#critical review

[mayasaura]

While it was a lot of fun, I think there are some places where Glass Onion just doesn't hold together as well as it could. Take Peg, for example.

The film calls Miles and Co out for overlooking her, forgetting her name, generally treating her like an extension of Birdie, but then it fails to rise above that. Peg was with Birdie for ten years. Ten years caught up in this wheel of assholes, she had to have known them all. The way she stares at Andi could have been something more than a natural effect of proximity to Janelle Monáe. But Beniot never once looks into her relationship with Andi, and the audience never finds out. She's not even on Helen's little Cluedo pad, and the film just uses her as the delivery system for Birdie's motive.

#glass onion #glass onion spoilers #critical review #glass onion critical #like I said very very fun movie!! #but about as deep as the song it gets its name from

[japanese-korean-lit-lover]

There are books that describe really important topics but at the same time they are so uncomfortable for me to read. But not because of the topic itself (which would be actually better because that would mean that I have to face something new and grow) but because of the side things like vulgarity, eroticism and sexuality.

I have two particular books in mind: „Walking practice“ by Dolki Min and „Norwegian Wood“ by Haruki Murakami.

The first one talks about what it means to be human and nonbinary in the binary world and how the binary world works in the mind of a nonbinary spectator.

The second one is an amazing struggle with mental illness and how it is to function in a relationship with a person who struggles. It shows many feelings and problems but also what it means to live in a reality if it actually exists.

But both of them were explicitly (and sometimes extremly) sexual. Needlessly sexual for me.

There was too much intercourse in the „Norwegian Wood“ but while reading „Walking practice“ I felt actually repulsed by the erotic descriptions. Moreover I really felt like it didn’t bring anything to the narrative.

Vulgarity has to play a role to be used but for me it looked like really tasteless sprinkles on top of an important story (here I’m talking speciafically about „Walking practice“). Yes, I’m speaking from the perspective of the aroace person. That’s why even though the sex scenes bugged me a bit, I can accept that it’s a way of displaying deep affections in the „Norwegian Wood”.

Meanwhile the vulgar sexuality of „Walking practice“ made me really uncomfortable not in a I-m-growing-as-a-person uncomfortable but in a I-want-to-stop-reading-immidiately way. Which is sad because as I stated before I consider the story extremly important in the discussion about binary vs nonbinary culture.

#books #japan #japanese #japanese literature #literature #south korean literature #dolki min #walking practice #haruki murakami #norwegian wood #haruki murakami Norwegian wood #Dolki min walking practice #south korean books #south korea #Japanese books #nonbinary #mental illness #mental struggle #book review #critical review

[eriquin]

Is dqb1 worth buying at full price? I keep looking at it and it's $65 CAD and I'm not sure I want to drop that much

In my opinion, no it's not. I played DQB1 on switch and it was fun enough, but not nearly as enjoyable as DQB2. Apparently the mobile port/remake is much better, and has a lot of QOL improvements over the original game. It needs those. If you've played DQB2 then the original version of DQB1 feels like a huge step backwards. It was super frustrating to get through.

If you can get it on sale, then go for it. But it's a Dragon Quest game so sales are rare.

#dqb2 #dqb1 #critical review #the story was great #the gameplay less so

[livingfictionsystem]

-Xanthe

#The Mad Women's Ball #Victoria Mas #Book reviews #critical review #One star

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Central to the superman idea, is, of course, the outcast, loneliness, the feeling of standing apart from other human beings. After the original, more complex or ambivalent science fiction classics dealing with supermen, Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmale, and Hans Dominik’s Die Macht der Drei, virtually all science fiction stories dealing with supermen have dealt with young ones, young and angry and alienated supermen, misunderstood by a cruel and stupid world. A very popular contemporary example is Marvel’s best-selling Spiderman comics, a modern superman with sinus trouble, girls trouble, money trouble. Most adolescents at one time or another feel that they stand outside the world, that no one really understands them and that other people are stupid. Science fiction fans tend to form a high opinion of their own group of science fiction fan friends, strengthening the conviction that they are really a breed of select supermen, standing apart from the mundane world which does not read or understood books - particularly science fiction. Tests made by and on fans on many occasions, in many countries during the past thirty years or so, unanimously suggest that fans - in their own opinion at least - are more intelligent than other people. No wonder superman tales have always been popular in science fiction.

A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan even started a Utopian community of sorts in 1943, when a group of American fans in Battle Creek, Michigan, lived together for nearly two years in the ‘Slan Shack’ community. Only fans were invited, and grandiose plans were drawn up for a ‘Slan Center’ consisting of an entire city block in Battle Creek, with its own grocery store, general store, common heating plant and electricity generating plant. Utopian societies have certainly been founded on flimsier premises than a common interest in science fiction and the belief in the Slanishness of oneself and one’s friends, but the project never materialized and the original Slan Shack, an eight-roomed house sheltering a dozen or so fans, finally was abandoned as well.

An exception to the misunderstood adolescent superman of science fiction is in one of my own favourites, the Mule, in Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, originally published as eight stories in the American magazine Astounding from May 1942 through November 1949). The Mule, an enigmatic mutation of superior intelligence and with the ability to play upon people’s emotions, appears in Foundation and Empire, soon unifying the entire known galaxy into a new, strong empire, using complicated Byzantine intrigues the like of which had seldom been seen in science fiction, until he finally meets his end in Second Foundation. A frail human being without most of the hero traits usually found in literary supermen, he is an oddly convincing and tragic personality and complex person who in many respects is the real principal character of the trilogy, certainly the most interesting of all the cardboard characters inhabiting this classic. He is no hero, though, and no science fiction fan community was ever founded to honour him.

The superman is in many respects the Utopian ideal of science fiction on a more personal level, coupled with the inevitable feeling of loneliness felt by many adolescents who prefer to read books instead of running round and hitting the other kids on the head with a baseball bat. The underlying dream of power is here, as is the feeling that one really ought to have the chance to change the whole world into something more glorious, or at least something more interesting. The fact that A. E. Vogt’s Slan, by far the simplest of all superhuman stories, is also the most popular in science fiction, never out of print since it first appeared and much imitated, tells, I think, a lot about the psychological mechanisms behind the lure of this science fiction theme”

- Sam J. Lundwall, Science Fiction: An Illustrated History. New York:Grossett & Dunlap, 1977. p. 184

[AL: Obviously, a 50 year old book - one of my favourites I’ve read over the years since being given an old copy by a friend in middle school - doesn’t necessarily tell us much about science fiction now, or is fully applicable to fandom now. Nonetheless, an interesting perspective on the superman and superhero in science fiction. Lundwall, a Swedish science fiction writer, was also a step removed from the American SF scene, and much more skeptical and critical about science fiction compared to the typical boosterism found in much SF writing and fandom at the time...or even now.]

#science fiction #sf #the mule #foundation #superman #superheroes #the superman #fandom #science fiction fandom #literary quote #critical review #slan #a. e. van vogt #isaac asimov #spiderman #utopia #utopian ideal #utopian community

[alchamy34]

Marvel is lowkey homophobic and embarrassingly old fashioned

Before I start:

Anyone who objects to this is not thinking critically or realistically. And anyone who tells me otherwise on this post will just be proving the main point of this post. And that I'm right.

This shouldn't only be offensive to the LGBTQ+ community. But the straight fans as well.

This isn't the 90s or early 2000s movies where the guy gets the girl and vice versa. There's a reason why Disney stopped that with princesses since Brave.

It just makes me angry that Marvel is sexist and makes us suffer from heterosexual stereotypes.

And yes I am aware of Captain Marvel getting her own movie, ms marvel and she hulk as well. I won't include black panther 2 because if Chadwick Bosman was still alive then Shuri wouldn't get her own movie. But it had to take until 2019 to start giving female characters some recognition.

Maybe its because making female lead movies are too hard or they want us to think all the best characters must be males because:

Marvel was a guy thing so it would be weird for girls to be interested as well.

And does the main man even need to follow the "get the girl" cliche?

It makes the movie super predictable. Spider Verse movies also count as the predictable cliche. Yes I am aware Miles and Gwen aren't really together but even I'm not stupid enough to see how sexist it is.

Would it be so wrong to give Gwen her own franchise? I'm tired of the spider themed hero being a guy. Girls can be funny too.

Captain Marvel is fine because she didn't need a love interest. Mainly because she's a lesbian.

Avengers endgame was probably the last good cinematic movie before the cringey slithered in.

It has to be:

Guy, girl

Roughly same age (only in live action but its actually a concerning age gap in comics)

They must like each other.

They must get together.

Can't the girl not be a love interest? Especially if she is also a superhero?

I would've liked into the spiderverse and across the spiderverse if Miles wasn't another "hero gets the girl" type.

#marvel #mcu #spiderman across the spiderverse #into the spider verse #critical review #lgbtq+ #heterorealism #feminism

[danielleurbansblog]

Critical Review: Queen Charlotte by both Julia Quinn & Shonda Rhimes

Synopsis: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn and television pioneer Shonda Rhimes comes a powerful and romantic novel of Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte and King George III’s great love story and how it sparked a societal shift, inspired by the original series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, created by Shondaland for Netflix. “We are one crown. His weight is mine, and mine…

View On WordPress

#accurate descriptions all but one major fact. #angry #Bestselling Authors #critical review #criticism #Fiction #fraud #historical #historical falsehood #historical junk #indeent work #Julia Quinn #literary #love story #messed up #new #New Release #not recommended #novel #publishing #sham #Shonda Rhimes

[juliangreystoke]

Don't forget to check out yesterday's video!

#zodiac academy #booktube #book review #critique #critical review #funny vid #snark #rant #rant review #also a ferret #Youtube

[ki11tr4p]

Like c’mon what were they expecting?

#five nights at freddy's #fnaf #fnaf movie #william afton #five nights at freddy’s movie #fnaf william afton #springtrap #vanessa shelly #mike schmidt #abby schmidt #foxy #freddy fazbear #chica #bonnie #spring bonnie #movie #movie critique #movie critic #movie critics #movie review #halloween #halloween movie night #halloween movie #steve raglan

[horrorlover99]

A Critical Review of Hellsing Ultimate

Hellsing Ultimate is an anime about war with the supernatural added in. The anime follows the Hellsing Organization, run by Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, her servant Alucard, and Alucard's recent sire, Seras Victoria. Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing is a human who was given the organization after the passing of her father. She is often behind the scenes along with her butler, Walter C. Dollneaz, who used to be referred to as the angel of death. However, neither are afraid of getting their hands dirty when needed. Alucard, as the main protagonist, has very little character development throughout the series. He is overpowered and does not struggle with taking out his enemies. The only thing that he struggles with is keeping his humanity. At points, Alucard seems to relish in the chaos surrounding him and enjoys killing his enemies, calling them weak. Seras Victoria, on the other hand, struggles with coming to terms of being a vampire. She very rarely takes advantage of her new vampiric abilities and she refuses to drink any blood, leading to Alucard’s frustration. 

The antagonist of the show is the Millennium organization, a Nazi affiliated party, whom Alucard and Walter thought they had defeated after World War II. Adding to the very little plot of the show, the leader of Millennium, the Major, has no real plan aside from starting a war. However, this does make the show easier to follow and understand what is happening to the characters. 

The anime is very gruesome and is filled with lots of blood. The show is not afraid to show characters getting ripped to shreds, so if you have a light stomach this show is not for you. The art is disproportionate, but that adds to the style of the artist. The style is much more consistent than that of the original Hellsing show. The show is very dark aside from the few moments of comedy slipped into the show at inconsistent points. 

The music of the show is very well done and adds to the dark and gothic themes seen throughout. It does not overpower the scenes and highlights key moments throughout the show. 

Taking on the vampire subgenre, the show references media that came before. In the show, Alucard is revealed to have once been Count Dracula and Vlad III Dracula. Alucard is also shown having been defeated by Abraham Van Hellsing, putting him into the position he is in. He also references Nosferatu, however, sunlight is shown only to weaken vampires, not kill them. Crosses do not have an effect on vampires, however blessed items such as Alexander’s bayonets do. Overall, I would give the show 7 out of 10. It is an action packed war story featuring supernatural creatures. However, the plot is lacking and very minimal as it comes down to stopping the war that the Millennium organization has planned. Character development is seen very little throughout the main protagonist of Alucard. However, the art and the music add to the unique style and take on the vampire subgenre. The ending of the show also leaves one satisfied, which is all one can ask for in a short series such as Hellsing Ultimate

#Critical review #for class #Hellsing Ultimate #hellsing

[trashyshrew]

#critical role #cr2 #shadowgast #essek thelyss #caleb widogast #reflecting on my 2023 art journey has me reviewing some old drafts #and throwing it back this thursday to a time when i would actually render things #also... wizards #now maybe i'll finally go watch the m9 reunion episode #and you know... campaign 3? #😅😅😅

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

The Boy and the Heron How Do You Live? (2023) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

#my real thoughts on the film are still Cooking but i felt compelled to make this. #also i might fuck around and retag my posts about it with the original title after all bc let's face it: it's just better #the boy and the heron #how do you live? #studio ghibli #hayao miyazaki #my edits #highly recommend david ehrlich's review. i don't always agree w/his critiques but he Gets miyazaki in a way that many other critics don't

[softpng]

sometimes I think about that guy on amazon who reviewed pride and prejudice and did an entire angry, weirdly math focused rant about how awful darcy is and then ends it all with "I could carve a better man out of a banana"

#the funny thing about the review is that hes so right about most of his points but like #that's why the book is good BECAUSE darcy is super flawed and so is elisabeth and everyone else #also his criticism of how basically nothing happens in the book except them all going to each others houses #austen literally says that's love love is going to someone's home and love is looking across the dinner table at you and love is walking #love isn't grand gestures love is saying i love you in a fucking field bro #anyways i love pride and prejudice in postmodern context because it's absolutely hilarious and deeply relevant #pride and prejudice #jane austen

[imagine-darksiders]

"Did you hear what the critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave Five Nights at-"

#You guys actually watch movies based on other people's reviews? #I thought that was a joke! #Fnaf movie #Movie critics have no credibility to me

[robobee]

just watched saltburn

#thats my critic review #saltburn

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The first North American science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926. Since only a handful of science fiction writers existed in the United States at this time, all of them inferior to the best in Europe which had had a much longer tradition of science fiction, Amazing Stories had to make do with reprinting mostly old French, German, and British science fiction, and The War of the Worlds was once again published in August 1927 issue, starting a flood of American monster tales that was soon to deluge their science fiction. This is where the typical science fiction monster is born, rearing its slimy tentacles against an unsuspecting world, seemingly born only to drag the shrieking heroine round the universe with the square-jawed heros in hot pursuit. Wells and others had given some purpose to their monsters, whether satirical or critical or to explore different modes of existence, but the monsters that now deluged science fiction, at least in the United States, had no purpose whatsoever than offering cheap thrills. 

Borrowing heavily from Western and Gothic tales, updating the aliens only by more tentacles and moving them out into space or letting them come to Earth from space to do their evil deeds (while, at the same time, noble Earth heroes murdered loathsome alien creatures on their home worlds), American science fiction magazines preached the gospel of uninhibited violence. Once again, as in the Gothic and simplistic Wild West tales, we have the externalization of evil, the pure black and white of fairy tales, only this time in a pseudo-scientific setting, vulgarizing all those works of science fiction from which the ideas came.

Until the advent of Amazing Stories, science fiction had been enjoying a good reputation as a useful tool for social criticism and also for its literary quality; this flood of pseudo-scientific poorly written tales, abounding in racism, violence, puerile sex and crude views of society, soon destroyed the last vestiges of that reputation in the English speaking world. Science fiction became ‘that Buck Rogers stuff.’ The mushroom men of Mars emerged triumphant from the carnage ... they became the dominant archetype of mid-20th American science fiction, and heavily influenced or reshaped completely the European, Latin American and Japanese genres as well.

The works that depicted extraterrestrials not as monsters, but as individual beings and definite personalities, not evil, but different were few and far between....Stanley G. Weinbaum’s debut A Martian Odyssey (1934) descended like a ton of bricks...One of my favourite stories of monsters, though not extraterrestrial, and certainly one of the most chilling examples, is a short story, Mimic (1942) from Donald A. Wollheim.... Wollheim’s remarkable insect - and the even stranger predators that feed upon it in the modern cites - is just a strange creature trying to survive, far removed from the kind of murderous aliens and monsters sadly common elsewhere...[a photo caption also praises the “non-bastardized first Japanese Godzilla film as another, surprisingly nuanced example - of the monster as punishment for human hubris.”]...[but even in the best works of this period] generally only humans are really worthy of respect, they steal and loot and kill with impunity, and only collaborating aliens are good aliens.

It is interesting to compare this attitude towards extraterrestrials, usually murderous and at best patronising, with developments in Europe, particularly the emergence of the new super power, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had not quite the American tradition of pulp magazines of the cheap Amazing Stories sort, nor the tradition of Wild West stories, from which the deluge of bad American science fiction writers got most of their inspiration. What the Soviet writers had inherited, and this was almost as suffocating, was the Utopian tradition from the Revolution, the demand that science fiction should be first didatic and educational and only secondly entertaining. This was in contrast to the demands of American magazine editors, that popular fiction should be entertaining, and nothing else. 

Another fault in common with both the Soviet and the American example was the emphasis on vulgarized political ideas. In America science fiction of this period advocated free enterprise and Capitalism; the Soviet counterpart advocated Communism and collectivism. Extraterrestrial visitors in Soviet works of this time usually exemplified either the dangers of Capitalism or the blessings of Communism. And some of these hated Capitalist monsters were just as richly endowed with tentacles as their Western anti-Communist parallels. (The word ‘Communism’ was seldom used in American works when describing monster and alien civilizations, but the many descriptions of insect-like communities, blind obedience to leaders and de-individualized lives are very revealing.)

The hate expressed towards the aliens particularly in American science fiction, however, is very seldom found in Soviet science fiction of this time. Novels such as M. Prussak’s Gosti zemli (Guests of Earth), A. Volkov’s Chuzhiye (The Alien Ones), and I. A. Bobrichev-Pushkin’s Zaletnyy gost’ (The Guest Who Came Flying) are typical examples of aliens visiting Earth not as enemies but as strange guests, bearing tidings from sometimes incomprehensibly different worlds. One of my personal favourites is a later short story by Marietta Chudakova, Prostranstvo zhizhni (Life Space, 1969), describing a strange man who might or might not come from another world or another dimension or another time, whose life span is limited not by time but by space. As he grows older, the area in which he can move gets smaller and smaller until he finally dies when he inadvertently steps outside his life space. It is a strangely moving story, giving hints of a life enormously different from ours. [And earlier Lundwall praises Arkady and Boris Strugatskiy’s various works related to the alien and the Other...]

Apart from obvious political reasons for the abundance of horrible monsters attacking civilization during the ‘golden years’ of American science fiction up to the mid-1950s, the principle of which was attained with a particularly nasty film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), where monsters from outer space try to create a new world order in which everybody is equal but, of course, are finally defeated and exterminated by the hero and the military, one of the main reasons for the sorry state of things must be the fact that most American writers were reared on the local cheap fiction magazine tradition, which called for WASP heroes, villains easy to hate, and simple sexual interest, with lots of gore naturally. Science fiction in the United States faithfully followed the pulp magazine formula, as witness the greatest names and influences of the time - Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and many others. Another issue was that, while some magazines were edited by people who might have loved science fiction, they had to bow to publishers who wanted nothing but fast profits [and] monsters and wild adventures and gore always sold...

The Soviet Union did not have these particular problems; instead, science fiction authors and editors had to keep a wary eye on the various politruk who thought that science fiction should try to solve technological problems of the near future, as well as presenting readers with ‘positive’ heroes. This was the time, according to a story by Soviet science fiction author Nikolai Tomas, when ‘fantasizing was allowed only within the limits of the Five-Year Plan for the national economy.’ American authors had blood-sucking publishers and over-worked editors to cope with; their Soviet counterparts had the Commissars. The difference - and here I am speaking as a citizen of a non-aligned nation which nevertheless was exposed to the various offerings of this time - was that the producers of American science fiction were exporting their junk. The ones in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries kept their junk for themselves. Only the best Soviet science fiction sneaked out, and those generally offered few monsters and very little preaching. Over the Atlantic, science fiction offered both in ample measure.

Starting in the early 1960s, this slowly began to change, with a new generation of urgently needed editors and writers producing works with a markedly changed attitude towards extraterrestrials and other monstrous beings...”

- Sam J. Lundwall, Science Fiction: An Illustrated History. New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1977. p. 111-114.

[AL: Lundwall was a Swedish science fiction writer and critic, and his history, as old as it is, is still valuable because of his knowledge of Soviet, French, German, Latin American and Japanese science fiction of the time. His account is markedly different than the often parochial, self-aggrandizing and American-centric histories written in the English world at the same time. It was certainly eye-opening when I read this many years ago in middle school.]

#extraterrestial life #extraterrestrial #science fiction #sf #pulp fiction #science fiction magazines #pulp magazines #amazing stories #soviet union #soviet science fiction #cold war #coldwar #literary criticism #literary quote #critical review