I have spent the last 20 years avoiding The Beach Boys: An American Family but yesterday, in a moment of weakness, I watched the full three hour epic whilst sipping a post-workout smoothie.
It features some of the worst character-acting and wardrobe malfunctions ever committed to celluloid. The rendition of Van-Dyke Parks is incredible. I want to commit this next part to memory and whip it out at parties as I’m leaving:
Unfortunately, according to imdb I missed some important historical details so now I have to watch it all over again.
Of all things, tonight I watched the 2021 Mortal Kombat.
Bold choice to make Liu Kang not The Main Guy. Disappointing that it ends so abruptly with a Sequel Setup but at least there’s not post-credits scene so they showed a little restraint. I think all the best fights are early on, and I like that Sub Zero is sorta The Terminator instead of just another ninja.
Yeah I hesitate to call it good but I guess it justifies its existence by doing enough differently.
it felt – in sharp contrast to MK11’s story mode, which was if anything more impeccably executed than the franchise has ever deserved – like one of the old 90s videogame movies, when they would just, like, read the instruction manual and then try to extrapolate a screenplay without any regard for the popular canon
I mean the YouTube compilations I’ve watched of the story modes from the last game or two did more to make me a fan of the entire series than literally anything else
yesterday and I hated it on every conceivable level.
inside is one of the specific reasons i hated it
I don’t even think it’s worth describing everything I hated about it, but in short it’s barely a film. It’s barely a series of connected scenes. It has no stakes, it has no emotional attachment to its own characters, it has no interest in telling a story. It is simply a series of answers to questions raised by the previous movies if i’m being generous.
i haven’t seen the middle movie btw, to be fair.
Anyway that’s the short of it, but I want to bring one thing up that absolutely stinks of JK Rowling’s awful writing habits. Specifically, the entire movie hinges on a technicality, which is only revealed in the last 40 minutes of this fucking interminable film. And that technicality basically reveals that most wizards are nazis and nobody is going to do anything about it.
So basically you have a nazi who wants to get elected President of Magic or whatever the fuck, and his plot revolves around getting a tiny deer to kneel to him (proving that he’s super pure of heart or whatever). I cannot emphasize enough how much this is not revealed for most of the movie, meaning that I spent most of the movie not understanding what the stakes even were.
Anyway he does a trick that gets this tiny deer to kneel to him and that makes him King or whatever and then he makes a speech about how he’s going to murder every non-magical person on earth. And then he tortures a man on live TV. And everyone cheers. Like, basically everyone who does not specifically have a name in this film is like “HELL YEAH I LOVE THIS FUCKING NAZI”.
Then the good guys reveal the trick and the real deer kneels to some woman and she becomes queen instead. And everyone cheers. Again, we have these shots of a bunch of extras going “YEAH SHE RULES, LOVE OUR NEW QUEEN” and that’s the end of the badguy who, I guess, teleports away or some shit.
And there’s this huge unanswered question of “why was every fucking magic person on earth so happy about this Nazi and how are we going to deal with this problem?” It’s just this stupid fucking lib-brained bullshit that goodness can win by “following the rules” and accusing nazis of bad decorum, basically. Instead of addressing the problem that EVERYONE IS A NAZI.
Anyway that’s maybe the thing I hated the most about this movie, and that’s saying a lot. I despised everything about this movie and should have fought harder to watch literally anything else. sorry mother-in-law, but i do not understand why you wanted to watch this.
I caught the last harry potter and the 2 fantastic beasts films on tv a few years ago and was shocked how horrible they were as basic movies. So this checks out.
the only stuff i know about harry potter is the basic shit you can absorb from its huge status in pop culture. i feel like that is more or less enough to understand the overall arc of the main series and, like, the personalities of the characters. (i resent my unintentional acquisition of this knowledge, but i also understand the personality traits that one uses to decide which “house” they belong to)
but every single trailer and piece of promotional media for this spin off series is … completely incomprehensible to me. the fact that there is a movie out there whose full title is “fantastic beasts 2: the crimes of grindelwald” is the funniest shit i’ve ever heard. “the crimes of grindelwald” is a non-video game thing i think about constantly.
(just to show i’m not a total hypocrite: I also really dislike the fact that the title of every disney star wars sequel requires you to have some prior knowledge of star wars to even understand what it refers to. the first two trilogies only take this bold move for part 3, which i feel they earned.)
I think George Lucas’ strength and weakness is that he can’t really tell a joke, so it’s hard to tell when he’s being silly and direct with his old adventure serial pastiche or building up his portal world. Attack of the Clones always read like it’s supposed to be taken as pastiche (and that was, what, within a year or two of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?) but without any context to support it.
watched the warped forest which is kind of the pseudo-sequel to the funky forest. it’s just as vignette-y but there are more normal character and narrative throughlines as opposed to being more like sketch comedy shorts. once again very horny and surreal like if you sprinkled a handful of barbarella on a more down to earth magical realist slice of life thing. like many of my favorite movies you can tell this was made by someone who is primarily a commercial director who spent everything on production design to an indulgent level and the actors actually do hold it together much better than i imagine it would be on paper. the casual, amiable, but theatrical tone of the human stories all work well to balance a world of wish granting alien monoliths and parallel worlds and fuzzy monsters and alive tree women and super sentai guns that open up to reveal flesh dicks that shoot cum. very natural onboarding into the weird rules and logic of the forest. it’s gross and uncomfortable and juvenile and touching and fun. captures the true tone of dreams.
Keepin’ the Tollywood train rolling by watching 2.0, which I found out was on Amazon when I couldn’t find Enthiran the Robot.
It’s been a really long time since I’d seen that movie, but I guess this is more or less like that one. Less, in that it’s not a sorta Pinocchio story like the first, more in that it’s as fucking goofy as I recall that first one being.
I dunno, gotta love they made a movie out of “y’all are on your cellphones too much” into a movie about a vengeful dead ornithologist making dudes inhale cellphones until they explode.
I dunno, if you’ve ever wanted to see a kaiju battle between a man made out of hundreds of thousands of cellphones and a sorta doughy robot man made out of thousands of versions of himself, there ya go.
Also glad to see one of these with the warning @Tulpa told me about, where a big SMOKING KILLS! SMOKING CAUSES CANCER! logo appears on screen if a cigarette appears for even a second.
Oh god, and it ends with a song that’s got about as many innuendos as you can wring out of technology and computer terms. Incredible.
Guess I might chase this with, uh, The Punisher. Y’know. The Dolph Lundgren one.
Are we actually “cool” with tom cruise now? how memory holed is all the scientology stuff from the 2000s? was it wrong?
i know he’s charismatic and has been in some good action movies since then, but the amount of celeb worship over the past decade is bizarre and seems exactly the sort of PR long game someone like him can pull.
SMOKING KILLS! SMOKING CAUSES CANCER! logo appears on screen if a cigarette appears for even a second.
