Sonic 3: The Knuckles x Tails x Sonic visit a Chao Garden Movie
loved how this movie relegated the human characters to supporting cast, and Sonic & Friends take the center stage.
Hope they are given the green light for number four, eith the current state of cinema/visitors per movie it def ranked lower than the first two, as far as i can see.
I saw Grand Theft Hamlet today. It’s the new documentary about a couple of actors attempting to stage a full production of Hamlet within GTA Online. I liked it!
They got a lot of mileage out of the juxtaposition of classic stagecraft and the goofy, violent game physics and affordances offered by GTA Online. They make the point that Hamlet contains plenty of violence, so they tried to work the game’s violence into the production with very absurd results. Lots of great, whimsical choices, like a scene set on top of a blimp over the city. I really liked seeing some of the logistical details they had to work out, like how to transport the audience’s avatars across the game world to each scene’s setting – “Will the audience please proceed onto this speedboat?”
The doc falters whenever it tries to get serious, imo. There are a few dramatic moments that felt completely staged and didn’t ring true at all. The worst of those was a scene where the filmmaker and her husband meet in-game and have a fight about how the dude is spending all his time on this project and not enough time with her and their kids. It really did not ring true and it was a total whiplash from the rest of the film’s tone. Felt very hack, like they were trying to follow a standard narrative template – “ah, this is where the protagonist needs to face consequences for his devotion to the project.” In a similar vein, the soundtrack was super royalty-free-core, and it kept trying to tell me how to feel in too blunt of a way. It committed the cardinal sin of using silly sitcom music to tell me to find a scene funny.
Overall I liked it a lot though! It’s a bit slight, but a solid comedy. As far as virtual world documentaries go, this was above average. It was much better than that terrible HBO VRChat doc from a few years ago.
I was curious what you might think of Grand Theft Hamlet! I enjoyed it but I watched it in a packed theatre of people who were really into it, which always helps.
The parts that felt most authentic were the players of varying levels of interest and commitment drifting in and out of the production, like the one who wanders into the auditions and recites the Quran on stage for the sake of participating / finding common ground, or the alien-skinned player who ends up adopting the role of troupe bodyguard.
I saw it a film festival shortly after a screening of Four Daughters, a documentary which made its subjects re-enact events that occured to them as a deliberately reflexive and interventional technique. I think this framed the behind-the-scenes melodrama sequences of Grand Theft Hamlet in a charitable light for me. I liked the idea of minor tensions that may have genuinely occurred in the production being re-enacted in machinima by the same people. The scene in the subway where the lead actor drops out of the production felt almost playful, like I could imagine the filmmakers enlisting this actor to re-enact their own quitting of the production, but the actor is not fully bought in to the reflexivity and they can only be bothered to half-ass it. I kind of wish the movie would fully “admit” to fabricating these moments with some creative humility, but I guess it would have risked making the movie too complex or, likelier, more corny then it already is.
But I’m definitely giving the movie too much credit. And now that I think about it, it was probably having seen Preserving Worlds that enabled any of this interpretation in the first place.
I completely agree about the players drifting in and out of the production. That’s exactly how that kind of thing really goes. And the filmmakers’ relentless positivity and openness really drew some sincere and beautiful moments out of these strangers. And then the times strange players just stared at them blankly before gunning them down were a hilarious contrast.
I actually did like this scene! I thought it had the funniest moment in the whole film. They’re location scouting in a subway station. Their lead actor quits his role, then just peaces out by jumping on one of the trains. On his way into the train he shoots a single bullet into the producer, who’s like “thanks for the goodbye bullet??” It’s this great moment where you just stop and wonder, what did he mean by that bullet? You could read it so many ways: a joke, a fuck you, a playfully fond goodbye, an accidental key press. Loved it.
WHOA I SAW THE OLD TRANSFORMERS MOVIE AND IT WAS SO COOL!!! Miguel taught me the universal greeting before they said it and named every robot. I was just going WOW!!! ACTION!!! MURDER!!! MORE MURDER!!! INTENSE MURDER!! then it ended. it felt like it was five minutes long holy shit
kup and blur are my favorite
I never thoguht I’d hear a transformer say ‘shit’
— Unicron
everyone talks about Orson welles but NO ONE TOLD ME THAT ROBERT STACK IS A ROBOT
transformers edit where the unsolved mysteries theme plays every time someone can’t open the matrix
On the DVD release of the movie, they put a chapter stop right before the Shit and it’s great
I once watched the movie at a gathering at a friend’s house and we paused the movie so everyone could take a knee for Optimus.
FWIW they tossed the shit in there just to bump up the rating as I think back then G rated flicks rarely got shown outside of daytime, while PG ones got shown all day long.
I wish every children’s movie had to toss in one random profanity for arbitrary reasons.
let the care bears movie say bitch
BTW as a child when walking home from the movie theater with my parents after seeing the Transformers movie I very dejectedly kept saying that I had to go paint my Optimus Prime figure grey. Parents nicked that.
For christmas last month I was gifted this:
Watched “Returner” with @Gimelrey . Pretty simple movie that mixes crime action with time travel, but which makes the time travel poignant by rhyming it with past regret. Liked both leads. Also liked that one of the protagonists was ascended street trash, which is a good and neglected character archetype in the present year.
Afterwards we went out to smoke and were enthusiastically greeted by a small and extremely manic latin american man which my boyfriend handled by enthusiastically and inarticulately screaming at or along with him until he was satisfied we were all friends.
Yeah, I loved the hangers on that kept popping up in Grand Theft Hamlet. The Tunisian guy with the alien avatar was the coolest, as was the no mic guy who became their driver.
Some of those interpersonal tension bits felt a bit off but the documentary angle seemed to be the guy’s wife’s production so my theory about who could be driving phoneying up those never lined up.
We were fully expecting to be the only people in the theater but a bunch of eclectic younger people also rolled out and took up the back row.
Watched Knight Riders. I have come to deeply appreciate George Romero, and also this movie perhaps because of its absurdity makes me feel more affinity for the preservation of human ways of life than any study of religion ever has.
lol
saw an Eggers double feature with my partners last night
The VVitch (2015)
Nosferatu (2024)
i loved them both… in particular Nosferatu was especially good. i have not yet seen the Herzog adaptation.
Found a DVD copy of Takashi Miike’s First Love in a discount bin and watched it with some friends last weekend. Takes a little while to get going but it’s a fun comedy of errors between crime gangs, a hapless boxer, a crooked cop and a girl forced into sex work.
Just saw Pulse for the first time… What a movie… What a picture… Wow… Crazy to think a movie about the internet like this could be made in 2001 I feel like Kiyoshi Kurosawa must be a true poster
Also quick question but why is it called Pulse
