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adultswim2021 · 2 years

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The Venture Bros. #20: “Twenty Years to Midnight” | August 6, 2006 – 10:30PM | S02E05

In this episode: Brock stumbles on a box of old shit. Among the items is a video left behind of the senior Dr. Jonas Venture relaying a message to his son with instructions for assembling an important device. It will involve Team Venture going to several locations to secure various parts for this machine. Thank god it's not season one, because this'll require a lotta new backgrounds, baby!

I don't call this one a favorite, but I do think it's really good and has a lot of things going for it. The design of the episode is fairly elegant; it has the plot of a very solid sci-fi adventure film (quietly ignoring that the ending is basically a parody of Contact). The second act has a few strong funny scenes that barely have anything to do with the story. Jonas Jr. and the ghost Pirate from season one (whom we learn is now working for Jonas Jr.) visit a drug-addled Jonny Quest who is living in some kind of underwater pod. Hank and Dean visit Colonel Gentleman who is apparently passed away in his bed. They read his diary that's filled with nonsense.

I'm just observing where the episode COULD be stronger, which is not necessarily the same as complaining. Actually it's exactly the same as complaining. I just don't want to get yelled at. These scenes are funny but I always remembered them separate from this episode. This episode has a strong story and those scenes are fun detours, but it’d be nice if those characters had more bearing on the plot and not just there as a goofy obstacle. They're mostly just stuff happening, driven by the location of a macguffin. I actually found myself saying “oh! So THIS is the episode where this scene comes from!”.

I still consider these scenes a net positive for the episode. It's just imperfect in my eyes because this could be a very good standalone adventure and a gateway episode for new viewers, except for the fact that it does wind up being a bit of a previous-episode-reference fest. This episode directly references events from “Ghosts of the Sargasso” and the third act is a sequel to “Ice Station Impossible”. This could actually have the opposite effect; further intriguing people into visiting the backlog of the series. There WAS a season one DVD for sale.

Actually... now that you mention it: that might be what happened to ME. No shit! I actually remember sort-of half-watching this episode. I was a “person who did not watch Venture Bros.” mostly because of the bad pilot episode and the lukewarm first regular series episode. I did have a positive experience watching the first Burger King Have It Your Way marathon, which included a small handful of season one Venture Bros. episodes. I do credit that night for helping thaw the freeze-out I was perpetrating on my now-beloved brothers.

I remember half-watching this episode, and hearing Stephen Colbert's voice, and thinking “wow, Stephen Colbert is on this show sometimes? I should probably watch it?” (NOTE TO YOUNGER READERS: Before Stephen Colbert did limpdick lib comedy for CBS he was a highly-respected subversive comedy writer and performer that none of us knew was a Christian). Even though I remember having this thought about this episode, I still considered this the “try before you buy” phase.

Somebody else already made this point, which is why I'm tacking it onto the end of my write-up: The scene where Hank and Dean discover Colonel Gentleman dead (or is he?) and go through his stuff, they leaf through his journal and find a bunch of inane lists, like “TOYS HE WISHES HE HAD AS A KID”, “GOOD NAMES FOR AN IMAGINARY FRIEND” and “HOLLYWOOD ACTRESSES THAT COULD USE A GOOD PUNCH IN THE MOUTH”. The very smart point, which I nearly passed off as my own until I remembered somebody on twitter did already, is that this is basically what clickbait articles are now. That guy was ironically presaging the future of the internet. It somehow wasn't badly writing up cartoons for a tumblr blog that nobody reads.

Oh! Also: the Jonny Quest scene was maybe the last explicit reference to the Ventureverse and the Questiverse being one-and-the-same. They kept this character but only refered to him as “Action Jonny” after this, I’m pretty sure. Remember when I promised to watch every episode of Jonny Quest in preparation for this? Whatever happened to that idea? I wonder.

EPHEMERA CORNER:

Ed's Burger King "Have It Your Way" Lineup (August 5, 2006)

Speaking of the Burger King “Have It Your Way” marathon! This happened! It was all anime. The end! Nothing else to say! Bye bye Ed!

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #the venture bros.

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freckled-lili · 3 years

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Finished Tell Me Why yesterday. I only have 1 achievement missing, which is the one you get if Alyson and Tyler’s bond was weak. I don’t feel like playing through the entire game just for that one achievement, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

You can definitely tell that the devs put a lot of time and effort into the scenery, because the game is absolutely gorgeous (as you’ve no doubt guessed when my numerous screenshots of the pretty mountains and sunsets). While the scenery is super pretty, characters’ facial animations can be a bit stiff and awkward sometimes, especially when they smile. Also, some of the facial texture quality ranges depending on the characters; some characters are fine, others look a bit undetailed, and then there are others who are so hyper detailed that it can be jarring and distracting.

But it was a pretty good game, with an interesting mystery and touching story about family. I tested both endings, and I think I prefer the “Locked-Up And Go” ending with the twins leaving the house for good. Mostly because I find the thought of Alyson just staying behind at her old home all alone a little sad, tbh.

I’m a little disappointed that it ended with a typical “we’ll never know the truth behind all this” resolution. It’s unsatisfying to invest in a mystery only for the writers to be like, “Well we’ll never really know what happened, but you can decide between these two choices which one you would consider the truth”, because it ends up feeling like a waste of time on the player’s part.

(More thoughts under the cut)

As for what I feel like is the truth, I’m inclined to believe that Tom was right about Mary-Ann not planning on killing Tyler, and this was all a misunderstanding on the twins’ part. It’s shown throughout the game that both Alyson and Tyler are unreliable narrators, with how both remember certain moments differently than the other, so it’s likely that both misremembered how that night went down. In addition, both were young and scared children who would have trouble processing what happened to them, while Tom is an adult and was an outsider to the event, so it makes sense that Tom might have a better idea of what went down.

Tom’s reveal of being their father was also disappointing, since it didn’t feel like there was a lot of set up or foreshadowing to that. Hell, we had more foreshadowing for Sam to be the father, getting to know his internal struggles and relationship with Mary-Ann more than we ever did with Tom. We barely got a hint about Tom’s feelings for Mary-Ann, so the game revealing that Tom is the father and cheated on his wife feels unsatisfying.

I would say the biggest criticism I would give towards the game is the pacing is really slow, almost painfully so. Chapter 3 is especially bad for this, but there a lot of moments where the game just forces you to just sit or stand around and wait for the story to progress, or make you sit through inane conversations during in-game cutscenes that have really don’t add to the story at all. Some of it is for character development or trying to be realistic, but it can feel like the game is just dragging its feet before getting to the next objective or story point. Like, do I really need to listen to Officer What’s-His-Name talk about his upcoming family vacation while waiting to have lunch with a friend ... who ends up having to cancel our lunch plans anyway?

This is can be especially frustrating when you decide to replay a scene for collectibles or achievements, because a lot of these “just sit down and wait/chat” moments are unavoidable and you have to go through them before progressing. Again, most of these scenes are character moments, and they’re good character moments! But I really think the game would've benefitted from gutting a lot of waiting around to improve the pacing.

I know I’ve kind of painted a pretty poor picture of the game, but I still enjoyed the story, and I adore Alyson and Tyler. I just wanted to reach into my computer screen and pinch their cheeks or give them a hug throughout the entire game. This is definitely more of a character story, and the mystery serves more to explore Alyson and Tyler’s thoughts, struggles, and bond with each other. I also like how they handled Tyler’s identity as a transman, and how everyone in the town it pretty accepting of Tyler and who he is, even if they get confused or use poor word choice sometimes. I thought think they handled Alyson’s guilt and anxiety over their mother’s death very well, and it really helps the player understand why she would be frustrated with and unwilling to continue to help Tyler with finding the truth behind their mother.

So, if you like character stories and family bonding, I would recommend it for anyone who has every expressed interest in the game. The first chapter is available for free, so you can play it yourself and decide whether or not you want to continue with the story.

#lili plays tell me why

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aurorawest · 3 years

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#46 please! :)

46. share a scene of a story that you haven’t published yet

I wanted to find something that was actually interesting but like...not too spoilery. So hopefully this fits the bill! Under a read more since it’s sort of long. It’s not the whole scene but it’s a lot of it. This is from A Full and Factual Account of Asgard.

Thank you!!

asks for fanfic writers

“How have you been?” Strange asked, breaking the silence.

Loki stopped pacing. His gaze flicked towards Strange, but he didn’t answer. He wasn’t in the mood to make inane smalltalk. Instead, he asked, “How did you find us?”

He’d read as many books in the Sanctum as he could get through. The portals were one of the most interesting parts about Kamar-Taj’s method of sorcery. On Asgard, Loki had known of secret passages between the Realms, which could lead to the appearance of teleporting, but it was more like finding a back door into the Bifrost, like slipping along a back hallway instead of walking through the main part of a building.

They were useless to him now, of course. All roads had led back to Asgard, quite literally. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried to use one of his secret ways now. Would he end up in empty space where Asgard had once been, asphyxiated and frozen to death in the void? Would he trap himself in a quantum-collapsed passage, like a tunnel caving in? Or would the passage simply refuse to open to him at all?

Kamar-Taj’s portals, though, were true portals. They could be opened from anywhere, to anywhere. But you needed to know where you were going. In his understanding, this was best achieved by having either physical coordinates or a very strong, concrete mental image of your destination. And Strange hadn’t had either. By his own admission, he’d had no idea what The Bifrost looked like until he’d gotten there. So how had he gotten there?

There was the barest muscle twitch around Strange’s eyes. Hm. Not so cool, perhaps? There was something he didn’t want to say.

With a shrug, Strange said, “I’m a Master of the Mystic Arts. We do these things. It’s easy.”

“I’ve read your books, Strange. Remember? I know how it works.”

Strange froze. “Uh, yeah. I guess…you did.”

Not cool at all, as it turned out. Despite himself, Loki found it a bit endearing. Though Strange’s reaction seemed a bit overblown.

He raised an eyebrow and held Strange’s eyes, waiting for an answer. As the moment stretched, it became clear that he wasn’t going to get one.

There was a sudden loud snore from Thor’s berth. A smile flashed across Strange’s face and he laughed. It seemed to startle him, and Loki startled himself by feeling an answering smile on his own face. It broke the tension, or awkwardness, or whatever had been in the air between them. Loki ran a hand through his hair. “What time was it in New York?” he asked. Speaking of inane smalltalk.

“About six.”

“In the evening?”

“Yeah. Traffic’s brutal, as usual.”

“Mm.” Loki crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you want something to eat?” he asked grudgingly. If it was dinnertime in New York, that would mean Strange was hungry. And honestly, knowing Strange, the man probably hadn’t eaten anything else today.

Strange looked surprised and Loki wasn’t sure if that stung or annoyed him. What did he expect, that they were going to starve him? Strange was his guest here, uninvited or not. Furthermore, he supposed there was some vague resemblance to the way Loki had once shown up unannounced and uninvited at the Sanctum. Though in that case, Loki would have been happy to take his leave. Strange had made him stay.

But regardless, Strange was a guest now. Loki would never have the chance to roll out the royal carpet for anyone ever again. The best he could do was a microwave meal and an uncomfortable bed. He’d throw in that his scintillating conversation was always available, but he was quite sure that wouldn’t appeal to Strange. At least the microwave meal had nutritional value.

He was a prince, though, even if it was in name only, so he’d live up to that.

Strange hesitated, then shrugged. “If you’re offering.”

With a nod, Loki went to dig through their food stores, crouching in front of the refrigeration unit. Luckily for Strange, they still had most of the food they’d left Vanaheim with, which was homemade. He pulled out a wrapped package and scanned the label, smiling a little. Standing up, he said, “You might like this.”

Strange looked at it suspiciously. “Are you going to feed me the weirdest thing you have in there? Because I’ve eaten some pretty weird things.”

“If I didn’t know better, I might think you’re actually concerned.”

There was a glint of amusement in Strange’s eyes. “Well, good thing I’ve never been concerned about anything a day in my life.”

“Right,” Loki said, rolling his eyes. He couldn’t help the smile that twitched at his mouth, though. “It’s not that weird,” he added as he unwrapped the frozen food and dropped it on a plate, then stuck it in the microwave. “I know your culinary tastes, Strange. Consider this the Vanir equivalent of Hamburger Helper.”

With a chuckle, Strange asked, “Is that a hint of snobbishness I detect in your tone, Odinson?”

“More than a hint.” Loki crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the bulkhead as the food heated.

Strange laughed quietly again. Then, he said, “Seriously. How are you? How long has it been?”

“I would guess you know exactly how long it’s been,” Loki shot back.

At this, Strange raised his eyebrows. “You think I’m counting the days since I’ve seen you?”

Scoffing, Loki said, “Hardly.” Though that was exactly what he’d been implying, wasn’t it? Anyway, Loki knew how long it had been. A year and a half. Eighteen months. They’d last seen each other in the aftermath of the Battle of New Asgard.

#afafaoa #writing meme #Anonymous

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chiseler · 4 years

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Unfunnymen

Sooner or later one has to face El Brendel, in the same way that sooner or later one has to face death.

But by way of working up to the grim task gently, let's start with Joe E. Brown. This vaudevillian, graced with an unnaturally wide mouth, which seemed on the verge of separating cranium from lower jaw, and giving him the flapping head of a South Park Canadian, spelled fortune to the exuberant, hearty, not particularly funny man who had been applied around this yawning abyss like lipstick.

We tend to remember Brown more fondly than his moderate talent deserves, because he delivers a classic closing line in a classic comedy. The line is "Well, nobody's perfect," and the film is Some Like It Hot (1959) and it's a good demonstration that great dialogue is often great because of context rather than because of the brilliant assembling of words. Here, the phrase is a commonplace one, but nobody can forget it when they've heard it used to cap the film's closing scene. Perhaps it was the prosaic nature of the line which caused its writers to doubt it: Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote it the night before filming, and turned in saying "Maybe we'll think of something better in the morning.”

Joe E. Brown says the line the way he said about every line of his career, enthusiastically, with a goggly stare and an effort to draw the corners of his rubbery mouth as far apart as possible. Stretching his elastic features like a chest expander was basically all he did. He was blessed with a funny face, but what was under it? A perfectly ordinary skull. No funny bones here.

Brown starred - actually starred! - in a whole series of pre-code comedies which prove that not everything made at Warners in the thirties was forward-looking, funny and challenging. He played "lovable" losers who win in the end. Like Harold Lloyd only with his face gashed open. His leading ladies included Joan Bennett, Ginger Rogers, Olivia De Havilland, Ann Dvorak. To contemplate any of those films proceeding beyond the final clinch-and-fadeout is to consider bestiality. One feels Bette Davis was lucky to escape his all-consuming maw. Every other Warners contract starlet was engulfed.

It's safe to assume Wilder gave him his great late role because Brown brought with him associations of a bygone age. Brown would remind audiences of the kind of stuff people used to laugh at. He isn't precisely used as a butt, more as a threat. He seems so genderless, acceptable jokes can be made about him marrying a man. Now that dream is a reality, but Some Like it Hot still seems just a little transgressive, or at least a rare film from its period which manages to imply a questioning of gender roles. Maybe Brown's earlier work would have been improved if he hadn't been required to show interest in girls. He would make a perfect speculative fiction hypothesis of what the third sex might look like. And his best quality as a comic is his alienness: like Harry Langdon, he seems to have beamed down from another world, some kind of asexual clown planet.

Warners had plenty of unappealing comic actors, but they didn't tend to make them leading men. And in small doses, mugs like Guy Kibbee or Hugh Herbert could work. H.H. had one bit of schtick, to say "woo-woo" and giggle inanely while flapping his stubbing fingers in nervous benediction. He did that for about twenty-five years and was never fatally shot or bludgeoned to death. Those were, in many ways, more tolerant times.

Woo-woo Hugh and "the Clown Prince" Brown appear together in Warners all-star A Midsummer Night's Dream, as rude mechanicals, which is perfect casting. A crowd of unfunny funnymen, delivering Shakespeare's less clever material, as background to Jimmy Cagney. The world has acquired some kind of order. But one film later, Brown will be in the lead again, baffling us.

It's bizarre that Brown played leads, since his equipment seems to better suit second banana roles. But its not as mystifying as the career of dialect comedian El Brendel, which requires the aid of a conspiracy theory to make it in any way intelligible.

The story is told that when studio boss William Fox was in a car accident, Elmer Brendel was the only one around with the right blood group to save his life. In gratitude, Fox disfigured his studio's entire output by thrusting the smirking, talentless goof into film after film.

El Brendel was in some good films, like the Oscar-winning Wings. But he's always the worst things about every film he's in, whether it's a classic like Wings or a schlock snooze like The She Creature (1956) at the far end of his career. A farrago about sea monsters and hypnosis, it's hilarious except when El is doing his comedy relief.

El Brendel's schtick was to play a fake foreigner - the Synthetic Swede was his sobriquet. With his little quacking voice he would play naive malaprops, garbling the English language. But he couldn't help smiling in apparent self-satisfaction at each of his would-be funny lines. For a character who's not supposed to know he's funny, this was a terrible mistake, and may explain why I want to murder El Brendel whenever I see him. There's a special circle of hell for comedians who act like they think they're funny. At its centre lies Red Skelton, encased in ice. But I like to think El Brendel is nearby, forced to listen to Red Skelton laugh at how hilarious he thinks he is. For eternity.

Asides from his tight little quarter-moon smile and his twinkly little quarter moon eyes in his punchable face, El Brendel is the comedian without qualities. To see him in what passes for action is to be reminded how much more than a mock accent Chico Marx brought to the screen. Chico was an incredible actor - the Brando of atsa-no-good. El Brendel couldn't even gesture at being funny. In William Wellman's You Never Know Women (1926), the clown makes his debut, playing a clown. It's all there, or rather it isn't, from the start. He is born fully unformed. Wellman resorts to putting him on a wire to try and make him funny. He doesn't even make a decent puppet. The presence in the film of an angry knife-thrower has you praying for a severed artery, but it never comes. Brendel would hang on to his eight pints until William Fox needed one of them. He wasn't talented, but he could marshal his resources.

El Brendel is not an actor, he's not a comedian, he's a gimmick in a flesh suit.

If Joe E. Brown was popular because people with an undeveloped sense of humor require comedians who look like clowns even without facepaint, and El Brendel was successful because movie executives need blood like everyone else, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, who used the stage name Stepin Fetchit, is a different case.

Fetchit only appeared as a supporting player, but his effect was striking, slowing any scene he was in to the pace of coastal erosion. For that alone, he deserves acknowledgment, whether you welcome his derailment of fast-talking thirties movies or not.

The discomfort Fetchit produces today qualifies him as an honorary unfunnyman, since he was a black actor specializing in playing servant characters of awesome slow-wittedness. Sloping apelike into a scene, his lower lip hanging like the rear flap on a truck, as if the energy to raise it were missing, Stepin Fetchit seems to embody every negative stereotype of his day. Billed as "the laziest man alive," he melded lethargy with ignorance to create a perfect simulacrum of stupidity.

But Perry was very popular with black audiences, who understood something white viewers missed. How much fun it would be, to act like Fetchit in front of white authority! They can punish you for disobedience, but not for your failure to understand an order. Nobody was going to get any meaningful work out of this man, sunk as he seemed to be in the depths of psychomotor retardation. It seemed to be all he could manage to raise his head above chest level. His voice issued in a reedy rasp, painfully stringing words together like an infant assembling building blocks, with the sentences liable at any moment to falter, turn back on themselves, or fade out altogether. Will Rogers, embodiment of the benign white master, could demonstrate his saintliness by finding Fetchit's stream-of-unconsciousness monologues interesting, enlightening.

It is questionable whether even John Ford, who cast Fetchit regularly even after liberal embarrassment had rendered him largely unacceptable elsewhere, understood the subversive side of the comic's character. Probably he just found him funny, and a useful modifier of the generally rambunctious Ford comic scene. Fetchit had the legendary minus factor: entering a scene charged with high emotion, he could make it feel as if someone had left. Where other actors are praised for presence, he had absence. Looking around him in bewilderment, he forced the narrative to its knees, to proceed at the slothlike pace of his dull comprehension.

Of course, the joke cut both ways, since the Fetchit character made white audiences feel comfortably superior. But it's hard now to look upon his schtick without feeling racial shame, an inward cringe. The last laugh is Stepin Fetchit's: no one else is laughing.

by David Cairns

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hopevalley · 4 years

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What are your favorite and least stories from each Season and why?

Oh man, this is a really thought-provoking question! I’ll try to come up with good answers (even though sometimes the seasons blur together a little bit):

I’ll give some basic thoughts on each season and what worked/didn’t work for me.

Season 1

While I appreciate that they made the effort to have Elizabeth stick out (vs. blending in with all the Poors), she was downright unbearable at times in the early seasons. Her wanting to help and coming up with ideas is pretty decent in terms of story structure and even characterization/character motivation, but holy cow was it intrusive and nosy/patronizing of her sometimes! I think the point might have been to give Elizabeth flaws, which is great, but people just seemed to accept it, and her, too quickly, at least for my liking. A shame because I felt like her struggling to fit in would 1) be good for her character/force her to understand that to be accepted here she has to concede to giving up her former lifestyle, and 2) be a great, GREAT way for her and Abigail to bond and become friends, since this is something Abigail also struggled with!

So basically, the ‘story’ of Elizabeth coming to fit in in Coal Valley? Vaguely rubbish.

So much DID work, though, and could have been expanded upon for even better storytelling!!! This is especially true of the widows/related stories.

Loss of faith/faltering faith

Loss of personal identity

Moving on/past grief

Processing guilt

Protecting the memory of a deceased loved one

We also had some great smaller personal stories.

Genius child has to work in the mine because there’s no one else ot take care of his family

Young man can’t read and has to work in the mine (and even after he does start learning how to read, probably doesn’t get to leave). Elizabeth still taking the time to try and help him still means something!

Season 2

I will never forgive the series for its convoluted attempt at a love triangle, here. Charles wasn’t unlikable, but he was OBVIOUSLY interested in Elizabeth romantically, and I don’t feel she’d be so stupid as to be blind to that, old chum or not.

Basically, it was one of the worst plots to ever exist on the show, because it just wasn’t believable in any capacity and felt like drama that existed to be a roadblock more than anything.

Also, not to whine, but Bill’s whole ‘counterfeit money’ plotline wasn’t very well-written.

The plot itself makes sense, but the way it bounced around seems to have just confused enough people that no one even remembers this was a thing.

That said, I think it was a good plot for the character... It was just not executed as well as it needed to have been to make a difference/really shine.

There are a lot of small things from S2 that were pretty nice, though.

Abigail’s fight to help Clara was meaningful, but I’m not sure how I feel about the addition of Clara from a writing standpoint. I feel like Abigail should have felt something was off about Peter’s trips from the start... The issue is that Hamilton is VERY far away and it’s VERY doubtful Peter would have ever gone there. Union City makes more sense if we’re talking about picking up shipments.

Tom and Julie were entertaining if nothing else.

I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in Hope Valley in S2, but I’m sure there were Events.

Season 3

Honestly I don’t think S3 had anything horrible in it. It just wasn’t very inspiring at times? It was like they had all these really good ideas but didn’t want to fully commit to any of them.

Henry Gowen was a star.

Frank was excellent in this season.

The biggest issue I have with this plot is simply that they didn’t take it all the way. Either he’s a dangerous man to allow to stay in town or he’s not. Saying he is doesn’t make it so. A rock through a window? Okay, sure...that’s threatening I guess. But it didn’t feel like enough to turn the whole town.

And again, having him barely doing anything even though he’d definitely be worried for Abigail and Cody’s safety is just inane.

Still, overall the whole thing was pretty good/well-done. Especially that unexpected turn at the end where Henry helped turn the tide. (I still wish that had gone somewhere and wonder even now if they had an idea they wanted to use and didn’t get the chance to.)

Abigail adopting children was nice. I wish Becky hadn’t been a part of it at all though. Like the IDEA is nice, but I can’t imagine she’d believe in it all as fast/readily as she does? This plotline just seemed great for Cody and meaningless to Becky, IMO.

But hey, the thing with Cody is meaningful enough. My issue is just that he’s like, 8 or 9 and remembers his parents very clearly, so I don’t think he’d be that willing to replace them. I guess it could just be his personality, but it might make more sense for him to be like 5-6 years old instead (less attached with fuzzier memories by this point if they’ve been on the run awhile).

Despite my qualms I think this was a pretty good story for Abigail. Just wish they hadn’t dropped her role as a mom as quickly as it felt they did.

Hattie was a good character and I enjoyed her introduction story. It was sad, but it felt good/satisfying.

Bill buying Henry’s share in the café was a great little thing. Maybe too convenient and itching for a story of its own (instead of it just happening), but overall a good idea.

Jack’s mom coming to town was entertaining. She had some really good lines. Lard in coffee. I mean...this was gold.

Season 4

The peddler was a cute addition but I didn’t much care for the overt magical element.

If it felt a little more real/grounded/down to earth I think I might have been more intrigued.

Frank getting his original Bible back was a GREAT story but when they tried tying it into his vaguely stalker-like behavior? It just ruined the entire thing.

For what it’s worth, Frank’s character goes downhill pretty sharply in this season.

There were a lot of cute kid storylines in this one. But they weren’t all...great...

Robert telling the lie about the bear? Nice.

The kid with the knee brace? Ugh.

The storyline itself wasn’t bad!

But after Becky miraculously recovered the previous season it just felt like a slap in the face. I live with chronic pain and it’s just one of those things where I’d like a little representation somewhere.

I still think Becky should have stayed wheelchairbound.

I can’t get over how insulting it was that she just MIND OVER MATTER FIXED HERSELF. The writer who put that in there should be slapped, and the writer who wrote the saME GODFORSAKEN STORY AGAIN with this child should also be slapped.

I really feel that if they were gonna let Becky recover like that, this kid should be living with a permanent disability and this episode could deal with kids helping him play/doing activities he could participate and enjoy.

Maybe it’s too on-the-nose but the hardest part about a chronic illness/disability of any kind is the part where you lose things you loved to do that you considered a part of your identity. That’s an awfully deep storyline for WCtH, but they should have gone for it here.

Phillip was in between.

Phillip and his father were great, but Elizabeth was just SO incredibly awful. This is where she and Abigail started always being right about everything and I felt her involvement was unbearable.

They should have just let Faith take over Elizabeth’s role in that plot and it would have been way better. They could have had the eyesight issue earlier and done something great with it.

Frank and Abigail’s relationship at the beginning of this season was pretty interesting. Even though the whole “danger” thing was a little goofy, it was nice to see them communicating and adjusting.

It felt like a natural issue people would actually have. And it wasn’t smoothly worked out, which is fine.

Also, Rosemary’s interference was hilarious.

RIP to the following:

Frank’s character after his earlier scene, because he doesn’t get anything else that’s actually in character.

Good writing because Carson is now the town hero he’s gonna save Cody from appendicitis because other doctors are just completely stupid!

Also Carson is a surgeon so TAKE THAT, regular doctors!

Doug. You were a real bro, my guy.

I DID like Doug’s role in the story, though. His death made some sense, but it was ill-timed. (How convenient that we only even hear of him moments before his death lol.)

AJ Foster is a highlight of S4 for me. I love her, and for the most part I love her introduction.

She’s such a pain in the neck, but she also talks a lot of sense.

The writing isn’t great for her, or for Bill in these scenes, but at least there was An Attempt™.

I appreciate that they introduced the idea of her much earlier in the season and built up to her actual appearance, which I couldn’t have guessed would be relevant early on.

Considering how the officers at my company hate our IRS auditor, I find the fact that AJ has enemies beyond believable.

Railroad shenanigans were pretty entertaining in this season, too.

Season 5

The last episode at least tried to be kind to the characters, so I appreciate it.

Elizabeth’s conversation with her father before her wedding was a highlight of the entire season.

AJ’s return plot was abysmal.

I’d be terribly embarrassed to have been the one to write this, especially considering how completely whack it feels next to the other plots.

I’ve ranted about this so many times I should have run out of steam but BOY is it cringey. This is the height of Bill-is-a-grumpy-old-man as a Thing in this series and this is probably when it is its worst.

The rattlesnake plotline was contrived as heck, but the only thing to make it worse was how weird everyone acted.

Rhonda was a good character and the plotline, if it wasn’t so rushed, would have actually been really great. I still liked it overall, though.

Frank’s send-off was dumb, but at least he got one on-screen.

I still can’t believe they killed their main romantic male lead off-screen.

What the heck...

Abigail was really, really annoying in this season, and so was Elizabeth. Unbearable.

Also, I still hate the pregnancy oooops~~ ♥♥ plot at the end of the grieving episode. Really? COME ON. I know they wanted to give the fans hope but it was jarring.

Season 6

I still HATE the nativity == baby Jack’s birth parallels.

Why did they feel the need to do that. Why couldn’t we have just gotten pregnant Elizabeth shenanigans?

They put Jack’s DEATH ON THE TOMBSTONE like how is she popping out a baby less than two months later when she didn’t even know she wa---?F?DJSAFLJDSAFHLDSAL?

Abigail?

DELETED.

Thank goodness.

Bill?

Assassinated. Or at least, his character was.

This is bad. :(

On the plus side he gets promoted to the position of JUDGE...and barely does anything worthwhile with it...yet.

GODFATHER BILL. The best thing in this season.

Fiona?

A goddess. I love her.

Lucas?

Slimy.

But handsome.

The 4th Property Brother. He even tries his hand at renovating.

Nathan?

Honest and good.

Pretty cute.

Works together with Bill once in one of Bill’s only good scenes.

The oil plotline is actually pretty good/fun. Jesse and Clara get more scenes finally.

Elizabeth isn’t the focus of everything.

Lee and Rosemary got like, no mention in any of these posts but mostly because it felt like they were never really doing anything before, but I did feel like they were given a little more meaningful lines/places in this season.

How’s this for an attempt? :P I’m probably missing A LOT but I can’t recall everything too easily!

#long post #anonymously asked #answered mail

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leakinghate · 5 years

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All I need to know is WHY? Why did they do this?

I’ve gotten more than a few asks with this question, and I assure you: if I knew I’d tell you. But, this is the big question, and I do have a theory. So here we go.

I’m sorry. I was hesitant to publish this. Some of you aren’t going to like this answer.

I want to stress that this is all simply my opinion, a theory. It’s my best guess as to ‘Why’ when taking into account all the evidence currently available. Please do not take this as absolute truth, and please do not harass anyone who disagrees with it or thinks differently.

If you’re just here to tell me I’m wrong and that kl is/was supposed to be ‘canon king’ I’m simply going to delete your message: consider this your warning and stop reading. To my friends that ship kl: I’m sorry, this isn’t an attack on your ship, I just don’t think it was going to be canon.

To start with: was the censorship, and the vile messages it resulted in, intentional?

No. I don’t think so.

I did at first, but after mulling it over a bit more, I’ve changed my mind on that.

Thing is? This is so disgustingly callous, that for it to have been intentional, whoever was responsible would have to be a monster. No, this wasn’t done by a creative. Someone who understands stories wouldn’t have made something this sloppy. The people who made this call are the sorts who mistake symbols as content, like a kiss with an unnamed extra as representation.

This has the cold dispassionate stink of marketing all over it.

I think this was about the toys.

Voltron was always a Toy™ property. When VLD was put into production they sold the toy rights to the same company that made the toys back in the 80′s, and that company turned out some updated versions of the toys they’d made back then. I don’t doubt DW was banking on moving a good deal of merch with bankrolling VLD. Unfortunately for them, this isn’t the 80′s anymore; they completely missed the mark on their actual audience right out of the gate and were then hamstrung by the rights contract which they either had to wait to expire or buy out before trying again.

Dreamworks’ marketing department has no idea how to handle a show like VLD, with a fanbase like this. VLD was nominally aimed at boys age 7-ish, but the fanbase it attracted was Fandom: overwhelmingly female and minority viewers in their mid teens and older.The people who wrote VLD understood this; the people who financed it didn’t. The market for toys has changed, and the same cheap plastic, ugly, poorly made figures aren’t going to cut it anymore.

They tried to switch track and market to the adult fans while they waited for the toy rights to return to them, but this attempt was manifested as jewelry. Very expensive jewelry.

A second misstep.

By now we’re sometime between June and August, VLD is 2/3rds aired, rapidly approaching Season 7, has a ravenous and toxic fanbase, and has completely failed to turn a profit. Extra money was already pumped into the show for rewrites to season 7 to include characters to base a spin off around (this happened circa s2′s airing, when the show suddenly got huge and popular - so when s7 was in the early stages of animation), but with things as they are it’s looking like that’s going to be a waste of an investment.

So they brought in some marketing people to look it over and advise changes to make the show more profitable. Season 7 is coming too fast for any but the most minor of changes, Season 8 is either completely finished or very near so. There’s no time to re-script, re-animate, re-record.

They took a look at what was coming in the final season, and they took a look into the fandom. What could be adjusted in this tiny timeframe, with the fewest amounts of edits and alterations, to appeal to the maximum amount of the audience?

They ordered adjustments accordingly.

I think it started out as marketing, but the things marketing advised, and that were ultimately enforced, amounted to censorship.

What is the loudest, most prominent, most obnoxious group of fans?What fans disrupted not one, but two con question panels with inane queries about their favorite character not being enough of a ‘hero’?

Look at what we did get. The stuff that came out of nowhere and made no sense: a//urance as endgame, Altean Lance - with marks the exact colors that the fanarts use (even though they don’t match his color scheme), a heavily Lance based season - and one in which Lance is the recipient of constant praise and encouragement, Shiro and Keith acting like they barely know each other, Lotor the only explicitly unredeemed villain, Lance and Keith both ending the series single with Lance very clearly no longer pursuing romance with women, Shiro married and unavailable.

They couldn’t make kl*nce canon, because the copyright holders of the legacy characters wouldn’t approve of it. What they could do was what they did. Removing all the Shiro and Keith scenes, giving Lance the girl. Making Lance the central focus of the final season. Langst.

Lance and Keith are the only two characters who have extensive personal scenes this season.

Allura and Lotor were casualties of making Lance the hero; because marketing advised DW to appeal to the lowest common denominator fan.

But these marketers are outsiders, and don’t really understand fandom. because this wasn’t what fandom wanted at all.

This is what I think. I think this is kl*ntis by way of marketing.

All the absolutely disgusting messages? Were an accident. A byproduct of removing the intended subversions. Whoever did this wasn’t very smart, and hadn’t realized the depth of story the writers were telling.

So when they switched it, and kept Lance with Allura, they played the intended subversion straight. But because it was intended to be subverted, it’d been written a little obviously regressive. To make it obvious. So we could pick up on it. So it would feel right when it was subverted.

But it wasn’t.

So Lance didn’t get to grow.

And Allura and Lotor didn’t get to live.

This is why I’m convinced that there’s a real s8 out there to get.

The good news in this, is that if I’m right - if this was ultimately a decision designed to appeal to the fans - then there’s a really good chance that DreamWorks will release the real s8. Whereas, if it was intentional censorship, then the chances would be very low.

Big companies like DreamWorks listen to three things: Profit, PR, and Personal Beliefs. The hardest one to combat is the last, so if we can rule it out we’re in a much better position. And I think we can. It’s very difficult for fans to make change with Profit, because we are so small individually, and because in this particular case they already weren’t making any money off VLD.So our best avenue of attack is PR. If we make a lot of noise about the toxic messages the altered season is sending, and remember to keep shipping out of it, we can convince them to release the original cut. They want us to shut up? They have two options: wait for the interest to die down, or give us what we want. We need to prove that we’re not going away.The future stretches ever onward; they need to ignore us for eternity.

All we need is one single, solitary yes.

#vld #VLD s8 #FREEVLDS8 #Voltron legendary defender #answered asks #Anonymous #Lotor #Allura #voltron discourse #Lance #seriously don't read this #if you think kl was supposed to be canon #mini meta #Hate tries to Meta

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battlestar-royco · 6 years

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But why did you consider AS0IAF overrated? No offence or smth, just curious.

None taken! Well, I mean “overrated” in the simplest sense of the word: AS0IAF is so mainstream because of the show, it’s like the first thing people think of when you say “fantasy,” the merchandise is everywhere, it fills up the fantasy section of every bookstore, and everyone references it as the best example of high/hard fantasy because of its “realism,” character moral ambiguity, and worldbuilding. It’s certainly a well-written series that I enjoy a lot, but do I think it is the most realistic, best plotted, best worldbuilt fantasy book with the best cast of characters out there? No. I don’t think there is a fantasy series that can fit all those criteria, but AS0IAF has become the standard when a lot of other series have equal if not better plot and worldbuilding and all that fun stuff.

My complaints are pretty similar to everyone else’s:

The books are way too long. Martin had originally planned a trilogy, then a five-book series, and now he’s projecting seven, but who honestly knows? I know we all complain about SJ/M’s editors but holy crap can this man write about inane stuff for hundreds of pages, repeat the same word on the same page two to three times, and use ten words to describe something that could’ve been written in three. It doesn’t help that the plot can be really glacial at times, especially when you happen upon a sequence of many unlikable/boring POV chapters.

I find the writing style awkward and heavy-handed. Sometimes he’ll use really awesome metaphors like “fingers of blood” or “crust of snow” over a riverbank but overuse them like 5 times in the same storyline. His characters also repeatedly use made-up phrases like “nuncle” or “must needs” to remind us that we’re in a ~medieval fantasy~. He also occasionally overwrites descriptions/symbolism to a nonsensical point. I recall him describing a rain of bloody rose petals on wind or something in a dream sequence, and I found it to be really extra. And don’t even get me started on the sex scenes; they’re all just awful and rarely necessary (describing genitalia as flowers, using onomatopoeia, etc).

One of the most iconic things about AS0IAF is how main characters die unexpectedly, but I don’t find the MC deaths to be particularly good for the overall reading experience. The MC deaths were probably innovative for the time the first books got published, but now we have a lot of shows and books with high stakes for the characters, so why are people acting like G/RRM is the only one to kill off a main member of a cast? Also, he wrote 5000+ pages in this world, and essentially asked readers to invest hours upon hours of time into his books, and he keeps on killing off characters that he purposely made us root for. As of AD/WD, there’s no payoff for all the horrible stuff that happens to the characters who were written to be our favorites. There’s reward for reading the books. It’s just nihilistic grimdark. (But I do think he’s going to give us some sort of hope/satisfaction by the time the final book is published, if he ever publishes it.)

The first books were published in the 90s, so there are a lot of really cringey racism/sexism/homophobia/ableism etc issues. For example, I think Dany’s storyline is not aging well at all. She was meant to be a figure of women’s empowerment by freeing slaves and becoming queen in the east, but it’s a classic White Savior narrative and there is not one Es/sosi (people of color who inhabit the eastern continent) POV in the books. The entire setting is super exoticized through D/any’s POV with oddly spelled names; characters with strong accents; and clothing, food, hairstyles, and magic a modern Western reader would find weird or disturbing. There are a lot of great meta writers on this site who discuss the Dead Ladies Club (women who underwent horrible suffering or were killed off before the start of the series to support men’s storylines), and a roundup post that counts all the female characters who have been sexually harassed or r*ped, plus all the instances of a woman being r*ped in the books. I don’t remember the exact number, but it racks up well over a hundred, maybe in the 300s. But people like to brush off all these issues because the worldbuilding is so strong and the bullshit “historical accuracy” excuse.

Hope that answers your question!

#asks #anti got #anti asoiaf #????#i hope that tag doesn't start any drama omg #i just wanna organize my blog #rape tw

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flyingmintbunnnyandfriends · 5 years

Text

Long Voltron Post Incoming

Okay peeps. Just finished up the last season of Voltron and oh boy do I have a few things to say to the third grader that wrote it. Before I even get started on why it was terrible, let me just say, it was horrible. The plot was lost in the flashing lights and disjointed cutscenes, the focus was completely shifted to a single character making every one else fade into the background, let me not get started on the FORCED romance, and yes, I admit the fight scenes were well executed, all things considered this DOES NOT EXCUSE the poor representation and the lies that we were told. So. Let’s not get all gung-ho just yet. While terrible overall, this season was not a total loss. Bringing back the old paladins, showing just what the warriors of old can still teach the new Paladins and passing on a bit of their wisdom to the next generation was beautiful; just watching them interact was awesome, and it was a genuine plot twist to see their consciousnesses being trapped within an insane psychopath. The final battle was exactly how it should be, one on one, a mech fight to determine the fate of everyone involved. The Acolytes were utilized well, a good setup to the final big bad. Similarly, I enjoyed the use of the Alteans on both sides of the war, as unwilling/unknowing pawns and then true allies to the forces of good. Just. Kinkade. Adorable bab. AND THAT SUNSET SCENE. Honestly probably one of the most romantic moments of the show, regardless of whether or not you ship it. Now that that’s out of the way....OH MY GOD WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT??? OOOhhhh boy where to begin on this flaming trainwreck. Let’s start with....pushing aside literally every other character in the series to focus on Allura! There were SO MANY plot points that were skipped over or never mentioned again that could have made this so much better. Where was Galra Keith this season? Other than a fleeting moment where he got so angry his eyes seemed to go Galra for a split second there was literally nothing to prove that his transformation last season even happened! It is never brought up, and it would have made an amazing scene to see the fearless leader of Voltron pushed to his absolute limits, forced to revert to his ‘other’ self in order to pull out a win...I know, it’s not all about Keith. Okay then, how about...Shiro? Yeah, Shiro. The one who supposedly lost the love of his life to the Galra invasion of Earth. Adam. Remember him? The one he was crying over? That Adam? And then Shiro suddenly gets together with someone we know nothing about? And we’re supposed to be okay with that?! WE DON’T KNOW HIM. How did they get together?? Yeah, Curtis? He’s a funny dude. Good guy. Excuses nothing. How about Pidge? We get to see her bantering with her mother, which was great, loved it. We also see her in monumental pain following the destruction of Olkari...and no one mentions it. They don’t take the time to tell her ‘it’s okay’ or have a heart to heart...she was given no closure. Hunk, sunshine boy. He got the least bad ending of the lot. Got confirmation that his love for cooking wasn’t just a side thing, that it wasn’t meant to be brushed aside. He was bringing people together doing what he loved to do! Also Sal. Happy he got brought back, honestly. And platonic Hunelle? The best. Not to mention his rock girlfriend saving the day? Even better. And then...Lance. Oh Lancey boy. What did they do to you, my poor baby? You deserved so much better...Lance is my favorite character, hands down. The happy go lucky, always dependable, self-sacrificing pretty boy who deserves the world and expects nothing in return...they RUINED you. What HAPPENED Dreamworks!? Who is this mopey, depressed, utterly dependent on another person...thing you replaced my baby with? Lance was never meant to be used in this way! Lance was the Soul of Voltron, the one who broke tension, who made everyone feel better, even at the expense of himself. Who gave over and over again and was still light hearted and friendly, brushing off anything negative and always seeing the bright side of things? Who sought out validation in the form of competition, always offering his help...the one who remained vigilant and protective, even against Lotor’s silver words and ‘Shiro’s’ endless aggression against him...THAT is Lance. Not this...sniveling shell of a person. He’s Voltron’s right hand! The one who supports the leader and gives his thoughts and opinions! Who is respected and listened to! Where did that go?! Keith trusted him enough to lead the team in his absence...and in this season? Nothing! He was talked over and ignored just like when Keith left to the Blade. Talk about a step in the wrong direction. Speaking of Keith and Lance...KLANCE IS CANON KING. There’s dozens of metas out there spilling essentially the same thing, but now it’s my turn. Let’s start with what we knew before Season 8. Lance would be someone’s first choice. Allura would have no endgame. Lance would not be a rebound. Whoops, screwed that one up, didn’t you? Also. Lance’s endgame was supposed to be SLOWBURN. SLOW. BURN. Does anyone know what that means? Hey writers, do you know what that means? Because if Season 8 is any indication, I think you need a dictionary!! After six seasons of completely ignoring and at one point insulting (see the ears comment) Lance, and then the whole Lotor deal, we’re expected to believe that ALLURA is the slowburn? When they literally went from date to Lance being her living shadow? WHAT? Speaking of Lotor...we are led to believe that Allura and Lotor are Soulmates, they complete one another. They know each other’s pain, and can depend on one another. Yeah, he goes off his rocker just like dear old dad...but who didn’t see that coming? And immediately after this the mice snitch about Lance’s crush. So what? She decides ‘why the hell not?’ and falls into his arms?! THAT’S THE DEFINITION OF A REBOUND, DREAMWORKS. But you know who doesn’t do that? Keith. You know who sees Lance at his lowest, and accepts him? Keith. Guess who listens when Pidge and Hunk refuse to? Keith. Keith has always listened to Lance, even in the beginning when he rose to the challenges Lance offered. Keith trusts Lance explicitly, completely, and without a second thought. When leading Voltron, Keith automatically follows Lance’s ideas, never speaking out against him, going along with even the most inane ideas like who gets to ride in what Lion, without a fuss. Keith, the hot head, offering no argument. Hmm. Interesting. Lance is the one to comfort Keith during the disappearance of Shiro, and Keith is the one to come to Lance when Allura is unconscious and hurt because of their actions. These boys have seen each other at their absolute lowest, and instead of taking advantage of this, they support and comfort each other however they can. And do I need to bring up all the romantic moments they had? Do I need to did out all those Bonding Moment memes? This pair have had more intimate moments than every other ship in the entire show. Rainbows, the colors of the bi flag in the background, all the romantic subtext...the way Keith’s eyes go all soft and unguarded when looking at Lance, how he lowers his guard and teases Lance, being as gentle as he knows how? How he is the ONLY ONE IN THE SHOW to not only accept but encourage Lance to be himself, that people should love him as he is, instead of Lance forcing himself to change? Or how about how Lance LITERALLY CALLS KEITH THE FUTURE WITH THIS DOPEY, LOVESTRUCK LOOK. The SAME ONE he gives Allura. The same one he uses when talking about Keith to the Yupper, when no one will hear? THAT look. The one that says ‘Yeah, I could be just a little bit in love’. To my knowledge, they tried to destroy Klance because some of the fandom doesn’t know how to chill, and honestly, we kinda deserved that. Some people are just terrible people that think threatening people is funny. But the rest of us? The ones who kept to ourselves and let people ship what they wanted? We have to bear the hatred of the rest of the fandom, who think we’re the same scum that don’t know how to behave. I’m not. Ship what you want, it’s no business of mine. But Klance is the only endgame that actually makes sense! (Besides Hunay, but that’s a precious ship that should never be questioned). Klance is the classic rivals-to-lovers trope, the one that draws people in and makes them want more, to see that happy ending the two deserve. Together. And instead, we got forced hetero romance. And yes, I do mean FORCED. Allura never ONCE said ‘I love you’. NOT ONCE. That doesn’t seem right, does it? The relationship between Lance and Allura was unhealthy at best. It’s not a fairytale romance about a princess and a pauper. Not even close. Lance is reduced to being ‘that guy’. The one who exists only to cater to his girlfriend’s every whim and question nothing. That’s it. That’s what they made him out to be. And it’s sickening. She pushes him away several times, even after they’re together, and he just takes it. That’s not how love works, people. Even without the Klance goggles on, that’s just not love. Love is being partners, equals, finding perfection in your partner’s flaws and growing together. And who do we see that from? Klance. From bickering rivalry, to trusting each other with their lives, from ‘you’re not my leader’ to ‘I’d follow you anywhere’. THAT is love. THAT is special. THAT is a slowburn. And THAT is what we should have gotten. But we didn’t. Because we were baited. That’s all there is to it. Despite all this, there IS still hope. Just because Allura was his ‘first love’ doesn’t mean that she’ll be the only one. Because someone is still waiting. Someone who is ready to support Lance, put his feelings before their own. Someone who has always put Lance first, to the point he left so that Lance never had to question his own worth. And that is Keith. THEY BELONG TOGETHER OKAY? Besides...now that Lance is part Altean and Keith is part Galra they’re gonna have a LONG TIME to figure it out. Because Galra and Alteans live long lives. Who else are they gonna spend it with other than each other? In all, I was disappointed in the final season. It should have been great, the big finale to cement it’s place in history...instead, I’ll never watch it again. I was let down and lied to, plain and simple. I still ship Klance, probably always will, but my time in this fandom is done. After the humiliation suffered because of bad writing and toxic fandom wars, it just wasn’t worth it. We were queerbaited into believing Klance actually stood a chance, that it would be everything we wanted...and instead we were left to burn. Way to go, Dreamworks. You ruined a good series. That last season was pitiful. So many plotholes never addressed, characters left to rot, questions never answered, and all the lies. For all of you that liked the final season, I applaud you. You are a much better person that I, it seems. Keep KICKing Klancers.

#voltron #keith kogane #lance mcclain #takashi shirogane #allura #blade of marmora #krolia #bad writing #rant

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minaminokyoko · 6 years

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Pacific Rim: Uprising (A Spoilertastic Review)

This movie should be the ultimate lesson for Hollywood on why you shouldn’t just replace a director who has vision with someone who just wants to make a quick buck in a lazy sequel. My God, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this utterly annoyed by a sequel. I mean, late sequels have a serious tendency to suck for many reasons: hiring different writers/directors from the previous film, changing the tone, removing important characters and awkwardly jamming new ones in there, relying on boring sequel clichés, or misunderstanding the entire reason why the first movie was a hit. Pacific Rim wasn’t a mega-hit stateside—it did $101 million domestically and did much better in the foreign market with an additional $309 million—but it was easily a fan favorite. Even if I had the full story on what went down between Legendary Pictures and the delightfully talented Guillermo del Toro, there is no excuse why Pacific Rim Uprising is such a pathetic pile of nothing. With del Toro, we had some excellent world building, a basic understanding of the premise, a loose but still adequate story, and characters that were easy to remember and enjoy. We also had a fun cameo from the incomparable Ron Perlman, a fantastic score, and some truly imaginative fight sequences of the Jaegers vs. the kaiju. I’ve said before that I think PacRim is a good movie, not a great movie, only because I felt you could have simply removed Raleigh entirely and focused on Mako and Stacker instead since they were both ten times more interesting and easier to connect with on an emotional level. However, after seeing this nonsense, I have a whole new appreciation for the first film, because at least it told a goddamn story and its characters had personality traits and arcs. Uprising is honestly an affront to what the first film established, not only for retconning things with Stacker’s forgettable son, but just botching every single enjoyable element from the first film.

I’ll get right to the point—yes, the Jaeger/kaiju fights are the main draw for this franchise. Even though I’m going to list why this sequel is godawful, a lot of people really just want to see it for the big fight scenes and that’s all they might want to take away from any reviews. Well, I’m here to tell you, I still don’t think Uprising is worth your hard-earned cash, because it’s frankly a bait-and-switch. The trailer shows you a monstrous kaiju made of three other kaiju, and that sounds amazing, right? Well, it’s intentionally misleading. If you want the full story, check below the spoiler line.

Overall Grade: D

Pro:

-Seriously, the only positive thing to note about this entire film is that the fight scenes were at least adequate. Not good, not great, adequate. When the fights finally do happen, there’s plenty of smashing, and the idea of the kaiju melding into one huge kaiju was at least a nifty idea. It was easily the only thing about the trailer that got anyone’s blood moving and could have built any hype. However, judging by the movie’s poor opening weekend, enough people could tell something was off about it.

Cons:

-The trailer is misleading. How? Well, there are no kaiju in this movie until the last fifteen minutes. Seriously. They pulled a Huntsman sequel on you guys—promising something that only appears at the end of the fucking movie. All other times, you are stuck with the bland protagonists training or trying to figure out how the rogue Jaeger attacked Sydney. IIRC, there’s only the fight of Gypsy Avenger vs. the rogue Jaeger and then the end with all of them fighting. There’s a brief chase sequence in the beginning with Bland White Child and Stacker-lite, but it’s barely five minutes long and it’s just them rolling away from the full sized Jaeger like Sonic the Hedgehog. Look, if that still excites you, hey, go see it. But to everyone else who doesn’t want to feel ripped off, I’m begging you to sit this one out for this and many other reasons I’m going to outline below. There are only kaiju at the end of the damn movie. It’s Godzilla 2014 all over again—a magnificent creature that is advertised heavily as being in the film, but isn’t actually in the damn thing.

-The dialogue is so painfully cliché that you will roll your eyes so many times they might eject from your skull. Jesus Christ. I swear, it’s like they had a checklist of every action movie cliché they could think of and they made sure to check off every single one. Every line of dialogue in this movie is a sickening cliché. There is not one original thought. Not. One. Every character is flat and some form of a lazy archetype. No one gets any development. It’s Michael Bay-levels of incompetent writing. The movie couldn’t have been any worse written than if there was a room of chimpanzees hammering away at the screenplay. It’s just plain embarrassing. Every moment there isn’t a kaiju smashing something or a Jaeger beating wholesale ass, you will be in massive amounts of pain.

-The fights are mediocre. Remember how carefully staged the fight scenes were in the first movie? Hell, most of the time we can list them off the top of our heads because those fights were so damn memorable. We had the opening montage, the Knifehead fight, the two kaiju vs. the Jaegers, Gypsy Danger vs. Otachi, and then the final brawl underwater at the Breach. Each fight was staged well and paced well throughout the film. You didn’t have to wait too long between fights during the film, and it also entertained you with smaller bits like Mako and Raleigh training or the flashback to Mako’s childhood with that scary crab kaiju. Uprising is a bottom-heavy film, much like the equally terrible Jurassic World (God, talk about another late sequel that entirely misses the fucking point of the original property.) The only difference is at least Jurassic World had enough sense to deliver a powerhouse ending to an utterly stupid film, and Uprising doesn’t. The fights don’t have clever staging, great music, or very much creativity to them. After suffering through two hours with these annoying paper cutout characters, you should deliver the best damn fights we’ve ever seen, but no, they’re just standard hacking and slashing. Punctuated by the intensely annoying, shrieking helium balloon shaped like Charlie Day shouting inane dialogue in his squeaky voice. The fights have zero weight, too, because no one has a character, so you don’t give a shit if they live or not during the fight either.

-Like many terrible sequels, they kill off a main lead from the previous film in order to give the new protagonist some pathetic kind of Mangst. If there is one thing I am sure of, it’s that most fans of the original movie are going to be LIVID they dragged the actress playing Mako all the way back on set just to kill her fifteen minutes in. It’s just insulting. Mako was the fan favorite from the first film. Seriously, she has most of the fandom in her back pocket, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the immediate backlash is because the movie’s disgusting use of Fridging the main female lead from the first movie to make way for Bland White Child and Stacker-lite. It’s possibly the most insulting thing about the entire sequel. Mako deserved better. I’d rather she was out of the movie entirely, like Raleigh mysteriously is, than for them to kill her in such a cheap, stupid way. What a waste of a good actress and a great character.

-Making Charlie Day the villain. Yes, because nothing is more intimidating than a tiny man with the voice of Bobcat Goldthwait spouting dialogue so corny you’d expect it from an Austin Powers movie. Are you kidding me? Look, I get it, Charlie Day is a fan favorite so of course they were going to bring him back, but what the actual fuck made you think he should be the bad guy? It’s weaksauce. It sounds like they were just bored and out of ideas for the villain, as if the fucking kaiju or the Precursors weren’t good enough somehow, and just slapped this idiotic role in his lap. It’s such a bad idea. I hated his character in the first film and wanted him removed entirely, but at least he served a purpose. Here, it’s just lip service. Anyone who liked him in the first one is going to be pissed off at this random turn of the character with no indication of changing him back.

-Thin, boring leads. Let me be clear: John Boyega is not to be blamed for any of why this movie is failing critically and financially. The kid is talented and sweet and I want to pinch his cheeks and feed him apple pie in my kitchen. But he couldn’t save this film because of that rancid excuse of a script. Boyega is a darling on screen in almost everything else, but here, he has nothing to work with. Stacker-lite is just a cobbled together mess of leftover script notes from Chris Pine’s portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboot. He has nothing going for him at all. No motivation, no skillset, no charm. This character is completely empty inside. Bland White Child is the exact same as well; basically just every Little Miss Badass/Underdog stereotype only done amazingly poorly. She has nothing to offer the audience and while she has slightly more motivation than Boyega’s character did, it doesn’t mean anything. Then we have Generic Good Looking White Guy Lead, because for fuck’s sake, it’s not like it’s 2018 and we aren’t tired of seeing him, Generic Latina “We couldn’t get Michelle Rodriguez to do this bullshit so here’s someone else instead” Tits and Ass (who made me even angrier because normally when they have the Hot Latina Military Lady, she gets at least ONE badass moment, but this chick seriously serves no fucking purpose and is relegated to the laziest Hot Girl/Potential Love Interest role of all fucking time), Generic Cadets Who are Carefully Ethnically Diverse (you are fooling NO ONE, sequel; if you’re gonna bother to make them diverse, GIVE THEM ACTUAL CHARACTERS FIRST), Kick Butt Asian Lady (seriously, why the fuck did you cast this lady and kill off Mako? It would make more sense if Mako was in this role, like maybe Raleigh died in the Jaeger and she wanted to make automated Jaegers so no one would ever lose their partner again, there, ah fixed it, you morons), and finally Returning Cast Member Who Looks Tired AF But Needed the Money. It is a headache spending two hours with these characters. You don’t care about any of them and they have nothing to offer you. They’re just constantly stumbling around bumping into things and spouting dialogue from 30 years ago.

If you can overlook all of those flaws for the promise of Jaeger vs. kaiju fighting, have at it. Everyone else, don’t bother. If you’re that curious, wait until this hits a premium channel. I’m extremely glad I saw it for free, because I’d have been pissed paying $10 for this lump of expired crab meat. Save your money and go buy another copy of the first movie.

#Pacific Rim Uprising #Pacific Rim #movie review #film review #spoiler alert #spoilers

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theliterateape · 3 years

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Call Thru The Metal

By Dana Jerman

The following fiction was written as a stylistic response to the novel Nightwood penned by Djuna Barnes in 1935.

THE LONELY LANDLORD LIVED ON A LUCIOUS AVENUE, but in his queer heart he was prone to jealousies. It was why his marriage had not worked. It was a struggle-and-compromise formation.

And the perfect tree-lined way glittered on day after elysium-colored day. These grasping feelings came from the notion that time was constantly playing gentle tricks on his then-benign intensities and dispositions. Perhaps too some issue came in the form of no frugality in the information he chose to gather, which leads one to feel embarrassingly overwhelmed and nearly completely impenetrable to jokes and jocularities. His wife was prone to effete witticisms. They were, the pair, hopelessly incompatible.

So there was the existence of an early love letter she had written about the scenes and trials of their courtship. It lay open on a side table in the library. It was not a thing that had been opened in a long while, and the Landlord did not know how it got there, but there it was all the same.

“And I have the memory of you coming over in a taxi. So late, to make love to me while a storm raged outside. And some of my favorite music played, which became your favorite. But then you had to go—so you went. Back into another taxi to a bed without me in it. Me to a bed without you, or your hard and yearning kiss.”

Events of this sort had been reoccurring in a harmlessly slight and insidious fashion for longer than he could remember. In the life of the Landlord, there were many a “Darling, I simply don’t know” and they had to be enough. They formed a sheen around his anger, but not an impermeable one. He could rise to meet the occasion of this emotional challenge with his perceptive attentions. But his body had other more nervous and mischievous ideas for the analysis and relief of the aforementioned psychic blocks.

✶

“I PICK THE HILLS,” She had said before leaving. And to think for even a moment she had been happy in a way he could not try or did not wish to steal away. She simply could not seem to wear anything humorous.

“My taste is displeased.” He had uttered thoughtlessly one day as she was dressing. He wanted to take the statement back almost immediately. When the flash of her eyes grew dark and brave he then lost all chance at redemption.

And how closely one factor predicts another in a side-shot look. This is the endless-father correlation. The thin-sliced experiment of his smile he counts as service. Daddy is a title that means all-judgement-no-forgiveness. The one chance at intimacy ruined by absence: Away on natural life for the stabbing death of his wife. Not the landlord’s mother however, that woman is also dead. But no one ever found her body…

Oh wives and their legends, Papa would say. Here was the astounding paradoxical implicit association test of a man who went to Yale then on well-directly to replace beerkeg compression units. Meanwhile collecting remote controls and antiquated batteries and used to run a street sweeper between jobs.

Somehow the glistening ignorant city left him as impotent as a bug.

He employed murder to match the white cross-dresser’s work in the dancehall. Completing the gaudy poem of their oozing hips. Caustic gains in worths of the ill-described are thus: A moaning laugh. Cough. Someone loses a shoe in the park. No one drowns but a few get wet. One pukes when he finds the homicide.

And the tendril is the spark is the stem creeping a creep ominous and slow from the poisonous spotted orchid named malice. The tendril of disease sprawled to clutch at the softest tissue of the closest one.

Ah—it is how the small learn from those whose blood fates bloom large in their own.

✶

THE LANDLORD’S WIFE. Now Ex-wife. She had two sisters.

She was one of a set of identical triplets. They were prized for the very product of their existence. Their mother was an heiress. Their father was a writer of much loved novels. The first time the Landlord saw his Ex-wife’s sisters was in a family portrait. He came very suddenly down with an atrocious case of basorexia. He swelled with guile from a sinister prospect.

If you had inquired of the Ex-wife to describe her landlord, she might see fit to call him a filthy Pan. Evil-grinning satyr who cares for no one. Immune to certain sensational transferences in the name of a push-button sex drive and the will to kill.

She would say something cryptic like “his best sketches were done in the hospital.” And it would mean bits. Any creative impulse he grasped or even momentarily exercised were masturbatory self-portraits in cum. Or they were the exorcism of insulting passes as the female staff on days when he was most warmed over with pain and injections. (The Landlord was pre-diabetic and had dirty kidneys as well as a predisposition to gout.)

The Ex-wife would say this only after she was slain at his hand, however, because she had deemed him previously to be too soft. Too much infused of a guilty-staring complex to be capable of such a thing.

But those nights alone while the landlord sucked treatments from fluid bags into his veins, they became projections to live over and over. She was like an already dead soul, keen and trenchant in the quiet under an authentic moon. She entreated the afterlife for its embrace. Summum bonum by the Bete Noire. She held the hands of her neverborn children and heard their whispers reveal projections of the adaptive unconscious. “You are very brave to be here,” They said. Confirming all stratospheric transferences with the long, direct looks from their dark levels of brow and eyes. She knew her sisters were in danger then, but not how or why.

Alas, defamation carried in the mind does no great good to anyone beyond. Verbalized estimations, however inane, to one and from one who consider themselves to be in possession of their better faculties ought to be shared.

✶

THE EX-WIFE WAS NOT BURIED IN THE LOAMY SWAMP at the back of the local zoo for a full day when the landlord, kept out in the park to think, ran into the second sister and her husband.

They inquired eagerly after his person and their own blood kin whom he claimed was home with pneumonia and recovering with a lot of sleeping. Assuaging them tho’ he could barely keep the glee from his voice. A glee saturated with new reason. For now, the life worth living the most for the Landlord was not without murder.

And seeing his Ex-wife’s twin strolling with her beau, he could picture her sweet face in its revelatory convulsions brought on my masturbating with her favorite ivory handled letter opener. Bone-shaped handle down as the business end, of course. Here another Ex-wife shape who probably championed very similarly in the morbid throes of enacted lust. And here she was accompanied by a man whose shirt matched her dress. Seriously.

“His shirt matched her dress,” he said aloud to himself as he passed, taken up suddenly with the true and profound absurdity of life as if he was in a whole-lie-wood film. No gunspinner of the wild west here. Just the primed experiment of an officious wheedling coward. Passing poorly along his doomed life like a preened rat who cannot find its way beyond the wine cellar.

And so it was under the guise of a brief and barely meditated gathering of the remaining two sisters at the Landlords behest and exquisite dwelling place. Alerted to the notion that his wife had gone missing from within a sick delirium.

The sisters had made the mistake of coming alone. As soon as they had gathered near to the fireside and taken up the miniature snifters of cognac from the hands of their host, it was then in a few abrupt slightly ridiculous curving motions their throats were slashed and eyes punctured by two separate antique steak knives that were pretty much lying around the back of a kitchen drawer not being used at all.

Not much later, he had no trouble surrendering to the man whose shirt had so perfectly matched the dress.

#comment #antique literature #wartime fashion #murder #unchecked rage #triple homicide #syntax and style #dark expression #hopeless killer #bombastic romance

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adultswim2021 · 3 years

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Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law #12: “Trio's Company” | April 18, 2004 - 11:30 PM | S02E02

I would say that Space Ghost's ending truly was the end of an era. I'm not sure how cognizant of it I was at the time, though. I can't remember if Space Ghost's season was plainly stated to be it's last or if it just felt that way or what. But if it did indeed seem like an ending at the time, then what a fucking insult giving us more Birdman to kick things off for phase 2. I mean, Jeuss Christ.

In “Trio's Company” we are treated to a barrage of empty zany jokes about Birdman trying and failing to get in GiGi's pants. She's a beautiful redhaired lady that is making out with every man in the office (and elsewhere) but him. She's based on Gravity Girl from the Galaxy Trio. Their relationship takes a turn when he asks her out and she agrees... to move in with him. Funny? I mean, it's not a bad concept, especially when she brings other dudes over with her (I think they're the dudes from the Galaxy Trio, but I'm so exhausted from looking up “Gravity Girl”, I simply can not bear it). But everything in Birdman's world has no gravity, which is pretty FUCKING ironic because [you get it already, I'll stop].

This is when I officially gave up on Birdman. I might have said that during the write-up for the last episode, but it's technically truer to say so here. I did actively watch “Blackwatch Plaid”, but any and all moaning about “I'M NEVER WATCHING THIS SHOW AGAIN” is basically meaningless for me, a person who will emptily make this threat and then wind up seeing a bad show to it’s conclusion anyway. Me giving up on Birdman has to happen in practice, which it did here when I did not watch this episode on television. I did not actually see this episode until I started this project.

Birdman plays it's comedy with the precision of that brief bit in The Animaniacs where it shows the writers “flipped”. I don't know if this is going to mean anything to any of you, but I’ll try and explain. Literally almost every time when I think about Birdman-- okay, you know how sometimes when you hear about something, like an object or a concept or a person, etc, your brain will sorta identify that thing to you by showing you a brief image of it? Like a flashcard? Does anyone else experience this? Like, somebody says “fishing pole!” and your brain just shows you a very brief picture of a fishing pole to you, so you'll continuing knowing what fishing poles are?

Well, when people mention shows or movies to me sometimes more than a flash card pops up, but instead it'll be like an animated gif, and for me when I think of Birdman I actually think about that brief scene in The Animaniacs theme song under the lyric “the writers' flipped” and it's just two writers with re-re arms bouncing around while they make goofy faces and springs are coming out of their heads. I probably can't convince anyone here that I'm right about thinking Birdman is unfunnily zany in a detestable way by urging you to google the theme song for Animaniacs and look at that short little animation. But I wish I could.

I've explained this before. But some of you like when I repeat stuff incessantly, so this is for you: I attempted this blog one other time. I started a thread called something like ADULT SWIM IN REVIEW or ADULT SWIM: REVIEWED where I just decided to go through every episode of every Adult Swim show in chronological order. I did it up to 2004 or so, kinda around where I am now (yikes!). I dashed it off initially, cuz it was just a message board thread and I was basically just using it as a way to keep track of it for myself, so I'd say stupid pithy things that usually involved some message-board specific shorthand (example: “puppets? compn must hate this one” “Frylock produces a list that would rival Lim da Skit’s!” like, the most inane-sounding inside shit ever). I started over because it’d been so long that picking up where I left off felt weird, and also those early entries really didn’t hold up. Anyway, here's a previously-unpublished write-up for this episode that remarkably says different stuff:

Historically speaking, I gave up on Harvey Birdman around this time. This was the first Birdman show that I intentionally missed. All these Birdman episodes from here on our are exciting and new to me!

So anyway, this episode is really terrible. Like, spectacularly so. I hate every character, I hate every joke, I hate how the story moves... man, I just hate everything about this one.

So okay, Inch High PI is fired for being short. See, his shortness interferes with his surveillance-photo-taking abilities. That's funny, right? Meanwhile, Birdman deals with a comically promiscuous personal trainer who moves into Birdman's apartment after Birdman asks her out on one date. She uses his apartment to fuck dudes in, while never fucking Birdman. Birdman thinks that he has a thread of a shot of a chance getting his cloacae stroked, so he puts up with it. While this all happens, Inch High PI is shown running in at the end of every scene trying to get Birdman's attention (he's small! so it's tough!). Reducto goes crazy at the sight of him (because he's small! Reducto is obsessed with stuff like that!). You get the idea.

The most frustrating thing about this episode is that basically nobody actually has a conversation. That's one of the main things that irks me about Birdman: the characters are crazy joke machines and pairing any two characters in a scene almost never results in a functional verbal interaction. It's like watching bad improv or something. Except, you know, it's a cartoon, where there are multiple stages in production where you have an opportunity to fix that problem. It doesn't strike me as a creative choice as much as just bad writing.

This episode bites and I don't care who knows it. Go away!

EPHEMERA CORNER

The Popeye Show #9: "The Hyp-Nut-Tist/Child Psykolojiky/Cartoons Ain't Human" (April 19, 2004 - 1:30 AM)

At 1:30AM, Adult Swim started airing The Popeye Show. I’m not sure they even promoted it. I think they just needed to fill that half hour suddenly and just decided to plug The Popeye Show on there. I liked The Popeye Show. They showed three uncut Popeye shorts and included little bumpers discussing certain historically significant Popeye facts. It was clearly aimed at adult classic animation fans and not kids. Really cool, honestly. Anyway dipshits who don’t understand that Popeye is great complained, because they thought it was kids cartoons polluting their block. Relax shithead. Popeye is good. It’s a cartoon about a gross guy that kills people for fun. It fits right in to your precious Adult Swim block. It’s okay. They’re going to take it off the schedule soon, anyway.

Swimpedia notes that it was Popeye’s 75th anniversary around this time which I guess means Adult Swim actually was acknowledging our boy Popeye at some capacity. Unfortunately I don’t remember this! But then again, this is around the time I started drifting away from Adult Swim as a regular viewer.

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #harvey birdman attorney at law #sassy guy

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior Home and Semi-Theater Edition 7/10/20 – GREYHOUND, PALM SPRINGS, THE OLD GUARD, RELIC and More!

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July weekend, even though movie theaters don’t seem any closer to opening, and I believe some in certain areas even closed! New York City just hit Phase 3 this week, and I’m not sure Phase 4 even includes movie theaters. Let’s not even talk about L.A. as it will just depress me. I literally have no idea what’s going on or if movies being back in theaters nationwide by the end of this month is even realistic. There are a lot of available movies this week, and I did my best to see as many as possible, but honestly, I’m getting a little burnt out watching movies on my computer and even on my TV set (the few times I can), so we’ll see how far I get this week. Hold on tight, because this week is gonna be a doozy! (I actually wanted to write a defense of Quibi and its content, but I’ll have to save that for a quieter week.)

Believe it or not, Tom Hanks has a new movie out this week, too, but it’s only on Apple TV+, since Sony decided to sell Hanks’ fictitious submarine drama GREYHOUND to the relatively new streaming service. Surely, that can’t be a good sign, right? Directed by Aaron Schneider (Get Low), it has Hanks playing Commander Ernest Krause, who is put in charge of his first fleet of ships to sail across the Atlantic Ocean’s notorious “Black Pit,” bringing supplies and troops to Europe during America’s early days in World War II. The area of the Atlantic got its name because the planes that normally escorted the fleet to keep an eye out for German UBoats would have to turn back. As Captain of the USS Keeling aka Greyhound, Krause is solely responsible for dozens of ships and men.

Greyhound is a classic case of “Well, it looked good on paper,” because when you have a piece of fiction by C.S. Forester and one of America’s most beloved actors wanting to make it into a movie, what could possibly go wrong? Well, I’ll tell you. As someone who generally loves submarine movies and movies with great sea battles, certainly this movie was made for me, but no, although there are a few decent CG battles, the majority of the movie involves Hanks calmly stating orders to his men from the control deck of the Greyhound, as they take evasive measures to protect the fleet from the UBoats. Really, it’s mostly about Hanks, because other than Stephen Graham in a small role, none of the other men on the Greyhound have much personality. The movie even has the audacity to waste a great actor like Rob Hunter on a nothing role as the ship’s cook who brings Krause food and coffee he never has time to eat or drink anyway, because fighting the Germans is very busy work indeed.

While some of the firefights do bring a much-needed level of excitement, there’s otherwise no real stakes or tension, because you always know that Hanks’ boat will never be sunk. Every once in a while, Hanks will ask for coffee or his slippers to change things up. That’s how boring this movie is. And then, despite all the “non-stop fighting,” they somehow have time to stage an elaborate burial at sea when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Maybe this would have been a better movie seen in theaters, but probably not. It’s absolutely astounding how boring this movie is, but if naval speak gets you hot then Greyhound might just be the movie for you!

Now that that’s taken care of, let’s try to get some of the other movies, hopefully some of them are better than Greyhound.

Andy Samberg stars in PALM SPRINGS (NEON/Hulu), the new romantic comedy and first feature from director Max Barbakow. Calling it a “romantic comedy” wouldn’t really be doing the movie justice, since it’s more of a quirky comedy that offers more than the simple Sundance rom-com formula of Samberg’s previous Sundance movie, Jesse and Celeste Forever. The movie begins with Samberg’s character, Nyles, waking up at a wedding with his horrid girlfriend Misty (a very funny Meredith Hagner). At the wedding, Nyles gives a rousing speech (despite no one knowing who he is) then connects with the bride’s sister, Sara (Cristin Milioti). But wait, maybe you think you know where this is going but when the two go off somewhere private to “hook up,” it’s rudely interrupted by someone trying to kill Nyles, and well, it just gets stranger from there.

I’m not sure how much of the plot and the early twist would be considered a spoiler, although maybe not if you’ve watched the trailer. Essentially, Sara follows Nyles into a cave where there’s some sort of dimensional thing that returns them back to the beginning of the same day over and over. They go to sleep or they die, and they’re right back at the start of the day, so yup, it’s basically a similar Groundhog’s Day premise that we’ve seen in movies like Happy Death Day, Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll, Before I Fall or others, but it’s all about what Barbakow, writer Andy Siara and the two leads do that make Palm Springs so much more entertaining and even deeper.

I have to be honest that I wasn’t familiar with Milioti at all before this film, so this ends up being an amazing spotlight for her talent, and similar to Rashinda Jones in Jesse/Celeste, she makes Samberg that much easier to palate. Not that I dislike Samberg, but I’ve never been the biggest fan when he’s given free reign like in movies such as Hot Rod. (But I did like Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, so maybe he’s grown on me.) I will admit that I’m a sucker for a good wedding-based romantic comedy—as seen by recent ones like Plus Oneand Destination Wedding -- and with its odd quantum physics twist, Palm Springs continually finds new ways of exploring the tenuous existence that is a new relationship. Oh, I should also mention that Roy, the guy trying to kill Nyles, is played by JK Simmons, and while it’s definitely a smaller part for one of my favorite actors, he also plays a significant role in the story.

You’ll probably know right away if Palm Springs is your kind of movie, but the mix of quirkiness and honest heart and emotion makes it one of Samberg’s better endeavor. It hope it allows us to see much more of Ms. Milioti, since I think she’s quite wonderful as well. Palm Springs can be watched on Hulu or in select drive-ins starting this Friday, and since it is this week’s “Featured Flick*,” I hope you’ll check it out! (*I changed the name of this just to see if anyone is paying any attention… or even reading.)

Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández’s comic, THE OLD GUARD, has been turned into a movie directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) that will hit Netflix this Friday. It stars Charlize Theron and is written by Rucka himself, and it’s a fairly high concept action movie involving a group of “immortals” – warriors who aren’t able to die, so they’ve lived for hundreds of years and are now hiring themselves out as hired mercenaries. When they learn there’s a new immortal awakening, they seek her out to recruit her.

I generally like Charlize Theron in action mode as seen in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, and she’s pretty kick-ass as Andromache the Scythian aka Andy, the leader of the Old Guard. Kiki Layne from If Beale Street Could Talk offers a nice counterpoint as her trainee in the form of Nile, the newest immortal, who discovers that she can’t die while serving as a soldier in the Middle East. The rest of the cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts and others, who are all okay, but I just wish there was more to the story than just watching them have to deal with a lame corporate villain named Merrick (Harry Melling), who wants to harvest their blood to create life-saving pharmaceuticals for others.

While I liked the flashbacks to historic times showing Theron’s Andromache in another light, the stuff in present day is rarely as interesting. I’m not sure I ever would have thought of Bythewood doing action, even though she was supposed to do a Silver Sable/Black Cat movie at one point, but her fight scenes pretty fairly impressive, but she doesn’t lose sight of losing the focus on characterization, at least in terms of the two women.

The Old Guard isn’t bad, and it really would have benefited from being seen on the big screen, but I’m not sure it really offers enough with its concept other than a few decent fight scenes. Personally, I felt it paled in comparison to Netflix’s other recent action film, Extraction, at least in terms of the story and characters.

A horror movie that got a lot of lavishing praise out of Sundance is Natalie Erika James’ RELIC (IFC Midnight), which you may remember me mentioning last week, because apparently, it opened in a few drive-in theaters last Friday. I had been looking forward to this due to the amount of praise it got from Sundance, comparing it to the likes of The Babadook or Hereditary.

The story revolves around Emily Mortimer’s Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heatchote) travelling to their grandmother Edna’s country home in Australia after she’s reported missing. Edna (Robyn Nevin) soon returns and is behaving oddly, and with Gran clearly not herself, Kay has to figure out if she’s possessed by something or just suffering from advanced dementia.

I feel like I have a general idea what James was trying to accomplish with Relic, as it explores what it’s like being the caregiver for your elderly parent once they’ve become debilitated by something that makes them unrecognizable, put into the context of a horror film. I ended up watching the movie twice, mainly because I had no clue what was going on during my first viewing, but honestly, this movie just ended up annoying me, and it was only partially due to the fact that I had very little idea what was going on since most of the movie is so dark. More than that, I found a lot of the movie to be incredibly dull, and comparisons to The Babadook are inane, since the only thing is that it’s a horror movie (sort of) directed by an Australian woman.

The movie also involves some sort of “evil presence” and a creepy old house that was on the premises when Kay’s family moved in, but this information is revealed in such a dreary and confusing manner that makes it harder to figure out what you’re watching. In fact, if not for a number of eerie random images, it would be hard to even consider the first half of Relic “horror” since it’s more of a family drama about these three women from different generations contending with each other in this house. As someone who has had many conversations with my sister about what to do about my own elderly mother, I could see why this might connect with viewers, but planting this idea haphazardly into a typical horror movie just never worked for me. Relic has some good things going for it, such as the performances by the three actors (particularly Nevin), plus the creepy imagery and sound design do a lot to create a mood even if it doesn’t necessarily help with the storytelling.

The problem is that this story is told at such a snail’s pace and by the time the horror elements start kicking in within the last 20 minutes of the movie, almost everything is in pitch blackness, making it almost impossible to tell what you’re watching. Any earlier qualities worthy of praise are lost with some of the bad choices in lighting and editing, as well as an ending that’s dragged on for so long and at such a drowsy pace that any good will towards the movie will likely be lost. Ultimately, Relic is a disappointing high concept but single-note thriller that fails to deliver on the scares, instead delivering a dull and slightly unsettling family drama about aging and dementia.

In fact, I actually much preferred Jeffrey A. Brown’s horror film, The Beach House, which comes to the streaming network sShudder this Thursday. It stars Liana Liberato and Noah Le Gross as Emily and Randall, a young couple who travel to his father’s beach house to reconnect. Once there, their vacation is broken up by Jake Weber’s Mitch and his wife Jane (Maryann Nagel), but as the two couples get to know each other, a freak environmental event unleashes an infection that leads to all sorts of freaky occurrences. While there was just as much weirdness and not knowing what was going on as in Relic, at least this movie mostly takes place in the sunlight, so you can actually see things that are equally or even more disturbing than anything in Relic.

Brown’s film starts out so simply with this young couple wanting to spend some time alone together, but there’s this constant menace looming that’s foreshadowed in the opening credits, and as Mitch and Jane show up and start behaving oddly, you’ll wonder what exactly is happening to them. Things get even more disturbing when Emily is on the beach and experiences even odder and grosser circumstances that lead into the film’s “body horror” portion that will make even those with the strongest constitutions slightly queasy.

Part of why the film works so well is the small cast Brown has put together. I’ve been quite a fan of Liberato for many years, and she effectively becomes the film’s lead. Certainly, there are a few common horror tropes in place including ones that can be traced back to the likes of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, but there’s also enough new ideas that the film doesn’t seem like retread. While I’m not 100% sure exactly what was happening in The Beach House, Brown and his cast do a good job keeping the viewer uneasy and disturbed.

Atom Egoyan’s new thriller GUEST OF HONOUR (Kino Lorber) will premiere this week as part of the Kino Marquee (and there’s lots of great stuff on there that will help support your local arthouse while you’re checking that out!) It stars David Thewliss as Jim, a health inspector whose high school music teaching daughter Veronica (Lausla de Oliveira) has been jailed over an indiscretion with two teen students.

Egoyan has proven himself to be quite a master at the thriller genre, and Guest of Honour involves a complex family drama narrative that scuttles between timelines in order to keep you guessing where things might be going. I’ll freely admit that the non-linear storytelling was somewhat confusing at first, as the movie is framed by a conversation between Veronica and Luke Wilson after the death of her father. It also flashes back to an important moment from Veronica’s childhood before her mother died of cancer, which led to other things that would affect her years later.

I’m frequently amazed by Thewliss as one of England’s more underrated exports, but I was equally impressed by Ms. de Oliveira, whose work I was not familiar with before seeing her in Egoyan’s capable hands.

While we’ve heard plenty of true stories about the relationships between teachers with their students, Guest of Honour isn’t just about that, and it’s the way Egoyan reveals some of the story’s more interesting complexities, like Veronica’s relationship with an obsessed bus driver (Rossif Sutherland), that builds to some of the events that happen later. Honestly, I’m hesitant to reveal too much about the plot since there’s a way that Egoyan unveils various elements that makes Guest of Honour another compelling entry in the filmmaker’s constantly-evolving oeuvre.

A really interesting crime-thriller with a sci-fi twist hitting Apple TV, Prime Video and other digital platforms this Friday is South African filmmaker Tony Dean Smith’s own directorial debut, VOLITION (Giant Pictures), a film co-written and co-produced with his brother Ryan. It stars Adrian Glynn McMorran (Arrow) as James, a man constantly down on his luck who has clairvoyant powers that he uses to get himself involved in a scheme involving valuable diamonds. Just before this happens, he meets Angela (Magda Apanowicz), a young woman who gets pulled into the problems James gets into with others wanting the diamonds, and when he sees a murder, he has to do what he can to change the future.

I feel like this column’s running theme is that I’m being deliberately vague about the film’s plot, and in this case, it’s because halfway through the movie, there’s a pretty big twist that involves time travel. While that immediately makes the movie more interesting, it also makes things far more confusing. Up until that point, Volition felt like a rather weakly-written indie crime-thriller from filmmakers who may have seen Memento a few too many times. In fact, it opens with such a pretentious bit of narration I was worried the movie wasn’t going to be very good, and there was very little in the first half to keep me invested. When that new element/twist is added, McMorran’s character ends up on a far more interesting journey, and that turns Volition into a far more inventive and original story. Sure, it isn’t Primer, but if you’re a fan of the twists that come with time travel, Volition does a good job keeping you wondering what might happen next, and it does this with a mostly no-name cast, which is always quite impressive. In that way, it reminds me of The Wretchedwhich opened earlier in the year, as that was also by two filmmaking brothers taking a DIY attitude towards independent film. Volition isn’t perfect but it’s far better than I was expecting, and it’s a testament to the filmmakers’ perseverance to bring their very specific vision to the screen.

I was pretty excited to learn out about the quirky Japanese coming-of-age musical comedy WE ARE LITTLE ZOMBIES (Oscilloscope) from Makoto Nagahisa, because it’s the type of movie that I would usually see at the New York Asian Film Festival that would have been going on right now if not for… well, you know what. But it did play Fantasia in Montreal last year, so I’m sure it would have been fun seeing it with that audience. It’s certainly cute and quirky, involving a group of kids who come together to deal with their parents. Honestly, I don’t have a ton to say about it, but if you like oddball Asian films like the ones that play those festivals, you’ll know whether the film is for you. You can watch a trailer and find out where you’ll be able to catch We Are Little Zombies at its Official Site.

At least that was more watchable than Gavin Rothery’s sci-fi directorial debut, ARCHIVE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Theo James from the Divergent movies as George Almore, a man in the year 2038 who is working on an AI that is as close to human as possible, one that will hopefully reunite him with his dead wife in this new form. If you watch this, you’ll immediately think that Rothery must have watched Moon quite a lot. In fact, he was the conceptual artist and visual FX artist on Duncan Jones’ movie, and the influences of that film are so obvious it’s hard to get past it. Then again, Theo James has so little personality and charisma, he’s almost constantly being overshadowed by his robotic companions. So yeah, not recommended, and I’m a little shocked this was accepted into this year’s cancelled SXSW. Honestly, I couldn’t even get through it.

Also premiering in the Kino Marquee is Nicholas Leytner’s Austrian drama The Tobacconist (Menemsha Films), starring Bruno Ganz (Downfall) as Sigmund Freud and based on the bestselling novel by Robert Seethaler, which I haven’t read (if that isn’t obvious). It deals with the friendship between a teenager named Franz (Simon Morzé) and Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna, when the former travels there to work as an apprentice at a tobacco shop where Freud is a regular customer. When Franz falls in love with a music hall dancer, he turns to Freud for advice.

Apparently “showing only in theaters” this Friday is Michael W. Bachochin’s sci-fi/”psychodrama” Parallax (The Primal Group) starring Naomi Prentice as a young artist who is haunted by nightmares and who wakes up to a life she doesn’t recognize. At this point, I might as well just post the actual synopsis: “As she begins to uncover the truths of the life that she's found herself in, the gravity of her failing reality weighs heavily on her psychological identity and the reliability of her sanity is called into question.”

Let’s get to some docs, and you can probably safely assume that Harry Mavromichalis’ Olympia(Abramorama) is about Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, because it is. Featuring interviews with Whoopi Goldberg, Laura Linney, Diane Ladd and more, that covers the Greece-born actress as she opens up about her struggles with depression, suicide and drug addiction, as well as stories from some of the actors she’s shared the stage and screen with over the years.

The next doc is about the Chinese artist who probably has had more docs made about him than…well, anyone else? Ai Wei Wei: Yours Truly (First Run Features), directed by Cheryl Haines and Gina Leibrecht, covers how the artist developed his 2014 exhibition, @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, inspired by his 2011 detention by Chinese authorities (which has generally inspired all his recent work?) Hey, if you’re a fan of his artwork, then you’ll probably want to see this doc, too.

One doc that I really wanted to see was Brett Harvey’s Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo (Universal), which had a virtual world premiere and is now on ITunes and other VOD, but my attempts to get a screener was met with absolute silence. The film documents the amazing life and career of the 71-year-old character actor and action hero who went from a life of drugs and doing hard time in prison to becoming an easily recognized and respected star, mainly thanks to Robert Rodriguez. I would like to see this movie, and maybe someday I will.

Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema will be adding Jacques Becker’s 1947 film, Antoine and Antoinette, this Friday, as well as the 1927 filming of the original Broadway play, Chicago, long before it was turned into a musical, although it does have Ginger Rogers playing Roxie Hart. Reinhold Schünzel’s original 1933 film Victor and Victoria (which was later remade by Blake Edwards for wife Julie Andrews) also joins the fairly hefty list of repertory films available, being shown as part of the “Pioneers of Queer Cinema” series.

Other movies I just wasn’t able to get to this week include Tito (Factory 25), I, Pastafari (Gravitas Ventures), The Medicine (1091), Never Too Late (Blue Fox Entertainment), Deany Bean is Dead (Global Digital Releasing) and Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Utopia).

Also beginning on Apple TV+ this Friday is the new JJ Abrams series, Little Voice, starring Brittany O’Grady as Bess King, a 20-something singer trying to find her voice in the rat race that is New York City. I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet but apparently, Abrams got Sara Bareilles from Broadway’s Waitress to write some of the tunes, so it should be decent.

Next week, more movies—some in theaters, some not in theaters! But most of them watchable from home in case you don’t drive or your city is exploding with the COVID after the rest of us have been in quarantine for months. Thanks bunches.

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #Streaming #VOD #Greyhound #Relic #TheOldGuard #Volition #TheBeachHouse #PalmSprings #GuestOfHonour

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