Bartimaeus

The Skin I Live In (2011). A sci-fi thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya about...the listed premise doesn't really actually do the film's concept any justice, but at the same time, you can't actually say much about it without revealing too much. Kind of had the full range of a movie-going experience for me: there were stretches of the film I really enjoyed, some stretches that I did not at all, felt creeped/grossed out at times, laughed because a few things didn't quite work for me like they should've...and even got a little emotional at the end because I really felt for a character. Weird experience being so all over the place.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019). For some reason, they mistakenly call her Alita instead of Gally. Well, it's a bit of an ugly and pedestrian affair: they jammed some new details in (which may come from later in the manga?) and yanked others out, but it more or less followed and ended with the incomplete two episode OVA...albeit I feel like they really missed the mark on setting the tone and atmosphere that the OVA did, on top of the characterization somehow being weaker. It's over twice as long as the OVA, yet feels like it really rushed through its story beats in favor of a lot of action scenes. Uh...I don't know why I watched this: I'm sorry. Whatever they did to "animate" Gally makes her look like a 3D cartoon character in a real world space - most other people look and move around like...well, people, and then you have this Shrek-looking lady awkwardly lumbering around right beside them; who thought this was a good idea? More generally, the first few minutes or so of this film made me realize I hadn't watched a big dumb CGI Hollywood blockbuster film in a while, and I'd kind of forgotten how they work: it was honestly a bit of a culture shock. Surely this isn't how the film is going to look and operate? Well...yes, yes it is. Right, now who wants to help me stick James Cameron into a blender?

Like every 3 months or so, I am faced with an announcement like this from a site I use: To which my reply, of course, is: "Screw you, I ain't watching any of that garbage...and while we're at it, screw all you people on here that will: we are not the same kind of people, I'm only on here to find old crap, while you lot are the rotten poison ruining the medium." ...I guess I have some internalized anger towards the people who make the anime industry what it is today, .

Yeah, I didn't love either of them, but they were pretty good quality, particularly for '87, and it would've been nice to see more and different concepts a la a real anthology series. Oh well.

It does appear that way. Out with the old, in with the new! Cue Dak Prescott coming back and losing a couple of games and the Cowboys fanbase collapsing in on itself.

I would pretty happily settle for everyone, male or female, keeping their underwear, pants, shirts, socks, shoes, gloves, cloaks, ski-masks, straw hats, and Chinese dragon costumes on. Weekly release, I presume?

How are you feeling about your week six meeting with the undefeated Eagles?

Some of those clips from the Intel presentation were...Konami-esque. You do not want to be like Konami. Alternatively, you should ideally always be like Konami.

I tried that crafting system probably like twice before I said that I was literally never, ever going to craft anything. I kept to my word...of course, I also quit the game when I got to like level 30 and stopped trying to play MMOs thereafter, .

If it was a joke, it made me burst out laughing; if it wasn't a joke, well...it still made me laugh. RIP their dev group, still need to play through that game.

To be honest, within the first half of the film, I found the gore to be more interesting than anything else that happened. I was quite certain that I was going to despise the film overall by that point and was heavily debating just turning it off, and while I can't say that I'm glad that I persevered, doing so did at least improve my disposition towards the film. The Seventh Seal very much looks and sounds like a film that I would hate on multiple levels...but then again, I very much enjoyed The Tragedy of Man (2011) and that doesn't sound very dissimilar in premise. But then again again, animation is a different medium that can play by very different rules at times... I don't know, it has six different sub-sections and contains quotes from critics calling out other critics for their apparently terrible readings of the film, presumably with follow-ups by other critics doing the same to them. There doesn't seem to be any kind of consensus on what exactly the film was about or was trying to convey, just a whole bunch of different ideas that are possible or seemed like they were intended. There are suggestions that Persona is actually an "impressionist vampire film". Which...I mean, I guess I can't disagree with because of how open-ended the film is, but that's certainly not where my lame brain was going with it. Meanwhile, the director says that while he had specific ideas in mind when he made it, he's not going to tell anybody what they were and instead welcomes any and all interpretations because that's more meaningful than him forcing any particular view. Which is probably the correct way to handle it, but still not the most helpful.

Persona (1966). A lot of the time, I pick out movies that that seem interesting to me that I don't actually try until months or years later, by which time I have no idea what originally made me interested in them or what their premise was, and I just start it blindly. This can be great because I don't have much of an idea of what to expect and therefore not much in the way of pre-conceived notions, which I think is often very valuable in movie-going experiences when you're not simply watching more of what you normally watch...other times, this is not so great because I don't have any context for what I'm seeing when it seems like having it would be very helpful. Within the first few minutes of this film starting, I saw at least a few different things that I can remember now that told me I was probably going to be in for a bad time: 1. A hand very graphically having a nail hammered through it. 2. A mutilated and decapitated lamb's head being drained of its blood. 3. What looked to be major organs being ripped out of some kind of creature. Suffice to say, it was not the most comfortable first five minutes of a film that I've seen. I have not seen a picture directed by Ingmar Bergman before, but that's certainly a way to be introduced to a filmmaker. Anyways, the movie is about a young nurse who has been charged with caring for an actress who's been thrown into the loonie bin - on account of having suddenly lost it and gone full antipathy and mute. As for me...well, I don't do plays, and this largely feels like a play. The kind of play where everyone kind of sounds and acts like aliens from another planet in that sort of unnaturally stilted way. That said...it started taking a turn about halfway through that made it a little more interesting and engaging for me, so at least it had that; better to end on a (relative) high note and with something to think about. Still, not really my cup of tea. (e): I see that the "themes and interpretations" section on Wikipedia is a bit of a hoot.

She'll make a fantastic Supreme Court justice once our president is back in office come 2024, .

Why Twilight Q? You a Twilight Zone fan or something?

I have Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes bookmarked, but like you, my watchlist is...crushingly expansive. I will take, uh, the other one, under consideration...I read the premise, and it actually sounds more interesting than the title would suggest, so who knows.

I did actually have you precisely in mind when I wrote that, yes.

The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021). I've never seen a movie quite like this one...and it's quite possible that I won't again.

https://kmph.com/news/local/amber-alert-issued-for-missing-15-year-old-girl-out-of-southern-california Husband kills mom, then he kidnaps their fifteen year old daughter. Amber Alert gets sent out, cops and father get in a shootout while he and the daughter are in his truck with him driving. 15 year old girl is apparently outfitted with "tactical gear" (what this means exactly is not yet known - armor/helmet, maybe?), she jumps out of passenger side door after the vehicle was disabled by police and runs towards police and immediately gets gunned down and killed by them. Amber Alert cancelled. I think this story could only get more American if it had also happened in Florida. (note: linked story itself is a little light on details, but responding police have already defended shooting her by saying they thought she was possibly armed - and of course, "possibly armed" means she was not, otherwise they would have said that she actually was; one rifle was recovered at the scene)

Primal, episode 6. I have a pretty intense dislike for emotional manipulation via fake-out deaths, but in this case, the show did it about as well as it reasonably could have by doing an entire episode set around tender love + care, rest, and recovery...well, while also under constant threat of being eaten because this is a prehistoric show, but yeah. That's about as good as you could hope for if you're gonna have a character be near bludgeoned to death.

Both Browns and Cowboys have looked surprisingly competent without their QBs. McCarthy saving his job, .

Isn't the 5000 series already like that? I thought the only way to gain more performance out of the 5000 series is by undervolting it and improving the power/thermal efficiency. This seems a bit more extreme because it goes to the absolute limit by default - not my favorite approach personally, but if it's still an improvement when working at roughly the same power draw as the previous generation, then that's still good, particularly because you can implement that yourself if you prefer. Though these benchmarks seem to be proving that performance only matters for productivity purposes, since games just...can't saturate CPUs anymore. I still remember the days of 4 core / 8 thread CPUs being the practical limit not all that long ago...yeah, no more. But if you love power-performance efficiency like I do, it seems the 5950x is still king(?). I wish I'd waited to build my system a little longer so I'd got one of those instead of the 5800x, but it's hard to convince myself to buy one now considering the 5800x is already far beyond my needs.

Neither of them liked the original Top Gun, but both of them really liked Maverick. What does it mean? ...I mean, I get it, since I'd agree, I enjoyed Maverick a bit more than the original, but still.

Twilight Q (1987), a two-part OVA that seems like it was intended to be a kind of rip-off of The Twilight Zone. Only two episodes were made, but apparently there were supposed to be more - all from different directors with their own original ideas. It's kind of a shame that only two were made, as it was a quality production, and it would have been a fun show to watch an episode here and there of a la an anthology series like Tales from the Crypt or The Outer Limits. Ah well.

Posts being eaten has been a thing with this software since the upgrade some years ago (those of us who have written lengthy posts only to see them mysteriously vanish with no draft saved have learned to always CTRL+A and CTRL+C before posting!), but there seems to be times where it's especially bad and it repeatedly happens.

The only work of his that I've seen is Spy Kids, back when I was like seven or eight years old. It looks very unlikely I would enjoy anything he was director or writer for. Apparently, James Cameron wanted to one-up it when he was slated to be director before he was canned because he was too busy with Avatar trash: "With James Cameron as potential director, the film was to be produced with the same mix of live-action and computer-generated imagery that Cameron used in Avatar. Specifically, Cameron intended to render the main character, Alita, completely in CGI. Cameron had stated that he would make use of technologies developed for Avatar to produce the film, such as the Fusion Camera System, facial performance capture, and the Simulcam. In May 2006, Variety reported that Cameron had spent the past ten months developing technology to produce the film." Like...couldn't we just give her a normal head/face but metal android body, like the show did? Wouldn't that look and work a lot better? I don't know, that would just kind of make sense to me. I'm not a famous Hollywood hack director, so my opinion on such things is eminently worthless. I watched Jojo Rabbit recently, does that count for anything?