Bartimaeus

Yeah, I did have a laugh at that. I totally agree with you on that aspect being...terrible: it's very transparently pro-U.S./military propaganda. But no, Maverick more or less follows directly in its predecessor's footsteps just about down to a T, while Aliens stands on the shoulders of a giant...and proceeds to have a diarrhea disaster all over the poor thing's head. Non-analogous situations, different impressions as a result.

Sigh, I was roped into watching Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Well, where to begin with this one? It was a complete...ly kind of okay-ish film. Sigh, I was roped into watching Top Gun (1986). Well, where to begin with this one? It was a complete...ly kind of okay-ish film. It could've been worse. I feel like you don't want to know what's going on in a bad movie though, so that should really work against the film if anything, .

I would say "heavily" is a tad generous...Lupin's grandfather being a partner to Bresson was very underdeveloped next to how much time was spent on Laetitia and her family, and it seemed to really be more of a basic setup device so that he had some kind of personal reason to be involved at all. But yes, it is ultimately Laetitia's and to a lesser degree Lupin's story, so it makes sense not too much time is spent on them given that it's a long-running series where I lack the particular context of the character dynamics due to not following the series (though I did remember Zenigata from The Castle of Cagliostro). I think the biggest issue with this film is that the film really leaned into the fairly bog-standard Disney plot and emotional core of Laetitia just a bit too much - I felt like I had figured out the film and where it was going with her the moment I realized her "grandfather" was the same guy that stole the medallion from the intro, which kind of took the wind out of its sails. Not to mention the very generic angry nazi as the nominal villain combined with the doomsday device...it all felt pretty standard even if competently executed. I think I complained about "the girl" being both the objective and prize in The Castle of Cagliostro, but that seemed like it fit this kind of series better...even if I thought "the girl" was just too weak of a character for it to quite click like it should've. Eh, again, 2019 3D animated Lupin film: it was fine and better than expected.

I think I read his DM of the Rings D&D/LotR parody many, many years ago. RIP.

Lupin the Third the First (2019). It's more or less a solid but unspectacular Disney movie mixed with a little bit of Indiana Jones, skewing slightly older in terms of tone (maybe around ages 10-13 with more violence and some fairly slight innuendo), but otherwise for setup, structure, and characters, I'd say that's right. I guess that's about what you could hope for out of a modern and fully 3D Lupin film. The 3D style is...pretty much Disney's 3D style but less blobby for character designs, which looks fine (certainly better than some of the 3D anime monstrosities I've seen in this thread), although the main character (Laetitia, girl in the bottom right in the poster) has a pretty strong case of Frozen face, as her resemblance to Anna from Frozen is just a bit too striking...though it's not super obvious from here, it starts to become so once you see her in motion. So aren't Lupin and Jingen supposed to be partners in crime? Didn't really feel like it, as the only time he appeared was for a few random save-Lupin's-butt moments and the very end sequence (which he wasn't really a part of anyways)...and Goemon (the samurai guy) probably shouldn't have been in the movie at all as he did and said almost nothing, while Fujiko (lady in green) did more as the seductive secret agent type that's usually out-smarting everyone else, yet she still didn't really feel she had much of a reason to stick around for the entire length of the film either. Maybe that's the result of the movie following a long-running series and them just not caring that some characters won't necessarily feel very important for every story, though.

I've seen just a minute or two of this one so far...it went into the "looks promising" bin, but I have approximately 40 shows in that bin right now. ...No, I actually went and looked, it's at 68 right now. I think I've said this before, but I'm better at identifying shows I might want to watch than I am at actually watching them...man, that's a lot. Okay, now we're talking. I guess I'll have to check it out sometime soon...er.

Three episodes in. The level of violence is...uh, pretty brutal: if you don't care to see various sorts of creatures bloodily disembowelled and eaten, probably not the show for you.

The American intro song isn't quite as good as Moonlight Legend, but otherwise I thought it was more or less a faithful adaptation.

(timestamped) The entire American Sailor Moon pilot was apparently recovered from the Library of Congress. It's...greeeat, .

Persepolis (2007). The local movie club is doing a watch of it, and it's been sitting in my bookmarks for years and years. Five minutes in: "...wait, this is Only Yesterday, only it's during the Iranian Revolution when everything's going straight to hell. But the thing is, I love Only Yesterday..." It didn't end up being quite Only Yesterday, but I enjoyed it anyways. Outside the occasional spot of animation floatiness for more background-y stuff, I thought the visual style was quite nice as well. No, that's correct.

Everything you say about WALL-E makes perfect sense and I'd be hard-pressed to argue, and yet it doesn't really feel it makes much difference to me - I get what it was going for even if the way it got there didn't work. The benefit of being more pre-occupied with the characters and it thus not feeling like an overt issue, I guess. Maybe I'm being too kind in giving a film with such an obvious construction issue too high of a rating...but then again, I've always said I try to rate films 75% subjectively and 25% objectively, and it's the only Pixar film I particularly like in the first place (out of the...fourteen I've seen - A Bug's Life would be next but significantly farther down, I guess). Up, ironically, was a film that started out on a high note that then spent its entire run-time steadily descending, so you'll see no disagreement from me there. Finding Nemo is one I haven't seen since I was like ten, so it's not included in the fourteen that I've seen...particularly because I hated it then, which is why I haven't seen it since. I've been forced to re-watch The Lion King at the end of the proverbial blade by my nieces (another that I disliked as a kid and didn't ever want to re-visit), so it's possible I'll eventually find myself similarly endangered there as well, .

First three episodes? How could you resist watching the second half of Challenge of the Masked Racer? You watching the blurays? Hope so, it's critically necessary for my favorite part of the show: spotting all the poorly drawn and/or silly faces Trixie makes, .

They're thematic shortcuts meant to get across an idea quickly (and probably to less critical children) even if it doesn't make much sense in the real world. Humans continue to litter everywhere they go to show that their nature hadn't fundamentally changed even if their environment is carefully managed to be squeaky plastic clean (i.e. they're still the same humans that trashed the Earth even hundreds of years later or whatever the time-frame is); the humans finally stand up at the end as a symbol of hope in trying to make a change, as wanting to make a change, as still being capable of making a change and righting the ship that is Earth if they really try. I would think much more offensive is the fact that clearly so few humans were afforded the opportunity to get off Earth in the first place, so where is all the evidence of incredible social upheaval, mass violence, and the survivors slowly asphyxiating in their own burnt out husk of an atmosphere? Where are all the hills of corpses, and why aren't the bones being slowly compacted into cubes by WALL-E? Well...it's probably for much the same reason: it's a lot easier and less problematic to skip over that kind of level of detail so we can get back to the silly robot love story, . I would say it seems likely that the film just didn't appeal to you enough on other levels to make it so you're not reacting hypercritically to these over-simplified symbolic devices, . If this were a more serious film (or if I didn't otherwise like it myself), I would agree that it's insufficient...but I mean, c'mon, it's crappy Pixar who makes movies about talking toys and fish - that we got any kind of attempt at a real world setting is kind of a miracle in my eyes. I would say that a more serious film should show the humans as being incapable of making any kind of change on a long-term (multi-generational) basis, and playing in with the themes, should also probably have our characters end up in the garbage themselves with all of their effort ultimately being for naught...but um, that would be a pretty different film aimed at a different kind of audience.

Hey, I don't deride your tastes in movies. Well, not much...publicly, anyways, . I'm about to start deriding your recent usage of those lousy art style emojis if you don't stop with that nonsense, though. Who in their right freaking mind would use that crap over the legacy emoticons? Some of us have eyes, man! Well, that's the nice thing about Galaxy Quest: it has a good emotional core driven by its characters, strong performances from its cast in their respective roles, some clever but also cliched humor played tongue-in-cheek with regards to its nature as a semi-parody...and some sci-fi silliness and action to top it all off. What more could you ask for from a film of this type?

Okay, funnily, Shrek, Nausicaa, and Mulan were the three that I thought were maybe possibilities, but again, my ignorance of the genre limits me in being able to determine that, and it definitely limits me in being able to tell if the Western influence is something I appreciate in them anyways. Mulan, for instance, I largely don't care about the dramatic action sequences, Hunnic invasion stuff, the particular musical cues, filmography choices and such...I love Mulan the character, her story, and the interactions with the rest of the characters. Those elements don't hurt the film by any means, but if they're not what I really care about, then it feels a little besides the point. But I definitely did not think of Tokyo Godfathers (...or Crusher Joe/Ghost in the Shell, for that matter...but I guess Crusher Joe is pretty Star War-sy, which of course has roots in westerns, so that one makes some sense after having it pointed out at least - yay for arguing from a place of ignorance!). @KP From Another World Maybe I'll check it out. Does it carry an official recommendation to specifically me?

I first watched Galaxy Quest when I was probably like...six or seven years old? My mom then made me re-watch it probably a hundred more times...and then a whole bunch of random bits and pieces of Star Trek: TNG and Voyager over the succeeding decade. Like with Holy Grail, you can consider it a form of childhood bias - the only difference between them (plus a few others like The Fellowship of the Ring, Beauty and the Beast...) and most of the other stuff that she made me re-watch a million times (e.g. the Indiana Jones films, the original Star Wars trilogy, A Christmas Story, The Goonies, and a pile of other random crap) is that re-visiting them as an adult still yields a "ok actually this is really good" reaction from me, hence why it and other exceptions rate higher than the rest. You can probably thank the cast and the characters they played for that (particularly, I'd say, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver). I get why other people don't like it, and that's okay. There are certain thematic, character, and setting elements that make it work for me where pretty much no other Pixar film does. Literally every other Pixar film has some kind of fatal flaw in at least one of those areas that makes it impossible for me to get into them nearly as much as I did WALL-E, but they're probably all things that literally nobody else cares about. I've always been a pretty big Pixar hater outside of WALL-E, even back when practically everyone insisted they were chef's kiss (pre-2010). I was really hoping that film was only 2 minutes long so I could watch it right now, . (e): I see that it was directed by the same person that made One Cut of the Dead, which I liked. Hmm.

Unfortunately, like @majestic, I very much dislike Tarantino. Another case of a director whose work is technically impressive, usually quite amusing, and seemingly well-written...and yet who leaves me feeling completely empty inside after seeing anything by him. His films are a bit like riding a rollercoaster for me: it's exciting enough while it's happening, but not much of note otherwise. I have not seen a single one of the films (or The Mandalorian) that you listed - a hearty combination of ignorance of and not much interest in the genre, I would think. Of all the films I would qualify as being a favorite of mine, I feel as though there is very little Western influence in any of them. And even if there is, it's probably what I would consider to either be irrelevant to why I like it or possibly even the weaker and less interesting components of whatever film it is. Here are my top 50 non-TV films (warning: somewhat dominated by animated films, particularly at the top...I'm very much an animation person more than anything else), see if you can quickly identify anything as being particularly Western-influenced: Fun fact: a good bit more of my top 50 films were made before I was born than after. I wonder how often that happens for people, particularly given how much of a hassle it usually is (relatively speaking) to watch older movies.

If RLM ends up doing a re:View of A Fistful of Dollars (mentioned by them as a possibility), I'll probably watch that one too. There doesn't look to be an Italian dub version of A Few Dollars More (or at least not one easily available), which might make that one a tougher sell if they end up doing that instead. I really have trouble listening to English when the vocal delivery just isn't quite right, whereas I don't know enough of what Italian should sound like to know whether they're doing it correctly, . I should watch some of those classic crazy Japanese films someday.

Westerns are not really my cup of tea, but I thought it was enjoyable (albeit somewhat indulgent - it's a long movie!). I decided to watch it so that I could watch the RLM re:View. I guess I should also say that I watched the Italian dub (2:54 run-time "Mondo Restoration") because the English dub was...um, pretty bad/wacky on the whole? Maybe the Italian was as well, but it worked much better to my ears. I kept switching between them for like the first twenty minutes of the film (well, once dialogue started at all anyways), and felt like I didn't really have a choice in selecting the Italian. Probably gave it a somewhat different tone compared to the English. (e): The re:View is much more enjoyable and interesting after having watched the film than it would've been without it, I think.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). This is a fascinating method of drinking from a bottle, though not one I think I'll be trying any time soon: What I've learned from this film is that if you're ever going to double-cross someone, you should be certain that they're dead before you wander off, otherwise you might be caught in an endless loop of revenge and more double-crossing. In my specific case, you're right: there's nothing that's fundamentally wrong with new movies that will prevent me from enjoying them wholesale, whereas with the other two, well...exceptions are very rare. For someone who has different preferences and priorities (possibly Gorth?), that may not be the case, though.

I don't know if anyone/everyone else feels the same, but I have to tell you...I get that you're doing an over-stylized Gromnir-like writing thing (...right?), but it's so strong and the context for what you're trying to say is usually so limited that I often really have trouble precisely interpreting you beyond "thing bad/good". Now that I've finally gotten that off of my chest after a couple years of being mildly confused by your posts...another episode of SpyxFamily! It's time to go to school. My only regret is that Anya doesn't spend any time mean-mugging, which should be an obligatory skill of any little girl. She could learn a thing or two from the best. But much better episode than the last, though - possibly the best one so far.

Tragic characters, complex themes, an emotional core so strong that it would make grown men weep...would be what I'd say if I was a moron inexplicably expecting a random Tom Cruise action movie to be something it's clearly not. Sometimes these things can surprise you (either for good or bad reasons), but if a movie is exactly what it presents itself as and you weren't interested in that, you only have yourself to blame for still watching it (alternatively, you can blame the people who pestered you into trying something when you made it clear it wasn't something you thought you'd like if they still recommended it to you anyways). Obviously, I'm not going to watch Top Gun, . But to @Gorgon's point, the age of big budget films not looking like a gross/uncanny CGI disaster is pretty much over. Smaller and more grounded films may look good for what they are, but those types of movies aren't ever going to be like...epic action, fantasy, or sci-fi films, you know? So if that's the type of thing that you like (as opposed to someone like me with a taste for relatively simple, character-driven stuff that doesn't really much need special effects), I could totally understand feeling as though movies are pretty much dead. It's not too different from what we're personally familiar with in regards to pathetic modern Japanese animation...or really even the sorry state of triple-A gaming right now: while the particular issues are different, that dread feeling of the entire medium having moved beyond you is largely the same.

Unfortunately, I've seen enough of Disney's other blurays to know that the phenomenon is not unique to Cinderella. Noise reduction is an ugly process that systematically leaves casualties in its wake, and whatever studio responsible for these sorts of modern HD re-releases is usually the only thing that we get for a given film - for better or for worse, and clearly Cinderella here got the "for worse" end of the stick. Previously, I've made mention of fans doing a terrible smorgasbord of filters to quality blurays in an attempt to simulate something like what Disney does...but that's a much better situation than the original bluray starting off like that - not possible to restore detail that isn't there.

It almost certainly wasn't intended, it's just a necessary artifact of the "digitalization" process. Look at the shiny stars on her dress, the fine white outline on the hem, the dark outlines between distinct objects...and how much of all of that was eliminated as well. Or how weirdly bulgy her eyes and lips got. Trying to squash noise into flat gradients for this kind of "restored" look necessitates that certain...sacrifices are made in terms of fine detail, and it's not unique to Disney's noise elimination process even if the result here seems particularly offensive. Manually restoring it is possible, but requires both a keen eye and an insane amount of manual work for little reward - the vast majority of people will not notice or care. And then there are people like me, who endlessly harp on noise reduction for old prints like these and the unavoidable damage it does...

Disney's blurays/HD streams for their classic films are generally of very ill-repute for the techniques used to make them look contemporary (i.e. "clean" and digital) and it makes me the big mad. And no, I'm not ever going to stop talking about it when I see egregious examples of it, .