#which funny enough is another series who got a terrible movie adaptation

[brutal-out-here]

You know I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been wait for this half my life or something but I feel like I’m one of the few people who has loved every second of this adaptation so far. There’s moments that are different from the books or scenes that are cut but those don’t bother at all really. And that’s coming from someone who has strong opinions about book to film adaptations and someone who is rereading the book as the show goes on. To me with reading a chapter and then watching the chapter play out is almost as if I get to relive these moments twice (technically 3 since I read it originally 9 years ago) and that feeling is so incredible to me!! Like these are the same characters going on the same overall journey but the different and new details makes it all just a little more exciting in my opinion. I could talk about this forever but imma get off my soapbox now before next thing I know I’ve written a whole essay

[thevindicativevordan]

On Supergirl

Figured I should put up my thoughts about Kara in the wake of her first film appearance being announced, and the final season of her TV show fast approaching. Short version is: Kara is very cool and DC needs to stop messing with her. 

My Introduction to Kara

I was introduced to Kara the way most millennials/Gen Zers were I imagine, via the Loeb Superman/Batman arc which brought the traditional Kara Zor-El Supergirl take into Post-Crisis continuity, after years of DC attempting to have a “Supergirl” without violating the editorial mandate that Kal needed to be the literal “Last Son of Krypton” (an example of one of the dumb ways DC fucked Kara over). Story goes that one day Dan Didio was in line at the Superman ride at Six Flags (I love that ride even though it’s stolen my glasses every time I’ve ridden it, even when I left them in a locker!). The ride had signs that talked about various Superman characters. Didio was reading the entry for Supergirl where it talked about her not being Clark’s cousin but instead some weird merge of alien shapeshifter, angel, and human girl, and he realized how fucking stupid that was, and he went back to the office and told Loeb to bring Kara back. 

Years later I would also be standing in line at the Six Flags Superman ride (probably at a different park location but who knows?) as a youngster and would read the new Supergirl sign that trumpeted that Superman had a cousin who shared all his powers, an update reflecting the new Loeb origin. I thought she sounded pretty cool, made a note to see if my library had any Supergirl stories next time I visited, then got on the Superman ride and promptly lost my glasses like an idiot because I wanted to take them off while I was riding and pretend I was changing from my “disguise” into Superman mid flight. My dad grounded me for this afterwards, but it gave me a funny story to tell at family get togethers and isn’t that what Six Flags is all about?

A month later (and with spiffy new glasses), my mom dropped me off at a new library next to where she worked, and they had one of the best Superman collections I’ve ever seen to this day. I was in heaven and while reading every Superman book I could find (I couldn’t check them out because I didn’t have a card, my mom’s card didn’t cover the area the library was in, and my mom wouldn’t have checked them out anyway since comics were “too violent”), I found the trade collecting Kara’s new origin. I read it and I thought both she and Superman were really cool, and Batman was a  punk who had to beat Darkseid by cheating, the loser. Turner’s art to my young eyes was the best I had ever seen, and the panels got engraved into my brain. 

I still get downright nostalgic whenever I see Turner Superman or Supergirl stuff. I also got my parents to rent the animated movie adaption of the Superman/Batman arc from Blockbuster (remember those?), and that sealed the deal. Seeing Kara hold her own against Darkseid convinced me she was as cool as her cousin. Next time my mom dropped me off at the library next to her workplace, I went looking for Supergirl stuff to read. I found the first volume of her new volume by Joe Kelly taking place after the Loeb arc and dove in.

It was... weird. 5 years later I might have enjoyed it but at the time I was majorly put off. Kara took a secret identity for a day and then ditched it because it was “stupid” and the kids bullied her. She was always getting into fights with Kal, and there was this weird plot that I couldn’t follow about how her dad had sent her to kill Kal, maybe or maybe not? Also she could grow crystals which I thought was dumb, and said she was stronger than her cousin which I couldn’t buy for a second given he looked like he was carved out of marble, and she looked like she relied on sunlight instead of food. I put the volume back on the shelf and kinda gave up on reading the character after that for a while. 

I followed her via the DC wiki updates just like I did Superman, and everything I read seemed dumb and convoluted. She was split in two, moped around a lot, made out with an alternate version of her cousin, and basically just flopped about the same way the rest of the Superfamily did during the 00s. Nothing made me think I had made a mistake dropping Kara until I read the latest update to her wiki page.

I was super into what I was reading about the Busiek/Johns era of Superman online. Lex was back and making a big revenge scheme that involved all the other Rogues! Old Superman Rogues were getting revamped and made cool again! Johns reintroduced Brainiac and made him a big threat, with Kal and Kara teaming up to fight him! Busiek was revamping Prankster and telling big ambitious Superman stories! For the first time in a long while, the consensus on the Internet was that Superman was good again. My “home” library had zero Marvel books and no Superman or Batman books, all their DC stuff was Flash or Green Lantern, mainly written by Johns. Insane to think back on now. My hopes that because Johns was involved with Superman, Superman books would show up at my library were fulfilled. They started bringing in Busiek and Johns collections, and someone there also ordered Sterling Gates’ first volume of Supergirl, and I checked everything out since I was old enough to have my own library card, and my parents were worried more about the violent video games I was playing rather than comics.

I read everything and loved it. I also really liked Gates’ take on Kara. She was still an imperfect teenager but she wasn’t insufferably angsty or constantly fighting with Kal. She was going to give the secret identity another try and Lana had “adopted” her. It’s funny remembering how I enjoyed all that given my current thoughts on how Kara should work, but it was great at the time. I liked Gates introducing new foes for Kara, some classic Superman Rogues adapted for her like Bizzarogirl, others crafted specifically for her like Reactron. Gates’ basically rekindled my enjoyment of Kara the same way Busiek & Johns rekindled my enjoyment of Superman.

Of course it ended terribly like everything Superman-related seems to.

I’ve got a whole post I want to do about New Krypton and what came after. In short that is the most blatant example of “hitting the reset button” that I’ve ever seen. All the potential got wasted, and afterwards everything except Lex’s Action Comics stuff just didn’t appeal to me. Gates got booted off Kara for Nick Spencer who ended up leaving himself later, a promising Teen Titans line-up with Kara on it didn’t happen, and the last proper Pre-Flashpoint Superfamily story was a crappy team-up with Doomsday against Bigger Doomsday (thank God for Cornell’s final Luthor/Superman confrontation at least). When news of the reboot arrived, I was honestly happy. The Superline needed an enema.

Controversial opinion time: I liked New 52 Supergirl. It’s weird because a lot of the stuff I hated about Kelly’s run was here, and a lot of the stuff I loved about the Gates’ run was not. This was angry, moody, emotional Kara again, fighting with Kal and not fond of Earth. But I was in my teens at this point, and I didn’t want happy go-lucky Superman or Supergirl. I wanted my heroes angry, scared of the future, ready to go out there and smash some cars. Morrison’s Action Comics was 100% my jam (still is once I really understood the deeper meaning beneath the work) and this Kara felt like a natural fit for this universe. Plus we got Asrar on art and that guy made it damn pretty to look at, lots of cool science fiction stuff going on, even with the dumb H’el storyline.

I loved all the new Rogues Kara got. I loved her new Fortress under the ocean. I loved how traumatized she was by the loss of Krypton, that she wanted more than anything to go home, that her cousin was like a stranger to her since they had been apart for so long. I found all of that incredibly relatable. A lot of the New 52 Supergirl stories might have been schlock but it was my type of schlock damnit, and I enjoyed it!

I kept with her New 52 series all the way through the Red Daughter Saga (which I loved). As someone who grew up on Johns GL (since that was the only comics my home library had), seeing a Supercharacter join a Lantern Corp was the hypest thing ever. I loved the finale about Kara finally letting go of her anger and losing the ring while smashing her foe into the sun, it was incredibly cathartic for me as an angry teen myself. I finally stopped following her series sometime after since I was no longer enjoying the Superline or really DC as a whole. It wasn’t until I heard that New 52 Superman died and the “old” Superman was back, that I checked back into DC.

DC Rebirth & How I Think Kara Should Work

I did not enjoy Supergirl Rebirth, and I think I’ll talk about my problems with it alongside how I think Kara as a character should work since the two are related. A pet peeve of mine that has formed over the years is this: I don’t like it when Superfamily members get turned into Clark clones. Kon wearing glasses and going to Smallville High. Kara going to high school and being involved in journalism. Jon more or less being written as a copy of his dad personality-wise. I hate that kind of stuff because it’s boring. What’s the point of a Superfamily if everyone is just copying Clark? It also doesn’t fit the characters especially in Kara’s case. Why the hell does she want to be a journalist? Were there journalists on Krypton? I don’t remember ever seeing one! Shouldn’t she want to be, I dunno, a scientist? That seems to have been the El family tradition, wouldn’t she have been groomed for that?

This one-off by Shea is honestly the only acceptable outcome for Kara going into journalism for me. She realizes she’s just copying her cousin and switches to something she wants to do. So Orlando copying the show, which already basically turned Kara into an expy of her cousin, just did not appeal to me at all. What had worked for me under Gates way back when was not clicking for me this time. I wanted to see Kara embody the principles of the S-shield in a different way than her cousin did. So I really enjoyed when Rebirth ended and we moved into the Bendis era with Andrekyo relaunching the title as Kara in space.

Kara in space has always felt like a good fit for me. Unlike Kal I’ve come to believe that Kara really shouldn’t be all that fond of Earth. For him it’s home, but for her it’s just where she ended up after her real home got destroyed. I think Kara works well as a sort of nomad, occasionally making stops back home to Earth to check on her cousin, but otherwise? She’s more comfortable out in space than she could ever be on Earth. Out in space she can be Kryptonian (which is what she should think of herself as in contrast to Clark being torn between his Kryptonian biology and human upbringing, and Jon/Kon identifying as human), be her true self, not have to pretend to be human to fit in. Kara founding a moon refuge was one of the best ideas for her that I’ve seen, I would love if DC made her Future State refugee center on the moon canon. I’m excited for more Kara adventures in space with the upcoming Tom King story.

Also love that her and Krypto are getting tied together, if they don’t want to use Krypto in Superman’s stuff, let her have him! Bring on cosmic adventurer Supergirl!

Personality & Other Traits

Kara to me should be more hot-tempered than her cousin. All the Superfamily members should have a temper in my opinion, I see that as the “Deadly Sin” of Superman and his family. But while Kal is like a simmering pot that will explode if it’s left cooking for too long, Kara is like dynamite. Light her fuse at your own peril because she will go off on you.

I also like the idea of Kara being rash. Kal’s got a maturity that came from over a decade of having to live with Lex Luthor constantly getting away with all his evil schemes. He’s patient because he’s been forced to be. Kara? If you ask for her help she’ll give it, but beware because she doesn’t really care about the long term impacts of her decisions. She’s an invulnerable teenager after all.

Really liked that Venditti Annual where Kara got tutored in history by a reincarnation of Hawkman. Kara having a passion for history is a neat trait, would be nice to see her teach Kal or Jon some Kryptonian lore, or have her lead a Kryptonian holiday celebration for the Superfamily because she’s the only one who remembers how to do it. 

Sexuality wise I know a lot of people ship Kara and Lena on account of the chemistry between the two in the show. I haven’t watched the show myself but I’m fine with making Kara bisexual, the Superfamily could use some LGBT+ rep, and Lena hasn’t done anything of worth as a villain, so undo that and throw the two together. If we’re letting Harley and Ivy get away with murder I think we can let Lena off the hook too, undo the Ultrawoman weirdness and put the two together. Could be fun seeing the two building that moon refuge together.

All in all I think Kara is a great character who is a stronger embodiment of the immigrant experience than even her cousin in some ways. I hope King does a good job with her, she’s treated better than her cousin on the film side, and that overall the 20s are a better decade for Supergirl than the 10s were.

[ruzek-halstead]

relight that spark ✨

prologue 

pairing: luke patterson x julie molina

a modern day adaptation of the classic ‘cinderella’ tale.

high school au based off ‘a cinderella story’.

series masterlist || masterlist || ao3

warnings: fluffery, swearing

join my taglist here (or leave a comment to be tagged for this story only :)

i want you all to bear with me because this chapter isn't very exciting (with the exception of juke's text messages) but i think it's very necessary for background information. especially if you haven't watched the original movie!!

as you all know, this story is based off the 2004 classic 'a cinderella story' featuring hilary duff and chad michael murray. this is one of my favourite films, so i do urge you all to give it a watch! this fic is obviously not going to be exact to the movie, but it will follow generally the same storyline, but in a more modern sense.

✨

Julie Molina was a simple girl. All she really wanted was to get accepted into the Berklee College of Music, graduate high school and make enough money to move out and afford tuition. It wasn't an easy feat, but it's what she had been working for since her father passed away eight years ago. Her life used to be fantastic. Julie was still young when her mom passed away from cancer, and the memories she did have of her were slightly clouded and slowly fading away. But she remembered that she was one of the most gentle souls ever. She remembered her soft voice when she sang her to sleep every night, but one night, she wasn't there anymore. Julie never heard her mom's voice again. But her dad never let her forget anything. The memory of Rose Molina was alive and well in the Molina household, and at the family diner Ray owned, Mel's. He had inherited it from his father, and every day, he worked tirelessly to turn it into a feel-good family diner where everyone felt welcome and at home. After Rose passed, it was where Julie spent most of her time. Her dad was always busy with work, so she tagged along, but she never minded because the staff was her family. Her Tia Victoria worked there as the boss behind the boss, and she always made time to help Julie with her homework. Julie did everything at the diner. Holidays, birthdays, you name it. It was her home away from home; a place where she felt utterly safe and accepted. Until one day, she didn't. Mel's provided her the warmth and familiarity she lacked in her true home ever since her mom passed away. But the day Karen Fields walked through the door, slipped on a puddle and fell into Ray Molina's arms, that feeling was stripped away and never returned. Her father and Karen dated for a few months, and before Julie knew it, they were booking venues, cake tasting and dress shopping. Her father was getting married. Julie had never gotten the warmest of vibes from Karen, only when her father was around. But she was young, and she didn't know any better, and she couldn't tell her father that this was a terrible decision. She saw him happy, she saw him smiling, and she couldn't take that away from him. So, they got married, and shortly thereafter, Karen and her two twin daughters were moving into their Los Angeles home. Karen's daughters, Jade and Sophia, were not friendly in the slightest. They never went out of their way to include Julie in any activities, and completely ignored her at school, even though they were in the same grade. Julie didn't care much about that. She couldn't be bothered with mean girls like them, and plus, she already had the only friend she'd ever need. Julie met Flynn Anderson on the first day of kindergarten. It was quite hard to not notice the five-year-old yelling at another five-year-old because he had stepped on her brand new white sneakers. Even though her screaming was driving everyone away, Julie thought it was funny, so she went to join her at the sandbox. Ever since that day, the two had been inseparable. It also wasn't the last time Flynn yelled at obnoxious boys who unnerved her. Flynn kept Julie sane throughout the death of her mom, the transition with Karen and her family, and the worst event of all; the unexpected death of her father. She didn't see it coming, none of them did. One night Julie's dad was tucking her in and reading her a bedtime story, but then the ground started shaking and everything fell off the shelves. Her dad pulled her into the corner for safety, but Karen's screaming caught his attention and he had to leave her. She still had nightmares of their last few moments together, when he squeezed her hand before running out of the room. That was the last time she ever saw her father. Her young life only went downhill from there. According to the lawyers, there was no will left behind. This meant everything her father ever owned was left to Karen; that included his house, his money, his diner and Julie. If Julie thought Karen didn't like her before, she knew with one-hundred percent certainty that her presence was more like a burden now. Tia Victoria tried to fight for custody, because she never believed her brother-in-law would leave Julie in the hands of anyone else, but the courts disagreed and there was nothing else she could do about it. Julie was banished to the attic, and all house-duties were dumped on her. She was in charge of dishes, laundry, cleaning the entire house. On top of that, as soon as she was of legal age to work, Karen demanded she work at the diner to cover her expenses. Julie really had no other option, and although she hated it at the beginning, she realized the silver lining. Working at the diner meant she would spend time with her Tia Victoria and the rest of the staff that she loved, and she could also make her own money so she could move out, pay tuition and leave this life behind. That was what her life consisted of for now. She had her mind set on the music school of her dreams and she was working day and night so she could afford it. She went to school throughout the day, worked at the diner after school, and finished household chores after her shift. It didn't leave her much time to focus on her music, which at the end of the day was okay, because she didn't like to work on her music around her step-mother and step-sisters. They didn't understand, and they were cruel, so the less they knew about it, the better. It was also okay because Julie hadn't been able to publicly perform since her father passed away. When her mom passed, she left dozens of songs for Julie so she wouldn't give up music; it was her father that encouraged her to keep going, even at a young age. But with him gone, a piece of her went with him and she couldn't find it in herself to sing in front of others when he wasn't here to watch her. She kept her musical talents on the down low; only her Mel's family and Flynn truly knew what she was capable of with a piano and a microphone. That was until one day she received a text message from an unknown number. It started out innocent, crossed wires based on a flyer she put up three years ago to make some extra money. She didn't think any of those flyers were still around; they were unbelievably basic, with just her phone number and rate for piano lessons. Even though she didn't know this stranger and their first conversation was a tad bit rocky, for some reason, she felt comfortable talking to them. One day they started, and it just didn't stop. 

That was how they met. She was expecting the conversation to end after she told them she wasn’t offering lessons anymore (she can’t even begin to explain how they found one of her flyers in the first place), but whoever they were, they were incredibly persistent. They were slightly charming, and for some reason, Julie found herself opening up and revealing things about herself only a limited number of people knew about her. She couldn’t explain the instant connection. She would honestly sound crazy if she tried. And even after she spilled her guts out, and it was well into the night, she was surprised to see another message the following morning. So, they kept talking; night and day, they talked about anything and everything. Julie never asked who they were; she never asked for their identity because the mystery was intriguing, and she really didn’t want to reveal her own. All she knew is that they were a senior at her high school and identified as male; she knew he was in a band and he played many instruments and sang a bit. Julie only told him the same amount of information; that she was also a senior and identified as female. Throughout their constant virtual interactions, they started revealing more and more about themselves. From their first conversation, Julie told him all about the death of her mom, and how that influenced her music career. She decided not to tell him about her father's death right away, because she did remember he was a total stranger and who knew if she could even trust him? She revealed that something traumatic had happened and her music was temporarily put on hold as she worked on herself. But through time, he opened up to her as well, and eventually, she let him into to all the details. He revealed to her that his parents were dead set on him pursuing other endeavours, including a full scholarship to Stanford University. However, that wasn't what he wanted to do. He wanted to purse his music and his band, and when he mentioned Berklee College of Music, Julie knew there was no forgetting they had ever met. She was locked in. Their conversations started simple, more like venting sessions. But overtime, they became random, about anything and everything. And to a certain extent, they became a tad flirty. Julie was no expert in the romance department, by any means. With all the tragic events in her life, romantic partners had been the furthest thing from her mind. But sometimes she got a real flirty vibe that she couldn't deny. And even when she wasn't sure, she'd show the messages to Flynn, who, with an eye roll, assured her he was definitely trying to flirt. It made her extremely nervous at first, but then she realized, she had nothing to lose. This was all virtual, they didn't know each other's identities; he couldn't hurt her. But Julie didn't like to refer to him as some random number in her contacts. As much as she didn't necessarily want to put a face to the number, she needed at least a name, or even a pseudonym. When he asked for an example, Julie suggested he refer to her as 'Dahlia' as that was her mother's favourite flower and she had an emotional attachment to it. He had made a lame joke about being able to top that but ultimately he chose 'Charming'. Julie had made the mistake of telling him he was charming once, and he still hadn't let it go. This was the ultimate power move to make sure she never forgot it; but secretly, she loved it. 

And so, that's how it went. Sometimes they talked about serious things, like their future at university, and sometimes it was simpler things. Julie liked to argue because her sassiness would have it no other way; Charming could give it right back to her, ensuring it was never a dull conversation.

When Julie wasn't working, studying, or working on her music, she was talking to Charming. It was enough for her, for now. She was just trying to get through senior year quietly, by doing what was expected of her and making as much money as she could to get the hell out of there. But she should have expected that things wouldn't go that smoothly; they never had for her before. This is the story of Julie Molina and her Prince Charming, and everything in between. 

✨ 

i was super unsure about this chapter because it wasn't that exciting and then i realized i could probably just use it as an prologue or something for some background information, so i hope it was enough.

i'm really excited to get into the nitty gritty of this story, so i really hope you all enjoyed this enough to follow along! i'm not sure how many chapters this will be yet, i'm thinking at least four/five with everything i have planned???

stay safe, thanks for reading!!

tagging:  @grootsgillespie​ || @jayhalsteadcpd​ || @moreflowersthanweeds​ || @well-hes-just-too-cute​ || @echocharm17618​ || @leopard-print-slippers​ || @jandthephantoms​ || @scribblingfangirl​ || @n0wornever​ || @simpformolina​ || @only-trust-fictional-characters​ || @snowmione18​ || @tellurphantoms​ || @knitsessed​ || @carriewilsons​ || @elitharavenclaw​ || @wakeupfantoms​ || @uselessnerdnherblahg​ || @anotheronechicagobog​ || @katie-navarro​

[whetstonefires]

Since you like the Hellboy...*perks up* Can I ask what you like about it? Does this need to be part of the ask game, if so, smash it in there. But opinions! I would love!

Ooh! Hm. This is actually surprisingly hard to articulate.

I’ve been ‘into’ Hellboy for like. Half my damn life now, and while I could have gone on at length about all the things about it I found fun as a teenager it was at its core very much a ‘this makes me Feel Happy’ thing. And now that glow is less intense but it’s bolstered by that habitual sort of attachment you feel to like. Family members.

Let’s see how far I can break this down lol.

I have never been able to much like most of the BPRD tie-in type materials and I was not at all pleased with the films, so to an extent I think I can say confidently part of what I like is the way Hellboy is situated in a superhero-comic-adjacent space while being very much coordinated by one overarching creative sensibility--like, other people were brought in to work on Hellboy a lot over the course of the run, but Mignola always had a unifying voice and even when I don’t actually agree with his taste or values that level of artistic...intentionality? Judgment? Presence? Something like that. Gives the work a sense of...integrity? Maybe just unity.

Anyway makes it feel less plastic than comics often do. This is a corporate product of course but it’s also just Mike Mignola hanging out doing whatever he thinks would be cool. Drawing rocks and monsters because that’s what he wants to draw. I like that.

Some of the higher-quality webcomics you get nowadays, when they don’t take themselves too terribly seriously but aren’t outright comedic, can land similarly in terms of voice, but even just fifteen years ago webcomics weren’t really at that point yet as a medium, and even now most are still amateurish as well as amateur. Which is fine, but different.

To get slightly less meta, I love the collection of genres that are smeared together for Hellboy--we’ve got a lot of detective noir stuff cut together with cosmic horror and like...the genre where people research folklore and then mostly punch it. Does that have a name? And then there are a bunch of other influences stirred in, sometimes for only a single issue, sometimes more.

Mignola managed to be significantly less offensive than average about the way he adapted world folklore into his weird groddy kitchen-sink fantasy system, which is pretty funny because he doesn’t come across as being careful about it at all. Not that I think there was no effort made, but also he just used research as a basis for narrative much more often than he started with a story premise and stretched the creature to fit, which by default gave him less scope for dickery.

Also I think the only god he ever fights is Hecate and she’s handled from a 19th-century-occultist angle rather than a Classical angle.

Also Hellboy fights Nazis and cyborg gorillas as well as like. Baba Yaga and vampires. The balance of schlock and gonzo nonsense to pathos and sensitive emotional bits is usually about where I like it.

The episodic format is really well used. It lets the storytelling style lean heavily on the late-19th-through-mid-20th-century short story genres that it borrows a lot from, and which honestly has always worked better for comics than end-to-end long-arc serialization. I like how the anachronic order of many sections of the series allowed for a lot of ‘building outward from the middle.’

Also it means the story can stay true to its roots and kill off a lot of characters in gothic excess without constantly sloughing main cast or having to do fakeouts.

...I can’t believe that since Hellboy isn’t really emotionally involved with the issue of his birth parents except inasmuch as it explains the world-ending stone hand, the single angstiest part of his backstory is technically when he went on a drinking binge road trip around Mexico in his teens and made friends with vampire-fighting luchador triplets but then the youngest one whom he was closest to was kidnapped by the vampires and Hellboy had to kill his best friend, and this is all established in a random side story that pushes the intentional genre absurdism to its breaking point and is equal parts comedic and grotesque.

(The second angstiest is probably the bit in volume 1 when he finds his dad murdered by frogs.)

I also just love characters who wear trench coats and are actually really clever and knowledgeable and kind but tend to resort, in extremity, to just hitting problems really hard. Okay? I like that. That’s a fave.

Hellboy’s whole character design is very strong, a bunch of dramatic broad-strokes decisions that contrast interestingly against one another, and then a lot of subtler elements layered in crosswise.

The way his relationship to the narrative ‘occult-fighting antichrist figure’ could be really straightforward, but keeps stepping a little sideways off the usual shape of the tropes in a way that creates depth.

He’s a giant red demon guy who stopped aging in the 50s; he’s never going to be able to be ‘normal’ or pretend he isn’t what he is--but also he’s a dude with a government job and probably a Social Security Number who goes and interviews people about the situation and says ‘I’m Agent Hellboy’ and gets called ‘Mr. Boy’ and is just this guy who knows his shit and can take a beating.

(This was one of the major things I hated in the first movie, that they decided to make him this weird secret cryptid whose dad keeps him locked in a vault when he’s not fighting.)

The way the identity thing is never reduced to comfortable binaries with him except by enemies trying to psych him out is just really satisfying. He fights monsters not because he hates them or himself but because he was recruited into this career young and he’s really good at it, and he feels good about helping people who are being victimized.

When something occult isn’t hurting anybody he’s down to chill, and if it turns out they secretly are after all he’s always so tired and disappointed, and if they really aren’t then he has a new friend. Whom he may never see again or may hit up for a game of cards next time he’s in town.

(I also like how he combines ‘being pretty private’ ‘being very casually friendly’ and ‘being an asshole who makes a lot of enemies’; it’s not that unusual a combo for his type of main character but it’s one I enjoy.)

When he breaks off his own horns as part of his rejection of being Anung Un Rama it’s not ‘choosing humanity’ or w/e it’s choosing not to be used for this. His name is Hellboy, which is an objectively awful name but it was given to him by people he loved and who chose him, not the people who made him or brought him to this world to be used, and he chooses it.

And that has weight. That has force enough behind it to carry a world.

Just in general in spite of all the identity stuff he gets swamped with he’s really good at self-knowledge and letting other people’s ideas of who and what he’s supposed to be just wash over him. As the story goes on and shit gets weirder his sense of identity gets shaken, but he never quite loses that anchor in the knowledge that he is the ultimate arbiter of his own identity.

His exasperation on being told via stabbing that he doesn’t get to be King of England even if he is the first male descendant of King Arthur since Mordred is so funny. Why is this a thing, says Hellboy. Why am I finding out like this. Why do I always find out this shit like this. Why would anyone think I wanted to be King of England. I already punched so many skeletons about not wanting to be King of Witches.

He’s got so much righteous anger that comes out when people are treated as disposable, or as less for being not human or less human or superpowered, and of course it’s founded in his own experiences and his own fight for respect but it’s not about him. It’s about the person who’s suffering now.

One time his combat one-liner before shooting something started with ‘The Torch of Liberty said I was the worst shot he ever tried to train’ that’s so funny! I love that!

He’s my boy okay.

[fostersffff]

Robot Carnival Review

When I first started my blu-ray collecting kick, Discotek was hyping up their release of Memories, an anthology movie organized by Akira’s Katsuhiro Otomo. While doing research on it, I saw it was recommended in the company of Robot Carnival, another anthology movie Otomo was involved with, with more animators and thus individual shorts, and a unifying theme of “robots”. As a robot enjoyer, I figured I couldn’t go wrong with this, and I was right! This was a joy from start to finish, where even the weakest segment still had plenty to offer. If this sounds like it might be up your alley, it’s available to stream for free on RetroCrush and YouTube!

Additional note before I get into talking about each short individually: with the exception of Cloud, the music for every short was composed by Joe Hisaishi, who has way more range as a composer than I would’ve ever expected, considering I knew him exclusively as the Studio Ghibli composer. Additional additional note: I watched the anthology in the original Japanese order, the version on RetroCrush and YouTube uses an alternate order from the international release.

Opening/Ending (Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of Akira and Atsuko Fukushima, key animator on dozens of anime projects, including Akira) - A mobile fortress (literally the above Robot Carnival logo) traverses a post-apocalyptic wasteland, bringing death and destruction wherever it goes. The Opening sets the bar for what you should expect going forward in terms of production values, and the Ending is a nice send off for the whole thing, but I don’t really have much else to say about these shorts.

Franken’s Gears (Koji Morimoto, Director of Memories: Magnetic Rose) - A mad scientist attempts to bring their robot to life, succeeds horribly. I think of all the shorts in this movie, this one has the most impressive mechanical animation. The whole thing takes places in the scientist’s lab, and the emphasis really is on all of the ways the environment is struggling to bring the robot to life, to the point that once it does so, it begins to crumble and break apart. But the animation on the scientist himself is also really charming; the way he moves almost makes him look gooey, which is apt because my sister pointed out he was probably designed after a snail, what with the big orb on his back.

Deprive (Hidetoshi Omori, Animation Director for Char’s Counterattack) - A super android has to mamoru his imouto from an invading alien robot army. One of my favorite shorts in the anthology, this was an entire action movie expertly condensed down into not even ten minutes, complete with an awesome soundtrack. I’d actually go so far as to call this one perfect for what it is, but it’s not much more than that.

Presence (Yasuyomi Umetsu, Character Designer and Chief Animation Director of Megazone 23 Part II) - A man builds an android for companionship, and he gets more than he bargained for. Longest piece in the compilation by a mile, and the first one with voice acting. Despite enjoying some of the other shorts more, I think I would call Presence the “centerpiece” of this anthology, as it’s definitely the most story-rich. It even has some prescient worldbuilding: the people of this setting do not see robots as sentient beings, which is shown right at the start when a bunch of kids knock the head off of an android and play with it while absolutely no one in the crowded plaza reacts. This sets the tone for the main character’s interactions with his creation, and provide additional context for the things he does besides the obvious explanations.

This was also the first short where I noticed something off about the animation, where it seemed to animate too well in for certain movements. As it turns out I was right; the liner notes explain that the director was using this project to experiment, and he would animate different movements on different frame counts. It’s not terrible, but it is a little distracting to see how smoothly something like a simple head turn will animate while more complex motions look more standard. Also, unrelated but fun coincidence: the liner notes also explain a reference in the script to a story called Daddy Long Legs, about an orphan girl who receives funding from a wealthy philanthropist she never meets, which explains a reference that went over my head Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Star Light Angel (Hiroyuki Kitazume, Character Designer and Animation Director for Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and Char’s Counterattack) - What could have been the most effective piece of robosexual propaganda ever made: a girl and her friend are at Tokyo Disneyland ROBOT WANDERLAND and are having a wonderful time, until she discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her, at which point she retreat into the park and winds up on a virtual reality ride. Meanwhile, a robot performer attempts to find her and return the locket she dropped while she ran past him. This is tied for my favorite, alongside Deprive, because I’m a big sucker for romance and the main song for the short is so perfect for the content. I was also delighted to find the explanation for this short was that Kitazume, who’s work up to this point was all mecha anime like Aura Battler Dunbine and Zeta Gundam, really wanted to try to flex with character expressions, and it came through brilliantly as the range and level of facial expressions was the first thing I really took notice of in this. Funny enough, though, Kitazume also apparently said he considers this and Deprive to be the weakest pieces of the anthology, and I suppose he’s right in that they have the least meat on their bones and are also probably the least technically impressive, but still: my two favorites!

Cloud (Mao Lamdo, a prolific animator on many projects, but probably best known for this) - A robotic boy wanders past a series of ever-changing clouds. Cloud is definitely a stand-out short for a number of reasons, from the way its animated to the incredibly tangential connection to the “robot” theme, and to be perfectly honest I got a lot more out of it after I read the liner notes. The short was adapted from a self-published book Mao Lamdo had written years prior that had nothing to do with robots, and his interpretation of the short and the change to making the main character a robot was that it represented his frustration with the trend in the anime industry at the time trending towards a being obsessed with the mechanical world, while he still preferred to draw and animate nature. As I mentioned at the top, this is also the only short to not have music composed by Joe Hisaishi, instead the piece used is by Isaku Fujita, and as far as I can tell, this is his only credit. Still, it’s a good credit to have; Lamdo said the song evoked the idea of having a conversation with God and asking the big questions, which I can completely see.

Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture: “The Westerner’s Invasion” (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Director of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure OVA and Golden Boy) A terrible steampunk mech invades a Japanese town, and is warded off by a team of youths piloting their own terrible steampunk mech. I watched this one with the English dub first and then again in Japanese because it’s been a fuckin’ minute since I heard a dub this racist, complete with changing r’s to l’s and vice versa, only to be cracked across the skull by what I am certain was a Japanese man doing his very best to phonetically read English in the Japanese version. In spite of that, though, this is easily the funniest short for all the right reasons, and it kinda clicked once I found out that the director was also responsible for Golden Boy; it’s that exact kind of humor, complete with a protagonist who could very well be Kintaro Ue’s ancestor.

Chicken Man and Red Neck, a.k.a. Nightmare (Takeshi Nakamura, director of Catnapped! The Movie) - A robotic magician wreaks havoc on a city by transforming everything in sight into robotic monsters, and a vagrant gets caught up in the chaos. I initially wrote down “this one has the energy of a Don Bluth movie, particularly In the Dark of the Night from Anastasia”, although the liner notes say he actually was inspired by Night on Bald Mountain, which is definitely a more flattering inspiration and more accurate, to boot. I think of all the shorts in this anthology, this one gets the prizes for “best overall animation” and “best use of robots”, and it also has the most intense PS1 RPG sounding music, which once again speaks to Joe Hisaishi’s talent as a composer for doing that a full decade before the PS1 even existed. Also, fun trivia, the director turned down an offer from Hayao Miyazaki to be animation director on Castle in the Sky to make this, which… was maybe not the best career move, but still this was a terrific short and I’m glad to have it.

Again, the movie is easily accessible for free streaming, and I’d heartily recommend you check it out if you haven’t already. But if you’re into collecting physical media, the blu-ray is crammed full of tons of goodies, including the liner notes I’ve referenced, art galleries for each segment, and a lot of other production materials. Discotek also announced they’re doing a 4k UHD release of this soon, which won’t include all the extras due to the way UHD discs work, but I gotta be honest, this would be worth double dipping for if the resolution bump is noticeable enough.

[ranma-rewatch]

Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’

Hey, it’s Ranma Rewatch, I’m on episode 7, and I don’t want to waste too much time with the preamble. I am super excited for this episode, my boi is here, I really hope it holds up, see you after I watch it again!

That wasn’t exactly how I remembered it, but not in a bad way. The episode starts with a short scene that has become pretty freaking iconic, and has been sampled in dozens, if not hundreds, of AMV’s: A man cloaked from head to toe, walking through a desert, his eyes barely visible under goggles. It is a really cool shot that catches the eye right away.

We cut from that to that same person approaching a small village, deciding to throw off his concealing clothes to reveal his typical yellow and green outfit, with a bandanna around his head and an umbrella on his back, which he takes out to slow down his descent when he jumps off a cliff. This village happens to be being attacked by a huge wild boar, wrecking everything in its way, but this fellow is able to stop the animal with little effort and send it flying. When the grateful villagers approach, he only has one question for them: where is Furinkan High School?

At first they don’t understand the question, until they look at what he has for a map and realize it’s of Tokyo. The problem is, this young man is on Shikoku, a completely different island in the archipelago. They point him in the right general direction, and he reveals before the scene ends that he is specifically trying to find Ranma Saotome.

Speaking of the show’s titular character, we get a small scene of him in his cursed form being blackmailed by Nabiki into wearing women’s clothes because all of his stuff is in the wash. After that, we get another scene of the mysterious umbrella-wielding stranger asking someone for directions to Furinkan High School, but this time he’s in Hokkaido. Once again a completely different island, only this time on the opposite end. Fun fact: Hokkaido was the inspiration for Sinnoh in Pokemon!

We get another small cut-away to Ranma in various outfits, then another of our new character somehow ending up back in that village he was in earlier. The point is being made clear to us: he is terrible at getting where he wants to go, but is also so inhumanly strong and resilient that he has no trouble surviving in the wilderness in the process.

What seems to be the next day, he finally gets to where he’s going, just as school is letting out for the day. Ranma is being chased by Akane for something, though we don’t know exactly what. (Of course, we know their dynamic well enough by now to know it’s almost certainly something Ranma did to annoy her.) The newcomer slams into the ground where Ranma is landing at the same time, leaving a crater in the cement from the force of his landing, all while screaming how Ranma has to die.

The problem is, Ranma has no clue who this guy is, which pisses him off to know end. Even after he brings up that his vendetta has something to do with Ranma never showing up for a duel, Ranma still struggles (and fails) to remember this guys name, but luckily he gives it to Ranma anyway: Ryoga Hibiki. They went to Junior High together, and they’d agreed upon a duel, but it never happened because Ranma wasn’t there when Ryoga arrived.

Now, Ranma protests that he waited in the agreed upon empty lot for three days before taking off for China with his dad, which is honestly more time than most people would have waited. As we already know though, Ryoga can’t seem to get anywhere quickly, so he got there on the fourth day. Oh, and the lot was right behind his house.

The crowd of students who only moments before considered him with awe over his fantastic martial arts abilities are now looking at him like a buffoon, and Ryoga is ready to get his revenge on Ranma already. But Ranma puts a pause on that, runs out, and comes back with a bunch of different kinds of bread. Why? Because bread was the reason for their duel in the first place. Their school was only for boys, and getting food at lunch was a nightmare. Ranma ended up snatching the last piece of bread just before Ryoga could get it time and time again, and all the bread he brought was one of each type he’d taken years before.

But Ryoga doesn’t care about that, making it clear that the bread isn’t something he cares about anymore, that Ranma has put him through hell, even if Ranma has no clue what he’s talking about. But before they can get a proper fight going, Ranma runs away, losing Ryoga enough that when he starts busting up the school looking for him, he ends up going the wrong way and out of the area entirely, leaving Ranma and Akane to wonder where he went. We do get to see where before the episode ends: once again back in that village that had the boar problem, where he gets a meal before running out into the evening to find Ranma once more.

Like I said before, this episode wasn’t entirely how I remembered it. Namely, there was a lot more humor than I remembered. For the most part, that’s not a bad thing, there was actually some really good comedy, and I don’t feel like it trampled over the more serious parts of the episode.

If it isn’t clear, I am going to say right now that I did still love this episode. The animation was really on-point, some of the visuals of Ranma darting around people or the brief combat he gets with Ryoga just looks beautiful. Also, even though we don’t get a fight between the two just yet, it’s already solidly communicated, through Ryoga easily beating the boar, barreling through steel barriers, and hitting the ground so hard it destroys concrete, that he is strong as hell.

As much as I love the opening desert shot, I actually think my favorite part of the episode is some of the conversation between Ranma, Akane, and Ryoga. Ranma straining his brain to remember who Ryoga is killed me. It was weirdly relatable too, I’m sure many of us have run into someone who obviously knows us, while we can’t even remember how we know them, let alone their name. The fact Ranma actually specifically bought one of each bread he’d taken from Ryoga before was kind of cute, more than I expected of the usually flippant martial artist.

There’s also an exchange I’ve seen on Tumblr a few times in screencaps and gifs, and there’s a reason people love to share it. When Ryoga says he’s going to destroy Ranma’s happiness, there’s this shot of him freaking out, only to turn to Akane and blankly ask if he is happy, to which Akane doesn’t understand why he’s asking her. They take such a trope-y line from a character seeking revenge and turn it around into a really good joke.

There was also a really interesting thing I noted in terms of translation. After hearing about the string of times Ranma stole bread from Ryoga, Akane makes an analogy to why it mattered so much, but it’s different from dub to sub. In the English Dub, she says the straws broke the camel’s back, a common phrase that seems to fit the situation. But in the English Sub, she says (loosely remembering) “enough dust can make a mountain”, and I think that actually fits much better. After all, we soon learned that the bread isn’t really why Ryoga is angry, but once you do know everything that happened that led to Ryoga’s rage, that analogy fits perfect: it isn’t so much one specific event, as a collection of small events that collected into an enormous vendetta.

All my compliments aside, I did have some issues with the episode. Some of the comedy didn’t really work for me, and that was most true with the early scenes of the Tendo girls trying to dress Ranma in Akane’s clothes. Some parts did make me chuckle, but on the whole the mini-plot made me uncomfortable. Primarily because, as I’ve said before, I feel like the best way to look at Ranma’s cursed form is as a trans man. Even though his body has changed, his gender hasn’t, he’s still a man. The scene has Ranma protesting again and again that he is a man, even as they try to dress him as a woman. The idea of some cisgender folks trying to force a trans man into women’s clothes just...isn’t very funny to me. It’s kind of terrible, at least from a more queer perspective. That complaint done, let’s do the character spotlight.

Oh come on, who else did you think I was going to do? If it isn’t clear yet, Ryoga Hibiki is my favorite character in the series, and he has been since I was a teenager. Who knows if that will remain true this entire watch-through, but so far I’m not liking him any less. I’ll get into why, but first let’s talk about his voice actors.

The voice actor I’m more familiar with, his English one, is Michael Donovan. Like most of the actors for this dub, he’s someone who worked with the Ocean Group for a lot of series around this time period. That said, if you’re a fan of the Fate franchise, he has done some voices in Ufotable’s recent anime adaptations, playing Risei Kotomine and Zouken Matou. In Japanese, his voice actor is one Kōichi Yamadera, and he continued the pattern of voice actors who are well-known in Japan for dubbing English works. He’s most well-known for dubbing over Jim Carrey in a lot of movies, but he’s done a ton of others as well. In anime, some of his notable roles include Spike Spiegel, Beerus in all the recent Dragon Ball movies and anime, and Gentle Criminal in My Hero Academia. Seriously, diving into this guy’s list of roles is like swimming in an ocean of great roles.

So, how do they do? Well, so far I’d say I like both of them a lot, but they do play Ryoga differently. At his core, Ryoga is actually kind of a perfect microcosm of the tone of the series itself. Ranma 1/2 is simultaneously a shonen battle anime, a romantic harem series, and a wacky comedy. Ryoga is someone who takes himself very, very seriously. His desire for vengeance against Ranma isn’t a joke, and neither is his ability as a martial artist. But he’s also a doofus who ends up crossing the length of Japan several times because he can’t follow directions properly and the reasons (so far) for his hatred of Ranma are completely laughable.

I wouldn’t say that Michael Donovan’s performance lacks seriousness, in fact when he wants Ryoga to sound menacing I think he does it well, but on the whole he leans more heavily towards the comedic parts of the character. Meanwhile, Yamadera’s Ryoga hasn’t really sounded silly once to me. He plays the character dead straight, and let’s the comedy come through in the contrast between that demeanor and the circumstances around him. We’ll have to see as we go, but I actually might be preferring the Japanese performance so far, a rarity for me.

Okay, so, why do I love Ryoga so much? There are SO many reasons, many of which I won’t go into just yet because I’ll save them for when they appear in-series. But there is still a lot shown in this episode that I feel I can discuss. To start with, I adore his design. I don’t mean the cloak and goggles, though those are absolutely awesome, I’m referring to his standard mode of dress. The yellow and green as a color scheme, with accents of black to top it off, is something really unique. I don’t know enough about art to really articulate why, but I just love every touch of his design. My favorite small touch has to be the yellow strands wrapping around his lower legs, clashing with his otherwise dark green lower half. I have no clue what they’re supposed to be for, but they just add something, almost making him look more rooted to the spot of wherever he’s standing, more solid.

That is a good word to use for Ryoga in general. Even though we haven’t gotten to see him in a proper fight just yet, we’ve seen quite a lot of evidence of his main attributes. In Dungeons & Dragons terms, Ryoga is making out his Strength and Constitution. He hits like a truck and he can be hit by a truck without slowing down. I love that because it contrasts so perfectly with Ranma’s strength: his speed and precision. I adore it when rival characters actually have qualities that make the fights between them more interesting from the contrast, and Ryoga fits the bill there quite well. He’s also a good foil in terms of personality: Ranma is easy going, likes screwing with people, and is quite quick-witted; Ryoga has a hot temper and a long memory for grudges, hates it when people trick him, and tends to let his emotions do the thinking for him.

I will say it feels like his character has some classic Early Installment Weirdness, as he uses his umbrella quite a bit in this episode. If I remember correctly, after his introductory arc, he doesn’t use his umbrella much at all for the rest of the show, preferring to rely on his fists. It definitely feels like they hadn’t quite nailed the character completely yet, if that makes any sense.

Ryoga is also doing that thing where he’s seeking revenge and really angry, but refuses to talk about why, drawing out the mystery as long as possible. While that trope can become annoying, I don’t really mind it in this case. This isn’t a situation like Godot from Ace Attorney, where Ryoga is purposefully hiding it for some grand plan or something, or to teach a lesson. Ryoga doesn’t go into specifics because A) he thinks Ranma should already know; B) Ryoga is very mad; and C) he doesn’t want anyone else to know his secret. I’m not saying it isn’t stupid that he doesn’t tell Ranma why he’s mad, but I am saying that it’s in-character.

Are you surprised that I adore this episode? You shouldn’t be, I’ve been gushing about it this whole time. Even with the parts I found more rough to watch, this is still my favorite episode of the series thus far, putting the rankings at:

Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’

Episode 2: School is No Place for Horsing Around

Episode 6: Akane's Lost Love... These Things Happen, You Know

Episode 4: Ranma and...Ranma? If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

Episode 5: Love Me to the Bone! The Compound Fracture of Akane's Heart

Episode 1: Here’s Ranma

Episode 3: A Sudden Storm of Love

The big question is: will the next episode of this four episode Ryoga arc be even better? We’ll find out next time with Episode 8: “School is a Battlefield! Ranma vs. Ryoga”. See you then!

[popculturebuffet]

Scooby Doo (2002) Review: The Most Punchable Fred Jones of All Time

It’s one last hurrah for Halloween as I take a look at the often derided 2002 Scooby Doo Movie! See what happens when you combine future superstar director James Gunn with .. the guy who thought directing the Smurf’s movie and Big’s Mama’s House were good ideas. Oh and with a splash of the guy who wrote the loveable family film Cheaper by the Dozen and the utterly loathed Percy Jackson film. It’s as messy as you’d expect with that.. but is it BAD? good, so bad it’s good, just sorta okay? Come with me as I try to find out under the cut with a full review. 

I’ve always loved Scooby Doo. I grew up with the guy, watching reruns of the non-scrappy classic series from Where Are You to the Scooby Doo Movies, the three Superstar 10 movies (Boo Brothers, Ghoul School and Reluctant Werewolf), or the at the time brand new What’s New Scooby Doo. And later in life i’d absolutely adore Mystery Incorporated.. minus the whole Shaggy, Scooby Velma love triangle, but i’ll likely cover that at some point or sooner, you can comission reviews from me for 5 bucks each, 5 dollars off group orders if you really want to make me suffer through that that bad. But getting off self promotion point is I loved and still love the franchise. While I”ve yet to see “Scooby Doo and Guess Who”, though given there’s Weird Al, Kristan Schaal and Urkel episodes you can be sure i’m going to eventually, and Scoob was VERY ehhh even if Dick Dastardly was awesome. But despite my history with the great dane much like with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, despite my rich history with the franchise I haven’t dove in yet and with a friend who could use a nice halloween suprise and loves scooby doo, I figured now was the time to take a look at it.  And since i’d been wanting to take a look at it again anyway, and decided going big wasn’t a bad way to start, i’m taking a look at the 2002 Scooby Doo movie. I saw this flim first run in a drive in, and saw the sequel the same way and loved it as a kid, and fondly remember checking out the Sountrack Preview page back before youtube existed to make checking out soundtracks easier. It was a simplier time. And even rewatching it later with my nieces, I found myself liking it.  And the thing was almost every time this film comes up it’s with a turned up nose. The CGI, the confused audience, the deciding to cast Freddy Prinze Junior.. all terrible decisions that overshadow the film, when it’s not that bad. It’s not GREAT, but it’s not TERRIBLE either. So what is it then? Well i’ll tells ya. Let’s start with

PRODUCTION: Wait James Gunn Wrote This?

At the turn of the millneium Scooby Doo was back on top. After waning popularity during the Scrappy era, the advent of the warner affilated Cartoon Network meant a whole new generation of kids (raises hand) got to experince Scooby Doo for the first time. This new audeince lead to Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, the first of the franchises 80 or so DTV movies that will continue on long after the earth dies, and brought back the franchise after it’s long slumber. Scooby Doo went from dead to as popular as he was in his hey day again. Naturally Warner wanted to cash in and thus this movie was born.  Originally the film was supposed to be a more adult project, a send up of the franchise with more sex jokes and what not than made the final cut according to writer James Gunn. Yes, the same James Gunn who wrote and directed the Guardians of the Galaxy movie and whose currently saving the suicide squad. It was one of Gunn’s earlier films but just from when he’s talked about it, you can tell he genuinely cared about the project.  Along for the ride with our future Guardian was his co-writer, Craig Titely,  who i’m convinced only came in to do punch ups as the guy has only written three other movies. One of them was being one of MANY writers on Cheaper by the Dozen and thus likely not doing much of note with that, and the other.. is being the only writer on Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief’s movie adaptation.. aka the movie the fanbase and general audiences rejected in droves yet SOMEHOW got a sequel. Which is somehow still worse than his other film, one that asks “was the moon landing a hoax?” Spoilers, it wasn’t. Point is this isn’t a resume that screams co creator and more screams “Guy brought in to kid freindly this up”. More on that in a minute.  The director is another less than reassuring face: Raja Gosnell, whose credits BEFORE this film were Home Alone 3, Never Been Kissed and Big Momma’s house.. so already he dosen’t have the best track record but somehow got worse because AFTER this film and it’s sequel he directed both live action Smurfs Movies and the universally hated Show Dogs, aka the film  that thought dog rape was funny. The fact this film isn’t out and out terrible is a miracle. 

Even more so because naturally, as Studios tend to do they interfered: The film was supposed to be more adult, cracking jokes about common things fans of the series growing up thought like Velma is Gay or Shaggy’s a stoner, and having both be fully true. But wanting to appeal to kids, Warner gradually lightned it, hence Craig, and Raja clearly having no shame gladly took it instead of you know.. standing his ground.  So Velma has a love intrest thrown in and her kiss with Daphne is gone, while Shaggy’s toke smoking was lowered to subtext.. because either of those things is bad apparently? I dunno the 2000′s were fucked. 

Point is THAT’S why these films are so tonally confused and why I don’t hold it agains the film now I know: It wasn’t James Gunn or even, as dumb as he is, Raja Gosnell’s fault that the film had some tones clashing when the studio was demanding it, instead of you know, thinking this through at all and realizing more kids cared about Scooby Doo than they would’ve josie and the pussy cats instead of bringing it up DURING production, when most of the adult stuff was in there. It’s also why the sequel has no real adult stuff, though it’s STILL damn good, but i’ll get to that some other day. 

The film was also shot at an actual theme park in australia. Neat. 

So yeah the film’s humor kind of ping pongs between knowing adult winks and kids stuff. We get Scooby dressing like a grandma in the same film shaggy enhales his demon possed love intrests breath like weed. The jokes themselves on average are pretty good: Some of my faviorites include the grandma scene, everything rowan atkinson does, Velma getting drunk off her ass, and the instructional video bit which is easily my favorite bit of the episode and one of my faviorite scooby doo jokes period:

This is even FUNNIER to me on rewatch, as we now know this is an instructional video for demons.. and that Scrappy clearly had enough problems with his demon horde to have to pay for this thing. It tis glorious.  However there also are also a few that HAVE NOT aged well, are very creepy at best and disgusting sexual assault at worst with Daphne getting her ass grabbed by the Luna Ghost at the start being treated as a joke and Fred oggling Daphne’s body when he’s in it being treated as a ha ha and not...

So yeah the humor’s USUALLY good, but the slipups are noticable and do bring things down a bit when they come by. So the humor is decent if mixed and the production’s a nightmare, how’s the plot? The Plot: Scoob, We’re Getting the Band Back Together!

I won’t be as through as usual because this is a 90 minute movie, I’m running behind as is and it’s 20 years old, 

We start with your standard mystery inc case with the Luna Goose, aka Old Man Incel who resented Pamela Anderson for not boning him. But Fred hogging the glory during the resulting News Cast leads the gang to start fighting over lingering tensions: Velma is tired of Fred hogging all the credit when she does most of the legwork solving things, Daphne is tired of being kidnapped and being mistreated by Velma and Freddy who laugh at the idea of her doing more, and Fred..

We’ll get to him later. Shaggy is the only one wanting to stick together, but no one’s having it and the group breaks apart and Matthew LIllard REALLY sells Shaggy’s heartbreak over his friends all abandoning him well. 

Two years later though, with Shaggy and Scooby naturally getting stoned and eating large quantities of food on the beach, have made peace with retirement, and have apparently had to duck tons of people coming to them to solve mysteries since they aren’t about that. The latest in that line is a man representing Emile Mondovarius, the owner of Spooky Island, a vast island resort and theme park. Naturally since it has spooky in the name the boys want nothing but Mondovarius does what honestly every previous guy coming to them should’ve done: offers them an all you can eat buffet.  Since they’ve done more traumatizing for Dog Treats, they agree and it soon turns out the entire gang was invited, though none of them but Shaggy and Scooby are happy to see each other. I will say one of my complaints about the film is it never tackles the emotions behind the breakup: while the teams slowly repairs there are never any outright apologizes or scenes of them recociling or scenes of Shaggy chewing them out for abandoning him due to their spat. It just skips over the emotional bits to either wave a joke for the kiddies around or scream 

Really the jokes aren’t bad, the film just has trouble with actual emotion or depth that could’ve been there and tries for it once in a while, but dosen’t really do anything with it. The gang splitting up’s a good concept, and at this point on Scooby Doo on Zombie Island had really used it, and that was one where they were clearly still close friends and were still in touch they just quit mystery solving for a while till Zombie Island happened. Mystery Incorpreated would finally give this story justice later: Instead of over a petty ego squabble, the gang broke up over underlying tensions: The revelations about Fred’s dad caused him to go try and find himself, Velma alienated herself by hiding things from them, and Shaggy was shipped off to Military School and Scooby doggy prison camp... thankfully the last two didn’t last and Scooby rescued Shaggy with a tank but the tension DIDN’T go away: While the gang mostly reunited, Velma took time to forgive them and also tried bringing in the friend/girlfriend she’d made in the meantime only for her friends to isolate her and throw her out while Daphne took her time to return due to being hurt by fred. It’s complex and good stuff versus here where it’s just “WE’RE APART BECAUSE WE HATES EACH OTHER. And now we’re NOT”. It’s just a waste of a good concept and i’ m glad the franchise got around to doing it right. 

But my gripes aside our heroes head to the resort and meet Mondevarious, who admits outright to having tricked then and with confronted with the gang being broken up, makes it clear he knews.  “That’s the thing about broken things.. you can put them back together.”

And so he did. He needs the Gang’s help as he’s worried about the island and something going wrong there: The teens are leaving polite, well behaved. and clearly not themselves as one reacts to an old friend by neck lifting him and tossing him aside. Something’s deeply wrong here and the gang’s intrest is piqued enough to stay though everyone but Shaggy is determined to solve it themselves out of ego. Mondvarius is played by Rowan Atkinson and while I watched the bean movie as a kid this is where I fell in love with the guy, with later watches of Blackadder confirming that in my college years. Rowan just brings a fun dorky energy to the character and a nice earnestness too but when he later takes a turn for the bad, he does that well too. Atkinson is HIGHLY underated in my opinon and easily the MVP of this film’s supporting cast.   So the investigation begins, and we get our supsects: The first we met on the plane, Mary Jane, a kind blonde played by Isla Fisher who got the job becasue Gosnel, in a rare good decision, saw how talented she was and while still picking Sara Michele Gellar for Daphne, made sure she had  a part. She’s a nice sweet girl who Shaggy falls for and Scooby’s annoyed by it.. though unlike earlier the film beats mystery inc easily here as it’s a more understandable conflict and dosen’t act like Dog Issues is a thing people says. Again i’ll get to that clusterfuck of an arc some day. The other two are N’Goo Tuna, a shady worker at the park who spouts off the legends of the island. In a nice twist, he’s NOT the vilian, as is obvious but is his right hand man. He also has his own right hand and muscle in Zarkos a cool looking Luchador and N’Goo’s muscle. Also N’Goo may be one of the worst names in Scooby Doo History, and that includes Dabba Doo. But the legend claims the island was once owned by demons who want revenge since the resort took the island from him. 

The other is probably my faviorite non Rowan Atkinson character, Voodoo Maestro, played by Miguel Nunez. He’s basically just a guy who lives on the fringes of the island and also hates the resort and tries using voodoo curses. He’s honestly a delight from his attempt to sacrifice a chicken (An already dead one at that), to his general hammy and annoyed at dealing with these teenagers demeanor. NAturally he has nothing to do with this but he’s still a fun addition and I wish he was in more scnenes than the two he gets.  But with what they’ve gathered the gang all end up at a spooky castle attraction, with Scooby and Shaggy of course being bribed by daphne while Velma and Fred show up indpeendntly and end  up finding the weird training video from earlier but all get caught when the traps are activiated> There’s also a farting contest which.. eh not funny to me but i’ve seen so much worse i’m not even remotely upset. But then the traps trigger though during the chaos Fred and Velma are forced to work together and finally start doing so, and Daphne finds a clue: A mysterious pyramid known as the damon righus and finally gets some, if not nearly enough, credit.  So the gang is back together.. even if it’s a tenative peace, the high from solving this and relay to their boss the suspects, including him, though Fred assures Mondovarius it’s just because he’s spooky and rowan’s character’s delight over that is fucking glorious.  So the gang enjoys some down time at the local bar, with Fred and Daphne doing their own look ins, Scooby and Shaggy eating and encountring mary again and Velma getting hit on by a dude while looking over the ritus, revealing it’s some sort of soul sucking aparatus, and going into their history... which is really just an excuse to bring Scrappy in who in this universe, is a horny egotistical little shit whose abandoned as a result. ANd before anyone boos he’s not a puppy here, he’s got.. dog dwarfisim.. which while .. how does that even work... means he’s a grown ass man and deserved this. We also get drunk velma and Linda Caredenlli is a delight

The night gets interupted by terrible cgi monsters, the aformentioned emon who soul suck most of the college kids present and also get fred and velma who both find out these are very much real. We also get the best song on the soundtrack, man with a hex. It slaps. But it makes good chase music as with Mondvarious, Fred and Velma captured, the rest of the gang and mary escape.  The next morning we get a surreal as hell scene as everyone’s partying, Fred’s talking in slang and Velma with clevage, thank you, is chatting up.. Sugar Ray? For those younger of you they were a band at the time. They were a big thing. Not half bad but faded away. They looked as 2000′s as hell though. WHy Smash Mouth gets all the memes and not them is beyond me. Look at lead singer Mark McGrath!It’s like the early 2000′s gained sentience and took a human form. But the gang is quickly forced to run from sugar ray, though they get Daphne in a deleted scene. Why it was deleted I dunno. Point is Shaggy, Scooby and Mary are all alone.. oh and Mary’s possessed. Shaggy and Scooby argue over it because Shaggy just thinks Scooby is jealous and while he is .. why would he lie about this? He’s as cowardly as you are. But Scooby falls through the floor, and Shaggy is now going solo but luckily finds his friends souls, and eveyrone elses in a massive cool looking vat and frees them all.  Velma, when the demon leaves her and confronts her, finds out sunlight kills the demons and saves Daphne from hers... only to find Fred in her body. Daphne is naturally horrified and we do get a great bodyswapping scene.

Our heroes reconvince on the beach where htey find the Maestro who explains what’s going on to a point, with the gang’s clues filling in the blanks: The ritus, which they stole back earlier, is used for a ritual that will allow the Demons to rule over the earth for “a thousand years of darkness” but it requires a pure soul to work. Cue our big bad talking Scooby into being their willing sacrifice since Scooby dooes not understand what a sacrifice is.  Shaggy naturally rallies the group to go save him after their understandably worried since they usually dealt with weirdos in costumes and not the apocalypse.. well okay Velma and Fred aren’t, Daphne dealt with this kind of thing once a week back in Sunnydale. So they set up a plan to destroy all the demons at once by unleashing the soul bath, setting them all loose and then using a spooky disco ball from one of the attractions rigged up over the ritual area to shine the light in. It’s classic scooby doo. 

Things naturally go wrong as while Shaggy goes to rescue scooby and makes up with him, he’s caught, so are fred and velma and they have to scramble, while Daphne looses a fight with the luchador up top while trying to let the light in to finish the trap. Meanwhile Shaggy saves Scooby’s soul just as Mondovarious sucks it out by shoving the guy.. revealing him to be a robot! DUN DUN DUN. And inside is Scrappy.. which you all probably knew already but try to act suprise who wanted to conquer the world as revenge for the gang abandoning him and because again, in this universe he’s kind of an asshole. He absorbs the souls gathered so far and merges with the damon ritus, because we’re operating on video game rules now apparently, so final boss time.  But we get a great climax as Scrappy chases scooby, Daphne goes buffy on Zarkos ass , and as a result he shatters the glass and lets the light in releasing the disco ball the kill the demons.. man I love that I get to type things like that. Scooby removes the ritus and defeats his nephew and the day is saved. Velma hooks up with random guy, Daphne and Fred get together, I die inside a little and Shaggy and Mary Jane bond. At the press Fred does his good deed for the movie by letting Velma explain things and get the spotlight and the group have firmly reunited. THE END. Overall it’s a solid plot, that works well, comes together in the end and was well put together, it’s more the filling that causes it to tilt back and forth a bit, but overlal outside of the issue I mentioned it’s a good scooby doo plot. While some have pointed out it is similar to zombie island, a case reuniting the gang, the person who brought them there wanting to sacrifice them, or just scooby here, monsters being real, it works because everything else is so different. But since there’s more to break down and it’s easier to give it it’s own section let’s look at...

THE CHARACTERS: NOT HALF BAD, FRED CAN GO FUCK HIMSELF. 

So we’re down to character.. and since there’s a blonde, preeening, selfish, arrogant, sleazy, sexist, obnoxious, loud mouthed, useless elephant in the room, let’s start with Fred. And to quote it’s always sunny....

Yeah so that fury of a thousand crashing waves (Cracks Knuckles): Fred is the worst part of this movie, the worst version of the character across the entire franchise that i’ve seen with the sincre doubt that there is ANY version worse than this. Everything I said above is true and THEN some. He is one of the most unlikable characters i’ve seen in a film that wasn’t INTENDED to be. There’s just NOTHING to like about him. Nothing. He treats his “Friends” like garbage, all four of them: He basically ignores shaggy and scooby at best and treats them as if they were nothing. For Velma he’s your classic power abusing douche who pushes her to the side and often steals the credit for things she did. He’s still a good mystery solver, but he acts like he does all the work to the press and takes all the credit when Velma works as hard as he does if not harder. And worst of all is Daphne, who he basically either treats like some moron who gets kidnapped due to incompetence and not because creepy old dudes want to feel her up, which given the intro is VERY likely the reason she’s the resident victim of the group, and not like a person, or like a pair of boobs and legs he wants to bang or feel up creepily while he’s in her body. For fuck’s sake his reaction to finding out he’s in her body is a creepy and smug “I can see myself naaaakeddd” If that dosen’t make you want to smack him get off my blog. And they get together in the end! 

Who who wanted that. I genuinely want the presumibly original ending where Daphne and Velma hook up and Fred falls off a pier and is never seen again. The acting does not help. While the other four gang members are expertly cast Fred was given to Freddy Prinze Junior, who made a career out of playing arrogant dicks who are somehow the main character so I can’t fault the casting but I can fault that he can’t delver any line without that smug air of trying to be cool douche and it’s at it’s worst with Fred since Fred’s already written as the biggest creepiest douche in the world and Freddy somehow makes it WORSE. He also has zero chemstiry with Daphne, which would be weird given he and Sarah Michelle Gellar had dated for 2 years at this point and as of this writing have been together for 20 overall and have two wonderful kids together... but given how badly written Fred is here, I can’t blame either of them. And i’m sure FPJ is a swell guy, loves his kids loves his wife seems like a really plesant guy, nothing against him as a person, but at least at this point in his career he wasn’t very good. And I am actually planning on trying to seek out one of his later works in his career to see if he’s gotten better in recent years, and willing to give him the benifit of a doubt that he probably has. I just don’t like him here, and while the script does most of the work he only makes it worse.And works before this (Pup Named Scooby Doo) and after this (Mystery Incorperated) would prove you can give fred a personality that’s not dick tip, so fuck this character, fuck the writing.. and I hope Freddy is having a happy halloween with his loving wife and children, seriously I meant it I have nothing against him as a person. A terrible actor can still be a WONDERFUL guy. 

Now that’s thankfully put to bed, let’s pivot over to Shaggy, whose easily the best of the cast. Matthew Lillard looks the part pefectly, has the right combination of heart and goofus and has some great comedic timing. Granted Scream had already proven the guy’s got genuine talent, but still he’s great here and is currently playing Shaggy in most films and productions, except Scoob which.. was far from it’s only mistake but easily the biggest. There’s not much else to say: the guy IS Shaggy and is the only person whose taken up the roll to equal Kasey Casem in it. As for how he’s written.. he’s basically the same and apart from one line of him wanting to leave everyone to their deaths, which feels like it was added later, he’s written really well and is easily the most likeable of the group. 

Scooby is alright. Not the best version but funny and charming enough when he needs to be and while I hated the CGI at one point.. it’s honestly not that bad. It’s not GREAT, but time has actually been very good to it both in how it’s held up and in the fact we’ve gotten SO MUCH WORSE with so much better techlogies. I mean.. Cats exists.. Marmaduke Exists.. the Bill Murray Garfield exists. This was offputting at the time but now it’s just okay. But character wise he’s good and again not much diffrent. 

Velma is the second best casting of the movie. Played by Linda Cardenelli, who i’ve harbored a crush on for a good few decades now and admire mostly for her talent and charm, Linda kills the roll and easily slips into it as easily as Matt did, and while not picking it up full time like he did, still did it a few times afterword and played hot dog water in mystery incorperated, so she did finally get to play a Lesbian Velma it just took a while. And while Velma being gay is kind of sterotyping, it would’ve been nice to have been kept in instead of edited out for bullshit reasons. But overal her character is decent: While she ALSO bullies and belittles daphne like fred, unlike fred it comes less from just being a douche and more from insecurity. As her scene at the bar makes clear she feels undervalued like the other, like the nerd who the cool kids LET hang out with them instead of part of the team. While it dosen’t make her treatment of Daphne OKAY, it makes Velma understandable. We also get Velma Clevage which.. okay not sure if the world needed that but whatever. Point is it’s throughly likeable portryal that I wish got some character growth.  Finally out of the main 5 there’s Daphne, whose alright. Not as good as the other two, as it feels they lean a bit too heavily on her having taken self defense and wanting ot be tougher, but Sarah Michelle Gellar gives her a ton of charm and likeablity that her husband’s character sadly lacks. There’s just a fun, adorable energy to daph that ends up coupling with her buffy style badassery at the end and Sarah plays both beautifully. The script didn’t give her a ton to work with, though that’s the same for all four of htem, but Sarah really made the character work and made her somewhat memorable despite not being as good as Linda or Matthew. Basically not the best, but still a comfortable third ahead of scooby doo and jackass jones. 

As for the rest of the cast, Rowan Attkinson i’ve covered and is utterly fantastic as is the Voodoo Maestro, and both should get hteir own hbo max spinoff together. The minons.. stupid name and luchadoor are decent enough, nothign special but they have presence and do the job of goon well. And Mary Jane is alright.. the joke is WAY too on the nose to be funny and she’s mostly just there to be sweet, but she’s harmless. Not good but not bad.  So finally we have our big bad, Scrappy. And i’m.. mixed about this. On one hand, Scott Innes, who it turns out is also from Missouri good on you dude!, does a terrific job and I couldn’t tell it wasn’t don messick as Scrappy and he plays him as evil great. On the other.. it’s just kinda goofy. Out of all the tips of hte hat to scooby stuff this feels the most over the top. Scrappy was hated, including by james gunn.. so he’s the bad guy. It’s just a bit on the nose, and the twist is pretty easily teligraphed since Scrappy suspciously is mentioned in one scene so him showing up at all is pretty easy to see coming. It’s not terible but it’s not great. His demon minons also just suck.. the designs are wonky and their cgi, unlike scooby and scrappy’s, is just REALLY bad and dated, and even as a kid I never liked them. 

FINAL THOUGHTS:  Scooby Doo is a decent but messy movie. The clashing tones, dated humor and godawful version of fred drag it down at times, and it’s very clear this had a lot of hands in the pot. But.. I still enjoy it. It’s not the best scooby ever, tha’ts mystery incorpeated, but it has great atmosphere, some good ideas, an utterly spectacular with one exception cast, and some really funny jokes. I genuinely feel the film is overhated when it’s a unique, weird and wonderful slice of Scooby. For better or worse there’s no other Scooby doo property quite like it, and that’s what makes it so fun. And it has enough good performances and jokes to smooth out the edges. It’s not the best, it’s a mess.. but sometimes a mess is fun and I like this flim for being a fun mess I can enjoy with my nieces and talk about to all of you. And sometimes that’s all you need.  Thank you for reading this. If you like this you can comission your own review: 5 bucks for a tv episode, 15 for a movie, 10 for an hour long special, and 5 dollars off when you order more than one episode of a show at a time. Just send me a direct message or ask on here and we’ll get started. Until then you can check out my backlog of reviews, check this space every monday for ducktales reviews, and VOTE DAMMIT VOTE. Until we meet again it’s been a pleasure. Play us out Atomic Fireballs, it’s been a wonderful halloween. 

[moviemunchies]

Hellboy (2019) Review

So I finally watched the new Hellboy movie.

I’m a longtime fan of both the comics and the Guillermo del Toro movies. I was bummed when del Toro announced that any hopes of a third movie in his series were dead, and a little skeptical and stressed when immediately afterward Lionsgate declared that they were making a reboot. But they insisted that it would be a more faithful adaptation of the comics; because while the del Toro films are brilliant and wonderful, they are not very good adaptations of the comics. 

And then the first trailer dropped onto the Internet. And it was… not a good trailer. It focused on humor and violence, the former of which was not very good and the latter of which was gratuitous. Neither of those are features of the comics. Furthermore, the trailer worried me because while character names and backstories were from the comics, the details weren’t: they didn’t act like the characters in the comic. Which isn’t necessarily bad, mind you; a movie adaptation doesn’t need to be precisely like the source material, but the team behind the film claimed it would be accurate to the comics, the trailer with its peppy out-of-place music and terrible comedy and characters that were in-name only versions of the comics characters… the trailer made it look like a bad movie, and I had concerns.

Then the film came out, and reviews came out. They weren’t great. Listen, I don’t think you should put too much stock in review or Rotten Tomatoes; if you’re interested in a movie, you should go see it and form your own opinions. But I don’t think it’s always worthwhile ignoring them. Because the problems described by critics were exactly the things I had anticipated from the trailers. I still resolved to see the movie, but I had less urgency than I really should have. Because by the time I decided I’d go and see it, it was no longer in theaters. 

Whoops!

And because the library system here often makes it hard to put new releases on hold, it took forever before I was able to get my hands on the DVD. But I finally did, and I finally saw the movie, and, uh

It’s a bad movie.

Alright I’ll try to put a positive spin on this first: it has some okay action scenes. It’s got some good design and visuals. And if you’re a fan of the Hellboy comics, maybe you’ll get some joy from seeing some of that stuff on screen.

And that’s kind of it.

I’ve heard some people say, “At least the acting from the lead is good!” I’m going to have to chalk that up to a Your Mileage May Vary thing, because I didn’t find any of the acting in this movie to be particularly outstanding. It’s not terrible, mind you, but there was nothing in it that made me say, “Wow, David Harbour did a fantastic job!” At most, there were some performers who looked like they had fun on set.  Maybe it’s because the acting is betrayed by terrible scripting.

I don’t want to compare this movie to the comics it’s adapted from, because you shouldn’t constantly compare an adaptation to its source material; they’re separate texts. But the makers of the movie kept inviting that comparison. And yeah, you can see from which characters are present and where the plot takes cues from comics, but it rings hollow. “We have Ben Daimio!” Yeah, but you made him British, gave him a different personality, and made his werejaguar form a powerup rather than a curse that’s the worst thing to happen to the BPRD. “We have Alice Monaghan!” Yeah, but instead of an Irish woman who doesn’t age and has a strange connection with the faeries, she’s a British woman that talks to dead people. It’s the shape of the story and the characters, but with different substance. Which wouldn’t be bad if the substance was actually, y’know, good.

Another problem was this film claimed it was going back to the horror genre, instead of the dark fantasy of Guillermo del Toro’s films (again, claiming this was a callback to the comics). But if that’s the case, then it’s the worst kind of horror. There’s barely anything atmospheric about the scenes. This is not the subtle, gothic horror the comics have, or the chilling Lovecraftian horror it delves into. It’s just monsters tearing people limb from limb whenever they’re on screen, spraying blood everywhere. It’s not scary, and it’s disturbing that it happens so often. The film seems to think it’s cool, waving its violence in your face like a child showing you a new toy. But this wasn’t made by children, so it’s just annoying. 

The plot isn’t strong either. It’s adapted from my favorite arc in the comics, but it’s one of the penultimate stories, so using it as a starting point for a film makes very little sense and has the movie doing the film equivalent of cramming before the exam. So often Hellboy will arrive somewhere, and someone will explain who they are and some part of critical backstory, usually with a flashback sequence. So much of this movie is made up of flashbacks, and I’m not sure why. Why did they choose to tell a story that relies so much on previous information, instead of just doing movies about one of those flashbacks?

All of this I might be able to handwave if I liked the characters enough, but I don’t. Hellboy is a whiny, annoying dick who keeps making “witty” comments that make you want to hit him. You know the kind of guy (and it’s usually a guy in my experience) who just won’t stop cracking jokes, almost all of which are not funny, and refuses to shut up no matter what’s going on? That’s how Hellboy is in this movie. The few moments he does get serious feel heavy-handed and tacked on.

He’s also really dumb. He gets easily distracted, and when the Blood Queen talks to him for the first time about how life’s not fair for people like them, he immediately starts whining about how people think he’s a monster and how the bloodthirsty vampires and zombies and demons he’s killed are his “brothers and sisters.” Early on the Osiris Club pretty much admits point blank that they’re sworn to kill him, and then he gets surprised when they stab him in the back.

The side characters aren’t much better. Alice is the annoying spunky girl who Hellboy keeps around by virtue of being the one character other than Bruttenholm who doesn’t want him dead on sight. Daimio is alright, but he’s just a grumpy surly douchebag who’s there to learn that Hellboy’s not so bad after all and doesn’t actually contribute anything plot-wise. Bruttenholm is--

[rubs head]

Look, okay: Ian McShane as Trevor Bruttenholm is such a weird choice that it boggles my mind. They’re going a different direction with the character. Okay, fine. But the way Ian McShane plays him looks like it’s going for the ‘stern and distant father who ultimately cares about his sone more than anything in the world even if he’s a bit of a dick about it.’ Except what they end up getting with his performance is just ‘he’s a dick.’ And his relationship with Hellboy is supposed to be the emotional center of the movie. 

I think, at its core, the movie is trying to distance itself from the Guillermo del Toro films. Which again, wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t for the fact that they do it in the worst ways possible. This film wants to not to repeat the kindly old man Bruttenholm of del Toro’s Hellboy? Let’s make him a bristly douchebag! Getting away from the Hellboy and Liz love story that’s not in the comics anyway? Let’s not have a romance subplot (which is fine!) and instead add a female companion that’s annoying! And instead of an origin story, like with del Toro’s first film, it gives a quick summation of Hellboy’s backstory twenty minutes into the story and doesn’t bother explaining much other than he’s destined to end the world. For Reasons.

They could have made a Hellboy movie that was all of the things they wanted AND a good film. I think it’s definitely possible to make a movie that’s closer to the original comics, and completely different from the del Toro films, was rife full of horror elements, and was a great movie all rolled into one. But that isn’t this movie. This movie’s a mess of a project that makes me shake my head.

I can only recommend if you’re a fan of the original comics and are curious to see how it all went wrong, or to see some of the monsters from the comic art brought to life on screen. But for everyone else? Steer clear. It’s not worth your time or attention. 

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Hidden Gems of the Silver Screen (And, to a Lesser Extent, the Telly)

It can’t have escaped your notice that the majority of my more recent posts (and fuck knows I’m not posting regularly at the moment) are about movies and TV. The reason for that is pretty simple: 2019 has, surprisingly, yielded some great movies and TV... and also some really torrid shite. On the one hand, films like Ma, Brightburn and The Perfection continue to breathe new life into the horror genre. On the other hand, sci-fi as a cinematic and televised thing continues to ignore its actual audience in favour of sniffing its own farts in a sound-proof chamber designed specifically for next-level virtue-signalling. One thing I will say about the dreck of 2019 is that it’s interesting dreck, at least so far. Another Life, for example, isn’t just bad: it’s mind-bogglingly, fascinatingly bad, as though someone set out to make the worst TV series imaginable and accidentally created a portal to another dimension made entirely of crap.

With all the amazingly wonderful and transifxingly terrible visual media on offer lately, it’s easy to forget that there’s a rich repository of films and TV series from just a few years ago that you’ve probably never watched. You see if you, like me, are a snooty, card-carrying member of the elitist intelligentsia, you probably missed films and TV series that looked dumb as soup on the surface on the grounds that they weren’t worth your time. Luckily for you, I’ve dived nose-first into the detritus of our dying culture, so you don’t have to, and I’ve ferreted out the diamonds from the pig-swill. Without further ado, I’d therefore like to present my list Easily Overlooked Gems.

1. Mandy The phrase “Nicholas Cage stars in a sword-and-sorcery rape/revenge thriller” does not inspire confidence. It’s therefore easy to ignore Mandy and the promptly forget it ever existed. Which is a shame, because it’s kind of a work of genius. The plot is exactly what you’d expect: a cult kidnaps, rapes and kills Cage’s girlfriend, Mandy, and Cage sets out on a mission of revenge culminating in a blood-bath. The nature of the revenge quest is what puts a sting in the film’s tail- or tale, if you’re feeling puntastic. You see, a lot of the bad guys exist in a constant hallucinatory haze after taking a drug that sent them mad after one dose. In order to fight on their level, Cage has to take a dose too. As a result, the world around him slowly but surely transforms into a nightmare landscape that looks like a cross between a D&D illustration and the cover of a heavy metal album and his grubby, personal mission of fury takes on the unmistakable resonance of a Conan-esque hero’s quest. By the end of the film, you have to wonder if Cage has actually slipped into some sort of alternate dimension or if he’s just lost his game-pieces completely. In places, it’s nearly as painful to watch as Landmine Goes Click (crikey, there’s one for the history buffs) but it looks and feels like Beyond the Black Rainbow. Worth your attention just because of how weird it is. I give it a solid four-out-five decapitated rapists.

2. Baby Driver Nothing about Baby Driver suggested it would be a good film: the way it was advertised as a car-chase movie trying to be cute; the stupid title; the fact that it came and went through cinemas like a fart in the night. Which is a shame, because it’s secretly brilliant. It’s a highly stylised crime film populated with the archest archetypes money can buy (to the point where some of the dialogue has a weirdly beat-poetic feel to it). It’s saturated colour palette and off-beat affect actually have something of a full-colour Jim Jarmusch flick about them. The hook, of course, is that the lead character (only ever referred to as Baby, because he’s got a punchably youthful face) has tinnitus and therefore has to listen to music constantly to drown at the buzzing in his head. The practical upshot of this is that a) every single scene is overlayed with surprisingly great and situationally appropriate music and b) he goes through life like he’s always dancing, so his way of moving lends to the film’s easy-going sense of flow. It also explains where his preternatural driving skills come from (I mean, not really, but within the context of the plot): he’s used to sliding effortlessly into patterns and rhythms because of the music thing. All of this could make a terrible film, of course, but execution is everything and, to everyone’s surprise, especially mine, this flick was executed with an astonishing level of panache. I rate it ten out of ten grizzly motor way pile ups.

3. Nightflyers It’s not just films that get overlooked as the tide of culture washes back and forth, like a great big sea of effluent. TV series also vanish unduly into the dustbin of history. Case in point, the criminally underappreciated Nighrflyers: Netflix pre-Another Life sci-fi offering that was actually good. It’s a pretty classic set-up: a group of mismatched wing-nuts on a spaceship, all of whom have secrets that that will threaten to tear them apart while they try to make contact with an alien life-form. What elevates Nightflyers is just how fuck-uped the cast are. There’s an angry British psychic whose spent his whole life in captivity in case he goes full Scanners on somebody’s head, a guy who only ever appears as a hologram for reasons too twisted to explain here, his evil mother whose uploaded her mind to the ship’s computer and gone batshit crazy, a genetic superbeing and a hacker who can send her mind into computers via a dodgy implant and who may or may not be drifting out of touch with the human condition. It’s great. 6 and half billion out of 7 billion monkeys, boiling in the void.

4. Hardcore Henry No, I don’t know who thought that title was a good idea either, but the point is that Hardcore Henry has no motherfucking right to kick as much arse as it does. It was clearly made on a budget that would embarrass a Youtube shampoo commercial, but it just flat-out rocks. Shot entirely in first-person, it follows the adventures of a mute cyborg as he seeks revenge against the bastard psychic entrepreneur who first built him then tried to kill him. Along the way, his main ally is a dude who keeps dying and coming back to life in a series of identical bodies but with radically different personalities and haircuts (this is eventually explained, but I’m not going to spoil it for you). It’s premise is demented, it’s surprisingly well-choreographed and its soundtrack is an aphrodisiac for your ears. Also, Tim Roth is in it, so that’s just yer seal of quality right there. It came out to a lot of fanfare and many, many cinema trailers back in the day and was then promptly forgotten about as soon as it launched. So I’m dragging it kicking and screaming back into the limelight. It’s on Netflix right now, so go watch it. I rate it a solid 11 out of 15 creepy duplicates of Tim Roth.

5. Upgrade Another lesser-known film about a cyborg. Unlike Henry, however, this cyborg’s life doesn’t so much ‘rock’ as ‘suck balls’. He gets crippled and then ends up with a sentient computer chip in his head that allows him to remote-control his own body despite not having a working spine anymore. Naturally, his experimental tech attracts the attention of some unsavoury characters and he and his brain-chip have to work together to figure out what’s going on, often through a series of ultra-violent, gory fight-scenes that horrify the protagonist himself. Of course, all might be well, except that the head-chip is a homicidal little shit that clearly has its own agenda. I give it at least 0000 0111 out of 0000 1001 painstakingly restored vintage kill-bots.

6. The Tick The Tick isn’t as overlooked as everything else on this list, especially since there have been a couple of previous televised incarnations of the franchise to lay the groundwork. However, I still feel like the modern iteration doesn’t quite get the love it deserves, so I’m throwing it out here. Following the adventures a mad, amnesiac and possibly stupid superhero and his neurotic sidekick, The Tick explores a world where superheroes aren’t the paragons of good from classic comics, the corrupt psychotics of The Boys or Watchmen, or the eternally struggling, walking moral life-lessons of modern cinema. Instead, they’re just ordinary people operating at various levels of competence/incompetence and mental illness and working within a bureaucratic, wildly inefficient framework. That might not sound like a recipe for a successful TV series, but it really is. Drawing out the mundane, human side of heroes and villains against the backdrop of cataclysmic, civilisation-threatening events makes for infinitely compelling and very, very funny viewing. It’s kind of doing for the superhero genre what Futurama did for sci-fi a few years back. It’s also where the phrase and/or popular song ‘seven billion monkeys boiling in the void’ comes from. My rating is four out of five sapient, homosexual boats (which will make sense when you watch it).

7. The Void Amid the high-budget horror extravaganzas of recent years, it’s easy to forget about the void, which feels like the best story H.P. Lovecraft never wrote and looks like David Chronenberg tried to adapt a Heironimous Bosch painting... in the ‘80s. The actual plot concerns a group of people getting trapped in a hospital by murderous cultists and discovering dark secrets and, arguably, a whole other dimension in its basement. You’re not exactly there for the plot though: The Void is a mood-piece and an exercise in visual FX craftsmanship. You’re there to drink in the atmosphere and see what each new cosmic horror looks like. I am delighted to award it ten out of ten unspeakable whisperers in the darkness. That’s enough for two barbershop quartets, an emcee and a supporting act.

8. Happy Death Day It’s Groundhog Day but as a horror film starring a really annoying lass in her late teens has to keep dying horribly until she learns to stop being such a terrible person... and also kill her murderer with a little help from her newly-minted, non-cunty friend. There’s a sequel that I haven’t seen yet, but the original is a low-key, oft-overlooked delight. I give it 9 out of 11 suspiciously similar corpses.

[vanilla-blessing]

Why you should check out summer 2019 anime despite my previous blog post

I was mostly wrong about this season here’s qb’s revised

Hype rankings for Summer 2019

Cop Craft (Funimation)

COP CRAFT DRAGNET MIRAGE RELOADED is the biggest surprise of the season for me. Coming from Millepensee, the studio and director team known for such Art as Teekyuu seasons 4-9 and Berserk 2016, this extremely sincere and wildly stupid Americanized take on anime fantasy adventure colliding with a hard-boiled cop drama is surprisingly highly enjoyable to watch for both intended and unintended reasons. 

The intended appeal of COP CRAFT DRAGNET MIRAGE RELOADED hinges on a well-realized mashup of genres from a long running novel series, the buddy-cop teamup of an anime girl with a magical sword and a gruff but kind-hearted cop, and the dramatic thrill of one of the weirder spinoffs of law&order. The show promises an interesting setting where a magical portal ring to the fairy forest where anime-chans are real has naturally slotted into the organized crime of a New Yorkish city, resulting in a fresh take on well-trodden ground, and it actually kind of succeeds at this. In practice, watching loose cannon cops shoot guns at wizards while busting a drug ring who sling fairy dust is maybe the dumbest thing I’ve seen in years, but the story is so overly detailed, thought out, and delivered without an ounce of irony, unlike the recent terrible movie from Netflix that also attempted to do this premise almost word for word, that it wraps around to legitimately compelling. It also helps that this anime adaptation is being scripted by the novel’s author.

The unintended benefit of watching COP CRAFT DRAGNET MIRAGE RELOADED is partly how completely absurd the words they are saying appear in English, producing some of the funniest out of context screenshots imaginable, the animation in execution ratchets between cool, frenetic action that contains distinct shades of a certain tennis club, and the hysterically awful cg that you’ve come to expect and love from the only team capable of producing Berserk 2016. When it’s good, it’s good, and when it’s bad, it’s incredible. 

In short, COP CRAFT DRAGNET MIRAGE RELOADED is a two-for-one deal of the best of both bad and good anime. It’s also getting an English dub by Funimation and I can’t even imagine how good literally any line read from that will be.

The Demon Girl Next Door (Hidive, VRV) 

Despite my earlier protests, this is actually totally fine, good even. It avoids the fanservice problem I predicted completely and instead sets a relaxed comedic tone that quietly highlights small gags in a way that feels natural, which sounds impossible but they found the only director who could pull it off (Hiroaki Sakurai, known for some quite good comedies like Cromartie High School and Majokko Tsukune-chan). The content is actually pretty funny when delivered in a non-hyperactive way, since a story about a girl who is bullied into making friends after her family circumstances tell her to murderize a magical girl, told naturally, hits that level of low surrealism that works. Her friends also take this in stride, encouraging her to use this as an opportunity to go out more, open up socially, and suffer for their amusement. The magical girl in question, after heroically saving Yuko from being run over by a truck, also encourages her to defeat her and drain all of her blood, because Shadow Mistress Yuko is so much of a non-threat that Momo takes advantage of their impending ultimate confrontation to trick her into being her gym buddy. It takes place in a post-season magical girl anime landscape where the world has already been saved, normal people are used to weird episodic junk, and hitting demon puberty just another thing your friends will tease you over. 

It still probably shouldn’t be full episode length, but it actually does something with that length, and is definitely the least painful iteration of this kind of slower, long-form comedy that you don’t usually see in anime because it’s usually a terrible idea. Predicting this would end up like other entries in the incredibly cursed magical girl parody genre was a safe bet, but this anime is the rare exception and it’s actually worth checking out. 

Given (Crunchyroll, VRV) is on the noitamina block and it’s about boys in a rock band who might become more than friends. You’ve probably tuned out at this point and you’d be right because you know exactly the tone and style of this from that description but it’s executed well and written well and directed okay, so if you’d like this sort of thing try it out. There’s an interesting range of ages (the band has members in high school, college, and graduate school), a fun sense of humor, and the music is a standout in a season that has Carole and Tuesday in it, so that’s something.  

I forgot to mention Fruits Basket (Crunchyroll, VRV, Funimation) in my last post because i didn’t know it was continuing. It’s hitting its “stride” in being massively depressing so check that out still. It’s tragic and great. 

Granbelm (Crunchyroll, VRV) is a magical girl show I watched on a whim and turns out it’s actually a magical mecha battle royale. The color scheme is overly bright and the mechs look squashed, but it has girls snarling and yelling their heads off summoning beam swords so it’s different from what I expected. It’s got a G-Gundam energy with the multiregional cast and how the mecha fights are playing out, so if you’re fans of that, and magical girl, this is both at once. The second episode introduced a unique motivation for the main character, that piloting the mech helped her get over crushing nihilism, and I want to see where that goes, if at all. Combining the sometimes bleak and fun-sucking writing of overly dark and philosophical magical girl with what I can only describe as Domon Kasshu energy is a choice and I would like to see where Granbelm is going with that.

Misc variable hype list

O Maidens in Your Savage Season (Hidive) 

This looks gorgeous and it may be the most Mari Okada thing ever written, move over Dragon Pilot, but the manga has some uncomfortable elements that would translate poorly to anime, in terms of keeping me watching it.

Crunchyroll actually did pick up Symphogear AXZ and XV, against my pessimistic attitude. 

Ensemble Stars (Funimation) is okay.

Fire Force’s animation is fire af but the girl who lives in her own hellish fanservice series is about to be introduced and this part of the series is kind of slow so it would take a lot of effort to elevate the material until it gets to the “good stuff”. David production seems willing to give it their best shot though, so we’ll see.

Vinland Saga started slow, quiet, chronological and ultimately strong, but it took multiple episodes to get there, which is why they aired 3 episodes in the first week. I think I still prefer the high octane opening chapter of the manga, but they’ll get there soon enough so it’ll be a non-issue in a few months anyway. I recommended this before and I still do. WIT studio is clearly playing for the longer game, setting themes that encompass the whole series first rather than the fleeting themes of watch the bad ass viking slice the mans, but it is currently missing the energy people associated with that opening volume or two. It will probably pay off though.

[the-desolated-quill]

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

[bbclesmis]

David Oyelowo on 'Les Miserables,' Making Directorial Debut With Oprah Winfrey

The Emmy- and Globe-nominated actor, who directs 'The Water Man' with Winfrey as co-producer, also discusses taking on the most iconic and tragic antagonist in literature and not wanting to be "the token person of color" on the PBS series.

David Oyelowo has always been a fan of the Les Misérables musical, but it wasn't until he picked up Andrew Davies' script that the star — who's been Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated for his work on HBO's Nightingale and in Ava DuVernay's Selma — fully appreciated the villainous Inspector Javert. "There was so much more depth and complexity to this character than I ever realized from any iteration I had seen," he says. Oyelowo, 43, spoke with THR about executive producing and starring on PBS' six-part Les Mis miniseries (which debuted April 14) and developing his directorial debut, The Water Man, a fantasy drama co-produced by Oprah Winfrey — "or Mum O, as I like to call her."

Javert is one of the most iconic and tragic antagonists in literature and theater. How did you key into his psychology?

One couldn't earn the way Javert comes to an end in such a dramatic, violent and self-inflicted way without a very clear runway and emotional, psychological and spiritual journey. The biggest clue to me was that he was born in prison to criminal parents, yet he is now a man who detests criminality to an obsessive degree. You go, "Well, it's fine to hate criminality, but to be so obsessed with Jean Valjean­ — what's going on there?" Victor Hugo actually based Jean Valjean and Javert on the same person, this gentleman he knew who had both sides within himself. To that extent, Javert transposed all the criminality he loathed in his own upbringing onto Valjean, and that justifies his obsessive pursuit of him. But when he recognizes that this man isn't just criminal, he is worthy of redemption, he is someone who somehow has been able to transcend his criminality; he realizes that this pursuit has been futile. The criminality that he loathes is still within himself, which is why he chooses to destroy himself.

Did you and Dominic West know each other before this?

We didn't know each other well. He's such a lovely guy and incredibly funny. I had to do as much as I could to stay away from him while we were shooting. For me, I need to inhabit and feel every tendril of the character, and I couldn't entertain the idea of being jokey-jokey with him and then go into the level of acrimony between us. There's such a cat-and-mouse element to Javert and Valjean's relationship that was so satisfying to play. As an actor, a lot of the time you are trying to find the subtext to a scene, to imbue it with interest. With this, it was absolutely inherent. These characters had so much history that was always present in every scene they had together. But we've become great friends ever since.

Was using the music from the stage adaptation ever a consideration?

It never was, no. We all discussed that if we're going to do this, there has to be a real reason why this should exist so soon after Tom Hooper's [2012] filmic musical. We wanted to make it a much dirtier, grittier, immediate, politically prescient version. Being a producer, I didn't want to be the token person of color within it. I was very clear that we need to have that be something organic and truthful to the time. We've done a terrible job of representing just how many people of color were inhabiting Europe at that time. And not just in subjugated roles. Anyone who's read Tom Reiss' The Black Count will know that Thomas Alexandre Dumas was a general in the French army in the late 1700s [one of the highest-ranking men of African descent ever in a European army]. So, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Javert was indeed someone like me. You want people to see themselves onscreen.

I've read that you've specifically asked your reps to seek out roles where you might not be first in mind. For this miniseries, did your casting come first or did you initially come on as an executive producer? Did you feel like you had to fight for the role at all?

I signed on as an actor first. They approached me and I was actually the first person to be cast in it. But yes, what you mentioned is absolutely true. Early on in my career I felt the need to say to my representatives, “Put me out for roles that are not race specific.” Because the truth of the matter was, the more interesting roles were inherently going to white actors. I am just so elated to now be going into a phase of my career where I am being approached with those kind of roles. It's not something necessarily I'm going to seek out. So yeah, Les Mis is something I was approached with, and that is incredibly gratifying because a decade ago, 15 years ago, I just don't know if that would have been the case.

As an EP on the series, was there a time where you felt like you had to take off your actor hat and fix a problem? Or did you feel like it was generally smooth sailing throughout the shoot?

It was pretty much smooth sailing. Tom Shankland, our director, had such a handle on the piece. You couldn't ask him a single question that he didn't have an answer for both on the basis of the script and the book itself. I was so impressed by him. Our producer Chris Carey also was just a monster when it came to making everything work in a beautiful way. For me, my primary function was just keeping on it when it came to representation within the piece. I think that is when sometimes things slip within the cracks. We all go to the movies and watch TV in the hope of seeing ourselves represented. We all have bias, we all lean into things that are more akin to our own experience. And of course, I have a bias toward seeing people of color in something like this. So it was very helpful, I think, to have me around to say, "Guys, let's remember the nature of the piece we're doing. We need more extras of color here. Let's not forget what we're trying to do here." Some of the development of the script I was very much a part of, and then a lot of the distribution and the marketing and the release dates and all that kind of stuff. Postproduction is a big side of getting a six-hour piece to be its best self. I got my hands quite dirty with that process as well.

This spring, your slate is pretty packed in addition to Les Mis. You had Relive debut at Sundance, you're in production on Peter Rabbit 2, and you have Come Away and Chaos Walking in post. How are you doing?

It's a very, very good question. I literally was in Sydney doing Peter Rabbit. We then went to London last week, and I'm now here in New York. Then, I leave here to go into preproduction on my directorial debut, The Water Man, in about three days. I have an incredible wife who makes it all work. We actually run our production company together. We have four children and they are with me a lot of the time. We scheduled the shoot for The Water Man over the summer holidays so that they can be with me. I really, really love what I get to do, and I don't take it for granted at all. I'm just trying to have as much fun and tell as many great stories as I can, while I can. But my wife and I have a two-week rule. We're never apart for more than two weeks, and so that means a lot of flying, and a lot of crazy scheduling.

You must have a lot of frequent flyer miles.

I have an enormous amount. So if you ever have any trips that you're planning, please hit me up because I have plenty.

Why did you select The Water Man for your directorial debut?

I was looking for a film that was akin to the ones I loved growing up — E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind or films like The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, The Goonies. They don't have to be $200 million extravaganzas, but they can have a fantasy element and be grounded in realism and truth with poignant themes. This script by Emma Needell was on the Black List. I fought hard and thankfully got it, and myself and Oprah Winfrey — or "Mum O," as I like to call her — came on as producers to develop it. Another director was going to direct it, but he fell out. My fellow producers turned to me and said, "Well, you've been working on this passionately for five years. Do you want to do it?" I took two weeks to really mull that over.

What was the deciding factor in those two weeks that made you say, "Yes, I will; I’m ready"?

Realizing that I was passionate enough about the story to dedicate as much time to making a film as is necessary. And the fact that the story is just so moving to me. It's about an 11-year-old boy who's on the hunt for a mythical figure who he believes can save his mother from an illness. I also love the fact that it is an adventure movie. Basically, this boy teams up with this girl and they go into a forest hunting for this mythical figure called “the Water Man.” So it has elements of Stand by Me and Pan's Labyrinth, both films I deeply love. I'm always looking for opportunities to scare myself, and this is the most dramatic example of that I have had in my career thus far. So I jumped in.

Was there ever a seed earlier on where directing first sprouted in your mind?

Very early on. It's something I've always wanted to do. I remember seeing Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and that being one of the earliest moments. I thought, “Whoa. That guy directed that and is in it. How on Earth is that possible?" And then he did it again with Hamlet. I think the seed just kept on being replanted of the idea of doing it one day. So when the opportunity presented itself, it had been long gestating.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-oyelowo-les-miserables-making-directorial-debut-oprah-1213657

[fibula-rasa]

October 2018 in Review

October was way more hectic than I thought it would be and I didn’t watch as many movies as I usually do. I spent a week in Korea (a post about my visit to the Korean Film Archive will be up soon!) And I was motivated to watch a lot of new movies (a.k.a. was on a long-haul flight).

You may have already heard the news, but the irreplaceable Filmstruck is shuttering this month after two wonderful years. Fair warning: I’ll probably spend a good deal of this month (November) trying to watch as many new-to-me movies in my queue as I can. I think I’ll try and write them up quickly over on my letterboxd, we’ll see!

Also, though The Vamps was intended to be an October series, the month’s general hecticness meant I didn’t get the final essay finished before the end of the month. So, in November, you all have that post to look forward to. (See if you can guess who it is! Hint: she’s a Dane.)

The reviews below are essentially transcriptions of the notes I took right after watching the films. They’re presented in the order in which I watched them. 

Enough blathering, on to the movies. BELOW THE JUMP!

Dolls (1987)

29 May 1987 | 77 min. | Color

As a long-time devotee of the Band family’s productions, I’m always down for a Band film I haven’t seen. (When I was a kid, we probably spent a dozen times what it would have cost to buy Pet Shop (1994) renting it from Dollar Video.)

Yes, I did talk about haunted doll movies in my last roundup but this one was more fun, okay? The cast of characters are a great larger-than-life assortment of weirdos. I wish that 1980s English punks would just keep popping up in horror films after the 1980s. I particularly liked the performance of the little girl’s father. In most other movies, it would be a terrible performance, but in Dolls, it’s pitch perfect.

Dolls is a fairytale story that creates the atmosphere of a child’s viewpoint. The dolls are scary and do scary things, but, of course, they can be reasoned with.

As with many Full Moon movies, Dolls had a great balance of scares and campy humour. The doll designs are gross and fun–especially their wet, bloodshot eyes.

Dolls is a great choice for someone who watched a lot of Are You Afraid of the Dark? growing up and wants a “grown-up” version of that.

Funland (1987)

16 October 1987 | 98 min. | Color

After watching Dolls on Amazon Prime, this film was recommended. From the plot description and the featured image, we expected a fun slasher film. And, with William Windom (who I’m pretty sure took time off of Murder, She Wrote to make this movie!!!) in the cast, we couldn’t resist. What we got was… a… comedy? I guess?

There’s no doubting that there are some talented performers in this movie, but it’s just not funny. The only reason I’m writing about Funland at all is that it’s a good example of the kind of cheesy movie where you can see what could have been a good (or at least more interesting) movie underneath the movie that was actually made.

How exactly do you think: “I’m gonna make a movie about a killer clown fighting mobsters!” and then come up with this movie? I wrote a much longer complaint but, I won’t subject you to it. In short, Funland doesn’t execute its plot very well.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend this one. However, I am curious if any Atlanta natives have feelings about this movie? It seems like it features a lot of locals.

Flying Air Canada

The movie below are what I watched on my plane journeys to and from Seoul. I was flying Air Canada and I need to rant for a sec before moving on to my thoughts on the films.

There are a lot of reasons why captions (or subtitles, if you’re British) are necessary. They’re needed by lots of people, including people who aren’t d/Deaf or hard of hearing. If you want to learn more about why captions are good Jessica Kellgren-Fozard has you covered.

Personally, I have sensory processing disorder (SPD). This prompts me to have captions on when I watch most things. At home, I do this because not every movie or TV show I watch has decent sound mixing. It seems to be an art a lot of film/video makers are neglecting nowadays. Ho hum. I keep captions on so I don’t need to constantly change the volume. On a plane, my SPD is significantly worse because the noise of the plane is so loud that there’s little to no chance of me catching dialogue without raising the volume too high for my own comfort. Unlike the airlines I travel on within the US, Air Canada’s captioned offerings are practically nonexistent. That’s why so many of the movies I ended up watching were foreign-language (or ASL) films–they came with English subtitles.

Now, Air Canada, listen: Most of the movies you had on offer are definitely available with captions elsewhere. Even in theaters they likely had open-caption screenings. What is the deal? Seriously.

Anyway, sometimes I take for granted that we do some things right in America.

Okay, back to movies.

Mary Shelley (2017)

9 September 2018 | 120 min. | Color

This film didn’t have captions, which honestly might have weighed negatively on my experience of it. I was excited to see Mary Shelley. Mary and Percy Shelley are two of my absolute favorite literary historical figures and I love their work. This movie was a let down. It seemed like it was meant to be a character piece but the characters felt more like types than people. Also, don’t get me wrong here: I give no ground to fuckboys, but the depiction of Percy Shelley felt particularly oversimplified.

A Quiet Place (2017)

9 March 2018 | 90 min. | Color

Everybody raving about this movie was totally right. Definitely check it out if you haven’t already. Even if you’re not big on horror, it’s worth a shot.

How Long Will I Love U (2018)

18 May 2018 | 101 min. | Color

Scrolling through Air Canada’s film options, I got the feeling that time-travel romance is pretty popular right now in China and Korea? I think I picked the right one to watch in How Long Will I Love U. The premise put me in mind of The Lake House (2006), a movie I don’t like but can never resist watching when it’s on TV. This movie is a lot better than The Lake House. The premise is pretty cool and the plot is spurred on by a proper sci-fi concept. The leads are very cute together. I love that the main characters both kinda suck but become better people in getting to know one another. The special effects are good looking, conceptually fun, and not excessive.

I highly recommend this one. It’d probably be a great date movie or a Friday-night-with-some-Chunky-Monkey-and-a-cuddly-pet movie.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable — Chapter 1 (2017)

4 August 2017 | 119 min. | Color

Listen. I have friends who are big fans of the JoJo manga and anime. I have never read any of the manga and couldn’t get past the first episode of the anime. That said, when I saw Takashi Miike directed this live-action adaptation of a story arc in the multi-generational JoJo series, I hit that play button right fast. Then, to my surprise, I enjoyed it! I often struggle with the visuals in live-action adaptations of anime and manga, but I loved how Diamond is Unbreakable played with the characters’ unique styling and design. The superhero-like story drew me in a lot faster than the anime and might just get me to look into some of the manga.

This movie might be a hard sell for a lot of people but if you wanna see something that’s out there and imaginative with supernatural overtones, Diamond is Unbreakable might be fun for you. Don’t worry–it’s easy to follow even if you don’t know who Joseph Joestar is. (Yes, that really is a character’s name.)

Un Traductor / A Translator (2018)

19 January 2018 | Color

I had no idea that following the Chernobyl disaster, some of the victims were sent to Cuba for medical treatment. I also had no idea that the program continued until 2011?! So, Un Traductor was a modern history lesson for me! Un Traductor is a model film for propaganda filmmaking–and I mean that in a fully complimentary way. The film does an admirable job of communicating how life for Cubans changed with the fall of the Soviet Union and how they adjusted to persevere.

You can probably gather from what you just read that this isn’t a fun watch, but it’s worthwhile if you have any interest in modern Cuban history.

A Casa Tutti Bene / There is No Place Like Home (2018)

14 February 2018 | 105 min. | Color

I don’t have a lot to say about this one frankly. It’s a decent family dramedy. Massimo Ghini and Sabrina Impacciatore both turn in good performances. *shrugs in Italian*

That’s all for this month’s roundup! Are you all ready for Noirvember? How about Kicksgiving? If you’re a Filmstruck subscriber, what are you marathoning this month?

[kingofthereunitedkingdom]

All right my dudes, let’s talk about this Amazon LOTR series. (Aka, the two cents that no one asked for ever. Seriously, all opinions are valid, I’m not here to fight, this is just what I think. Anyways.) Please read til the end.

I for one was initially very very upset. Because I don’t trust Amazon, okay? Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy was a once in a lifetime miracle. Him and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens poured their heart and souls into making the best possible adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpiece that they could. Everyone on that production, from Weta to the stunt people to the cast to Howard Shore were committed to bringing Tolkien’s vision to life. Was it perfect? No. Was it as close to perfect as we’re gonna get? Yes! There’s a reason it got all the Oscars. People who think that Peter Jackson’s LOTR wasn’t faithful enough are so deluded that it boggles my mind. It’s like people think he could just snap his fingers and turn the book page by page into exactly what you envisioned in your head when you read it. Modern day filmmaking has so many constrictions it’s not even funny. Producers, lawyers, marketers, auditors, people giving the project money who in return are in it for the money. And these are the people that Jackson had to work with in order to get the film made on the scale it was, rather than a home movie shot on a camcorder in his backyard. With this in mind, it’s a miracle that the films were as amazing as they were. You should actually all go watch the behind the scenes appendices footage on the extended edition DVDs. If you can’t get your hands on the DVDs, a lot of it is actually up on YouTube. The part where they talk about the process of converting book to script is very fascinating and explains a lot. Tolkien did not write these books with a movie in mind. The pacing is a screenwriter’s nightmare, he spends a lot of time on details we don’t necessarily need, and the time frame is positively loopy. You say Frodo was thirty three when he received the ring and fifty when he left the Shire, I say did we need to see Frodo moping around in the Shire for seventeen years? You say that the Fellowship’s travels were rushed, I ask if anyone ever wished they could spend a month in Lothlorien while absolutely nothing happens except resting and crying about Gandalf? I love the books, I truly do. But even I admit that a shot-for-shot adaptation would be awkward and at times difficult to watch.

Now, as for the show in question, do I think that Amazon read the Silmarillion and said ‘wow, let’s spend billions of dollars to make a faithful and heartfelt adaptation!’? Um, no. Somebody in a highrise read that Game of Thrones was ending and realized that now there’s gonna be an open market for that genre of show. Now, who else can think of a series that checks the boxes of fantasy, long and complicated af, pre-existing fan base, and minimal barriers when it comes to obtaining rights? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Tolkien is the million dollar answer (or billion, in Amazon’s case). What gives me hope is (now this might be hearsay, don’t take my word for it because I cannot confirm) that apparently they only have the rights to events that take place before The Hobbit and LOTR. Which is essentially just the Silmarillion and/or the appendices. Now, this could be interesting. The Silmarillion doesn’t have a screen adaptation, so whatever they did would be groundbreaking. There would be nothing to compare it to. But what I’m afraid of is that Amazon would be afraid of it. The Silmarillion is a lot to chew. It’s wordy, the characters would be hard to adapt on screen, and it would be really hard to market it because the concept of the Silmarillion has (unfortunately, but truthfully) long been associated with ultimate geekdom.

This is why Amazon is probably going to pick the lower-hanging fruit and reinvent popular characters we already love. I’ve been hearing a lot about how they’re doing it as a young Aragorn prequel. Which, for surface level selfish reasons depresses the heck out of me because Viggo Mortensen is and always will be my Aragorn. If this was happening years ago and they got Viggo to be the character again in a TV show, I’d be all for it. But unfortunately Viggo cannot age in reverse and if they were gonna use him they’d have to use a shit-ton of CGI a la Carrie Fisher in Rogue One which… *shudders* *war flashbacks*. But then again, Viggo has aged remarkably well. Did you see Captain Fantastic? Maybe with some heavy makeup and nice camera angles- Ah, it’s all just a pipe dream anyways. As long as they don’t bring back Stuart Townsend. Cue more shuddering. But I wish Amazon would understand that they’re investing their money in the wrong horse! We don’t want to see Aragorn reinvented! We’re happy with what we have!

Think about it realistically for a minute, in the hypothetical event that this is a young Aragorn TV show. Amazon is a studio giant, trying to establish themselves among other streaming services known for their original TV shows such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. We, as Tolkien fans, understand that Aragorn’s history prior to the events of LOTR is pretty straightforward. He grows up in Rivendell, is informed that he’s Isildur’s heir, goes into the wild to become a Ranger, fights for Rohan, fights for Gondor, falls in love with Arwen, etc. There’s a sixty year block of time between his childhood in Rivendell and the War of the Ring. That can’t possibly all be covered in one show, as hard as they try. They won’t be able to resolve his storyline, because his storyline and character arc get resolved during the War of the Ring. They would have to establish the fact that he’s the heir to the throne of Gondor, establish the fact that he’s conflicted about his destiny, establish the fact that he goes into self-inflicted exile as a Ranger, and then end the show without ever showing the resolution that he eventually does reclaim his throne and his destiny. Unless they were to just bite the bullet and remake the original trilogy. And then there’s the matter of a love interest. Arwen is his first and only love. Their courtship is fast-paced and they go long blocks of time without seeing each other. Noooot very marketable for a mainstream audience. So how are they gonna spice it up? Give Aragorn another love interest? That would literally completely ruin his character. How about no. Make it seem like a lot more happened between Arwen and Aragorn before the War of the Ring? I mean maybe, but how!? They still wouldn’t be able to complete a story arc, because the meat of the changes in their relationship take place during the original trilogy: Him lowkey wanting her to go to Valar and not die for him, her refusing because she believes in their love, their ultimately getting married and her being crowned Queen of Gondor. Again, you can’t give us any of that without remaking the original trilogy! Cue all the annoyed Aragorn faces.

So, that was a lot of negativity. Maybe this is too little too late, but: I remain hopeful. All is not lost. There is still some good in this world, Mr. Frodo! And maybe Amazon will prove me wrong. There may yet be light at the end of this tunnel. We may yet prevail, and get a thoughtful, heartfelt adaptation. Because done right, we could all use with some fresh LOTR content so we can stop rewatching the original trilogy. Tolkien wrote a lot, and the current screen adaptations have barely scratched the surface. As a fandom (and I most definitely include myself in this), we get very protective over our material. I think this is because we are one of the rare few whose material has remained untarnished and stayed behind the line of corporate greed and terrible adaptations (The Hobbit trilogy walked that line like a tight rope but even it managed to escape the true jaws of the beast.) Maybe, just maybe, this Amazon series can be a chance for us all to take a risk. Because if it pays off, you can all call me a fool of a Took and we can grab popcorn and watch a kickass LOTR TV show. And what would be more awesome than that?

So, in conclusion, I have a lot of feelings about this Amazon show. If you made it this far, thanks for bearing with me. We’ve got a wild ride ahead.

[lindsaynsmith]

10 Mind-Bending Cosmic Horror Films

10 Mind-Bending Cosmic Horror Films https://ift.tt/2NMS16d

A peek behind the curtain: this bracket gave us the most trouble out of all the 31 Days of Halloween lists. Definitions were tossed around, examples were given — but the more we tried to define what made a “Cosmic Horror” film, the more confused we got. Which is, of course, deeply, hilariously ironic.

Cosmic Horror is tied in the popular imagination to horror’s racist uncle H.P. Lovecraft, who defined it as “the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” But things start to get confusing when you realize that Lovecraftian Horror and Cosmic Horror aren’t the same thing. And likewise, that merely being set in the cosmos does not a cosmic horror make. All told, Lovecraft’s definition is best: that cosmic horror fundamentally involves a terror predicated on the dislocation and dwarfing of human sense and understanding. Simply put, it is the disorienting horror of bumping up against something you don’t understand. That you can’t understand.

If gazing slack-jawed into the unknowable sounds like a fun night in, have we got the list for you. Keep reading for a look at the top ten cosmic horror films as voted on by Chris Coffel, Kieran Fisher, Brad Gullickson, Rob Hunter, Jacob Trussell, and myself.

10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The dawn of man. We get by with a little help from our friends. Our ancestors took a little bit of knowledge from beyond the infinite and transformed it into a killing blow. From our ability to take the life of another we rose out of the primordial ooze. Our great intelligence transformed into a series of potential catastrophe. A bone club launches into space and orbits the earth with enough firepower to obliterate our third rock from existence. With one small step, we create artificial life and become victim to its judgment. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a staggering work of cinema in which Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke track humanity’s evolution through its great leaps in terrifying technology. Will we ever be worthy of the intelligence gifted upon us? Are our great brains doomed to descend rather than ascend? Is the Star Child a momentous triumph or just a next stride to doomsday? We are but apes forever reaching for the moon – Brad Gullickson

9. The Endless (2017)

What’s effective in The Endless is what is unknown, and for a large part of the movie, everything is unknown. What happened at this UFO death cult so many years ago that made two devotees leave? What is lurking out in the woods that have caused so many earthly anomalies around the community’s campgrounds? And why has no one aged? At the core of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead‘s sci-fi/horror tale are two brothers attempting to make up for the arrested development of their lives, but the scope of the story explodes as their work melds with their past filmography in a wholly unexpected way. Fatalistic and heady, The Endless is a curious look at thoughts and ideas just beyond the spectrum of our imaginations — Jacob Trussell

8. Event Horizon (1997)

A surface glance at Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Event Horizon might seem to argue against its inclusion on this list as rather than face an unknown the characters here are faced with hell. But in addition to the mystery of the black hole — is it a purely scientific anomaly, or is it a gateway to true evil?— it’s clear that these are hells of their own design. They can’t understand or comprehend their fates, and that fear of the unknown is exactly what terrifies the crew members. What is hell, after all, but the things that cause us our own greatest pain? It’s different for each of us, and as characters are subjected to a glimpse into this void their attempt at understanding comes in the form of unique suffering — Rob Hunter

7. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Peter Weir’s gauzy Aussie period piece might not have any of the traditionally tentacled cosmic horror hallmarks. But upon closer inspection, it absolutely fits the bill. Hanging Rock concerns a group of boarding school girls who disappear during a school outing. Time gets funny, and as if drawn by some magnetic force, they climb the outcropping and never return. Whether the girls were raptured, lost, or suicidal remains a matter of mystery. It’s a lack of certainty that Weir never resolves; that, instead, exposes the fragility and impotence of the film’s authority figures in the face of the unknown — Meg Shields

6. Uzumaki (2000)

Based on the manga of the same name, Uzumaki is an overlooked gem that didn’t gain the international recognition it deserved during the J-horror boom of the late 90’s and early 00’s. While the rest of the world was transfixed on the nation’s cinematic ghosts, this weird movie about a small town population being turned into spiral-shaped monstrosities flew under the radar. This is a nightmare on film— but that’s the beauty of it. The horror that unfolds is otherworldly and unexplainable, but it merely enhances the notion that the universe works in mysterious and terrifying ways. The inhabitants of the town in Uzumaki are tormented by the unknown and the film never clearly states why or how it’s happening. One day we’re all going about our business. Then, before we know it, we’re snails. – Kieran Fisher

5. The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Taking a meta approach to filmmaking is a risky proposition. There’s always the possibility the film veers off into the mocking parody territory and if you’re dealing with a genre film that can elicit a negative reaction from the hardcore fans. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon tiptoed this tightrope perfectly with the wonderfully entertaining, and incredibly bloody, The Cabin in the Woods. This is a movie that takes all the horror tropes that have been established over the years and uses them just as we know them while also managing to flip them on their head. It’s geared specifically towards those that love horror movies and those that hate them. As the film playfully toys with every genre convention imaginable it tries to get to the bottom of why all those terrible things that happen in horror movies happen. Turns out there are some evil gods that need appeasing. I knew it — Chris Coffel

4. Annihilation (2018)

If the crux of cosmic horror is a dizzying sense of established order coming apart at the seams— Annihilation takes the cake. Some unknown thing has landed in the wetlands. What it wants, and why its presence has caused reality to fold in on itself, is a mystery. Its presence has turned madness into a matter of proximity. By the end of the film, we’re none the wiser about the entity’s intentions or the kaleidoscopic fractals at its epicenter. What we’re left with is disorientation; vertigo after bearing witness to the collapsing of all things — Meg Shields

3. The Mist (2007)

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a busy supermarket then it’s highly likely that you’ve felt like insignificant meat in the grand scheme of things. But when you’re trapped in one because there’s a spooky mist outside that’s harboring creatures from the unknown… well, that’s pretty brutal as well. This is also the basic set-up of this Stephen King adaptation from Frank Darabont. It’s a simple story about monstrous invaders in many ways. At the same time, it’s also shrouded in mystery and ambiguity and feels apocalyptic. And while the overarching terror may be cosmic, the film also told us that the real horror was George Bush’s America. The shocking ending also contains some of the funniest gallows humor you’re ever likely to see. It’s such a shame that the TV show isn’t very good. — Kieran Fisher

2. Pulse (2001)

No film, whether from the horror genre or not, has captured the concept of loneliness with as painful a precision as Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Pulse. The film gives new meaning and power to the word “haunting” as it shows us a world where even the undead have come to dread the feeling of being alone in the universe. Ghosts are forcing their way back into our world, the living are committing suicide, and the world is crumbling beneath the weight of misery and ambivalence towards this thing we call existence. The film is equal parts terrifying and fascinating, but both feelings are layered with the depressing fear of not feeling anything at all — Rob Hunter

1. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Words are dangerous. With the click of a keypad or the flicker of a pencil, lives can be made or unmade. But the creator at the desk is not you. Do you read Sutter Cane? Crack the spine and discover your place in the universe. Skip to the end – you’re both the pawn and the star of your own story. In the Mouth of Madness is the closest cinema has ever come to capturing the existential dread upon which H.P. Lovecraft built his church. While others have attempted to directly adapt the unimaginable/unshowable horror of “The Lurking Fear” or “The Call of Cthulhu,” John Carpenter wisely sidestepped direct reference by focusing on his engine of cosmic paranoia. From space, humans are but a speck of insignificance, and yearning beyond such lowly station can only result in catastrophic knowledge. You are less than a fly. You’re a meaningless accident of biology. At best you are the butt of a joke to a creature raising its foot above your head – Brad Gullickson

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via Film School Rejects https://ift.tt/23tjcnD October 19, 2018 at 10:05AM

[smillingcartoonist]

TV Shows that I Watched in 2017

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2 Episodes)

I Nearly forget that I watch this ! I Watched 2 episodes and then something happened to my computer, I don’t remember what ! but I lost interesting, and still with no interesting what so ever to continue watching.  

Samurai Jack (Season 5)

This wasn’t my favorite cartoon back in the day so I wasn’t expecting much out of it ,but oh man ! Turn out to be a really good ! a much more mature story line, I got a little down by the end, But I think it end really well ! The whole story of Jack dealing with his failure and his own wish for Death was pretty interesting, when all of that was solved it kinda drop the ball a little ! and Visually too, by the end the visual aspect of the show is gone ! I remember that some people are really worried about if Ashi and Jack are gonna end up together,well this is tumblr,this is what really important here !! I don’t know/care about the general opinion about the ending of the show, but I guess for other people if doesn’t go the way they want they will rage about it ! which is pretty stupid ! after the success of this revival, some other shows announced a revival,First Invader Zim and then Hey Arnold, The Arnold movie come out just recently,But Invader Zim is still with no date of release,that’s a bummer.

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Season 1)

If we talk about fidelity to the material which was originated, this version of Ghost In the Shell is the more faithful adaption of the comic ! Mamoru Oshii movie was good, but It kinda goes really far from the manga, like this version got more of the political and crime drama that the comic had and it’s more appropriated to the show. The Major of this version is more like the Major of the comic, she have a pretty humorous personality, way more in the comic, The tachikomas are in here and the the whole section 5 appears in most episodes, even trough the main focus is on The Major,Batou and Ishikawa,most on him ! I guess because he’s the most Human Character in the team !

The Show is divide in a main line story,The Laughing Man case, and some others cases, that later on some of they get integrated into the main story, overall is pretty good, I can’t think of something bad about this show, everything is really well craft, expect to the Major Child Spare body,why the fuck she have that ? Why she use that ? That’s was really weird !! Other think that is good and deserve some credit is the dub, the English dub is really good,but only for the main characters,everyone else have a mediocre or bad dub, In fact it was really hard to find subs for this show ! 

Doctor Who (Season 10)

This season was bad ! The First half of episodes are ok,but the second is just the worst ! and this season got the worst season Finale so far ! Let’s break this shit down !!

Let’s start with Bill, did she have a arc of a story in this show ?? for most of the time she was just there ! either something happen to her and the doctor have to save her or she was there to do something and say something, but outside of that, she doesn’t have a story ! in comparison to another character like Martha from Season 3,she did have a story, she began travailing with the Doctor,she kinda fall in love with him but he doesn’t love her, things happens and Martha and the doctor solve it ! and by then end she quits because the Doctor doesn’t love her and she get on her life,it’s kinda lame but at least it have some goods reasons, Bill story is like What ?? She travel with the doctor,die and becomes a cyberman, die again and become a liquid alien and then she goes way because the doctor is Dead and her Crush come to get her ?! Is that even a conclusion ? Nardole was even worse, he’s boring, he is a boring comic relief, he was pretty funny on the Christmas specials,but on this he’s like the Doctor’s mom ! and he also have nothing to do ! most of the episode he appear he doesn’t  do anything, So Why put him in there ??

The First half episodes are good, they are most involving the relationship between the Doctor and Bill, again Jamie Mathieson write a really good episode “Oxygen”probably the best episode of this season even trough I don’t think it was his best episode ! Extremys was also good, even trough it had some of the over the top stuff that Moffat like to put ! The Doctor meeting the Pope, The Doctor Fuck the pope, a female Pope ? for some reason they keep trying to make that Doctor have bang half of the universe ! I was expecting at some point Matt Smith say to Clara “hey Clara did I Tell you about when I Bang Joana D’arc ?” and also anything that happens in this episode got nothing to do with the next, Why the monks are running this specific scenario ?? Why they let they own Computer send a warning to the Doctor ?? 

 The Other half of episode is when things start to fall apart, “the Pyramids at the end of World” still a solid episode even trough the most convenient thing happens at the end to let the story have a third part ! This Third part is a Failure,they had a really good premise “the Monks have brainwash humanity to believe they are they rulers and the Doctor is on they side” This could be a really good episode, but turns out to be bullshit, turns out the Doctor is faking he do a faking regeneration just to fuck with Bill, also they really exploit the fact that this is the last season of Capaldi and think they audience are a bunch of idiots that don’t know that will only happens in the last episode ! At least the scene with Michelle Gomez was good !  Mark Gatiss write another bad episode so fuck it,  The Eaters of Light was really good, after two really bad episodes it’s refreshing to have a episode with Doctor Who stuff on it !! and then The Season Finally comes in, World Enough and Time was pretty good, even trough I Got a big issue with The Doctor saying that he have a Crush on the Master when they are children, was that really Necessary ?? did Moffat had to do this so he could appeal the hearth of some horny teenager girl Out there ? did the Doctor really need to say “Oh he was my fundamental school crush”, Was that necessary,no ! Fuck You Steve !! But that’s not even the tip of the Iceberg ! The problems get worse on the last Episode !

The Doctor Falls his the lamest Season Finale so far !! This episode is a soap novel that doesn’t go anywhere !! and also they keep showing the Doctor Contenting his regeneration, Oh he can do that now ? yeah I Guess he can, and only now !! Why Bring John Simm back if you not gonna do anything with him ?? The Only thing that he do is Flirt with Gomez and then shoot her in the back, also that, You expect that Missy story will have some kinda of nice conclusion,Oh ! Missy is turning good ? she will have some kinda of redemption at the end,that since interesting, but Moffat have to end that in a lame way with he Master Shooting himself, Oh ! God Moffat ! get your dick out of our mouth !! that was terrible and we something even worse ! You have the lamest Deus Ex-Machina that I Ever seeing,so the Doctor is dead,cyberBill is about to die and then The Liquid alien girl appears at the end and just transform Bill into another liquid alien, Because she can do that of course !! if this chick could appear anytime to help she could appear sometime before all this shit happens,or even in some other episode where Bill was in danger and she could help, But any way, she get then make in the Tardis,How ??, and she just happens to know how to pilot the Tardis,because she is a Dues Ex-Machina !! and then Bill leaves the Tardis seeing “Yeah Doctor that was fun,But your Dead Now,and my Crush have come pick me up, so Bye !” and the she leaves, The doctor wake and say some embarrassing and unnecessary stuff and go outside the Tardis to Scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO in the snow,because he acting like a kid and does not want to regenerate. Man ! That was terrible ! Fuck You Steven Moffat !!

American Gods (Season 1)

Adaptation of a book,written by Neil Gaiman,Book that I read in the beginning of the year and I Like reading it,maybe it was the last Book that read this year ! I don’t remember ! But anyway, I Liked this show overall,really competent adaption,just some things i Think Like: Anansi is not a elderly pervert man,that was the whole reasons I like that character,because he was grumpy and every line he insulted Shadow. Other thing I didn’t like was the among of gratuity sex scenes in the show,there is not that among of fucking in book, there is this scene where Bisquis Pussy vore this guy in the beginning and some other sex scene later, in the show they put some more of Bisquis eating people for no reason at all !! she also become a important character now,because in the book she appears and then she appears again and die ! 

Michiko To Hatchin (22 Episodes)

Anime is not really my thing, But this year I Try somethings, this and Ghost In the shell are the ones that I Like ! I find this thanks to Tumblr,Yeah !! sometimes you can find good things in this place, It got my attention because of the premise, It happens in Brasil and some Brazilian guy made the sound track, that enough to get me to watch ! and I Like it, one thing I find weird is the Tone of the show, like it begins really cheeky and Funny and on the forth episodes things start to get more serious and then get less serious, and it keeps going like this into the end. The Director of this show Sayo Yamamoto, direct a show that made a huge success last year, specially here on tumblr, the anime about gay ice skating “Yuri on Ice” I kinda wanna watch that now,just because it was directed by her ! By The end of anime I Got that the message was “Girls shouldn’t be running after man that are fucking jackasses” which I think that is true and right !

Ballroom & Youkoso (4 Episodes)

This was the first deception on trying to get on Modern anime ! It is this slice of life with a bunch of dull characters and dull humor, I didn’t like anything about it, the animation too was really dull,like everything in this show was dull for me ! The whole point that I thought it will be interesting was the dancing part ! but when that happens, it’s lifeless, like Finally the dull Protagonist get to Dance and he does a incredible move where he stand still !! don’t move, dance is all about moving and the first he does is not Move !! in the next episode the “I’m the best” character goes dance,furious because the dull protagonist got some fun not dancing on his place, and the you think is gonna be the most awesome thing into the next Dance contest,but there is only 10 seconds of actual dancing and the rest is just flashing images and the crowd cheering, I Get the impression that I should be doing the same but is so dull !! after this I really could care anymore !

Preacher (Season 2)

I Enjoyed This Season a Lot more then the first,Like this season have a lot more of the fell of the comic into it then the first and it’s way more resolved in the adaptation part ! finally Jesse gonna search for god ! the they motivations are different, in the comic Jesse what to find God because pissed with him and the TV show he want to do that because he thinks that he is in some kind of holy mission ! The Humor get’s kinda predictable, Because everyone in the world of Preacher is really nasty and terrible person, so you know that something nasty is gonna happen ! One thing that I find strange was the whole Hitler good man thing,every time that happen is said “No Man! what are you doing !!” in times like this, that’s pretty dangerous !! 

Castlevania (Season 1)

Warren Ellis can do anything, he can write a story about dish washing and it gonna be the most awesome thing ever, it will probably involve a alien abduction or a secret organization plot to kill aliens or supernatural creatures ! any way this was another good show with marvelous quality, the only bummer it is so short, 4 episodes, and when it ends it end out of the no where like “that is, more next year” ! I Just wandering what’s gonna happen in the next season ! if Belmonth is gonna have to fight the monster of Frankenstein and mummy ?! 

Psycho-Pass (20 Minutes)

Din’t even bother to get anything for this ! I Thought this would be a good show, the premise was good, the design of the characters look like shit ! But maybe the story would be good, but when I Finally watch, damn, that was terrible ! the first episode begins with the villan (I guess) wanking about himself and then it goes for some of the stupid anime shit that ever seen ! I Just could care ! after 20 minutes i Just stop the video and said no ! fuck this !!

Twin Peaks (Season 1,2 and 3)

My favorite show of the year !! I Got interesting in it when I saw somethings here on Tumblr,and the I decide to Watch the First episode of the Third season, after watching some episodes I decide to go see the other 2 seasons (To see if anything that I saw it will make sense), that was like 36 episodes or something, for some reasons at the time I got nothing to do so had plenty of time of nothing to do ! I Enjoy most of it, it’s like a Soap Novel with bizarre characters and that managed to get me entreating to watch everything and see what was gonna happens with to does characters,You Know like any other show should be ! But It fells kinda flat after they solve the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, but the whole thing with Window Earl was cool the actor that play him was really good ! I Just wonder how he moved a giant piece of Chest to that, hum that … that place and later they show like 5 people with a crane trying to move that thing from there !

I Also watched the two Movies,Fire Walk with me and The Missing pieces, The Movie are really different from the the TV show, like It doesn’t have space for comedy into it so the Movie is really depressing,You already know what is gonna happen, but even so !! after watching that I watched the Missing Pieces in a vain hope to see if anything that I saw later would make more sense ! Guess what, It Didn’t !! The Missing Pieces is all the scenes that didn’t make to the movie,it also have the scene of the meeting in the Convenience store and the scene with Phillip separated of which other,that for some reasons Lynch decide to put them together to make even less sense !! does that mean that it make sense now ! I Guess !? 

Season 3 was incredible, if I was not terrified I would be laughing my ass off, but after 18 hours of pure surreal stuff did i Understand anything of it, mostly of it no, I saw some theories and it make me fells stupid ! Because there is this whole other thing happen and I didn’t even notice, “I’m a idiot for not noticing that early” I said to my self, and I saw some other theory about how this things that seen out of place and weird are in fact critics to state of America. When I finally saw the ending I was not expecting anything different, I wasn’t expecting to end on a good way, every season didn’t end with a happy ending, so this one should be the same ! What i find incredible was the number of people trying to figured out the meaning behind the ending in a number of way’s, but like It doesn’t matter if you watch all episodes at the same time, you not gonna find anything, the only way to figured out is to Interpreted everything you see and figured out how that work !! You have to think about you saw, But if can’t do that,what are doing watching this then ??

Big Mouth (Season 1) 

I Got interested in this after seeing the two teaser, the first one I laugh once, and the second,that was the ending of the second episode, sold me into it. I find it really funny at some parts and not funny at all in others, all that Thing with Jay and his Pillow I think that was the most surreal stuff that I have seen in years !! even more surreal then Twin Peaks. Maya Rudolph was The Hormone Monstress is the high point of this show,she give a lot Charm to the character. A Lot of people didn’t like this show because it was to offensive for then and too ugly !! But like, all this cartoon show for adults are all really ugly !! so like, so what ??

Mindhunter (Season 1)

I Like a lot of crime investigative stuff, and like most of the show even through there is somethings that kinda seen like they go no where, all that stuff with the tickling, I Though it go to something bigger but it didn’t !! I Though that they will go back to the first case they reject and solve it, but I guess that would be a think for season two. I Like how they handle the arc of the Mindhunter,this whole thing of him being this ambitious agent that want to discovery a new method of investigation and becoming this self centre asshole that thinks that he his the fucking most ! Now that is a Grow of a Character !!

American Vandal (Season 1)

The whole part of the humor of this show kinda feel flat for me, but the investigation stuff is way more engaging, I like how fluid the whole investigation process how they going finding out how everyone in this school have some dirt in then and how that later affect them ! in the end they come to a solution to get the asshole that was false accused set free, but later he get in jail again because he’s just a asshole, But they don’t solve the mystery,Who Draw the dicks ??  My Guess is that was the History teacher,the cool dude that bad mouth the other teacher, I think because the way he storm out of a scene they show in the last episode.

Inuyashiki (3 Episodes)

I already have made fun of the two first episodes of this anime, I was reluctant to continue watching this,after the third episode I was done with this, basically what happen in it is a reminder that Bad guy is bad and good guy is good Nothing else happens,the characters does’t haven anything to them they have no charm or anything,they are this bland person with no expression, I guess that they faces never change,they have the same face every time !! I was really expecting something more out of this !! I Guess that I don’t have the age to watch this animes anymore,I can’t go back be a thirteen old again !!

Genocyber (5 Episodes)

This is some old cult anime stuff, ultra violent and really nonsensical, and some how can be was better any of this other animes that I have watched, is there a lot of more effort put into it by the way,it was kinda fun to watch this and see the stuff happening and just shout to the screen “What ?? Why ?” it made me care that’s the important thing, also the soundtrack is good,is probably the best thing out of it !! 

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Season 2)

Is kinda sad talk about this,since the show was cancelled, But even so,I don’t have enjoyed this season as more then the first one, It was funny and all,but the whole fantasy world don’t have got me, and this whole another plot of Dirk trying to be a normal Detective didn’t land well for me.I Think that the Third Season out have turn out to be great, also this thing of turning that Computer guy into the antagonist was kinda surprising and out the nowhere !! Also The Creator of the Show Max Landis was accused of Sexual harassment recently, Guess that’s way the show was cancelled !!    

The Young Pope (Season 1 ??)

From all the shows here,this is the one that got the best cinematography of them all !! really stunning photography, Jude Law give a incredible performance in this show,I Guess that i never seen anything else with him,But anyway he’s just awesome ! They gave him a bunch of huge speech to him, so there are some incredible long scene of Jude Law talking about how his character is awesome and can do anything ! also I was kinda confused watching, the initial speech that he give on his dream confused me when he was taking decision that are the opposite from early, I was thinking that he was just pretending to be a huge asshole when in fact he is a huge asshole !! but also sometimes not a total jackass and by the end he have some kind of redemption ! that I don’t understand if they want to make a Season 2 out of this,the whole story of Jude Law is done what more can you go far from this ? But if they wanna do it I’m Fine with this !

Dark (Season 1)

My Second favorite show of the year, I Like everything about it,the story,the photography.the music, it’s really well put together, a lot people compared this to Stranger Things,and it’s nothing like it ! Stranger Things is this little light harder show that funny and colorful and Dark it’s just Depressing, It’s this show that nothing is gonna go well and it’s not go end in a happy way, The only problem that I got is that I don’t remember any of the names of the characters I Only know the name of the main kid with the yellow jacket that is Jonas. I’m looking forward to the next Season,the show leave a lot of question open, and I wanna know who is going to be our real protagonist !! Also The Director of this show Baran Bo Odar,is the director of one of the worst movies of this year called Sleepless,which I find weird since this show is so good.

Stranger Things 2 (Why The Two ? Season 2) 

Another Show That I don’t think it make it up for the last one, I not part of the cult of adoration of this serie,but I like it I Think there are good and fun to watch and not this Grater masterpiece that people make up to believe. I felt that the some of the same stuff that happened in the last season is happening again in this, Hysterical Mom is more Hysterical, let’s trash Winona Ryder House in some way ! Friends are not friends anymore and get back being friends !! the rest of it was just ok, they the asshole from the last season not be a asshole anymore,guess I Kinda like him now, which make four of the characters that I like in this show,Him,Dustin, the new Hellboy man and Eleven. I Guess that they could’t stretch this for one more Season,but they did !! What gonna happen in the next season ?! Did they gonna turn the asshole of this season into not a asshole and make him have a affair with the mom of the sour face kid ?! is Dustin gonna have more adventures with the non-asshole cool guy ?! Winona Ryder is goona stop being Hysterical ?! (probably no !) Also they kinda ruined Dustin Character in this season,they turning him into fat kid slop comic relief, I don’t remember him being like that In the last season ?!

Punisher (Season 1) 

The last Show that I watch this year, I enjoyed watching, even trough I Don’t think it had the among of shooting that I wanted to have ! From all this netflix super heroes show’s I only watched this,Jessica Jones and Daredevil,I Really don’t care about the rest, But This show is on pair with Jessica Jones in mine opinion.I don’t know much about The Punisher comics so can’t comment on anything of this part ! I Think that Jon Bernthal is great actor, he really give a good performance making the Punisher into this psycho maniac that want to kill people ! He have great Gutural Scream ! I saw video about Sicario and how Dennis Villanueve put this whole section of in the movie so he could Film Jon acting !! Like he is really good, I Think that he is the perfect Candidate to be a New rambo, If someone ever wanna do a new type of Rambo Movie he would be great there !! shooting people and screaming at the same time !