Ford_Dent

Yeah it definitely gives you more flexibility, and it makes it a much smoother experience overall. I still wish they'd last longer than a minute, though.

@humanity: My god episode 2 is a fucking chore. If you were to take a drink for every slow pan, you'd be dead by the end. If you made a rule that you had to keep drinking during every slow pan, you'd be dead in ten minutes.

If you took a shot every time someone said Pele, you'd die in forty.

I really like Wending Refn but maybe TV was not a good fit for him.

@rahf: Apart from the fact that I kind of like having to meditate to drink potions (and also I like potions lasting for longer than 30 seconds to a minute), I am inclined to agree. The look, gameplay, world, basically everything, is fuckin' rad. I'm deeply into it, mostly because of Roach. Roach is great. I will die for Roach.

@therealturk: See I loved the potion situation! I still do! I think it's a bummer that potions aren't as long-lasting in 3, and also that you don't like, sit down and prepare before a big fight. Or before heading into certain territories where you know monsters might be. In the first two games, you had to take that stuff into consideration, and I liked that layer of strategy. I do understand the decision to give players more of a chance to not screw themselves by going into a fight unprepared - you can always prepare, because you pause and fiddle with your inventory, and you're done. It's not in the spirit of the books, but you could argue it is in the spirit of, you know, a better video game.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters: The first thing that we should probably put out on the table before we get started is that Godzilla, and the whole kaiju film genre in general, have a real special place in my heart. So any movie that doesn't only promise me more Godzilla but adds the promise of King Ghidorah (take me to your leader) throwing down as well and like... I'm going to probably have a good time regardless. Add in Mothra, my favorite giant moth with vaguely undefined psychic powers and Rodan (who I guess exists, he's alright) and there's no way I don't spend most of the movie trying not to weep openly at its beauty.

Which is kind of what I did. Millie Bobbie Brown deserved a better plot, but Charles Dance is a dude who knows how to chew some scenery (but doesn't, apart from once or twice) and he seems to be having a good time. The other actors are also there, and do fine I guess. I didn't mention Ken Watanabe just now because he's to good for you, me, and everyone else in this fucking movie. Just give me a movie where Watanabe and Godzilla hang out for two hours and I'll watch that too.

The plot has something to do with climate change, I guess? Godzilla is there to fight climate change, I think, and there's a lot of kaiju (sorry, Titans) who are there to help/hinder depending on what Ghidorah's up to. You get to see some real cool shit, like Godzilla going all SSGSS on Ghidora's ass Also there's a bit where he rips one of Ghidorah's heads off. It's tremendous, and who cares that a lot of the plot doesn't make sense when you have all these kaiju whaling on each other?

Special shouts out go to the soundtrack, which deploys the O.G Godzilla theme in a couple moments that did, in fact, cause me to nearly break down crying - and that's without adding a surprise use of Mothra's theme! It was real goddamn good, and that cover of Godzilla during the credits from the System of a Down guy is pretty fucking rad to boot.

Anyway, this is way better than those god-awful anime films that released last year/this year.

Hopeless Fanboy Rating: 3 dragon heads out of 3

More Realistic Rating: 3 Ken Watanabe's out of 5

I know! It would be a wild fucking trainwreck.

Man I have my fingers crossed that Vinny is lured in by the promise of a weird open(?) world and we see some of it, but I have my doubts. Now if Austin were still here, I don't even think this would be a question (and my fingers are crossed that we get some thoughts out of him over at Waypoint or The New (Again) Vice Gaming Dot Com), but as it is I just don't know. I've dumped around ten hours into it myself and have so many thoughts on this game, all of which I need to eventually write down somewhere, but I would love to see someone take a look at it.

I might actually kill to see Dan even attempt to approach the thing before throwing his hands up in disgust about two minutes in.

Last week involved flying to the US and back, which means I watched some Quality Airplane Film Entertainment:

Holmes and Watson: I take back what I said about Quality Airplane Film Entertainment. There are bad movies, where nobody has the talent to make them good, there are bad movies that wrap all the way around to being good, and then there are movies like this where you have incredibly funny people who fail utterly to be funny in the slightest. Around ten minutes into this movie I felt like I should just turn it off and maybe open the plane door and plummet to the ground below, because death would have felt less joyless. None of the jokes land. None of them! There's a musical number at the end which might have been the only part I felt anything other than numbness for, and it was basically just me thinking about how Will Ferrell is really good at singing (remember that scene in Stranger than Fiction? I have a soft spot for that scene). If you've ever been curious as to what depression feels like, it feels like watching this movie. As a bonus, when I started watching it my airplane touch screen had glitched and selected the Japanese voice track instead of the English one, and I think it was better that way when I could at least imagine a good joke in there. 0 out of 5 serial masturbators. In fact, -5/5. In fact let's just pretend this movie never happened.

Venom: I am a big Tom Hardy fan, and I loved him in Locke, where he spent the entire movie in a car talking, so a movie where he once again spends a lot of time talking to himself is pretty good. The plot is uh, well, let's just say it's 'whatever' and leave it at that. Venom and Eddie are a good power couple, and I especially like the bits at the end where Venom keeps talking about how they're going to get their asses kicked. Also Woody Harrelson's wig at the end is... well, it's certainly a thing of beauty, in its own way. Maybe it was because I was so emotionally dead after the experience of Holmes and Watson, but this was fun. 3 out of 5 armless, legless torsos rolling down the street like a turd.

The Girl in the Spider's Web: I read, and then watched, the Millenium Trilogy a long time ago. I remember thinking it had a cool character in Lisbeth Salander, and a useless character in the form of the reporter guy who is, ostensibly, the main character that Lisbeth somewhat unconvincingly decides she wants to bang instead of her girlfriend? What if, the makers of this movie decided, we made Lisbeth even cooler by giving her even wilder haxx0r p0werz but also ramped up the uselessness of the reporter dude, who really didn't need to be in this movie at all? Also what if we included a scene where Lisbeth overcomes a bout of being poisoned by... crushing up heart pills and snorting them? Or something like that? They do a whole thing with Lisbeth's sister which felt undercooked, there's a whole thing with a CIA murder machine and I guess Lisbeth's other haxx0r business partner doing wild-ass sniping shit, there's some pretty enjoyable car chases, I think that's probably it. Make another one of these but leave the reporter guy out because I feel like there is no way you will ever convince me the blatant author wish-fulfillment surrogate will ever be cool. 2 out of 5 shots of a guy holding the delete key down on a computer for way too long

The Bourne Identity: This was the last of the movies I watched on the flight out, because I felt like watching it after The Girl in the Spider's Web reminded me of other, better techno-thrillers. The copy on the plan was in 4:3, but I endured because this movie is great and I fucking love it. I did a whole series of posts about all the Bourne movies earlier in this thread so I won't do much beyond say this film is still 5 out of 5 and I am unabashedly in love with Franka Potente in this movie.

Aquaman: The first of the films I watched on the flight back. This was... okay? For DC films that feels like high praise - Wonder Woman is still the only film that really excited me, but Jason Momoa is having fun, and Willem Dafoe is always a good laugh. I saw the twist with his mom coming a mile away but I still kind of ended up catching feelings at the end, if only because I am a sucker and also I think something about airplane travel makes you more emotional? Pretty sure that's a thing. They did some good punching, and Black Manta looked suitably Black Manta-y. 3 out of 5 tridents (seriously this is a trident-heavy movie)

Bad Times at the El Royale: I wanted this movie to be better than it ended up being. You got Jeff Daniels being the Dude, Jon Hamm being casually 1960s racist, and Cynthia Erivo putting up with it all. Plus Chris Hemsworth walks around with no shirt on and talks in a weird like, southern drawl mixed with surfer bro voice. All enjoyable things! But the way the movie wraps up feels a little too tidy, and after like the second or third DARK SECRET REVEALED it stops being particularly thrilling. Still, I guess I enjoyed it? Mostly? It was fine. 3 out of 5 concealed listening devices

No Country for Old Men: Much like The Girl in the Spider's Web reminding me The Bourne Identity was a good time, Bad Times at the El Royale reminded me that No Country for Old Men existed. I'm not sure there's a real theme or even throughline that tie the two films together beyond like, a really good cast and at least one menacing psycopath, and also dialog written by someone who felt very clever while they were writing it. The difference is that in No Country for Old Men the dialog never falls flat and the sound design is basically flawless. I could listen to floorboards creaking and boots crunching in gravel all fucking day, for real. Also like Bourne Identity the plane's copy of this was in 4:3, except this time the picture was also stretched out to fill the 16:9 screen so everyone looked like a fatter version of themselves. Still enjoyable. 5 out of 5 coin tosses.

As a bonus, I also ended up re-watching Wrath of Khan, Jurassic Park, and The Lost World. The first two in that list are 5 out of 5 films and I will not be convinced otherwise. The third film in that list is probably a solid 4 out of 5, even if the ending is kind of shit (and gymnastics vs velociraptors is just... so very dumb, even if they do actually take the two seconds to set it up at the beginning of the movie). But come on! Two T-Rexes! A guy gets ripped in half! They go into the tall grass even though they really, really shouldn't do that!

I needed something neon and cyberpunky, so I finally sat down and watched Blade Runner: 2049 over the weekend.

I tend to be attracted to science fiction that explores weird ideas, or at least brings them up for consideration - I'm not looking for deep philosophy, but even bringing up the idea of, for example, your hologram girlfriend hiring a prostitute so the two of you can actually fuck is... deeply weird and, I should add, 100% my shit. That and, you know, the philosophical implications of a manufacturered human reproducing (making it effectively just another human, really) and what that implies, and Robin Wright being icily competent and completely unafraid to die because fuck youis also highly appreciated by me. The story of a sad robot boy and his AI girlfriend was, in the end, the most interesting part of the movie for me! But the parts that weren't about the sad robot boy and his AI girlfriend were also pretty good.

The fly in the ointment for me was Jared Leto, because I cannot stand the dude. He's trying to do this vaguely menacing voice (I think?) but he just comes off sounding like a prick which is, perhaps, because Jared Leto seems like kind of a prick IRL. Plus the film definitely goes the lazy route of "let's establish the bad guy is bad by having him perpetrate violence on a naked, defensless woman" which like... Okay, thematically I can understand they want to establish how he sees Replicants as products and not people (MUCH LIKE ALL CAPITALISM SEES HUMANS), but the whole monologue he does establishes that pretty goddamn well so the part where he knifes her just felt unnecessary (kind of like Deckard forcing himself on Rachel in the first movie!). Anyway, I would like to see a movie about the upcoming Replicant revolution, but all we're getting is an anime set between the Watanabe short and 2049 which will have to do.

3 out of 5 tiny wooden radioactive horses

A couple things made their way across my view this past week, so buckle up:

Love, Death & Robots: This thing misses waaaaay more than it hits. Sonnie's Edge established a cool world and concept, and even told a decent story to boot. Also, some tits to let you know it's mature (this is kind of a recurring complaint of mine with the whole anthology, although you know what, full marks for equal opportunity nudity here - plenty of dongs in this thing. Still, I feel like the animators in most of these were like OH IF WE HAVE THEM GET NAKED IT MEANS WE ARE FOR ADULTS). The Witness had a really cool style, but ultimately nothing to say. A lot of the other shorts didn't even have style going for them and settled for hyper-realism, which, I think I'm at the point where that's not enough. Other standouts were Beyond the Aquila Rift, The Secret War, and (my personal favorite) Zima Blue. Of all of them, only Zima Blue seemed to actually want to explore an actual sci-fi concept like transhumanism (arguably the one set in a steampunk China (the name of which escapes me) touches on the intersection of technology and magic in a way I liked, but more than damn near any other leans heavily into sexual violence to appear edgy and that's a real bummer). Overall, I give this 2.5 Robots out of 5. For an anthology titled Love, Death & Robots there were not enough robots.

Ghidorah: Three Headed Monster: In honor of a departed friend of mine, I watched this film because it is precisely the sort of shit he was into. A good old-fashioned kaiju beat 'em up, running alongside a weird political assassination plot. Standout scenes include Ghidorah just wrecking shop when he shows up, a guy getting himself killed for 200 yen, and Godzilla being chastised for having a dirty mouth. There's also something just charming as fuck about how the world of the films knows exactly who the fuck Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra are. The Mothra twin fairys even show up on a fucking Japanese variety program at one point! I love these kind of movies immensely, and this is a particularly good example of the genre. It also gives you a good idea of how Godzilla: King of the Monsters is probably going to play out. 3 dragon heads out of 5.

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "why the long face?"

The Horse says, "My wife left me."

The Bartender says, "Holy shit a talking horse."