@WTFE If you can get past the 'omg that is so 90s trenchcoat and a katana' brain that generated the gun fu, it's a pretty powerful flick. The scene with the room full of 'artifacts', as it is discovered, is strikingly well done.
Similarly, there was a piece of crap horror flick that was part found footage part 'documentary' about kids who got abducted by aliens and disappeared (the faux documentary part is the families investigating the disappearance, the found footage part the last evidence they find) had one of the most impressive visuals I've seen in a long time: after years when these kids had been gone, they showed a picture of a blank wall in the house of one of the families, which had the vague outlines on it that indicated that there were once a number of small pictures there, that had now been taken down, as the families spoke about trying to find resolution in the narration. They later pan down to a box with the framed family photos in it, but the simple image of that wall was surprisingly profound (and it's sad that the 'explainer' pan down is necessary, but lowest common denominator, I guess). Most of the movie was garbage, but that was a very finely crafted sequence.
If you, at any point, @Thenomain, see me disavowing membership in geek circles, please point it out to me. (Hint: this is not possible.)
Translation for the hard of thinking: go fuck yourself.
NO U!
My short review of Equilibrium:
Ah, what is there left to say about this cult-classic? Visually-impressive. Stimulating ideas. All good bits for a good movie. And, really, Equilibrium is a good movie.
Yet much about it seems fashioned from the same puerile sense of style that followed The Matrix. Allusions to Christian myth -- John Preston / Prester John -- aren't easily overlooked, especially when the "soldiers" are called clerics. The whole idea is a mish-mash of nerd fantasy -- oh, let's use angles and mathematics to explain this gun kata martial arts crap! Yay! Woo! At least The Matrix didn't demean us with that crap.
There's little I liked in Equilibrium that I didn't find and enjoy in Tank Girl, but that movie didn't try to keep things serious for us, and wallowed in its comical nature. In the end, all of the glitzy coolness of Equilibrium is eaten up by the banality of its over-wrought polemic: that its wrong to tamp down creativity and emotion in favor of logic and formula.
So, aside from the visuals, it's hard to truly marvel at the movie, which gets consumed by its own sense of self-importance. It's almost enough to drown out the ironic play between the message and the movie's similarities to The Matrix.
Almost.
Fun fact: The fight choreography in Equilibrium isn't what the director wanted for Gun Fu. He wanted it to be a more fluid style rather than karate-based. Which is what he did with Ultraviolet...
Which wasn't as good.
So, I have a horrible migraine today. (Yes, it's a day ending in -y, I know.) So does meg. That's the 'RL Anger' part.
But friends are the best, because as a result, this happened.
Sparks: Someday I’ll write a character somewhere who’s like a dark cultist, and their backstory will literally be that the demon they serve was like, “I will cure your migraines” and the person went “DONE. Do you need a signature in blood, or what?”
meg: 'need to rip out my soul now or anything? idc, do whatever.'
Sparks: nods to meg Exactly.
meg: talk about fantasy fulfillment.
Sparks: You can have your “be a badass mage/vampire/elf/whatever”, my fantasy fulfillment will be “headache-free existence”.
meg: 'want to TS?' 'nah, i'm gonna rp about my migraines being cured'.
I'd fux with that.
OMG, the hell, Skype. (Anyone else who is on right now is probably watching the mad mad bounce-fu, so.)
Oh fucking well.
My short review of Paranormal Activity:
If your idea of a good time is having loud noises and sudden movement startle you, then you are either a house cat or someone who liked Paranormal Activity. The fact that this series got several sequels/installments serves to reinforce my belief that ill-educated people will always confuse pornography for sex.
I sort of understand why this is the case. This movie came out around the same time that YouTube got kind of popular, and porn tubes started to proliferate. People like to have what they want immediately, and to have it be as gratifying as possible. I shouldn't say "people", though; rather, this is the common perception of what we are entitled to, as this is as horrifyingly incorrect as labeling Paranormal Activity as entertaining.
The only thing paranormal about the movie is its popularity. It's spooky. Whereas horror fans could have enjoyed gems like The Orphanage (Il Orphanato) or [REC], they instead found themselves adulating this awful cinematic abortion that's about as fun as voyeur porn at a convenience store: something exciting might happen if you lower your standards enough, but you're probably better off buying a subscription to BangBros., which produced more films that are more entertaining, humorous, and tongue-in-cheek than Paranormal Activity.
It'd probably make more sense too.
I thought PA was scary AF. I saw it a couple weeks before moving into my current place, which is the first apartment I've had with hot water heating. Damn those midnights creaks and pops, fucking noises kept me from sleeping for 3 months! Much scarier than REC, though REC was a much more interesting movie.
Anyways, back to pornhub.
I didn't say that the movie wasn't scary. It was. So is being in a pitch black room with random gunshots going off. Which would have been more entertaining to me.
I'm not sure I'm allowed to be frustrated by this, but:
I'm having a facebook conversation with a friend who is "on the spectrum" - he's a Shakespeare focused academic. I'd asked him if he was watching "Will", and he said he had not, but he was curious. I noted that has a very similar sensibility to "A Knight's Tale" and suddenly he started bragging about reading Chaucer. I guess he was bridging the conversation in a way that made sense to him, but felt like a complete derail to me. Am I an unreasonable bitch? In this situation, I mean. (Shut up, @Coin, @Ghost.)
"If you stand for nothing Burr, what will you fall for?"
-- Hamilton: An American Musical
So while you're totally allowed to feel frustrated by it, he may not realize it as a derail. Like you said, it may make sense to him.
As someone on the spectrum myself, my brain makes weird leaps sometimes and I know for a fact I go off in directions that make total sense to me at the time and end up with people looking at me with wtf faces wondering how I got there.
It's not that I was trying to derail or go off in a wholly new direction, but to me things made total sense! So he may have thought (in the way his brain is wired) that it made sense. All I could say is to maybe try to guide it back on track with a 'Hey dude, we're talking 'Will,' can we get back to that?' or similar.
But your frustration is totally just as valid as his brain wiring. The two are just clashing in this case it sounds like?
I'm not sure I'm allowed to be frustrated by this, but:
I'm having a facebook conversation with a friend who is "on the spectrum" - he's a Shakespeare focused academic. I'd asked him if he was watching "Will", and he said he had not, but he was curious. I noted that has a very similar sensibility to "A Knight's Tale" and suddenly he started bragging about reading Chaucer. I guess he was bridging the conversation in a way that made sense to him, but felt like a complete derail to me. Am I an unreasonable bitch? In this situation, I mean. (Shut up, @Coin, @Ghost.)
You sure he's bragging and not just gushing about Chaucer?
I can actually absolutely understand how mentioning A Knight's Tale might lead me to gush about Chaucer. Because yes. Every single time.
I'd consider it less a derail and more an inevitable consequence of you bringing up A Knight's Tale.
You should know better.
Shame on you.
<.<
You can always ask what made them think of Chaucer in particular.
I personally only bore my wife with this, because she is intimately familiar with the things I think about, my attitudes, sense of humor etc, AND she has the time to listen.
It's a good thing she loves me.
Am I an unreasonable bitch? In this situation, I mean. (Shut up, @Coin, @Ghost.)
Dude, I was over here minding my biz and practicing my bomb-ass magic spells and you called me to this post. Course I'm gonna comment.
THE COMMENT: Spectrum or not I always kinda get doucherage when you're talking about one topic (in your case, good TV) and someone uses it as a chance to derail into a topic about how big their brain is...
So, nah, I don't think you're being a bitch. You were talking about good TV and got one-upped by means of highbrow intellectualism, it seems.
Edit/Afterthought: It's worth asking a clarification, but if the person is on the spectrum, the intent might not have been to be a douche. So tread gently, but it seems like you two may be having two separate conversations at the same time.
Maybe I’m on the Spectrum, but I absolutely would take someone’s talking about A Knight’s Tale to OMG about Chaucer. I’d be sorry about interrupting someone else being excited about their thing to be excited about my thing, but the idea is that we’re sharing being excited, yes?
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
That almost made sense to me!
I can spot the chain, too, on that one. I'm not on the spectrum but have ADD, and the 'keep things in mental buckets' would have 'Chaucer' and 'A Knight's Tale' in a mental bucket (cool characters in guilty pleasure movies I love); 'Chaucer' and 'Shakespeare' would also be together in their own mental bucket (English authors of ye olden days), so you'd probably get an overlap with me, too. It'd likely also give Will a tenuous place in the Entertaining Instances of Anachronisms Included mental bucket, with things like A Knight's Tale and The Princess Bride and Blackadder so on.
Oh fucking well.
Why the fuck do people go to a movie, pick a seat next to someone else when the whole theatre is open practically, and then /talk/ through the whole fucking movie.
I just want to kill these people.
Happened when I saw John Wick 2, some asshole talking on their phone throughout the movie.
Happened when I saw Atomic Blonde, with two people chattering away in Portuguese. It's like, really?!
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
Maybe I’m on the Spectrum, but I absolutely would take someone’s talking about A Knight’s Tale to OMG about Chaucer. I’d be sorry about interrupting someone else being excited about their thing to be excited about my thing, but the idea is that we’re sharing being excited, yes?
