Yeah exactly! I actually think I kind of liked it, like I remember being really obsessed with Ren and Stimpy, but I have absolutely no idea why it appealed to me. I’m pretty sure it was just, like, what was marketed at me. It retrospect it feels like some kind of weird psyop to create a generation of booger obsessed weirdos, but I guess it’s probably just like young boomer / old gen-x fallout from having to deal with insipid shit like the Howdy Doody show as kids whatever
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Yeah I’ve been thinking about this, the prevalence of theme parks as (ultimately stupid) destinations in films, like Clifford and Vacation… I kinda think John Hughes/National Lampoon had a lot to do with moulding the dynamic of stupid parents and smarter/jerk kids that would extend into things like The Simpsons but I also got some of that vibe from watching Albert Brooks stuff, especially Real Life, these guys who were fed crap like The Mickey Mouse Club and Father Knows Best and were aware of how bullshit it was but also grew up on Looney Tunes (the idea of capturing that energy with real people led to so many uncanny experiments, hello Joe Dante) and developing this humour around mocking all that stupid American dream stuff…possibly making America even dumber in the process? I’m rambling but then this maybe laid the groundwork for things like Ren & Stimpy and sliming adults on Nickelodeon and directly catering to young kids by telling them that they’re smarter than adults who are all squares because they don’t like boogers and Gak or whatever.
Anyway, at my little weekly movie night, one of my friends who is Gen Z is just baffled about this stuff, “You all watched this and liked it as kids? It’s so gross and everyone’s terrible!” I hear the voice of my mother and instinctively want to be like, “Ah, you don’t get it” but they have a point. We ate a lot of garbage in the 80s and 90s.
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yessss
In my head “Adventure Time” is the turning point for this, I think the moment I saw that show I realized that I had been deprived a childhood full of, like, delightful whimsy and instead just got boogers and slime.
There may have been something else before that but that was the first one that was really striking to me, as American kids entertainment that didn’t have even a small amount of gross-out humor as a selling point.
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i got my clean, delightful whimsy from adventures in wonderland as a kid.
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what about maya the bee and the noozles
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neither of those are american
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eureeka’s castle
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Holy shit I didn’t know those weren’t American shows and was gonna be like “What about David the Gnome?” but that’s originally a Spanish cartoon David, el Gnomo!?
Eureeka’s Castle was dope though.
eureeka’s castle is disgusting
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Fraggle Rock and Muppet Babies?
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i remember being into gross stuff as a kid but i don’t really have any nostalgia for it - i feel like people picked up on a basic insight of “kids can be interested in grotesque or negative imagery in part because they’re still working out how to feel about it” and then having that get kind of unimaginatively translated to only meaning “pimples and b.o.” it’s funny to think that toxic waste must have seemed like a subversive thing to joke about at one point before it just became one of the eternal imaginative humours alongside lava and quicksand.
also interesting how much of this stuff can seem bizarrely fetishistic in hindsight but i guess that’s partly a chicken/egg situation.
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from yakuza-eiga: a primer, by paul schrader
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Tried to re-watch Knives Out, which I saw in theatres and thought was nonsense, because people are acting like each new cast announcement for the sequel is a big deal. My initial impressions after seeing it were that it was a predictable-as-hell quirky-bullshit movie that would’ve been a lot more fun restructured into a Columbo episode since you piece everything together so early that it might as well just be a more involved “how-dun-it”. Same exact feeling this time around. I don’t see the appeal, there’s nothing appealing about the protagonists or antagonist or anything like if this were a Columbo episode so who gives a shit what ultimately happens, you don’t have a mystery to piece together throughout the movie, so what the fuck is there in this mystery movie? The sequel will probably have the same problem – it’ll think it’s clever and funny but the whole time you could just be watching Any Old Port in a Storm, Try and Catch Me, An Exercise in Fatality, etc and probably be more engaged.
Brick, which is by the same person, was a lot more engaging. It’s been well over a decade since I’ve last seen Brick, but I recall it being kind of goofy but also an interesting experiment (an attempt to adapt old noir shit to a modern setting with teenagers) that I could sit through and would want to watch again based on its merits vs Knives Out, which I only re-watched because the world seems to be telling me I must’ve been in a bad mood when I saw it but I had no desire to actually see it again.
Anyway. Yeah, I don’t like Knives Out, probably won’t like Knives Out 2, but I don’t think I’ll even bother to see it. Call my ass when he decides to do something interesting like Brick again. 
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the only bluray release speed racer has ever gotten is it’s initial bd25 vc-1 encoded lossy audio one. it’s sickening
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I want to see it in an HDR grade so badly
I want to be crying rods and cones
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Army of the Dead is a two and a half hour long State of Decay/Dead Rising/Land of the Dead fan-film. There’s just no good reason for this to be that long. Five minutes into the movie, we get a zombie music video set to a cover of Viva Rock Vegas, then about 15 minutes in, we get a music montage. We also get a “getting the crew together” scene, which is roughly 20 minutes and completely trivial. So much of this movie is fluff and it’d be a lot better without it.
The scenes with Tig Notaro are so awkward. You can tell she’s acting into the void. I was wondering what was going on, and after like, the third scene with her, I had to look it up because it was so distracting. I guess she replaced somebody else and COVID precluded proper reshoots.
Just kind of all over the place, not particularly scary, tries to shoehorn some end-of-life Romero-esque social commentary, etc. Super glad I didn’t see this in theatres, because I would’ve passed out.
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So there’s this warmovis on Netflix called Mosul. It’s about Iraqi security forces clearing ISIS out of Mosul. The Americans are entirely absent and mentioned only a couple times entirely dismissively, as simply irrelevant. As far as I can tell all the actors are of Middle Eastern descent and they speak Arabic the whole movie.
And yet it is essentially a warcrimes apologia in the same mold as say Blackhawk Down. Extremely weird to see the exact same left-liberal Hollywood warmonger tropes applied to a totally different culture, albeit one whose modern military we trained. It’s also hard to root against guys killing ISIS who really are pound for pound probably the most evil people on the planet. Allows you to get your operator-porn war jollies without quite so much guilt, I guess?
I looked it up and the writer-director is the dude who wrote The Kingdom, which makes so much sense - that movie was also about a very effortfully antiracist attempt to give proper respect and agency to foreign security forces that the American public mostly considers hapless proxies, all in the service of justifying US imperialism, but the viewpoint characters were all Americans tromping around the Middle East and therefore less sympathetic.
Knives Out is a hollow candy apple. Utterly obnoxious how self-satisfied it is in being a pastiche of murder mysteries while failing to be even a fraction as compelling as the real deal. The multimillion dollar budge does afford for some great set design though.
The centrist “anti-Trump” circa 2018 politics don’t help - having the wealthy grandfather patriarch be the one good liberal and savior of the (good) working class does not play well but I suppose foreshadows Biden.
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how cold is it on toei studio’s sets, you can see everyone’s breath in half these movies
I heard Sean spicer is in this?