Bartimaeus

visual reference in case anyone has forgotten don't forget, or I'll have to post these again hopefully egwene immediately falcon punched her right outta the show

I, Tonya (2017). Well, whoops. I did not realize this was supposed to be an unreliable narrator comedy-ish mockumentary thing going in. I get that the film is more about the infamous Nancy Kerrigan knee-breaking hitman incident rather than the woman herself, but...I don't know, I think that approach kinda left me a bit cold, felt like the film was constantly undercutting itself as well as Tonya, which I really think is a shame when you have this great woman in her messed-up, tragic story. Her entire life seemed to be an endless series of failures and humiliations while almost everyone around her let her down and abused her at every turn, but the film kind of treats her like she's the butt of the joke until right at the end, where the film suddenly wants you to treat her and what she went through seriously. Didn't quite gel for me.

Man, I thought the 14700k review yesterday was already bad, the 14900k is straight up a scam.

That particular line was something said by Trump himself in the wake of the 2020 election, so no surprise to see morons parroting it. I'm so sorry that all of us don't treat politics akin to cheering for our favorite sports team...or as if Biden were the head of our cult religion, .

Alone in the Wilderness (2004). I saw this rank in the top 15 of a consensus-derived list of the greatest films of all time and decided to watch it. It's a 57 minute video shot on hand-cranked film of a guy making a cabin and then living in said cabin. It's basically a Bob Ross painting video, but about a cabin and surviving in the wilderness. There's apparently a sequel that is also somehow exactly 57 minutes.

Don't think I'd ever even heard of the Venture Bros. before today, and now I've come across it twice in different places. Odd. Edit: I decided to watch two episodes, worst show I've ever seen, but probably not worse than all the ones I haven't.

They Live (1988). I talked myself into watching this again, because I thought I must've missed something the first time when I watched it years ago. My experience now is my experience from back then: I am bewildered. From the very beginning, it's...pointedly serious, awkward, slow, and ham-fisted. There's this constant gratuitous lingering in how shots are filmed, and there's so much camera A to camera B back to camera A, repeat, repeat, repeat until what the film is trying to tell you (and it's not exactly subtle!) has been bashed into your skull. It's as if someone without even a shred of subtlety or respect for their audience directed it...or maybe the director just had a sense of humor that is completely alien to me. I want to like this, because it's John Carpenter and the premise is fun and I even like what the film is trying to say (especially in the context of when this was made, the end of the Reagan era), but...I just do not get it. I can see why people mostly seem to remember the silly pro wrestling fight. That got a snort of derision out of me. Does have a fun score, though. No, I don't think I will: I was barely "fine" with this one as it is. Fairly certain I would like any even passingly similar entries by the same filmmakers significantly less. Oh, it would be even funnier if the tagline was something they themselves made up for the cover. I honestly should've heavily questioned the film right then and there just for including that. Useless subtitles is a real pet peeve of mine as well. Why would you want to distract me from what's going on when it doesn't even aid my understanding of what's being said?

Well, I'm pretty certain that whom I was remembering was not Trump, although boiling him down to just "some Republican politician" that I can't really remember would be pretty funny, unintentional as it was.

I distinctly remember some Republican politician, though I don't remember whom exactly, fairly early on intoning something to the effect of "if we would just stop testing for covid, there'll be less covid". It was at that exact point that I realized that at least some states were, suffice to say, very likely to have less accurate data than other states.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Got fifteen minutes into it and was like "man, this German film sure is...German", and then turned it off. I'm sure it's O.K., but...nah, wasn't feeling it. So instead of a German film, why not go Austrian? Ich Seh, Ich Seh AKA Goodnight Mommy (2014). It starts off as a very obvious "our parent is an imposter!" kind of psychological horror film, but it's really just a cover for being a different and only mildly less obvious kind of psychological horror film. I think I liked it a little more than Martyrs, which I feel is a rather similar kind of film, if stylistically quite different. Don't know a lick of German, but @majestic, does the tagline on the poster say "The Shining for a New Generation"? Bit of a sham of a tagline if so - you'd have to be utterly daft to compare them in any way.

British film Peeping Tom (1960). I watched this on a total whim while knowing virtually nothing about it going in, as I'd only taken a quick look at the poster, and to be honest, it's not a particularly remarkable one. So all I expected was a very tame 'thriller' that'd be able to put my insomniac brain to sleep, and for the first ten minutes, that's more or less what I thought I was getting. It was not what I got. Great film that accomplished the exact opposite of what I wanted it to, but I can't really complain about that. It's kind of wild that this came out the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho, though it was across the pond in a film industry that was in a bit of a different place compared to Hollywood.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The Secret of Fuzzy: The Motion Picture: The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1991). No, really, that's the real title. Okay, wait, no, I lied, I added "The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water". Anyways, I completely forgot that there was a movie to end the series, though it's a film everyone says is very bad and that it's basically a scam. Well...pictures can speak volumes in this particular case, I think. This is how the show started: ...and this is how the movie's ending it: Enough said, right? It can be pretty rough sailing when they break out the D or F team to make the end to a series.

You know, I don't ever remember wanting to kill any children in BG1 and BG2, where you actually can, but all of these games where you can't, there's always at least one that I definitely did. Kind of feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did they give children immortality because they realized their child characters were so annoying that they needed immortality to make sure that players weren't heartlessly slaughtering children en masse, or did they oh so smugly develop all these annoying child characters with the foreknowledge that there's absolutely nothing that the player can do about them? Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea for developers to remember that players will want to mutilate and butcher children if they're too annoying, incentivizing those developers to write them appropriately with that firmly in mind.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to matter if the very little that Republicans want to do (and there really is not much they seem to want to specifically accomplish, which is not surprising for a party that does not currently have any clearly defined platform besides some "we hate x, y, and z" bullet points...and also we love guns) is actually completely counterproductive to helping the people suffering the most, the point is to make those voters identify with you and have them feel like they belong and that their grievances are legitimate and perhaps that they even accomplished something important by voting you in. Whether they believe genuine problems will be solved, or if it's just stemming the tide of evil, hurting the "right" people, ending 'wokeness' or some other kind of lunacy - it doesn't really matter, not so long as they tie feeling better about their life and the state of the world to their side winning. That's a very strong and rather intangible feeling that's hard to quantify or argue against, so no surprise that there's not a lot of movement among the believers no matter how objectively laughable the results were under Trump and Republicans.

Yes, but only for the thread creator (i.e. as part of the first/original post). To be honest, I didn't have the particulars of that question pinned down when I posted it (I was kind of just mildly and indirectly clowning on the Cowboys getting absolutely steamrolled by the 49ers, which I can obviously do without any issue because unlike the Cowboys, the Packers have just been so good against the 49ers in recent history), but I think what I was going for was basically...you know, he was a nobody in the draft but he seems to actually be pretty good, but he also has such a fantastic team around him and he's still so young, it just seems difficult to fully understand how good he may or may not be at this particular moment, so hey, given the similar unique set of circumstances Tom Brady faced early on his career, it seemed like an obvious (if completely silly) question to ask. If he and the 49ers win the Super Bowl this year, that'd really be an uncanny parallel what with Tom Brady also winning a Super Bowl in his second year.

Poll Is Brock Purdy the Next Tom Brady? Yes No Maybe So

my ears, man all the audio is straight up dumped into the left side and it is badly clipping, but...but on the other hand, there is no piano music 6/10, would prefer if they were less technically incompetent at making trailers (e) Wait, this wasn't an official trailer, just some rando who made a clip. Okay, I guess I can't put the blame on the people working on the show for that. Still, if the guy that made/uploaded the clip doesn't have a good explanation for why it's so bad, off with their head and all that.

Ooh, fleas on rats, fleas on rats.

look, i hate to double-post, but even @Hurlshort won't show his children the Matrix sequels: i really feel like that says it all if we can agree on at least this

who re-watches them to even find that out in the first place like many bad sequels (see: indiana jones' crystal skull), there may be parts that are fine or even good, but if they can't make up for the overall experience being bad, they deserve everything they get that was definitely the only problem they had and why both of them received inordinate amounts of hate...in 2003 ftr, i think i liked the third one more than the second, but i only remember the second feeling like a giant waste of time where literally nothing interesting happened, and then later i found out that there was only supposed to be one sequel but they were contractually obligated to make two sequels, so suddenly it made sense that nothing happened in Reloaded stretch that roll of garbage tape out as long as the roll of garbage tape will go, baby my gosh, why hasn't one of Yor, Anya, or the other guy killed this piece of crap yet

Yeah, I'll definitely give it that. Just the 80s big hair lady samurai (now edited into previous post) beats the hell out of anything I saw in either of the sequels, and that wasn't even my favorite one.

The Animatrix (2003). I finally sat down and watched all of it. World Record (guy running so fast he breaks out of the Matrix) was the trash can sandwiched between my two favorites, Program (80s big hair lady samurai getting co-opted by her boyfriend to rejoin the Matrix) and Beyond (lady and her cat exploring a 'haunted house'). The Second Renaissance was also a pretty nice lore setup for the series...but the rest was mostly forgettable, I think. Not too shabby overall.

The premise is interesting, the execution leaves me...wishing it weren't quite so play/theater-like. Scene after scene where characters are sitting, standing, or slowly walking around while pompously pontificating endlessly about various things in a very untrue-to-life fashion seems to always be a bit of a difficult sell for me, no matter who or what it's about, or what it all eventually culminates in. It's just not really my preferred manner of storytelling, no matter how many times I've experienced it. It may be because I never really get a strong and independent impression of the characters, who they are, or what they're trying to accomplish, as they end up feeling like lifeless extensions of the film with no real setup, personality, or agency of their own - instead of the film being an extension of the characters, which is always my preference. I think The Banshees of Inisherin is a good example for comparison, as that's a film with some vague similarities in style and comedy to El Conde, but the moment I think of that film, I'm instantly recalling the three main characters, things they said and did, what they wanted and needed from one another, each one's specific and personal eccentricities, and how they all connected to the themes of the film, whereas...with El Conde, I don't know, it's all very much a muddled mess with characters that I can't really pin down for the most part, and that makes connecting with the film in a broader sense very difficult for me. Boil it down to just not getting much out of the experience, I suppose. Speaking of Utena, I always thought Utena was at its best when it was just being silly and letting characters organically interact as opposed to getting singlemindedly focused on bolting whatever it was trying to say straight to my forehead. I think El Conde would've benefited from being a little more silly, which you think would've come naturally with the premise, but somehow it didn't manage to get there for me.

El Conde (2023). That was weird. It won't be cracking the shell, I'm afraid.

now i'm no deer expert, but that really looks like the same guy from last year