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happymetalgirl · 3 years

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The 15 Worst Metal Albums of 2020

This list might have been shorter if not for my running into a few awful albums at the end of the year that I had been avoiding wisely up until that point. My morbid curiosity got the best of me, and what’s done is done. I’m paying the price for it by going back over the worst albums I heard all year. Let’s get this over with.

15. Ghøstkid - Ghøstkid

This was the debut solo album from the former singer of Eskimo Callboy, who had a pretty decent backing of hype heading into this release under the Ghøstkid moniker, but with the namesake frontman putting in no more than the standard performance on a bunch of poorly assembled tracks in an unappealing and dated poppy metalcore style, ultimately the eponymous album wound up disappointing me pretty substantially.

14. Powerman 5000 - The Noble Rot

Powerman 5000 are just such a low-rate band that even one of their more okay albums makes it here. While not as astoundingly, mind-numbingly basic as their worst material, The Noble Rot is still some of the most unevolved, underwritten, and forgettable electro rock and industrial metal I’ve heard from a big name artist. This is some eighth grade level songwriting here, and that’s a fuckin’ feat for a band that’s been around longer than any eighth grader has.

13. Corey Taylor - CMFT

There was a lot of hype around Corey Taylor finally coming out with a solo project, and it was pretty damn disappointing to hear a bunch of uninteresting classic rock too tacky for Stone Sour. CMFT focuses on the fun side that has made its creator such an enigmatic figurehead in the metal press, but its one-note approach does little more than highlight Corey Taylor’s songwriting deficiencies. I really could have seen this album turning out better too, with just some more time and care put into it, if a fun time of an album is what Taylor was going for. Unfortunately Taylor tried to make a party album and a grand ceremonial tribute to his greatness at the same time, and ego-petting and partying don’t really go hand in hand.

12. Evildead - United States of Anarchy

It has some good bones underneath it, but Evildead’s long overdue (if anyone was asking for it) third album wears out its welcome so quickly with some of the most adolescent thrash I’ve heard in a while. The band gets some good rhythms going and the vocals aren’t terrible either, fitting the older thrash style pretty well. But the band’s predictable formula tires out very quickly, and the political commentary of the lyrics is too cheesy and cringeworthy to ignore. It seems every year we get a handful of these kinds of albums that try to get into the simmering thrash revival with some ultra retro approach, and a good portion of those albums are from long-defunct bands who figure their primitive old-school approach might be a selling point despite their sounds often being even more juvenile against the backdrop of today’s metal landscape. So it’s not a huge surprise or anything to hear an album as ham-fisted and corny as United States of Anarchy; this year it just happened to be Evildead.

11. Five Finger Death Punch - F8

They may not always place highest in this list, but they always manage to make it here, and this was actually an improvement on the last album, not that that’s saying all that much. In fact, I’d say this is the only time in the band’s history that they actually shifted their trajectory upwards. But while the band’s ugly continual creative decay has been a hard thing to watch and made them the five finger punching bag of the metal world, there seems to be a large enough swath of mouthbreathing chuds who love their incoherent derivative shit and flock to their shows enough to put them in lucrative headlining slots and on top of the metal world. Goddamn that sure sounds a lot like someone else we all know doesn’t it. I’ve criticized them plenty in the past, and while indeed an improvement, F8 only mildly remedies the numerous problems with Five Finger Death Punch. Still septic to the system are the predictably formulaic and tiresome songwriting, the stale production, the corny butt rock choruses, the shitty bootlicking worldview that bleeds into Ivan Moody’s douchey and faux-deep lyrics, the contrived ballads and country-dabbling. Even with an improvement in the flow of the track listing and a few more bangers that somewhat hearken back to their first album, F8 is still an over-thought and overly calculated batch of Sirius XM fodder that’s trying to please everyone in some superficial way. I’ll grant that it seems as though the band realized they had been giving the more metal-immersed side of their fanbase that has been with them the longest smaller and smaller crumbs with each new album. I’m not gonna hold my breath for this being anything more than placating for the time being; I’m sure the next album will find the band back on whatever bullshit they feel (or their execs feel) they need to be on to pull enough streams from inattentive radio metal bros. I always end with the disclaimer that I still steadfastly stand by the band’s first two albums, and even American Capitalist to a degree, and that I totally acknowledge the immense potential for greatness this band could seemingly at any time decide to fulfill. Ivan Moody is a talented vocalist with a lot of star power and they really could have been the second coming of Pantera or singlehandedly ignited a new wave of American groove metal and metalcore or carried it on their own. But instead the band have followed the money on the path of least resistance to fast-track their way to the top of festival tickets, which I’m sure affords them quite enough luxury and comfort in life, more than most bands these days get, but it doesn’t exempt them from criticism, and unfortunately I think their legacy will show that they were a lowest common denominator kind of band at the end of the day when they could have been, again, like a second Pantera or something.

10. Anvil - Legal at Last

Another year, another album of Anvil unable to evolve past their prototypic thrash of their forty-year-old origins. Though as tacky as ever, Anvil actually also managed to make a mild improvement on their last album on the musical front at least. The songs are a little more energetic and easier to get through, if not for the lyricism though. Anvil lyrics are never anything beyond a fourth-grader’s poetry assignment for their English class, but some of the Facebook boomer lyrics here are fucking cringy dude. A quick look at the track listing will let you know exactly where you’re gonna find the juiciest cringe, but honestly, even as far as cringe goes it’s nothing comedically special and cringe culture in general is played out anyway. So do yourself a favor and just ignore Anvil the way they deserve to be ignored.

9. Halestorm - Reimagined

It feels a little harsh to place an EP here, especially for a band whose album back in 2018 was one of the best things I have heard to come out of hard rock in a long time. But these stripped back covers and revisions of songs from the band’s catalog just suck all the oomph out of them, perhaps making the case by contrast for the importance of the role the rest of the band behind the indeed charismatic powerhouse frontwoman Lzzy Hale play in making their sound what it is. It’s unlikely this points to any kind of new direction for them, so I’m not particularly worried about them running into this problem again. Plus, I don’t think Halestorm and Lzzy Hale are like fundamentally incompatible with more ballad-y rock music, this forced balladization of older songs just did not work, and it makes perfect sense as to why.

8. Gama Bomb - Sea Savage

The fact that this album is only number 8 on this list is just depressing for its reminder of just how much shittier it got this year. The fact that there are seven albums from this yet worse than Sea Savage, goddamn. With one exception, this was maybe the stupidest album I heard all year, at least in the thrash department it was. God this thing is a sugar high mess. I feel like a toddler on an entire bag of Halloween candy or an elementary schooler on a 2-liter of Mountain Dew sat at a computer to program a thrash album would’ve probably come up with something like this. The erratic operatic highs and dumbass lyrics, it all just embodies everything that ever made thrash look bad. It’s like that drunk guy at a party who’s hyper as shit and doing a bunch of crazy stunts for attention because he thinks it’ll make the people there like him more, but really he’s just embarrassing himself. Yeah, definitely the worst thrash metal album I heard all year, and one I wish I could unhear.

7. Amaranthe - Manifest

One of the albums I was avoiding but reviewed late out of my own weird sense of obligation that I wasn’t surprised to find only validated my reasons for avoiding it in the first place. The weird combo of dancy pop music and power metal isn’t as crazy of an idea as it might seem at first thought. In fact, that’s basically in part what Babymetal are doing, and actually getting better and better at. But Amaranthe get the worst of both worlds with Manifest, unsavory pop melodies and utterly generic symphonic metal to make for something I’m not at all surprised I was so repulsed by.

6. Trapt - Shadow Work

Yep, I listened to it. God, no wonder this band is flailing in irrelevance with aggressive MAGA nonsense being their only audible desperate plea for attention. The album, thank fuck, isn’t steeped in the same bitch boy tantrum that the band’s singer has engaged in all year to the point of getting his band’s Facebook page banned for hate speech, and the music isn’t like offensively poorly made or anything like that either. There’s clearly a conscious meeting of the baseline requirements for the type of music they make, but holy fuck it’s so damn flavorless and predictable. It’d be one thing if this was the trendy thing to be doing, but this diet hard rock for people who think Three Days Grace is too wild has been out of fashion for over a decade. And Trapt are just recycling the same dumb formula that overstayed it’s welcome in the early 2000’s. Yeah, I’m not surprised at all, but god, it’s the kind of thing that has to be apparent to the band themselves too unless they’re lacking of any and all self-awareness. Trapt have thrown themselves to the forefront of the online metal world’s discourse by being an annoying, toxic, and childish presence all year; the silver lining being the unity among metalheads in roasting their laughable posturing about their Pandora numbers and the juicy memes about their one hit “Headstrong” that rile the snowflake singer up without fail. And this shit album is just another reason to laugh at them and more fuel to roast their crybaby Trumper frontman with. Go back into your hole, Trapt. 3/10

5. Unleash the Archers - Abyss

I talked about it in my review, but there really is only one simple thing that sinks this album so low. And that is just how incredibly low-effort and lifeless it is with a genre that’s supposed to be so life-affirming. Power metal isn’t the most highly revered genre in metal, but that’s just for its cheesiness. I love it; when it’s at its best, it’s some of the most inspiring metal music out there and I genuinely wish there was a bigger demand across the board for it. But Unleash the Archers just sound so flat and unenthusiastic in this album, and, sorry, in power metal, unabashed enthusiasm is just nonnegotiable. The guitar parts are phoned in and lacking in imagination, and the vocals especially are so narrow-range, it’s all so antithetical to the ethos of power metal and it doesn’t make a strong case for itself. I’ll leave it there; this album is lazy and lifeless so I feel no need to waste any of my time and work on it.

4. Burzum - Thûlean Mysteries

Ol’ Varg must’ve needed a new wizard hat or camouflage pants or whatever goofy shit he’s been doing since retiring the Burzum name to focus on his racism and LARPing because I thought Burzum was supposed to be finished. I thought you were done with Burzum, Varg. Apparently not too done to not dump an hour and a half of embarrassingly half-baked ambient dungeon synth song fragments that sound, so many of them, quite obviously unfinished. Varg Vikernes has been a washed-up shell of the musical god the various weirdos who idolize him make him out to be for a long time now, and it has shown in the gradually degrading work he had put out after his release from prison. Yet after clearly not caring about creating music in any meaningful way for a long time, Varg drops this heap of shit in his fans’ laps. I suppose they deserve it, but I’m sure some of them are delusional enough to lap it up with a smile on their face while still believing their white nationalist idol to be a musical genius. Again, it’s entirely dull ambient music, not metal at all, but it deserves to be shit upon for its astounding laziness and purposelessness.

3. Asking Alexandria - Like a House on Fire

Doubling down on exactly the unflattering crossover of pop music with their significantly sanitized butt rock in their apparent quest for arena glory that started with their self-titled album back in 2017, Asking Alexandria’s bid for the big spotlight that Imagine Dragons occupies didn’t get any stronger this year with Like a House on Fire. After three or four years of aiming for this style, the band still aren’t even all that competent with the basics of fucking pop rock, which is pretty downright laughable. Honestly, for an album so high up here on my shit list, my feelings on it are more or less just that of unsurprised disappointment; as soon as I got a feel for what the band were doing with the album, I knew it was going to be a mess of predictable results. And lo and behold. This was just such a wholly inexcusably floppy paper towel of an album, and one more Asking Alexandria release I know I won’t be returning to ever again.

2. Hollywood Undead - New Empire, Vol. 2

Coming on at the last minute to get on the scoreboard, reliably, is Hollywood Undead. When I reviewed both volumes of this project earlier, I referred to them as “corporate Linkin Park”, and I stand by that 100%. This album especially showcases nothing but what an incoherent, vapid, clout-chasing act they are, with such a corny, focus-grouped sound that sounds like it was made in a lab by a bunch of out-of-touch boomers. God, they could’ve been safe too if they had left it with the more tolerable first volume back in January, but this follow-up sequel from just this month was exactly why I had avoided listening to the first installment in the first place. And I should’ve never played this second one either. The album opener, “Medicate”, is probably the worst song I sat through in my own volition this year, and the rest of the album doesn’t get much better. It’s nothing new for Hollywood Undead after I gave their 2017 album my award for least favorite album of that year: more unfitting interplay between machismo posturing Eminem-cosplay and the sappiest, wimpiest radio rock and pop choruses; more cringy tough-guy struggle bars; more forgettable-at-best instrumentals. Congrats again, Hollywood Undead, you made one of the worst albums of the year once again.

But even worse than Hollywood Undead is an album that I feel like is already so legendarily bad, that there is no other album that could’ve been sat here. It had to be this one.

1. Six Feet Under - Nightmares of the Decomposed

Shitty metal bands everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief any year Six Feet Under decide to put out new music because any album they release is just about bound to end up as everyone’s #1 worst album of the year, and boy is that guarantee becoming more and more airtight with each successive release. It’s truly astounding too how Six Feet Under manages to outdo themselves every time. I don’t even want to think about what could possibly come after Nightmares of the Decomposed; we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But for now, holy fermented shit, this thing is not just bad, it’s like the holy grail of terrible TERRIBLE albums and I don’t want to know what kind of apocalyptically despicable album Chris Barnes and company could possibly conjure to outdo this one. And make no mistake, it’s still Chris Barnes dragging this band down. I gave this album a 1/10 instead of a 0/10 because there was at least a sliver of salvageable instrumentation on it, as thin of a sliver as it was, a few halfway decent musical ideas of you squinted hard enough. The instrumentalists are checked out and clearly just participating for the paycheck, but I can’t even imagine what kind of professional instrumental performance could possibly overshadow the embarrassment that Chris Barnes put to tape in the studio here. Maybe that says it, because it honestly sounds utterly unprofessional. It’s baffling how this got through management and sound engineering to be released to the public because I don’t think I’ve ever even heard any amateur high school band’s vocalist sound this bad. Vocal ingenuity is generally something to be applauded in the metal world, and pioneers like Randy Blythe, Dani Filth, and Travis Ryan deserve all the praise they get for their innovation with dirty metal vocals, yet what Chris Barnes has “invented” here on Nightmares of the Decomposed to compensate for his continually-deteriorating vocals is just sad. The man simply cannot perform highs anymore, clearly, and the alternative is this fucking comical, cartoonish squealing that sounds more like a bratty toddler gargling their own snot than it does anything fitting for a death metal record, even a death metal record at stupid and cheesy as Nightmares of the Decomposed. Chris Barnes should be thankful that metal is not a sport and that there’s not nearly as much of an abundance of performance statistics to point to and analyze to see what kind of records are broken in a legendarily awful performance. I feel like if there were any kind of performance stats to pull up, this album would have to break some kinds of records. Like this is worse than that 7-1 Germany-Brazil World Cup game, this would be like if the Brazilian team all got unholy levels of blazed and repeatedly scored on themselves because they kept going the wrong way and kicking the ball into their own net, and then pissing their fucking shorts. Even in 7-1 defeat, Brazil had more dignity than Chris Barnes here. Six Feet Under and their label have to know they are a laughing stock and that people will listen to them at this point for the sheer entertainment value of how mind-blowingly awful they sound. It’s not an illegitimate marketing tactic, and it’s the only explanation I can come up with for how this passed inspection. If that’s their mission, to be a spectacle and instill cringe in death metal fans in a regular ritual of comically stupid performances across every successive album, they’re sure doing it, and I guess this baffling headache-trophy is their well-earned prize. Congratulations Six Feet Under, you did it again! Worst metal album of the year.

#metal #heavy metal #worst albums of 2020 #hard rock #thrash metal #groove metal #alternative metal #butt rock #acoustic rock #power metal #dungeon synth #ambient #ambient music #metalcore #arena rock #pop rock #alternative rock #death metal

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minaminokyoko · 5 years

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Godzilla: King of Monsters: A Spoilertastic Review

To get straight to the point for some of you, yes, thank God, this movie is better than Godzilla '14.

For one, the title character is not only in the movie for a decent amount of time, they don't constantly cut away from the action and the film is properly lit so that even in night scenes and scenes with heavy rain, our lizard boi is fully visible. He also is kicking some ass and taking some names, and that's what we came here to see. Thus, it's immediately better than its predecessor.

However, a big problem with the movie is the humans. Not the supporting Monarch team, mind you, but the "family." This is one of the most poorly written families I've seen in a while. It's just baffling. They are very, very unlikable people. You don't really get to know them much, and moments where you do, you just don't like them. They are not easy to root for. It's a very similar problem to a lot of other disaster movies, where they pick a bunch of high strung, angry, selfish people as your leads to the point where you're kind of rooting for the disaster to get them, and that's sadly the other half of this film.

In short, they do the kaiju stuff well, but the humans drag the movie down a couple of enjoyment levels, if you ask me. Let's get to it.

Overall Grade: C

Spoilers ahead.

Pros:

-Godzilla and the other monsters look and sound great. They truly feel like their title: Titans. The movie does a good job of offering scale and giving you different perspectives to understand the size and scope of these creatures, and it's very cool to see some of them in the flesh while others are just named. They name-dropped Kong three times that I counted, but he's still Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Movie, which is irritating, but I also think that's for two reasons: (1) they need to build the hype train and sadly this movie is not on track to do well, as evidenced by my theater only having about eight people total in it opening weekend, and they need all the help they can get if they truly want to turn this into a franchise (2) they want to give him and Godzilla an entire rivalry film to themselves instead of just making him an extra here in this movie. Give them the room to breathe and be rivals in their own film rather than just shoehorning Kong into this debut of the other kaiju. But back to my point, the monsters all feel corporeal and intimidating. I really liked Mothra's design in particular. She looks gorgeous and is kind of the Ugly Cute variety of monster. I very much enjoyed seeing these creatures with some good effects given to them (although there are a few spots where it could look better, but WB struggles with this a lot, I've noticed) and the sounds they make are tremendous and impressive.

-The monster fights are pretty solid. I do admit that Pacific Rim kind of raised my bar for kaiju fights even though I know it's not the same story, but that to me is the perfect balance of human characters who are actually likable and useful versus giant monsters. I think it just should be a good blueprint for how to run the show if you're advertising giant monsters blowing up shit and beating the stuffing out of each other. I think the monster fights in King of Monsters are paced well and you can mostly understand where they are in relation to each other and how evenly matched they are. There were also smaller, neat details like seeing Mothra in her larva state then evolve into her adult form. That's very cool and creative and I enjoyed that little detail. The final smackdown with Godzilla and Ghidorah was a good monster mash, and I appreciate them giving it time and not cutting away. Godzilla's finishing move was 100% badass. Kudos to the big Lizard Boi, and kudos to Mothra for coming to help her lizard boyfriend as well against Rodan.

-The Monarch team is dicey at best, but the humans actually did more than just following him around like in Godzilla '14. It was actually a smart idea to introduce the ORCA and the concept of trying to at least either soothe or summon the monsters. I liked it a lot, and it was relatively realistic. We as a species are stupid and would of course try nukes first, but once they learned that these things actually feed on radiation and it makes them stronger, then they would be forced to find alternative options. It allowed the human characters to finally be truly relevant and not just dumb, wide-eyed spectators (although, God, there was a lot of that in this movie) and it gave the whole thing a sort of story.

-Just like the previous movie, Ken Watanabe gave a performance this movie did not deserve. He's just one of those actors where he's so seasoned that even though God knows this movie's script is not fucking Shakespeare, you could still tell that he cared a lot about the project and was easily the best actor hands down.

-I'm glad Emma dies. Fuck her. Thank you for having the teeth to not try and give her some shitty redemption that she wouldn't have deserved anyway. Thank you for sticking to your guns and doing just like Deep Blue Sea and letting the person responsible for all that death take the final bow for her shitty fucking actions.

-This has nothing to do with the canon, but I had a really cool idea: what if Last Action Hero Bad Guy is Tom Hiddleston's character from Kong: Skull Island? Wouldn't that be fucking neat?! It just occurred to me that since Hiddleston's character was probably in his 30's during the 1970's, he'd be in his 70's during this film and he's a tall, thin British dude. I would love it if we got some kind of backstory reveal that something happened that caused Hiddleston's character to turn against Monarch. Wouldn't that be a good idea for a second Kong movie? Seeing the hero turn to the villain for the sake of saving the planet? Man, I like that idea a lot, but that's me.

-I was glad to see Ziyi Zhang return to a big screen movie. I liked her and felt bad about what happened to her career, so it was cool seeing little bits of story, especially about how Asian cultures do in fact consider reptiles to be helpful and not hurtful. That was a neat little mythos thing for me.

Cons:

-As mentioned above, I hated this fucking family. This family is just unbearable. I know the film is ham-fisted in its attempts to deal with loss and tragedy and a broken home, but there is a way to do that. There is a way to write characters reconciling and putting aside a rough history to come together. This is not the way. It's so sloppily written that I was throwing my hands up in exasperation at certain points. They are so unlikable. You see so little of their home life, first off, that there is no real connection to get to know them. This is a common problem in action movies these days, too--they don't know how to set the stage and just rush into action. It's true we come to action movies for action, but that doesn't mean we don't also want to enjoy the characters we're spending time with. We know it's fully possible to have action packed movies with well-written leads. It's been done for decades, so this movie has no excuse for why the three family members are aggressively terrible. Emma is a selfish, thoughtless bitch and her motivations make zero sense. Mark is just an angry ex-alcoholic who just barely is relevant enough to be in the story. Madison is damn near a blank slate daughter archetype with little to offer except to be something to rescue. Even with one brief flashback of when they were happy, we're not given a reason to root for them because you never get to know them and the few character traits they do display are just awful. For that reason, we're gonna give Emma her own bullet point to explain why she is just the worst.

-Emma's motivation is completely ass-backwards. Going the eco-terrorism point makes no fucking sense for what happened to her. Hear me out. I can see what this movie was going for, and I know it's kind of an odd comparison, but what they ended up with is basically blonde Thanos. Fuck this woman. Fuck this woman for deciding that she's right and millions of other people need to die because she thinks she is right about something, and she was fucking wrong. 100% fucking wrong. It made no sense that because Godzilla killed your kid, you're gonna slaughter tens of thousands of other kids to "restore the earth" and make it some kind of utopia. You're gonna subject innocent lives to torture and death and trauma in the hopes that titantic animals you cannot at all control and barely understand will raze everything to ashes and then shit can grow again. This is some deeply white people shit, too. Sorry to pull that card, but yes, this is a full-on white people mentality of doing something that will hurt everyone else BUT YOU and thinking you have the right to make that fucking decision. She and Maddie were somewhere safe, and she told her ex-husband to go somewhere safe too, and then she pulled a trigger that killed millions of fucking people whose only crimes were existing. That environmentalist message was utter shit. Is the earth overpopulated and polluted? Yep. But the fucking solution is not to kill half the goddamn population. The solution is to work together and overthrow the corrupt people keeping us from finding realistic ways to solve the problem, not wiping out half of humanity while you sit in a goddamn doomsday bunker sipping coffee and congratulating yourself. The crazy thing is this blonde Thanos bullshit did not need to happen. Last Action Hero Bad Guy was perfectly fine in this role of basically the kaiju version of Ra's Al Ghul. It made sense for him to be like, "ay, fuck y'all for killing the earth, let's let the monsters have it back and then clean up afterward." All you had to do was keep it the way it was presented to us: he kidnapped her and the kid and forced them to help wake up the monsters. There was no need to for this idiotic Deep Blue Sea nonsense of her agreeing with him and somehow setting it up. Which, by the way, made no goddamn sense because he kills all those innocent scientists in the lab at the beginning of the movie. Did she know he would do that? If so, fuck her. Fuck her in the ass sideways for killing her own teammates. She could have met him somewhere else. What was with the guns and shit if she's the one who came up with this dumb idea? I hate everything about this character and I am glad she died in the end because she was as much a fucking monster as King Ghidorah.

-The dialogue in this movie is atrocious. Look, I get it, it's a generic action movie. But come on. There were seriously points where I just rolled my eyes or threw my hands up in exasperation because there were just so many Captain Obvious comments or unfunny one-liners thrown back and forth. It's painful to endure some of this shit. The "humor" in particular really hurts, because you can see they put pauses after certain lines where they think the audience is laughing, and trust me, no, we were NOT laughing. Stupid shit like telling a character to "hold on" as a fucking maelstrom is trying to blow them away or just other dumb filler dialogue that makes me wanna slap my forehead. It's egregious.

-The Monarch team is still kind of as stupid as the last movie. Not completely, but they were reaching hard in certain cases and they still felt useless. One example that drove me insane was when Godzilla went back to his bachelor pad to recharge, they then say this is where he comes to heal...and then proceed to nuke that shit. And I'm like...bitch, whatchu gon' do now if he gets hurt?! You're just gonna find him and nuke him every single time he's hurt?! What the fuck kind of plan is that? I get that the movie writers wanted a sense of urgency, but that was such an idiotic way to accomplish something needed for the plot. They introduced a cool concept and then eliminated it immediately. Oy. Another example is Mark's dumbass screaming for Maddie like she can possibly hear him at Fenway Park with fucking Ghidorah and Godzilla literally fighting right on top of the stadium. Are you kidding me? My God, Mark is stupid. He did the same thing when he ran into the base with a fucking pistol screaming her name and letting the armed mercs know exactly where the hell he was. I am shocked his dumbass didn't get immediately picked off. Moron.

-Sarigawa's death was some full-on nonsense. Fuck you for killing the only credible actor in the entire movie, and what's worse is that it very much feels like a person of color dying for the sake of some goddamn white people. Because, yes, folks, I'm sorry, this is a white woman's fault. All this shit is because a white woman wanted to be Thanos and now this awesome dude has to sacrifice himself. Fuck off. I hate this point in the story, even though bless Watanabe for giving us the only credible emotional scene in the entire movie.

-Even though she was barely a character, I disliked Sally Hawkins biting it randomly in the first third, and not getting much reverence. No, we didn't know shit about her, but it felt like the movie just said "fuck it" and moved right along like it was no big deal. I don't know why they even bothered.

-How in God's name did they somehow "sneak" Ghidorah's whole ass head out of fucking Boston with no one noticing? It's a giant dragon head! How did you fucking do that and no one saw you bring it all the way to Mexico? I swear to God, this movie is filled with plotholes. I'm fine with them setting up Mecha Ghidorah or just cloning him all over again, but why couldn't it just have been in Boston and they just snuck in during the dead of night and moved it somewhere nearby? That thing is gigantic and it's a hard pill to swallow that they just left without anyone noticing it.

EDIT: A fan corrected me that this was the head that Godzilla ripped off before the end fight, so the above point is invalid. Nice catch! Thank you!

-Nitpick: Did Mothra die? That was unclear. I hope not. She's the Queen. I'll have to ask some Godzilla fans to explain what they thought happened after Ghidorah blasted her in the final fight.

-Nitpick: Good God, these human characters survive shit that would easily kill a normal person and it is a little bit grating on the nerves to suspend your disbelief this hard.

-Nitpick: I hate it when monsters the size of fucking buildings somehow notice tiny ass humans enough to bother giving them their attention or even their ire. "An ant has no quarrel with a boot." I hated it in '98 Godzilla and I still hate it. Something on that scale should not even vaguely bother with one tiny human being, but that's me.

I know I have some very heavy criticisms, but this is still a decent flick if you're just going to shell out for a matinee showing. The monsters are great and entertaining and there's plenty of fighting to go around that is worth a peek, especially the end fight with Ghidorah and Godzilla. It was pretty cool to see in IMAX as well, but I leave that up to you folks if it's worth it.

Kyo out.

#godzilla #godzilla king of monsters #movie review #film review #warner bros #kaiju #monsters

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svtskneecaps · 6 years

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Snarky Outlining: Best of the Bits

and they double as dialogue prompts!

⬤ “i forget who the pirate is but they’re in a painting”

⬤ “w like pool and chess and hoity toity rich man lookin’ dudes“

⬤ “coups has an excessive amount of mirrors on his bike, he looks like that guy from The Good Dinosaur with all the pets”

⬤ “in this like vegas casino lit 80s fever dream”

⬤ “they’re like hardcore devouring their food like wild beasts but it’s just a ham sandwich drowned in ketchup”

⬤ “they chop a kid’s hand off with a fucking chainsaw and are just like ‘FUCK ok i’ll just put it back’ and then it regrows and they just clap like ‘wow cool i didn’t just almost lose a limb or anything’ ”

⬤ “mingyu’s like that long haired emo kid i sat next to in seventh grade keyboarding?”

⬤ “they’re tearing up the town or something”

⬤ “there’s alternate dimension bullshit”

⬤ “they’re mostly just dunking on people and blowing up cars”

⬤ “WhaT tHE fUCk iS hAPpenInG”

⬤ “THE VIOLINIST WHO I NOW MUST HAVE A BLOOD FEUD WITH AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE”

⬤ “literally the nicest voice mine ears have witnessed or some other shakespearean nonsense”

⬤ “how is it physically possible to be that tall you friggin beanstalk”

⬤ “the type of person to sen you a meme as a good morning text”

⬤ “let’s be honest boi be creeping”

⬤ “why do people sleep on him like HAH can’t relate bitch”

⬤ “cute to sexy with the addition of a forehead i stg who gave you the right”

⬤ “lampshade the remnants, cry a little, and move on”

⬤ i referred to a character as “spirit douche,” “spirit asshole,” “spirit dick,” or “spirit asswipe” through my entire outline

⬤ “just leave it and kill them with what could be”

⬤ “make sure not to leave any of them out if you do i’ll kill you don’t test me binch”

⬤ “because of a crazy ex and a spell”

⬤ “aight, that isn’t something you can fake cool beans”

⬤ “now she’s gotta exorcise her best friend somehow (and boy is no noodle so that’s going to be damn hard to get him to fuckin sit still for)”

⬤ “the actual reason i don’t want to do that is bc i’m highkey too scared to fuck with that sort of thing”

⬤ “boi splits them up using wall shift and chasm creator or something idk i’ll make it up when i’m writing it (terrible plan)”

⬤ “spirit douche goes ‘oh yeah sure’ with like some evil side eyeing the camera or something to prove to the audience he’s evil, as though they need clarification after his unconvincing statement”

⬤ “choo choo it’s the editing train telling you this fucking sucks rewrite it”

⬤ “so are they like the hippy club”

⬤ “they do a lot of fighting over the brick”

⬤ “umbrella guy runs to grab the rotary phone”

⬤ “undercover agent, the handsome delivery boy version”

⬤ “seems like the shithead royal thing to do”

⬤ “uh oh, turns out her boyfriend is rich as fuck!”

⬤ “infiltration! robbing! alarms! laser grids! explosions! firearms! other fun things!”

⬤ “tIME TO RUN”

⬤ “question: how obvious do i want to initially make it that this is a sketchy ass place”

⬤ “but she accidentally goes beyond in explaining and whoops now they’re having a heart to heart”

⬤ “no, no they’re not it’s just this specific hellhole”

⬤ “the kind of person to drink coffee with a can of Red Bull at six in the morning”

⬤ “she just can’t believe adults could be this petty”

⬤ “ ‘when all else fails, hit them really hard in the head and they’ll come back’ -black widow probably”

⬤ “it takes a load more equations than they’re comfortable with actually utilizing but they do it”

⬤ “psych, not in a million years”

⬤ “against all better judgement, they did it”

⬤ “once there it’s surprisingly simple to shout ‘i’m a fuckin wizard!’ and get them on one’s side”

⬤ “how the fuck? answer: with great difficulty”

⬤ “trying to defend daddy’s honor”

⬤ “no idea how the frick happened”

⬤ “ya know what fuck it let’s throw in some superpowers too that sounds like fun”

⬤ “is that a bad idea? eventually they decide yes it is bc they love their buds and not being government property”

⬤ “they can’t cancel cause it’s tradition damnit”

⬤ “so heydy heidy ho that whole shindig is a goddamn mess and a half”

⬤ “and SUPERFAST TRAINING MONTAGE”

⬤ “take a bow, write some fluffy finishing dialogue, and call it quits”

⬤ “now this guy’s the biggest fuckboi on the football team”

⬤ “look it’s the meathead best friend who always says shit like ‘bro’ ‘dude’ and ‘man’ ”

⬤ “the incredibly salty football coach who wishes he was a social studies teacher and doesn’t care who knows”

⬤ “meanwhile this nerd’s suspicious as fuck and extremely gay™”

⬤ “and the administration actually did something for once”

⬤ “basically just stereotypical british nobles: snooty voices, the occasional posh accent, and they sound like they just stepped out of an 80s film (an 1880s film)”

#as always drop an ask if you want context and i will supply

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bunnyandbirb · 7 years

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Birb’s Summer 2017 Sports (Anime)

My first distinct memory of trying to play sports involves trying to win a game of soccer by ignoring the ball and repeatedly kicking the opposing players in the shins instead.

During four years at my basketball-crazed college, I never went to a single game (my priorities were with Overwatch and figuring out how to survive the rest of the month on two dollars.) I remember once going to watch the Denver Nuggets play, and then waking up when it was all over. So yeah. I might not be a “sports person.” That being said, I fucking love sports anime. They’re super straightforward, feel-good shows and I’m a sucker for underdog stories. I would call them a guilty pleasure, except I don’t feel guilty about watching them at all. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re all good.

I watched all of the sports anime that debuted this summer (in one night) and here are my sleep-deprived opinions:

Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun (Clean Freak! Aoyama-kun) Studio Hibari

Aoyama is a freshman in high school, a genius soccer player, and has a crippling obsession with cleanliness. I was very into the premise of this show when I first read the description, which is why I watched it first. I’m still glad that I did watch it first, so I could get my disappointment out of the way faster. Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun isn’t a true sports anime, more like a comedy anime with sports. The pacing in the first episode is pretty atrocious, barely introducing the main character before suddenly getting into a game with an enemy team (that I think I’m supposed to care about?) and then wrapping it all up in less than ten minutes. Basically the whole thing is a series of setups for jokes, and if they don’t make you laugh, it’s a little bit awkward.

The ‘clean freak’ joke started getting stale near the end (and it had only been one episode). There was even a moment where they actually tried to take it seriously (it’s so TRAGIC that he wants to play SOCCER when he’s a GERMAPHOBE), and that just made me confused. Aoyama also looks suspiciously similar to Haru from Free!, and it doesn’t help that they both have that quiet, unfazeable, non-personality.

I don’t even remember the names of the other characters, because they weren’t particularly interesting. There was an angry guy who was always angry that Aoyama didn’t want to be a dirtyboi, generic side characters, and then some girl who stalks the MC because he talked to her once. The best part of the show was the ending, which was an obvious nod back to old-school sports anime and was pretty entertaining.

The show’s art/animation isn’t that bad, which is a shame because I’m never going to be watching more of it. I’d say this is a mediocre show that I can see people liking if it matches their sense of humor. I’m not someone who finds gag comedy particularly funny, which doesn’t make me the right audience for this kind of thing.

Ballroom e Youkoso (Welcome to the Ballroom) Production I.G.

It’s an anime about ballroom dancing. The first time I heard of this, I immediately thought this was coming out to snatch up the audience of Yuri on Ice. I still don’t think I’m wrong, but Ballroom e Youkoso feels both similar and very different from both that show and Haikyuu!!, another product of this studio (and one of my favorite shows in this genre.)

Our main character is Tatara Fujita, a kid (supposedly in eighth grade, clearly doesn’t look it) with no hobbies and no idea what to do in life. He almost gets beaten up but is saved by Sengoku, a professional dancer and owner of a nearby dance studio. He eventually gets a lesson and then watches a video of Sengoku dance, which gets him hooked on dancin’ (at least it isn’t drugs.)

To understate it a bit, this show is VERY DRAMATIC. Maybe I should have expected an anime about dancing to ham it up a little, but this was a level of drama that I haven’t seen in a sports anime in a long while. They stretch limbs like nobody’s business to emphasize the ‘fluidity of dance’ or something (I don’t really know) and I laughed out loud at how silly some of it looked. Not to the say that the animation is bad. The whole CLAMP-esque rubber limbs syndrome is clearly a stylistic choice, and everything looks pretty good when they’re not dancing.

But it’s not just the animation. The plot is also VERY DRAMATIC. The entire show is a lot heavier than a lot of other sports anime, and all of the characters are way more passionate about dancing than I’ve ever been about anything. And honestly, I did get a little caught up in it. The music in this show is pretty good, and definitely contributed to how invested I got in the scenes. The characters are likeable so far. There is a bit of fanservice every now and then, which is annoying but I’ll deal with it. This is a true underdog story, and while I can predict how the rest of the show will go by watching these first five episodes, I’m sure I won’t be bored following through with it.

Dive!! (Not-Free!) Zero-G

Okay, so the alternate name isn’t really Not-Free!, but it should be. This show is mostly boring and a little hilarious (for unintentional reasons.) Dive!! is an anime about… diving, and is centered around a middle schooler named Tomoki Sakai. His combined middle/high school diving club will shut down unless one of its members can get into the Olympics within a year, which is totally reasonable.

Where to even start with this.

It’s almost impossible not to compare Dive!! to Free!, because it begs you to compare them. I can imagine they had a list of how to one-up Free! and, judging by the show, came up with this:

MORE ABS. Everyone gets a 10-pack.

Swim jammers? Pussy shit. Speedos only.

You like high schoolers who look like college students? We got some that look like they’re 12.

Add another exclamation mark in the title, that’ll really get ‘em going.

I’m not exactly sure what Tomoki’s character is supposed to be. In the first episode, he is walking to the diving club with his girlfriend. She starts talking to him, trying to engage him in a conversation… you know, the thing people in relationships have sometimes. He only gets like three sentences through before he starts zoning out completely and has an inner monologue about how much he loves diving. THEN when she confronts him, he looks past her, sees his beloved senpai and BLUSHES. IS THIS A BL SHOW??? IS THIS GIRL A BEARD?? But really, watching this pissboi interaction was probably the funniest thing in the entire show.

The animation is serviceable, but if they wanted to compete with KyoAni’s work on Free!, they might as well have not tried at all. All of the characters are forgettable as fuck except for one, who isn’t even a main character. Actually, I take that back. The main character’s emo twin brother is also pretty memorable, only because he spends every waking moment trying to steal MC’s girl. The majority of the show is straight-up boring; Unlike Ballroom e Youkoso, I didn’t feel any sense of tension or urgency no matter how much they tried to get me to care.

In conclusion, Dive!! sucks. Don’t watch it.

Nana maru san batsu (Fastest Finger First) TMS Entertainment

This might not be considered a “sports anime” in the traditional sense, but I would argue that’s exactly what it is. Koshiyama Shiki is a nerd enters high school and is drafted into the “Quiz Study Group”, where he learns the joys of competitive quiz bowl. So yeah, it’s basically a show about people answering trivia questions on a timer.

I’ll be honest; This show isn’t that special. It’s predictable, the characters are generic, the dialogue is pretty trash at times, and the art is decent. Pretty much everything aside from the actual tournaments crawls by at a snail’s pace, and by the third episode I was skipping past most of the scenes that didn’t have to do with quizzes. There also is some random fanservice (really? In a quiz bowl show?) and sometimes the character artist draws their heads too big for their bodies.

Despite all that, I will keep watching this show until the end. I’ve had a lot of fun learning about quiz bowl, mostly because I didn’t know anything about it before this. I’m a big fan of trivia, and I feel like I can just watch the show for that and still enjoy it without caring about whether the characters die in a fire or not. I’ll just ignore the repetitive conversations and weak romantic subplot in between tournaments.

Okay, so the two shows I said were my faves of the bunch are about ballroom dancing and quiz bowls. But my three all-time favorite sports anime are about tennis, volleyball, and football, so I’m just saying my preferences are based on the qualities of the show, not on the fact that I’m a loser.

Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully we’ll see some more quality sports anime in the future... or I’ll just wait for the next season of Haikyuu!!.

~Stay tuned for more nonsense~

- birb

#thisisbunnyinthetags #i think namaikizakari is the best sports anime and i will fight you on it #mostlycusshoujosaretheshit #tuesday #birb #anime #nana maru san batsu #dive!!#ballroom e youkoso #Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun #summer anime 2017 #tuesday trash #bunnyandbirb #sports anime #long post #text post #reviews #opinions #blog

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