My name is Nico and i used to write media reviews on LiveJournal until my account got suspended for no reason - so now I am posting them on here instead. Something to note is that a lot of these posts will be written in a stream of consciousness. I canât guarantee a full spectrum of coherency during these and they will probably make the most amount of sense if you've already seen what I'm talking about. I just wanted somewhere to note down my thoughts and feelings about the art in my life in the moment. So all that being said, welcome.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Botolo (2016), Silk (2019), The House Guest (2020) and Weapons (2025).
Botolo
Synopsis: BOTOLO is a hybrid game of keepaway and king-of-the-hill. BOTOLO is a fast paced mindreading competition. BOTOLO is a dance inside the negative space between your opponent's thoughts.
It would have been awesome to have gotten to play this game but it is either bugged or just ... not compatible with me. It's borderline impossible to play with a keyboard but whenever I try to use a console control the up and down are inverted. No other controls are inverted. I tried for about 20 minutes to try and get adjusted to this but it wasn't working and I didn't want to waste my entire evening trying to make something that was aggravating me from the jump work. There is also literally nowhere to contact the dev to ask for help. Their socials are all dead links. It sucks because it genuinely did look like fun. I liked the music and the visuals of the game a lot. It just didn't work for me at all - whether it was the intent or not. Oh well. Might do an updated review in the future if this ever gets clarified/fixed.
Silk
Synopsis: Enter the biggest handcrafted open world of all time, fifty times larger than Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall! Explore three million square miles of uncharted terrain from Roman Damascus to Three Kingdoms China in an exploration RPG that transports you onto the Ancient Silk Road of 200AD.
So I started Silk some time ago and have popped back into the game a few times since. I think that it's a fun project but ultimately just kind of fails to make itself interesting. You essentially roam around the world as mentioned in the above synposis, get to a location, either trade with or colonize that location, rinse and repeat. The world is splayed out in this really cool pop-up map style before you with potential threats moving around like chess pieces at random. You can also see places you can loot or temples, etc from a distance as well which give you a drive to keep moving forward or even veer or a bit and explore. I do really like how this game looks.
You can also build a party, gathering some very cool looking people with varying kinds of skills and abilities (traders, shamans, warriors, etc) from different cities/villages/etc you stop off at, but it doesn't really mean a whole much beyond functionality because you can't really interact with them. They're also all pretty interchangeable among each of their factions. All the warriors act the same, all the shamans act the same, etc. They have set reactions to set occurrences (praying at a shrine, resting, etc) and you can ask them for their advice on stuff at times but it all gets very repetitive after a couple of days. Speaking of days, time goes by way too fast in this game, which is also a resource management game by the way. You are also constantly under attack by one group of people or another who get incredibly hostile for like ... no reason whenever you try visiting a kingdom. Not tourist friendly at all! They're relatively easy to avoid running into most of the time and sometimes you can just bribe them into leaving you alone but they do not leave the map after this happens which will just make them attack you again shortly after if you don't immediately beeline away which sometimes is in the opposite direction you want to go.
I wish this game had a compass. It's pretty difficult to navigate and you have to constantly be looking at your map to make sure you're headed in the correct direction. Speaking of, I wish when you visited a place - the name of said place would show up on the map. As you explore, you essentially unlock more of the map visually but you can't really keep track of anywhere you went in-game which makes it pretty frustrating when you're hours in and have no idea what direction you're going in or where the place you're meant to go is and whether or not you've even already been there. Everything is timed, mind you. So imagine being told to go somewhere by a certain day, except for you have no idea where you're going. How are you meant to be an explorer without a functional map? It's like the one most important thing you need, especially if you're meant to be exploring somewhere very specific.
As you travel, especially as you uncover new cities/villages/etc, a narrator will pop in to give you some very uninteresting information about said location. It would've been cool if maybe some of the information would impact how you interacted with the place or something. Something to give you a reason to remember any of it, but it doesn't really care to make you care so you don't.
There isn't a whole lot of sound in the game, just occasional sfx and twangs of music. Nothing to write home about really.
The game has potential. I think if there was an actual story and actual characters, this game would be so much better. Top that with some UI improvements - fixing the map issue, giving us a compass, maybe even adding a mini-map in the corner. It feels like a demo, I guess. Rather than a completed game. The skeleton is there but it needs meat packed on. Lots of meat. Some sort of narrative that keeps us engaged and a UI that actually helps it so it doesn't just feel like we're walking in circles bored out of our minds would've ranked this one of the better games I've played on the BFRJAE. But alas.
The House Guest
Synopsis: A young married couple allows a female friend move into their home; this house guest, whom the wife has not seen in years, begins seducing everyone around her and people start dying.
This movie was fascinating to watch. Not exactly like a car accident but more like watching a couple argue out in a Walmart parking lot. I thought that the acting ... well, it was present. I am of the strong mind that everyone needs to start somewhere, y'know? This is an indie movie working with an indie budget and everyone is just trying to make a name for themselves - everyone! Actors, directors, camera guys, all of them. And for what it was, it was okay! It feels like a first draft, you know? A lot of it needed work - the writing, the acting, the characters. I don't actually remember any of their names at the time of writing this so I will call them WMC (for woman main character), MMC (for man main character) and Crazy whenever they come up which probably won't be much because I really don't have much to say about this movie.
My main gripe is that it was really difficult to understand Crazy's motivations for anything she did. She just kind of does a thing and we're meant to ... feel something about it, I guess. I don't know what exactly. I found myself extremely indifferent any time she killed someone. This is the thing that kind of drives me up the wall when men write insane and hypersexual women in their stories. They lack empathy and only want to show a woman being hot and covered in blood in their thing that they're making but they also don't to come off as Some Pervert (which is fine, being horny is legal) so they don't commit. Neither to humanizing them or going full camp and making sexploitation or whatever. So it's just writing an "insane person" and not writing a person who does insane things. Does that make sense? It's beyond trope. It's cardboard cutout. Even insanity has logic. If someone stabs someone because "the voices" told them to, that is a reason. If someone stabs someone because they threatened to leave and they couldn't imagine life without them, that is a reason. I don't know why Crazy did what she did.
The one thing that could've saved this movie (especially considering the low-budget aspect as well as the still-learning actors brought on to the project and the general tone) was leaning more into sex, action and violence. It wasn't thrilling at all, it wasn't scary at all, the sex scenes were extremely un-sexy and uninteresting, there is no emotional investment in any of these characters so there's no drama or tension either. I just don't get any of it. I don't know what the purpose of this movie was. It made it a pretty boring watch whenever there wasn't stilted dialogue and chuckle at. I think the WMC's friend was kind of funny. She was genuinely a hysterical person who would grow hostile at the drop of a pin, and just constantly acted like a lunatic and in a good movie, that would be something to critique and question but in this movie, it means something is actually happening on screen so we'll take it.
The thing is, right, this director - Jonathan Milton makes a lot of movies. He's made so many. This was his fourth movie he ever made, with a two year gap between this one and the previous one. So I'm willing to cut some slack. It was those early learning days, I guess. I'm considering watching one of the three movies he directed this year. I am very skeptical that there's going to be much if any improvement but I'm curious to see if the man that has made 20 movies in eight years has learned anything at all in all that time. Put a pin in this, I guess.
Anyway, this is a movie that lacked intent. It all falls apart at the seams. The beginning, middle and end is just not cohesive or interesting. That being said, I didn't hate the movie. I could tell that there was care in behalf of the people that worked on it. I dunno why. I don't think there's anything in particular that is leading me to feel that way but I feel somewhat endeared by it.
Oh right, there's also a scene in the movie where MMC is playing basketball with a friend and he starts shouting GAME POINT over and over and thank God for subtitles because I straight up thought he was shouting GAY PORN.
Also I will never get over this review for it on Letterboxd. I think about "They do their own stunts (suffocating inside a plastic bag in a ford focus)." at least once a day since I first read this.
Weapons
Synopsis: When all but one child from the same classroom mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
Zach Cregger is really setting himself up to be one of my favorite horror-comedy directors. I liked Barbarian a fair amount but Weapons was definitely a step up. Apparently he's set to direct a Resident Evil movie (an original one independent of the story in the games) so that's kind of interesting, but I don't know if I'll really care to watch it because I'm not a Resident Evil fan. Like it's fine and all but I didn't grow up with the nostalgia for it that a lot of people have because I never played it so IDK.
Anyway, I really liked Weapons is basically what I'm saying. Something that the synopsis above leaves out is that the sole remaining child is not the only person who doesn't vanish from his class. His teacher is also very much still there, and is consequently blamed for the disappearances of these children by most of the parents/people in town. Justine (the teacher) is insufferable. She's constantly over-stepping with her students, she tries the patience of her cute gay boss (school principal) Marcus, she gets hostile the moment she's told to own up to something or is confronted about anything, she tries (and partially succeeds) to convince her recovering alcoholic ex Paul to drink and cheat on his girlfriend. She's genuinely a bad person. But in true Zach Cregger fashion, she is just absolutely fascinating to watch. I love her. And you could say the same about pretty much any character. This movie is shot in parts, similar to Barbarian, with overlap in the timelines for some scenes and I love how perspectives sort of change small details based on which character the story is following/centering.
For example, there's a scene where Paul is chasing down a known hooligan and substance abuser James (he's my favorite character in the movie) after catching him trying to break into a building. Paul is a cop btw, he's not doing this for the hell of it. After catching him and putting handcuffs on him, Paul asks James the usual schtick "Do you have anything in your pockets that's gonna poke me or stick me?" James says no and Paul goes to empty his pockets, except that James either lied or forgot, who knows, and Paul pricks his finger on a clearly used needle. In a rage, Paul punches James in the head and knocks him to the ground - only to realize in his post-punch clarity that the dash cam in his cruiser is recording him.
When the story follows him, he sits James up and asks if he's okay. He's very frazzled and shaken by what just happened. He offers him an exchange of sorts, to let him go and pretend none of this happened as long as he keeps this between them. He also says "I don't want to see you here again, okay?" which is an insane thing to say, like he lives in town. What is he meant to do? Anyway, when it comes to Jasper's perspective Paul is much less shaken up by everything. He actually speaks rather condescendingly to him. He doesn't say "I don't want to see you here again, okay?". He says, "If I see you around here again, it's gonna be a different story." He's threatening him. In Paul's version, he helps James up to his feet - still flustered and adrenaline rushing. In James', he just tells him to "Get the fuck up" before the scene ends. I think that kind of "unreliable narrator" style writing is just too cool and it's fun to have it shown in such subtle blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses because little details like that really change so much about a situation.
This all brings me to Gladys and the point of the movie which is what I most want to talk about. I guess, my take on what the point is anyway. It'd be foolish to shrug off what the movie has to say about gun violence. Everyone has talked it into the ground, there is literally a giant floating assault rifle in the sky at one point. People have mentioned the constant reference of the time 2:17 either citing bible passages about child death or representing a gun reform bill that just barely passed by 217 (against 213) votes. I think the movie has a lot more to say than just that, though. I think it's just about violence (and the consequential grief born of violence) in general, and especially violence against children - whether it be physical or emotional. Apparently the style of running the kids do in the movie was indicated on the script as mirroring that well-known photo of Phan Tháť Kim PhĂşc as a child fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam - a historic instance of weapons utilized to harm children. Cregger actually talks in an interview about how he pulled a lot about what happened to Alex (the only boy in his class not to disappear) from his own childhood, and how it felt growing up with addiction in his household. The way Justine victimizes and shrinks herself as a way to manipulate those around her, the way addiction eats you up from the inside, the way Paul abuses his authority as a police officer and yes - the way Gladys literally turns the people around her into living breathing weapons - again, including children. It's all about violence - cyclical and merciless and terrifying.
With the climate of politics right now, it's not exactly a secret that children are constantly used as a tool for discourse. Oppressive and fascistic regimes of censorship and bigotry often take space while feigning that their purpose is simply the protection of children. People should be abducted and disappeared without explanation to protect children, people are not allowed to artistic self-expression to protect children, people are not allowed to live their lives authentically to protect children, people are not entitled to basic human rights to protect children. Children are weapons for parasites - parasites represented by Gladys in this movie. A witch that saps the vitality of children to go on living, to go on festering and sucking every breath out of the world until there is nothing left but it. She is a beast, the beast that is fascism. And the ending showed rather clearly what one does with that beast.
I wish a lot of what I was saying here made more sense. It feels like I'm rambling but I think I just kind of get like this when I get in over my head trying to talk about something I really like without the ability to parse any of it. But I guess the point of these reviews is that this is just something I'm doing in my spare time for fun and nothing else. Anyway, I really like this movie and the more I think about it and the more I write about it, the more I like it. There are just so many layers, so many interpretations and so many moving parts in it and I love how much Cregger really just kind of wants people to develop their own personal relationship with it. I had gone into it with really no expectations. All I knew about it was the short synopsis for it on Letterboxd. I had heard that people had really liked it but I get really skeptical when there's a lot of hype around something, especially in this day and age. But I was really pleasantly surprised and I'm really glad I gave it its fair shot. I figured I would've gotten around to it eventually but it might have not hit as deeply as it does in this exact time and it makes me wonder how many movies in the past will never carry the weight it did when it first released because of the world it existed in when it was first born.
All that being said, this movie also looks amazing. The violence is visceral when it does happen. A lot of flinching and looking away from me whenever something particularly nasty was about to happen. (The potato slicer to the face was a hard pass for me LOL) I did anticipate it but I can be squeamish here and there so bare with me. I loved the scene at the end with the kids and Gladys. I just know they have a blast filming it. The energy was insane, the practical effects were fantastic. The action, everything - oh my God. I can not remember the last time I was that captivated by a scene in a movie. i literally could not look away. The acting was solid. Everyone, even Cary Christopher who played Alex (WHO IS 9 YEARS OLD) was absolutely amazing. I know there were a lot of casting issues when filming this but I can not overstate how much I can not see another cast for this movie. I'm NGL, I do not remember there being music for this movie. I don't really feel like it detracted much from it either way but I don't really feel like it did very much either. I definitely have plans to rewatch soon so I might pay closer attention the second time around?
Oh, one last thing. While reading about Weapons, I found an interview where Cregger talks about how he had to change the ending of the movie to add a narration sort of giving closure about the whole story because initially, it just cut to black without really explaining things. A woman in the theater during the previews negatively reacted to that ending and Cregger decided to change it, which I found very strange. He didn't really strike me as the type to really give a shit, personally - but anyway. I think this sort of stuff is stupid and annoying and that art shouldn't be made to be more "marketable" but I also understand that it's also not super up to him and all that. I did just want to mention it because it really pissed me off. Artists should get to make the art they want to make and if people are confused or upset or whatever - so bet it.
Ummm, yeah. I think that's like a lot of what I had to say. I think I'm gonna keep thinking about this movie forever.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Circle (2015), Goodnight Mommy (2014), The Pink Cloud (2021), The Last Knight (2014) and War of the Worlds (2025).
For the sake of just getting this last batch over and done with so I can enjoy my media day later today without stressing about having to write about all this in addition to whatever I play and watch tomorrow - we're going to be doing a little speedrunning here. Luckily enough, I don't really have too much to say about a lot of these so it all works out in the end. Anyway, just mentioning this in case anyone wonders why I might not be going on my usual yap sesh about everything. It's just many reasons!
Also, I think from this point on, I'm just going to include the plot synopsis at the start of each review just so I don't start prattling on explaining the crux of the plot when I can literally just use the synopsis and work off that. OK? OK! I am officially done with the pre-yap session. Let's begin.
Circle
Synopsis: Fifty strangers, held captive and facing execution, must make an impossible decision of choosing one among them who deserves to live while the others perish.
So I want to start this off by saying that Circle was a movie made by a couple of dudes just kind of starting off in this industry. They started out making a Youtube webseries before happening upon a connection with Netflix, who they then pitched Circle to. I'll always have tons of love and respect to small creators who manage to make it, especially given the small but loyal cult following they have managed to scrounge up for themselves.
This movie was a fun experience, especially watching it with friends. I think the actors were mostly pretty solid, the premise while having definitely been done many times before still managed to draw you in enough to keep you watching until the end if nothing but because of a deep-seeded morbid curiosity about who is going to make it out of this situation. I think something that I find interesting with movies like this (which is absolutely not something I have in common with most people unfortunately lol) is that I find it difficult to really judge people based on their decisions. I always find myself going "well, that guy's being an asshole but it's completely plausible that someone in a situation like this would be an asshole", etc. People love to complain when a character doesn't just do what they would do. It's very funny. Almost like .. the character is a separate individual .. but anything, I'm not gonna waste time complaining about reviewers like I usually do.
I think there are fun and interesting characters from all walks of life and I ... definitely understand what the movie is trying to do sometimes. I'm just unsure if it does things ... well. I don't know if I'm explaining myself alright but the crux of it is, right - so in the movie there are some people whose bigotries come into play. We've got pretty much everything come up - racism, ageism, ableism, misogyny, etc. This guy should get killed because he's probably here illegally, that woman's gay so she should die next, this guy is old so he won't live much longer - it's all a game of trying to put value on a human life based off biases and using "logic" as a shield. Which is funny given that they're all going to die save for one person. Not that they know that, but I think that once we've whittled down the numbers quite a bit, it would be safe to assume. I found a lot of the writing about these things ... I dunno, just kind of flat. Not very interesting and honestly? I don't know why the guys (knock off Patrick Bateman and the banker) who were being hateful didn't just get voted to die from the jump because there was a good while where most people seemed to just really find anything they had to say extremely unwarranted and annoying.
I just wasn't exactly sold on all that but it definitely made for some eyebrow raising piss your pants laughter in the stream we watched it in.
Overall, the movie looked very nice. I think some of the performances were great. Some were kind of rough but I understand also that this is the first time for a lot of these actors so I definitely think they should be cut some slack. There was only one character I felt actually emotionally touched by and that was the woman who chose to sacrifice herself after speaking about having lost her son and just wanting people to remember her. I don't know why but I found her acting really genuine and was touched by her performance.
I definitely also enjoyed skeevy manipulative guy that was just gaming people the whole time even though we could definitely see his betrayal coming from ten million miles away. He was just a little too eager, y'know?
I wish I liked the banker more. I really like obnoxiously evil characters but the banker was just ... awful. Every time he opened his mouth, I knew he was gonna PISS ME OFF!!! I liked the fake Patrick Bateman guy because he was kind of funny, even if he was also infuriating. I think this movie would have been improved if he and the banker guy touched tips.
The guy who couldn't speak English at all who those two freakazoids kept rallying against, I had a lot of empathy for for obvious reasons. When the woman that was translating for him gets offed, I just kept pointing out that he literally had no fuckin' idea what was going on for the rest of the time he was on. I wish we got to like ... hear more from him? Especially given how much time was spent arguing about the worth of his life, it felt a bit like he didn't really get to say his piece until his end.
I also liked the man who chose not to participate or speak at all. He was very interesting and I do think it's cool of the movie to really kind of branch out in how many different forms of choice were presented in the movie. Some people chose to sacrifice themselves, some chose to pull out every ugly stop they could, some used sympathy, some dug their own graves and some chose no involvement whatsoever. It was just fun to see so much variety because it's really common in the genre that a lot of people just kind of jump on the same ship with little pushback just for the sake of keeping things running smoothly. But then again, that's kind of the point of Circle - the fight. And people fight in their own way.
Anyway, it was a fun watch. I enjoyed it a lot. Probably wouldn't rewatch really. I just feel like I wouldn't personally get anything from a rewatch but I did enjoy my time with it.
Goodnight Mommy
Synopsis: Twin boys who do everything together, from collecting beetles to feeding stray cats, welcome their mother home after her reconstructive surgery. But with her face wrapped in bandages, and her demeanor distant, they grow suspicious of her identity.
I always tell people that just because you guess the reveal of a movie, it doesn't make it a bad movie because it's about the journey to the reveal and this movie is a good example of that. I guessed exactly what was going on about five minutes into the movie, called it out, locked it in and was very smug about it when we got to it but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of it at all. I think I just love movies where kids are fuckin' weird. And these kids are soo weird. I love the premise of this movie and the breadcrumb trail you follow to get to the end, even though you can see the box propped up on a stick at the end of it waiting to drop on you, is soooo yummy.
The way this movie looks, is fucking amazing. I love that the house is covered in photos of their mother but in the photos, her face is always obscured one way or another. It really hammers in her insecurity prior to her procedures. The house feels so cold and clinical, especially when compared to the warmth with which the scenes outdoors are filmed. The acting in this from both boys and Susanne Wuest is phenomenal. I was blown away by them. I do think it's a bit easier to get kids to act well when they're meant to be very serious and off-putting and not super emotive which is kind of cheating but they pull it off so well that I'll overlook it because I'm kind and generous.
There are some things that didn't really, idk sit well with me. Some people call this movie torture porn. As someone who was a big fan of the genre in my teenage years, I wholeheartedly disagree. There are events that occur during it that are akin to torture but it does not fall into the exploitative and drawn out nature of "torture porn". It makes you flinch and recoil but it lasts like five minutes, chill out. That isn't my complaint, though. My complaint is that I don't really get why the boys do anything that they do to their mom. The summary is that they burn a spot on her face with a magnifying glass, they glue her mouth shut because she keeps shouting, then have to cut it open because they realize she can't eat which accidentally cuts her lips a bit and then at some point they painfully floss her teeth (at which point I hid behind my pillow because yuck). I just don't get why they did any of that really. It felt like the writers were winging what they should do which feels weird because these boys have been planning this to an extent, right?
I feel like it would've made more narrative sense that it tied into forms of abuse that their mother inflicted. Like when she slaps Elias and demands he say she is her mother. So something like them slapping her and telling her to say she isn't their mother. If the floss thing had maybe tied into something she did earlier. For example, at some points she shames the boys for the mess in their room and mocks them about it so when she wets herself while tied to the bed, they do the same. That felt like it came full circle. Like it would've felt like more of a moment of reflection for her, for her to realize the extent she's hurt Elias by denying him the truth because now she's experiencing the brunt of her own abuse. It just kind of felt very whatever and I wasn't a bit fan in comparison to the rest of the movie.
I think it'd be weird to not mention the fact that a lot of people say that this movie is basically ripping off A Tale of Two Sisters. I don't know if that's the case, I guess I'm just gonna have to watch it and decide for myself.
Also I don't know anything about like, Europe but those Red Cross people were CRAZY!! What do you mean they're in my house?? In my kitchen?? Opened the front door like they pay rent?? Hello??
The Pink Cloud
After a toxic and mysterious pink cloud suddenly appears around the globe, people are forced to shelter in place. A woman finds herself stuck in an apartment with a stranger after a one-night stand, and the two come to terms with staying together.
This movie changed lives, apparently. People love it. I can NOT, for the life of me, fathom why. Although it has some very interesting things. I love the petty fighting, the weird across the apartment courtyard sex, more petty fighting, the delusion - but there's just not enough of it and this movie is too fucking long so everything in between the interesting stuff is just so god damn boring. I personally think that the only reason that people were touched by this movie was because it was coincidentally (and admittedly very well-timed...ly?) released during the height of COVID and people have some very weird feelings about that time. I'm gonna be real, I think I am in the minority of people who is just completely numbed out to any and all COVID sentiments because I felt like I was not a human being that entire time. I barely remember COVID. What I do remember was that I was not part of the cushy fortunate groups that got to just get paid to dick around in their homes and whine about not being able to go outside. I was forced to still turn up to work because I worked for a small family business that couldn't afford to totally shut down and my rent did not take a rest for COVID sooooooooooooo. Maybe if I hadn't been brainwashed into hating people who complained about getting to just hang out at home and do whatever, I would've GAF about this movie.
Anyway, I felt like the movie was pretty well acted but I'm not a native Portuguese speaker so I can't say that it was 100%. I believe the emotion, anyway. I've read some native Brazilian Portuguese speakers say that the actors are clearly not from Brazil. I looked them both up and they are both from Brazil so I don't know what that's about. It doesn't matter either way, I guess.
At one point, the MC Giovanna finds out her younger sister who had been staying over a friend's house when this all went down is stuck in some kind of harem situation with her friend's dad and her other friends staying over which is all kind of glossed over by the movie. There's just some insane things going on that we could definitely be harping on and investigating but the movie chooses to just be boring.
IDK, I don't have much else to say about it. I just wish it was better. It had so many little glimpses of interesting scenes. I love the scene where they recreate a nightclub in their living room and they're pretending to meet for the first time and it all gets ruined because they just do not fucking like each other. It's so funny and good. I love the scene where Yago, the MC's one night stand turned ex-husband, is jerking off with his new girlfriend through video call and Giovanna bitterly shuts off the wi-fi to fuck with him because she hates him. I love little things like that, but it feels like any time we go to dip our chip on in that toxic pool, it gets snatched away and replaced with just like ... a compilation of one of them doing yoga or some shit.
Oh, right. I almost forgot. So people receive items they order online (via the government, maybe? IDK) through this like tube thing that suctions to their window and is access through a hole in the glass they cut into it (following an instruction manual). So you can order groceries, technology, etc. to just kind of continue your daily life just in your house or whatever instead of running out into the death cloud. At some point Giovanna is seen laying in like a giant pile of sand in her living room and I think it's stupid we didn't get a scene of the sand just getting blasted in through the window tube.
The Last Knight
Synopsis: Countless enemies had been shot, hacked and slashed in the history of games. Now it is time to ram a wooden lance in some gut, send your foes flying, and watch them bite the dust! Body parts ripping off, ragdoll horse physics, and destructive environments included.
A janky ass runner. It's too charming to hate. I love that it kind of looks like shit. I love that it kind of functions like shit. I love the INSANE opening trailer for the studio that worked on it. I love that it feels like I'm downloading the worlds worst virus onto my computer when I downloaded it. I love that you can tell that the people that worked on this game absolutely adore it. It's honestly also kind of addicting. The story is silly, the writing is pretty hilarious, the characters are fun. I didn't get around to finishing the game because it's definitely the kind of game that you just kind of get the gist of after a bit but I do want to return to it and finish it at some point just because I feel like it deserves that much.
War of the Worlds
Synopsis: A computer security analyst working for the U.S. government finds his daily life disrupted by an alien attack. Accustomed to dealing with virtual threats, his struggle extends to secrets the government may be hiding.
This is probably one of the funniest movies I've watched in a long time. I don't think I've laughed this hard at anything in so years. People get really angry at the fact that this movie is bad. I don't know why. I think I'll remember this for the rest of my life.
I think this movie is like 10x funnier if you picture that Ice Cube just thought all this was happening for real.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Heart Eyes (2025), The Magnus Archives Season One (2016), Fortune-499 (2018).
Heart Eyes
So I watched Heart Eyes because I was on a long flight and I wanted to watch some horror movie schlock to keep my mind somewhat distracted. I get pretty stressed and anxious during all the early airport stuff and needed something to settle me down so I watched something I thought would be pretty stupid. And I was right, it was pretty stupid but I ended up enjoying it so much more than I thought I was going to.
So the premise of the movie is that there has been a serial killer out and about killing couples on (or near Valentine's Day) for the last few years. In the midst of this all, our main character Ally who works in marketing for a jewelry company has just gone through a rough break-up. This leads her to making an promotional ad harping on the "til death do us part" note for their Valentine's Day line that is honestly actually pretty cool visually but in poor taste given all the serial killings. Because of this, she is made to team up by her boss with this new guy at work who is gorgeous. His name is Jay and he's so great.
Anyway, so Jay invite Ally to dinner so they can brainstorm and they happen to be spotted by the Heart Eyes killer during this all which makes them their new target. At some point, we also get introduced to the Detectives working the case. They're pretty fun too. So yeah, after this - the usual slasher shenanigans ensues. Lots of chasing and lots of random side characters getting killed in the process up until the big twist at the end. I won't give away the big reveal at the end about who the killer is though there is kind of a clue about who in what I've written so far. If you wanna know, look it up or watch the movie. The reveal is stupid in the funniest way. Definitely a case of you either love or hate it.
I liked the Heart Eyes slasher design a lot. It was fun and silly which just really matches the tone of the movie overall. I thought outside of that, the movie was visually just kind of okay. There are some sets like that big climax scene at the end were really pretty but everything was just shot pretty standardly. The gore effects are okay and the kills are kind of immemorable, unfortunately. I think the only death I remember is the one of the girl at the start and then the lug wrench kill which I think is in the trailer for it. The action in the movie is very fun, though! The chase sequences are crazy fun and makes the characters really shine with how quick-thinking both them and the killer can be.
My favorite thing about the movie was the acting and the characters. I personally found them extremely likeable. They were consistent and funny and genuine. I feel like towards the end, things kind of spiral outwards a bit but it finds itself again. I don't think it's a perfect movie but it ended up being pretty fun. I feel like the cast understood perfectly what kind of movie they had signed up for and locked in. I definitely think that that was the strongest part of the movie.
I think some people find the movie cringe because it definitely dates itself a lot with all the social media stuff but I can't help but think about a lot of others movies that do the same and still make it big. I think people are just a bit weird whenever media brings up things like "callout culture" or how toxic online spaces can be. But I don't think the movie takes itself or any of those themes seriously, so I don't think you should either.
The Magnus Archives Season One
I tried getting into The Magnus Archives a few years ago. I mostly wanted to check it out because everything I saw of the character Michael, I loved, and I wanted more. A few friends insisted it was really good too and this isn't me saying it isn't, this is me saying that my attention span makes it really difficult to pay attention to podcasts. I mean, I'm the person who is constantly playing video essays in the background as I get work done and walking away from them not having heard a single word. So my brain is just kind of trained to tune out audio whenever I'm doing literally anything but listening intently. And obviously, I don't want to sit down for maybe a hundred hours absolutely still and only listening to a podcast. Anyway, eventually I worked out a process in which I listen as intently as I can while getting things done (namely drawing) and then later that day, go back and skim read a written version of the episode and take notes on important details on Notion. That's worked out pretty well for me and gotten me up to Episode 56! But this review is only for Season One so alas.
Anyway, I really ended up liking this podcast so much. I love the characters - Jon especially I ended up getting so attached to! I love Tim as well and Martin and Sasha too. I definitely think Jon is my favorite of the bunch. Oh, Elias too - I've loved what I've seen from him so far, which isn't a whole lot but we love a Suspicious Suspicierton lurking the premises. I think the actors all do a relatively good job. I love the sound design in the podcast a lot too. I think it's a great concept and I feel like it's all fleshed out really intelligently. Everything feels very purposeful, very thoroughly planned out. I don't know if that is the case. As a creator, I know how often some shit you really didn't think about could end up later being really kind of important or a big highlight for people. And I think that's it's very cool that intent never really seems to be the focus. Just world-building.
There's some things I do not really enjoy, though. I don't really like that when you're listening to these one after the other - they all just sound exactly the same. They all have a very particular writing style, where every beat is exactly the same. They're supposed to be written statements told from the perspectives of different people but they all sound like they're statements taken from the exact same person every time. And no amount of Jon putting on an accent is gonna really change that. It's kind of laughable sometimes but most of the time, it can make the episodes where it's a lot of statements being told one after the other feel like a slog. Like same face syndrome with writing.
I also can not not stop thinking about it after my partner pointed it out but the show is constantly pointing out people's races/ethnicities in it but only if they're people of color. It's a very bizarre choice. I can understand that some people focus on that kind of stuff when they're recollecting but this kind of falls in line with the earlier observation where all the statements all kind of sound the same. "There's a Chinese family", "This guy, I think he was Puerto Rican or something", "Then she looked at me. I think she was mixed." Like, I do not understand the purpose of this, especially in a series like this where it's kind of important to pay attention to the details. Maybe they're trying to sprinkle in details that are unimportant to mask the important ones? But in that case, they should stick to the statement givers infodumping about the one thing they're very good at doing and how that makes them very sure that the thing they experienced was fucked up and crazy.
The ending of Season One has me dreading Michael's fate as the show goes on. I have been reassured that things get better overtime so I'm hoping that is the case because the finale was just bad. I wish I cared at all about Prentiss but I don't. The show never really gave her much affection, never really treated her like a person. I never got to know her as a character. There was one statement where we get some insight into her, but it mostly focuses on - you know, the whole bug thing. The actual finale itself was also just, a wet fart. They all hide away, Tim breaks through a wall or something and then they turn on the sprinkler system and it kills all of Prentiss' bugs. Or most of them. And it's over. It just felt like a huge build-up only for like, nothing to really happen. The craziest thing that happens is Sasha getting yoinked by the table, or whatever. And that's just like, an aside. Prentiss, meanwhile, just wanders around and vandalizes shit. Like, who actually cares? I wish there'd been more of a confrontation, an attempt to try to reason with her, a glimpse of her as a person, suffering underneath all that. Anything, really. It just felt very color-by-numbers and it was over before it ever got interesting.
It wasn't so bad that I wasn't to quit or anything but like I said, I did get nervous because I didn't want Michael to get a flop end like that - mostly fueled by the feeling that he's possibly getting set up like the next big bad they're gonna have to deal with. I've been reassured that it's fine, though. So we'll see, we'll see.
As much as I'd love to go through every episode and talk about them all at length, that's what my notes are for. Maybe I'll make them publicly available some day. But in the meantime - my favorite and least favorite. I think my favorite statement from the first season was probably Anatomy Class. It was equal parts silly and horrifying. I love all those weirdo freaky students and their very normal names and I'm very hopeful that we hear more about what their whole deal is. My least favorite is probably Schwartzwald. It was just really boring. There are definitely a few in the whole that are pretty boring but this one is a slog to get through every time I've done it - be it listening to it or reading it. I just don't care.
I'm already a fair bit into Season Two and I'm really enjoying it a lot! Really eager to see where the rest of it goes. I'm getting the vibe that I might be forgetting to mention some thoughts I've had. I should start writing things down ... Oh well. I'll edit if so.
Fortune-499
Fortune-499 was one of the games on the BFRJAE I was definitely looking forward to playing when I was first going through the list. It looked very cute and seemed to have an interesting gameplay mechanic and after having played it, I can say that both of those things are true. The game centers Cassandra, a fortune teller working in the magical resources department of some blanket corp - underpaid and underappreciated. The story focuses themes of worker exploitation, fate, burnout and more. Usually Cassandra's job consists of what I assumed to just be clerical work, but when hordes of monsters suddenly appear at her job in search of their leader - she's roped in to a bit more than she can handle. More than she's willing to admit, anyway. We also meet her boss Derek, who tries to stick up for his team as best he can but he's kind of a needy wimp. A charming needy wimp, at least. She's got a cool friend she hangs out with outside of work sometimes called Kiki also. Wish we saw just a tiny bit more of her tbh. And a secretive strange witch working for the monsters with a score to settle ...
We also learn that her name is cursed and so she is also cursed by proxy, especially as it turns out - it's a name she chose for herself. There are definitely some themes of gender identity interlaced through the story with Cassandra's character but even though it's never fully dissected - it never feels like it isn't enough. In fact, wanting more feels like prying - especially with everything Cassandra already has on her plate. I like the writing in the game a lot. The characters were fun and the humor got some genuine laughs out of me. I really like the lesson it builds itself up to and the ending, though pretty tough - was the perfect finale.
The gameplay is also very fun. It's kind of ... a deckbuilding turn-based rock-paper-scissors. You have a deck of cards and the four cards you draw per move from that deck of cards tells you what the highest probability rock-paper-scissors attack your enemy is going to make is. You then have to decide what your move will be based off your divination. It's fun, a little frustrating at times because while it's chance heavily skewed to favor you (and the game definitely allows for some extra skewing) - it's still chance so sometimes you get put in tricky situations, especially as things get more puzzle-y and complicated as the story builds and the mechanics match it.
Everything that essentially "packages" this game is also amazing. The art is great - a nostalgic pixel style with pretty colors and fun character and enemy designs. The level design is fun and always has a fun and interesting spin every time. The music is amazing too. I'd genuinely get some of the songs stuck in my head sometimes. The game really understands the tone it wants to go for, the story wants to tell - you really feel like everything's in perfect symbiosis with each other.
Some nitpicks I have is that there are quite a few typos in the game. Also whenever you pick up a new spell, it by default forces you to remove one of the three spells you already have equipped instead of choosing to just exit out of the spell acquisition menu and continue with the spells you had before. I wanted to see what new spells I'd get from the new levels I was playing. It didn't mean I wanted to use them though. So that was a little frustrating and only encouraged me to keep away from the new spell cabinet thingies whenever I felt confident in the spells I already had.
I think the most unforgivable aspect of this game is that it will not let you save mid-level and only has autosave. A level could take you anywhere between 30-60 minutes to complete if it's your first run through the game so getting stuck at the big boss at the very end of a level and not being able to save and wrestling whether you want to go to bed more than you want to not have to play through the whole level again the next time you boot up the game ... it was rough. I really did not like it. I don't think having a save function would have negatively impacted gameplay at all, in fact I find it a pretty awful decision not to.
I don't have too much else to say about the game in all honesty. It was just fun. I liked the gameplay, I liked the characters. I think my favorite level was the blacksmith lawyers. Figuring out that puzzle was a bit of a nightmare but it was extremely satisfying when I finally got it right. I think it took me two separate sessions to get it too. Lol. I think the legal department in general in the game is so much fun. I feel like the characters that needed to be rounded out all got rounded out well enough, nobody ever really felt like they overstayed their welcome, y'know? It all sort of fell together well. Music is great, visuals were great. I don't know that it has replay value really imo but I will definitely think on my time playing it fondly and highly recommend it to anyone who may be curious about it.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Speak No Evil (2022), Speak No Evil (2024), Hazbin Hotel Season 1, Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) and Angel (2018).
For those that don't know, I've been really busy this last month. I came back to the states to stay with my GF after six months with my partner and then immediately had to move house. It's been completely exhausting but we've managed. I'm back now and it's time to write. Unfortunately, this means I have a lot to talk about. This one is ... very long. Whoops.
There's still so much more media that I need to catch up on talking about on here but I'm trying to break it down into parts for the sake of both of our sanities.
Speak No Evil Showdown
Ro and I had been planning to do this double feature for quite some time and I donât know how to feel now that weâve finally gotten around to it. Starting with the original movie, I gotta say that I have straight up not stopped thinking about it since the day we watched it. Itâs brutal. Itâs unrelenting. The movie centers a couple and their daughter - Louise, Bjorn and Agnes, who befriend another couple and their son - Karin, Patrick and Abel while on a holiday to Italy. Things go very well and we learn some important things - Patrick is a doctor, Louise is a vegetarian, Agnes has a stuffed rabbit she is detrimentally attached to and Abel is shy, so much so that he does not speak. Probably the most important thing to happen during these early scenes is a moment in which Agnes loses her stuffed rabbit, Ninus. Bjorn goes off and wanders around town looking for it, eventually he finds it and then returns to find that his wife has been approached by this friendly couple and their son. When he explains what he was off doing, Patrick calls him a hero. Put a pin in that.
Some time after this trip is over, Patrick and Karin invite Bjorn and Louise (and Agnes) to come visit them in the Netherlands, to get away from their droning lives in the city for a bit and stay in their extremely secluded cabin in the woods. Louise is skeptical of this invitation, something that sort of deflates Bjorn. She argues that itâs a long time to spend with people who are still technically strangers to them, that itâs far, that she feels weird about everything which is pretty reasonable - but ultimately, Bjorn makes enough pouty faces and she caves to his request. And thatâs the crux of this movie. When do you put your foot down and say no? When are you going to set your boundaries and hold people to them? When will you fight for yourself, for your comfort, for your safety? How long until you stop yielding to others for the sake of being polite, for the sake of not being an inconvenience? And will it be too late?
During this second, more intimate trip, scenes are inflicted upon us. I donât think Iâve ever been more stressed and uncomfortable watching something than I had watching this movie. It was amazing. Slowly, with every passing moment, these new friends of Bjorn, Louise and Agnes overstep and toe the line and we can only grit our teeth and watch helplessly as our protagonists smile through it all.
Patrick pressures Louise to eat a piece of a boar he hunted. Instead of reminding him that sheâs a vegetarian, instead of firmly declining - she eats the meat. Agnes, who usually shares the bed with her parents during trips because she is a particularly coddled child, is made to sleep on a mattress on the floor in Abelâs room. Louise accepts this and urges Agnes to do the same - passing on the very same mentality that inevitably dooms them all. Itâs these small things at first, but they donât stay small things. Patrick and Karin invite Bjorn and Louise out for dinner, only to reveal at the last minute that the children would be staying behind at home with a babysitter. Louise is incredibly uncomfortable with this but, in the end, relents. During the dinner, Patrick begins to grill Louise over her being a vegetarian - which also makes her uncomfortable but he gets little pushback about it. Patrick and Karin start feeling each other up while dancing, which again makes Louise uncomfortable. And then, when theyâre done eating - Patrick comments on how high the bill ended up being. Bjorn offers to split the bill, to which Patrick thanks him for taking care of it and leaves - sticking him with everything to pay on his own.
Now you might be noticing at this point that Louise is majorly the one who is rather disquieted by this situation. She doesnât want to go on the trip, sheâs pressured to eat meat, she doesnât like other people parenting her daughter, etc. What the fuck is Bjorn up to? So I gotta tackle the biggest eyebrow raise to me which is that there is a fascinating relationship between Bjorn and Patrick. An envy, a fixation, a crush even? Patrick is strong and rugged and he says what he wants and he does what he wants and he doesnât really bother with considering the feelings of others and heâs charming and cunning and Bjorn canât figure out if he wants to be him or fuck him. And Patrick knows this, and he weaponizes that. He weaponizes his masculinity and he weaponizes Bjornâs insecurities for the sake of their game of cat and mouse. Watching them in the same scene, you can tell that there is a magnetism there and calling it compelling is an understatement. Itâs like watching a fish investigate the glowing light of an anglerfish.
Thereâs one scene where Patrick takes Bjorn out to this rocky middle of nowhere spot. Bjorn breaks down about how tired he is of his life, how mundane and empty and repetitive it all is. Thereâs this really good review on Letterboxd here talking about how a lot of the themes of the movie intersect with the cycle of capitalism. You should check it out here because I donât really have much to add to what theyâre saying but itâs really such a cool observation. And so Patrick lets him out of the car and he has him scream, assures him that no one can hear him there and he does. And itâs cathartic but Ro pointed out something very interesting about this scene and thatâs that even in this case, where heâs finally able to just find some kind of release for his pent up rage, itâs still out in the middle of nowhere. Itâs still not bothering others. Itâs still polite, itâs still considerate, itâs still hidden away.
There are a few times where we finally get just the tiniest bit of relief, the tiniest bit of pushback. One such occasion is, after feeling reasonably violated when Patrick goes into the bathroom while she is showering to brush his teeth and pace around like a lunatic, Louise seeks comfort with Bjorn. The two end up blowing off some steam and having sex, during which they decide to ignore Agnes outside their room asking for comfort. After the sex, Louise goes to check on Agnes only to find her not in her bed - so she checks the only other place she could be. The pit in my stomach that formed at the sight of Agnes in Patrick and Karinâs bed, all sleeping - with the latter two completely naked ⌠I couldnât even begin to describe. Itâs such an horrifying violation. And hereâs where Louise has had enough. Well, momentarily anyway. She grabs Agnes, she rushes back to their room and she makes everyone pack up so that they could sneak off into the night. And man, do you wish that was a roll credits moment.
As theyâre leaving, Agnes finds out that she canât find Ninus anywhere. She cries over her plush rabbit, unable to hear the chorus of everyone in the audience screaming âFUCK THE RABBIT!!!â Bjorn pulls over to check and make sure Ninus is nowhere to be found and makes the decision - much to everyoneâs dismay - to go back. And this is where weâre pulling that pin from earlier. It is impossible to overstate just how fucking terrifying Patrick and Karin are. From day one, they are grooming their victims. Every compliment, every kind gesture, even every criticism and rude action - functions in this delicate balance where everyone just sort of naturally falls into their roles of predator and prey. Bjorn wants to be the hero, so he turns around and goes back into the lionâs den.
Obviously, the other family are awake by now and very distressed at the fact that the others left without even saying goodbye. And then weâre followed up by a relentless amount of gaslighting. âWell, where were you when your daughter called for you?â âYouâre upset with us because weâre affectionate with each other?â âIâm sorry we donât have a big fancy house to accommodate you all in.â Itâs one of those conversations where you fall into every pitfall and then proceed to think about it nonstop every time youâre struggling to fall asleep. Where you think about what you shouldâve said instead of what you did and having to bite back the bile of not saying what you wanted to. So they apologize and they make up and everything is okay now.
Another time where Louise and Bjorn put their foot down is shortly after the last scene when Abel and Agnes do a silly little dance in front of their parents, one they had choreographed. Now these kids are like 8-11 years old. Very young. So obviously it looks like a dance choreographed by two 8-11 year olds. Patrick gets crazy during this, blowing up at Abel repeatedly because heâs off-beat, because he keeps forgetting the moves. It results in him launching a mug at him, even. And this is when Bjorn finally reaches his breaking point, shouting at Patrick for this - defending an innocent kid that didnât do anything wrong. But itâs interesting to think that this rage never seems to exist when it comes to defending himself, or even sometimes his wife and daughter. Maybe because he subconsciously sees them as extensions of himself. If theyâre rude, heâs also rude. But kid is this odd sort of outlier in this puzzle.
That night, Abel acts up. He apparently has some difficulty sleeping, wailing for a while until he suddenly just passes out essentially. Itâs something that concerned Louise and Bjorn at first of course, but Patrick and Karin quickly explained it away, shrugged it all off, insisted it was all fine. And so they figured everything was. But this night, Abel is refusing to settle and Patrick is fed up.
After some really concerning noises followed by Patrick heading back to bed, Bjorn gets out of bed to check on Abel. He wanders around for a bit, right into this separate sort of shed outside. He steps inside, curious about this place that heâd noticed before was pretty tucked and locked away. And in here, he finds pictures. Hundreds of pictures of Karin and Patrick with other families, only something isnât matching up. In every photo, they have a new kid and that kid just so happens to be the kid from the photo with the previous family and the one before that and so on and so forth. Itâs an insane reveal, so insane that it sort of broke my suspension of disbelief for a moment. If these people had killed this many people and abducted this many kids, they wouldâve obviously been found out by now. Itâs like genuinely absurd how many there are. In retrospect, I donât know that itâs meant to be really taken that literally. I mean, in the context of us watching the movie - if that makes sense. What I mean by that is that, the world doesnât care.
Ro and I did our usual half-star five-star review reading when we were done with this movie and itâs genuinely so baffling to watch people not only not get the point but also quite literally turn into the literal antagonists of the movie. I donât want to go too much into the end here because I want people to watch this movie. Just know that it doesnât end well, not for Louise, not for Bjorn and not for Agnes. But I do want to talk about what people failed to take away from this movie. Most people with negative opinions of this movie expected some sort of action thriller, basically the slop served up to them by the American remake - which trust me, I am getting to. This is a horror movie. Itâs meant to be horrific. Mainstream media centralizes stories of triumph, so much so that when things end badly in a movie - people consider that a fault of it and not the fucking point. And donât get me wrong, I really hate movies that exist only to torture people - emotionally, physically. I find them often one-dimensional and focused more on shock value than anything. But this movie truly lacks a lot of that. Itâs such a slow climb to the end and when you get there, you are very matter-of-factly kicked in the face and it hurts because the movie earned that hurt. Because youâre frustrated, because you spent the whole movie going âI wouldâve done so-and-so if this happened to meâ or âThis is how I wouldâve handled itâ. Itâs such a transparent lack of basic human empathy to not even be able to consider that there is no such thing as a âperfect victimâ. You can do everything wrong. You donât deserve to be hurt because of it. But people wrote things like âThose people deserved that by the end of itâ or âThey were so stupid. They shouldâve runâ. Like that is the point!
At the end of the day, this incessant need to put the feelings of others before their own boundaries, before their comfort was what ended up leading them to their demise. It made me think so much about actual real life true crime stories where victims are found with the DNA of their attackers under their nails and people reply talking about âThey didnât deserve this. They fought so hard to live.â. How is this personâs life worth any more someoneâs who didnât fight? Someone who froze in fear or fainted or just couldnât or gave up? They arenât any more deserving of their fate! And itâs so fucking weird to see this same weird victim mentality leeching into peopleâs perspective when it comes to this movie that is specifically made to criticize the cycle of complacency.
Itâs important to say no! Itâs important to follow your instincts! Itâs important to fight for yourself! Itâs important to ask to be treated with respect! That is what the movie is TELLING YOU!!! This is a two things can be true at the same time situation in that, âItâs important you establish boundaries and always listen to your gut when something is making you uncomfortableâ and âYou do not deserve to be harmed if you make decisions that put you in a vulnerable situationâ can coexist. People, I feel, are just ⌠I dunno. Anyway, itâs a broad statement for me to make anyway. Not everyone thinks like this. A lot of people have really awesome and insightful things to say about this movie. Itâs just frustrating to see so many just ⌠not get what is so clearly spelled out by the movie. I think it was a stupendous watch overall. The tone it set was terse and off-putting and ominous from the jump. I do think maybe it was a bit overdone from the beginning, definitely yelling in our ears about how this is definitely not going to be a fun time. It wouldâve been, I think, a bit nice to start off a bit softer in a way that matches how both Karin and Patrick initially come off just completely harmless and disarming.
Okay, I could go on about this movie for ages so I need to cut myself short here because I have so much else to talk about in this post. Before jumping into the American remake, I just want to add that this movie is extremely well-acted. Even the kids were locked the fuck in. Karin was genuinely the scariest person on the planet to me. She is just so detached and unbothered by everything, it makes a knot in my stomach - especially in juxtaposition with her co-actors in later scenes. The movieâs visually stunning, extremely gloomy and foreboding when it needs to be. Ugh, itâs just great.
And then, because I guess we as a society are just incapable of original ideas anymore - the movie got a remake. Iâd just like to clarify that there are only two years difference between these two movies so itâs not like theyâre brushing the dust off an oldie to revive interest in it or something. And itâs just ⌠bad. Itâs not the worst but itâs bad. What I mean by that is - it did what a movie is meant to do, which is to entertain. It was just a fun action movie watch. It was whatever. I wonât ever see it again, in all honesty. It was just fine. But itâs not Speak No Evil. This is something else. Something that should be pretty fucking embarrassed about comparing itself to the original. Itâs just one of those things where you can only be confused, yâknow? What was the train of thought here? What was the logic? Itâs just not there for me. Okay, so let me stop whining and actually talk about the movie.
So letâs get the biggest issue out of the way. The cast and characters. There are some significant changes made to them which I think work strongly against them. The relationship issues between Louise and Ben (Bjorn) take center-stage. Apparently one of them cheated on the other and they have trust issues or whatever and honestly, none of it really matters - does it? Because itâs just something they kind of argue about for a bit and then the story moves on. The actors have no chemistry from the jump and are both pretty insufferable. Maybe because they feel like characters and not people, as is usually the case with these remakes. Agnes is awful. Both of the kids are, in fact. They are way too old to be playing the characters theyâre playing how theyâre playing them, acting extremely juvenile but then tapping into moments of genius whenever the plot demands it.
Also - yes, James McAvoy is in this and I wish he would be cast in a movie where he can really just kind of go ape shit that is good. Well, I guess that would be Filth - which is probably his best movie in my opinion. But he has some fun crazy muscle body horror stuff going on in this and Split and they are just unfortunately not good movies. They should cast him in a Baki live action. Anyway, his character is named Paddy because this is taking place in England so sure, why not. Whatever. I donât like that heâs a boisterous and loud person from the jump. His acting is just unhinged from the beginning which ⌠Okay, I will say, he definitely gets more unhinged later because James does have like limitless ability to perform insanity so his character does have somewhere to go- but it just doesnât really set you up for anything because youâre already put off by him a bit from the beginning. In the scene where theyâre first introducing themselves to one another, heâs already taking Agnes on a vespa despite Louisâ complaints and driving her about recklessly. Itâs just too much all at once at the start. Heâs just too abrasive which also weirdly makes him come off as ⌠stupider? than the couple in the original movie. Both of them, in fact. Karin is Ciara in the remake, btw. But both Paddy and Ciara just feel like these hotheaded oafs who just kind of stumbled into this situation. Which just ⌠is not possible with the extent of their whole scheme. Oh, God. Their scheme. I can not stand when people see a thing that doesnât really get explained much because the horror kind of lies in that unanswered question and then comes up with like convoluted âfix itsâ by over-explaining and just fucking ruining it all from the jump. But I havenât even gotten that far yet in all this. Sheesh. Okay, so thatâs the crux of my issue with their characters - which to summarize is just that they are simply way less interesting characters who are mostly poorly acted compared to their original counterparts. So, the story.
Honestly, a lot of the skeleton is still there - I mean, what would be the point of the remake if there wasnât? So structurally, a lot of the first half is much of the same. Some details are tweaked and Ro and I couldnât help but notice that a lot of those details were things we had unimportant sideways complaints about when watching the original. Minor things, yâknow? And interestingly enough, I found myself pretty annoyed at these changes, even if theyâd been things Iâd mentioned not liking too much during my watch of the first movie - because sometimes things arenât just made to cater to us and itâs okay to have feelings about that - positive or negative but James Watkins shouldâve just written a fix-it fic on AO3 like the rest of us and moved on instead of making his discomfort everyoneâs problem.
Harping back on the characterization thing too, something that I thought was odd in this movie was that there was a bit more pushback from Louise and even Bjorn at times even early on. As the movie goes on, we get some arguments that arenât native to the original story but factor in that Louise and Ben are American now so we get what could be an awkward stilted dialogue about guns but no, itâs just a pretty standard debate. With Louise holding to her anti-gun mentality even after Paddy argues that population control is imperative in keeping the ecosystem balanced. Like this is what I mean with what I was saying earlier about pandering. The director watched the first movie and saw the scenes where Patrick was domineering and even a bit subtly misogynistic when he talked down to an awkwardly polite Louise and they went, âI wouldnât be a pushover. Iâd argue my perspectiveâ, completely missing the point (Iâm sorry to keep harping on this but COME ON!!) and then made the remake with all these changes thinking he was fixing a mistake instead of just bull in China shopping the entire narrative. The original movie is just such a slow and careful masterpiece. Itâs so thoughtfully crafted with a lot of intent put behind it. And the remake just takes a chainsaw to all of it. Itâs like impossible not to get mad. For me, anyway, apparently. I just donât understand the point of any of it. It really feels like Watkins didnât like the original movie at all. Which is just ⌠really sad.
Okay, so just envision it. The skeleton is about the same so far. Tack on some really uninteresting takes on the original characters, bad acting from adults and children alike and inconsistent story. And then we get to the big changes.
In this movie, Ant (Abel) takes on a bigger role in trying to get Agnes and her family to understand what all is going on which is just ⌠different, I guess. I think something that really fed into the misery of the original movie is that Abel is so young. Heâs so young, he canât really explain himself to anyone - especially not with his missing tongue. He can barely even process what is going on. But because heâs older in the remake, itâd be a bit silly for Ant to not try, right? I guess Iâm not opposed to it in like a stand-alone concept. I guess, when it comes to things I donât really hate about this movie, itâs all just that it just should have been another movie. But I donât think that the remake wouldâve gotten nearly enough attention if it hadnât been a remake so, there we go. Anyway, so this kid manages to actually get through to Agnes what is going on. Thereâs other stuff going on before this but I really canât stress how much of it is either irrelevant unimportant bullshit that has been added to the story or how much of it is completely butchering the way entire scenes were structured narratively and practically. This whole thing would be ten times as long if I went on about every little detail. But yeah so Agnes finally gets it kinda and then itâs her turn to get it across to her parents who then want to leave obviously. But by then, itâs too late. So the trap card activates.
So we gotta talk about the scheme.
Much like the original couple, Paddy and Ciara invite couples over to then kill them, keep their possessions and their child. The reason why Patrick and Karin do this is really just kind of left to the audience to deduce. You could say they have the same reason. You could say they have another reason. Whatever you personally decide, it is nowhere near as stuffed down our throats as it is in this remake. They just tell us everything. Itâs all a scheme theyâve cooked up with some other local to kill couples and drain their bank accounts, Paddy even goes on a tirade painting this all as if it were some sort of anti-classist vigilantism. They happen to target people with kids because Ciaraâs decided she wants a kid but I donât know why because they presumably kill them. I always read them having a child in the original as them using the child to come off as relatable to parents with similarly-aged children, but at the same time the original movie to me exists in a plane outside of reality. I donât really know how to explain it. I guess that I feel that a lot of the functionality of things and the mechanics of the real world just kind of exist outside of the situation. There is no point in âlogickingâ your way through why they do what they do, how they get away with it, etc. That isnât the point. But the American remake canât conceive of that because American creators think theyâre smarter than everyone else in the world. So itâs not that there was blank space left there on purpose. Itâs that you didnât explain this well enough. So we get a reason for everything, just told to us. They even use the most bone-chilling line of the original movie as just a throwaway. It feels like a punch to the gut.
And then the rest of the movie is what youâd expect from a movie like this. The family hunkers down inside the house while Paddy, Ciara and the random local thatâs helping them with this all try to break in and kill them. There are so many traps a la Home Alone. I will admit, I was pretty entertained but itâs just kind of the formula, right? To be entertaining? Itâs like listening to a pop song and bobbing your head or tapping your foot. Oh also, during all of this we learn that apparently Paddy was/is(?) Ciaraâs foster-father. I donât know why I should give a shit honestly. It was just such a random thing to incorporate, as if we need another reason to root against Paddy aside from the fact that he kills people and cuts off kids tongues. Karin was my favorite from the original because she was so brutal. And all with a smile. The remake just made Ciara a victim, which was just a really uninteresting direction to go with her character. Especially because sheâs just kind of useless. I definitely think I like her more in the first half of the movie and I think she was probably the strongest actor of the bunch in those early scenes but once she starts getting hysterical, sheâs just nothing to me.
So the ending is just a big stand-off where Paddyâs decided that now that Ciaraâs dead (sheâs got thrown off the roof RIP), he needs a knew wife so he grabs up Agnes, who was by the way just told to go hide somewhere. No one to like, look out for her or anything. Just everyone split up and go hide by the car! Surely this wonât end poorly. Except Paddy grabs her OBVIOUSLY! What the fuck did you think was gonna happen? Anyway, so he wants Agnes as his wife now. Oh also, Iâd just like to add that itâs very funny when the movie keeps highlighting some kind of age difference between Paddy and Kiara when they really do not look that distant in age. They have Louise at one point ask, âWhat age did they meet again?â but they both look grown. Itâs kind of funny. But yeah, so as I was saying - Agnes is now at gunpoint. And she ends up using a syringe of ketamine he was earlier going to inject her with to sedate her for her tongue removal to down him. Ant then busts his skull in with a brick and we get the shot of the worst prop head ever while heâs doing it. I do think Antâs actor had his strong moments in this movie. Heâs much better than Agnes'.
Oh right, almost forgot to mention. This movie is such a fuckass Tesla ad. It was actually cringe-inducing. But uhhh ... anyway, the good guys winned and bad guys losed and we all learned nothing from this! Yay! Long live Hollywood!
Hazbin Hotel Season 1
I've always found the discourse about Hazbin Hotel fascinating. It really makes you realize how people can be when "their side" has officially made their mind up about something. I've always been the kind of person who likes to make my own mind up about things, as opposed to falling in line when someone tells me what I'm supposed to think. So obviously I watched the show everyone is constantly wasting their limited and precious time on this Earth arguing about. Let me just make it clear that I don't care about the discourse revolving the studio or Vivzie. That had nothing to do with this review. I don't care about fandom bullshit. I don't care about discourse. I'm just reviewing a show I watched.
So, I had seen the pilot when it first came out ages ago and I enjoyed it. I had been looking forward to it because I love musicals very much and getting to see an animated 18+ musical that wasn't fucking Family Guy or something was kind of exciting. I didn't think it was the most amazing thing to ever be made in the history of art and animation but I had fun watching it. So I was looking forward to the proper show. I was curious about what they'd change, what they'd keep and to be honest - what the crux of the show was going to be. Based off the pilot, I was wondering if it'd be more episodic with random episodes that didn't really follow each other or if it was going to be more grounded in a timeline. And in the end it was ... kind of both? But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Hazbin Hotel centers Charlie, Princess of Hell - determined to help lost souls redeem themselves in order to leave Hell and get into heaven by way of a hotel where guests stay to work on and better themselves. The main reason for wanting to get out of Hell is because once a year, angels come down from the heavens and ... kill(?) people in Hell. So she wants to save them from that so they have happy eternal life in Heaven. It's a cute concept ... until you think about it for too long. Maybe this is the point of the show, I don't know. It feels too early to ask this question but you can't help but wonder - what exactly qualifies as sinning? The show casting substance abuse or sex work as actions that should be punished until they are stopped feels a bit like it's just reinforcing fascistic Christian values. And why stop there? Who is hanging around in Hell because they dared mix wool and linen (Deuteronomy 22:11) in their life as a human? Or because they ate a shrimp (Leviticus 11:10)? But maybe that's the point of the show - that this kind of stuff is just arbitrary and convenient for the ones writing it down. I don't know because, like I said, it's early on - just the first season, and this kind of stuff hasn't really been discussed at all so it's possible we go more into the philosophy of sort of stuff as the story goes but it was something I couldn't help but think about - particularly whenever characters like Angel Dust or Husk were getting dogged over things like sex work or substance abuse. I'm interested in seeing where the show goes with this and would be pretty disappointed if the answer was ... well, nowhere.
Also, I'm a little confused about how death works in this show. They're ... in Hell. So they're dead, right? At the end of the season, one of the characters self-sacrifices to protect their friends and actually gets redeemed and sent up to Heaven. But ... they died? I don't understand the logistics of it. You either die in real life or you don't and when you do, you get sent to either Heaven or Hell - but I guess maybe Hell functions more as like ... a purgatory than it does actual Hell? And if you are killed, your soul is gone forever. But this other character died so do you get a reevaluation or something when you die? I don't really get at all how any of that works.
Which brings me to the characters. The main characters specifically are genuinely the best part of the show. A lot of people argue that they are over-designed, ugly and annoying. I personally think that's subjective and I think there are no hard rules about what characters in any media format should be like and anyone who says there are are fucking lame. I am actually kind of obsessed with what is practically the equivalent of someone's sparkledog OCs getting their own show. I also like a fair amount of the designs on the show. Maybe not like as a style I would take on for me or my characters or incorporate into my art but I think they're fine in their show, doing their thing.
Sir Pentious is definitely a front-runner for a favorite. He's so lovable and silly. I mostly like his design, except the eyes on his tail always feel so weird to me. It's not that I don't like that they're there but something about the combination of the pattern already on his tail and the roundedness of the eyes makes it feel off. But I love his little hat and how reactive and expressive his hood is. Angel Dust is another favorite for me. Maybe I just have a soft spot for him because he actually reminds me a lot of one of my own OCs, LOL. But I liked him before my OC was really around/had much in common with him so I'm choosing to believe that is not the case. I think people saying that his character is somehow homophobic or transphobic or whatever other bullshit they want to come up with are just trying to build themselves a hill to die on. I do not see it whatsoever and I think it's honestly kind of fun to see a character who is a weird sex pervert but also very likeable. Angel Dust is a sweet guy under his self-admitted persona.
Even baddies (negative) like Val and Vox can bring an electric energy into a scene. Do I want to throw Val specifically into a wall and watch him splat to death? Well, yeah - but he's pretty compelling and chilling to watch. I love Vox a lot. He's so pathetic. And Velvette is fun though we haven't seen a whole lot from her - I'm hoping that all the set up in this season was to make them the big bads for Season 2 so that we get to see and learn more of them.
I think the cast does a great job in bringing these characters to life. I'm especially enamored by the choice of Keith David as Husk. He's perfect. I do really miss the original Alastor's voice effect. I don't know if they toned it down because too many people complained about it but I thought it was fine and felt very true to the jankiness of the show and overall vibe of Alastor's character. The voice acting never really feels off and they're all such talented singers. I don't think there was really a moment where I was put off by their vocal performances. Well, at least not in the technical aspect. Which leads me to chat about my first major problem with the show.
I think there are times where the very charming "these are someone's janky and silly OCs in a TV show" works against it. One of the cases is just that there is no real pacing or balance when it comes to side characters. Every introduction and reveal means something to the people who made it or maybe even people who have been following the creator prior to the show because they know who these characters are but it honestly left me, who really had no ties to Vivziepop at all prior to watching the show and little interest in checking out anything outside of it, kind of confused. To the point where I looked online to see if there was ... anything I was missing but it seems not? When characters like Carmilla or Emily, who are like literally just being introduced in that very seen - get these emotional ballads, they feel just ... largely unearned. It sucks. The reason why songs like Loser Baby or Ready For This hit so good, is because the characters singing it worked to get there. The story brought them there. We didn't really get introductions for Carmilla or frankly, any of the people in her goon squad. So a lot of their interactions, for example - the drama with Velvette - meant nothing to me.
So many of the main characters didn't really get songs of their own. I guess there's still time for that to happen but I don't think random side characters should've taken precedence over the main cast, and if they were going to and we're meant to take them seriously - then the show needs to treat them as such. I think a lot of the crime syndicate drama wasn't really thought out or given much importance - which is crazy because they gave the characters involved with this subplot multiple songs. It just unfortunately felt lazy. Which sucks because it seems like a lot of people are intrigued by them. Maybe they will in season 2? But in that case those emotive songs should've been saved for later.
I definitely think the songs are at their best when they're funny or electro-swingy and at their worst when they're ballads and trying to be emotional. I actually made a tierlist of all the songs in the show so enjoy that.
Something I noticed is how much the style of the art changed from pilot to final. There seems to be a lot of back and forth on how people feel about the stylistic changes but I'm personally fine with them. While there are some designs I preferred the pilot versions of, I don't find the new versions so egregious that it puts me off the character entirely. I did really like the jank of the pilot too and while it is at times present in the final show, it is a bit missed. It's not one of those earth-shattering kinda deals. I just found how rough the pilot was in comparison kind of charming but I obviously understand that with proper production and all that, everything is bound to get smoothed over. And I don't think it at all stripped the show of it's personality, which is often the case with these situations - so at least there's that.
I also love those shots where someone monologuing goes into focus but in the background, you can see everyone in like little guys versions of themselves standing there listening. It's cute and silly and made me giggle and point to them every time.
Despite some additional nitpicks outside of what I've already mentioned previously, with either gags that I don't really find funny or the show going full-edge, I genuinely ended up enjoying my time watching it. I just have to say, it irritates me to no end just how much people go on about how twisted and dark this show is. I'll be honest, when I first watched the pilot years ago - I was fully anticipating not liking it but I kept an open mind. And I'm glad I did because I really think it's a fun show. I'm looking forward to Season 2 in October and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they come back with stronger writing and characterization chops.
Predator: Killer of Killers
Man, this movie was just great. It was so great. I want to start this by clarifying, I have never seen any prior Predator movie. I'm probably not going to. I usually do not like the alien and most sci-fi genre shlock. A lot of my friends recommended this though so I decided to check it out.
The movie is split into three parts. In each part, a warrior from a different setting/background is targeted by one of those big ole alien guys - managing to kill them but ultimately ending up abducted and made to participate in a death battle against one another. In the first chapter, we have The Shield - Ursa. She is a sick ass fucking viking lady. Brutal and tough and lost in her desire for vengeance against the man who killed her father when she was a girl, Zoran. She and her clan, one of which her son Anders, are in the middle of an attack on Zoran's clan when the Predator shows up and manages to kill every last person there, save for Ursa.
In the second chapter, we have the Sword - Kenji. Kenji is cool as fuck. He's skilled and fun to watch, quick-thinking and prepared for everything. Kenji and his brother Kiyoshi are the sons of a Samurai. As children, they are made to duel to see who would become the hair to their father's legacy. While Kenji refuses to fight, Kiyoshi strikes - ultimately winning. Twenty years later, after training as a shinobi, Kenji returns to confront his brother - but during this confrontation, a Predator appears and the two are forced to fight alongside one another. They win, though soon after Kiyoshi dies due to his injuries.
In the third chapter, we have the Bullet - Torres. Torres is drafted into the US Navy during World War 2. He's more of a tinkerer and definitely the odd one out in the trio when it comes to battle savviness, but in a fun way. He's silly and gets himself into Situations and it's always a joy to watch him get himself back out of them. In his chapter, he puts together a whatchamacallit with wings, taking to the sky in his contraption when his squadron is suddenly attacked by a Predator. With some exhilarating flying, he's able to out-maneuver that thang. He's abducted shortly after WW2 ends, which we actually see happen and makes you wonder if the others were also abducted some time after their wins or immediately after in comparison.
Anyway, for years these three have been essentially frozen in time so that they could then partake in a battle to the death for the Predators. Things don't go so well when the three decide to instead team up and work to get the fuck out of there. Honestly, it's just such a fun concept. It kind of reminds me of that Tumblr post that talks about how cowboys and samurai both existed around the same time. It's a sickass crossover for a crazy pilot tech guy to team up with a shinobi and a shieldmaiden. The movie is so well-animated, though I know that is a point of contention. I'll admit, the style was a little jarring at the very start but I eventually just got used to it and ended up just really fond of the style. It was different, y'know? Which in this age of everything just looking bad all of the time, it was much fucking appreciated.
I feel like my main bone to pick with the movie is Torres - but not really for any fault of his own. Torres is a Latino character from Florida in the 1940s. I'm not saying Mexican people don't exist in Florida but I really get so frustrated when media acts like Mexicans are literally the only Latinos to exist ever anywhere. I guess I'm just being petty because if there had been a good time and location for there to be a Cuban character in something, this would've been it but whateverrrr. Anyway, I love Torres a lot so I'm willing to overlook that but still pointing gun emoji at the writers.
Anyway, so then the other thing that was bugging me was the fact that he's The Bullet. Why is he the Bullet? I guess there are guns attached to his Contraption but that isn't the focus of his chapter, it's that he can fly really well. He should've been The Wings or something more relevant. When I first saw the title card drop, I thought we were gonna get a cowboy or something, was admittedly a bit disappointed when that wasn't the case. Ah, well. Torres definitely made up for that in personality. He really gave the other two characters a really good balance. I guess it kind of came full circle with the name not really fitting him when he is given a gun during the death battle but his success rides mainly off of him hijacking the Predator tech around them.
Either way, I know this movie has been pretty contentious among fans. I have to say, there's nothing better than being able to enjoy a piece of media on its own with no outside influence. Just kind of rolling up your window while people shout over each other outside your car. I liked it. It was well animated, well acted. I like the character designs, the music. The kills were brutal and fun. No, I still don't like Predator but this was a great movie and I might one day change my mind if this is the direction the franchise chooses to go in.
Angel
If you know me, you know Ro and I love Donal Finn. He's our favorite Orpheus now and forever. So when we found out he was in a short film where he was gay kissing dudes, we were like - well, obviously we gotta watch that. So we checked it out on Youtube! You can actually watch it for free here. It's just under 20 minutes.
The movie opens to siblings Killian and Katrin finding their father in the woods after he'd hung himself from a tree. They bury him and choose to hide this from their two siblings Jess and Sammy, instead telling him that he left them all but would be back at another time. Without their dad around, the student film really ramps up its student filming and we get a sick montage of them dancing at night around a fire with paint on their faces while a kind of music is playing. I guess it's just meant to show that they're wild and out here and all that. I couldn't help but chuckle a bit during it because it really did just feel like a movie someone in art school made.
Anyway, during their dance party - Killian (nicknamed Kill which is pretty funny) stumbles back into their trailer. I forgot to mention but they all live in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere. It seems like fun honestly, though I wouldn't survive without wifi out there. He is followed by Katrin, to whom he confesses feeling uneasy about this. Through their dialogue, we can discern that there seems to be some kind of land-owning issue which may be what lead their father to committing suicide. We can also discern that Katrin and Killian's relationship is a bit more than that of siblings, what with her kissing him on the lips in a way I definitely wouldn't kiss my brother in. As soon as Katrin leaves, though - Killian wipes his mouth away in presumed disgust. The way she kissed him and his immediate reaction to it prior to wiping it made me feel like this wasn't exactly the first time something like this has happened which is very curious.
Now alone, Killian finds himself instead distracted by one of his sisters bras - dangling off a mirror nearby. He puts it on in one of the prettiest scenes of someone putting on a bra I've ever seen and while admiring himself in the mirror, Jess enters the trailer. He rips it off and storms over to her, demanding that she keep quiet before leaving.
We then go to the next morning where we meet Matt, the land owner's nephew who is there to deliver some bad news. He tries to speak to Sammy but we learn through Jess that he is learning disabled and struggles to communicate properly. As the others come out to speak to Matt, they learn that the farmland they're living on is being sold to land developers and that they have two weeks to vacate. The siblings gather in the woods and decide that they have to kill the land owner's nephew, I guess? In order to get them to not sell the farm. I don't think this is a very good plan personally but I'm getting some not very good at planning vibes from these guys. Killian draws the short straw in the most rigged game of drawing straws I've ever seen and is sent on his way to bash this guy's skull in with a hammer.
Killian does a really bad job sneaking up on him and Matt catches him. Not knowing he was seconds away from the sloppiest murder attempt ever, he awkwardly explains that they didn't want to sell the land, implying some financial hardships leading to this. I'm still just really confused about how killing the guy who is selling the land's nephew was gonna resolve this. Anyway, they end up sitting by a tree and having a toke. They talk about like ... heaven and stuff. I don't really know why aside from the fact that this is an art student's film. It doesn't really matter though because Donal is soooo pretty.
At some point, Killian brings up the farm. Matt explains that his uncle ran the farm into the ground and that the only option was to sell it, to which Killian argues that that isn't their fault. After Killian explains what this place means to them, we get a very random build-up to a kiss. It's like sweet in the moment but the pacing and lead-up to it felt weird. Like, they're literally talking about how Matt is going to make Killian and his siblings homeless one minute and then they're kissing? It feels really skeevy and gross which would be fine if that was the point the movie was trying to make but I do not think it is. I think this is supposed to be romantic or some kind of coming of age which really is not good. But it does make me think a bit of some maybe unintended parallels between Matt and Katrin. I think if the movie had focused more on that - more on Killian's need to feel validated leading him into being exploited as maybe a commentary on how often LGBT people end up being the victims of sexual violence - I think it could've been really interesting.
I think that might be my main issue with the movie. I feel like it starts off with a strong story but it kind of loses itself once the romance aspect is introduced. Like it didn't remember what story it wanted to tell.
Anyway, Killian, while at first pretty into the smoochin', he eventually grows startled by it and takes off back home to his siblings who are waiting to hear the good news. When Jess finds out about Killian's failure to bop Matt over the head, she derides him and says their dad would've handled it. To which Killian reveals the truth, throwing her their dad's suicide note. We get a random monologue from Sammy and, I'm gonna be real - I don't know what he's talking about or contributing to any of this. I was just like, oh okay then. Killian runs away then. I don't know why. I'm so confused by this entire interaction but it doesn't matter for long because then we get a really funny looking scene of Killian running aimlessly through the woods in the rain. And of course, as we all do - finds Matt out in a field. It could've been the field from earlier? The thing about fields is that they all kind of look the same. Anyway, they kiss and the Killian runs away again.
Now in the final stretch of the movie, Killian mentions his "real dad". So maybe they aren't siblings? Or maybe step-siblings? Anyway, that isn't important right now because Killian is now standing on a bridge and preparing himself to jump down onto the highway and his death below. And then we get some random stranger? touch him on the shoulder and tell him it isn't worth it. And when she leaves? Like I'm picturing her patting herself on the back like nice one. Another life saved. Probably! But it works and Killian sinks down to the ground and decides not to walk in his not!father's footsteps. Roll credits.
It's a well-shot movie with interesting characters. It's got a strong start but loses steam halfway through, which isn't very long given it's only 17 minutes. I think it's great for someone's early work, y'know? We all gotta start somewhere. It's very well acted. I really enjoyed all the performances. For some reason, the first time I watched it I couldn't understand anything anyone was saying but I watched it a second time weeks later and understood everything fine so that was weird. Anyway, normalize putting subtitles on all movies ever. I definitely think a few storyboarding courses could've helped develop a more meaningful and stronger arc.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â KPop Demon Hunters (2025), Ladyhawke (1985) and Surf's Up (2007).
Hey! Long time since I was last on. I just haven't had a whole lot of time and energy in the last few weeks to keep up with watching, reading and playing things. I don't think I've mentioned it before but I am currently playing through Fortune-499. I should be finishing up next week. I haven't really made any progress with Oh, I also almost forgot to mention but Media Sundays are now Media Tuesdays so these posts will now being happening on Wednesdays instead.
I think that's everything I had to say so let's get started with these reviews.
KPop Demon Hunters
Before I get into this review, I want you to be warned that I, like many other art I review, have both positive and negative criticisms about this movie. If you think that reading a negative criticism about this movie will upset you, then do not continue reading and go about your day. I'm not interested in debating my views about it. This is just how I feel and I am not you. I don't think less of you for disagreeing with me. We are two different people with two different opinions and that is fine.
Okay. So I heard a lot of really good things about this movie so I'd be lying if I said I went in with low expectations. Everyone was talking about it and I'm ngl, based off the trailer I'd seen, it looked really cute! And, at the end of the day, I had a great time watching it - which ultimately is the most important thing. I did, however, was a bit miffed about a few things here and there. Before I get into that though, I just want to say that I love the way this movie looks. Ever since I saw the trailer, I was really excited to see an animated movie where the animators really packed so much personality and emotion into the expressions of their women lead characters. There's always so much focus in media to always make women look pretty which often leads to a lot of dead-eyed staring and a severe lack of any genuine emotion at its best but a lot of dehumanizing and objectifying women as a whole at its worst. It was fun to see the main characters make insane cartoonish expressions.
That being said, I personally found their designs pretty lackluster. I think Mira was the only one who I thought looked interesting. I liked how tall she was especially. I think my favorite character design trait though was how deep her voice was! It's so rare to find women in media, especially animated media, without pitchy voices.
And this sort of leads me to the main issue for me personally about this movie. Before I get into that, a brief synopsis - Kpop Demon Hunters is about a girl group made up of three girls Rumi, Mira and Zoey (who's name I keep forgetting because she is such a non-character in this) who live double lives as demon hunters and a Kpop girl group called Huntrix. While getting ready to promote their newest single or something (idfk anything about how the music industry works), the demons they kill are scheming. They come up with an idea, a Kpop group of their own. And so we get the Saja Boys who use their music to steal people's souls and feed them to their demon king Gwi-Ma. As the girls try to fight off this hostile takeover, we learn that Rumi is hiding a secret of her own - she's half-demon. And so there's drama about that of whatever. Anyway, that's about it.
So. My issue is simple. There just isn't enough time for things! I think that this movie should have been a TV show, had more time for things to marinate, let other characters (namely her teammates) share the focus with Rumi, etc. Maybe it wouldn't have gotten as much traction had it been? I don't know. But there were too many characters that get sidelined in favor for the extremely one dimensional, flat and uninteresting doomed love romance between Rumi and Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys).
The other girls get no opportunity to be fleshed out at all. Celine, who is the woman who raises Rumi (and is the only person who knows she is half-demon and instructs her to keep this secret) and trains Huntrix to be demon hunters for presumably years literally only shows up for like two minutes for some big dramatic exchange between Celine and Rumi as Rumi is slowly losing herself more and more to her demon side. This scene just does not hit because we have no reason to care for the relationship between them at all because we've only seen them interact in a flashback scene with Rumi as a child being told to hide her secret and that's like. It.
We don't really get to know anything about Mira or Zoey aside from a very brief set-up for their backstories but neither really get treated with the same attention as Rumi and it was a huge bummer to me. It's Kpop Demon Hunters. With an s at the end.
People complain a lot about the fandom giving too much attention to the Saja Boys. I think the movie does. Or well, it does Jinu anyway. The whole romance between Jinu and Rumi felt extremely stilted and boring. I felt absolutely no chemistry between them at all. Maybe because it felt like during those scenes, the movie lost a lot of its personality. And don't give me the "they're influenced by kdrama tropes" because it's like, okay? It doesn't change that it was boring. It just was. At least to me. If this is your taste in romance ... well, at least you'll always have an surplus of media you will enjoy available to you.
I think what is aggravating to me I guess is that this movie markets itself as a "Girls Get It Done" cool three kickass women MCs movie but two of the three girls get pretty much sidelined for the sake of the one most specialest girl in the whole wide world's male love interest. Which again, leads me back to my argument that this should have been longer. If there was more time for the three of them to get a character arc, even if Mira and Zoey's are just b-plots to Rumi at least they'd have something, if we'd gotten Jinu and Rumi's relationship to be more fleshed out, if we'd gotten Celine's relationship to the three girls more developed so that it actually held any emotional weight whatsoever, if we knew literally anything about the Saja Boys aside from the barebones minimum we got thus allowing us to perceive them as anything beyond cardboard cut-out bad guys, if Rumi's demon side actually had any sort of real consequence to existing outside of just getting socially isolated - I think the movie would have felt more rounded out.
On that last note, I genuinely do not understand what the situation with the demons is. They steal people's souls right, all of who are later shown to have "gone missing" so I'm assuming they're dying, right? How is the world not in an utter panic over presumably hundreds of people all dying. There was a scene where an entire train car was lost to the demons. That is insane? Maybe if there was some lore about the world forgetting those people exist and go on like they were never real or something would make sense? But you're telling me an entire train car of people goes missing and nobody gives a shit? That's crazy.
And to expand on that, the purpose of the demons is to steal people's souls to feed to Gwi-Ma so that he can presumably take over the world or whatever. But like why are all demons the same? Like outside of Jinu and Rumi. No one has ever defied Gwi-Ma? He's never really established as an actual threat. He's just kind of a bully that hits you with the occasional psychic blast but ultimately, you can just do whatever you want, right? He just makes you feel bad about yourself but he can't actually like physically control you? The movie's kind of vague about all that. If he makes all demons feel compelled to follow his orders, then why can't he affect Rumi? (The movie might've said something about this but I might've missed it but still, I think that Rumi being a demon doesn't really bring about any real consequence so the stakes in that storyline feel ... weak so I want to mention it).
So that's almost everything I had to say, which brings me to what I think will probably be my most contentious opinion about the movie which is just that the music is just not very good. Pop music as a whole has a very "sounds exactly the same" issue and there's a lot of reason for that mostly summing up to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I feel like this applies here. I judge how good the music in a movie is based off how much I remember it when it's over. There is only one song I can remember clearly from it with no outside influence (artist youtube shorts community loves using their songs for speedpaints and I get so many of them while scrolling through them so I'm not counting that) and it's the song that Jinu sings to Gwi-Ma when he is first introduced. It was so cool. "Jinu's Lament" some people have called it. I love that song so fucking much and those sixty seconds have outlived literally every other song in this movie.
There's something really interesting to me when any media (it's happened with games too before) build themselves off a culture but never really fully seem to carry that sentiment all throughout. I feel like it would have been interesting to incorporate like ... any kind of traditional Korean instrumentation in like ... literally any of the tracks. The Saja Boys, specifically, I think should've been operating on that mindset given that Jinu just ... would not really have much personal familiarity with the genre? Anyway, I'm not saying to make the music not KPop but there is a lot of KPop out there that does exactly what I'm talking about. Here are just some examples,
Ascension by Kingdom
Lit by ONEUS
Thunderous by Stray Kids
Arario by Topp Dogg
Music genres change, that much is certain, you even get a neat little time passage sequence when we watch this happen - but you also have to admit that macro-genres like Pop and Rock in this day just do not hold any weight anymore when it comes to describing music. Even narrowing it down to just KPop, there are so many KPop micro-genres. It would have been cool to have seen what I can only describe as a love letter to the genre do more work, found ways to make their music stand out. In Any Way. When you strip away the cool fight scenes, you're just left with music that honestly just kind of all sounds the same.
I was watching an interview with Ian Eisendrath who was the executive music producer on this movie and listening to him just kind of ramble on and on about nothing really whenever he's asked a question just really feels like the music didn't really have a particular direction it wanted to go in. He talks about how the music is narrative and even goes on to disparage other musicals that lose the narrative tone to their movies midway through and I just do not see how KPop Demon Hunters was any different. The thing with musicals is that they very rarely have mass appeal in the way that a radio pop hit has mass appeal, it's because they're too specific and too attached to the story they stem from. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's rare. So you either sacrifice some of the narrative threads and make it generic enough that people aren't confused about the lyrics when it stands alone or you commit. Think about why, for example, why Mein Herr or Maybe This Time are the Cabaret songs that most popped off with mainstream audiences over the titular Life is a Cabaret, for example.
This is all to say that Huntrix should've just rebranded as a KMetal band to fit Rumii's screaming voice instead of having her "overcome" it or whatever and sound exactly the same at the end of the movie as she did at the start - given that losing her voice/her voice changing was one of the main plot threads throughout the movie.
Anyway, that's about everything I had to say about the movie. Ultimately, I enjoyed the movie a lot. It was a great watch with friends. I just wish it had been longer so the story and characters had more time to properly develop.
Also, my partner really loved Jinu's silly tiger so I'm putting a gif of it here for them.
Ladyhawke
Oh man, this movie was so much fun. I have to admit I was initially put off a bit by the soundtrack for this medieval fantasy that primarily consists of what I can only describe as synth power ballads. The story starts with Mouse, a thief who (as the movie begins) is escaping the prison of a most terrifying Bishop of Aquila. During his escape, he befriends a man named Navarre - who is accompanied with a very sick ass looking hawk. We come to learn that Navarre is very interested in Mouse because he is the only person alive who has ever escaped that prison, a place Navarre would like to get into as he has a score to settle with the Bishop. As the two travel together, we come to find out that both Navarre and what we thought was his pet Hawk are in fact lovers - cursed by the Bishop of Aquila to never exist in one another's company as humans. At night, when Isabeau becomes human, Navarre becomes wolf. When the sun rises, Isabeau becomes hawk and Navarre human. They hope that they may somehow break this curse if they were to confront the Bishop somehow.
It's a really fun premise, only made more fun by the delightful presence of Mouse. He's so much fun. A thief, who does good, despite also doing bad - but always doing his best. It is a real bummer when you think about the other two he's sharing the movie's runtime with, though. Navarre is the most middlest actor of the three. I like his character. He's kind of stupid despite holding himself with an air of intense competence and severity. I like how stubborn he can be, beyond reason at times. There's just something missing from his character that I can't really put my finger on that I just fail to fully connect with. And Isabeau ... Let's be real. She's just a pretty face. She doesn't really have a personality at all. At times, she shows small glimpses of insecurity at her relationship with Navarre as it stands which ... it fair given the circumstances, but she never really ... does much of anything. I think the hawk actor had more personality tbh ...
The movie looks fantastic. I love looking at it. The cinematography is great. I love the coloration of it. That one scene in the snow where Isabeau and Navarre just barely catch glimpses of one another as the night turns to day is so beautiful.
I think, overall - it was a solid story that was decently acted with the most charming soundtrack you could ever witness in a movie of this genre. I definitely think it's up there with some of my favorite watches of the year so far.
Surf's Up
So, we had penguin movie night last night which has apparently unlocked a new trend in the friend group as we are doing rat night next week. I showed everyone in server my favorite childhood penguin movie which was the Pebble and the Penguin and it was met with much love, yay! I won't be writing a review for it because if I start down that slippery slope, I may as well change my name to Sisyphus. But before that we watched Surf's Up which was ... honestly? A very unexpected great time.
The movie centers a penguin named Cody who loves to surf, but he lives in an icy region named Shiverpool. He was first inspired to surf when a surfing legend by the name of Z pays a visit to his neck of the woods when he's a small child, tells him to never give up on his dreams and gifts him a shell necklace. Ten years, later his life changes when he gets scouted to come on down to a beachy island to participate in a surfing competition! In the process, he makes some friends and some enemies and uncovers a big secret. Z, who was previously believed to have died in a surfing accident, was alive the whole time! Despite his desperate requests for him to train him, Z refuses. That is, until he starts having fun. Which leads us to what is essentially the crux of the movie.
It's cool to see a movie that teaches kids something really important. Things like social hierarchies, winning, societally accepted perceptions of success - none of that really matters if you don't have community and if you don't enjoy or find fulfillment in what you're doing. Cody wants to find purpose and, after a life of being compared to his brother and fighting for a dream that feels helpless to everyone around him, he decides to achieve success in doing the thing that everyone else considers a success. Which is, winning the surfing contest. But Z doesn't want to help him if he just wants to win, he wants to help him only when he decides he wants to have fun. And we see a lot of that internal struggle in Cody as the movie progresses, what it means to win, what it means to him and what it means to those around him. How much are we willing to sacrifice to win? And are we willing to sacrifice winning in order to do the right thing?
The movie looks great. I read that they essentially invented a whole new style of animation just for this movie. Please, check out this page full of a bunch of awesome facts about how much love and work went into creating this movie. I really like the characters. The baby penguins were such a joy any time they popped up and Mikey was so cute, I loved his little scuttling legs. Chicken Joe also ruled. He was so funny and silly. I really can't believe I ended up liking this movie as much as I did.
It isn't to say the movie was perfect, of course. You have the bizarrely long scene where, after having stepped on a poisonous sea urchin (the sea urchin cutaway gag was funny and should've just been the one thing that was made to make this scene funny tbh) Cody is held down and then has his foot pissed on by Z because it's a cure, apparently. I don't think it does but I would just like to make it very clear that if you step on a sea urchin or get stung by a jellyfish or bitten by a shark or nibbled by leeches, you should not piss on your open wound. It does not "nullify" the toxins. Go to a hospital. The scene was drawn out and a bit horrifying and should have just been reduced to something that was Not that and just relied on the very funny sea urchin to carry it. There's also another scene where Cody and his love interest, Lani both splash around and play in a puddle of glowworm shit. I mean, I guess it looks pretty because it's glowing and blue so it doesn't actually look like shit but ... c'mon.
And then there's the little penguins that appear to be some kind of reference to indigenous Polynesian people? I'm sorry, I'm not going to go at length about it but it was just awful and it really made me grimace any time they popped up on screen. Thankfully, they are minor characters so it's not too often.
Anyway, despite that. It was a cute movie. I loved the messaging about it. The music was so extremely fitting and a very fun little time capsule. The characters were fun. I think my favorite was Mikey because he's so silly. But I do really like Z and Cody a lot. I love protagonists that are a little annoying because people turn against so quick and as a person who is also a little annoying, I have to protect them. It's just honestly a great time.
Oh also, this is kind of unrelated to the movie itself but there are people on Letterboxd who are traumadumping about their experiences related to this movie. You kind of have to dig a bit for them but it is insane how many people will give a movie a bad rating just because someone farted next to them in the theater or some shit.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Data Loss (2021).
This one's going to be really short because I only played and finished one game in the last week. I started a second one but I haven't finished it yet. Hoping to before the end of the month but it's definitely a chunkier one than a lot of the ones I'd played from the BFRJAE bundle so it's taking me a bit of time.
I also started watching Hellsing Ultimate. I can't say I'm impressed with it so far tbh but it's only ten episodes so I'm hoping to finish that quickly so we can chat about it more.
Data Loss
Data Loss is a game that presents itself as an anti-capitalist hacking minigame. The crux of it is that you are sick of a corporation by the name of Money'Surance CorpÂŽ contributing to the wealth gap of society so you take things into your own hands and join a hacker group with the aim to steal as much money as you can from this corporation so that you may redistribute the wealth and clear the debts anyone has ever owed to them.
I'm not entirely sure how much my review of this game really matters given I wasn't able to go past level two but the gameplay, while pretty fun and kind of addicting, is just too punishing. The gameplay consists of a alternating between searching and infecting (you can either use two different keys to do this or just use your tab key which is what I did) nodes that belong to the corporation. You search, unveiling the nodes and then hit tab and click them quickly before they disappear and before a crosshair that is consistently bouncing around on screen catches you. That on it's own is manageable but then we add that there is a time limit, starting at I think 30 seconds? And every time you are detected, it cuts your time limit down. And then in addition to that, you also have limited moves. So you can only search and infect a limited number of times as you play. Which makes for a .............. fascinating experience. I really like the idea of this game but playing it tips the scale a bit too much into infuriating for me. This is this creator's first game, which honestly - it's great for a first game but it is kind of a bummer that I couldn't get further. I don't know what but I definitely have mobility issues in my hands so games like this that require very fast and very accurate hand movements tend to flub me up a lot. The creator mentioned having very little interest in coming to the game so this is kind of pointless but I think if it'd had some kind of way to adjust the difficulty or something, that'd be neat.
There have definitely been other games on this bundle with this issue but why do most indie devs not let us pick our application window size at the start of the game? Not everyone's computers are going to fit the default dimensions of your games! And not giving us an ability to toggle between windowed and fullscreen is also frustrating. The entire bottom bit of this game is cut off on my laptop.
I definitely think this game has insane potential to be great but I think the difficulty should've been built gradually throughout it instead of starting you off in the nine circles of hell.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â The Quick and the Dead (1995), Don't Take it Personally, I Just Don't Like You: The Camping Trip (2020), Everyone Is Going To Die (2023), 825 Forest Road (2025), Wolf Children (2012), The Woman Who Stole Fingers (2010) and Popeye The Slayer Man (2025).
I said last time that I wouldn't put off doing these reviews anymore so I wouldn't end up having to review a million things again and then I immediately fucked that up again. Bleh. Let's get on with it.
The Quick and the Dead
The Quick and The Dead is an extremely stupid fun movie. It centers Sharon Stone as Ellen, a mysterious Gunslinger who makes an equally mysterious appearance at the town of Redemption, which is currently being run by John Herod - a guy an outlaw who has self-appointed himself mayor. She joins a fastdraw competition being held by Herod, promising a big cash prize - but it's pretty apparent she's not at all interested in that prize. We get to know some fellas around the town as the story progresses - Leonardo DiCaprio as Herod's son fighting his way out of his dad's shadow and Tobin Bell as ... a doctor, I think? were the two that got me to do the
but Gene Hackman is also in this, playing Herod. Oh, yeah - Russell Crowe is in it as well playing an outlaw who used to work for Herod now turned anti-violence Priest.
The story is very much lacking any sort of emotional depth - rife with unexplored and ham-fisted romance, an unfortunately hilarious vengeance origin story and very sad, inconsistencies in characterization and failed attempts at building tension and drama. The characters are very interesting at first glance but they are all extremely one dimensional, some even bordering racist caricatures. It's a bit of a bummer but not exactly anything new in the Western genre.
What I'll give this movie though is that it is so much fun. The way it's shot is just ... spectacular. It definitely screams "I just graduated Film School and I'm busting out all the neat tricks I learned" and while a lot of people have gripes with that, I personally found it extremely charming. There is a scene where a guy gets shot straight through the head and the bullet leaves a hole big enough that you can clearly see the shooter straight through it. I am talking MASSIVE, by the way. Like Gene Hackman launched a fucking pool ball through his skull. It's unrealistic and stupid and it's so fucking good. I think that this is something that kind of sets this movie apart from what we usually see in the genre, which is that it knows it's kind of stupid and it's fine with that.
I thought that Russel Crowe's character, Cort, was fascinating. A man who turned his back to his life of crime and violence and took on the cloth to take care of orphans and praise God or whatever. What's sort of funny to me about him is that he has been taken captive by Herod, who is angry with him over his new lifestyle choices (an anger bordering on hilarious obsession). The orphans he was taken care of? They were all killed. He does not seem all that beat up about it, to be honest with you guys. And his life of peace and anti-violence? He kind of just gives up on all that eventually. It made me think about a manga I like called Vinland Saga where the character actually makes a vow to be anti-violent and sticks through it, no matter what. And how much more interesting Cort as a character could have been (especially in this genre) if he was just even a little consistent.
The last thing I will talk about for this movie is that (if you haven't all guessed it yet) wants to kill Herod. It's why she's come to town and why she's joined the competition. Why is this? Well, because like ... twenty years ago or something, this used to be her hometown and her dad was the sheriff - at least until Herod showed up. So that's the big reveal, right? Herod ran her and her family out of town? Or he killed her dad and she managed to get away maybe? Well, the latter is closer but not quite. While he does string up her dad to be hung, she runs in and pleads for his life. Herod gives her a gun, tells her that if she manages to shoot through his rope and free him - he'd spare them. This was when I turned to my partner and jokingly went, "And then she shoots him in the head."
And then she shoots him in the head.
I couldn't even tell you how long I laughed for over that. Anyway, it was a fun and silly watch. I really enjoyed it.
Don't Take It Personally, I Just Don't Like You: The Camping Trip
Right off the bat, I want to clarify (in case I haven't mentioned it before) but I do not like it when people add their demos to charity bundles. To me, it feels like you are using a charitable cause as promotion instead of actually wanting to contribute your work to something meaningful. It feels sleazy. There have been a few other people who have done this in this bundle (itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality) but that was before I started doing these reviews so alas.
Anyway, that being said - I'm going to make this quick and to the point. I did not like this game. The art is rough to look at. The people I was streaming it to could literally identify what Danganronpa sprites the in-game sprits were ripping off. I think the backgrounds were fine but those were mostly just photos with filters over them so I don't think that really counts personally. The art isn't the worst of it, though. Visual Novels are an interesting genre to me because you'd think they'd have really good writing most of the time because that is the main focus of the game, right? That the gameplay is pretty much entirely made up of reading. But that's just not true. I think a lot of inexperienced writers who have not found what does and doesn't work for them specifically in writing, try to jazz up their amateur writing by making it into a Visual Novel in hopes that it can get some eyes on it from just its existence as a VN.
Anyway, this is one that feels like that.
You talk about nothing. You talk in circles. I only played through to the end of the demo because I was convinced that something interesting was bound to happen at some point but nothing ever does. Demos are supposed to make you want to play a game. This demo made me want to never touch anything ever made by this creator ever again out of fear of getting stuck in another hours-long cycle of nothing. None of the relationships in this game feel real. Everyone is weird and does not behave like a normal person.
Okay, let me take a second to just give a brief synopsis. And it will be brief because, again - nothing happens.
You play as MC, who is currently in a will-they-won't-theyship with Rose - a goodie-two shoes who you go to college with. You are going on a camping trip with your friends - Maria, a homeless alcoholic, and Todd, Maria's best friend who is going through a break-up or some shit and ends up not coming on the trip. Because Todd doesn't come on the trip, you are now stuck going with two insane people who are supposed to be your love interests. Except you spend the whole time walking on eggshells because they are both extremely insufferable and get unbearable offended and jealous any time you even breathe in the other's direction.
No one acts like this! And people who do, probably don't get invited to a whole lot of camping trips.
For example - there is a point where you can either choose to sit with Rose and make-out or go help Maria in the woods find the lighter she dropped so that you guys can get a fire going. What would you do? Realistically? Go help Maria, right? WRONG. Rose will never forget this. You cheating whore. Like, it is actually crazy. The whole thing is like this. If you side with one person in a disagreement, you may as well just fuck them right here and now.
Just, completely insufferable.
The game calls itself a "lofi" game. What the fuck is a lofi game? Lofi is a type of music and while the game admittedly has lofi tracks playing throughout it (not that many, to be honest), what makes the game itself lofi? It doesn't even fit with what people consider a "lofi" aesthetic. People associate lofi with comfort, warmth, coziness. You know, "Lofi beats to study to"? The point is that it helps you relax so you can concentrate. This game is the opposite of that in every way. It's just awful. Not the worst in this bundle, shockingly, but I did not have a good time with it at all outside of occasional bursts of hysteria over someone saying something totally ridiculous or whatever. Not good.
Everyone Is Going To Die
Trigger warning â I will be talking about a scene in this movie depicting a rape which results in pregnancy in no specific detail.
Let's imagine a scenario. You are a teenage girl who has been raped and you find out you are pregnant. What are your next steps?
A. Tell a trusted friend or family member for advice
B. Tell a doctor/therapist/other health expert and ask for resources
C. Go to the police
D. Follow through with the pregnancy and raise that child telling her how she came to be. Show up to your rapist's house twenty-something years later on his (not your) daughter's birthday and hold the two of them hostage, going through his belongings and traumatizing his other daughter by showing him that he likes sex toys (?) and barely legal porn. Refuse to elaborate the entire time why you're here or what the point of it is. Try and demean him for fighting you to defend himself and his daughter (because he doesn't recognize who you are or what your history with him is so he just thinks you are trying to rob him) and try to make this all about like, feminism or something. Kill his girlfriend again, for like, feminism or something. Then in a very clever (sarcasm) play-within-a-play scenario, have your daughter force him at gunpoint to recreate the night he beat and raped you in front of his daughter. Get it, because now he's the one getting raped and rape is good and empowering as long as it's happening to bad people, apparently. And then once it's done, have your daughter kill you ??? And then ... profit?????? I guess????
E. Get an abortion
If you are a man and you want to make a movie centered around rape, misogyny and mental heath - is it too much to ask that you make the bare minimum effort to treat women like actual human beings and have some basic fucking human empathy?
I don't want to talk about this movie anymore. It's bad. It sucks. It pretends to care about rape victims, about children born of rape, about trauma, about women and it's just self-masturbatory bullshit. It's so self-masturbatory that the fucking director gave himself a cheeky four star review for it on Letterboxd.
I don't know what's more embarrassing - this or making your account, where you catalogue and review movies, publicly affiliated with you, as a director of a really terrible fucking movie. You ranked actual films, like legitimate movies, like Saltburn, The Substance, Challengers - lower than your own movie. YOU GAVE NOPE TWO STARS? The audacity actually made me laugh out loud. Christ.
825 Forest Road
I watched this movie shortly after watching Everyone is Going to Die and I enjoyed it but I can't tell if that's just because I had watched a significantly worse movie before this one so anything would've been better. The story centers two siblings - Chuck and Elizabeth and Chuck's girlfriend, Maria as they all move to a new town after Chuck and Elizabeth's mother dies in a car accident, an accident Elizabeth survives. They are hoping for a new start but unfortunately move into spooky scary house. This house is haunted by the mother a child who committed suicide decades prior due to incessant bullying. This woman ... also killed herself, I think? I'm not going to lie, this movie is kind of boring most of the time so it's hard to stay engaged most of the time so bare with me. Anyway, legend has it that now that ghost makes other people kill themselves so they suffer like her daughter suffered.
Except for that she doesn't? I don't think anyone in this movie actually dies until near to the end and the ghost lady just straight up kills them herself. Not much of a suicide. We hear a lot about suicides but there aren't any like - Truth or Dare or Smile type incidents where someone is possessed and kills themselves nor is there a situation where someone is so scared they feel pressured to do it? It was just a bit ... odd.
I think the only thing I actually like about this movie, which is apparently contentious, is that it is shot like mostly over the scope of the same time period but each chapter follows a different perspective from the main three - with the end of each chapter nudging the story along a bit more than the last. I thought it was fun. Maybe I'm just nosy but I like to see what everyone's up to, y'know? I thought that was fun, though it probably has been done before? Maybe better? IDK. This is my first time seeing something like that, though, and I thought it was neat. Nothing else about the movie really stands out though, unfortunately.
Oh, right! Look at this tap water the character Chuck pours for his piano student to drink! Like, I am not drinking that shit.
Wolf Children
I've been meaning to watch Wolf Children for a while now. It's a classic, feels almost like everyone else on the planet's already watched it. Anyway, the stars finally aligned.
The story centers Hana, a woman that falls in love with a Wolf Man. The two get swept up in a whirlwind romance, moving in together and starting a family. This is, unfortunately, shortlived when suddenly this unnamed Wolf Man is swept up in a flash flood and dies. It's pretty unceremonious. As he dies in his wolf form, he is treated by the city like a dead animal and is just thrown in the trash. Hana never gets a goodbye, no closure, and now she has to raise two wolf children all by herself. It's such a deeply sweet story with an emphasis on community, coming of age, finding one's purpose.
I could honestly go on forever about the things I like about this movie but I have two more movies to cover and I've been working on this post for like three hours now so I am going to keep it brief and instead implore you to check it out if you haven't already. It's got an amazing score. The art is totally captivating. The emotion runs so strong in this film - the fear strikes deep, the sadness makes your heart sink into your stomach and there are moments so full of joy that my eyes tear up just thinking about it. The voice acting, I have to say, is divine - especially with the kiddos. I love all the side characters we meet, I love how rural life is painted, I love how much this movie wrestles with itself.
And man, can this movie do like slice-of-life day-by-day montages. How do make doing laundry and cooking dinner feel desirable and nostalgic and sweet? It gives so much intimacy and respect to these little moments, to these relationships.
That all being said, though - I can't help but mourn a bit that some aspects of it fall a bit flat, specifically when it comes to Hana and Yuki (Hana's daughter). For about the first two-thirds of this movie, the emphasis seems to be very much on Hana's relationship with Wolf Man and her raising these children but about midway through the second-third of this movie, the kids start to go to school and such and the attention shifts mostly on them - especially as it's clear that they are both choosing to pursue different lives. Only a lot of that attention seems to be on Ame (Hana's son) and not all that much on Yuki. Don't get me wrong, we do get scenes with Yuki and all but Yuki's character arc does not come anywhere near in terms of development to Ame. Ame's story essentially takes up the entire ending, which ends up sidelining Yuki. Which is insane given that Yuki is the one narrating the entire story.
And then there's Hana who, while I really like, really feels like she just sort of exists to be a Mother and nothing else. I know it feels weird to say in a movie about motherhood but woman can be mothers and also have lives outside of motherhood. It just sort of feels like she was just there to give birth to these two and then cling on to being a mother when the two are getting older and moving on with their lives and then once they both take their paths in life (which ftr consists of them essentially leaving her behind), she just kind of sits there. Like, IDK if I'm explaining myself well but it just feels like the two main women/girl characters in this do not get the full emotional character arc that the one boy character does. And I thought that it kind of sucked seeing Hana in this house all by herself at the end, already a memory to both Yuki and Ame at that point. The movie was treating like growing up meant never talking to your family again or something. IDK how to explain it atp. It was just weird.
Anyway, yeah. Some narrative hiccups to me, just a couple of things that didn't really sit well but ultimately, I really loved this movie. It was sweet and I'm glad I finally got around to watching it.
The Woman Who Stole Fingers
This was an animated horror short! You can actually watch it here on Youtube. (TW for body horror and possible implied parental abuse.)
It is a story that relies more on implication and metaphor, centering a son and his mother. What can be taken from the short, it really just is in the eye of the beholder. I spent quite some time reading through reviews about this short and it's truly left an impression on most people who've checked it out - what I'd call unfortunately relatable. I've chosen to view the story as that of an overbearing mother who sabotages any attempt her son makes at independence. Is it because she only finds purpose in being a mother? Because she's grown far too attached to him? Because she's scared he isn't ready to be part of the world, that he'll never be? I don't know but it's a film that stays with you.
A film with incredibly striking art and a disturbing premise. I'm not too sure but I think the animation style is painting on glass, which is just amazing to watch in action. I haven't seen a lot of stuff like this before but the sort of cloudiness and splotchiness it adds to the atmosphere of the short really keeps you feeling incredibly unsettled throughout. I'd love to snoop out more animation like this some time. The absence of music also feeds into this sense of total isolation and dread. There are still sound effects but everything still feels like it's in a bubble. Most sounds come from the characters alone, except for in the one scene where the boys misbehaves and releases his mother's hand to run out of the yard. In that scene, we hear the wind. A sense almost of freedom in the moment. And then, silence again.
The body horror in it is stomach twisting. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth as all you can really do is watch on helplessly.
It's a great short and it's only four minutes! I highly recommend it.
Popeye The Slayer Man
Okay, last review for this batch! I was in the mood for some B-Rated horror so I decided to check this thang out. The whole topic of horror movies exploiting children's media falling into public domain is a bit contentious but my two cents is that, I don't care if people do it! I just want to see a good movie. If you don't want your kids to see it, then don't show it to them. It's not like any of these movies are hitting theaters. Lol. Anyway, that all being said - this movie isn't very good.
The movie centers a group of teenagers that go into an old spinach factory in order to research and investigate the rumors about a spirit haunting the grounds known as Popeye the Sailor Man. The big plot twist is that it's not a ghost, Popeye is a man who has gone insane after his wife, Olive Oyl, went missing after she whistleblew about a spinach contamination at the factory. For some reason, he ate a bunch of this contaminated spinach and it's made him even more insane. Also it turns out, one of the girls in the group (the more secretive of the bunch) reveals herself at the end to be Popeye's missing daughter and she sort of just like. Talks at him to get him to stop killing people. After he's already killed a bunch of people. Like, it's a bit late for that, huh?
Anyway, the rest in bullet points because my fingers are going numb,
What is the point of using Popeye as a slasher if you're not going to do anything interesting or referential with the character? And that being said, the kills in this movie are just .. boring. If you'd replaced Popeye with like, any other guy, nothing would really change. Like, all slashers have a schtick, right? Freddy takes you into his nightmare world or whatever, Jigsaw puts you in a contraption. Popeye doesn't really do anything that makes him stand out from like Random Killer That's Kind of Strong or whatever. Which is just a total waste. I will give them that there are some fun callbacks to the cartoon. There's a funny reference to Wimpy, for example. It's stupid but it's camp and that's what I love about stuff like that. I wish it had more stuff like that in it.
The way characters know that Popeye is near is that they can smell his pipe smoke, which means that we consistently get a lot of "Do you smell that? It's pipe smoke" which, can someone explain to me what the difference between pipe smoke any any other tobacco product smoke is? Anyway, it's obvious they're only saying that for the audience which is annoying. If only Popeye had some other identifiable trait about him that the audience and characters could use to track his movements that would also be very funny and perfect to use in a horror movie about Popeye.
I can't help but notice that the person that gets the most violent death in this movie is the only woman of color in it. There's also one black guy in it and Popeye is so deadset on killing him (even though there are like six other people running around the factory begging to get slashed), that he follows him like several yards away from the factory to do it after he runs away. Kind of funny in that I have to laugh kind of vibe.
There is a point at the end of the movie where a police detective goes "Popeye the Sailor man? More like Popeye the Slayer man" which was hilarious and also this reminded me that when I first told my partner the title of this movie, they thought it was about Popeye in drag so ... Any ladies interested?
I also love this scene where this security guy hired to keep squatters away from the abandoned factory goes looking for a suspected intruder (spoiler: it's Popeye) and he picks up a wrench at one point and he does that thing where he like taps it against his palm menacingly but they are like the lightest little taps ever and so extremely hilariously unintimidating.
Why is Popeye killing people that go to the factory? If his goal is to expose that his wife went missing because she uncovered shady business at the factory, would you not want to draw attention to it in a way that doesn't cause literally anyone who can speak to the spinach contamination to die? I'm NGL, I am mostly guessing what his goal is though. The movie is just not very clear on any of that.
Speaking of the spinach contamination, the contaminated spinach literally glows green. Someone had to whistleblow that something was up with it? Really?
Okay, last point because I really just am over talking about this movie at this point is that there's a guy in this movie that looks weirdly like younger Steve Carrel and another guy in this movie that looks kind of like younger/no beard/long hair Oscar Isaac and it was weirding me out the entire time. Maybe I'm insane.
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Sinners (2025), Saloum (2021), The Trolley (2018), Shn!p (2017), Mind Game (2004), Interactive Portraits: Trans People In Japan (2020) and Maurice (1987).
Late but here! I've been tired as fuck so apologies but it probably will happen again. (*I came back to this after I finished writing everything I will never miss another media Monday blog post ever again if it's the one thing keeping me from having to write a whole 7k words that are meant to not only voice my opinion on something but also be coherent.) Anyway, two weeks worth of media to chat about and I have a lot to say about some of them so get cozy.
Sinners
Starting out with the one I have the most to say about. I'm sorry if this is absolute chaos because when I have a lot to say, I sort of lose track of myself and it becomes a bit incoherent but I am doing my best ... Alright, here we go. So, Sinners centers around three characters â Sammie, the son of a preacher who loves to play the blues, and his uncles, Smoke and Stack, who have just returned to town after some time away in Chicago to make them some money and are now looking to open up their own juke joint with those funds. I love how this movie starts. The actual opening scene is fine and all that. It works well to set the tone of the story, to warn us to strap in to acquire the missing pieces. But what I really mean by this is that I specifically love following these characters as they pull in more and more people to get involved with operations for Club Juke. I loved meeting Grace, Bo, Annie, Cornbread, Delta Slim, Pearline â all the chess pieces for the board. Learning about them, about their histories together, delving deeper into the brothers and their ambitions and what and who they hold dear. One of the standout scenes in this for me will forever be when Delta Slim is recounting the lynching of an old friend while riding in the car with Stack and Sammie. Delroy Lindo's performance is absolutely heart-wrenching as he bursts into song, a way to cope with the inescapable sorrow deep inside. Delta Slim was absolutely my favorite of all the characters, which sort of sours the later half for me â but we'll get to that in a bit. (Stack is a very close second, though.)
While Stack and Sammie do their work, Smoke pays a visit to his ex-wife, Annie. We learn that they lost a child and that Annie practices Hoodoo. They also gleefully tossed their name in the ring for 2025s Skip The Foreplay award when their affection for one another rekindles and they have some very, in my opinion, sexless sex. I deeply care about their relationship outside of that but I just find 90% of movie sex scenes extremely appalling most of the time for all of what happens here once they start smooching. At least it was refreshing to see a larger woman on-screen being actively desirable. Wunmi Mosaku is absolutely gorgeous and brings such a delightful balance of levity and humor to Annie.
So here we have our general line-up â Smoke and Stack as the owners, Annie running the kitchen, Sammi and Delta Slim as performers featuring Pearline, who is a married young woman who has a spectacular voice who is invited by a very smitten Sammie, Bo and Grace are shopkeepers that are brought on as suppliers for the grand opening, a fella named Cornbread who is just honestly kind of here to be a funny guy is the bouncer- Oh, and Mary. Mary is Stack's ex-girlfriend. She is white-passing and I think it's important to bring up for reasons in a bit. I think this more or less covers most of my very basic thoughts about the main protagonists, at least, so hopping over to the story.
The first third of the movie covers them all preparing for this event. The twins come into town, pick Sammie up and then split-up to coordinate the rest of the festivities. We meet most of our cast during this, get well-acquainted with their complicated, lengthy and over-lapping relationships. I love it so much. It's great.
The second third of the movie covers the opening event itself. As the sun sets, everyone puts on their fancy clothes and heads over to Club Juke for a fun night out. Nearby, we are set-up for the horror premise of the movie. A vampire, by the name of Remmick, finds shelter and safety from Native Vampire Hunters with a KKKouple he then turns and recruits to his noble cause â Liberalism.
It was insane to see Jack O'Connell again after all these years. I didn't even recognize him at first, though something about him was definitely familiar. Anyway, Remmick. He was so fun. I think he was just built to play the bad guy, honestly. An absolute delight. It was interesting how much people who had seen the movie were convinced the vampires represented right-wing conservatism only to watch the movie for myself and realize with amusement that they were just liberals. Which says volumes, I feel. The details where vampires use the faces of those you love and feel community with in order to make you feel complacent or comfortable enough to lower your guard. I felt my heart sink when turned-Mary weaponized Annie's earlier "We're family" when defending her earlier. Clever and devastating. I wish so deeply it stayed that way.
I do have to say the movie had me pondering vampire rules so much afterwards to the point where I was definitely being a nuisance about it. Like, if you need to be invited into a building in order to enter it, what if you build an addition to the building over say, a window, and around yourselves â would you then be permitted into the rest of the building? I can not help being a nuisance and I know it's not that serious nor does it matter, but this kind of stuff is very fascinating to me. That being said, IDK why they didn't at least try to coat the bullets with some of the pickled garlic juice and shoot the vampire with it. Would've been worth a shot, I think. And I also don't know why everyone had to eat a whole clove of garlic to prove that they hadn't yet been bitten. They witnessed with Stack that just touching the juice would've burned them, so they could've just stuck their hands in the juice to prove they were fine. That tension with threatening Pearline because she finds garlic disgusting to eat was unnecessary.Â
Before I get to the finale, I just need to talk about how absolutely phenomenal the score for this movie is. I love the music in it so much. Every song hits different and it hits good. It brings me so much joy to read about how much of a collaborative effort it was and how much effort lead composer Ludwig GĂśransson. It really genuinely makes me so frustrated how much people miss just how much this movie is about how music has been a coping mechanism for humanity since we could fucking hum. I'm NGL, I was bawling during I Lied To You. It is not only a beautifully composed song, but the crossover of past, present and future and of the cultural exchange that is just co-existing. It really struck such a deep chord in me, and the fact that Remmick wants, more than anything, to utilize that extremely human feeling to build his community of death â something desperate and eternally unhealed and empty and angry and unyielding, beneath that smiling friendly disposition, that haunting voice. Many people have pointed this out so I'm just a voice in the crowd here but I love how much of an overlap there is with how mythological sirens utilize their voices to lure people to their doom. I don't know what else to say and the thing is that there is so much to say but I don't even know how to put the words to the feelings. Like, I genuinely can't remember the last time I've been this affected by the soundtrack of a movie. Miles Caton has one of the most amazing voices of this generation.
Just a couple more things in bullet point form because this is getting so long âÂ
I feel so stupid because I had no idea both Smoke and Stack were played by Michael B. Jordan. I was like, whoa they found a guy that looks just like him that's crazy ... He fuckin' delivered with these two. Played them both as total individuals, their own quirks, their own depth. At no point did it feel gimmicky like these "actors plays twins" situations tends to feel. It was phenomenally done.
I loved the special effects and lighting in this movie. It's hard to do the glowing vampire eyes without looking over-the-top cheesy but this movie knocks it out of the park. Their glow looks almost like their eyes are simply catching the light, an effect that makes you sort of second-guess what you saw, makes you shrug it off. The shadows that sort of cast over their faces lend so much to their untrustworthy disposition, using the night almost as a cloak to mask their true intentions. It's just *chef's kiss*.
I almost burst my bladder during this movie because I didn't want to miss a second. I ended up giving up and sprinting to the bathroom during the credits because I didn't want to miss the two post-credits scenes. Which, for the record, I am extremely against. As someone who worked at a movie theater, there is nothing more annoying than having to stand around and wait for a theater to clear before being able to start cleaning it and having a scene at the very end of the credits in addition to the middle-credits gives workers less time to clear theaters for the next showings. I'm sure some theaters take this into according with scheduling but my old one did NOT give a fuck.
Apparently Ro was tricked into thinking that this movie was a "Devil Went Down To Georgia" type movie by someone on the internet and spent the entire thing waiting for a music duel to happen.
The trailers for this movie was NOT GOOD! I saw a couple and I was really excited about it but so many of them give away who dies or gets turned into a vampire so it kind of just ... makes it a bit of a wet fart. Stack, specifically, I knew from the jump would turn into a vampire because some of the trailers have the "That's not your brother" scene. Maybe they thought we wouldn't know which of the brothers would get turned because they're twins but you can see their outfits and they both have very distinct ways of acting and speaking so anyone with a braincell would be able to tell it was Stack.
For a while, I grimaced a bit about the choice to make Remmick Irish because it felt a bit tone-deaf to ignore the experience of the Irish not just in their states but in Ireland but then I realized that the issue I took was with outside perspectives and the willful blindness when it came to Remmick and his relationship to the movie's themes about culture, loss and music. About viewing him entirely as an outsider and not someone who'd had everything taken from him, who in his search for connection â loses everything that made him human, everything that kept him connected in the first place.
The Native characters in this movie ... were very much just ... caricatures. They were in it for like two minutes and were nothing but like. A stereotype. Big bummer.
On to the third ... third of the movie. I feel like things just sort of unraveled when Grace finally let the vampires in. Everyone kept insisting that they just needed to make it until dawn but then what? Everyone has lives here, families, businesses, etc. The sun would come down again and what would protect them then? IDK, I'm not entirely opposed to just going to town on those MFers but I think they should've maybe ... strategized this a bit more. Anyway, the confrontation itself isn't an issue with me, just more about how it all plays out. So let's try to tackle this in a way where I make sense.
OKAY. My main complaint, and I actually went back and pulled up a bootleg of this movie to confirm this because I was second-guessing myself, is the fact that there are people inside the barn with our protagonists that are never named or acknowledged at all until the big battle once the vampires are let in by Grace. It is so insane to think about. I swear, go back and rewatch that scene closely. Like four random guys get attacked by the vampires and I'm just like ... who the fuck are these people? Where have they been the entire time? Why were they not made to eat the garlic clove but Pearline was threatened if she didn't eat one? I think they realized a bit too late that it didn't make sense to have so few people on the protagonists side and just threw in some random guys but it completely distracted me from the intensity of the moment because it made me be very confused about what the hell was going on and who actually was dying, how and when.
I haven't seen anyone else bring this up because I want to but I think it's very strange that literally the only woman that survived this movie was the white-passing one. As a heavily mixed white-passing person (as much as I'm willing to elaborate on public mediums lol), I was really happy to see a movie this big talk about feeling like you don't ever really belong when you don't look a certain type of way and how this feeling obviously isn't exclusive to being white-passing and how there is communion in that sentiment of not belonging anywhere else other than with each other. But I'm not going to sit here and turn a blind eye to the fact that both the dark skinned lead black women in this movie die. I could understand, narratively, why Annie did (to an extent but discussing unwieldy narrative uses of misogynoir and the historical refrigeration of women to fuel man-pain could be a whole ass separate post). But killing Pearline was stupid to me. Like many of the deaths in this end stretch, it's unceremonious and not given much attention or respect, in my opinion. I guess I understand that maybe the point was just kind of for Sammie to be the only survivor but ... I dunno. I think it would've been more meaningful for a vampire Pearline to reunite with Sammie decades later. We could've still gotten vampires Stack and Mary if hearts were set on that but ... I dunno. It didn't really hit for me.
I think that more or less covers my general sentiments for the movie. I could honestly just talk about it endlessly, I think so I need to stop myself. I loved Sinners a lot. I think it did a phenomenal job. I was hooked from start to finish and despite the criticisms I have about it, I think it did its story, its history, its cast, everything â justice. An ode to horror.
I have to say, I will never forgive Coogler for not using this as an opportunity to set up a franchise featuring Sammie as a vampire hunter that uses his music to lure vampires in and kill them. And we should've also gotten an actual Devil Went Down To Georgia moment.
Shn!p
Shn!p is a cute little puzzle game that reminded me of a mobile game I used to be obsessed with called Dots. Its gameplay is different but has a similar sort of vibe â appearance, some aspects of gameplay, etc. I like the sound effects a lot in the game, it made toying with it all the more enjoyable. There's not all that much to say about it, really. It's pretty to the point, something to pick at when you just kind of have some time to kill. Fun and short.
The Trolley
A game where you play as a man hired to take apart a small town's trolley. It's a game that wishes it had a lot to say, but doesn't really. It's part-walking simulator part ... visual novel, maybe? I don't know but the gameplay left a lot to be desired. As the character, you reminisce riding on the trolley, think about the impact getting rid of it will have on the community, suspect that there might be suspicious reasons behind the removal of the system. You can choose your dialogue options which leads to different forms of speculation but they all sort of fall a bit flat. They don't really ever have anything introspective to say.
There's a lot of asset reuse in the game, which is fine when you're not walking past the same drugstore with the same drugstore sign outside it twenty times. Would it have been too much work to change the name of the store? Or even just be rid of it entirely. It just extremely stood out as the only building with any sort of writing on it. Everything is unpolished as well, which I'm not necessarily opposed to but it kind of makes you wonder how much actual effort was put into the game. One part I did really like visually was when you are riding the trolley up the incline and you can see the city skyline. It's not some breathtaking sight or anything, but that's okay. It balances well the tone of the game and the wary future of the town it is set in.
The bland appearance of the game makes it a bit difficult to navigate once you receive your tasks for the day. It'll tell you to go to the office to do something but there will be three buildings that all look like offices. So most of the game time, you spend wandering around a bit aimlessly until you stumble onto where you were meant to go next.
A good little starter project with potential to be something deeper, something more thoughtful.
Mind Game
Trigger warning â I will be talking about a scene in this movie depicting a sexual assault in no explicit detail.
Man. I'm always like ... I love art. But then you go and watch something like Mindgame and go ... MAN, I LOVE ART!! I finished it and felt so full of life and inspiration and energy. Invigorating. The movie follows Nishi, who's an aspiring mangaka, as he dies trying to protect his childhood crush Myono from yakuza who are there to beat up Myono's dad for stealing one of their girlfriends. Also there, is Yan, Myono's sister and co-owner of the restaurant this all goes down in. After dying from getting shot in the butt, Nishi impresses what I can only describe as the most outstanding depiction of God in any piece of media ever with his outright refusal to die. He is given a second chance as he outruns God, who is charmed by his determination and also is late for a date anyway. Nishi returns to the plane of the living with the promise that he will live life with no regrets. He comes back to just moments before his death and manages to make away with both Myono and Yan, stealing the yakuza's car and taking off into the night. In the chaos of the pursuit, they are eaten by a whale. Yeah, I know. You're just gonna have to watch it. It rules.
While in this whale, they cross paths with Old Man Yaoi. He's actually not called this but he's called Old Man by the others and I can't not call anyone who is an old man Old Man Yaoi so it is what it is. As it turns out, he's been living in the whale for years now and has essentially established a life in there. The story follows this little group through coming to terms with their current fate and their eventual attempt to escape the whale. Which is great. It goes on forever but it feels like you are being sucked into an airplane turbine the entire time.
I don't know how to put into words how much this movie rules and I wish people liked it more. I think it's stupid whenever people use stupid thoughtless arguments to discredit art, especially when it's just to feed their own superiority complex. The number of times I read that this movie was bad because Myono had big boobs or because there was an attempted sexual assault on her was unbelievable. I won't bore you with my arguments about this again, because I've talked about what I think about this kind of stuff, especially when it comes to narratives about sexual assault, in the past â specifically in my Paprika and Crank reviews. But I will say, the thing that irritates me about people pointing out Myono's breasts in specific is that most everyone is naked or in their underwear in this movie for a while. We see Nishi's wiener so much, but it's only misogyny if we see boobs â I guess. Because boobs are inherently sexual. Of course. That makes sense. (No it doesn't, this is a stupid thing to think.) It just feels very much like big boobed women can't exist in things because their existence alone is an affront to women everywhere.
I'm not acting like the movie isn't a pervert movie. It's a movie by and for perverts, through and through. But like, whatever? I just think that when you completely center your opinion and make your every interaction with art be based entirely on whether or not it fits your criteria of "problematic", you are an extremely boring person with no understanding whatsoever of art and a lack of ability to process nuance. FWIW, this isn't me saying you can't critique art (fucking obviously, that is what I'm doing in these reviews lol) but there is a huge difference between entirely writing off a piece of media because there was a boob in it and engaging with why the boob was there in the first place, what purpose or meaning it carries, what it means to the characters and what it means to the creator and what it means to the audience.
Anyway, this movie has some phenomenal sequences of animation. It's genuinely hard to wrap your mind around some of it. It's absolutely gorgeous. It's so trippy and experimental and janky and crazy and refreshing and it's everything I love about art. You can really tell that everyone that worked on it was having a blast. The characters are all freaks and weirdos and so fun and full of life. It also has one of the most beautiful sex scenes in any piece of media ever. I don't even know what else to say. What can I say? Just go watch this fucking movie right now!
Interactive Portraits: Trans People In Japan
This was such a fun game in theory. It has a lot of issues when in practice, though. The crux of it is that the creator, Zoyander Street, had multiple conversations with trans people in Japan and then logged them into a game so that it could feel almost as if you were the one interviewing them. The responses are enlightening, albeit a bit odd at times. The problem lies majorly with the format. Sometimes the game bugs out and questions take you to the wrong responses, sometimes you get stuck in a loop of asking the same questions and getting the same answers. Something that bothered me is that every time you interview someone, they have something they say as a greeting. Most of the time, you don't have time to read all of it before it goes away. I don't know why we can't dismiss that ourselves by pressing Z like the rest of the dialogue?
The game is visually very fun! I love all the designs people got to represent them. I wish we could know more about how the project itself worked. Did they get to pick the little creature that represents them? Some of them have a lot of overlap in design which I thought was kind of lame. Some people's interviews enter this like, second stage where you get to dig into their thoughts a little deeper. It's a bit more interactive and fun and I'm not sure if it's meant to happen with everyone but it only happened with two interviewees with me. Sometimes the dialogue also feels a bit disjointed. Like there's stuff missing between the questions/answers that got cut out.
I do not like the sound in this game. There's no music or anything and there are no volume settings. I ended up just muting it in general at one point. It's an issue specifically with the noise that places when those being interviewed are giving their responses. It's droning and repetitive and annoying.
It was fun that there seemed to be a diverse range in people interviewed for this. All with different experiences. It was enlightening and sweet. The game is described as inspired by the visual novel genre and games like Tamagotchi. I didn't entirely see the Tamagotchi aspect. It would've been fun to maybe have them each pick an item they really like and have us drag it over to them and it unlocking dialogue they have about the thing they like. IDK, maybe leaning to that might feel gross in that it might frame trans people as pets or something because Tamagotchi's are virtual pets? But I just didn't really see or understand the Tamagotchi aspect at all.
Anyway, this is all to say that this game is a very pleasant and eye-opening experience when muted. It doesn't take very long to read through it all if you can get it to not bug out on you. Worth a look-over, in my opinion.
Saloum
Trigger warning â I will be talking about a scene in this movie which implies the sexual assault of a child in no explicit detail.
Saloum follows a group of mercenaries made up of Chaka, Rafa and Minuit, escaping Bissau to Dakar after rescuing a Mexican cartel leader they might've been hired to rescue. I'm honestly not entirely sure, tbh â which leads me to one of my complaints about the movie. But that'll be for the bullet points. During their escape via plane, they come to realize that their fuel tank had been sabotaged which lead them to have to land sooner and seek refuge at a conservationist camp in order to lie low and figure out their next moves. While their, hidden truths are very suddenly unveiled â which turn the action genre over on its head and spirals the movie into a full-on fantasy horror.
The big twist (or at least one of them) is that Chaka had been the one to sabotage the plane's fuel tank in order to get them to land the plane near the camp because he had a score to settle with Omar, the man who runs the camp. My question is, what if they ended having to switch plans and go in another direction? How was he able to calculate exactly how closely they would land to the camp? I know they end up having to walk a bunch and then even go the rest of the way on boats, but what if it ended up lasting them like days longer â to the point where it'd be senseless to go back the other way? I just think that it was an odd way to go about this. Could've had him listening in on a radio, intercepting frequencies, and lying about there being an attempt at a surprise attack up ahead which gets them to give up an aerial escape entirely? IDK, it was just a strange choice that worked out a bit too well for him.
There are other people staying in the camp. Two of them are a couple named Sephora and Youce. I don't know why they're in this movie at all. Their characters contribute nothing whatsoever to the storyline outside of making them expendables when the Horrors are unlocked later.
There is also a woman named Awa. She is woman who is deaf-mute and is so good at lip reading she doesn't even need to be looking at you to read your lips. I'm not gonna rib them too hard about this. It's not an extremely huge deal but it was funny. And admittedly despite the minor flubs there, it was very cool to see so three different languages utilized in this movie. An amazing combination of French, Wolof and Sign Language. I was very curious about what exact regional Sign Language was being utilized because I only know very extremely basic and random ASL signs and nothing else but the movie never really clarifies. It was very cool that the mercenaries also know Sign Language, though. Something that lends credence to the recon aspect of their work and fleshes them out a bit more. That being said, I would've loved to see Awa be more of a character. She is just very adamant about joining the mercenaries. I don't really know why because the movie never expands on it. It doesn't really seem to show much of any interest in her TBH which is a bummer. There are two more people who are like There but don't really matter, really. There's Salamane, who works for Omar at the camp and Captain Souleymane, who is Omar's OOMF and also a cop and happens to be visiting around the time the mercenaries are there, very coincidentally.
Okay, anyway â here's where things get a bit odd. We find out that the reason Chaka had sabotaged the plane with hopes of coming to this encampment was because he had, at one point, been a child soldier working under Omar (who at that point was operating under the name Colonel Remington, a nickname he got because of the gun he had which Chaka stole from him as a child during his escape). It didn't exactly end at child soldiering there and Chaka also strongly implies that Omar had also raped him during his captivity. When this big reveal is made, Chaka kills Omar which ... unleashes a curse. I'm NGL, around this point I got pretty lost. I'd really enjoyed everything until then honestly but it seemed like a lot of things were just ... not gelling with each other. Direction, genre, tone â everything just sort of got muddled up.
So historically speaking, there is a folk tale that originates in that area about King Gana Sira Bana (who existed in real life), who placed a curse onto his people and land (which is the folk tale part of this) after they all conspired to kill him (which is also real). Omar, apparently, was ... controlling this curse by performing rituals involving young boys he keeps locked up in a nearby village of cultists who also seem to worship (?) this curse. An important aspect of this curse is that it manifests itself as a swarm of shadowy insects. The Wikipedia page said it can only affect you through hearing but I could swear the movie (or the subtitles, at least) said it affected you through any sense. But given that we don't really see it attack anyone via any other sense, I'm gonna wager a guess that the subtitles were wrong.
Anyone not extremely plot-related dies as these bug monsters swarm and attack anyone that'll hear them out. Wait, actually â so those kids I mentioned earlier that Omar was utilizing in his rituals, so Chaka finds them during all this chaos and releases them from their imprisonment and then they just like ... run off? Into the wilderness, I guess. Just the whole lot of them. No food or resources or like anything at all. I guess they kill Salamane and enact a bit of vengeance but ... Anyway, the movie certainly refers to itself as a horror but there really isn't anything scary about it. I could agree there are horror-like aspects to it but ... IDK. I don't feel like it full committed to it, personally. Minuit (who is my favorite of the mercenaries) is a bwiti practitioner and manages to enter a trance-like state in which he manages to hold back the swarms in exchange for giving himself up to them. So that makes you go, oh okay â he sacrificed himself so they'll leave him and escape thanks to him since he's holding them back, right?
No, they mercy-kill him. What?? Why? Now those thangs are unleashed again and coming after them, so he died for nothing? That was so bizarre and irritating. Anyway, they all get on a boat and escapes â which is a big step for Chaka because he has horrible aquaphobia. But that's what this is all about, right? Confronting your personal demons and coming out the other side of it all stronger? Well, no to that too. Chaka gets attacked during the escape by Omar, who is essentially just an undead host for the curse now, and he's dragged into the water, which I still don't get what the fuck the thing's deal is. Like what is the point? What do you want, y'know? Chaka is now apparently meant to take Omar's place in satiating the demon, which is like. Yeah. Not great. The narrator awkwardly shuffles in while Awa and Rafa, our sole survivors, make their escape, to tell us about how revenge is bad and all that. Which like, I think a cautionary tale about the cycle of revenge is fine in concept but I do not think it really came full circle at all in this at all unfortunately.
The music in this movie is absolutely phenomenal and the costuming/wardrobe is amazing, especially when it comes to the main three. Minuit especially looks so so cool. I really like the way the movie is shot. There are a lot of very cool compositions and lighting set-ups. It was also just a great watch in general. Extremely fun with extremely likeable characters. Though I haven't been able to find exact numbers, the director confirmed the film was made on a very tight budget. And I can honestly promise that any of the nitpicks did not come from that. Every penny was used dutifully and you can see it in the quality of the film throughout. I just wish maybe the actual story, the hard details, had gone through just a few rewrites, edits, drafting, tweaks, etc as you will.Â
Maurice
Okay, I have officially been working on this post for more than six hours. Let's make this quick. As much as I'd like to joke about this movie and how much it is just the average gay experience, something about it is just so ... tender. The movie centers Maurice and Clive, two men at the peak of their lives in 1910s England who are deeply in love with each other. While Maurice wants to shout it to the high heavens, Clive, after witnessing his college friend be jailed and lose everything for being outed as a gay man, hesitates. But he never says no and that is the crux of this tale. Both of them stuck in this merry-go-round neither want to be on but neither can bring themselves to jump off. At least not until Maurice, heartbroken as he watches Clive move on and marry a woman and bury himself deeper in the closet, meets Alec â and this leads me to bring up something I don't really see anyone at all bring up about this movie. Alec is a groundskeeper at Clive's estate. Which is to say, he's poor. Maurice and Clive both attended Cambridge, both are the heads of their very well-off families. So much of this movie, I wondered why they didn't just say fuck it, take their cut of the inheritance and fuck off to France or Italy or something.
I actually laughed when the doctor Maurice begins to see for conversion therapy just tells him to do exactly that, a fascinating suggestion from a person you'd least expect to hear it from. And thinking about Alec, it really puts it into perspective the class discrepancy. Just how much more leniency you are given when you have money. Even the friend Clive was so traumatized over ended up with only a six month jail sentence because of who he was and all that he would lose (his social status) being enough punishment in the judges eyes. So what happened to men who didn't have all that to lose? There's just something that settles in the pit of your stomach when Alec and Maurice are in one another's presence. A lot of people talk about how Maurice just wanted someone that loved him enough to give everything up for him and it's like, Alec doesn't really have anything to lose. And I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, I don't think it matters â but I think it's important to think about.
I'm not into that whole dark academia vibe or whatever so the movie was pretty okay to look at. I mostly liked any of the scenes with plants in them. There's a really good review I'll link here that talks about how nature is utilized in the movie. Everything else just sort of looked whatever. The fashion was also just okay. And the music was. There, probably. The movie's biggest crime was that it just went on for too long. Someone in another review pointed out that it was nice to see these moments of affection sort of slip in from the nothingness of mundanity. And I can agree with that to an extent but it's just kind of like, all the movie is. At least until we get closer towards the end, where things kick off and we get full-frontal, baby. The most common negative thing people had to say about this movie was that it's boring and like ... yeah, I have to agree. It wasn't like the end of the world or anything, though. It's okay to be a little bored sometimes.
As boring as it is at times, there are some parts I just can't get out of my head. I can't stop thinking about the scene when Maurice runs his hands through Clive's hair, or the scene where Clive and his wife watch themselves in the mirror â his wife's face slowly morphing from affection to a distressed puzzlement when she registers that Clive is not present in the moment with her, the scene where Maurice breaks into Clive's room to sneak him a kiss and confess his affections mirroring Alec sneaking into Maurice's room later and doing the very same.
I also can't stop thinking about Hugh Grant's evil, evil mustache.
To leave this all with an EM Forster quote another reviewer kindly shared that touched my heart,
âWhen I am with him, smoking or talking quietly ahead, or whatever it may be, I see, beyond my own happiness or intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of thousands of others whose names I shall never hear, and know that there is a great unrecorded history.â
For ease of access, in this post I talk about â Badder Ben: The Final Chapter (2017), American Election (2019) and Paprika (2006).
We've started a habit now whenever we finish a movie specifically, to log on to Letterboxd and read a couple of pages of the half star reviews on them and read a couple of the pages of the five star reviews. It really puts it into perspective what you hate about people.
Badder Ben: The Final Chapter
I watched the first Bad Ben a few months ago and dare I say, it was life-changing. It made me think so much about the end monologue of this Ralph Sepe video, which is one I love and I regularly reference. If you want to make something, just make it! Nothing is stopping you but yourself. And that's exactly what Nigel Bach did. I loved the first movie and I loved this sequel too. The story follows Tom Riley after he purchases a house, only to find out that it is very haunted. The sequel (meant to be watched after the prequel but we unfortunately were unable to find where to watch it that would also allow us to stream on Hyperbeam so we just hopped over to the sequel) follows the story of Tom as he's given up on trying to keep his house after surviving a horrific attack and lives as a recluse in the woods, only to be sought after and offered money in exchange for cooperation by a small documentary group looking to investigate what exactly went on in the house. The movie is shot entirely in the Paranomal Activity-style, alternating handheld camera/security camera which is used to its full potential. It never finds itself copying any of its inspiration, carving out a path for itself in the found footage genre.
I do have to say, that there is just kind of one glaring thing I didn't really like or understand about the movie. I don't want to be mean saying this but I don't know why the character of the documentary producer (?)/leader guy (David, according to Letterboxd) was there. He didn't really offer a whole lot. I didn't exactly enjoy the Jacquie character, though she was pretty funny there are times where she can be a bit grating, but at least her character did things. Maybe it was just that he wanted to get some of his friends involved and have a good time making a movie, which I can't fault them for. Schmiddy was a great character. He was funny and really offered a great balance to Jacquie's intensity and Tom's jadedness.
The special effects in this one ruled. I love that they are pushing forward and experimenting a bit more, really building on the previous movies.
The last thing I really wanted to talk about this movie is just its crown jewel â Tom Riley. He's such a fantastic lead character. He's skeptical and quick-thinking and silly and just sort of feels like an amalgamation of what we're all thinking and feeling when we're watching yet another derivative found footage movie. He's sarcastic and fun and a breath of fresh air when it comes to all the stale horror movie protags we are typically being served up.
Can't wait to watch the other thirteen movies in the franchise.
American Election
Sometimes you interact with something and go "That wasn't for me" and then you look at what other people have to say about it and you're ... perplexed. I really don't know how much I want to go on about the 100k all hurt no comfort unrequited lesbian reader/Donald Trump fanfiction I played through last night but it was definitely something. I only played through this once because it is eleven chapters for some reason but the story follows Abigail Thoreau as she is sought after by the presidential campaign of a man called Truman Glass â a very obvious stand-in for Donald Trump. She accepts this position and works up the rungs to eventually become his campaign manager. Throughout all of this, she dwells in self-loathing and doubt about whether the man she is backing is actually a good person or not and ultimately, comes to a conclusion.
Call me callous but I do not understand the sad attempts at trying to get me to empathize with the pathetic actions of a pathetic woman. Because she projects her feelings of resentment towards her dad onto him and tries to mentally replace her dad with this man? I don't know, I have no fucking clue what this game is. I don't understand the point of it. It drags on for so fucking long and it's just hot air. Who is this game for? The centrists? It has such a narrow view of the world, of politics, so little to say. To actually say.
The thing is that I take no issue with the morally ambiguous or even downright evil protagonist. Hell, I recently reviewed Crank and yapped about how much I loved it. It is fine if Abigail is this woman who is tormented by her own decisions, who is in over her head, who keeps fucking up â but the issue is that despite the wordy pretentious rambling about wolves and home and what the fuck ever â we never really get to the crux of why she is the way she is. She is never explored in-depth at all, we are just given a bunch of random scenes throughout her life which are supposed to carry meaning but ultimately hold absolutely no weight. There is nothing interesting about her character, there is nothing interesting about this story, there is nothing interesting about this game.
I do have one question though â why is the Trump stand-in Truman Glass? Why is he not just called Donald Trump? Obama exists in this game world, there's no stand-in for him, and fits his role tidily in the story as the rumored/purported reason this shadow puppet of a character runs for the presidency in the first place. And Truman Glass is so obviously meant to be a Trump stand-in that it'd be laughable to try to argue otherwise. Here's the crazy thing too â Truman Glass is written with a cunning and calculation that I can say with full confidence the liquified pudding that is the brain of Donald Trump could never in a million years conjure up. It's just ... fanfiction. Deluded centrist fanfiction, meant to what? Make them feel better about not picking one fascist over the other? I don't know. I genuinely don't know what the hell this game is. I don't know if it's because of how I played the game but it seemed that regardless of what I picked most of the time, the game rerouted me to whatever was the most centrist result. I was curious about playing the game through a few more times to see what would happen but I just don't care to. It's too slow, too boring, too pointless. Three hours of my life I will never get back.
Paprika
We did the alphabet randomizer thing to pick the first letter of the next movie we'd watch and would you believe we got a P this time? It was also the shortest movie starting with a P on the list and we were on a bit of a time crunch so we said fuck it, another Satoshi Kon flick it is. Paprika was a movie. It sure was. Let me try and figure out how to structure this so that it is not totally all over the place.
Paprika is an action mystery movie about a little machine called the DC Mini. This machine allows you to enter the dreams of others and up until the start of the movie, it is currently (while in its research phase) being utilized to offer a sort of dream therapy. We come to learn, however, that one of these machines has been stolen and though unclear at first, the thief's goals aren't exactly awesome. We follow Paprika, a sort of dreamsona cohabitating existence with a woman named Chiba, a man named Tokita who invented the DC Mini alongside his assistant Himura â who is at first believed to be the initial thief of the DC Mini. We also have Dr. Old Man. I don't know his name but I'm not gonna be talking a lot about him anyway. I think he's the like ... head of the department for this project or something? And he jumps out a real life not dream window at one point for shits and giggles so that really tells you everything you need to know about him.
There are also two other guys. Osanai which is just kind of like a dude who is third-wheeling Chiba and Tokita's apparently relationship founded on their mutual fatphobia fetish. And then there's a guy I call Professor X, who is a bald dude in a suit and wheelchair who, I shit you not, has the role of chairman in the company. By the way, this is like a science and technological research company he's the chairman of and apparently he like, hates science and technology? I don't get it. There are a lot of tangents in this movie. He is also like constantly gassing it on the wheelchair. I swear to God he zips around on-screen at like, at least 20 mph. We'll call him Chairman for reference. Okay, I've planted the seeds. Let's try and figure this out together.
Oh, wait shit. There's also a cop in this movie. A detective. I don't know why he's here. This movie would've been infinitely better without him in it. He's silly and all but there were more important things we could've focused on, like you know â the titular character of the movie. Also I forgot his name so we'll call him Cop. Anyway, okay. Actually moving on now. Let's get into the meat and potatoes.
Uuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. It's just not that good. I'm sorry. Starting with the visuals, I went in expecting to get my mind fucking blown out of my skull with the cool surrealist visuals given how often people jerk themselves off about how awesome this movie looks. It's just. Fine. The coolest part of it is the opening credits where we get Paprika just sort of hopping around being very manic pixie dream girl. Very cool and fun and much of what I expected the rest of the movie to be. But I guess they blew their budget on that? It just does not really look very cool for the rest of the movie. It's just like oh okay, here's the parade again (which repeatedly plays and cuts off the best Susumu Hirasawa song ever made time and time again before it even gets to any of the cool parts), that's cool. Oh, that cop is having the dream. Again. Okay. Oh, the fat guy is trapped in an elevator because he's so fat and he's eating so much because he's such a fatty fat fatty. So glad we're wasting screentime on this.
Okay, you get the point. I think Paprika is Kon's least visually interesting movie. And that was about the longest I could put off talking about the fatphobia so Christ does Kon hate fat people. What is his fucking problem? Perfect Blue definitely sniffed of fatphobia to me but there wasn't necessarily anything as like outright and blatantly cruel as everything Tokita has to put up with in Paprika. And some people could argue "Well, he likes it! He's into it!" and it's like, he's not a real person! Kon specifically wrote it so that he likes/is into being bullied for being fat. And that's so fucking weird dude. The endgame romance between him and the woman who is just constantly ridiculing and demeaning him is so gross and left me grimacing.
Which brings me to my next thing I want to talk about. I have once again, much like Millennium Actress, fallen into the trap of getting mad about people having no media literacy. So I want to make it very clear that rape existing in a movie is not misogynistic. The rape seen in this movie is hardly graphic, it utilizes its narrative tools (the dreamscape) to give us a very clear metaphor for sexual violence. As an actual survivor and not someone searching for brownie points for completely reframing my engagement with art around whether it's Problematic or not, I think it was done rather masterfully. To the people reading this who were grossly offended by this scene, it was supposed to upset you. It was supposed to make you feel bad. Art is not about always catering to the happy warm feelings and sometimes bad things happen to people. What is misogynistic is that this assault is left completely unexplored narratively during the rest of the runtime. It is something that happens, something both Paprika and Chiba experience â two very different women who co-exist in ways no one else in the world could ever understand. And neither have a word to say about it. This all brings me to my thing about Satoshi Kon, my thing that I also chatted about in my post from last week where I yap about Millennium Actress âÂ
Miwa, Paprika and Chiba, Chiyoko â they are all lead women in Satoshi Kon's films. And all of them are about as dimensional as a scuff mark on a hardwood floor. Kon falls into his own trap. He is wo he criticizes. The fanatic, the objectifier, the obssessor. These women are tools to him, but not in the way a character is to an author â rather in the way women are to men in his eyes because it's not just about how women are written, it's about the way they are treated, the respect they are given, the growth, the time, the care. Take into account how much time we spend with the waste of life that is the cop's storyline, for example. What did any of that matter to the overall plot? Nothing. Why was he here? Nothing would have changed if all his shit would've been cut. And we could've spent a lot more time focused on the actual characters that matter. But when faced with the idea of understanding a woman, Satoshi Kon would rather cringe and live in this idealized delusion that he does understand them. It's pathetic and why his movies won't stick with me.
Well, all of them but one.
My last post has since been amended to note this but I was unintentionally deceitful when I said Perfect Blue had been the only Satoshi Kon movie I'd seen before Millennium Actress. I had also seen Tokyo Godfathers, I was reminded by a friend while discussing my last review. But it was jarring, to consider that a Satoshi Kon movie and I really plopped my ass down and wondered why I felt that way. So I did a little digging.
So, after having officially seen what is essentially his main filmography, I can confidently say that I think that Perfect Blue and Paprika are his weakest movies narratively speaking. And I came to realize that a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are both based off of novels that had a bunch going on in them that needed to be cut out for runtime which makes things hard to follow, motivations unclear, storylines inconsistent or under-developed â etc. Which leads me to venture an assumption that Satoshi Kon really likes convoluted stories but he doesn't know how to tell them cohesively.
But there was still more to this. Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress has the least interesting character writing, in my opinion of the bunch. And I couldn't help but notice that there was a co-writer on the script there alongside Kon on both of these projects. A man by the name of Sadayuki Murai who worked a tiny bit on some really interesting stuff around the time but has worked a lot a bit on some really obnoxious generic bullshit afterwards. Interesting. I then checked out Paprika â also co-written between Kon and a man named Seishi Minakami. He had previously worked on Paranoia Agent with Kon, which leads me to believe that he's a strong mystery/sci-fi writer and thus weaker in the aspect of people. I haven't seen Paranoia Agent since I was in middle school so I can't fathom pulling any memories about it up now but I've a feeling I'm on to something here. Anyway, that's all to say that this is another dude who was doing alright for the time and then cannonballed into generic slop anime work.
Which leaves us with Tokyo Godfathers, the one standout, the one that feels the most disconnected from the other usual Kon works. Keiko Nobumoto ... Now, some of you may find this name familiar. You may know her from some of her work on Cowboy Bebop (she scripted almost half the show and scripted the entire movie), Macross Plus, she even wrote an episode of Samurai Champloo (only my favorite anime of all time that I have watched start to finish 14 times). Others may know her from, oh I don't know â MOTHERFUCKING WOLF'S RAIN! As in the creator of Wolf's Rain! It all adds up now. Satoshi Kon's movie that least treats women like props ... was co-written by a woman. CASE CLOSED!
Okay, now that I got that all out â I don't really know where to go from here. Um. That music is really good. Susumu Hirasawa, you will always be famous.
For ease of reference, in this post I talk about â Kintsugi (2020), Dee Dum (2017), Bestiary (2019), Keep It Together (2017) and Millennium Actress (2001).
Kintsugi
Kintsugi was a short and sweet game about the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery using a lacquer mixed with gold pigment. The first thing that comes to mind to talk about this game is the absolutely insane music playing throughout it. I'm not saying that the game should totally lean into Thing Japan and play some wistful koto tracks if that's not what the creator envisioned for it but I did, at the least, expect a quiet and meditative song to fit with the calming nature of the game itself and instead got a very loud song I can only describe as Song That Plays During The Long Walk On Your Way To Face Off With The Final RPG Boss. It's so odd because it starts off very calm and chipper but gradually built to a point of total chaos where I straight up could not hear anyone I was streaming on call with. It simply did not match the vibe at all. Anyway, enough of that.
I thought the rest of the game was fine. Very simple. Fairly easy. I think something that would've been fun is if you dropped broken pieces, they too would also shatter into more pieces you had to put together. Or if when you were done with the game, you were told you were done with the game. What I mean to say is that it would've been nice if there was just a bit more care put into it. I guess maybe this was just meant to be a smaller lower-effort project, which is totally fine - I just didn't really personally get much from it.
Dee Dum
Dee Dum was another short game. I only really did a few levels because it's pretty easy to get a general idea of what's in store for you after a handful. I think the general aesthetic of the game needs a lot of work. I understand it's just a very simple shapes in puzzle game but there is nothing setting it apart from so many other games offering the exact same thing save for the fact that some of these other games simply look better. It was simply fine and I don't have a whole lot to say about it aside from that.
Bestiary
This one had so much potential. The crux of it is that you are a Professor tasked with cataloguing creatures from another world based entirely off of pictures sent to you from the exploring scouts. The game randomly generators a creature with a combination of top, mid-section and feet, you come up with a name, determine their diet and characteristics and send in the information. It sounds fun! But it's not nearly as fleshed out as it could be. After a few turns, you realize that the generator in the game does not have many assets to work with. The game also is never-ending. You don't really have goals to reach. Nothing really comes of the work you do aside from the game saving a screenshot of your work to a folder on your computer for you. This could've genuinely been such a great game but it was more of a concept of a project than an actually finished project. At least it's fun to collaborate and play with friends. Anyway, check out some of our little guys.
Keep It Together
Definitely my favorite of the night! You play as a bunch of rats in a trench coat and the goal is to navigate brief interactions with others in hopes of not being found out. Every wrong answer you give, your stress meter goes up. After each filled meter, you have to hold down a key on your keyboard as you continue to play. As you progress in the game, certain characters unlock traits to help you better curate which responses they'd react most positively towards. It goes on until you either can not hold anymore keys or the game bugs out because your laptop is not designed to have more than four keys held at any given time. The dev has cleverly pointed out how it serves as a metaphor. On the topic of bugs, that would be my main complaint of the game. Sometimes it decides to stop registering your responses entirely, other times it fills the screen with several faces of the people you're meant to be talking to one by one and asking you to press keys despite that game having just freshly booted up. It's fine, I'm honestly willing to overlook it just because this game is so much fun. This game â it is so addictive.  Fun, quick, chaotic. I love the art in it too so much. It's so original and colorful and silly. It perfectly fits the vibe.
Millennium Actress
I've been meaning to watch more Satoshi Kon movies and when this one came up from the randomizer, I was pretty excited â but not really for the reason you'd think. I feel like Millennium Actress has always kind of been held at a distance from other Satoshi Kon classics like Paprika and Perfect Blue and I really wanted to try and learn why. The answer might surprise you. (Sorry okay I wanted to do the corny media article thing I won't do it again)
Millennium Actress' story, while very interest-piquing, is still water compared to a lot of what is admired about Satoshi Kon's usual writing style. But my question is, have other Satoshi Kon's movies ever really had a really interesting storyline or were you just transfixed by the cool art and surrealist imagery? Now, for the sake of clarity, I have only seen Perfect Blue*. I'm eager to watch Paprika but I unfortunately do not have the time to watch movies all day so it will get its time in the sun someday. Millennium Actress focuses on Chiyoko, an actress who met a concerningly vague-aged man as very much a high school student and fell in love with him. The two are driven apart as political tensions rise in Japan and the man happens to be a political revolutionary. She then vows to find him again, something that he seems laughably indifferent about. She becomes an actress in hopes that he will one day see one of her movies and they would then be reunited by it. The movie focuses on her as a 70 year old woman as she reflects through her filmography and how it balanced her constant failures in searching for this man. Whose name, just to point out, she does not even know. A lot of people argue that it is misogynistic to portray a woman so obsessively in love with this stranger, so much so that she is willing to alter her life and essentially form her entire personality around chasing him. I personally think it's misogynistic to do that and never tell us why.
I wish the movie cared about Chiyoko at all. I think so much of it was sweet. The scene where schoolgirls tease her about this fellow she loves so much, asking her if he's cute and what his name is â only for her to break down and cry because she doesn't even remember what he looks like. It got me, y'know? I could feel some connections to this character, who is so devoted to another. I just do not think enough effort was put into rounding her out and giving her writing the respect it deserved. And here's the thing, I remember finding Mima just about as one-dimensional as Chiyoko. That's the thing about Satoshi Kon, it's that he gets you with a concept and then he bombards you with stellar enough imagery to keep your mind off the fact that nothing is ever narratively explored as thoroughly as the visuals.
The entire situation with Rumi from Perfect Blue left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't like the way her character was handled at all, it was dismissive and weird and in all honesty? kind of fatphobic and ableist. But that's a conversation for another day. The point of bringing this all up is because I want to highlight that Satoshi Kon's writing has never been peak, especially when stripped of the aesthetics the films are famed for. So what does that leave then? If the writing is as bad, then what makes Millennium Actress a less favored movie than other Satoshi Kon works?
I think it boils down to the aesthetics and surrealism. Millennial Actress is one of the more visually grounded of the movies. It doesn't go full surrealist but it plays with set design, time period, location, clothing, and so much more to keep constantly questioning â what is going on? Chiyoko's life as an actress keeps you wondering what is real and what is film, and I really loved that so much. It would have been cool if that was dug into more, could playing all these roles starting from such a young age have stripped her from developing an identity of her own? With nothing but a key the man left behind to hold on to? The surrealism was subtle enough to trick you and keep you engaged. And it was one of my favorite things about the movie, but I don't think it hit with other people like it did me. It's a bit disappointing. I don't want to sound pretentious or whatever â but I think a lot of people do not engage with Satoshi Kon's movies with any amount of respect. With the mindset of a Cocomelon toddler, they just want to sit and watch the pretty colors go. They don't want to have to pay attention. They just want it to be indecipherable from the jump so they can say, "that was cool" and then feel cultured or whatever.
Anyway, do I think Millenium Actress is Satoshi Kon's best work? I don't know. I've only seen two of his movies* and I liked this one about as much as I liked Perfect Blue so ... whatever that means.
Also, unrelated but at one point Ro and I were in hysterics shortly after finishing this because it was 3 AM and I logged onto Letterboxd to read the reviews people had written and I was confused as to why nothing came up when I searched it only to find I had typed Millennial Actress so ... American remake when?
Also when the Godzilla monster came up, Ro referenced this post and we also died laughing about it for like ten minutes.
Okay, that's it. Bye.
* Follow-up edit made on 04/28/25: A few days after posting this, a kind friend reminded me that I have, in fact, seen another Satoshi Kon movie â Tokyo Godfathers. I had completely forgotten because this movie is so good I forgot to associate it with him and also because it only ever exists to people during the month of December for whatever reason so it slipped my mind. Anyway, I just so happened to have watched Paprika this weekend so consider this movie brought up and added into the dialogue of Satoshi Kon's works there for the sake of preserving my thoughts in this post.
For ease of reference, in this post I talk about â Big Fish & Begonia (2016), Risk System (2019), The Boys Season 4 and Crank (2006).
Alright, it's been a hell of a couple of weeks so I've missed maybe an update or two, I lost count, and I don't particularly want to get into any of what's been keeping me busy so let's fucking do this shit. I have decided at this point that I am only going to be writing about media I have finished only. It feels dumb to keep posting about stuff that is ongoing and only updates once a week or month because I don't really have a whole lot to say at that point so it just feels like a waste to keep reiterating the same thing until it's over and just save everything to an overall breakdown at the end of it all. Okay, let's do this actually now.
Big Fish & Begonia
I decided I wanted to start including anime movies to movie night since I used Anilist to track animanga instead of Letterboxd, these movies wouldn't turn up during the movie roulette system I use to pick non-anime movies. Anyway, I am now alternating â one week anime movie, next week non-anime movie. This was the pick for the night! First of all, I want to say that I ultimately did enjoy this movie but I don't think that a lot of it had to do with the movie itself. The premise is a bit absurd. The plot summary reads as follows:
This is a mythic land where no outsider has ever set foot. The spirit-like dwellers there, however, know us mortals well. They are responsible for human emotions and desires, for seasons, weather, the elapsing of time. Our protagonist, a spirit girl named Chun, has just turned sixteen and goes in the form of a dolphin to explore the earthly part of the sea, to see what the human world is like. While cruising at sea, Chun gets caught in a storm and finds herself enmeshed in a fishing net. A human boy spots her and comes to her rescue, trying to free Chun from the entanglement. By accident, the boy drowns leaving Chun wretched and heartbroken.
Da Hai tells an absorbing and bittersweet story of sacrifice and redemption when Chun is determined to bring back to life the boy's soul, now in the form of a little white fish. Da Hai is about an adolescent coming to terms with her limitations, and a spirit, coming into possession of her powers, dealing with the difficult issues of death, love and maturing emotions with empathy and nuance.
What that summary doesn't encapsulate is how much of a "at what point into sacrifice for the sake of something do you back out and call a loss?" this movie is. The number of people, of friends and family, who die for the sake of this one girl's refusal to accept the death of a total stranger (no matter how charmingly this fixation the movie and its creator's try to pose it) is absolutely absurd. At one point, I had tears in my eyes from laughing over it. In all seriousness, I think the frustrating thing about it all is that the movie never truly confronts its themes. In the end, Chun makes it to the mortal world with the newly resurrected boy and there is no actual lesson to take away from it whatsoever. Death is not something to be accepted. It's something that can be manifested and compromised with. I understand that they might have wanted to end the movie on a high note but maybe don't make a movie majorly about grief and coping with loss if you don't want to reconcile with the weight of the narrative. And I think a lot of this could have been forgiven if the character writing was at all interesting or engaging or just. Anything.
This movie has some very cool and interesting character designs. It's unfortunate that none of them were reserved for any of the main characters. And a lot of this lack of effort also goes into their characterizations. The main group have no depth whatsoever. There is just nothing about them that really makes them feel like anything outside of characters in a thing we are watching. And this is where I have to draw some comparisons.
It's pretty clear that Big Fish and Begonia took a lot of inspiration from Studio Ghibli. That they had big pants to fill to compare is an understatement, and I'm honestly not at all a Ghibli fan. I've actually only seen two Ghibli movies and I fell asleep midway through one of them. But even then, I could see the inspiration. But was it inspired? Or was it derivative? In terms of writing, in terms of stylization, characterization, heart â the substance just was not there. That Ghibli films were made by people who care what they are making is something I can definitely agree with, but this didn't feel like a movie made by people who cared about what they were making. It was a movie made by people who were trying to make a Ghibli movie. Oh well.
Risk System
So I started Risk System back in October and I have played it on and off since them. Recently, I've decided to shelve it. It has an interesting premise, fun character designs and writing (though minimal). I enjoyed the music a lot and the aesthetic. It had everything going for it but ultimately, the gameplay was lacking. A grazing shmup with movement inertia and incredibly buggy hitboxes. I got a few levels in before I figured that if I dedicated a single additional month to this instead of the hundreds of other games waiting on my backlog, I'd lose my mind. It had incredibly mixed reviews with some people hating it, others loving it and some just content with it's addition to their repertoire and I think that very accurately captures the experience of playing the game. When it's good it's good and when it's bad it's bad and unfortunately, for me â it was mostly bad.
Maybe another time.
The Boys Season 4
Trigger warning â I will be talking about scenes in this show in which people have been raped in no explicit detail, but still. Proceed with caution.
I don't know, man. So much of this season was just sort of ... dicking around. I don't care about Starlight's abortion, I don't care about Hughie's mom, I don't care about whatever they're doing with Black Noir. So many plots just become so inconsequential â like why the fuck did Frenchie put himself in jail? I know, it's because he is an expert chemist and they wouldn't have needed to kidnap Victoria's boyfriend if he wasn't locked in a box somewhere. It lent no credence to his character whatsoever. It never really went anywhere. Everything in general for this season felt like just set up. A lot of set up for the final season. And what isn't set up, is just much of the same of what we've already seen. I just don't know. It doesn't really feel like they're milking it too, y'know. Like when shows just sort of go on for too long that they lose themselves, it just feels a bit like the writers are a bit lost on where to go. It just kind of feels like it's run out of steam. This tends to happen a lot with adapting series that deviate so heavily from their source material. Anyway, this isn't exactly even my biggest complaint with the season. As aimless as the plot feels throughout, it's always entertaining in one way or another and I could honestly spend hours just watching nothing but shots of Anthony Starr giving his Homelander stare. Starr just really brings exactly what needs to be brought to the character at all times.
No, my biggest complaint is the extremely weird stance the show has taken with rape all of a sudden. The Deep raped Starlight when he forced her to give him oral sex. This was treated with extreme weight and severity. She is a person who was victimized but she rises from it and fights for justice. Becca is raped by Homelander. This was treated with extreme weight and severity â though it also serves for good manpain fuel for Butcher, I guess. But it's still given the seriousness that an event like this deserves. But then, the Deep is raped. When this happens, I couldn't help but feel like it is treated with nowhere near as much compassion. As if the writers feel that he deserved this and it is morally justified to mock him for it. As a survivor myself, it made me feel sick â but I chose to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was a hiccup and I suppose that there are other victims out there who disagree with my perspective and lean into the "an eye for an eye" mentality. Fine, whatever. I was willing to shrug it off.
And then Hughie. Hughie is raped several times in this season. It's actually absurd to say this as I'm sure you know what's coming but yes â Hughie is raped several times in season four and the show treats it with extreme levity and even goes as far as to villainize him for it. Firstly, he's assaulted by Tek Knight. I know there's a very weird sort of grey area in the earlier parts of the scene because Tek Knight thinks he is someone else who has consented to this, as does Ashley but when Tek Knight discovers he is not who he thinks he is â he plans to torture and assault him. I also would like to remind everyone who doesn't remember from earlier in the season/series that Tek Knight was Hughie's favorite Supe as a child. This was someone he looked up to as a little kid and now this man is sexually assaulting him and the show thinks it's a fucking joke. He has a panic attack and cries and then it is swept away as the story moves on to the rest of the inconsequential bullshit it's churning.
Then, we have the Shifter. Shifter was a pretty interesting character. I actually was very intrigued by them. I loved the way they actually shifted bodies, that they had to do so constantly or their body would start rotting away, the fact that they had no idea what they even looked like, the fact that their brain is likely full of the memories of hundreds if not thousands of people. They were really fascinating, as a character. And they raped Hughie repeatedly when they took on Starlight's appearance and proceeded to seduce him under the false pretense that they were Starlight. It's rape. And it is infuriating that when Starlight learns about this, she immediately tries to make it into some bullshit faux-feminist "Wow, is that all you see me as? A sex toy?" argument and has absolutely no understanding that this was an incredibly violating thing to happen to Hughie as well as her. They were both victims. She's not perfect, no one is, so I just want to clarify that I think it's perfectly understandable for the show to have characters who are flawed and don't always say or do the things people would consider the "correct thing" to do and that the actions of characters aren't always in any way indicative of a writer's thoughts or feelings but it is extremely concerning that the rape of men in this show is never given any grace or compassion or empathy. It just feels so extremely callous and has left me with a really sick feeling in my stomach.
And it's also made me think about how regularly men experience other minor forms of sexual assault on the show that are always treated as jokes. MM is regularly poked and prodded at by Love Sausage's giant dick. That thing is around his neck so often, it's more scarf than cock at this rate. MM gets Web Slinger's webbing shot out of the little hole in his lower back and it goes on his face, an obvious "cumshot" joke and something that MM, a man with misophobic OCD, is distressed by. And then of course in herogasm, when he gets absolutely bathed in cum. I can't remember anymore off of the top of my head but I know in the back of my mind, I know there is more. But then meanwhile, Homelander's backstory is being treated as if it were one of the greatest tragedies on the planet. The nationalist genocidal psychopath is being granted more kindness than Hughie.
And we've seen them handle PTSD before. One of the things I most have liked about the show is how it has handled mental health, substance abuse, etc. There was always a degree of understanding but this season has felt ... devoid of that. Devoid of humanity. If you've seen the show, you know it's not subtle. When it wants you to know something, it tells you. Which is fine, that is the vibe it has always had. An over-the-top satirical spin. But that only makes this whole situation all the more jarring. We'll see what happens in Season 5, I guess.
Also, them changing the name of the last episode is some real wimpy cop-out bullshit.
Crank
Trigger warning â I will be talking about a scene in this movie depicting a sexual assault/rape/dubious consent situation in this movie in no explicit detail.
Last night's movie was a riot. This is definitely one of those I've been meaning to get around to for a while and was so excited to finally do so. The editing, music, acting, cinematographyâ it was just so stunningly produced. From the get-go, everyone in the stream was enamored. Now, for clarity's sake, it's a rough watch. There are a lot of slurs tossed around, some jokes that are meant to be pretty clearly offensive and a scene that has pretty much all watchers of this movie fighting a war that has gone on for almost twenty years. This is getting really long and I've been working on it for a little over two hours now so I'm gonna keep it pretty short.
I can get how this movie isn't some people's style. It's janky and gritty and stupid but it's such a good fucking time. I think it's probably one of the best action movies to have ever been created. A few things bring it down, a lot of which pretty fucking heavily dates it. I was bummed when Kaylo was sort of just used as collateral damage in the movie. I was pretty excited to see a trans/gay character in a movie like this but I guess that just showed a degree of naivety in me I didn't expect. I guess I thought that with the way the movie had handled such a fun and interesting character like Orlando, it would have done the same with Kaylo. Which brings me to say that I feel that a lot of the movie at times feels disjointed with itself. It was as if six different people were all trapped in a room for a week with nothing but a pile of cocaine to survive off of and came up with the script, which is both it's biggest strength but also it's biggest weakness.
It's not like the movie isn't capable of compassion. I was actually rather taken with these random moments of contemplative introspection littered in the movie. The scene in the hospital where Chev stumbles into the room of a (comatose or sleeping) sick man in a hospital bed and spend the time he can afford grappling with his own mortality. The scene where his doctor offers him an "easy out", a dreamful sleep into death and he once again finds himself in this fork where he must either break the cycle or turn the wheel. It is able to offer glimpses of humanity into the beast that is Chev. Even Verona, who struggles internally with the grief for his dead brother but the pride that disallows a semblance of vulnerability. It just doesn't really want to dig its fingers into that gaping wound, which is disappointing.
Movies like this, where the protagonist is a sack of shit is always very divisive, especially when those characters also show semblances of being good people. Some people strongly believe that only good people should be the main characters of thing and that those people can only ever do good things and that the people who stand against them are bad and can only ever be bad. You know, like real people in real life, I guess. I do not agree with this mentality at all but I do think that people who are writing characters like this sometimes lose the plot. It's a dangerous line to walk but not impossible.
Anyway, this is all to say that I don't like that they made Chev assault his girlfriend in attempts to goad her into sex so that he could keep his adrenaline up and not die. I think it was a severely mishandled scene that could have been fixed with more than two seconds of critical thought. My partner actually pointed out that he should have just started jerking off or something if he was that desperate. I don't know if it makes it less of an assault and more of a harassment situation but it's definitely a better option than him clinging to her legs like a pathetic horny dog and trying to knock her onto the ground. Many people argue that she ends up agreeing, which would I guess push this more into a "dubious consent" situation. I'm not here to argue semantics. I think anyone with a brain capable of rational thought can surmise that this largely contributes this the rape culture mentality that no does not always mean no and can then become a yes with enough grit and determination. That being said, I don't think it's the end of the world that a movie made twenty years ago has shit politics. I'm an adult that can watch a movie and say "there are some things about this I really liked and there are some things I really didn't." Which is to say, there are some things about this movie I really liked and there were some I really didn't.
For ease of reference, in this post I talk about â Jujutsu Kaisen Chapters 227-242, Chainsaw Man Chapter 196, final thoughts on Who Killed My Father Academy (2018), I saw the TV Glow (2024), Natasha, Pierre & the Comet of 1812, Ride the Cyclone and Mickey 17 (2025).
Okay, so I missed last week ... so this is me trying to do both last week and this week together in one post. So what I'm going to do is just narrow down each breakdown into one simple paragraph to try and limit my rambling but cover the important things I'd like to talk about with each piece. Sorry if things are still kind of inconsistent with these first few posts, I'm still trying to find a way to approach these posts that works for both of us. Anyway, moving on.
Like last time, manga first.
Jujutsu Kaisen CH227-242
Gojo is finally dead. I'm gonna be real that Sukuna v Gojo fight was an absolute slog to get through. So much boring yapping. I hope someone smarter than me sits and breaks down anything that was said during that fight and reveals it to just genuinely be a bunch of nonsense because it really is how it all comes off. All the exposition dumps aside, the action itself left a lot to be desire too. I think the reasoning behind everyone else not going out to help Gojo during the battle is an absolute copout. I think Gege knew that Sukuna would be toast if everyone jumped his ass and needed to make up some arbitrary BS to make it make sense. Unfortunately for him, the seams are showing. Pretty blatantly at that. On the plus side, Kenjaku v Takaba is an absolute joy. I say this with no exaggeration whatsoever, it is straight up the best fight in the entire manga. Any scene in JJK is made better with Kenjaku's presence, to be totally honest â but this fight is just so extremely fun. I love their dynamic so much. For once there was a backstory reveal that didn't grate on me. I wish so much that Kenjaku was the central antagonist because Sukuna is so fucking boring in comparison. I know we're going to go back to the obnoxious kick-punch-throws-a-building-at-you slog after this but I'll enjoy what I have while I have it.
Chainsaw Man CH196
Chainsaw Man has so many cool looking devil designs and my least favorite will always be the ones that are just like. Teen Girl. We finally get to meet Death and her whole concept is just extremely uninteresting. I am only still reading because we are so close to the end and binge reading to me is more of a pain than going chapter by chapter when it's something I'm not particularly enjoying. I need to start being more picky about the shit I pick up because half the time, I end up experiencing some Real Suffering Hours. Also, I guess Denji is there. Or well, Chainsaw Man. Whatever.
Who Killed My Father Academy (Ending)
Finished this game last week and played through all endings. A bit let down by the ending to be honest. The characters were so much fun. I loved Ellis, Victor, Dux was okay, Gia, etc. I really enjoyed reading them all interact and investigate this all together. It's definitely a series that can be a bit off-putting at first glance because it has a very strong identity but it definitely grows on you the more you play it. I wish the main/good ending lived up to everything before it. It just felt very "OK, game is over everyone go home". There was so much that happened and we never really get to reconcile with any of it, or at least start to. I, for whatever reason, got it into my head that Marcy played a much larger role in all of this â especially given her prior relationship with Stacy. I really dug the idea of all these elite families having sort of these crazy convoluted connections to one another. I just don't know ... There could've been more of that. Oh, right â I was confused as to why we switch into Stacy's perspective at some point. The writing around that was very confusing. And I also don't know why we can't have a concluding chat with everyone at the very end instead of having to go through one chat, reload before, go through another, etc. Anyway, overall â It was a really fun game, especially to play on stream with friends. I just wish it'd had a more clever and thought out ending.
I Saw the TV Glow
I just didn't connect with this movie as much as I thought I would. It's essentially about questioning trans people living vicariously through their kinnies. That has my name written all over it â and yet I felt a disconnect. Mostly because of the dialogue. It is unbelievably cringe-inducing, specifically any time Maddy is on screen. Whenever I complain about teens being edgy and annoying in media, I remember when my old boss responded to this complaint of mine with, "Well, isn't that exactly what teenagers sound like, though?" and she's right. But Maddy was grown in the third act and just as irritating. It's like the manic pixie dream girl grew up and did way too much acid in the time since you last saw them. Don't get me wrong, they are very much a real kind of person that exists because I was at one point in my life friends with people like this â but my patience is very limited with this kind of bullshit.
That all being said, I absolutely adore Owen. Definitely the sort of character that immediately triggers a protective nature in me. I did really like the messaging in the movie â implications that it will never be too late to embrace yourself as you are. Sort of a "I'm right here if you need me" sort of comfort. To know that if right now is not okay, there will always be tomorrow, or the next day. People trying to pawn this off as "tragedy porn", as I've seen it ignorantly called, are fucking stupid. I think a lot of people feel pressured to come out and I think a lot of people see not coming out as a tragedy but I think that's a condescending and patronizing perspective to have about an identity, life and experience that does not belong to you. Anyway, I liked it but I wish the writing around Maddy was better. Oh also, the movie is visually pretty stunning. Very well shot. I love seeing movies with actual colors in them.
Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812
Despite some occasional but inarguably good music â this musical left so much to be desired. For starters, I haven't nor will I ever read War and Peace. I've always been vehemently against non-continuations requiring you to partake in another piece of media to understand. Meaning, if it isn't a sequel â then I shouldn't have to read an entire novel to understand the context of your story. For those of you that don't know, this musical is an adaptation of a 70-page segment of War and Peace which is why I'm bringing any of this up in the first place. I'd also like to mention that the reason that I checked this musical out in the first place was because it came heavily recommended via Hadestown fans, which in retrospect was my bad. Why I thought a recommendation coming from my least favorite thing about Hadestown (the fandom) would hold any way is now entirely beyond me.
That all being said, this musical is extremely vapid and has absolutely no idea how to handle its subject matter. To save you some time, the musical ends with a young woman who'd just been manipulated into leaving her fiance and eloping with a man who was using her to entertain himself immediately falling for a third man (who is Tolstoy's self-insert, by the way) the day after trying to end her life via poisoning over the elopement man. So yeah. Anyway, the costumes are fine. The stage is very cool looking but nothing actually interesting is ever really done with it. And the music is mostly fine when it sticks to its Russian folkloric inspiration and does not, for whatever insane reason, delve into EDM.
Ride the Cyclone
Ride the Cyclone was very interesting. I liked the concept of it a lot and the music was very fun. My favorite thing about it was the characters. They were all really interesting â especially Noel and Ocean. Karnak was also extremely fun! I liked the dark humor of it all, a lot of the music hit â even if they didn't specifically stick with me, I do remember just having a lot of fun the entire time. What the World Needs, Noel's Lament, The Ballad of Jane Doe and Talia were my stand out favorites. Talia specifically managed to get me teary-eyed. The composition of it just scratches an itch and Chaz Duffy has such a pretty singing voice. That being said, I didn't really understand Jane Doe's existence in this. I also don't understand why she was chosen to be resurrected. In the story, her body was so destroyed in the Cyclone accident that she is unidentifiable. How exactly is she meant to be brought back to life when she was fully decapitated? Some of the story and character related questions I have make me wonder if the lost Legoland musical, which is meant to be the prequel to Ride the Cyclone, has some of the answers? I don't know.
Oh, also â I did not like Ricky somehow magically no longer being disabled post-death for whatever reason. I don't know why you would write a character with a disability that renders them unable to speak into a musical only to have that disability magically cured as a solution ... to a problem you made. And even if that was acceptable, I don't understand why he needed to get rid of his crutches as well? Especially when there's Constance, who uses glasses. Is blindness not seen as a disability worthy of cleansing away? Does it fall just below the threshold of undesirability/uselessness? Because based off the logic that affected Ricky, Constance should have also gotten rid of her glasses. I really enjoyed the musical but I don't think the creators gave much (if any) thought to how disability was written and should also lend more focus to intention because the set-up didn't really work well with the endgame, in my opinion.
Mickey 17
Okay, last but not least. I think maybe this movie should have been a two-parter? Maybe that wouldn't have worked either. Maybe it should've just stayed a book. The story is just a "things happening" compilation with very little explanation. Characters are brought in with no introduction with the expectation of an audience knowing just who they are and then nothing really happens with them confusingly so. The ending is just ..................... extreme nonsense. I really really wanted to like this movie. I was excited for it since it first came out. I think maybe the best way to go about it would have been to do something inspired by the book but not directly pulling from it. It just feels like there is a lot more in the book that needed to be cut out due to runtime (the movie is two hours long as it is) but then some things in the movie wouldn't make sense without them so they needed to retain some aspects of them. I don't know. I don't know what happened behind the scenes. It did not yield the best results though.
I did love both the Mickeys dearly. The comedy was great and I love the campiness of it â very typical of Bong Joon Ho. Parasite had been a movie that deeply touched me (I cried for like two hours after I finished it) and Snowpiercer is just purely great. I just think there was a lack of grounding present in Mickey 17. Something to sort of sew everything together. It was just very scattered. It raised some interesting questions about the morality behind cloning, what it means to die, etc â but never actually takes on the challenge of trying to answer any of them. Oh, also given a lot of the very hamfisted but also vague politics, I was pretty ... unimpressed with that I felt was very racist writing of Nasha as a character. She's the only black woman in the story and she's written as extremely hostile, hyper-sexual and as a cop that is just Constantly abusing her authority. And then she became part of the council or whatever the fuck at the very end, which is crazy to me. This woman is totally unhinged. I don't understand why she does anything. I don't understand most of anyone in this movie. It just ... wasn't good unfortunately. I'm glad other people found something in it that I can't seem to see at least, I guess. I did love the creepers though. They're very cute.
For ease of reference, in this post I talk about â Jujutsu Kaisen Chapters 223-226, some thoughts on Who Killed My Father Academy (2018) and The Breadwinner (2017).
I finally started the arduous task of finishing Jujutsu Kaisen. Iâd been procrastinating on it for a long time but now that Iâm all caught up with all my other manga, itâd be dumb to keep avoiding it - especially with only 50 chapters left. I managed to squeeze in four chapters in the thirty minutes I had before I had to rush off to make dinner and Iâm gonna be real, itâs been a while since I last read JJK so stepping back into it was a bit of a clusterfuck but alas. Weâre finally at the over-hyped and long awaited Sukuna vs Gojo fight - something I felt like 99% of readers were so excited about this while I stood amidst the cheering crowd confused as to what the point of sticking Gojo in the box in the first place was. (Though many questions can be asked as to what the point of most things in this God forsaken series it TBH.) I can not comprehend why the Sorcerers donât all just go jump Sukuna and kill the guy, why this has to be an âhonorableâ 1v1 fight - especially given how much of a generally unfair and malicious person (?) Sukuna is. There is an air of grandiosity to all of this which also coexists with an extreme lack of severity, as if weâre watching a long hyped UFC fight and not a city-destroying battle between two sycophants that will quite literally determine the future of the entire planet. There is a lot of pride written into the event on Gegeâs behalf, as if this was something to behold and not just an incredibly waste of everyone's time and effort and life. I just think itâs stupid. I guess thatâs what I get for reading shounen slop in the first place but Iâve since sworn to myself, I will avoid shounen after this was done and over with like the plague. I just can not do it anymore. And in my defense, I only started JJK at the behest of many friends. So thanks for that, guys. Lol. Anyway, itâs just not good. There is some like ⌠nostalgic affection I still hold for early JJK which is the only thing that has carried me this far. It has so many things going for it - Kenjaku, for one, is probably one of my all time favorite villains in a series. I think the main three had such great potential before Gege lost his only braincell and did whatever he did to Nobara and Megumi. I just donât know why weâre here, why he's done any of what he's done. Part of me wonders if it was meant to end much earlier (Shibuya is my guess) but he was goaded into just milking it for longer.
Oh and I donât want to really talk at length about it but that one chapter that was just all the characters that could literally be helping Gojo fight Sukuna right now sitting up in some basement somewhere watching the fight via livestream (???) and just spouting off literal gibberish about their CTs was one of the worst chapters ever made in a manga in history. Moving on.
I started playing Who Killed My Father Academy last weekend and I continued it this weekend. Iâm still not done with it yet but Iâm enjoying it so far. I do like the side characters a lot more than I do the main character we play as. Sheâs very weak, narratively. Halfway into the game, she doesnât know why sheâs investigating the death of a father she never cared for in the first place. Itâs a whole lot of effort to literally put your own life at stake during this investigation for someone whose feelings are simply never explored, so it feels weirdly hollow for me, as the âstring-pullerâ. Sheâs also incredibly dumb. I canât tell if sheâs just meant to be dumb for plot purposes or what but it is straight up infuriating during some scenes. I do like whenever she talks about how edgy and corny she was when she was 14 while also still being edgy and corny at age 17 which is exactly what a 17 year old would say. That partâs good. I dunno. There are parts about her that Iâm not super sold on but at the same time, Iâm a bit endeared to her in the way an older sibling would be protective over her. Iâm not sure. A lot about this game is just strange in ways that are both very charming but also incredibly off-putting. Lol.
Anyway, so how the gameplay works is that you go down all these routes where you interrogate different suspects related to your fatherâs death and then go back to a prior save state and tell her everything youâd learned. Given this tactic, I donât know why we canât tell the different route versions of her what weâd learned from the other routes as well. Itâd make things complicated in terms of structure, sure - but if weâre gonna approach this method then we should go in on that shit, yâknow? Maybe thatâs just me. I find the art in the game both very unsettling but also endearing. I love the side characters a lot. Ellis is probably my favorite of the bunch. I like the music a lot as well. I believe the songs are all just free-to-use or public domain classical tracks but theyâre all used to cleverly set the scenes and pace of the game as you click through. They build suspense and work around the characters really well.
Planning on finishing the game next Sunday so weâll see how that goes then.
Last topic for today is the movie I ended the night with which was The Breadwinner. It seems to be a rather controversial movie based on a book by a white woman who seems to write a lot about the suffering of children around the world - most of whom she has been personally affected by in her travels around as she seems to be an activist. I wasnât able to learn very much about what exactly she does to help anyone other than show up and interview people. Maybe act as a conduit? The story is apparently loosely based off of a mother and child she met in an Afgan refugee camp. I looked into this movie quite a bit after watching it, read a lot about what a lot of people had to say about it. Itâs definitely one of those things where itâs way too complicated for me to cover extensively in a sloppily thrown together blog post on a random lifejournal account no one outside of my friends will be reading. Iâm just not the person to discuss all that. I just think that two things can be true - I think that you can acknowledge that the movie was made from a largely white western perspective for a largely white western audience and that it is also a well-made movie about real world strife made out of a very genuine empathy.
I donât think that charitable donations are some kind of person-defining action. You can donate to charity and still be an awful person - but I think itâs worth someting that most of the proceeds of the books the author writes are donated to charities involved with helping the people she writes about.
I personally found the movie very touching. Themes of generational trauma, of being a child amidst political unrest, of finding kindness, hope and love in a world that seems hostile and unkind at first glance - itâs all handled with grace and humanity. It is very well-animated and visually stunning, especially the story segments throughout it. The voice acting in the movie also felt extremely human, something that often puts me off from animated movies is just how disconnected I feel from the characters because of how much the voice acting turns them from character to caricature. This wasnât the case in this movie. I do agree with the criticisms in that the movie could have had more direct input and work from Afghani women outside of what I view as a co-opt of their stories. I canât help but wonder where the mother and daughter that inspired this very story are now, what they think of the books, the movie. Do they even know what they inspired? I donât know. Anyway, like I said before - decades long socio-political history, the intricacies of US imperialism and its ties to the Taliban, itâs all too nuanced and complex to really dilute into a dumbass blog post where Iâm practically word-vomiting my Feelings but I didnât want to sit and act like I hadnât watched the movie. It touched me and I wanted to remember that.
