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A beef and mushroom ragu with a simple salad and sheet cake for desert. I'm satisfied.

My hype level for this is rising, hopefully I can finish my Maddening run of Engage before it releases or it may get interrupted just like last time with BG3.

Admittedly I'm not the biggest Star Wars guy, but I took the Darth Plagueis story to be more of Palpatine trying to trick Anakin into falling by tempting him with something, especially because his promise went unfulfilled. And Star Wars cloning doesn't seem to replicate the person so much as create a biological copy of them, while Return of the Jedi: Abrams version had it definitely as Palpatine himself, not Palpatine's body double. But really it was just a bad move for the reasons you've already mentioned. It's clear that the only plan for the sequel trilogy was to try and print money off the brand name and that the trilogy was greenlit without even an outline which is questionable storytelling but apparently good bizness. Moreover, the obvious answer would be to have just introduced Abeloth. I think we can all say 2 hours of Star Wars Cthullu would have been better than what actually happened.

"Somehow, Palpatine returned" ...... I think the bigger problem isn't the talents of professional writers per se as the studios being increasingly neurotic and businesses wanting to overwork everyone while not paying ****. So the only ones who can reliably work in Hollywood are nepobabies while talented people from less wealthy backgrounds get burned out in the gig economy instead of being able to create....all while studio execs burn down hundreds of hours of work for a tax break because the algorithm told them 1000 pound twin housewives would be better. It's all a ****show.

Yeah that's worse than I'd have thought. Mostly I'm just sad about Nintendo both being sue happy IP trolls and bizarrely unwilling to curate their classic titles. I can see doing one or the other, but doing both is just head scratching.

Knowing nothing about this I have to say it sounds incredibly dumb on the part of Yuzu. We all know Nintendo can be extremely litigious and to test them by trying to scalp them on their biggest release in years is asking to get your ass buried in lawyer drama. That said Nintendo's track record of preservation is atrocious and it's sad that what was one avenue for preserving a rich catalog has effectively been demolished. I'm thinking back to the N64, GameCube, and even Wii games that will likely never be able to be played legally without hunting down old consoles and physical media.

Moar Fire Emblem Engage - Maddening The main chapters aren't that hard but holy **** the paralogues are brutal. The Ike one has a great "oh ****" moment where Ike just blows up half the map and you get rushed by everything from the top of the map and stupid busted reinforcements (with no xp gain from fighting) that pop up to **** up your backline. If Ike had used Great Ather I'd have had to restart.

Arrebato (1979) This film is very weird by my standards, so make of that what you will. Many have made films where cinema itself was the focus, this is the first I can think of where cinema is treated as an addiction akin to heroin with steep withdrawals and eventual consuming those who are hooked on it. Stylistically it feels like a drug fueled nightmare with unnerving music throughout and a raspy static voice over narrating much of the film.

I can see that, but the thing is that he's more of a burden when he tries to do stuff and has been told so every time we have to rush him a chair and water. He's also convinced himself that there isn't a big issue with his lungs despite having been a heavy smoker since he was a teenager and struggles for breath constantly. It's just exhausting.

My dad's back in the hospital, heart and lung issues are coming back. I'm trying not to be angry at him but his refusal to let anyone help him with anything until he practically collapses and his apparent delusion at the reality of his situation is just making me furious. I'm not a doctor and may be rushing to judgement but the fact is that he did not give himself time to rest and kept on trying to do stuff that left him winded and begging for help.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) I think I saw this for the first time with an ex back in my early 20s and I was too distracted to really appreciate it. Coming back to it as an older and marginally wiser man I want to go back and slap my younger self for yet another reason. This film is great, no qualifications. It beautifully does magical realism in a way that Sorry to Bother You (2018) did, but on a much more personal level to illustrate the breakup of a couple. For starters, the world feels lived in. The apartments look like what I wake up in, the doctor's office feels like what I deal with when I go for a yearly physical, etc. Obviously it has the advantage of being set in the real world, but it's the small things you wouldn't notice unless they weren't there that really make it. While some hacks may hate it, the film feels driven by dialogue and that works here perfectly. Joel and Clementine fight a lot during the film and if you've ever been in a relationship or known those who have you will absolutely recognize at least some of it. It's got a stellar cast and virtually all of them kill it in parts big or small, everyone flawed in the same ways that you or I or others that we know are. It's also visually incredible. The dream/memory erasing scenes are simple but work to much better effect than big budget stuff that looks like an old videogame within 5 years. The frozen landscape (and the temperature drop around Houston) made me shiver. All in all this is a hard reccomend for anyone and everyone who hasn't seen it already.

I have never read Dune and my knowledge of it was the David Lynch film and the fact there is a man-worm-god-emperor. While I can't speak for anyone but myself, my problem is that his films feel like someone didn't really think about the world beyond the way a machine would. @Bartimaeus previously mentioned his sterile sets in Bladerunner 2049 as an example of this, it just doesn't feel like anyone actually inhabits the worlds Villeneuve builds, it may as well be the Neil Breen green screen with substantially bigger budgets and polish. This also spills over to the characters, Android Ryan Gosling can be forgiven for being mechanical but when every character in Dune feels like a drone created to further Plot instead of a real person that's just **** and disrespectful to a cast that talented.

True, but we're not wrong. Villeneuve's ideal movie is a 2 hour videogame cutscene. Sure that may look kewl (aside from the fact it's going to age like milk) but it's all spectacle and no substance. I have seen three or four Villeneuve flicks and for the life of me I can not remember any striking character interactions that stick with me. The thing I remember most is that the Dune worm looks like a giant fleshlight. I'm much more likely to get wowed by aesthetic images than @Bartimaeus but even still I can't think of any movie I've truly loved that doesn't have memorable characters. Villeneuve's track record shows he couldn't pull that off if his life depended on it.

Having just watched the entire Ethan Hawke tiktok, it goes even harder than what the article quoted. I would love to see a movie without any dialogue. But that would still require interesting characters and nothing that Villeneuve has done makes me think he can pull that off as all his major characters are flatter than Hank Hill's ass. There is no damn emotion in any of his films and as such all of the sound is noise and all the image is lifeless. Cinema is not just photography with motion and sound.

One thing I will say in the favor of the live action Avatar is that at least it doesn't appear to be ashamed of what it's based on/adapted from unlike the bulk of superhero stuff. E for Enthusiasm I suppose. The problems I have with it can boil down to that it tried to translate rather than adapt. I don't think it's shot for shot but it certainly feels more like they copied the animation scripts and edited them to fit live action rather than started with live action in mind. The result is having scenes that feel like I'm watching a cosplay reenactment of the animation which imo isn't fair to the cast.

The Girl From Monday (2005) If there ever was a KP movie, this would be it. A satirical sci-fi where the world filmed on a shoestring budget and early digital that makes it a headache inducing fever dream with such memorable lines such as "let's **** and increase our buying power". Speaking of movies, I read this and thought I'd share it with @Bartimaeus so we could both hate on it.

I put it on in the background while I was cooking and couldn't help but feel that it's simply a lesser version than the cartoon. So why would I watch the bootleg when the real thing is right there?

Is it Obsidian Forum Adventures 3: The Wrath of Sonicmage117?

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) It's a classic film that has some very beautiful scenes. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Do I think a 20-something brit showing up and showing the Arabs how to really do desert warfare is ridiculous western savior bull****? Damn right. The film serves to mythologize Lawrence's legend rather than be historically accurate, while the man himself was remarkable he certainly did not single-handedly lead the Arabs to defeat the Turks on the Arabian front and (try to) hand them democracy against the will of the British and French empires. We can go on and on about "products of the time" and "dramatization" and all that noise, but at the end of the day I think dramatized war stories (ie real events interpreted into fiction) that tend to make heroes, saviors, and/or legends out of single men end up reducing the many people who fought and died to just side characters at best so I'm inherently biased against them. It is a very good movie though. Notably there are no lady characters at all in this movie. Women show up once to sing at the army once and otherwise are completely absent. That's to be expected from a 60s war movie but it does feel strange in 2024.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989) An incredible small scale crime drama. It's sleazy and grimy in a way that you'd want the film to be, there are no criminal empires or masterminds, just a small gang of addicts who knock over pharmacies in order to consume and deal drugs. Because of this for me it has more heart and hits closer to home, I've known more than a few people who've gotten addicted to substances; of those more than a few have done less than legal acts to feed their addiction. It also looks and sounds dope.

How naughty But at least you spared us from amv music so I'll approve of it. Also using Walk Like An Egyptian as the ending credits in part 1 of Stardust Crusaders is an incredible power move.

Virtually every AMV is beaten by any JoJo ending credits scene.

Wow, sounds like the devs perfectly captured the reality of the gig economy.

I think weaponized ftl would be pretty cool as a concept, ftl asteroids or drone "suicide" bombers seem very much like something that could be used to bigger effect in scifi. But there's a difference in doing that from the jump and having cool purple hair lady do it out of nowhere with no setup because it does break the internal logic of Star Wars in the same way as having Sailor Alderaan show up and blast the imperial fleet with Alderaan Honeymoon Therapy Kiss. When I think about it, having Laura Dern do a much more conventional suicide bombing would have been a much more cinematic and fulfilling experience, but Disney Star Wars is more about the kewl cgi scenes that look like dog**** strewn together until they've got 2 hours or so. On a side note, it's incredible that in less than a decade Disney has managed to make Star Wars go from being a massive movie behemoth to a much more niche (limited) series thing. I get that covid ****ed production and all that but it's wild to not see Disney even try to **** out a beeg movie every year after The Rise of Skywalker. I'm under no illusions that Star Wars is dead or even can die, but it certainly seems to have receded to the purgatory of Disney+.

I have never played Borderlands and calling Eli Roth a hack would be an insult to hacks.