Bartimaeus

Speaking of Toy Story 4, I actually watched it recently, and here's a more differenter opinion: I think Toy Story 4 is my favorite of the Toy Story series, even though it has some serious problems that bring it down so completely unnecessarily (like the entire plot revolving around the literal, LITERAL trash that is Forky...or Buzz Lightyear being a completely useless and utterly flanderized moron the entire movie when it seems like they should've just found a way to remove him entirely). There's some quite stupid stuff in that movie...but I fell in love with the villain instantly, I didn't mind where they took Bo Peep's character, I even liked her little toy friend, and I identified more with the themes in it more than in any of the others. I do recognize, however, that it is probably the worst quality out of all of them in terms of consistency and storytelling, but now that I've confessed this sin, I can...uh, live peacefully, I guess.

For whatever reason, I felt more emotional connection to those two stupid robots than all of the rest of Pixar's characters combined, I think. Don't ask me, it's overwhelmingly the reason the film works for me where so many don't. Anyways, it's thanks to Frozen that I started getting more interested in animation again, which eventually lead to me trying out a few Cartoon Network shows like Gravity Falls (STINKS), Adventure Time (SORT OF STINKS BUT HAS SOME GOOD PARTS), and Steven Universe (DOESN'T STINK OUTSIDE OF A RELATIVELY SMALL PERCENTAGE OF EPISODES), which then eventually lead to me checking out various other animated movies and shows, which eventually lead to me incidentally coming across that one Nausicaa poster that inspired me to me actually give it and the other Ghibli movies a chance, which eventually lead to me trying out more random stuff like Perfect Blue and Sailor Moon, which finally leads us to having resurrected the anime thread and where we are today. All's well that ends well, aye?

And I disliked Finding Nemo back even when I saw it right after it came out so I am not particularly tempted to try Finding Dory (especially since I didn't have positive memories of her as a character from having seen Finding Nemo), and I have been told by others repeatedly to watch Inside Out...but I never got around to it, . I like the first ~5 minutes of Up, but I couldn't tell you about the rest of it because I think I fell asleep watching it. Something about...a bird...and a talking dog.

A few big problems for me with Pixar: 1. I seem to never feel any kind of emotional connection with their characters. This may be because they overwhelmingly prefer young male protagonists, which I have previously noted a number of times as being anathema for me. Between the time Pixar was founded and the time Frozen came out, they had exactly...one? female protagonist, and that was in Brave, and Brave... 2. Their worlds/settings are utterly fantastic without even the slightest bit of being grounded that severs any ability for me to treat them the least bit seriously. Disney may have really annoying animal companions that are way too human for their own good, but that's something I can at least kind of head canon away if I'm invested in the other characters and the world. 3. The structure and emotional cores of their stories are very formulaic, and while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's pretty serious when nothing else in their films really interest or grab me. 4. Their character art style is generally hideous, and while that shouldn't really matter, and I am a noted art style snob. ...There are probably other things, but these are the biggest things that constantly annoy me about their films. The only Pixar film I really like is WALL-E, and it has all sorts of problems that I'm going to completely overlook because it's the only one I really like, . (e): Perfect timing with Amentep saying he hates WALL-E, . I'm so sorry.

Yeah. I mean, no. ...No, I haven't seen Dark Star yet, that was going to be the next one, but I was persuaded by someone not on these forums to change my pick to Little Trouble in Big China, which unfortunately turned out to be a ludicrously terrible idea. Not sure when/if that'll happen. Also, yes, Whisper of the Heart, .

I don't think I saw literally anything else that you mentioned that wasn't Star Wars or The Thing, but you did mention a lot of things, so don't quote me on that, . My feelings on Nolan's Batmans were that I liked Begins, Dark Knight is close enough to it if a little difficult to follow, and the last one felt like a significant step down in literally every way possible to the point where I didn't like it at all. Speaking of Frozen, I've seen Frozen a handful of times of my own free will as well - it helped re-kindle some interest in animation after a looong vacation from it, after being starved out by Disney's very lacklustre 2000s and my long-held general dislike for Pixar and the kind of material they put up.

I have a friend with the a similar reason for why they love Mononoke so much - it was the moment they realized that cartoons didn't have to be just silly kids stuff. Of course, I then replied to them "yeah, that movie was a pile of dogcrap". ...We're no longer friends for some reason I can't discern. ...Okay, only the first sentence was true, but you get the idea, . Yeah, I wasn't going to get into animated stuff, since most people in here wouldn't have any idea what most of it was, plus animated stuff is a pretty different medium from live-action. But yes, Whisper of the Heart is the best Ghibli...followed by Only Yesterday, and then Grave of the Fireflies, . But everything else you said that wasn't Sakura were all terrible choices. How embarrassing! ...I'm trying to think of what the movie I've watched the most is, not accounting for stuff I watched a lot as a young kid just because it was on. Most of the movies I listed I've seen between 1 and 2 times...I guess I've seen 12 Monkeys and Heathers around 4-5 times, so probably those. I don't make a habit of re-watching stuff very often - movies are not really my natural outlet for "comfort entertainment", as @Raithe put it. Though I do sometimes watch very specific stretches of a movie or show a number of times, usually parts that make me emotional for when I need an emotional kickstart. I'm not a hundred percent sure why I do that.

Least reliance on CGI out of the three, cares the most about actually developing its core characters, has a great balance between lightheartedness and tension without dipping too far into forced attempts at humor like TTT and TRotK do, characters are the closest to how they should be without diverging too much for the sake of FORCED CONFLICT (Frodo and Sam are especially unfortunate victims of this as the trilogy goes on)...and best of all, it's really long BUT not outrageously so like TTT and TRotK. Yeah, it's easily the best of the trilogy, . I can't really rate movies in terms of like...a top ten list, but it's easy enough for "tiers", and when I separated my live-action movies from animated movies, there were literally exactly ten live-action movies that fell into the very top tiers, so it was easy to create a "no order" top ten list, . Alien, Children of Men, The Witch, and The Lighthouse are the ones I've seen from your guys' lists, and I like all of them, . ...Technically, I've also seen Pan's Labyrinth as well, but it's been so long that I can't say how I feel about it. (e): And also The Warriors, which while I didn't dislike, I didn't quite like either - I appreciated it is how I would put it.

@Keyrock I've seen Total Recall, Pulp Fiction...and The Last Crusade, of course. I'm struggling to remember whether Total Recall is the Schwarzenegger movie about clones or the one about Mars...and the fact that I can't remember tells you enough about how I felt about it, . Pulp Fiction is alright, but Quentin Tarantino frustrates me with his unending commitment to reprehensible characters and having his films only ever serve as the movie equivalent of a rollercoaster with hardly anything else going for them. Good rollercoasters...but still just rollercoasters - my brain begs for just a little bit more, and he never gives me anything. And I've seen a few minutes of both Goodfellas and A Clockwork Orange and I might revisit the latter someday, but probably not the former. And that's the "odd one out" for me, so to speak, but I have a bias for it because I watched it so many times as a kid since it was one of my mom's and my favorite movies. Yeah, I get you there. Fellowship is the only one that's really even vaguely worth watching the extended edition for too, because most of the scenes added by the extended editions in TTT and TRotK are somewhere between mediocre and bad and they're way too danged long as it is. The two things I think I usually value most in "serious" movies are love of the characters (in whatever form that takes) or tension (again, in whatever form that takes). Only extremely rarely do I get both (e.g. 12 Monkeys, Perfect Blue, The Florida Project, etc.). So yeah, I suppose that makes sense, . "comedy-horror epic" wat Yeah, see above what I wrote in the first block with regards to Tarantino, . Good inclusion of Casablanca, I rather like that one as well.

Some observations: The closest we come to agreeing there is, funnily enough, Die Hard, . Not that it would place anywhere near my "favorite films", of course, but as far as action movies go, I rather enjoyed it and can appreciate how good it is and why it would obviously be considered important and great. I think I also rated it the most highly out of anything you listed at a 7/10. Haven't seen The Hangover, Office Space, Elf, or Army of Darkness - I THINK the only one I would strongly consider watching is Army of Darkness. The Goonies (6/10), Back to the Future (6.5/10), A New Hope (6.5/10), and The Last Crusade (6.5/10) are all valid enough choices - lot of action-adventure movies there (with the exception, to a degree, of BttF), but at least I understand them. If you had chosen Temple of Doom (7/10) or The Empire Strikes Back (7/10) instead, they would've competed with Die Hard for being the closest, . I've seen The Black Cauldron (3.5/10) and basically all I remember is being shocked by how bad it was...but that was some years back, . All in all, it could be a lot worse! My top ten favorite live-action movies would be the following in no particular order: 12 Angry Men [1957] Downfall [2004] Parasite [2019] Heathers [1989] Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1975] Rosemary's Baby [1968] The Florida Project [2017] The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [2001] The Thing [1982] 12 Monkeys [1995] Please let me know if you consider any of these particularly great, so that I can take some time to reflect and re-think whether they were actually that good or not, .

Is that the lady I just mentioned that I wanted out of the movie more than literally anyone/anything else? ...Hmm, . I didn't have any problem with Kurt Russell's character - indeed, it was rather amusing to see him play a kind of dumb and incapable version of the type of character that he usually plays. ...I get the feeling I should've asked all of you guys "should I watch Big Trouble in Little China yes/no", to which all of you would've immediately said "absolutely, 100%"...at which point, I would've then included the following addendum to my question: "...given that I hate kung-fu, swordplay, cheesiness, usually action and comedy movies in general, and so on and so forth", to which all of you would've said "if you crap all over this movie, we will throw you down a well" or some such. Yeah, I'm not sure we've ever agreed on a film, and we probably never will, . Heck, if I had known you loved it, I would've probably taken it as a warning...

Yeah, I did mostly get that, but it's still a very cheesy 80s action(-comedy) movie. The utterly clueless protagonist (who asks "what the hell is going on" approximately 40 or 50 times throughout the film, ) may not be the suave action hero he thinks he is, but it doesn't really fundamentally change how the movie plays out for me, especially when the movie has some peculiar character direction and dialogue (the "romantic interest" lady, Grace, was an absolute albatross in almost every scene she appeared in - if there was one character being cut out of the film that would've helped make it at least a bit more enjoyable for me, it was her, as I could not wrap my head around why she acted the way or said the things she did outside of "we need to complete this picture of a borderline parody American action movie, and that means having a girl"). But I'm not an action guy, and I'm especially not a cheese guy, so really, I'm just the wrong audience for something like this.

It's less to do with however good Grim Dawn might be, more to do with that I am not, and have not been, interested in any ARPGs for many years now, so I'm not going to put any time into playing a new one. Path of Exile was the last one I put more than a couple of hours into (probably about a handful of years ago now) and I stopped playing it when I had a lagspike that killed my character on the (then) final boss of the game. Felt no urge to keep playing, and have never felt any urge to play any new ARPGs since. With D2, there's nothing new to learn, it's not complicated or particularly challenging, it's just a matter of playing an old game for a few days until I've had my fill.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986). This was the dumbest 80s action movie in the history of dumb 80s action movies, maybe ever. Everything everyone said and did in this movie seemed like it was written to be as dumb as humanly possible. It was somewhat amusing in a "what the hell is wrong with you" kind of way, I guess, but didn't do much for me beyond that.

Two things: 1. The forum software inexplicably loves to color-shift my avatars, and I have no idea why. It's not as noticeable with this one, but it was super noticeable with the previous one (to me, since I was very familiar with the previous image I had). 2. For some reason, the forum software would not accept this one in .png no matter what I did, so I actually had to save it in a .gif instead to avert some kind of inexplicable and unexplained error (and no, it wasn't due to the size, the limit of which is like 100 KB and mine was ~82 KB). So in conclusion...circle avatars and the whole avatar upload process is crap on here and the forum eating posts and really the whole post-submitting form is crap on here. I am trying to think of what got better on here since the forum upgrade...the easiness of embedding images and videos, I suppose? Of course, there have been many times where I *didn't* want to embed something and found it very difficult NOT to...so, really, all in all, it's been a bad deal. Curse the Obsidian forums!

Google says that's Justy Euki Tylor from The Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Right, then. Meanwhile, I can't figure out what KP's is from at a glance because approximately a billion different people have used it for their avatars across many different platforms and it's too much work to sort through that crap. I would also like to point out that I'm the only one that changed my avatar in good faith - the rest of these cretins did it just to troll you and/or simply follow the leader, @majestic, .

The one thing I appreciate about Last Tour is the fact that it's clearly a more toon-esque style, which naturally makes it less offensive to me than bad attempts at non-toon styles...even if I still don't like it. PSA: Circular avatars are still dumb. vs. Kind of makes it look like she's not wearing any clothes because it cuts out her shoulder - thanks, I hate it.

I looked at all of those, and I was like, "Yeah, thing is, I actually like Sakura: Clear Card more still..." Then I actually looked back up and was like "wait, actually, no I freaking don't, they look like horrific aliens". All of these look pretty bad to me, but if I had to pick one that looks the most terriblest, it is Love Live...followed by probably Crystal (especially if you're looking at season 1 Crystal which I don't think is the particular screenshot you included), then Clear Card, then...I guess Last Tour, then Blood-C. So I guess you're right.

Yeah, considering how wretched the trailer looked, it was surprisingly fine. Well, I'll disagree with you on the art style which I think is bordering on hideous, of course, but whatever, .

The excitement of a new ladder is literally the only draw to ever playing again for me, and that possibility will be gone soon once the original game dies what with D2:R and all. I'll probably never play an ARPG ever again, for a few different reasons. Trading was a disaster in that game until d2jsp came around. Can't imagine going back to in-game trading. Uber Diablo was added back in 2003 (1.10), while Pandemonium came in 2005 (1.11). But if you were using the ancient Guided Arrow bug, that was in 1.09 before either of those, .

Gear: Yeah, I didn't generally ever play anything that required gear because high-end builds didn't interest me that much. Exactly three characters really matter PvE in Diablo II: your generic Sorceress (early ladder do-it-all), a Hammerdin (later ladder magic/rune-finder), and a Smiterdin (Uber/Pandemonium-killer). Everything else is really just for PvP or for fun, because nothing else can really match those three's effectiveness for the jobs they do. Though there is something to be said for fun, of course, if you like a particular class' playstyle. But I'm not a huge fan of D2's janky PVP, so my experience with non-Sorceress/Paladin characters is admittedly a lot more limited - I've probably made exactly one "serious" attempt each at Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, and Amazon...and never an Assassin because playing an Assassin is basically playing a worse Sorceress if you go the traps route OR a worse Barbarian if you go the martial route. One ladder, I finally did enough to slay Uber Diablo and Pandemonium, and I have never been particularly tempted to put that much work into another ladder since. If I ever play, it's just as a glass cannon sorceress built to boss-rush* that I play for the first week or two of ladder to make some quick early ladder money** and then I run out of steam and quit, . *One of my favorite strategies is using my horribly-equipped, too low-level sorceress to join nightmare and hell Baal run games (in nightmare, she'll usually be around level 55, in hell around level 70) to slay quest-bugged Andariel, Duriel, and Mephisto before the rest of the players are able to kill Baal, thereby repeatedly giving me quest boss drops every single time I kill them as well as not suffering from the no-drop mechanic*** without having to ever share drops, and then I'll just stay with the same group of Baal runners and keep doing it in new games. And the reason my sorceress is always horribly equipped is because I sell all of the good stuff I find (e.g. SoJs) to other players immediately as I get them because I don't need them. How I play Diablo 2 is probably a little different from most people, . **As a comparison point, and I just checked right now, and a Stone of Jordan now a few months into the current ladder is worth literally 1/100th of an SoJ a week into the ladder - makes no sense to even play right now. ***The no-drop mechanic being what determines when items drops - when you have only 1 player in a game, most of all drops are deleted before you can see them, hence the term "no-drop". With additional players in the game, the no-drop chance drops significantly, so it doesn't make much sense to ever magic-find in games that aren't at least mostly full...unless you're having a bot do it for you. Of course, more players makes it a lot more difficult...

12 Angry Men (1957). The entire movie takes place in one room, twelve jurors discussing the guilt of an accused murderer where all of the evidence is stacked up against the accused. What a great movie, especially because of but certainly not just for the time - it would be great even if it were made today, though stylistic differences as a result of being made today would probably make a much weaker film out of it. I can see why it's rated up there with the best of all time: it did everything perfectly right without going too strongly one way or the other and it concluded just as it should've if you have any belief in the core concepts of "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond reasonable doubt". Characters, dialogue, themes, plot, filming, premise...this one absolutely goes into my small "favorites of all-time" pile.

Curses are super useful...though my favorite usage of curses is having either a Wand of Life Tap or a Wand of Lower Resistance on the weapon swap of a sorceress. Either one increases the effectiveness of a sorceress greatly - Life Tap makes it so your mercenary can tank just about endlessly unless they're truly outmatched, while Lower Resistance...yeah, lowers enemies' elemental resistances and makes them that much more vulnerable to sorceress' already overpowered spells, . Sadly, Decrepify (the slowing curse) can't spawn on items with charges, .

...The thought of which naturally made me go investigate to compare for this particular scene. Nope, that just won't do - I'd rather listen to the Japanese before that. This reminds me that I should investigate whether anyone ever created a hybrid of Death, because there was a DVD release of Death in the original English dub from way back when, but the BD was only released with the new English dub, and while Death is pretty dull, it is still semi-a part of the original show. Before Trump, even a far-right U.S. politician saying something like that publicly would be shocking. Maybe not quite so much anymore... Then again, we have a two party system that kind of requires everyone in the party to kowtow to the party line, which means politicians aren't usually elected on the basis of their virulent racism, which is not the case for a multi-party system with more radical parties.

Not sure, I can't watch the Netflix version because they redubbed it with an entire new cast. It's hard for me to even listen to the Japanese because of how weird and different it is, never mind an entire new English dub. What's up with this show and re-dubbing stuff? Even these "director's cut" versions of episodes are new recordings compared to what originally aired and have new scripts, at least for the English. Anyways, that was my first time seeing that "fun" sequence...I found the English much more brutal, but I would, wouldn't I?