unfortunate, because there was a potentially quite nice film buried somewhere in there. As for Goro, I think From Up on Poppy Hill is actually solid (if pretty derivative of other Ghibli stuff), while Tales from Earthsea is irredeemably goshawful - I guess Earwig places as being roughly in between the two, though unfortunately probably closer to Tales from Earthsea than From Up on Poppy Hill. I generally hate 3D animation, but this film actually looked decent enough...for the most part. Occasionally a weird expression (or an expression held for uncomfortably long) that didn't seem to quite work here and there, but the general style and aesthetic really wasn't half-bad. Also, I wouldn't even bother trying to watch the English dub - due to it being in 3D and having more specific mouth-movements for the original Japanese, they couldn't even try to have an English dub that matched them, and it makes it unwatchable IMO. Not only that, but they got the VA for the main character very wrong in the English dub - this terrible manipulative little girl should not have such a nice and cheerful voice that makes her sound alarmingly similar to the titular character from Netflix's Hilda.

@majesticUtena sure is starting to feel a lot more Evangelion-influenced than anything Sailor Moon.

Do the other characters ever even like yell at Nico to cut that crap out? I'm not really sure one would realistically want to keep being friends with someone that goes around assaulting other women... Just finished watching up 'til then. My request for no more brothers and sisters (either literal or in spirit in the case of Juri and that other girl whose name I already forgot) has so far been completely and utterly ignored, and instead we have just gotten more and more. At least there was the hilarious Nanami episode where she turned into a literal cow to cheer us all up...although Nanami episodes almost feel like they take place in a different show from all the non-Nanami episodes. The crazy shadowplay girls getting wackier all of the time while Utena actually talks to them is indeed a bit much for the senses, .

Belle de Jour AKA Beauty of the Day (1967). Did not realizes Luis Bunuel was the director of this until after I'd seen it - I've seen his Exterminating Angel and Viridiana as well. Exterminating Angel I couldn't really get into at all because it was like social commentary specific to the place and time it was made in and did not really offer much in the way of anything else or so I thought, but I did love Viridiana - this one was more in between the two. Wish I'd liked it a little better, but this result was predictable as soon as I figured out what kind of character the singular protagonist (who plays a young, unaffectionate wife that's attempting to learn how to...love her husband, no matter the cost) was going to be playing. She's basically in a perpetual state of great inner conflict that unfortunately reduces her to a sort of wishy-washy incomprehensibility where she's confident yet meek, totally into what she's doing yet still full of "oh, I couldn't possibily!"s, etc., and completely unable to deal with the consequences of her own inanity. Although a pretty different kind of movie that also wasn't necessarily as exciting or Hollywood-ish, I appreciated Jeanne Dielman (1975) a bit more which tackles some of the same general subject matter.

No, no I did not. All these sick bastards are making Nanami look wholesome in comparison...at least she's stayed relatively above board with her disgusting love for her brother, I think. ...I think.

Utena, up to episode 14. I feel like I no longer have any clue what's going on in this show. majestic wasn't kidding about this show going places...and ye gods, I'm really getting a little sick and tired of people having siblings. Let no other characters have siblings for the rest of this entire show, thank you very much.

!!! (e): That was a game. Heart just exploded towards the end there, and I had to scream silently (because of how late it is) when Jrue made that steal and then the insane alley-oop. Chance to go win it at home in game 6!

Still sitting on the backburner for me... At least it's finally over. It didn't quite live up to the original show, but I'm super glad to hear it was ever so close, . Weirdly, I saw it (as well as Scipio's Dream) mentioned in the lyrics of a Utena song as well - literally on the night of the same day I watched Night on the Galactic Railroad. Was a little weird, .

They're not fantastic by any means, but they're way more efficient and effective than the Wii controls. And I can tell you as someone that tried to play the original on an actual Wii that not having to use motion controls to try to select things in menus is already a godsend and makes the game significantly less frustrating. Being able to skip cutscenes and speed up dialogue, not having to shake the Wiimote to do basic crap like go faster, being able to manually turn the camera instead of it always being auto-controlled...yes indeed, it's like the game is actually semi-playable now without a million different pointless annoyances that should've never made it past initial playtesting. You know what I really love, though? The sound of Link breathing heavily because that's what he does every time you hold down the A button to run for more than one second. And all these close-ups of characters' faces is enough to send shivers down my spine...

I've made it a rule to never directly reply to "hey"s or "are you there"s. If they do it multiple times, what I'll do is see it, not reply and instead wait a bit, and then find something else to message them about that completely ignores it. Lead by example, maybe they'll learn someday. Yes, I am unfortunately very passive aggressive about people who somehow have gone through decades of life without ever learning how to communicate in an even remotely effective manner. Ironically, they're usually the extroverted type, so you'd think they would know better...and sometimes I wonder if that actually has something to do with it.

WARNING to non-@majestic people of this thread: the following post is a love-letter to one show in particular. It's difficult to envision a show in Cardcaptor Sakura's vein (a combination of cute, sweet, simple, heartfelt, girly in all the right ways) somehow ever being better than it - as much as I love Sailor Moon, it's impossible to deny just how positively sublime this show is in everything it chooses to do...and it's especially powerful when you're so strictly rationing out episodes like I've been doing: every half hour episode of this show feels like it's own wonderful little movie. The sheer attention to detail and the always appropriate callbacks, consistently being completely overloaded with cuteness that somehow never gets repetitive or tired, the intelligent but perfectly age-appropriate dialogue and character writing, all the different yet sincere and meaningful or funny ways our characters somehow manage to interact with each other, and never wasting your time with anything that ever feels unnecessary... Even the art style: I sometimes wonder why I like the art so much, especially because whenever I pause the show on an individual frame, it somehow doesn't appeal to me quite nearly so much...and yet when I unpause it and see it all in motion, it somehow looks so perfect for what the show is, and everything feels framed just exactly as it should be. No, it's not Ghibli level of detail, but it still feels perfect for it in just the same way I feel Sailor Moon's art style is perfect for what that show is. The individual parts are great, but somehow the sum of them are even more so: if the show had ended right here, right now on this Sakura-has-the-flu episode, I think it would be difficult to deny Cardcaptor Sakura as being a perfect show, something I've never, ever said about any show or movie ever. @majestic says the final arc of the show, which I have not quite reached but am getting close to starting, is a little weaker than the first two arcs, so perhaps I will have to downgrade this evaluation by the end of it...or maybe not, if I keep watching it slowly and take time to appreciate each and every episode, .

Which one of them literally drowns kittens because they get in the way of her voracious love for and obsession with her own freaking brother? I'm not talking "kind of crazy" or "a bit neurotic", I'm talking "this person is legitimately mentally disturbed and should not be in or around the general populace", . I think part of the reason she's more likeable to me than she should be is that up until THAT episode, all the episodes she had a major part in were absolute silly nonsense, so even though she's being terrible in them, it came across as more fun and ridiculous than it perhaps should have. Your Name: I actually had like 4 specific complaints about it that I came up within the first five minutes that annoyed me and nearly made me turn it off...buuut one, they're things I've already complained about in other movies, and two, a couple of them weren't really problems beyond those first five minutes. It's...fine. Other people that aren't as particular as me would probably love it. Really, it's fine. There were some ideas and implementations of those ideas that I rather liked even given how ridiculous they were. It's fine.

Third Xbox One Controller? I think I'm on my sixth or seventh from since when the Xbox One released, and I don't even play very many games, much less intense ones that often...but I do admittedly use them regularly for non-gaming purposes. At one point, I saw a good sale and I got a handful for $20 each, but I literally only have one unopened one left, and I'm about to cycle back to one that only has one minor problem, which is that the right analogue doesn't work (and actually, it came out of the box that way). Every single one, either a trigger or an analogue stick goes nuts - my current one (that I've been about ready to chuck out of a window for a few weeks now) the left analogue stick can't go left without it going up-left and it can't go right without it going right-down. But you're not wrong re: Microsoft/Nintendo. I don't know how anybody uses a Playstation-type controller as their main controller, the form of those things are intolerable. In regards to wireless stuff, if I was playing something like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, I definitely would not want wireless input...but most of the time, I'm playing more slow-paced stuff, so it doesn't really matter.

...Also, I just realized that my favorite character in a show like this is YET AGAIN the crazy obsessive one - bonus points that they're legitimately sick in the head this time around. I'm starting to think that I'm the crazy one. Your Name (2016). It was fine. Plot was kind of pants and needed a lot of of really arbitrary ridiculous stuff for anything to really work, and dialogue could be a little...wacky in modern anime dialogue fashion, but it was mostly cute. There was even a scene like 2/3rds of the way through that got me to tear up and made me remember some lost feelings from many years ago. It was fine, .

Looks interesting as basically a Switch-but-a-PC dedicated mobile gaming machine (although obviously it will also have the option to stream video and stuff), but boy, the close-ups I saw of people actually playing it, the ergonomics of the controller part of it look like it'd unbearable for me...but I do have notable hand problems and need very specific ergonomics.

The first season of Ranma 1/2 also ended with a clip show in between some other stuff, so that's weird. Thought that was strange at the time unless they knew they were being cancelled (since they had planned a bunch more episodes) and needed to do just one last episode and fill it up with like half of stuff they'd already done. (e): Man, Nanami is so terribly mentally ill, .

Thanks for the context. I'm not big on anthropomorphized animals at all, so I kiiinda woulda preferred they weren't cats, especially because I think that would've necessitated that the two main characters be at least slightly more expressive than they were (I think if I had really liked the protagonists, this film could've been less "weird and interesting" and more "legitimately great"...but they were just mostly kind of stoic and inoffensive; it really would help to have characters you're more invested in to steer the ship in something like this). And I had a real brain situation going on when humans suddenly walked into the movie out of the blue halfway through, and then sat down and talked to our main characters as if it were the most perfectly normal thing in the world - no note of it made at all. Real weird film.

I've heard that a number of times before and I used to agree, but I'm not sure that I do as much anymore, especially as I've moved almost entirely into watching only either smaller (and usually more independent) films that make little to literally no use of CGI...or straight-up purely animated stuff. I'm usually not watching anything these days that would really have much of a budget for CGI in live-action...but I guess occasionally I do watch something that makes some use of it for odd and ends in a more low-key manner, like The Lighthouse, so there is that.

Yeah...but it was incredibly ugly and sloppy, not to mention horridly officiated. Neither team looked like they had any business in being in the Finals, in a series plenty of people are already putting an asterisk next to...

Have not been able to come up with any semi-intelligent theories on that yet. Weird show does weird things is all I've got so far, . Well, he certainly had the right idea, especially with what he was given to work with in Mamoru, .

I already used my Dr. Phil seizure gif, which is a shame, because what I just watched now deserved it a lot more than Utena: Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985). Some sort of extremely theme-heavy, incredibly slow-paced, deliberately plot-thin metaphysical space journey about eternity, time, death, and being left behind with lots of strange philosophizing kind of movie. As slow-paced as it was, I have no clue what the hell happened in this film or really what it was trying to say in the slightest. I don't regret watching it, because the art's quite nice and it was weird and interesting, but it was not entirely dissimilar to watching The Tragedy of Man (2011)... ...but more Japanese and in anime format. If you want a sample of the kind of scenes and dialogues you can expect out of this (although this particular scene doesn't really have any of the more interesting-looking backgrounds or compositions throughout the film, of which there are a number of), I made a clip: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/nrg2e94izop6w5y/xrAvhHikai.mp4 Your guess is as good as mine on what any of it's supposed to mean, because I have no clue. Nope, not even why the guy at the end just disapparated suddenly. Very much a "what you make of it" kind of film...not sure if I was ready for this at 5 AM in the morning. I think if this had been faster-paced and a little more extreme instead of the slow-paced plodding kind of style it had, it might've been able to melt my brain trying to keep up and make sense of anything that was happening. The sheer amount of interesting or weird anime I can find in just the 80s is a little bit much to grapple at times...

Utena, the curry episode: Narrator: He was not.

I cannot believe the Bucks won that. Dear lord.

I'm trying to think what the last "big" live-action blockbuster movie that I've seen was, since I literally never watch stuff like that anymore. I was forced to watch the horrid live action Beauty and the Beast a few years back? ...But that still came out in like 2017, so even that's still some time ago. Emma Watson in a singing role when she can't sing, what brilliant decision-making on the part of Disney. ...Most of The Force Awakens? Oh my, that was in 2015 - hard to believe that was that long ago already. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to go back to watching that kind of crap anytime soon.

From the RLM review of it, it sounds like the big action CGI snoozefest crap in Black Window was somehow WORSE than usual. And she's supposed to be a martial artist, but she doesn't actually do any martial arts? That's like having Spiderman not sling any webs...how lazy can can the movie get?