It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
The mortal kombat 2 movie that came out recently, it was an empty CGI fest, with little focus on combat or the gore from the original games
FDR American Badass.
It’s a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.
The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.
You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)
We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.
You quit too early! It totally redeemed itself by the end!
Just kidding, I’ve never even heard of it, but your review of it made me want to check it out right away. It’s sounds like my kind of movie.
Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Loved the first one. Only negative I had seen about DD2 was the performance wasn’t great. It’s fucking dookie. Tons of great ideas that aren’t executed well or for more than a single, short-as-fuck quest and then never used again.
The best part of the game is the Sphynx; and even those puzzles are a bit stupid toward the end. Like needing to remember where the very first medallion thing you picked up was. By the time you’d realistically find the Sphynx without any external guidance, you’d have found a ton of those fuckers and you sure as shit wouldn’t think to mark down where after the fact.
Combat gets repetitive quick as enemies spawn constantly, and this includes big shit like griffons that can literally fly in while you’re approaching the end of a long journey and snatch you up and carry you across the damn world to their nest.
Every little thing you do has some long-winded animation you can’t cancel tied to it, and NPCs walking along roads constantly stop you to initiate meaningless dialogue; it doesn’t just not respect your time, it pisses on it.
And to top it all off the story is stupid, short, and ends abruptly before you even know what the hell is really going on. This is including what little extra you can get after a NG+ cycle which makes it even more annoying that you are required to do the whole fucking game twice to still get a shitty ending that doesn’t answer a single question you might have about the events of the plot.
I fucking hate this game.
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I guess books fall in the “whatever” category :P I was majorly disappointed by The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. I actually enjoyed reading about 85% of it, but the ending completely ruined it for me.
Coming out of a world war vs going into one.
I still remember the opening of that book as being absolutely marvelous, but I can’t remember the ending lol.
Still Life with Woodpecker may be something you’d enjoy, different, but they’re linked in my brain.
Dr Who after Peter Capaldi left.
The plots went to crap. The retconning destroyed decades of canon. I’ve nothing against the actors involved but the writers should be taken out and beaten.
I keep trying to give it a chance and don’t understand what the fuck happened, but I feel so bad for Jodi Whitaker and Ncuti Gatwa. The writing is so awful it’s like they don’t even get to play the same part.
I agree it’s a mixed bag, but there’s still some Stephen Moffat episodes in there that are fantastic, though.
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
I’m so tired of finger-touch interfaces. Especially when they lag and they don’t register your input right away.
Avengers End Game - after years of build up and creating the entire MCU, it felt like a cop out for them to fix everything with a time travel plot that they set specific rules for. It was just lazy writing.
I know I will get hate for this… Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - “it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good”. It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something… else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the “give it a chance” phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I’ll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.
For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it’s possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me “you should watch it, it’s decent”, I’d might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a “cool bad-ass”, which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.
I was also disappointed in the series not because it wasn’t good, but because people overhyped it. I’ve learnt my lesson to never listen to people’s hype for series I am interested in watching.
The biggest fault was walt being built up to be a good guy. He’s the main character, but he’s definitely not a “good guy”. That’s kinda the whole point of the show. Most people who walk away thinking walt was a badass have a relatively immature take on the story.
Something I never hear people talk about with BB is how it hit differently when it was first being broadcast, than when it hit streaming.
The original show spooled out slowly, an episode a week, and then nearly a year before the next season, then they broke the final season in half, and dragged that way out. So between episodes and seasons, you remember the excitement, and you apply that to Walter, and sort of forget all the atrocities he’s committing. He’s just a cool anti-hero.
But when you binge it on streaming, your shock at his behavior doesn’t dissipate, it accumulates, and by the end, he’s just a bad guy who got a lot of people killed, and deserves his fate.
I watched it during its initial run, then binged it, and I can’t think of any other show that had such a different dynamic between the two.
I didn’t finish the show but I got the idea pretty early on; he’s like Captain Ahab, right? Not a good man, at least not anymore - a tragic character.
That’s a pretty good analogy.
Rezero S2. It is straight up ass.
my two favorite media franchises are Star Trek and Sonic. how long have you got?
Oh god… Star Trek just got… I dont even know how to describe what had been done to it.
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Anything after that was vapid shitty pew pew cgi flare fest sci-fi, and the Picard series ruined TNG for me for years. I used to watch ST at least a few times per week, DS9, TNG, mostly. After ST :Picard i stopped. I couldn’t anymore, it was ruined for so fucking long
But there was a small ray of light, though
Watch “The Orville”, it’s made by Seth McFarlane after he rejected what the execs wanted for star Trek. It’s basically TNG updated for the 2020s and the first two seasons are amazing and have a BOBW episode, even, and hell, even a “family” type episode after. Seriously, it looks and feels like modern TNG, has great episodes like TNG used to have. The third season kinda went the pew pew direction as well, very few very long episodes where the good writing got replaced with loads of CGI, but it’s still doable.
There isn’t a fourth season, yet, anyway, but Seth recently said he is finishing writing the fourth season, let’s see what happens
Those first two seasons though, are star Trek magic, the Orville magic
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Many trekkies said that Trek couldn’t be a Saturday morning cartoon and that after TAS would never survive, there are people who said that after TNG came out star trek was dead because the captain was bald, and some people who said DS9 killed it as a space station was not exploring, then some people complained that VOY killed it because the ship had infinite torpedos and a lot of people said ENT was the franchise’s death knell because touch screens, and OMG what did JJ Abrams do? After DSC came out some people said Star Trek was over because people dont cry in space, After PIC came out some people said it ruined everything that came before because space captains can’t change, some people said that LDS was turning ST into Rick and Morty fan wank, a horde of people said that PRO was trying to be be Clone Wars and that it gave the franchise a terminal diagnosis, it was the consensus of many fans that SNW was shitting on the memory of Kirk and crew, a loud group of trek consumers suggested that there couldnt be female Jem’Hadar and therefore SFA caused the franchise to flatline…
Yet there is more trek in development, that will be loved by some and derided by many
*edit: Section 31 definitely murdered the franchise because Rachel Garrett something something, irish vulcan space robots?
First, The Orville is excellent and for anyone who watches Trek I always recommend The Orville. It’s a little crude when it starts, but it’s levels out and is really great.
Second, since you didn’t mention it, Strange New Worlds is the modern Star Trek in universe show you’re looking for.
I’m honestly so confused by (presumably) adults who consider Sonic as their favorite media franchise… Just… What?
Have you, like, tried reading books or watching movies since you’ve become an adult, or…?
I don’t want to sound judgmental, but I kind of feel bad for people like this. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it, I guess… But you’re missing out on like actual good shit lol
Edit: hurr durr gotta go fast!
Prole, why do you always have so many hot takes?
People who grew up with the games have a certain fondness for the series that even better written franchises cannot replicate.
What’s wrong with people deciding the franchise that made them happy in their childhood should continue making them happy in their adulthood? None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
It kind of does though. They said it’s their “favorite media franchise,” not just that they were a fan.
It’s for literal babies
And I have a problem with it, because it’s not a rare thing and it demonstrates a lack of curiosity that I find to be dangerous for a modern society.
If the video game for babies that you played when you were 10 is still your favorite media franchise, then you need to expose yourself to more media.
Heaven forbid an adult should enjoy video games. It’s also possible to have a favorite franchise and read books, including outside of that franchise.
2001; A Space Odyssey
I generally like older, slower paced movies. The Bridge over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Guns of Navarone are all great movies, despite them being very dated in some regards. With that in mind, I decided to give the movie a try, it being a very famous classic and all. Despite that, my expectations weren’t unrealistically high, but the movie still fell very short.
So, it consists of four chapters/acts, basically. The first one (with the monkeys) was very “meh” and could have been shorter, but I didn’t mind it too much because, again, old movie. The second act on the moon was better, but honestly was “OK” in my books. The third act, now that was really good in my opinion. I though; “looks like the story is really taking off now!” And then came act 4…
I thought that, while the beginning wasn’t great, it was still perfectly salvagable if the ending was decent. Here is where it fell really short, in my opinion. It is, in essence, just a light show with music. Now sure, I bet that for the time that was all very advanced, so I want to give them credit. But it didn’t need to last for 15 fucking minutes! Even for that time, that is extremely long. I found myself starting to skip ahead to see if anything else was going to happen. And it did, I guess. Wasn’t exactly blown away though.
Now what I think they were trying to achieve was what we now typically describe as eldritch horror, to see something we simply cannot fathom. And I think they did that very well with the tools that they had. But it was just way too long, and that thoroughly put the nail in the coffin for me.
I’ve always felt the structure and pacing of 2002 to be musical, literally a symphony in four movements. The classical music soundtrack really sells that concept.
The light show at the the end has to be taken in context. It was 1968, the peak of the hippie movement, and one of the most explosively creative moments in popular art in history, partially fueled by hallucinogenics like weed, but also LSD, which was making it’s way across the country. It was already widely available in California, where it was being distributed by associates of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.
In LA, Kubrick would have been quite familiar with the trend, everyone was, it was being talked about in the media constantly. Would it be that surprising if Kubrick tried what everyone was talking about, and was as blown away as everyone always is, and had to reference it in his movie?
Light shows of various kinds were becoming a standard addition to concerts, using colors, lasers, projections, blobs of colored fluids, etc. Kubrick knew that people would be coming into this movie to trip, and he wanted to give them a big light show to entertain them. If they dropped their tab at the beginning of the movie, they’d probably be reaching a nice peak right around when the light show started, or at least tripping enough to enjoy it.
I’ve always figured that was the reason. If it was any other era, I would doubt it, but this was made in California in 1968, when EVERYTHING was about drugs or the Vietnam War, and this wasn’t about the war.
That would make some sense, yeah. Still, if you are sober and watching something that is considered a classic, it falls short. Either way, it is some nice historical context, so thank you for sharing!
I might be in the minority, but I enjoy every minute of that movie. Yea, it’s masturbatory pleasure, but uuh… Yea I’ll take it.
I love the 2001 book (and its sequels) but the movie is outright boring, technically amazing for its time, but its so slow and borders on masturbatory in its execution
OK, I thought I was missing something, but cause I’ve tried to watch it so many times and its just blah
2001; A Space Odyssey
And then came act 4…
I completely agree. You also never hear anyone talk about the fourth act. It’s basically a weird post-credits scene.
It’s weird they spent so much time on act 1 since it was a single chapter in the book. Act 4 was multiple chapters of the book (and just as terrible as the movie).
Act 3 is iconic and just plain good, but act 4 just ruins the entire story for me
The Hobbit movies
One of my favourite books as a kid, I don’t think I’ll ever watch the movies again by choice
Same. I still have the discs around for no particular reason. I watched Desolation of Smaug in theaters, but then I watched all three of them in a row at somepoint.
My point still stands, so much unnecessary clutter for an otherwise short book.
Like okay, I know people were probably eager to see something Middle-Earth related after they felt like it’s been ‘forever’ ago since the LOTR films up until the Hobbit ones. But, they didn’t need to do the Hobbit that dirty. But, Amazon raised the ante later on. I’m not watching the Rings of Power, ever. Not even because of the diversity issue, but, it supposedly is based on the Silmarillion and I consider that my sacred book not to be fucked with and I don’t want to see a show that probably is going to mess with it.
You could tell those were going to be a gongshow just from the production process. LotR had years of prepwork to make sure everything was sorted out and ready for filming, so they had a relatively smooth time filming. The Hobbit films were rushed and you could tell. PJ apparently was finalising scripts and storyboards the night before each shoot.
LOTR was bad to me, I absolutely loved those books as a kid, I even enjoyed the animated ones from forever ago, but the movies were far too long for what they showed.
When The Hobbit came out as a trilogy movie series I was a bit confused but gave it a try.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a LotR fan whose favourite film adaptation was Bakshi’s. That’s really interesting.
I think it’s probably because I saw them a long time before the new ones, it was something I remember from childhood. The live action ones came out when I was a young adult and they skipped the better parts and embellished others in my opinion. I know the “Tom” debate is overdone, but beyond providing the ancient weapons needed to defeat the Witchking, he provides a glimpse into the lore without making it a detour that just seems out of place.
Dragonball: Evolution.
Yeah, I forced myself to sit through this shitshow. All it did, was solidify my opinion that animation to live action anime adaptations are garbage and will forever be garbage and I will not care how fondly you think some live adaptation of an anime is done.
The last fight sequence of the movie, was nothing but CGI glittery dust being spat between characters, they couldn’t be bothered to make actual ki beams. And they had the audacity to think that they’d be successful enough to warrant another film?
Tool’s Fear Inoculum. I wasn’t really wow’ed by this album. 13 years since 10,000 days and we got this. Just because every song was 10+ minutes long (save for one and it’s a joke song. and excluding the Digital version), doesn’t mean it was good. But because people waited so long for another Tool album, they just accepted it.
The One Piece Live Action proves that it can work somehow. Before that, plenty of live action version produced in Japan has decent reputation, like the Rurouni Kenshin and Death Note series. On the western side, Alita Battle Angel and Speed Racer was also received well.
I dunno, live-action Fullmetal Alchemist was pretty ass.
The only good thing about Dragonball Evolution was that it was so bad that it brought Akira Toriyama out of retirement.
I still can’t understand why the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender exists.
Episodes 7 through 9 of Star Wars. Yeah 7 was a retelling of the same story almost but we also live in a world where we’re repeating history so… It provided some New Hope for the series but 8 was total subversion of everything though I doubt it was all that well planned out to begin with. There were some questionable decisions and characters in that movie. And 9, I didn’t even bother to watch it after I found out Palpatine is back. Just…yeah.
I at least appreciate what 8 was trying to do, even though it really needed more time in the oven and probably would have worked better as a side movie, but 9 was an abject disaster. It convinced me that JJ Abrams literally can’t concieve of a Star Wars story that isn’t just the original trilogy with a different coat of paint. He deliberately undid everything in 8 so that he could cram ESB and ROTJ into the same movie. Hell, he got Adam Driver onboard with 7 by telling him that Kylo Ren wouldn’t be a rehash of the Vader plot, then rehashed the Vader plot with Kylo anyway. At least 8 showed some form of creativity.
My roommate has only experienced 9 by way of Lego Star Wars and said the characters side-eye the camera every time the plot doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty sure that’s the best way to see the movie.
