#and honestly 2 hours is like a solid runtime

[spineless-lobster]

Hello odyssey fans are we aware of this?????

[monkey-network]

Good Stuff: Best Movies of 2023

This was NOT a great year for blockbusters, huh? This was probably Disney's worst in years, multiple flops including what was meant to be their centennial anniversary film. It looked remarkably by the numbers, but think of the conglomerate's losses... Anyway, this to me was a pretty great year for films. Like 2022, I'm amazed at the variety we got that says more about the shifting tides of people's interest in movies. It was the most times I've been to the theater. We got a big worker's strike over the summer, especially large push back against degenerates trying to push AI to do more than just shitposting. And it was enough for me to know Adam Sandler, Godzilla, and Hayao Miyazaki could get the better of Disney. With this said, let this be a first for Good Stuff and count down my favorites of this year.

12. Renfield

My suspicions were on the money and I'm glad I gave this a shot in the theaters. Cage was the best Dracula I could've asked for in what you might say was an Adult Swim-esque dark comedy. It definitely has that style of gruesomeness and humor given Robert Kirkman and the Writer/Director behind Moral Orel made this. Unfortunately, Ben Schwartz stuck out like a sore thumb even if he fulfills his purpose in this, reminding me of Christopher Mintz-Plasse in KickAss; I feel he or Jason Schwartzman would've been better suited. Plus it can feel all over the place, an identity crisis that you can't even grasp after it finishes. Then again, I just had fun watching and would gladly rewatch for Cage and Hoult who are the highlights of this.

11. Migration

Call it blasphemous, but I enjoyed this more than the Mario movie. It's essentially Rio mixed with National Lampoon's Vacation, with a lovable cast, solid animation, and an eazy breezy road trip story. I've always looked to Illumination for simple enjoyable romps and I got what I expected here. Gave me Amphibia vibes in a way, replace frogs with birds. Everything surrounding the villain is my only real issue, he was an obvious and very nothing bad guy, but it's overall better paced than Super Mario Bros where it felt like you watched an eternity in 3 minutes. Still don't get the air of folk looking down on this for just being serviceable when it's honestly become my favorite Illumination movie next to the first Despicable Me.

10. Killers of the Flower Moon

Sad to say this is the weakest Scorsese movie for me, mainly because it felt like we're following the wrong main character. Lily Gladstone is incredible in this, among the other great performers, but she felt sidelined in favor of DeCaprio and De Niro's perspectives. It's like if in 1995's Casino, we just follow Ginger throughout the moment Sam introduces her. I liked the turmoil Leo's character goes through, but it paled in comparison to Mollie who was more affected by his and Hale's actions. That does not mean it's all bad. This can be a beautiful, dynamic, and ruthless movie that just made me feel bad for watching it; running with the words "harsh reality" throughout the 3 and a half hour runtime.

9. Good Burger 2

I watched Good Burger 1 & 2 this Thanksgiving weekend, and just had a blast. These are the kind of movies that are charmingly stupid but not insultingly so. Kel Mitchell's Ed is emblematic of how much dumb fun this duology is where he's actively comical but not smoothbrained to ruin your time. This I say is like Home Alone 2 where it is just beat for beat the 1st movie with minor developments but that doesn't really matter when it's just as well put together. It never feels like Kenan nor Kel missed a beat and the drama not overstaying its welcome. It is just "Good Burger Again" without it feeling like diminishing returns compared to other rehashing sequels.

8. Leo

Can you believe this got better publicity than Disney's Wish? Even YMS could appreciate this movie, that's how you know Sandler has his recognizable game when you least expect it. But Leo is a surprisingly good comedy that has actually sincere moments. Being Happy Madison's 2nd ever animation, it's like Adam waited to refine the production as opposed to putting a cash grab together like one would expect. It's not all good, especially trying to be a musical, but seeing it once you'd be impressed how much good it does with the risks it takes.

7. Nimona

Like Migration, everything surrounding the villain is the one big issue I have with this, especially when it comes to affecting the film's message. At the same time, she pales in comparison to the dynamic pairing of Ballister Blackheart and the titular shapeshifter. Nimona is my favorite character of 2023, her energy and confidence matched by the struggle she bears existing alone and the facade made to band-aid it. Her and Ballister's journey alone made me glad this got out of development hell, being Blue Sky's final production posthumous. To me it wasn't about being a take that to Disney, it was about the fact a movie like Nimona got to exist as great as it did. Hoping Stevenson is satisfied with their adaptation, because it definitely earned its flowers.

6. Emesis Blue

Offhand, it openly sucks that Letterboxd refuses to let this stay on the site to log, but it can't be overstated how much of a marvel this was. Repurposing not just the characters, but the lore and mechanics of Team Fortress 2 into a feature length horror thriller. The animation's top notch where it can have godly framing that was on par with the known legends of horror film making. SFM animations can be beautiful on their own, shitpost or otherwise, but Emesis Blue goes a step beyond by having a compelling story fitting for the universe on top of, again, every frame being a painting.

5. Shin Kamen Rider

I've never really saw any Tokusatsu shows. Not that I hate the genre, just could never get into it while recognizing the glorious looking chaos found in clips. Knowing Hideaki Anno directed was what got me into seeing this film and it opened my mind quite a bit. This was the legacy film that definitely had Anno's touch in both the action and drama. While the climax can notably drag, you never feel left out of what was essentially the original Kamen Rider's origin story. It doesn't have the complex VFX of stuff like Marvel, but the costumes and fight scenes makes me wish we got more of this in America beyond Power Rangers.

4. TMNT Mutant Mayhem

Advertising before release really didn't make this appear like a promising film. If there's anything I learned from this year though, appearances can be deceiving. Like Nimona was for her movie, the creative choices for this made it the TMNT movie I never knew I wanted. To me this felt akin to the Lego Batman movie where it's not only a good love letter of the franchise for more than its fanservice, but this spin on the characters is able to have a new sincere view of them without overhauling everything about the TMNT. That and it has the greatest needle drops I've had in a long while like how do insert He-Man Fabulous Secret Powers and expect me to hate this?

3. Godzilla Minus One

I call this a great year for films because it marks the first time I got to see a Toho produced Godzilla, with subtitles, in an real movie theater. Needless to say, it felt like I got to enjoy the 1954 film again anew. Not a remake mind you, but the parallels were uncanny and this spins here work just as well, if not more here than with the original in a couple places. Both are still strong movies nonetheless. Minus One is a refurbish that dishes out what people always wanted and uniquely giving a little more while never sacrificing why the OG is that timeless. With it getting more than a limited release, I'm glad this got to be more than a niche celebration of the kaijuu king.

2. Oppenheimer

This film's been meme'd to heaven, hell you could say it got meme'd to success thanks to its dual release with Barbie, but it didn't undermine getting hooked to watching this anyways. This really has become my favorite Nolan film, a compelling biopic that doesn't exactly herald its titular lead in the best light thanks to the paradoxical storytelling. Oppenheimer gives us the largest ensemble I know, and delivers in the most breathtaking moments I never knew I could get. Cillian killed it among the many who made the three hours of people sitting and talking in rooms actually tense and intriguing to thread. Plus it gave us the beauty of Josh Peck being the guy to detonate the test bomb like cherry on top of this cinematic cake.

1. The Holdovers

I remember watching Alexander Payne's Sideways with Paul Giamatti as a high schooler but couldn't appreciate it until rewatching this year. It's one of the best mid-life crisis comedies you could see, still fresh in its easy going presentation and music. The same can be said for this film, made to feel like it came from the late 70s or 80s with the old opening logos that I didn't think you could do in these times. Out the gate, this was the holiday story I was shocked would be as relatable as it was, with the trio of Giamatti, Randolph, and Sessa each having their story that resonated with me strongly. With the right amount of time, Payne offers an remarkably cozy, down to earth movie where from reserved to outgoing, it did a lot for me emotionally. Like Netflix's Klaus, I kinda want this to be a traditional rewatch for the holiday seasons. One that everyone should try at least once, especially if they feel the disillusionment of the season where this might lift their spirits one way or another.

If there's anything to learn from this year, it's that the meta has definitely shifted. Even when the many on my list didn't make billions like the Avatar films, the variety and risks made spoke more than the big dogs like Disney and WB putting out unprofitable blockbusters that ranged from very by the numbers to you don't need to see The Flash to know how god awful it just was. More people are & should branch out beyond the major mainstream names. Not that the big dogs aren't ever gonna make great films in the coming years, but we should appreciate more than the big budget features you can tell are playing it safe. Time can be patient for great cinema, sleeper hits or not, so take advantage while you're young.

[bestworstcase]

with only three episodes left, what do you think is in store for the rest of the volume? personally, i’m having trouble imagining a solid resolution fitting into such a small window. not that i doubt there’s a way to end this volume succinctly—rwby is always throwing curveballs i could’ve never predicted hitting, which i love—but i suppose the hangnail in resolution’s cuticle is that jrwby are all finally facing their lifelong, beaten-in worldview being turned on its head and that seems like the kind of thing (on top of neo’s untold ever after story) that needs more time to be resolved. in which case, ig we’re not looking at a clean wrap up? do you think they end this volume ascending the ever after? escaping back to remnant? (i ask those two questions separately bc i wanna say they might have different answers lol)

as a point of comparison, here’s everything (not necessarily in chronological order) that happened in the last three episodes of V8:

1 - ironwood vs everyone beat down

2 - winter heel face turn completed

3 - met ambrosius + staff of creation rules

4 - magic rules lawyered penny into a flesh body to save her from the virus with a side dish of horrible body horror robot body death scene and holy shit atlas is FALLING.

5 - creation of whacky portals for evacuation to vacuo

6 - emergency evacuation broadcast CANCELLED!

7 - cinder remembers the power of friendship and uses it for evil

8 - cinder recovered the lamp and scored the password and used the last question to spy on team oz which is fucking hysterical by the way, so she knows the entire plan

9 - YANG DIES?

10 - ruby and blake fall too. and neo

11 - the evacuation dumps everyone in a sandstorm so they can’t call for backup and also the exit is one-way (“oh dear. ambrosius \:” love that enthusiasm sir)

12 - HARRIET TRIES TO NUKE MANTLE?

13 - ironwood murders jacques

14 - eleventh hour harriet heel face turn also zeki dies because atlesian tech goons thought the nuke needed to be plugged into the IOT for some reason god bless

15 - PENNY???

16 - and winter becomes the winter maiden

17 - TEAM RWBY TOTAL PARTY KILL!!

18 - jaune also

19 - salem and cinder playing chicken over who is going to blink first like they don’t both already know that it’s going to be salem

20 - ATLAS OBLITERATED FOREVER

that’s a lot of things!

now, it’s a lot easier to set up and execute a dense, tightly-paced climactic spiral of disaster than bring a lot of interconnected emotional crises to satisfying resolution in the same amount of runtime—but on the other hand, V9 has a lot less going on. it doesn’t FEEL that way because the emotional development has been so rich and done so, so well, but there honestly are not that many narrative threads to tie off. basically, the big ones are:

1 - ruby’s emotional crisis

2 - jaune’s corruption

3 - neo

4 - how do we get home?

5 - what do we do once we get there?

compared to the sheer amount of dominoes V8 had to juggle, handling this stuff is a nice little walk.

the key thing to remember—& this has been true for every one of rwby’s climactic sequences and also counts as writing advice—is that none of these major threads are truly discrete. they’re all interwoven with each other and bound together with all the smaller filaments (like the cat’s arc or little’s arc or the framing device of ‘the girl who fell through the world’ and what really went down with alyx and the tree), so you don’t have to resolve them separately and indeed you can’t because it all has to happen at once. what this means, from a writing standpoint, is you layer up and make every scene work towards the resolution of two or three major threads and however many minor filaments you can fit comfortably so that everything is doing work for everything else. if you’re efficient you don’t need a lot of time to pull off a stunning climactic sequence, and efficiency is something rwby has always been very, very good at. this is true even of V1 even though V1 feels laughably inefficient by the standards of V8; which is to say, they started off good and got much better.

the other piece to bear in mind is that V9 is not meant to be self-contained; it is not a character-focused breather volume to let the protagonists heal up before returning to remnant to carry on as they were, it is The Answer. when rwbyjn go home they are not going to return to the story they fell out of at the end of V8. that story is OVER. it ENDED. the final word was checkmate and the world they knew is GONE FOREVER. salem WON. the ever after is an epilogue to that story and the prologue for another; it isn’t building towards a resolution so much as it is building a hook.

(<- remember V3 “beginning of the end” and “end of the beginning”? this story-within-story device is something rwby has utilized before; this show is a singular contiguous narrative in the literal sense, but it’s structured as a trilogy.)

so V9 needs to be a satisfying farewell to the middle book and also make the case for continuing on to the third and final story—which very much works to its benefit here, because the sweeping emotional changes being developed actually SHOULDN’T be resolved. a clean wrap up would critically weaken the narrative structure. the immediate crises need to be realized—there must be a moment of peace, of closing one book and beginning the next; a hopeful glimpse of the story to come, of what it could be—and then they go home. and the new story begins.

in the figurative sense you could call it ascension. in the literal sense, no, i don’t think any of the remnant characters are going to ascend because i don’t think they can (frankly i’m bemused as to why so many people seem to believe otherwise; it seems to me that the cat has made it very clear that ascension is closed to non-afterans). but the idea of ascension? oh, yes, they’re carrying that forward with them.

as for whether they’ll return to remnant—yes. i think the probability that they don’t find their way home by episode ten is zero. how they return is an open question but also not a question at all, because the tree is the question and their answer is the door; this has been spelled out, explicitly, albeit in wonderlandish terms. what we don’t know yet is what this will look like, because the tree is also the blacksmith and the ever after runs on wonderland rules. it’s not going to be literal. (<- unless abstraction is less absurd than the literal option, which is possible given the likelihood that the ever after itself is fictional.)

[agentnico]

The Beast/La Bête (2024) review

Dolls, Blue Moon and… pigeons.

Plot: In the near future where emotions have become a threat, Gabrielle finally decides to purify her DNA in a machine that will immerse her in her previous lives and rid her of any strong feelings. She then meets Louis and feels a powerful connection, as if she has known him forever. A melodrama crossed by the genre, which unfolds over three distinct periods, 1910, 2014 and 2044.

Essentially this is a film that covers every genre possible. From *deep breath* melodrama to romance to thriller to mystery to sci-fi to drama to psychological to surrealism… the list goes on. It is so difficult to stick The Beast (or La Bête as the French title goes) into a specific box, as it’s so many things all at once. This is a bold and audacious piece of filmmaking from French director Bertrand Bonello, based on a Henry James short story/novells “The Beast in the Jungle”. However this film is anything but short. At over 2 and a half hours, this takes you on a disorientating, divergent and daring odyssey through time, and it is both bombastically incredible yet also highly frustrating. Look, this didn’t completely burn out my eye-sockets like Edward Yang’s 1991 epic magnum opus A Brighter Summer Day that was 4 flipping hours long! Don’t get me wrong, that movie has novelistic level of richness in character, narrative and depth, but at that runtime you’re taking the actual mick! So The Beast is nowhere on that scale, but it is definitely a movie that will challenge you mentally, and will make you question everything.

Exhausting is a word I’d choose to use when describing this film. Not in a negative way, but more so how it throws so much at you, but doesn’t explain the half of it. In fact it is very Lynchian in its absurdist style, and reminded me in some ways of Mullholland Drive - a movie at the end of which I too found myself asking the simple yet well earned question of “what the actual f***??”. The Beast feels, especially at the beginning, as if it should have been a piece of poetry, as scenes were happening, and even though there was the loose narrative connection of them being various versions of characters’ past lives, for the most part it seemed like a cluster of random allegorical shorts squeezed together in an anthological format. In the end it does come together granted, but as a collective Parnassus package this movie isn’t supposed to work. It can easily be called out for being pretentious and convoluted and slow, but I do believe this thing somehow, for no genuine explanation, works! It’s a baffling interweaving of the intimate and the spectacular, classicism and modernity, known vs the unknown, yet at this core this is a love story, that is expressed in its varied forms. Essentially The Beast is the answer to the ideology of human connection. Deep.

Wes Anderson darling/Bond girl Lea Seydoux is truly magnetic in this role. She delivers so much through her eyes, and I felt every emotion, even in scenes where I was completely narratively lost. This is easily her best performance I’ve seen from her. George MacKay has less to work with, as he’s more of a foil to Seydoux’s counterpart, but his chemistry with her is solid, and also in the LA segment he absolutely nails this incel character called Louis Lewanski who blogs/monologues on his iPhone about hatred towards women. It’s a performance that is suffused with pitch black humour and a mounting sense of dread. Both Seydoux and MacKay are incredible in this, but also I must applaud the look of this movie. Each shot feels like it should be a painting in a museum. The use of colour to the camera set up to the angle and blocking, with pitch perfect set designs and costumes, this movie looks crisp. The imagery somewhat reflects the movie’s focus on visions and dreams, and honestly this may be the most beautiful looking film this year.

La Bête will stick in my brain and haunt me for a long while, and in fact with how AI is such a current majorly spoken about topic, it does make one wonder if we do become overly reliant on artificial intelligence, will we lose all that is necessary to the human spirit - our emotions, our fears, our doubts? Additionally, the psychological idea of fear and that behind everything that we’re afraid of there is a wish, and the romantic ideal of persistent love…. gosh, this movie is sublime! I do think in parts it does get up its own arse, don’t get me wrong, but this is the type of movie that has something to say, and also is very much the kind of film Letterboxd users would quote as “THIS IS CINEMA!”.

Overall score: 8/10

[shacklesburst]

Watched John Wick Chapter 4 yesterday.

One thing that I've been noticing more and more recently is just how pretty movies can be nowadays. Pretty effortlessly, at that. Technology has just made it much easier to produce very pretty shots it seems like. Yeah, sure, directing is part of it, but like there is so much that can be beautiful, especially if you don't go that ham on the CGI, but basically just touch the shot up a bit. Also it's not a John Wick movie without a fight scene at a themed night club and those shots at Himmel und Hölle were phenomenal!

I also liked that the story has come to its natural conclusion. It's honestly such a good ending, a rarity in today's sequel obsessed world. (Yeah, sure, they could've had a similar conclusion after 2 or 3, but 4 does make it a very round finish.)

I'm just astonished they managed to just show 20 minutes of a absolutely regular night at the Arc de Triomphe roundabout without it breaking the flow of the movie.

What I could've done without was the whole business of "getting the word out" once more in the hours before 6:03. We've tried that like 4 times by now and it hasn't worked, what makes you think it's gonna work now? Slow John down so he doesn't make it, which would lead to him ... being excommunicated and hunted such that they may perform that threatened "immediate execution"?

Would've made the whole affair a bit more succinct, bringing down the runtime from a pretty egregious 169 minutes (!!). What happened to movies being 90 minutes long anyways???

But all in all just a really solid action flick, exactly what you'd expect with some gorgeous shots to feast on.

[noblechaton]

so. the ml movie huh. hm (big ol post with spoilers under this cut btw)

so after almost 10 years of being on this bug and cat train they finally get a big ol expensive movie and I think it was. fine? maybe? there's a lot going on here and while I don't think I can call it good and mean it I don't think it was the worst thing ever. a 6? out of 10 feels kinda right for me. got a lot to say here fwiw so buckle in if ya wanna read it all lol

main issue I feel is obviously them trying to adapt 5 seasons, each of which was dozens of hours at least, and a near decade of storytelling into a movie that doesn't even hit two hours. no idea why - I imagine the money ran out tbh - but running through the entire thrust of the series in ~1h40m movie just. was never gonna work man. feel like there had to be better options out there, like just adapting Origins with some episodes from S1 thrown in between them getting their miraculous and Hawkmoth revealing himself or something. idk. I ain't a writer

but then also I felt despite the short runtime that it sorta dragged on at times? like it got stuck spinning wheels here and there. Marinette constantly needing her confidence boosted even after being Ladybug for so long was weird. it's so strange bc they flashed through a dozen akuma - some of which looked kinda cool btw, be neat if they made the jump to the show - and yet it felt like there'd been no progress made? like the flow of time in the movie just. didn't work. a lot of stuff just sort of happens at you and you gotta hang onto whatever ya like and hope it doesn't just vanish in the river of events

voice acting in English was like. pretty solid honestly. maybe the best performances I'd heard from that side of the dub tho I have no idea what they were thinking with the singing voice for Marinette at least. couldn't really tell if Adrien's was still Bryce (I don't think it was but it wasn't as jarring) and I know Keith sang for Gabe's songs but whoever they got for Marinette just. wasn't even close to Marinette's normal speaking voice and it's super distracting. really weird choice. no shade on the singer tho she was solid imo just like. no connection to Marinette's normal voice really took me out of it

also the songs were kind of nonsensical most of the time and there's way too many of them. some are kinda good - Gabe's, Chat's and tbh I kinda liked the one over the credits to name a few - but like. they were not good enough for there to be what felt like 6-7 different songs in a movie that doesn't even crack 2 hours lmao

they made a ton of changes in terms of the story and general world and I actually kind of liked some of them - Ladybug learning to swing through the yoyo (which had a neat redesign) and doing so using that Ladybug vision was cool, I appreciate that we get a reveal and how it's done even if the end card was brutal, the miraculous seeking them out felt more like nice compared to just having the weight of the world dropped on them by some ancient man lol - but then there's others I didn't. Ladybug just never uses the cure until the end? I guess? she also doesn't purify the first akuma I don't think and like. nothing happens? Adrien's just sorta out and about? going to the school already? he gets a really understated intro imo. Gabriel sort of doesn't get an ending. I'd assume he's in jail? we get almost none of Adrien's perspective on getting the ring which is really weird

and that sorta extends into my feeling that somehow we did not get enough Gabriel in this. really weird saying that after having enough of that bum for the last 4 years of my life but his motives are carried hard by my knowledge of the show, and even then they're not really shown enough - he's not shown enough, and I don't feel Adrien is either. neither is the school setting or side characters, heck I'd say Adrinette gets kinda shafted overall since most of the development they get is in a montage sequence. there's a lot chopped out of this for the sake of a brevity that doesn't feel all that brief?

there's some good stuff in here for sure. the animation is undeniably pretty and slick even if some models are kinda wack. most of the action was fun and cool, the final sequence with Chat running up the tower and such was neat. I loved the Ladynoir something fierce honestly, the bantering and the sparring and the getting closer and closer. missed them being like that a lot tbh, someone on staff clearly did too. couple of jokes got me too like the opener with Chloe getting a single drop of coffee on her shirt lmao

but then there's a lot of stuff that really didn't work for me. Plagg being reduced to a fucking fart joke kind of made me mad lmao. them being super inconsistent with their powers was so weird. no lucky charm?? WHAT?? did I miss something?? no side character getting any focus beyond Alya was disappointing too and even Alya just dips out of the story after a while. breaking out into song once every like 15 minutes got old kinda quick too regardless of song quality (tho it was funny that Marinette seemed aware of the fact that she'd just participated in a musical number at one point lol)

Fu opens the movie with some really weird monologue and basically dips after the first akuma and they just. never find him again? he plays zero role beyond that point? Adrinette's first meeting is kinda cute in an understated sort of way but it's also sort of nothing and doesn't feel like a lingering thing for long afterwards - it ain't no umbrella scene dude. also Chat Noir seemingly drops the "my mom died btw" thing on Ladybug like she'd know that and she just sort of goes "Ah. Sorry, Chat." and that was. super fucking weird lmao

like I said. there's a lot going on - tho I gotta say for sure the writing was not consistently good. there were moments, flashes, Ladynoir is the strongest thing in the movie imo but there's so many fucking craters in terms of quality that it makes me so happy we get what we do in the show

on the whole I felt the movie was somehow way too condensed and yet too long at the same time. it felt like it was made by someone who really likes the surface details of the series but not the whole thing and like that's fine but I wouldn't say it was a good representation of the show. like the things I like about the movie are kind of all things I've liked about the show, and I like them more so because of that but also like I can't say the movie was good just bc I like the show lol

shallow is a good word for it I think. a flashy, expensive hour or so with little more beneath the surface which I feel sorta betrays the show it's based on where it's cutesy on the surface but has more going on under it. which like this feels very much made for the younger demographic and those that aren't into the show, like sort of an ad for someone's ideal version series even if it sorta strays really far from the show itself. as if someone perhaps in charge of this movie was clinging to what elements of their flagship series that they thought were keeping their company afloat and foolishly believed they could do it better than the creator or any other actual writer. wonder who that could be. anyway

as an adaptation of the show I don't think it was good overall and as a movie on its own it was like. fine. imo. wouldn't sway people into picking the series up but definitely not the worst movie ever made. super safe and super shallow, really messy with a few bright spots thrown in. a cluttered Ladynoir reveal fic where the Ladynoir bits are good and the rest is not. etc.

I like it but mostly bc I love the show - I would not introduce someone to the series with this and might not even urge casual fans to watch it either tbh. real mixed bag imo

also what happened to the "Awakening" subtitle? I kinda liked it and it's just gone. weird

[peniswizard69]

The arc of Torchwood as a series is something that's sooo interesting to me so enjoy reading this post if you care.

Seasons 1 and 2, which I like to call Torchwood Who between me and myself, are very simple. It started off as a Doctor Who spinoff, but horror drama instead of scifi adventure. It tries to mix in some worldbuilding, some character work, mystery driven plots, and deeply explored themes, and there's just no room for that; solid bones but kinda boring all around. It's furtile for fandomwork, inkeeping with Tumblr's fine tradition of making up half of their favorite show, but the tone is on the grim and gray side for those purposes. It's ultimately British fast food tv, for everything you'd expect of that.

They didn't expect to get a season 3. They killed off two of the main cast, and gave the rest an ending in the Doctor Who season 4 finale. Then they got a season 3

Season 3 is called Children of Earth and it's a gut wrenching, stomach churning, horror tour de force. The total runtime is down 54%, from thirteen 50-minute episodes (per season) to five of an hour each, but Torchwood Who was monster-of-the-week but Children of Earth is fully serialized, so the premise has 6 times as much room for all the things the series wanted. To a more discerning viewer this is an oasis of pure light in a dim desert; to the humble Tumblrina, this is a betrayal. Children of Earth is not fun; it has fewer gaps to fill with little scenarios and interpretation; and it leaves you broken, hesitant to come back. Honestly CoE being stapled to the end of Who is one of the wilder things in television.

They didn't expect to get a season 4. They killed off another of the main cast and blew up the secret base and almost all of the gadgets; and they gave the rest a sort of biter-sweet ending. Then they got a season 4

Season 4, whose name is Miracle Day, was mostly produced in the US and it shows. The season mostly takes place in the US, but there's a definite change to the writing that's hard to pin down. It's faster paced and more plot-driven, lighter in tone. The runtime was brought back up to ten 50ish-minute episodes, which feels like bloat given how tight CoE was om 60% of that, and the lower budget/screentime ratio is more important with the American style. It also has Bill Pullman? What is he doing here? It would be rich ground for a fandom, if not for the rest of Torchwood. Fans of Who that didn't bounce off CoE are probably gonna mostly spend it missing Who, and to the discerning CoE enthusiast it is AWFULLLLL. My brother hates it so much, which does fill me with power. At the end of the day, when you hear "American sequel to high budget British mini series" you make a series of assumptions and they're all correct.

They thought they were gonna get a season 5. They set up a recurring antagonist, only killed characters that debuted this season and made one of them immortal. They didn't get a season 5, which gives me ample opportunity to pretend to speculate on season 5. Jathesson is endgame

The arc of all of this is soooo delicious to me. They legitimately went "I'm dying let's party!!!" and then "I survived let's just sorta sit here". Hard to sit through for three different reasons. Campy to classy to cheesy. Ultimately I have to give Torchwood 1 out of ten children, because that's a CoE reference. Trying to actually rate the show is tricky, it's three different shows amd deserves three different shadows. I give it 1, 7 and 3 out of 10 on my little pet scale where 0 is neutral. You probably don't need to watch Torchwood Who to get Children of Earth, but you do need Children of Earth to get Miracle Day.

Also, Bill Pullman in Miracle Day is actually so fucking good??? He brings this powerful and spcific energy where he's the most wretched and disgusting thing in history but also still charming and charismatic. How did he do it

[gastrobrack]

Brave New World 2020 review from probably the biggest fan of the book you’ll meet in your life

(Mostly Spoiler Free) Okay so. I’ve been waiting for this show for a really long time because I absolutely love the book and it means a lot to me. My standards were admittedly pretty low because it can’t get worse than the 1998 movie, so I didn’t really mind when I saw the trailers and stuff where other people were complaining. 

TL;DR I thought the show was actually pretty enjoyable, but you have to read the book first in my opinion, or else it seems like it would be hard to follow at times. Where the show really screwed up royally was Mond’s storyline, which felt completely out of place and confusing, and when it ended up dominating the end of the final episode it just kinda ruined the story for me. The show is definitely more focused on the setting and characters than the societal predictions and themes of the novel, and for me that’s okay because we have the book to tell it better anyways.  I’d say watch it if you liked the book or are curious about it, but I don’t think it would really be enjoyable for the average viewer.

Side note: I watched this in the wee hours of the morning and some of the praise might just be the special interest talking, I’m just happy to be here and get more content

That being said, I think this show is like the Riverdale of Brave New World. However, in its defense it’s at least got the energy of the parts of Riverdale like the “epic highs and lows of high school football” and the “serial killer gene”, so it’s at least pretty funny. Personally, I knew that they would have to change a lot both to adjust for the longer runtime (around 9 hours) and to make the book enjoyable to a TV audience, because of course in the book you can have 2 chapters of exposition at the beginning and that’s not as enjoyable for a TV experience. So, let’s get into the pros and cons of the show!

PROS

-I really liked Bernard! In the book he means a lot to me personally (hell, I’m writing this while listening to my Bernard playlist) so I was of course kinda worried they might screw him up again like they did in the ‘98 movie, but I was pleasantly surprised! They did change him and divide his original personality between John and Lenina, but somehow they managed to create a new Bernard that both kept me on my toes and at the same time felt authentic and likeable! 

-Honestly, almost all the characters were done very well. They were all expanded upon in an interesting way while also staying generally pretty accurate to their book counterparts. I generally felt the same about them as I did with the novel, so I think that means they did a job well done. I think that John and Lenina were very different, but they still ultimately had the same general motivations. A lot of the cast’s interactions felt very natural, and I liked that they expanded upon Lenina and Fanny’s (or Frannie as she’s called here) friendship. 

-The show looked great, I know a lot of people really didn’t like the look of it because it wasn’t what they thought it would be when they read it, but for me that’s basically exactly what I imagined it would be. The costume designer clearly had fun making a bunch of outlandish outfits for everyone to wear and it’s all very pleasant to look at. 

-I think they did a good job fixing some of the problematic elements of the book without actually damaging the integrity of the things they were changing. For example, in the book, the savage reservation is quite literally just a native reservation, written in a way that clearly suggests Huxley didn’t really put a lot of thought into his depiction of real people. In the show, it’s a theme park where British people get to immerse themselves in the cultures of the old world, with the savages themselves being poor theme park workers reenacting events to shock and mystify the Brits. Now, admittedly, I think this makes a lot more sense as it ties into the consumerism that runs deep within their society. I know some people are mad about this because they think it’s cancel culture or something but honestly it’s not a big deal to me.

-This one might not be as important to some people, but I liked that the cast was pretty diverse, and the fact that John is the only straight one honestly made sense to me considering it would be in the World State’s best interest to encourage bisexuality amongst its citizens. Some of the characters (Helmholtz and Mond) are being played by women, and some people are kinda upset about that but I don’t really think it changed too much, although to me it is funny to think the showrunner thought he was doing something by “casting women of color to play white male characters” considering everyone I know who read the book didn’t picture either of them as white. 

-Honestly, I think the show did humor very well. It was very funny in a sort of dry way, and never felt forced or out of place. It all seemed like it naturally stemmed from the characters’ awkwardness and culture shock (on both sides) and it made me really happy as someone who loves all these characters to see them make me laugh.

CONS

-Now, I’m not usually one to complain about this too much, seeing as I love the book in a non thematic and academic context, but the message kinda got lost in all of it. I think the issues they brought up certainly were there, and could lend themselves very well to being good. The writers just focused on the entirely wrong things in the last episode, and that misguided focus completely changes the lens in which the rest of the show is retroactively viewed for me. 

-Mustapha Mond was just, where do I even begin. In the book, Mond doesn’t show up much except to provide exposition, and his position as an authoritative figure ultimately moves the plot towards the end of the novel. In the show, Mond gets this weird AI plotline that makes no sense, as in this version they have a sort of internet contact lens type system that allows them to connect to everyone else, and it is powered by said AI. The system itself doesn’t bother me as much as how poorly handled this plotline was. Not only was it completely random and was the only plotline in the show not to have some sort of roots in the events of the book, but it was extremely confusing to me. This leads into my next point, which is:

-The ending. Oh my God the ending. Now, look. I’m not gonna say much because I want this to be as spoiler free as possible, but the ending just honestly was a dumpster fire. The writers chose to focus the whole ending on the aforementioned AI plotline, despite the book providing a much more solid framework for an ending that they already seemed to be setting up. This shift in focus comes very late into the final episode, and it honestly doesn’t make any sense why the writers would really want to go this route. It feels like they were just adding things that didn’t fit into the story, and I can’t really discern why except for the possibility of setting up an unnecessary second season. I love the book, it’s my special interest, but I think I speak for everyone when I say we do not need a second season especially if its gonna be full of plotlines that make no sense and serve no purpose.  This heavily changed ending not only undermines the whole thematic purpose of the novel but honestly kind of goes actively against everything the book was trying to say in the first place. 

-They really don’t set up any of the world building, and although I caught on very quickly due to my familiarity with the book, it seems like it might get confusing for unfamiliar watchers. In the book, they explain their process for birthing and then conditioning children into their social body very in depth before they get into the actual plot and characters, and I think this show could have used some of that. Here, they talk a lot about conditioning but don’t actually explain what the conditioning is or why they have the caste system in the first place. 

-This is a minor disappointment more than anything and I didn’t actually notice till about the second episode, but there’s no more Ford talk, which is kinda disappointing cause it was pretty fun in the book. 

-Obviously it goes without saying that there’s sex in this, I mean it IS Brave New World. However, in this one, it just feels excessive and kinda just like it’s there for shock value more than anything. 

-This isn’t really a con so much as it is just a disclaimer, I know a lot of people are excited for Demi Moore as Linda and Joseph Morgan as the new character CJack60, but don’t get your hopes up too much, they don’t get to do much. If you read the book, you’d know that about Linda but I’ve seen reviewers get upset that she wasn’t in it more when she was one of the big names attached to the project. (FWIW she did a great job and I loved Linda in this whereas I didn’t in the book) As for CJack, he spends a lot of time just standing there and looking at things and doesn’t get to do much until the last 2 episodes or so. 

CONCLUSION

As someone who really loves the book’s setting and characters sometimes even more than the actual messages and predictions, I’ve always wanted an adaptation that focuses more on those elements, especially since that would make for an easier transition to the screen. Seeing this was a very nice breath of fresh air, because it embraces the inherently satirical and dare I say funny aspect of the story, as well as the characters’ individual quirks and distinct personalities. Obviously it’s not as hard hitting and important as the book, but I think those messages were better left in book form anyway. For someone like me, who loves the book with all my heart, this show honestly gave me most everything I wanted and it felt the most true to the spirit of the book’s world and characters out of any of the adaptations. I would say check out the show if you’re interested in it or enjoyed the book, but you should definitely be familiar with the book before you watch this. 

[destressjournal]

DCOM Rankings #103: Descendants 2

Wow if the tangled movie was the shortest DCOM ever made, this one might be the longest…it’s like almost 2 hours!

So I’m just gonna say this right off the bat now that I just finished the movie. I think this one might be slightly better than the first one. GASP! A sequel that I like better than the original??? How dare I???

I’ll explain, of course. Why else do I write these reviews?

Let’s see….where to start? Well I think it helped now that I kind of gotten used to the whole “all the Disney characters live together in one place even though they all come from different time periods and parts of the world” thing. I’ve just accepted it’s an alternate dimension and that it’s not canon to any of the actual Disney movies. That made me enjoy things a bit more.

The overall story actually nicely builds upon the first movie. You see Mal struggling to adjust to the “good” society because at her core she was still raised to be evil. Change doesn’t come overnight. She feels like she’s not the same person she used to be, and it feels wrong. Meanwhile she goes along with it because everyone else seems to have adjusted rather well.

The other characters really don’t get more development except for maybe Evie. Because she was just trying to forget her past but has learned to embrace it within her dress fashioning skills. Carlos and Jay are still kinda the same. And the dog talks now….so that also happens….he’s not as annoying as I thought he would be though. The new characters they added are pretty neat. I like uma! She’s a nice addition to the cast and her character is pretty solid IMO.

Anyway, all this stress leads Mal to start cheating by using magic to get ahead, and therefore lost Ben’s trust. And that’s how everything kickstarted. As a couple, I feel like Mal and Ben kind of have chemistry, certainly more than the first movie I think, but nothing will ever beat Troy and Gabriella (or the couple from now you see it, I keep forgetting about them). But what I did think was really cute is that Mal did point out he’s never been to where she’s from. And when she runs away, he follows her and now he’s on her turf. He gets to actually see the isle and all its evilness, and try to be part of the crowd so as to not be recognized. He’s learning and trying to understand where she comes from in the process of finding her and bringing her back. I just thought that it was cute that he wasn’t judging or being snooty, just overly friendly.

I think this movie had either more songs or slightly better songs than the original. I’m just so glad they left the poppy version of a Disney song in the credits where it belongs. Now all the songs are original, and that definitely gets an extra point. I think some of the songs drag on for a little too long, maybe to fill up the never ending run time, but they’re not bad. However I don’t remember any one of them. But I don’t know if I remembered all of high school musical songs right away before I got the CDs, so I’m willing to forgive that a little bit. The lip sync is also better with this song too. It was so bad in the first one it was like dove Cameron was singing a different song half the time.

Speaking of the runtime. I wish this movie was like 10 mins shorter. It didn’t need to be as long as it was. Maybe just 5 min. Idk some songs and scenes dragged on much too long. Like that fight scene with all the pirates on the ship. They sang a song about it, they talked, they realized they’ve been tricked, and then they fight for 11 years! Like I was just kinda sitting there waiting….are they done fighting yet? Nope? Okay.

I will say that the visual effects are pretty damn good for a TV movie! I was honestly surprised. Like the dragon and the octopus legs in the last act looked really good. Obviously not marvel movie quality but I’ll take what I can get for these DCOM’s.

Honestly as much as I found some things a bit annoying or weird like the usual fart and butt jokes (or the ever-present DCOM cringiness), there isn’t too much I absolutely HATE about this movie, except for one thing. The ending.

Uma just gave up. I actually really liked the twist in the middle cuz you kind of forget that uma had the spell book. She had a brilliant plan and it all just fell apart because Ben talked to her. Like….how did it work that time and not the previous time? Uma worked so hard to come over there and then she just leaves as soon as Ben says a few words about getting along. Like I know it’s not the end of her story but still, they could have replaced some of the run time with a confession from uma about how she missed her friend and just wants to spend time together again, and then Mal would be all like “well friends don’t do this to each other, I’m no longer interested” and have her retreat after that. That would make more sense.

And the they immediately sing a song and the credits roll (the song wasn’t that bad though, the placement however, was kinda awkward. I wish this song took place back at the castle). And we get that little 10 second snippet at the end. That’s it. The ending was so built up and I thought we would have this giant animal fight or the boat would be in danger or something. Nope. It all deflates like a balloon. Super disappointing.

Another disappointing thing about the ending is the fact that still not everyone in the isle is able to come to Ouradon (idk how you spell it). Only certain people. Maybe they address it in the third one, who knows. It just seems really shitty now that Ben knows how many people he’s hurt and he’s still like, “ask me if you want someone to come over here”. And we get like two more people plus some kids. It’s a start but like…idk…I would have been more satisfied if there was a way for both islands to come together as one land.

So yeah, overall this is a slightly better movie I think because this is a much grander and more focused story that DEFINITELY wasn’t put together in two seconds. The songs in general were better (ooof China Anne Mcclaine has SUCH a good voice). And the tone was just a little more serious. The twist was still somewhat expected but still a good twist! The visual effects were better. Yeah. This movie is definitely going higher than it’s predecessor, where ever that is. I may have given it an A, I don’t remember. Will I watch this all the time? Idk but if there’s only one maybe two things that I hate in the movie, I feel like an A+ is deserved. We’ll see. Like I said I may re-do my rankings based on how many A+‘ s I have….which is a lot….like I think we’re at like 20 now.

Next movie!!

So it looks like a Halloween movie but it came out in February…huh….interesting. I think this movie also got two sequels so this should be fun getting through all these and the last descendants movie. Wish me luckkkkk!

[davidmann95]

It seems Tyler Hoechlin is your favorite live-action Superman, but can you rank the actors from worst to best as you see it (of the current actors, I'm not sold on Hoechlin yet, but I think it has more to do with my dislike of his costume—particularly how the cape attaches—that it distracts me from the character, while Cavill seems to physically look perfect for the part and certainly is capable of the acting and charm, but the script he has to work with is lacking)?

Leaving out Kirk Alyn, John Haymes Newton and Gerard Christopher, since I’m not familiar with their performances:

7. Tom Welling

I feel kind of bad about this one. I grew up watching Smallville, y’know? And in terms of sheer man-hours devoted to the role, Welling has more of a claim to being Superman than anyone other than Bud Collyer. But he…wasn’t great, in retrospect. I suspect it was largely a matter of the material he was given; he did well whenever he actually had something to do, whether as dorky reporter Clark Kent intermittently throughout the final season, or various cases of amnesia/mind control/body-swapping/Red Kryptonite exposure. But outside maybe a sweet spot after he’d grown into the role and before he visibly started to get tired of it, and occasionally when getting to spar with (better) actors like Durance, Rosenbaum, and Glover, he had a weird stiffness when playing regular Clark Kent that for the most part didn’t translate into charm once he couldn’t bank on teen awkwardness anymore, and while that frankly made him a pretty honest depiction of the increasingly dicey version of the character he was written as, it didn’t make for a great take on Superman.

6. Henry Cavill

Cavill’s been more let down by the material than anything else - the unfortunate unifying factor of the bottom three here. When the movies let him be great, he really is great, whether promising Martha that he isn’t going anywhere even after learning the truth about Krypton or fighting for the stories he believes in against Perry White. For the most part though he just seems to be called on to look varying degrees of sad and solemn, asked to call on none of the charm he showed in, say, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Granted his Superman has a lot to be down about, but there’s no range on display here; I don’t doubt he’s got a great take on the character in him, but for now it’s being kept under wraps.

5. Brandon Routh

Of all the reasons Superman Returns was such a damn shame, maybe the biggest was that it buried any chance of seeing the performance out of Brandon Routh that he so clearly had to offer. He’s a great dorky Clark, a charming Superman, and when the stars line up just right, he really manages to capture the idea of Superman as a melancholy figure - his take doesn’t just seem to be bearing the weight of the world in the philosophical abstract, but much more palpably feels an entire planet crying out for him, knowing he can never save them all but always trying anyway out of unconditional love, very much in line with Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s take on him in Hitman. Unfortunately all that takes up maybe 10-15 minutes of runtime, spending the rest of the movie stalking his ex with a neutral expression until he gets shived by Kevin Spacey and regurgitates Brando at his secret kid. Superman Returns was weird, ya’ll.

4. Dean Cain

I was honestly surprised with myself when I decided Cain won out as the best of the rest outside the big three - I thought for sure it’d be Routh. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while Routh’s take is definitely closer to the version of Superman I had in my head, it’s compromised in a way the Superman of Lois & Clark never was: like the take or not, this is a perfect realization of the Superman the creators of the show clearly had in mind. His Clark’s funny, clever, warm, and vulnerable, and while it feels weird for him to be acting that way in the glasses these were the Byrne years, so as an expression of his ‘real’ self it’s pretty on-point. His Superman’s the weaker end, stilted even given it’s supposed to be him putting on a performance in-universe, but there’s such an unironic earnestness there that it typically slid back into charming.

3. George Reeves

I thought for awhile about 2 and 3, ultimately concluding that what was asked of George Reeves was a fair deal simpler. He didn’t much differentiate between Superman and Clark, and his booming radio announcer voice made clear we weren’t supposed to be measuring his performance in terms of whether or not he seemed like a real person. What he was called on to show though, and what he had out the wazoo, was raw charisma. When Jimmy asks him why he burst through a wall rather than using a door and Superman replies with a grin “Well, this seemed a little more spectacular,” you’re 100% willing to buy into that explanation, because yeah, it was spectacular, because Superman’s fantastic. And he could more than hold his own with the best of them when asked to work with more serious material, whether wandering through an amnesic fog in Panic In The Sky with only his instinctive decency to guide him, or here, in the final scene of The Dog Who Knew Superman, where Clark has to deal with a dog not only adoring him, but recognizing him in both identities:

2. Christopher Reeve

I gave Tom Welling his well-earned due earlier, but if you really want to talk about a guy with a solid claim to being Superman, Christopher Reeve didn’t just embed himself on the psyche of a generation, but is still held up today as the unequivocal standard by which the role is set. In all likelihood he’ll always be ‘the’ Superman, in the same way as Sean Connery will always be James Bond, and Bela Lugosi will always be Dracula. He shone like the sun in the costume, he was believably such a wimpy klutz out of it that no one would guess they were the same even when it was staring them in the face, and if anyone has any lingering suspicions that he just had the easy task of playing two extremely arch roles to the hilt, they might be forgetting this bit:

Was it perfect? I don’t know about that - if nothing else there were one or two awkward line readings, and the identity division is so sharp that it’s hard to tell when you’re getting a glimpse of the real guy underneath all the identities. But while I definitely question how much of a positive impact on Superman those movies themselves really had in the long run, Reeve’s performance on its own was an undeniable revelation, everything he did reverberating with such a sincere and powerful sense of decency and love for his fellow man that it not only brought Superman to the life, but frankly changed him forever for the better.

1. Tyler Hoechlin

I expected nothing out of this guy. Not that I by any means thought he’d be bad, but when I heard some dude from Teen Wolf was gonna appear on an episode or two of Supergirl, my reaction was about as intense as…well, what you’d expect upon hearing that some dude from Teen Wolf was showing up on Supergirl, even given who he was playing (granted I’ve never seen Teen Wolf and don’t actually especially know what Teen Wolf is, beyond that it’s based on that werewolf-playing-basketball 80s movie written by…wait, Jeph Loeb?!). Looked fine - and it became clear he actually really did look the part once behind-the-scenes pictures started to come out, rather than that godawful original promo picture - and I figured he’d belt out his best Reeve/Animated Series/Cartoon-on-the-side-of-a-cereal-box brand Generic Superman Performance to cheer Kara on before vanishing into the sunset forever outside of the opening credits. I was plenty interested in the potential long-term ramifications of Superman being allowed on TV again in any capacity for the first time since the 90s, given the influence that suggested Geoff Johns had as the new DC President and what that could mean in terms of other characters showing up down the line, but I wasn’t inclined to think of this as anything other than a stepping stone, only notable in its own right because it meant someone would be wearing the s-shield.

Then we actually saw him.

Where the hell has this guy been all these years? Was he grown in a goddamn laboratory for the part? How did the best Superman ever end up in a minor recurring guest spot on the CW Supergirl show?

It would be so, so easy to leap to the idea that he simply works as a jack-of-all-trades: he’s almost as charming as Reeve, just about as confident as Reeves, nearly as vulnerable as Cain. But that would be selling what he’s doing short - especially given that he probably hasn’t had the opportunity to stretch as far as he could in any of those directions, as his role so far has very much been as Supergirl’s backup dancer. What it comes down to is his general demeanor and how he incorporates those aspects into a whole that feels more fully-realized than any portrayal before him. His Superman and Kent are not only distinctive to the point that within the heightened reality the show occupies you can buy that people think of them as different people, but you can see threads from both of them connecting back to the real Clark you see around Kara. He’s open and warm and authentic in a way none of his predecessors quite were, and he’s able to turn on a dime into steely determination or outright fury while remaining recognizable. He’s above everyone’s heads and vaguely alien at times without ever seeming detached or less than entirely loving of the people around him, able to admit his fears and failings while staying strong and capable of changing for the better, utterly and palpably good without ever sliding into naivete or cartoonishness. In short he has range and nuance, and thanks to that along with the air of laid-back friendliness he brings with him, he more than anyone else to put on the suit feels like a real person. And somehow, that real person feels as much as anyone ever has like Superman. And that’s a hell of an achievement. So someone give him his own goddamn show already.

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/oneplus-7t-pro-review/

OnePlus 7T Pro Review

If you’ve been following OnePlus’ product cycle over the past few years, then it should have been obvious that ‘T’ versions of the 7 series were inevitable, although they have arrived sooner than expected. The OnePlus 7 (Review), positioned well below the superior 7 Pro, has already been refreshed. The new OnePlus 7T (Review) has borrowed many features from the OnePlus 7 Pro (Review), and its design, cameras, and display have all been improved, making it nearly as good as its more premium sibling.

So now, with the launch of the OnePlus 7T Pro, has the company made equally big changes to its higher tier model in just four months? Well, the short answer is no. The new OnePlus 7T Pro is a minor refresh with a slightly faster processor, a marginally bigger battery, and faster charging. It also ships with OxygenOS 10 out-of-the-box, just like the OnePlus 7T.

This might not look like much of an upgrade on paper, but is there more to it than meets the eye? It’s time to put the OnePlus 7T Pro to the test to see if these upgrades make any significant difference in our day-to-day usage.

OnePlus 7T Pro design

The easiest way to tell the new OnePlus 7T Pro apart from the OnePlus 7 Pro is by its colour. The new model comes only in a new ‘Haze Blue’ colour, at least at the time of its launch. This looks lighter than the Nebula Blue variant of the OnePlus 7 Pro. OnePlus has also created a McLaren Edition of the OnePlus 7T Pro, with orange themed accessories and a unique paint job for the phone itself.

The frosted, matte texture of the OnePlus 7T Pro’s glass rear feels great in the hand and doesn’t easily attract fingerprints, but is quite slippery. Other than colour, the only other differentiating factor is the placement of the laser autofocus sensor on the back, which has been moved from within the camera strip to the left of it. The OnePlus 7T Pro is practically identical to the OnePlus 7 Pro in terms of dimensions and weight. This means it’s still a little heavy, and not the easiest to manage with one hand.

Other design elements have stayed the same. You get 3D Corning Gorilla Glass on the back and front; a pop-up selfie camera; an in-display fingerprint sensor; stereo speakers; and all the same ports and buttons in the same place. That includes the textured alert slider on the right, for quickly switching between ring, vibrate, and silent modes.

The OnePlus 7T Pro standard (left) and McLaren Edition (right) side by side

The display is the same 6.67-inch QHD+ Fluid AMOLED panel with a 90Hz refresh rate and support for multiple colour profiles, including DCI-P3 that we saw on the OnePlus 7 Pro. It’s also rated to support HDR 10+ encoded videos, for displaying a wider spectrum of colours and higher brightness. We found the display to be excellent in most usage conditions. Colours are vibrant and well saturated, the brightness is very good even under sunlight, and viewing angles are great. The OnePlus 7T Pro ships with a pre-applied screen protector, which is a little annoying since lint and fibres stick to its edges quite easily.

The USB Type-C port and SIM tray are on the bottom. The tray only accepts two Nano-SIM cards, and there’s no support for a microSD card. As before, you don’t get a headphone jack either. Around the back, the vertical camera strip creates a small bump on the otherwise even surface. As we mentioned before, this phone can be slippery, but thankfully there’s a bundled silicone case.

Inside the oversized red retail box, which is very similar to that of the OnePlus 7T, you’ll find the usual accessories including the aforementioned transparent silicone case, a Type-C cable, a SIM eject tool, warranty information, some stickers, and the charger. The latter is now called the Warp Charge 30T charger, where the ‘T’ signifies faster charging over the previous-generation Warp Charge 30 charger, even though both are rated at 30W.

OnePlus 7T Pro specifications and software

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ SoC replaces the Snapdragon 855 which powered the OnePlus 7 Pro. This newer chip made its debut with the Asus ROG Phone 2 (Review), but is now seen in many recent flagships, including the OnePlus 7T. Qualcomm touts around a 15 percent improvement in graphics rendering performance, and the chip’s ‘Prime’ core runs at a higher clock speed. We’ve tested phones with this newer chip and honestly, with regular usage it’s quite difficult, if not impossible, to actually tell the difference between the Snapdragon 855 and 855+.

The display on the OnePlus 7T Pro is HDR 10+ certified

The OnePlus 7T Pro is only available with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, unless you choose the McLaren edition. Like before, the smartphone features LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 3.0 storage.

You also get dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5, NFC, dual 4G VoLTE, support for multiple satellite navigation systems, the usual suite of sensors, and Dolby Atmos. There’s no FM radio and the 7T Pro still lacks an official IP rating for waterproofing. This would have been the perfect time to add wireless charging, considering it’s the company’s flagship device, but sadly, OnePlus hasn’t done so.

When it comes to software, it’s hard to find any company that does a better custom Android skin than OnePlus’ OxygenOS. On the OnePlus 7T Pro, you get OxygenOS 10 which is based on Android 10. The security is up-to-date too, with the September patch pre-installed. Compared to OxygenOS 9.5, which debuted with the OnePlus 7 Pro, version 10 has some notable changes, partly thanks to Android 10. We’ve talked about most of these in our OnePlus 7T review, but we’ll skim over some of them here.

OxygenOS 10 looks slick on the OnePlus 7T Pro

Reading Mode now gets a new ‘chromatic’ option, which reduces the saturation level of colours so it’s more comfortable to the eye when viewing content. You can manually set which apps use the monochrome and chromatic options, so the display changes accordingly when they are launched. Game Space is redesigned and now offers a more intuitive way to set up customised profiles for each game.

You can choose to use gesture-based navigation, instead of the three-buttons system. This works well, except for the ‘back’ gesture, which can conflict with pull-out menus in some apps such as Slack. We really like the design of the new ‘Customisation’ menu in the Settings app, which shows previews of all visual elements in one place and lets you change very specific elements such as the clock style and accent colour.

Android 10 features such as auto-suggested replies in message notifications, a new sharing menu for files, and new privacy and permission notifications are also present.

OnePlus 7T Pro performance and battery life

We tested the OnePlus 7T Pro for a little less than a week, and we had a very positive experience. Similar to the OnePlus 7 Pro, the OnePlus 7T Pro feels extremely fast and snappy. We had absolutely no delays when browsing through the various menus in Android, and the 8GB of RAM comfortably allowed a good number of apps to stay running in the background, making it easy to switch back and forth.

The 90Hz display makes scrolling through menus feel fluid, and some games such as Rayman Adventures can actually take advantage of it, running at the full 90Hz refresh rate. This phone isn’t the easiest to handle with one hand, but it’s just a matter of getting used to its size.

The OnePlus 7T Pro’s pop-up camera does a good job with face unlock

We also liked how fast the face recognition and in-display fingerprint sensor are. The selfie camera module is quick to pop up to authenticate you, and it takes no longer than a standard front camera. There is the faint whirring sound of the motor every time it ejects and retracts, but it’s not at all distracting. The fingerprint sensor, like last time, is also extremely quick. All it takes is a quick tap on the display to unlock the phone.

Regular app and gaming performance is solid. We were unable to run all our usual benchmarks, since OnePlus has blocked many of them on pre-release devices in order to prevent the model number and specs from leaking, but we did manage to run a few tests. Geekbench 5 returned 773 and 2,789 points for the single and multi-core tests respectively, while GFXbench gave us 60fps and 41fps in the T-Rex and Manhattan 3.1 gaming tests. PUBG Mobile ran smoothly at the ‘High’ preset, and gameplay was lag-free. The back of the phone did get a little warm during gameplay but never got uncomfortably hot.

Media files look and sound great on the OnePlus 7T Pro, thanks to the HDR display and good stereo speakers. Dolby Atmos works even for the speakers. The stereo effect is noticeable, but not as good as on, say, the Asus ROG Phone 2 (Review). The main speaker is louder and produces richer sound than the earpiece, but the two of them don’t sound too unbalanced with casual listening.

The OnePlus 7T Pro (left) looks identical to the 7 Pro (right), except for the colour and the re-positioned laser autofocus sensor

The battery capacity of the OnePlus 7T Pro has increased by a tiny bit to 4,085mAh, from 4,000mAh on its predecessor. With the display resolution left to ‘Auto Switch’ and the refresh rate at 60Hz, our battery loop test ran for 15 hours and 12 minutes. Setting the refresh rate to the default 90Hz, we got a lower figure of 11 hours and 19 minutes of runtime. This is a little less than the OnePlus 7 Pro’s numbers, but that was on older firmware based on a seasoned build of Android 9 Pie. Things could improve with future versions of OxygenOS, and as Android 10 matures.

Real-world battery usage was much better. With a full day of heavy usage at the 90Hz refresh rate, which included testing the cameras, streaming music over Bluetooth, and some benchmarks, we still had about 20 percent left in the battery at night. With a little more frugal usage, we were getting more than a full day’s worth of battery life but not enough to take us through a full second day. This is more than satisfactory, especially since the phone charges really quickly.

The Warp Charge 30T charger managed a 59 percent charge in half an hour and a 96 percent charge in one hour. It took about five to six minutes more to top the phone up completely. These are very good charging speeds, and will come in especially handy if you’re in a hurry.

OnePlus 7T Pro cameras

The OnePlus 7T Pro features the same camera setup as the OnePlus 7 Pro. This includes a primary 48-megapixel Sony IMX586 sensor with OIS and an f/1.6 aperture; an 8-megapixel telephoto camera with OIS and an f/2.4 aperture; and a 16-megapixel ultra wide-angle camera with an f/2.2 aperture. In the front, we have a 16-megapixel, fixed-focus pop-up camera for selfies.

However, the camera app has gotten a host of new features such as a Super Macro mode and the ability to use Nightscape with the wide-angle camera. You still can’t adjust the level of background blur in Portrait mode, but you can now use either the telephoto or main camera to capture a portrait shot.

In daylight landscapes, the OnePlus 7T Pro captured good details and colours. HDR works well, exposure is balanced nicely, and there’s a good amount of dynamic range even with backlit subjects. Overlay buttons in the viewfinder let you quickly toggle between the different camera sensors.

The wide-angle camera is useful for framing more in each shot. Details are slightly poorer compared to shots taken with the main sensor, but this is only noticeable if you zoom in to the image. The telephoto camera is useful for getting closer to your subject. Details are good, and there is optical stabilisation, but focusing is a little slower.

Shot using the primary camera on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

Shot using the ultra wide-angle camera on the OnePlus 7T Pro

Shot using the telephoto camera on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

Close-up shot from the primary camera of the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

We had a slight issue with the OnePlus 7 Pro’s autofocus system when it came to close-up shots, but thankfully, this has been fixed – well, almost. We came across this issue once or twice when using the OnePlus 7T Pro but not as often as we did with the OnePlus 7 Pro. Close-ups had very good details and colours, with a pleasing shallow depth-of-field effect. Colours could look boosted at times, especially reds. Some edges of close-up subjects still lacked good definition though, and we noticed a bit of colour bleeding around the edges of objects in some shots.

There’s a new Super Macro mode, which we also saw on the OnePlus 7T (Review). This lets you get as close as 2.5cm to your subject. It uses the ultra wide-angle camera, and works very well. It takes a bit of patience to get the focus right, as there’s a lot of hunting even with slight movement, but we managed to get some good macros. It’s a much better implementation compared to phones with dedicated low-resolution macro cameras, as you can get much crisper shots.

In Super Macro mode, the viewfinder still appears to give you the option to switch between cameras, but what it’s actually doing is digitally zooming in with the ultra-wide camera itself, to emulate the perspective of the other lenses.

Shot using Super Macro mode on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

Portrait shot using the telephoto lens on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

Selfie HDR test (tap to see full-sized OnePlus 7T Pro camera sample)

The selfie camera captures decent shots under good light. HDR worked well, giving us well-exposed selfies even when shooting against bright light. Skin tones had a slight reddish hue, which we didn’t quite like, but details were decent. Videos are recorded at up to 1080p with the front camera, and there’s electronic stabilisation too.

Portrait mode works well when shooting people and objects. The camera app now lets you use either the telephoto lens (for extreme close-ups, like headshots) or the primary lens (if you want more of the background in the frame), which is handy. You still can’t adjust the level of blur before or after the shot is taken, but thankfully, the applied effect looked pleasing most of the time in our experience.

The OnePlus 7T Pro did well at reproducing accurate colours when shooting in low light. Focusing speed dipped a little and there were instances when the focus in landscapes and close-ups was too soft. At times, we had to manually tap the viewfinder to get the phone to lock focus properly. The main camera managed to pick up fairly good detail, but shadow regions did have a bit of noise.

Shot using the telephoto camera in low light (tap to see full sized image)

Shot using primary camera on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap for full-sized image)

Shot with ultra wide-angle camera and Nightscape on the OnePlus 7T Pro (tap to see full-sized image)

The wide-angle camera’s narrower aperture doesn’t let it capture very bright images, but thankfully, you can now use Nightscape with this sensor too, making it more useful in low light. Keep in mind that while Nightscape does help brighten scenes and produces better detail in shadowy areas, textures on objects tend to look a little artificial. We’re also happy to see the phone actually using its telephoto camera in most of our low-light samples, rather than digitally zooming in using the main sensor.

Video recording tops out at 4K 60fps. Colours continue to be terribly exaggerated at 4K, irrespective of the framerate, which is an issue we had with the OnePlus 7 Pro. Reds, especially, look almost radioactive. Colours are a bit more under control at 1080p. We found that continuous autofocus worked very well across resolutions.

The OnePlus 7T Pro uses a combination of optical and electronic stabilisation whenever possible when shooting at 1080p 30fps. You can manually switch between the sensors while recording, but only at that resolution and framerate. The switching feels a little abrupt and there’s a noticeable drop or gain in image quality, depending on which sensor you switch to. Stabilisation is also available at 4K, but you can only use the primary camera. The phone does have a Super Steady stabilisation mode, which records at 1080p only using the wide-angle camera. With this, the frame is cropped heavily to get rid of of the fish-eye effect, but in return, you get gimbal-level stabilisation.

Low-light video quality still needs a lot of work. Even at 1080p, the quality is below average as there’s a lot of visible grain even in relatively well-lit scenes, and stabilisation causes a lot of jitter and distortion when you’re moving about.

The camera app is clutter-free and easy to navigate. The main shooting modes are just above the shutter button. Additional ones hidden in a separate menu that you can swipe up to reveal, but this isn’t really obvious and some users might miss it completely. Controls for various settings line the upper portion of the viewfinder. You can also shoot in the full 48-megapixel resolution by using Pro mode, but again, you’ll have to dig around to actually find it. OnePlus has mentioned the ability to capture 960fps slow-motion video with the OnePlus 7T Pro, but our unit only had 240fps and 480fps options, so this might come with a future software update.

Verdict

Looking at the OnePlus 7T Pro, we can’t help but feel as though OnePlus was obligated to refresh the OnePlus 7 Pro, just so it wouldn’t look old and irrelevant now that we have the OnePlus 7T. We would have liked to have seen more meaningful upgrades, like the OnePlus 7T received, but this isn’t the case with the OnePlus 7T Pro. There isn’t much differentiation between the two product tiers anymore, apart from the higher-resolution curved display and the pop-up camera on the more expensive model.

The OnePlus 7T Pro looks and feels premium, and does a lot of things well. It features an excellent display, good stereo sound, very good software, and useful camera capabilities. It’s still a bit on the heavier side though, and we’re still waiting on wireless charging and IP-rated waterproofing. The new software has fixed some of the niggles that we previously encountered with the cameras, but this phone still struggles with capturing video, especially in low light.

This is one of the best looking phones at Rs. 53,999, but this is also a pretty steep premium over the OnePlus 7T, which offers very similar features. Some might argue that the design and display alone are worth the premium over the OnePlus 7T, and if you fall in that camp, then you won’t be disappointed. If you want to go even crazier, you could opt for the McLaren Edition of the OnePlus 7T Pro at Rs. 58,999, which gets you 12GB of RAM, a fancier case, and a unique colour scheme.

The OnePlus 7T Pro is a good flagship, but keep in mind that the Google Pixel 4 is right around the corner, and going by recent rumours, it could be priced very competitively. It just makes good sense to wait a bit and see how things play out, before spending this kind of money.

[theinquisitivej]

‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ - A Movie Review

For all its impressive visuals and wondrous aesthetics, ‘Valerian’ is an agonisingly boring slog to sit through.

          I will admit to several factors which may have negatively affected my enjoyment of the film. I didn’t see it in 3D. I maintain that most films should be able to stand up just as well no matter how many dimensions they are experienced in, but there are one or two cases where a film was made by its impressive 3D, such as 'Gravity’ or 'Life of Pi’. 'Valerian’ has been praised for its 3D, and there was the occasional sequence that made me think man, this actually would be pretty neat to experience with that extra level of immersion that 3D can grant when correctly implemented. I also haven’t seen 'The Fifth Element’, for which the director of this film, Luc Besson, is best known. Again, that doesn’t mean much - each part of a director’s body of work should ideally be just as rewarding whether they are the first film you’ve experienced from that director, or the twentieth film. Still, there is always going to be that background context that can make a viewing experience more fulfilling when you notice patterns in a director’s style. Also I’m going to be pretty negative in this review, so I want to make every attempt I can to be diplomatic, in case you enjoyed this.

          Where to start with the plot summary? Well, ‘Valerian’ is a sci-fi film based on a comic series. In the film, humanity is part of a galactic alliance between countless species who all live on Alpha, a space station and the titular ‘City of a Thousand Planets’. Valerian is the name of a male human government agent who works alongside Laureline, both his professional and romantic partner. After an entertaining opening montage that showcases several creative alien designs, which is undoubtedly the film’s best feature, we get a sequence where an idyllic planet lives in peace until it is destroyed by a vague apocalypse, and Valerian wakes up from his sleep, having experienced this sequence as a dream. After that, Valerian and Laureline embark on a series of missions and tasks that bring them closer to the truth of what happened to this lost planet and its people.

          Like I said before, the visuals are honestly quite impressive. There is a heaping dose of countless aliens throughout the film, and they vary wildly in their look and design. It’s an excuse for the people making the film to showcase their creativity, and it’s certainly welcome, especially as it aids the film’s theme of striving for unity and co-operation between cultures, even if we are worlds apart. We need more stories preaching that message these days. The CGI will sometimes look a little shaky on a particular creature as it moves around, but for the most part it’s implemented well and helps the filmmakers put together a vast, visibly appealing world.

          Unfortunately, I was only drawn into this world and its characters as far as its surface features, because the story, performances, and explanation of how this world works was terribly dull. Valerian and Laureline are boring lead characters with not much more to their personality aside from making sarcastic remarks with little energy or enthusiasm as they get on with their mission with such professionalism and ease that neither they nor the viewer ever feel any tension or dread towards their dangerous situation. This isn’t helped by the flat performances of Dane DeHaan or Cara Delevingne, whose rigid expressions and tones of voice repel any investment we may develop towards their characters. That’s a major problem, because Valerian and Laureline are clearly our window into this setting that we’re meant to immerse ourselves in. If we can’t sync ourselves up at least a little bit with the characters whose perspective we are intended to share, then it’s going to be very difficult to care about the rest of this world if its foundation is so shaky.

          The pacing is rocky as hell. Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure the only parts of the film that were directly relevant or necessary to the central storyline were in the first half hour and the last twenty minutes. The rest of the plot was a series of meandering detractions that could have been written around or completely lifted out without anything vital having been lost. These diversions are of course there to showcase more about this fictional universe and flesh it out. I can respect the intention, but unlike ‘Mass Effect 2’, this film doesn’t depict its characters or settings in an organic or compelling enough way to justify the bulk of its runtime being dedicated to just that. Information about creatures, species, segments of the city, and more are often just dumped at our feet by disinterested voices. It’s blunt, artless exposition that rarely has any justification for being explicitly stated beyond the director wanting to share all the really cool stuff about this world with the audience. But so little of it has any bearing on the rest of the plot, making it difficult to care about retaining any of the wondrous facts about this universe. It’s like a bad history lesson where facts are blandly read out and go through one ear and out the other.

          ‘Valerian’s characters, story, and the weak development of its fictional setting are its main problems, but beyond a pleasant enough aesthetic, it is also poorly presented to the audience. The film tends to rush through things, whether its exposition or shots in an action sequence. The occasional sweeping camera pan or extended shot as Valerian runs through a series of creative locales is an effective demonstration of the film’s creative setting, as well as its 3D technology. But apart from these moments, ‘Valerian’ doesn’t take the proper time to let you drink in each element as its introduced to you. Think of how comparatively managed the first ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ is with the number of locales it introduces, and how it takes its time setting up exactly what you need to know about each and every setting. Here, meanwhile, you can practically hear Luc Besson saying “come on come on, quick dilly-dallying, there’s so much more for me to show you!” So yes, I did see a lot of content in this film, but I remember hardly any of it because we spent very little time on anything.

          All this might be excusable if the pleasing visuals were strung together by a decent musical score. ‘Tron: Legacy’ and the Star Wars prequels have somewhat interesting visuals that are marred by lacklustre stories, but the soundtrack for all of them is astonishing and keeps me going every time I watch them. Alexandre Desplat’s score for ‘Valerian’ is serviceable enough, but it’s all exactly what you’d expect. Nothing stands out, so I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the distinctive sound for this movie is. ‘Valerian’ has some strong designs under the surface for its world and its inhabitants, but it fails to frame it in a competent enough way for it to be memorable in the slightest.

          I was so very bored throughout the majority of ‘Valerian’, wishing I could just find some way to connect with it. It’s bright, colourful, creative, and celebrates unity, so I want it to succeed. But its unengaging performances, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink creative approach, awkward pacing, weak musical score, and terrible main characters drag it way down. Apart from its intended message and impressive visuals, I have nothing to recommend about this movie.

3/10.

Sitting through ‘Valerian’ is like listening to a friend awkwardly meander through the thousand things they love about their favourite sci-fi book series. You’re happy they’re so passionate about it, and you’re sure there’s something solid beneath the endless waffle, but your mind is growing number by the second as you keep checking your watch.

[aurimeanswind]

Super—Sunday Chats (7-23-17)

Ugh, I have to write about Batman v. Superman and I’m already over it you guys.

So About Superman

Okay, two things first, 1- Batman v. Superman Spoilers ahoy, and 2- this is just my opinion. So fucking chill with the tweets you guys. I’m pretty seriously over it. If you wanna have an adult conversation by some means that isn’t limited to 140 characters, please do. If I don’t know you and you just want to spam my mentions with your hatred of my opinion, I got some block and mute buttons.

I’m putting this caveat here for my non-Sunday Chats regulars, because apparently if you tweet about Superman people will just FIND you.

Alright so this morning I was watching Comic-Con Trailers in my lack of sleep, and I tweet this series of tweets:

So I am gonna elaborate on what I meant here, and that’s gonna be my whole OpEd this week, and I hope you’re happy. Again, just my perspective.

So to give a little history here, MY Superman is the Superman Bruce Tim animated series Superman, which is the same as my Batman, from Batman The Animated series, and then Justice League, and the rest of the Bruce Timverse. I have never been a huge comic book guy, so this was my exposure, and this was when Superman became my favorite superhero. As I’ve gotten older, I think that’s shifted to Batman if I’m being honest, but that’s mostly because I think really good quality Batman multimedia is more easily accessible for me? So my Superman is really not including comics, but I really do want to read Max Landis’ American Alien, don’t worry, it’s at the top of my list. As far as solid first Superman comics to read, that seems like a good one.

Okay so with this in mind, I love the animated Superman. Honestly, there are kind of Spider-Man vibes there, like Supes flying around the city, waving to the people, smiling and helping people. 

Like, having gone back recently to watch some episodes, it’s definitely pretty light hearted and aimed more at a younger audience, but I loved it. It was happy. Hopeful. It wasn’t stated or emphasized that Superman was a symbol of hope, it was just kind of... inherent, ya know? And I fucking get it. People hate Superman. Irrationally so, I think, but you know there are plenty of other superheroes out there to be positive about so why folks find the need to trash on the one I like instead of be fun and cool about the ones they like I will never understand. But a thing in this animated Superman show, again, >>my<< Superman, is that he was very vulnerable. He had a lot of weaknesses, like magic and kryptonite, and wasn’t absurdly overpowered. It made him more grounded and made the show tense and fun. He is smart, strong, a little air-headed at times, and happy. Above all, happy. Hopeful. 

So with that backstory in mind, when I say that Man of Steel and Batman v Superman did not establish Superman as what they made him out to be in this new Justice League Comic-Con trailer, let me explain why. 

In the Justice League Trailer, this is what is said about Superman:

“Superman was a beacon to the world... He didn’t just save people, he made them see the best parts of themselves... I don’t recognize this world”

So like, I’m sorry, what? The responses to my tweet ranged from “Superman fucking sucks” to “clearly you didn’t get the subtlety of Zack Snyder’s work. Don’t you remember the scenes of the people worshipping him and the statue! Don’t forget the statue!” Like okay, you all are describing things to me. Shots and scenes that have both no context, and no substance. 

Let me explain. And I’m not trying to start a flame war. I’m kind of over it, but I wanted to write about this. And I’m not trying to sit here and have the “Batman v Superman is a bad movie” discussion. No, I don’t like the movie, but like, you can totally like/love/adore it. That’s fine. I’m not chuffed either way. I’m not about putting folks down for things they love, as I’ve made clear on Sunday Chats in the past, this is just my issues with it, so hear me out.

So we see Superman saving people. We see shots of him stopping missiles and rescuing lost and stranded people. That’s great. But there are a couple very important aspects of these scenes. One, Superman is never smiling in any of these scenes. He seems depressed. He has no joy or hope in his eyes. Why? Is this supposed to convey some kind of internal struggle that saving people makes him sad? If you want to convey that, you need to give me more than an emo Superman face, that is not enough. I’m sorry, it’s just not. The other thing is these scenes never have context. The big ones throughout Batman v Superman specifically are montages. Like, thrown together scenes. I get it, you can tell me he saves people, but you give me context-less scenes of him saving people and he looks fucking miserable during all of them and you honest to god expect that to be enough for me to believe he is just the, QUOTE UNQUOTE,  “beacon to the world”?! 

No. 

That’s not how character development works. That’s not how heroes are made. Think about the scene in Wonder Woman when she steps into No Man’s Land. When she looks into Chris Pine’s eyes and says “Someone needs to help these people”. That shit is giving me chills right now, while I’m writing this. When I saw that in theatres, I fucking cried. A, because I’m a cry baby, and B, because it was fucking powerful. Wonder Woman is a hero. She changed all those peoples lives, and was a sheer force of surreal and reality-bending power in that entire scene, and it’s incredible. Oh my god.

Fuck. Wonder Woman was really good.

Avengers Age of Ultron gets a ton of shit, and I really love that movie, and one of the things I love the most about that movie is the ending scenes where the Avengers save people. Through both Avengers movies there is a constant theme of the heroes banding together to save the people in New York/Sokovia, and I love that. It’s hokey as hell, but so are Superheroes! These scenes of the Avengers saving people have context. The people are there for a reason, it’s relevant to the plot, and the tension and stakes in those scenes is genuine and real. I love it.

None of the context-less scenes of Superman saving people in BvS have literally any of these things and it makes those scenes come across as soulless set dressing. You can show me Superman saving people all day but that doesn’t make me believe he is a hero if those scenes come across as elaborate set dressing (because they were) and especially if he just looks so unhappy to be there the whole time.

You wanna know the scenes that dominated Superman’s presence in BvS? This shit:

And like, I don’t dislike Man of Steel. Like, I really like the “journey of self-discovery” Supes goes on, how he learns of his heritage. But it needed more Superman. Just like The Dark Knight felt less like a “Batman” movie than Batman Begins (imho, still love it), Man of Steel barely had like, legitimate Superman superhero stuff in it. But I like the concern of using your power. I like the killing Zod makes him never want to kill again aspect. I really respect the set up. I also think the movie ends on a really lighthearted positive note (the last five minutes, literally) and sets Superman up to be this imaginary dude that the Justice League trailer is talking about.

But boy oh boy does this dude look so excited to be a “beacon of hope” doesn’t he?

No. No he doesn’t. He looks miserable. And hey, if you wanted to make Batman v Superman partially about Superman’s internal struggle with being seen specifically as “a god” and not just someone trying to do the right thing, go for it. But, uh, hey, guess what? In Batman v Superman’s two hour and thirty one minute runtime, it never really comes up I guess. Actually, pretty sure Superman at some point asks his mother if humanity even deserves his kindness, and she is like “nah”. 

I don’t know what movie you all saw, but you can “tell me” that this guy is a hero all you want, but that doesn’t mean you’ve “shown” me it. That’s what Man of Steel should have been about. And there should have been another Superman movie between MoS and BvS specifically about all of this, and had the latter half of it represent a joyous Superman coming into his own as a hero and a symbol, but nope. You had to end MoS will a city getting blown up and then rolling right into Batman hating him. And then them bonding over the fucking name Martha. Uhg.

And then uh, guess what, I would love to see them course-correct and save him as a character and try and rewrite history so Superman is actually the good, cool, complicated character he is meant to be in their cinematic universe, but I’m pretty butthurt about the idea honestly, MOSTLY because you took him, beat him to the ground, essentially only gave context on screen of him being a symbol of controversy, and then went and fucking killed him. You only get to pull the “kill Superman” card once, and you did it when literally there was no reason to like him, and all his character was up to that point was a physical embodiment of the “frowny face” emoji with super strength.

So good fucking job.

But anyway, to end my negative train, I really want Justice League to be good, I am genuinely hopeful, but that is a way too long elaboration of my issues with the trailer, which was literally two lines of dialogue.

So I hope you all are happy.

At least Greg Miller is with me on this one. He’s the real dude.

uhg.

well, fucking anyway...

What’s on Tap

Overwatch

God this game is so good I can’t believe i didn’t play it for sixth months it was so much timeeeeee

I could have gotten so many event-exclusive skinsssss AARRRRGH

Real good. I’ve gotten better recently. Been writing a ton about it. It’s kind of a technical piece. Excited to publish.

Nier Automata

So I just started this, so not a lot to say yet, but I wanted to say this.

Long-time Sunday Chats readers will know that I played through the original Nier recently, and what I’m most surprised by is how much it feels like the original Nier.

Essentially, it feels like a sequel to Nier, which is a weird thing to say, because it IS a sequel to Nier, but it’s been a long time and it’s a different studio (Platinum) but the ins and outs, the meat and potatoes, so to speak, feels like Nier.

About two or so hours in, more to report later

Crash N-Sane Trilogy

This has honestly been taking up most of my time, and I’m really excited about it!

So first of all, I like Crash 1 a lot more than I remember. I also found it a lot more playable and easy to complete than I remember. I get it, flame wars galore this Sunday Chats, but that was just for me. It’s definitely hard.

I also 100%’d Crash 2 and am about half way through Crash 3. 

There really just aren’t games that quite feel like this anymore, with that nice difficulty curve, and the kind of tightness you’d hope form a platformer. It’s really rad, and I’ve been playing a lot of PSone games recently, so this just felt like a nice continuation of that.

Destiny 2 Beta

Honestly too much to say about this here. Will write about it later. Must.

Questions

If you’d like to have you questions answered on Sunday Chats, look for my tweets on Sunday afternoons (Eastern Time) with #SundayChats in them, send your question in a reply, and I’ll answer! My twitter, as mentioned above, is @ALFighter27. 

Please. Please don’t ask me about Superman. Ever. Never again. You all ruined your chance. It’s gone now.

So I had to look this up because unlike you wrestling nerds I have no idea what the hell this is and jesus good lord christ does this sound like the worst.

No. I mean look at this:

Could you honestly see me surviving in here for longer than 15 seconds? Hell no. No.

No Tyler.

No.

YOOOOOO

Thor Ragnarok looks SO GOOD. And I’ve always loved the Thor movies. And you Thor bandwagon-ers are all welcome to come about the Hems-train. BECAUSE IT’S GOOD ON THIS BEAUTIFUL BLONDE LOCKES.

But seriously it looks so amazing.

Sonic is a good one. I’m really curious to see if that turns out to be rad, because all signs point to a yes on it!

The next game for me is TACOMA!!! Oh my god it’s like two weeks away! I am so excited! Gone Home means so much to me, so I am just gonna take a day off, curl up with a blanket and lose myself to that game and its story.

Past that, the next “big” game is Destiny 2/Danganronpa 3. Very, very excited for those bangers.

So I watched this, and I have never read the book. I actually bought the audio book recently, but I just haven’t dug in yet. I want to! It has all the makings of an Alex O’Neill-ass novel, considering i’ve heard it referred to as a Young Adult novel, which I’m down with.

Now the trailer seemed to feel definitely like “teaser” right, there was no set up to the scenes they were showing. A lot of cool imagery, but no real context to support them, so I don’t know how strong the thru line of it all will be. But just seeing specifically the Iron Giant on display for the first time in so long is really rad. I’m curious to see how the pop culture stuff is handled, since I know there is a lot of it in the book, but being super referential isn’t a bad thing. That’s the heart of that story so I’m excited to see it play out.

I dunno, I know a lot of people didn’t like it, but it definitely got me interested.

It’d be so cool. He is the best. And agrees with me on Batman v. Superman.

Honestly, one of the coolest things I saw was the Stranger Things S2 trailer. Like, whoa dang. That blew me away. Stranger Things was one of my favorite things to come out of last year, and hearing the theme song play at the end of that trailer for the first time in ages I immediately remembered why. That soundtrack was sooooo stellar.

Also, the Westworld trailer got me super excited. I was concerned with where they left it, but if my vibes for the way this season “looks”, again, just vaguely, it’s an unexpected direction, and it has me really excited.

Oh and Thor. Fuck me up Chris Hemsworth.

Oh he is truly wonderful. Very incredibly lucky to have stumbled into a friendship with such a lovely human. While I think he makes declarative statements too frequently, and seems a little too closed to hearing me out on things, haha, I think him and I are on the same page with our perspective on video games as a medium.

Obviously I like Zelda way more than him, but I think we share the core philosophy in our games writing that video games are an art-ass-art medium, and when that’s the epicenter, the evocation at your core and what drives your words, it comes out more passionately. Logan looks at games through a scope of artistic, and above all else, emotional value. When he plays something, he feels it, and above that, he leans into all the things he feels when playing a game. A lot of the time that is emotion, joy, sadness, but past that it’s also frustration, nostalgia, and more. He has a great narrative way of boiling those feelings downs into personal narrative, and weaves those descriptions into his discussions around games in an almost effortless way. He makes poignancy seem second nature, and it impresses me all the time.

For folks who don’t know, Logan Wilkinson writes for my site IrrationalPassions.com, and is on Twitter @LeftyLoggy. Go follow him.

The Checklist

Cool Games Inc: Specifically Episode 5: Glasshouse, Feature Dave Lange. - https://soundcloud.com/coolgamesinc/episode-5-glasshouse-feat-dave-lang - By Griffin McElroy and Nick Robinson

In my continued McElroy brother’s binge, I’ve finally taken the time to get into Cool Games Inc. An aspect of the show I was unaware of was Griffin and Nick taking their pitch to someone else. Essentially, the show is them thinking of an absurd video game idea and then pitching it to someone who has no idea what the pretext was. And it’s brilliant. This one specifically, as I just now begin my Cool Games Inc journey, was stellar. Dave Lange is a fucking G.

Monster Factory - Fallout 4 Episode 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1jGnFt78H8 - By Justin & Griffin McElroy

I don’t know if I have ever laughed at any one thing as hard as I laughed at this. That’s hyperbole, obviously, but jesus christ. This episode is so funny. Oh my god. Watch Monster Factory. It’s brilliant.

Break in Reality Podcast Episode 53 - The Flavor of Love Cast - https://soundcloud.com/breakinreality/episode-53-the-flavor-of-love-cast - By Quinten Hoffman feat. Roger Pokorny & Logan Wilkinson

A very good show with a few of my friends on it. By which to say all of them are my friends and they're very wonderful. There were some audio-syncing issues that I don’t know have been resolved yet, but I thought this episode was super funny. Worth a listen.

This was a very exhausting SC to write. Sorry I was so negative out the gate, it really did bum me out, and I’m like, kind of over the internet for today now. I hate the feeling of sending a tweet that’s just your honest opinion and then getting unsolicited people telling you why you’re wrong or telling you that they think your wrong but won’t say anything. Like, why the fuck bother? I know I let this stuff get to me too much, but I really love Superman and I want better, so I am gonna put the problems I see out there.

Just do me a favor, keep it real

and don’t fucking @ me.

[scrawnydutchman]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Movie Review

*NOTE: The following review contains spoilers, highlighted in bold letters for reader’s convenience. If you haven’t seen the film yet, skip the bold letter sections of this review and come back to read them when you have seen it.

Well, the long anticipated episode 8 to the beloved Star Wars franchise is here. My group of friends and I went into The Last Jedi  knowing that it had some pretty mixed opinions going around for it. Some people, like my brothers, were giving it some high praise for being absolutely spectacular and epic. Others were calling it stupid and non sensical. Now that I’ve seen the film, what’s my verdict? Well . . . . it’s no wonder people are as divided about the quality of this film as they are, because it’s a very mixed bag. It may be the most dramatic and thematically deep Star Wars film in years, possibly the whole franchise . . . but it’s also the most laugh out loud ridiculous. Yes, that includes The Phantom Menace. But while the prequels were mainly just boring and/or annoying, The Last Jedi is silly in a way that kept me consistently laughing hard in the theater. It’s an unintentional comedic goldmine.

PLOT:

Synopsis:

After the events of The Force Awakens, the rebellion is on their last set of legs in their fight against the First Order. There are so few rebels left in the fight and hope is dwindling. The only chance they have left is if Rey can receive Jedi training from the rediscovered Luke Skywalker in hopes that she can help the rebellion survive and eventually overthrow the First Order. Will the rebellion win the battle?

Now I know that’s a pretty bare bones synopsis but really, it’s the only way I can be as cautious about spoilers as possible. This movie has like 50 different twists and turns happen throughout it’s runtime. Every time you think one cliche’d or recycled plot point is going to happen, they go in a completely different direction. My guess is that after the fact that The Force Awakens was a pretty blatant repeat of old film beats leftover from A New Hope and to a lesser extent The Empire Strikes Back, the writers decided they wanted to flex their own creative chops a bit and experiment with the old formula. Honestly, I welcome it. I like that this movie was so unpredictable, since The Force Awakens and Rogue One were truthfully pretty easy to guess (Rogue One especially since it was a prequel). I also like the ways this movie challenges the old Star Wars formula we’ve come to love. 

One way in which the film does this is it’s blurring the line between good and evil. Star Wars has always been pretty blunt and rigid about who are the true antagonists in it’s story, pretty childishly so even. It got to a point where the movie villains have been pretty cartoonishly evil (especially lord Palpatine and Snoke). But in The Last Jedi it’s not that simple. Despite the fact that we saw Ben Solo kill his own father, he makes decisions in this film that make us think he might turn to the light, such as kill Lord Snoke when he threatens the life of Rey. We also get a pretty poignant scene with the code breaker about how the grotesquely wealthy weapons dealers provide starships and guns for both the first order and the rebellion alike, making a point that the rebellion also does ethically questionable things for it’s cause. We as the audience even get trust dilemmas with beloved characters we’ve known for years, like Luke friggin Skywalker!! Did he fail Kylo Ren and make him succumb to the dark side?! Did he attempt to murder him?! Were his actions justified?! Stuff like this is great and It’s a welcome change of pace from an otherwise pretty black and white story about who’s the good and who’s the bad. 

That said, not every choice in this movie is a good one. Sometimes the twists and turns of this plot are counter intuitive, for a number of reasons. For one, because this movie is big reveal after big reveal after big reveal, a lot of times characters actions, even if completely understandable in retrospect, could have been made a lot easier if they just EXPLAINED why it was they were doing what they were doing. Luke is reluctant to teach Rey the force, and goes for literal DAYS without explaining anything to her. The code breaker guy needs Rose’s cherished necklace in order to infiltrate the First Order’s tracker, but won’t just explain that and creates this whole thing about being selfish and heartless. But by far the biggest offender is vice admiral Holdo, who had a completely noble reason for charging the escape pods but couldn’t be bothered to explain what she was doing to Poe, leading him to mutiny against her. The plot forces these characters to behave irrationally in order for big reveals to happen, and had they been honest and communicative with each other they could have saved themselves ample amount of time. But being open about your thinking doesn’t fill a 2 and a half hour runtime I guess. 

Another way in which the movie challenges old Star Wars sensibilities is that while The Force Awakens  tried desperately hard to be as much like the old films as possible with it’s constant references and reappearances of old characters, this film has quite a bit of those old themes disappear by the end of the film and even has Kylo Ren talk about getting rid of the old ways to Rey. Luke Skywalker dies by the end of the film (albeit through a string of what I think are fakeouts). Snoke is killed off, and of course due to the unfortunate passing of Carrie Fisher, it’s unlikely Leia will be appearing in episode nine (unless they already finished shooting her scenes). I appreciate this films willingness to explore it’s own territory, as if to say “alright guys, we had our fun gushing over all the cameos and nostalgic feels, but now it’s time to tell our own story”.

But all of that said, there’s a great deal of silliness in this movie. Like, Star Wars 1-3 levels of silliness. The most prominent coming to my mind being when Leia is flung out into the cold depths of space after an explosion and survives by channeling the force and guiding her body to the safe remains of a rebellion ship. Now at first I thought this was the world’s ballsiest way of killing off a character whose actress tragically passed away the year prior. Instead, it’s the most laughably ridiculous part in the whole movie. If you’re one of those people who was upset at how quickly Rey was learning the force, how about seeing Leia, who has NEVER DEMONSTRATED SUCH COMPETENCE IN THE FORCE,  suddenly being able to defy death in a way that no jedi or sith has ever done before?! There’s also basic plothole knitpicky shit, like if Finn and Rose were arrested for illegal parking then why was their spaceship still kept on the beach where it shouldn’t be? But to be fair they end up not being able to use it for escape anyway. Also the Chrome lady Stormtrooper from The Force Awakens shows up again, but does nothing and is taken out like a chump. She’s pretty much the Boba Fett of these new movies; she looks cool and sells toys, but does absolutely nothing. The irony is she has more dialogue than Boba ever did but is somehow less memorable.

Overall the plot of this film is a bit too ambitious for it’s own good, but I appreciate the ambition regardless.

VISUALS:

Much like previous Star Wars movies of recent years, this movie is pretty hit and miss. I’ll give it credit that it isn’t like The Force Awakens where it’s just too aesthetically similar to previous films to really have it’s own visual identity and it isn’t like Rogue One where the new stuff pretty jarringly clashes with the old. This movie has a pretty consistent feel and look to it and offers some creative new environments and creatures.

My favorite environment in the whole movie is the casino. While I was initially afraid going into it that this would just be another cantina just like the bar in The Force Awakens was, this movie has a setting that’s reminiscent enough of real life casinos to be instantly recognizable but also has enough distinguishing features to be it’s own version of it and also creates solid additions to the lore of the world. This is an explanation as to how the First order gets it’s weaponry, as well as how there’s one aspect in which the rebellion isn’t perfect. It’s also just an environment we haven’t seen in Star Wars before; a rich aristocratic type place that’s beautiful on the surface but hides a sinister underbelly. 

This movie also has some decent CGI effects . . . . mostly. Okay, the Star Wars films have recently had a reputation for having somewhat scary looking CGI characters, particularly the recreations of Tarkin and young Leia in Rogue One. But the creatures and machinery in The Last Jedi are pretty creative designs and are pulled off effectively .  .. again  . . mostly.

But of course, this movie has as many goofy visuals as it does plotpoints. I already mentioned the hilarious image of Carrie Fisher’s limp body floating through space via conveniently appearing force powers, but there’s also Kylo Ren’s weirdly wide shirtless body which has been meme-ing for a while (EDIT: Apparently that’s actually what Adam Driver looks like Extra weird). The visual problems aren’t just with the CGI though. This movie has noticeably weird cuts and overall editing with it’s clips that does a weirdly specific amount of worldbuilding. There is of course the infamous shot of Mark Hamill milking the utters of a CGI animal that adds nothing to the plot and could have easily been cut out while still maintaining a two and a half hour movie. There’s also this one shot of a laundry iron coming down that would initially have you believe it’s just a starship in the SHAPE of a laundry iron, but it is in fact just a simple laundry iron ironing out the wrinkles of First Order officer’s uniform. YES, THIS SCENE ACTUALLY HAPPENS and it is so off-putting and weird it’s hilarious. I didn’t know how much I wanted to learn about the day to day maintenance a First Order officer has to go through until right now. Are there dish washing droids on their ship? Is there a vacuum droid? Is there a sewing machine constantly making new uniforms every few minutes? I have SO many questions.

The verdict on the visuals is pretty much the same as the verdict on the plot. Lot’s of ambitious choices; some effective, some weird but still entertaining. 

Acting Performances:

The cast here is pretty damn good. Rey and Finn bring the awesomeness from The Force Awakens back (albeit with a few corny one liners worthy of The Phantom Menace). Kylo Ren is more likable this time around, playing up how he’s just an emotionally confused guy who doesn’t know what to think, kind of like a Star Wars version of Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Mark Hamill has both a gut wrenchingly hilarious and compellingly emotional performance (and is particularly badass in the finale). Carrie Fisher remains classy as ever even in her final on screen performance. There’s some pretty decent new additions as well. I like Rose a lot; she’s cute (if only a little stupid in the end). I like the Code breaker guy (even if he’s kind of a Deus ex Machina) because he’s a morally ambiguous character who only acts with money as his motivation. He’s kind of badass in his own way and I hope he comes back in Episode 9. Poe was great. Holdo was . . . . .eh, kind of just a generic by-the-books general butting heads with the reckless Poe. I know she ultimately has good intentions, but because she’s both introduced and dies in this movie she doesn’t leave much impact otherwise. Not much else to say here.

Sound/Music Production:

Typical great Star Wars quality. Effective sound effects, unique voices coming from every CGI creature, a soundtrack that’s not offensive but also not as poignantly epic as the original trilogy. Overall serviceable.

Conclusion:

Whether it’s edge-of-your-seat exciting or bombastically hilarious, The Last Jedi is very entertaining. I appreciate it’s very ambitious choices even if a lot of them are pretty stupid, and I do legitimately like the ideas of blurring the line between good and evil and moving on from the old ways of doing a Star Wars movie. The film keeps you guessing, has good drama, interesting ideas, all tied together with hit-and-miss execution. I’d say give it a watch!

Plot: 1/1 - Average (but with extra credit due to being hilarious)

Visuals: 1/1 - Average  (but with extra credit due to being hilarious)

Acting Performance: .5/1 Average

Sound/Music Production: .5/1 Average

OVERALL: 3/4.