Bartimaeus

Triumph of the Will (1935). "The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany." It was about the time Hitler smiled at me and looked into my soul that I realized that I may have made a mistake in sating my morbid curiosity as to what a Nazi rally propaganda film would look like. What's up with fascists and their outrageously flamboyant theatrics and pageantry, anyways? I basically just watched two hours of Nazis marching in a parade, except instead of being for entertainment, it's supposed to instill some kind of wonderful sense of national pride. Obviously, I'm not the correct target audience for this seeing as I hate Nazis, but man, I just don't get it.

Yeah, she's pretty much "the girl" for being "the girl"'s sake, which I do not generally view very positively. Perhaps not as bad as an actual terrible or annoying character I wish would be completely cut out of something (Mari from Rebuild who is both says hello!), but still not my cup of tea. I see that a Japanese BD was already released a few years ago, but no U.S. version. Although people already spliced together four different English dubs into the Japanese BD, which can be a bit of a time-consuming technical process to do with just one, never mind multiple (English dubs: "2003 Pioneer", "1996 Manga UK", "1995 Streamline", "1979 Toho", ). I once considered trying out the Lupin show until I saw how many entries into the series there were, plus the second TV show is very long... Don't think I've seen Hotel Transylvania, though I did hear at one point that my good man Tartakovsky worked on it...guess he's the director and everything. Hmm.

How about when you do actually invest a good chunk of change into a decent sound system...only to discover that you straight up still do not like having the volume high enough where you can hear all the dialogue due to excessive volume in other parts of the film? I sure love either having to manually raise and lower volume constantly or just enable subtitles on all-English films in order to not get headaches. It's part of the reason why if I'm going to watch a film by myself, I really have zero qualms about just putting on my headphones and watching it at my PC instead (hell, even a tablet with headphones is better if it means being able to hear everything while not getting a headache...).

That was the worst part in the one Lupin-related thing I've seen as well, The Castle of Cagliostro - the girl felt pathetically underdeveloped and like she was there just to be "the girl". I'll check it out. I can't decide if I like or hate the 3D character models and animation from stills, so I suppose the only way to know for sure is to watch it. I appreciate that they're not just amorphous blobs like so much of Disney and Pixar, at least, and the influence of the old style still looks to be there. Yeah, I had a huge snort of derision from reading the subtitle - that's how he got into this mess in the first place! Sounds like a pretty solid ending to the adventure. Eh, I think stylistic comparisons are always valid, even if it's between something that's good and something that's bad. Doesn't have too much bearing on how novel or well-executed it was, . I'll watch one or a few someday and get back to you on Escaflowne, except that I'll have completely voided any memories of the Escaflowne movie by then. Honestly, my brain has already forgotten a lot of it, just like I did with Rebuild immediately. Oh well. When I think about how freaking long Rebuild was, that is certainly an inhibiting factor. I guess I'd probably rather watch a highly abridged version of Rebuild where I'm skipping all the crap I don't care about (75% of it all?) than watch a highly abridged Escaflowne because there's really nothing much for me to care about in Escaflowne in the first place, but from beginning to end, yeah, I suppose you're right.

Princess Tutu, episodes 6 and 7. We're back to shrug city, folks. It's just not quite there for me in terms of characters and how it's trying to tell its story. In a vacuum, it probably would've earned...maybe a 6/10 from me - it did not have the things that I require for something to be "good" to me, but it did do enough right to be more interesting and visually enjoyable than most all the other dreck. As it is, it's feeling more like a 3/10...I might be more charitable later when I start comparing it to the Rebuild films, although their situations are not totally dissimilar for me, really. Characters, plot, and themes were all neatly gathered up and dumped into the nearest garbage bin. At least Escaflowne didn't literally give me headaches because of its horrific animation, unlike Rebuild and its stupendously bad action scenes...but on the other hand, I think there were more parts in the Rebuild films that were good, even if it was conversely drowned out by even more that was terrible. Haven't seen The Seven Samurai, and I get zero feeling for what you mean by looking at a bunch of random screenshots of it, .

Man, that's my thing, I can't believe I didn't think of it, . Yeah, it's not exactly bad in a vacuum...but it is pretty bad as Escaflowne. As you said, who the hell is this made for? Certainly not fans of the original show, and people who didn't like the show might enjoy this...but if they didn't like the show, they probably wouldn't want to check this out anyways - even if they did, they're still not going to want to go back and watch the show. So what's the point? I heard someone describe it as a "gaidan" (alternative/side story) film in the vein of (coincidentally) The End of Evangelion, because apparently those kinds of films were popular around that time period. So not exactly a retelling nor a continuation - only thing is, The End of Evangelion was...um, you know, a little more true to NGE than Escaflowne was to TVoE (and also, while The End of Evangelion doesn't continue from the end of the show, it does at least serve as a direct ending to the show as an alternative to episodes 25 and 26). The Hitomi/Merle scenes (and there weren't very many) were about the only part of the movie that I liked. The art style was pretty out there - lots of influences, and I can see what you mean by saying it looked a little Perfect Blue-ish. I'd be willing to forgive it if the movie was better...but instead, it just becomes part of a long laundry list of Picard facepalm-worthy inexplicabilities in the decision-making for this film. Ergh.

Princess Tutu, episode 5. It was the best one so far! Not sure if I'm getting more into it or if it just happened to be more of what I wanted out of this show.

I would probably be more interested in giving JoJo another chance than resuming that, for the record. What that statement meant was more "if you took a collection of 100 random anime shows, I'd probably dislike somewhere between 95 and 98 of them more than Twelve Kingdoms, so yes, statistically speaking I guess I would rather keep watching Twelve Kingdoms than go with another random anime show".

Twelve Kingdoms, episode 1. Main character is an emotional stammerer that can't finish sentences and says "w-what?" and "b-but..." to just about everything said to her - ah, yes, my favorite kind of anime character. Given the type of show that this is, she will presumably improve over time, but holy crap is it annoying throughout this episode. Main character ignores a bullied girl that tries to say hello to her, then a couple of scenes later lectures said girl about being sure to put in effort to make friends. What a jerk. Some monotone fantasy dude suddenly appears in the middle of her classroom talking about "the enemy" and "protecting her" in front of all her classmates and teacher, and then everyone besides those two starts getting whacked by some big bird that causes the windows and walls of her school to collapse merely by flying near them. The fantasy dude tells her that she has to fight the big bird, but obviously our main character has no idea how to use the sword handed to her, and the bullied girl (who happens to be nearby) asks him why he doesn't fight the thing himself...and he says he doesn't want to shed blood. So, let's recap: he swore to protect her, says she is his lord and he must get her back safely to "her world", but then refuses to protect her from an imminent threat and says she has to fight it herself? Look, I get this is the first episode and this stuff probably won't ultimately matter in the long run, but this kind of cloddy writing really gives off the impression that this was written by an imbecile. Anyways, while she's sitting there stammering, crying, and screaming about how she can't do anything, a magical force just takes control of her body and slays the bird for her. Um, okay. How...empowering - and resume crying. Nah man, you know what, I think I'm good. However, if I were forced to pick between this and most any other anime, I would pick this. This first episode was like...maybe a 5/10 - pretty bad, but not disastrously bad like I would regard almost every other anime show you could throw at me, and it could certainly get better once some of the clumsy setup is out of the way and it finds its groove. But with about a hundred other pre-2000 shows on my "to check out" list that have a much better chance of appealing to me in style, writing, characters, and art, it doesn't really seem worth my time.

If I don't become ill within the next couple of days, it'll be a minor miracle. My nieces went from minor cold-like symptoms at the beginning of this week to full-on flu symptoms suddenly as of yesterday and today. I've spent many hours being right next to them while they've been coughing and sneezing on me since they've staying home from school, and now it's Easter break. Prognosis seems...uh, less than great.

It's kind of the exact opposite way around for me in terms of creating characters - I determine what my character will look like first, and then I can see what roles it looks like they could fulfill and choose from there. Escaflowne: The Movie. First five minutes was Van inexplicably dropping out of the sky onto a ship and violently murdering everyone on board in unironic shonen action fashion. The next five minutes then cut to Hitomi and her "best friend" Yukari talking. The scene culminates in Yukari finding the suicide note Hitomi wrote, which she reads against Hitomi's wishes because Hitomi wasn't actually ready to give it to her yet, and then Yukari subsequently mocks Hitomi for it. Oh yeah, this is gonna be good.

Title of the article is "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid", but a better title would perhaps be "Social Media, A Modern Age Tower of Babel", a long read from The Atlantic about the internet and social media and how the two of them seem to be breaking down the binding forces of society.

I guess I wouldn't want to be lumped in with the pro-hate reactionaries either, I suppose. Thing is, I feel like you could just...cover different shows if you actually don't like it, . Maybe that's what the critics who have any sense do, leaving just the people who actually like the show to review it and thus giving a falsely positive aggregate impression. Yep, it's pretty easy to tell what you're getting into, and if you want to watch sleaze or smut, fine, whatever. With anime, it's hardly ever clear where the line will be when you're getting into a show, and you can go from "it's perfectly clean" to "this is filth" with the drop of a hat. There just isn't a strong or transparent delineation like there is with most other mediums. At least Utena didn't have fan service...I think. Does Nanami turning into a literal cow count as fan service? Also, you say "4 episode OVA", but there's also the two twelve episode sequels and the movie... I do better with something like that, because a portrait essentially the equivalent of a "preset" for a game like Baldur's Gate, and I have a better idea of what I want to be represented by when given a very finite amount of choices. Although the specific example of Baldur's Gate is not great, particularly BG2, whose portraits were pretty universally terrible. Stop using professional models for character designs, BioWare - the results have been very bad. But if decoration of something is ever left up to me, you can bet it's going to be incredibly spartan, .

Beggars of Life (1928). First two minutes of the film, a man wanders into a house to ask for a place to stay for the night, only to find the master of the house keeled over with a bullet through his skull. Cue Lulu entering the scene and anxiously explaining that yeah, she killed him - he was her adoptive father and he had been sexually abusing her ever since he adopted her, and she had finally had enough and shot him dead this morning when he attempted to rape her. Uh...yeah, so are there any starring roles that this poor woman played where she was not sexually abused? Good lord, this is a ridiculous level of typecasting. Would it be so difficult for her to be generic happy protagonist girl, just once?

Have had a couple of funky monitors that would seem like they were dead for a bit, would suddenly resurrect because of something strange like switching the cable, then months later would suddenly "die" again, and rinse and repeat. It's really annoying when it happens. My assumption is something somewhere in it is getting rattled/unrattled because of using and messing around with the monitor, leading to seemingly random life and death.

Queen Beryl is literally what I thought of every time it happened. Yeah, you just keep spinning your Life Day orb while doin' absolutely nothing of use, queenie... It's difficult for me to even imagine anybody who didn't watch the original show starting with and somehow enjoying the films for them to be able to go back and check out the show. I guess you might be right in regards to the popularity/"you have to watch and like this" factor, though. Live-action is also different because...well, how often do you see shots in live-action shows where the camera zooms in or cuts away to just a character's chest or butt? In anime shows, it's not a totally irregular occurrence, and it's really freaking disruptive, particularly when it lingers for several seconds at a time and particularly when there's no in-show justification for it. Sure, it might happen in certain types of lower budget movies that I've never seen (...as well as Transformers, where it really is just as bad or even worse than any anime), but shows that actually aired on television? A live-action show with "fan service" might have a lady wearing a ridiculous and overly sexualized outfit, but if the scene at least keeps trucking along like it should... A momentary glimpse of unitard during a fight in Sailor Moon versus mashed potatoes Miranda and her barf-worthy butt being inexplicably placed directly in front of the camera in the middle of an important conversation in Mass Effect 2 feels like all the difference in the world. I still don't love the former, but at least it's not getting my face caved in with a sledgehammer like the latter. There are different levels to these things, and anime has a history of casually going to an extreme that I remain very uncomfortable with. I must admit, I've never known exactly how to feel about that sentiment regarding MMOs and female characters - obviously, the troglodyte way in which it is expressed is pretty reprehensible, but then I have to consider the case of my own self. I always play as a female character in games where you have to design your own character. Why? I usually don't even design my character: in games like Dark Souls, I always go with one of the available presets while just changing the hair style/color, and that's it. If there isn't a preset to choose from, I either sit there and agonize or I just straight up uninstall the game. I don't "sit there and agonize" because I'm going back and forth on what I want, or because I'm testing out stuff. No sir, I so utterly loathe making those kinds of decisions entirely that it inhibits me from doing anything at all, because nothing about the visual or creative design of a character really comes to me naturally and I don't have any kind of idea of what I even want, so I don't even know where or how to start. So why always female if I don't even really care what my character looks like? I'm not entirely sure. I know I was mad when I played Dark Souls 2 and they got rid of the particular passive character voice (grunts/yells/screams/yelps) that I used for DS1...and I was happy when they actually brought back that voice for DS3. On some level, I feel more comfortable playing (or identifying with?) a girl than I do a guy, but I don't understand the specifics...though it's certainly not because "I want to look at a girl's butt the entire game", I can tell you that. My biggest issue with the look of Escaflowne is the generic-ish anime fantasy aesthetic, particularly in relation to Gaea and its characters. Obviously, I made my peace with it to some degree, but boy, there were some scenes where I would pause it and be like "...how can I like this when I've immediately spurned so many other anime fantasy shows?" purely because of the way the show looked, . Funnily, HoonDing said Hitomi was unbearably ugly, but it was actually pretty much everyone else that this problem applied to for me because she and the other Earth characters had a little bit of a different style going on in comparison to the Gaea world/characters.

I'm all about that journey, and the journey sure is a lot sweeter when you take a little time to have nice character moments, flesh everything out, and just give everybody some room to breathe rather than rush full speed through a plot. All those nice little Hitomi + Merle moments and such woulda never happened otherwise. Ironically, as you said, the show was actually a bit too fast from that perspective, but knowing that...one, this was originally supposed to be a full-on shonen, and two, they lost 13 episodes after the story had been finalized and had to rush to try to make it work, both sure make it easier to forgive, particularly since...you know, the show is still pretty great, . Yes...or the sheer amount of times that silly emperor repeated himself about his ridiculous perfect future and being able or not able to see it or whatever... We have a very limited run-time here, we don't need you to spend a minute of every episode giving us extremely vague updates about what you can or cannot see, okay? Stuff that would annoy me if the show didn't have a bunch of other things that I like going for it...but like you/Jay said - when something's working for you, it's working, and never mind the details. Good question, I'm really not sure. HoonDing had a whole rant about how Hitomi was unbearably ugly. Maybe it's less "the show is tediously slow" and more "the show is tediously slow...given that I do not much like or care about the characters and their interactions". Why one does/doesn't like or care about any given character can be pretty complicated - visual appeal is certainly one factor, although how it applies in all of its different facets from one person to the next, especially in regards to an inherently artistic medium like animation, is very difficult to pin down. I'm certainly no exception in that I'm drawn to certain art styles and character types/styles a lot more than others*, so I get it. I mean, I don't really get how one can look at Twelve Kingdoms and somehow think literally any single element of it looks more visually appealing on any level than Escaflowne, but I at least get it in the sense that I understand that some people clearly prefer that over Escaflowne for equally arbitrary preferences as my own, . Legitimately one of the best parts of Wings of Honneamise for me was Manna mean-mugging everything and everyone the entire film. That's a pretty bizarre and arbitrary thing to enjoy on a visual level, but for some reason, I really did - I genuinely got great delight out of it, and it'll be something I remember for some time. For a whole lot of other people (well, particularly men/boys), it's all about women's chests and such instead...meanwhile, @Amentep and I had a whole discussion about how that was the most horrifying and unnecessary part of the film. Some of us pretty clearly speak in different film language from one another, even if we all happen to be able to use English to try to convey the specific film language that we use and prefer, . *Seriously, trying to use your generic male gaze sex appeal has pretty much the complete opposite intended effect 99% of the time for me - I'll almost always hate and be grossed out by it, and there's a high probability of it greatly taking away from what I'm watching. Some love it for reasons I'll never be able to get, while others are somehow able to just pay it little heed and enjoy the rest of whatever they're watching without hardly thinking about it. Alas, not I.

The forum software updated, and the software got rid of it with the update. It happened to a pile of different places that were using Invision all at once. Well, there was a transition period where you could switch to BBCode mode for a bit, but then it was just...gone with another update. What I do these days is always highlight a part of a person's post, like this, and it just goes wherever your cursor currently is in the box. Using the actual quote button is the path to madness: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/onlwdqqg7j7mlmd/firefox_XAYVSnPJW3.mp4 (e): Ninja-ed by Amenpoop, .

Hey, I wasn't going to name names, . I know this sort of stuff certainly has its audience, but this is majestic we're talking about here - the guy that almost exclusively watches shoujo, hates all things toxic masculine, and pretty much never cares for mindless action? It would genuinely be pretty shocking if he enjoyed Redline or anything like it.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news directly in the face of others recommending something, but someone has to be the voice of reason here. It's a very strong anti-recommendation for Redline to at least @majestic due to the film being about as dumb as it looks - if you like fast-paced mindless 2000s action/racing machismo-laden seinen (IIRC, with some barf-worthy fan service to boot), I'm sure it earns high marks, but in what universe would that ever be the case for majestic? My intervention here is almost certainly unnecessary though, because taking even a glance at the film should make him run for the hills, which is what I should've done when someone already made the recommendation in one of these threads a year or two ago. Classic of classics mode, activate! I'll get back to the Escaflowne post later.

i still haven't decided if i'm ever going to play it, though

The extension says .gifv, but it's actually a .webp, that relatively new-ish format that's suddenly become very en vogue as of the last few years for cheap and quick downscaled/cached images, animated or not. I didn't think of using that...but on the other hand, I don't have anything that can convert to that either, so I guess it still doesn't help, .