I just saw a double feature at the drive in theater: Top Gun Maverick and Bullet Train. Top Gun was fun, very Ace Combat, you know what it is.
Bullet Train was the worst movie I’ve seen in years. It felt like it’d been on ice since that early 2000’s wave of mediocre imitation Tarantino movies and they finally defrosted it.
Please take in the concentrated 2004 energy of this fucking movie:
Extended Hello Kitty parody
Frequent non-sequitor jump cuts to barely relevant character backstory flashbacks, played for comedy
“Eat a bag of dicks”
Poisonous snake on transit
Hitman who’s obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and mentions it in every single line of dialogue, 500 fucking times, and they never develop the joke in any way, it’s all just him comparing every person he meets to one of 3 Thomas characters.
Tiny cute lady assassin dressed in a pink schoolgirl outfit
Wiseass whiny weedy mustached British criminal
Yakuza boss wearing an oni mask who moves like the joker
Flamenco guitar stinger plays whenever it cuts to the Mexican guy
Assassin constantly talking about his self-help journey
Extended tired comedic monologue about bidets and Japanese toilets
“See what I did there?”
Snarky hitman handler - “did you just say wacked? Stop trying to bring back wacked, it’s not a thing”
Briefcase macguffin
Lady assassin called The Hornet who’s dressed like a train attendant and fights using poisonous hypodermic needles
Katana fight in snowy courtyard stolen from Kill Bill (which stole it from Lady Snowblood)
Ironic deployment of Japanese covers of old American pop songs
“I have such bad luck, my bad luck is bad luck on acid”
Villain removes oni mask at the climax to reveal he looks exactly like Bill from Kill Bill
2 hours and 6 minutes runtime, feels like 5 hours
How do you manage to mess up an assassins on a train movie this badly? Is the original novel just watered down and snarked up Tarantino pastiche too?
That VR Chat HBO documentary, We Met in VR, was better than you might fear, with legitimately interesting filmmaking, some good distancing built into its presentation, but in the end not interrogative enough so it comes across a bit like a advertisement for how this coooool thing you didn’t know about has been changing people’s lives for the better!!! There was a lot of talk about emotional support and found family, but also no talk about how people’s quest for those things often sets an expectation which most interactions fail to ever meet, where instead you get toxic codependency and trauma bonding in the virtual world instead of sappy wedding vows and best friends forever type stories.
As the forum’s accidental VRC socialization expert I still need to see this, but I keep putting it off because I know it’s going to never touch on the extremely popular virtual furry scene because nobody ever talks about the cool people in MMO documentaries.
Yeah, actually, there was like zero furry stuff in that documentary. Of course there were furry avatars in shots, but even the moment they were interviewing someone who was nb and was represented with an anthro avatar there was no mention of anything like that. smdh…
doing a Predator series rewatch, starting with the first 2, then I will do Prey, then the other 2 if I feel like it even though I do not have particularly fond memories of either of them. I’ve just finished the first one… movie still owns. I appreciate it so much for having only purposefully cringey comic relief and a totally dialogue-free climax.
I’ve always liked the movie, but the two things I didn’t really care for are much clearer now: 1, the score, which is OK sometimes and very intrusive most of the time. The main riff is pretty cool, but the rest of it is just overbearing and usually unnecessary. 2, although the writing is good, I feel like a lot of the acting is kind of weak. Everyone in the cast has their moments of greatness, but also a lot of lines that should land a lot better just seem muffled or underemphasized.
I also feel like if the movie was made today, the duplicitousness of Dillon (that son of a bitch) would have tied in more directly to the overall plot of the movie, like he was hiding the details of the governments quest to locate the predator. Is that a retcon they introduce in part 2? It feels vaguely familiar. I also didnt remember that the woman somehow waits until halfway through the movie to tell everyone about her village being plagued by predators for generations or whatever. It feels kind of corny, and there are about a dozen ways they could have worked that info into the movie in a more seamless way. Oh well!
I really think the best part of the movie, beyond the awesome end sequence, is how frequently jungle foliage is used to partially obscure and frame the characters. Because there are always leaves and branches in between the camera and the characters, it always feels like they are in the middle of a dense jungle, but they are always carefully planned enough that you can always see everything you need to. It’s pretty remarkable! In general there’s just a lot of good landscape scenery in this. The movie is always moving, but at a less frantic pace than contemporary action movies. But it never feels boring because the scenery is always so pretty.
I watched the first one with my dad last week (he’s somehow never seen it), and it reaffirmed that of all the characters in the movie, Bill Duke’s Mac is probably my favorite.
The payoff on his little habit of shaving with that blue Bic razor is so good.
me too! i like that there is something enigmatic and almost menacing about him in the beginning, it feels like he must have done some deep character study for that and only a little of it actually ends up on screen. i wish he got more to actually do!
Watched The Rescue, a documentary about the Thai soccer team that got trapped in that cave. It was fine! They were interviewing tons of British and Thai divers and random army generals and shit and I kept wondering, “Where are the kids??!? when are we gonna learn what it was like to be in the cave?!?” I really wanted to learn what they did in the cave and where they pooped and stuff. The practicalities of being a trapped cave teen are mindboggling to me.
Well, Wikipedia says:
The filmmakers had difficulty securing rights to the story, with National Geographic able to secure the rights to the divers story, while Netflix had acquired rights to the experiences of the soccer team, preventing them from telling their story in the film.
Still haven’t seen Prey yet but I can only imagine that the humans win in some way, which led me to the funny conclusion that the Predator species have just been flying to earth and getting their asses handed to them for centuries. Like, none of them ever make it back so it becomes this legendary challenge to them, no one knows what goes on down there they just know their guys get absolutely wrecked
I guess in predator 2 they have all those old earth weapons on the ship so probably not really canon compatible but it’s still funny to think about
i honestly like the idea that most of the predators are just Safari Dentists who fail at least 60% of the time on any planet…but that’s just the way they are.
i like the idea that it’s their version of Jackass or skateboard crash compilations. you read the alien comics and it’s all people going muahh the wonderous purity and strangeness of the xenomorph and then you switch to predator and the uniform consensus is, yeah they’re just oafs, whole species is just these big durable lummox guys wandering around in their underwear and punching one another.