majestic

Catching up on last week's Strange New Worlds episode. 20 minutes in... yeah, just one word: Nope. edit: To elaborate, this episode was, next to being somewhat comedic, almost entirely crew interactions and a really weak "A"-plot about negotiations. It's barely there so calling it an A-plot is a bit of a stretch, but nothing in the crew interactions is worthy of being called a plot (let alone A-plot) either, so that's about the measure of it. I noticed I don't care about any of the crew members enough to watch their interactions and be satisfied with them. Things this episode was about: How Nurse Chapel fell in love with Mr. Spock, I question I asked myself every time Majel Barrett-Roddenberry mooned at Spock in TOS. Not. Doctor goes fishing, wears a funny hat. Ha ha ha. First Officer and Security Officer, both very unfun and serious people play "Enterprise bingo" to learn how to lighten up. Spock dreaming about fighting himself, literally, so we can have an action scene. Spock switching bodies with his fiancee. Aliens of the week negotiating by trying to make the other party understand their positions in the stupidest way possible. It was all so rote, and nothing was good enough to actually be fun. Body switching two Vulcans, come on. The comedy of body switching episodes is based on actors playing each other's roles (characters need to be different enough for the comedy to work), and that only works for well established characters that are likeable, not Spock and his guest starring fiancee*. I feel about this episode like Lindsay Ellis felt about the new The Beauty and the Beast film: *Arguably the body swap wasn't about the comedic effect but for character growth, but that should have been handled differently.

I think you have the wrong impression of the amount of effort it takes me to find old posts. Finding and posting the links took roughly three minutes. Thanks, but I'm afraid of Agent Smith.

I feel dared to watch whatever it is you're currently talking about. I will try to resist.

BruceVC and his thoughts about unions and violently breaking up protests. "Unions ruin the economy." "Sometimes governments have no choice but to violently end strikes." "People on strike thought they were impervious to bullets so they got violent." and also "Affected shareholder values, so it was necessary to break up the strike." Nothing hasty about your judgement. Don't let the old posts fool you, just because BruceVC stopped using there and is now typing their all the time, it's still the same poster. I originally made a joke on their being a posessive pronoun. The Agent Smith showed up and asked me why I persist, and I had no real answer. I bet he'll come around the corner and will threaten to terminate this post too.

edit: Note to myself: The hell is wrong with me.

The film is a great example of what it takes for me to enjoy a comedic focus in a film. No or at least limited slapstick, not related to anything supposedly romantic, although we could argue that Nic and Javi have quite the bromance going on, and occasionally absurd, even if they shamelessly stole the joke with the wall from Hot Shots 2. It still works because it has this wonderful interaction attached to it. Plus there's this whole meta level that makes the film generally interesting for me, but it is not the entire movie. Might want to try 7 Psychopaths too if you haven't already. That one's a little more out there though. Not sure, didn't really expect you to enjoy this enough to call it a fun and cute movie, but things have been weird enough recently in this thread. Who knows.

If you mean the talk between Shinji and Gendo at the end in the negative universe, then kind of, yes. There's something I haven't mentioned yet, I never could shake the feeling during the entire film that it is somewhat derivative of other concepts. I felt like I've seen all of that before, or read about it, or played games with such plot points. I can't really give any specifics though.

If that was the intention, then it's actally worse. Would have been a nice concept, but it would have needed to be communicated differently - and with even less action. In fact, more like absolutely not action scenes at all. Would have made for a nice 1:20 minute runtime too. The casting would have been great too, then, because that would have subverted expectations in a good way.

I dreamt I was stuck in a Maniac Mansion'esque point and click adventure. I'm not sure if that is at all related to watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, but probably. I'd post more details about the dream, but what happened in it is curiously out of grasp. I remember dreaming and the topic, but the details are gone. Anyway, I debated with myself whether or not I should post an honest opinion or not, but I will. This will be like the many times my friends dragged me to a movie and then asked how it was, and I usually say fine or okay, with the unsaid implication that fine isn't as good as it sounds, and okay was worse than that. I said it before, but I've been also asked if I like films at all. Which I do. *sigh* So, before getting needlessly verbose, here's a TL;DR: The film was fine, and it's my turn to be the meanie zucchini for a change. Which is fine too, because that's usually my role when talking about films anyway. For this to make sense, I'll have to explain a bit more - and spoil the end of the book series, so take care. In King's The Dark Tower, Ka is a wheel. Ka is a concept of fate, destiny and destination the people in this world have. As such, and even though a whole lot of people were disappointed with the ending of the book series, it makes sense for the protagonist of the series, Roland, to eventually end up exactly where he started. Albeit with the slight variation of having the Horn of Eld, an item of some importance, in this new turn of the wheel. The Horn of Eld in this case is me not hating the film, which makes it different to the last time the forum - back then before Interplay went belly up and some of Black Isle's staff founded Obsidian - agreed that there's a movie of year (or better) to watch. That, back then, it was also a film containing some martial arts, namely Kill Bill Vol. 1. As I said, the difference between this and Kill Bill Vol. 1 was that I hated watching Kill Bill for a myriad of reasons. There's a fine irony here insofar as I've mentioned to someone that I will hold off on watching Everything Everywhere All At Once because I'm afraid that it will be another Kill Bill repeat. Misgivings were overcome by this thread being overwhelmingly positive about the film, and what do you know, the wheel turned. I should have stuck with my initial feeling, really - and that was based simply on the reactions of posters, not even on knowing anything about the film. Alas. I did not hate Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I also don't think it is movie of the year material. For any number of reasons, many of which are spoilers. I'll try to post some general things before marking everything for whoever still wants to watch it. Anyway, the first, and most subjective of it all, is the casting of the film. I like Michelle Yeoh. I also like Jamie Lee Curtis in most of her roles. Even if @Bartimaeus hadn't pointed out that Waymond is Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I would have noticed that, because apparently he was directed to simply act like Shorty in the film during the times he wasn't told to act like Jackie Chan. Which is, luckily, most of the time. He also often still sounds like Short Round. Although that last part is an issue that fused with knowing two versions of the film, the original, and the German dub, therefore it is hard to attribute this entirely to, I don't know, either Ke Huy Quan as an actor or the direction. To add some further insult to the injury, he looks like Harry Potter throughout most of the film. Right at the start I was thrown into a film where the main cast consisted of Michelle Yeoh, someone you don't cast simply for a role as small business owner in the US, Chinese Harry Potter and Jamie Lee Curtis as tax auditor, and while the film at least proceeds to show off that Ke Huy Quan is indeed a good actor, the overall impression of the cast was pretty immersion breaking right from the beginning. I can't put this any other way but to say that I think this movie would have benefitted immensely from not having big name actors attached to it.That said, I liked most of the opening, and I enjoyed the film up until the point they had the first action scene that went on for what felt like an hour. That said, let's move the thing that saved the film: The core of it, the message, if you will. Chinese Harry Potter's take on life is wonderful, and the resolution to the character's problems is great. And yet, therein also lies an issue, yet again. There's so much more of that which could have been in the film, instead of, well, protracted action sequences that serve no purpose. If there's one damning thing I can say about it is that I actually sat through the action and contemplated skipping the film ahead to the good scenes. Imagine how much that takes. I don't even skip the really bad episodes in series I sometimes rewatch. Yes, that means watching Shades of Gray from TNG (no relation to the terrible book and equally terrible film), or Move Along Home and Let He Who Is Without Sin... from DS9. And yes, Threshold from Voyager. I ultimately, being who I am, did not skip around on the off-chance that the scenes would contain something necessary for the resolution, or some minor tidbit that would cleverly come back into play, like, I don't know, a raccoon. There were not many of these, and in fact, I would have liked the film better if I just had fast-forwarded through all the nonsense. So, hey guys, reality is saved. I didn't hate it, so unmaking the entire universe isn't going to happen (yet?), and I certainly am not going to cause the fourth trumpet to blow by loving it. It was fine. It could have been so much more. It just wasn't. No need to hold on to your potatoes.

The world's still here, I guess that means that at least I don't have any reality shaping powers. It's 2 am now, and I need a good night's sleep to make sense of what I've just watched. Kinda feel a little like Roland in the Desert, with the Horn of Eld.

The world is doomed either way. We either all agree on something and cause the end times to occur, or reality finally ceases to exist because the mythical space of the Venn-Diagram that violates reality as we know it will open and end everything, everwhere, all at once, like in Dogma.

Okay, guess I'm going to watch that film too.

Quoted for truth. Do yourself a favor and bail out of the Hinterlands the moment you can. You'll be back more often than you'd like anyway.

Paddington 2 is one of Javi's favorite films.

I'm sorry but I can't really alleviate your concerns here. The emotional core of the film, i.e. Nicolas Cage being aimless, his carreer not going where he wants, his problems with his teenage daughter and the part of the film that's just a buddy movie with Pedro Pascal, that might work - but the film basically starts off with assuming the viewer is familiar with Nicolas Cage on some level. That is actually a fair amount of the films 105 minute runtime. Then there's the rest of it. Spoilers: Some of the jokes - well, many of them - require at least a passing knowledge of Cage films. In this way, the film comes with the same downside that Jean-Claude van Johnson came with. It's absolutely brilliant in its meta jokes and how it treads the ground between being fully serious in a ludicrous way and over the top satire. However, unless one is familiar with the subject matter, it might prove to be a little impenetrable and fall short.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) A ways back when I posted the teaser for this film, I expected it to be a whole lot of things. Fun, stupid, over the top. Nicolas Cage playing himself, what else could it be. Apparently he turned down the role three or four times before taking it. I don't know if that means he should be given the credit I wanted to give him for being able to make fun of himself or not, but that's besides the point. I expected this to be the most fun I had with a film in a while. A longer ways back, my expectations of a film were wildly subverted. The difference is, with The Last Jedi, I expected a bad Empire remake, and I got a movie that made me think Attack Of The Clones was a good idea, and nothing ever should make anyone feel like that. Here I expected good things in a certain way, and expectations were once again subverted. Except in a good way. Out of all the things I expected of this film, it being a legitimately good movie was definitely not among them. Funny that, but somehow, it is. It's well executed, the actors are all delightfully into and great in their roles, particularily Pedro Pascal who is just the best. Hell, there's a digitally de-aged, super creepy Nicolas Cage appearing every now and then who is giving his hammiest performance, and as a bonus, Cage actually says "not the bees" in the film. The film just works in every way. As a silly comedy, as a Nicolas Cage action film, and as an adult character drama. Yes, this is partially a meta joke, but not entirely. It really is all that, in a nice package that's good looking, and it certainly deserved more than not even making its budget back at the box office. Looks like Nicolas Cage's handler was right in the film. There simply is no place for adult character dramas without mass appeal any more. I guess the action at the end was too little, too late, or the film was too much of everything and delightfully meta at the same time for most. I don't know. All I know is that I expected this to be the most fun I had with a live action film in a while, and that was true - and it was also a good deal more. If anyone of you liked 7 Psychopaths, give this a try.

Hate-watching would make for more entertaining posts, I guess, but I think I prefer this non-offensive, somewhat mediocre Komi for the time being.

Fixed.

Komi can't Komi-san. Somewhere, somehow, with the last three episodes, this stopped being terrible and went to being mediocre, so I really didn't post much about it. This week's episode has some really nice moments, which is such a weird contrast compared to the rest of the series. Series toned down Najimi a little and kept the other creeps squared away for the most part. It's done wonders for my, well, don't want to call it enjoyment of the series, but it is making watching these much less of a chore.

"Your honor, I did not lie when I said I did not steal the car, at the time I did not know that cars aren't public properties. I thought it was locked by accident."

Fascist gonna fascist. The Führer can do no wrong, and rules don't apply to them.

True Heirs, do I win the thread now?