majestic

It's a bit weird to say I'm having a hard time coming up with a top ten and then ramble on about the many movies that didn't make the list, but there are only so many that really stand out for some reason, and not many at all are readily explainable. There's no real reason why I should like Dark Star so much, yet I do. My wife is absolutely not movie or TV show compatible with me. Didn't stop us though. She hates almost everything I watch. It's kind of funny, actually. edit: The Black Hole is a film I regret rewatching. It wasn't nearly as good as I remembered it to be. Eh.

I don't really buy that you've seen either Wanted or Indien, so I'll just disregard that last statement there. Whisper of the Heart isn't just the best Ghibli film, it's legitimately one of the best films I had the pleasure of watching, even with that not so great ending. Have you watched Dark Star yet and not posted about it? That bad? Did it get turned off? I also realized by reading the other posts that I forgot Memento. Yes, the film is by far and large "just" its gimmick, but that worked surprisingly well. It's Nolan's best film, and the only one I would truly consider excellent. The others all have issues, even though everyone seems to love The Prestige, for instance. Inception was fine-ish, great visuals, but there's something off about DiCaprio's and Ellen Page's acting, or maybe I'm projecting something on Ellen Page there. Guess compared to the rest of the DC movies the Batman films were decent enough, but even them... eh, dunno. Begins was all right, the others increasingly confusing, and the last one pretty bleh. Here's the funny thing - as a general rule, I don't rewatch much either. It took me close to 25 years to have another go at Sailor Moon. Having seen Star Wars as much as I did comes from a time where I had a lot of free time, only a handful of video tapes, two channels on TV (neither of which showed anything worthwhile for me, at the time) and a good bunch of books that I already went through twice. They were my Frozen, I guess.

Nothing will ever be as awesome as Neil Breen's ballsack.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a top 10 list. I've seen a lot of films, and a good deal of them are either of a genre I enjoy or do something well enough to not be considered bad, but as someone once asked me after the umpteenth time we watched something at the theater and my reaction was "It was fine, really": Do you like movies at all? Why yes, I do, why else would I spend money on watching them. Do I define this based on my greatest appreciation for whatever reason, then that list suddenly includes films that based on any objective criteria shouldn't even have been made. Like the Masters of the Universe live action film. Should I focus on watershed movies in film history that I happened to like? If so, there's a place for For a Fistful of Dollars, even though I very much prefer Once Upon A Time In The West. Ultimately, throwing out any non-subjective reasons to appreciate something beyond pure enjoyment to make this manageable, but it will also mean that a lot of films that normally are on these lists aren't in it (like Termintor, Alien, Indiana Jones movies that aren't Crystal Skull, etc.). I'm also going to include animation, because I can. It's also something based on my current mood and place in life, sprinkled with a couple of all time classics. Tomorrow it might be different, but here goes nothing: Indien (1993) or Wanted (1999) - good idea to include year of release, because writing Wanted would otherwise leave people dumbfounded. Wanted - the one with James McAvoy - is terrible. It's so bad it crosses from so bad it's good back to just awful. Wanted on the other hand is a great, both funny and thought provoking film about someone escaping from reality, and Indien is a tragicomedy road movie. Who knows, since I'm not exactly planning this post this might not even be an "or" but a both - depends on how many films I really loved I can come up with. Masters of the Universe (1987) - the obvious guilty pleasure. This is just bloody fantastic, and I was sort of surprised that nobody else seems to be of my opinion. Has an absolutely great Skeletor philosophizing about the loneliness of heroes and villains, cheesy special effects and soundtrack, totally ridiculous plot elements, an early role by Robert Duncan McNeill. I will never say good bye to this, only good journey. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) - not only the best of Sergio Leone, but the best Western. Keep your John Wayne, and yes, it wins out over The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Period. Fantastic soundtrack too (but what else would you expect from Morricone), great use of the actors and even a great performance of Charles Bronson. The only way to make this better would be to have Clint Eastwood play Harmonica (the role, not the instrument). Violet Evergarden (2020) - so now everyone who is a regular at the obviously best thread on this board will wonder why this is here after I've spent hours writing what amounts to a 25 page essay on how much I hated the ending, but that's five minutes out of it's two hours and twenty minutes runtime. Has the obvious disadvantage of being a film based on a series. It might still work as a standalone film, but won't be as effective. I'm honestly not sure if this should be here, or not, but it sure left a mark that barely any other film can claim to have. Could be substituted for Marriage Story. Dark Star (1974) - this film does have a cult following that enjoys it in spite of its flaws, while I like it for its flaws. Honestly, the absurdity of it all makes this so much worthwhile - or utterly boring, depending on how much you appreciate when really nothing happens for an hour in the most absurd of ways, followed by the 20 minutes that everyone else likes. Cardcaptor Sakura - The Sealed Card (2000) - Where Violet Evergarden might work as a standalone film for fans of romantic drama (and B-plots involving terminally ill children) there's no way this works at all without having seen the series, as it is the capstone that ends it. Or should have ended it, because just like so many things these days, it got an unnecessary and terrible sequel series. This film is probably as close to a 10 out of 10 you can get, but it does that simply also because there are 70 episodes establishing these characters. In a way, that's close to cheating. Movies based on a series more often than not end up being an overly long standalone episode never utilizing the strength of the series to create a worthwhile film. Not so this one. Paid with having no appeal for non-fans. Star Wars, original trilogy (1977 to 1983) - no real need to separate these. I could, but then I would have to say that Empire is the best of the three, but Return is the one I like the most - very much in spite of its many flaws. Also the film I saw the most. Easily. Not just a couple of times, more like hundreds. I killed a bunch of VHS tapes watching and rewatching this, like daily. Whisper of the Heart (1995) - I'm just going to agree with @Bartimaeus and say that this has become my favorite Studio Ghibli film. Iron Sky (2012) - if it weren't for Iron Sky, Starship Troopers would be here. Expected nothing going to the theater, found absolutely biting satire that got way too real back in 2016. Charming performance by Udo Kier, as always. Has a really bad sequel. Stay clear of that. Has an extraordinary amount of negative votes in IMDB by people who simply didn't get it. I bet a whole bunch of them would bite their own butts today for saying it's way too unrealistic to have a Sarah Palin stand-in as president. *snort* The Big Lebowsky (1998) - @Gromnir might say that films should have a plot, and he likes to cite this one as proof, but I'll just disagree even if I in principle agree with the argument. This is the best film about nothing ever made, and it's all down to three perfect performances where you can't quite shake the feeling that everyone is just playing themselves, not roles. Well, that's ten films (13 if we count Star Wars as three separate films and both Indien and Wanted). I could add more, I guess, but a top ten it was supposed to be. A fair amount of new additions removed some others from what I normally would have. The list also leaves out a few films that I really enjoyed but are all on a similar level with nothing to elevate them in a subjective way. There's the fantastic Terminator, for instance. Alien. Nightmare on Elm Street 3, which is my favorite slasher film (actually, the Nightmare on Elm Street series is the only slasher series I have any sort of appreciation for, and that's 100% down to Robert Englund - the third movie also has the kookiest premise and is just overall good fun to boot). It's leaving out the fantastic works of Luc Besson and Roman Polanski (both of which are very problematic filmmakers for obvious reasons) which probably deserve a mention too. These are all films I would watch to the end if I happened across them, as would obviously be The Thing, or Escape from New York. There are more local films (Muttertag, an absurd black humor satire with the five actors of the main cast playing well over 20 roles). Many french films starring Jean Reno or Alain Delon. Any of the older Asterix films. Various Disney films, several Pixar ones. The dour but impressive works of Michael Haneke, like The White Ribbon or Amour. Shortbus, that @KP the meanie zucchini mentioned, certainly was a great little film, although this is so far out of mainstream (and @Bartimaeus in case you don't know what it is about but got curious after us mentioning it, I don't know if there's a censored version, perhaps. An uncut version is, I think, out of the question - it has several scenes of unsimulated intercourse, but even a cut for TV version is not really... compatible, I think). Bunch of guilty pleasures that are missing too. Like the third Starship Troopers film. Other cult films like Cube, or classics Casablanca. I have probably forgotten to mention a whole bunch of films. I've just seen way too many to count. Most of them were... not good. Still, with the sheer volume, there are too many that I liked for whatever reason to not make an overblown post here, even with being picky. Because for as many films that I seem to have really liked based on this post, the ones I hate are legion. The lot of the American Pie films. @Hurlshot's favorite The Hangover is so offensive based purely on its premise that I don't need to watch it at all to know I'd hate it. Anything that has Adam Sandler in it. And lastly, because as if this post wasn't offensive enough, there's a huge amount of absolutely overrated films and people. Like virtually everything by Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers. From Dusk 'Til Dawn. What did KP say? Have at me.

Very much not safe for work to google, just a heads up in case any of you go "huh, what's that, funny name" right now.

Well, that puts you above any suspicion. I only noticed today, guess I really wasn’t browsing through anything else this week.

Also, I need to reiterate this, there's nothing to be done about the issue itself, so if you want to change avatars at any given point, just do it. Don't think twice on my account.

Yeah, a couple of months back, I changed my avatar to Kyubey, not only did I have to manually edit the base image because the editing and uploading process didn't work as it should, I also needed to switch browsers to make it work, only to then notice that I can't stand looking at a new avatar (much less Kyubey, of all things) and switched back, only to notice that it was impossible to make good old Blue Hair look like he did before. Bad forum software is bad. Wee. No Mari in each thread improves things a lot, so thanks.

Obligatory joke: Once past thirty you lose your ability to enunciate words?

It's okay, really. This is just what happens when after a really long and highly annoying workday I can't keep up appearances any more. Welcome to the real me. Or at least, a part of it. The last couple of weeks really threw me for a loop for a lot of reasons, and there's no end in sight for now.

Yeah, I know. I re-worded that post a good amount of times to take the edge out of it, if you feel like it's still in there, that was only semi-intentional. I'm also not expecting anyone to be considerate towards my weird sensitivities. That's entirely unreasonable. It just is what it is. It's not like I can help it, weird hardwiring is weird. Okay, I think I need to edit my post. That seems to come across as much crasser than it was supposed to.

I would like to preface this post by saying that some of you guys inadvertently shot yourself in the foot trying to be funny, but before I'm beginning to excessively talk about my second most favorite topic besides Sailor Moon, namely myself*, let me agree with @Bartimaeus here, and he can feel left out by any "you"s in the following paragraphs. @Amentep can do that too, because his avatar change happened in parallel and not in response to this thread (or at least I will give him the benefit of the doubt). I'll do my best and try to take your trolling as good natured fun, and not as mean spirited, however I expected more of you. No, scratch that, after the past few pages of Faris GIF spam, I didn't. Cretins, the lot of you. Fie! FIE! Disclaimer: The above is a good natured joke. Like your avatars. At least you guys don't feel a weird brain itch, probably just some twang of remorse. Sumimasen! So and now for the part that you can probably gloss over because it could potentially get into TL;DR territory. I'll put it in spoiler tags for formatting (and for the off-chance that Bruno clicks on the thread, I doubt he could be bothered to look through any spoilers). TL;DR: Nice try, but it's not doing what you thought it would. @Sarex' avatar is offensive on a whole different level, so he's the only one of you who managed to troll me in some way. Good job, I guess. *According to the hokum that my birth horoscope is, I should try to not talk about myself too much. Reading this thread one could actually get the idea that I'm actually doing that, but it's just something that readily comes up, not something sought out. Astrology is still hokum. What a surprise.

Would you like fries with that?

I want to officially log a protest against your avatar change. Not that I don't appreciate Miyu, but avatar changes are bad for my mind. It'll be a few days until it's no longer weird, circular or not.

You know, without having watched the others, yeah, I would readily agree that Blood-C is borderline bad, but in this day and age "It could be worse!" is sadly a mark of quality on its own. How depressing. I think I need to watch something that looks good soon. edit: Out of the examples that aren't Blood-C, Girls' Last Tour is the only one I really enjoyed, and that is very much in spite of its looks.

Feels like a forced perspective change, you know. I mean... it could look like: Yeah Honoka, your face is really similar to mine when I look at this. Or... Hello, I'm Tomoyo, and I once was a real character in a much better looking show. Nice to meet you. Or... Chii, why do I look like a melon? Or... (and I apologize for that one profusely): I'm sure the Amikoto shippers loved this scene. Compare... Really. Blood-C looks fine. This is fine. Really. It's fine. At least the backgrounds are kind of nice!

Blood-C turns out to have a couple of (for me ) recognizable voice actors. The cafe guy is Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon Crystal. Saya is Rue from Princess Tutu. Saya's father is AC/DC Esidisi from JoJo's (among other things), the twin girls from Saya's class are Chibiusa/Black Lady from Sailor Moon Crystal. In terms of the episode I can't say much more than @Bartimaeus already did. Curiously weird introduction sequence with pretty terrible ENGRISH in the song. Not sure the teacher should show up dressed like that in front of teenagers, but hey, I guess some concessions are in order here and there. Aside from the opening scene that looked a bit uncanny, the art isn't half bad. I mean, for something that is from 2011, this looks nice. Even if the character models are a little giraffe-ish. It's also already noticably CLAMPy in certain things. All in all it's off to a good start. It might turn sour a ways down, but so far so good.

I traded a couple times in Path of Exile. Way way back when the game was a beta and it had like two or three acts with difficulties instead of ten acts with a sliding increase in enemy damage (and decrease in resistances), all it had was an overspammed trade channel. It's still all the game has, but trading works by looking at one of the larger trading sites, ruffle through the listings, find what you want and click on "copy" which copies a /whisper into your clipboard to post in game. Then you wait for the guy to invite you, pick the item from the stash and coordinate indicated in the whisper, then you need to join his hideout, complete the trade, say bye bye and leave. It's as clean as an interaction in the game can get, but it's still incredibly tiresome. Simply because you have to join the other party in his personal instance. Why can't we just have action houses like in MMORPGs. A trade waste my time, and the other party's time, because they have to interrupt whatever they are doing. Or just ignore a potential sale. Never felt any excitement for the ladder race. Trying my best to do the impossible with just self-found gear on the other hand, that was always a draw. Took a bug and some Mephisto drop luck to work, but work it did. I mean, aside from conveniently bypassing the worst part of the D2 online experience. Obviously never tried anything with d2jsp. Yep, that was in 1.09. I almost said feels like ages ago, but... that's because it was. Ages ago.

That reminds me of an old LOTR-GIF: I've finished Hell difficulty once so far (killed Baal, that is, this was before the Ubers or Pandemonium), and that was early in Lord of Destruction with the absolutely fantastic Guided Arrow bug. While I put a lot of hours into Diablo 2, mostly it was more of a theoretical exercise for me. I knew all about builds, the items necessary to play them, all that stuff. But I never really played anything but self-found. I'd join random games for the better drop rates, but interactions were limited, and trading? Yeah, no... not at the time, anyway. Things would be different nowadays, except my interest in ARPGs kind of died away too. For the record, I just downloaded D2, then got supremely annoyed at having to download an installer to download the installers to install D2, then LoD separately, had to manually download the newest patch after a non-descript error message from the game, created an account and finally be greeted by a "realm unavailable" message (might just have been something else, but I really don't want to bother checking right now) and then played a character to level 6 in single player, only to find out that the feeling of "been there, done that" is surprisingly overwhelming.

The biggest slow the Necromancer has since the introduction of syngeries is the clay golem. Taking most synergies will make him really sturdy, it can be readily recast (decidedly less so without +mana gear, but still possible) and whenver it hits an enemy or is hit by an enemy it slows them by upwards of 85% when combined with Decrepify. I don't know if there was a bit of nerfing applied in the past patches but bosses, for instance, you can slow down so much you can almost see the individual frames of their attacks. The biggest problem is getting a summoner's retinue to deal damage. Most skeletons survive when you can reliably slow enemies, but it gets really ugly against teleporting enemies with elemental attacks (burning souls just trounce you unless you have good enough gear to resist them), or in small, enclosed spaces where the summons can't swarm enough (similar to a Hammerdin's issues in Act 2). Boss kill speed is fine, could be better, but also really safe. Duriel is a joke when he can't move. It's trying to get your summons to do what they're supposed to that makes it a lot less fun than it could be. Artillery Necros are theoretically fun to play, but those you can't play without having the gear for it first. Well, at least not while having any fun, at any rate. Hm, now I want to fire up some D2. Yay...

Well, that is a cup that passed by me, lucky me that went with the Japanese original. I don't know if the German dub as as many versions as the English one. Par for the course for our Freedom Party. They also really like making racist slogans, like Heimatliebe statt Marokkanerdiebe (lit. "Patriotism instead of Moroccan thieves!") - the German one rhymes, of course. They had a party leader who openly thought the employment policy under Hitler was great, and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff that really is no wonder once you look at their history. They were founded by the leftovers of the Austrian NSDAP after the end of World War 2, tolerated (more like backed) by the US in order to draw votes away from the communist party and had more than a couple of former SS officers in their ranks.

I just looked it up, and yeah, it has the director's cut. But yeah, I know what you mean. The English dub of Rebuild was impossible to endure for me after getting used to the original. Heh. One of our members of parilament just said: "Congo isn't in Africa, it's in here!" Yeah, nothing like open racism from our far right.

See, that reminds me, I never saw the original cut, only the Director's Cut. At least I read that was the one available on Netflix, or am I mixing things up? I didn't get to watch much recently. A combination of a lot of work and having to watch live feeds from our parliament. It's pretty fun at the moment.

I just realized how easy it is for any given sci-fi piece of entertainment to run into something that is my personal version of irrational dislike for a topic that can't quite be explained in any logical fashion and it's pretty bad because it's really... not even consistent. When Doctor Who, for instance, has these fixed points in time that will always happen regardless of what action is taken by any given time traveller (or other agent), then that doesn't bother me at all. It fits Doctor Who, where time travel always just does what it needs to do. In Steins;Gate, based on the many worlds time travel plot, the idea of a fixed point in time that is as harmless as what is going on right now is quite a bother. It's silly and kills my immersion. The anime is dangerously close to breaking through my suspension of disbelief here, and the story is the only thing that makes me like it so far. Doctor Who in total doesn't do the many worlds thing though. Just a single timeline that can be changed with certain limits. And a super stupid episode about time guardians that eat the universe when there's been too much change (whatever that was). It's the same - and that we talked about before here, or in the TV thread - when sci-fi shows elect to make higher powers "real", like in the new Battlestar Galactica where at the end they ran out of ideas and with no better explanation possible they made Head!Baltar and Head!Six actual real angels of God. Why? What? Way to go. Leave actual gods out of my sci-fi stuff, please. I mean "God" gods, not Asgardians or something. Or the ascended Ancients of Stargate, which for no particular reason don't bother me either, even though they are literal gods. See? That makes no sense.