nutter

@shiftygism: This man speaks the truth.

Raid: Redemption and Raid 2 are masterclass action films with fantastic martial arts.

The Night Comes for Us is just fucking bananas in all the best ways.

Headshot is rock solid. Merantau is a slow burn, but it’s worthwhile, too.

Less martial arts, but The Man from Nowhere is a great action thriller. The 2010 version of 13 Assassins ends with an insane action sequence, as well.

@wmoyer83: Full disclosure, I was in an altered state of mind in a foreign country when I made the decision to purchase the movies. ;)

My wife and I actually had a lot of fun watching them. They’re silly and RE2 is better (less awful?) than I remember.

If you go down this hole, let me know what you think of RE5. I thought it was Street Fighter levels of “this is just bad cosplay,” without Raul Julia.

Now I want Raul Julia as Albert Wesker....

I also want This Ain’t No Game season 3, but I’m not sure who would do it justice...

@sethmode: I couldn’t disagree more, but having an extra 15 hours of NOT listening to podcasts this holiday was actually nice.

Resident Evil 6

This movie shed most of the crap Matrix slowmo nonsense that plagued so much of these films. It was better shot, hid a lot of bag CG, and just felt better put together than any other movie in the series.

Quite a follow-up to the train wreck that was RE5.

A wholly decent send-off to the franchise. RE6 is the best film since the first. While none of the movies are high-art, here’s my Ranking of Resident Evil:

1) Resident Evil - fun, dumb, and well-paced

2) Resident Evil 6 - the mature one

3) Resident Evil 3 - The Road Warrior with zombies

4) Resident Evil 4 - Started off shit, got to be totally fine

5) Resident Evil 2 - Cheesy cosplay and rubber costumes

6) Resident Evil 5 - Cheesier cosplay and rubberier costumes

@chaz934: I’m curious how they justified it in the past, spending all that time on GOTY. The TV episodes year, the FMV year, the video games are gone year...they used to do some great stuff. The deliberations, of course, were amazing then, too.

I think last year’s (or maybe the year before) Blitz championship was fun. Dan and Ben make for a fun team of hosts (which they’ve gone back to repeatedly), and Dan and Jeff’s game was fun to watch. Small things like this that just bring some new chemistry to the mix can be plenty of fun.

Actually, I’d love to see Jeff, Vinny, Brad, and Alex do the old guard, knives-out GOTY deliberation. That’s a cross coast team you never see anymore. Let them give us a little classic Giant Bomb and go knives out. They don’t need to talk about every game. They don’t need to do 5 days worth of shows. Just do a top 10 (or hell, a top 5) and maybe two days of mixed fun and serious categories.

In the meantime, let the others come up with new end of year game shows, playdates, skits, whatever. Abby, Ben, Jan, Jason, Rorie...Business Goddamn Dave...I bet they could come up with some fun stuff.

13 Assassins (2010)

Great drama, evil antagonist, some pretty great dialog, and bananas action to close it all out. I’ve seen this one before, but it’s always a great time.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2020/01/04/evil-dead-sequel-sam-raimi-ama-bruce-campbell-ash-remake-reboot

Holy shit, if this movie ends up starring Bruce and being a sequel to Ash vs. Evil Dead, I’ll lose my fucking shit. That final teaser was AMAZING!

Continuing with the Resident Evil movies, I watched the 5th one.

It had the biggest budget, but looked like the most made for TV schlock so far. The awfulness teased at the beginning of RE4 is fully realized here, giving us a movie that breaks the five point scale, making the worst RE movie (RE2) look pretty good in comparison.

It’s plotless, short, stupid, and basically a vehicle for shit cosplay. It’s saved by an ending where our budget-cosplay heroes (plus Alice) return to the US to find DC under siege and Wesker taking up residence in the White House. Points lost here for not having people call him President Wesker...

Anyhow, the war for mankind is apparently coming up in the last movie, and I guess Alice is going to fight some zombie dragons. It can’t possibly be as bad as this fan movie, can it? I’ll find out tonight!

I got sick and was unable to work, workout, play video games, focus my eyes on reading, etc. for days.

As a result, I watched a few movies of varied quality noted above (Irishman, Predator 2, Resident Evil).

Well, I continued down the Resident Evil rabbit hole and watched RE2-4.

RE2 was a rewatch. I remember it being abysmal. It’s better than I remember, but it’s a bad movie. I had fun watching it, but it was BAAAD.

RE3 I remember thinking was okay. I was wrong. It’s not much better than RE2. Still, it’s a quick and entertaining thing to look at when you’re not used to shutting off your brain.

RE4...man, this is a lot of these movies all at once, but I’m on a mission now...RE4 started out as an atrocious and unbearable movie, making RE2 look like an accomplished work. It got better after the opening action sequence in settled into mediocre fan service that’s still quick-paced, bad, but somehow watchable.

Next up: RE5 and RE6...wish me luck.

@geebee: @devise22: I really liked Joker a lot, but it wasn’t exactly a revelation. It practically begged you to watch King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, so I’m not sure originality was what it was going for.

I’d argue that a lot of great movies lack originality. Sometimes, execution is enough. I think that was the case with Joker.

EDIT: Re: “getting” Joker, all I know him from are movies, the old 60s TV show, and the Arkham games. I couldn’t tell you shit about comics.

As for God of War (while I’m back), I also really enjoyed that story but didn’t find it wholly original. I doubt folks behind that game thought they were telling a story never-before-told. Maybe they told it in a new way, or a way that’s new for the medium, or whatever...I’m not keeping score. But I don’t think following footsteps takes away from quality being top-notch on the big-budget video games scale.

I think scale is important in this conversation. Big budget means low risk. Joker did something new in making an R-rated comic book character study. I guess maybe Logan did something similar, but that was more of a family piece, really. It could do this because it was a very low budget film.

Similarly, I thought the must-have-been-super-risk-adverse God of War game didn’t do anything risky, but it did bother telling a very good story when you line it up against its peers.

I don’t expect to get Cormac McCarty out of a mass market video game, of all things. My expectations for video game stories are less beautiful prose and more Spiderman, Master Chief, and Marcus Fenix. I think that’s all we can usually hope for out of the big games. Sometimes you get a Bioshock or a Last of Us. But it’s usually just pulpy fun that hopefully doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay. Anyhow, considering what we usually get at those budgets and levels of risk aversion, I think God of War’s storytelling was pretty great.

Fuck, I rambled too long...