Patrick R

I think plinking piano Ghostbusters theme might be the absolute nadir of Hollywood nostalgia surfing. The rest of the trailer is whatever, those are mostly funny people (or all? I don't know Kate McKinnon at all) so I'm sure there are actual funny parts they decided to leave out of the trailer. BUT THAT GODDAMN PIANO PLINKING HAS TO GO. YOU CANNOT PLINK OUT THE THEME SONG TO SOME MOVIE FROM PEOPLE'S CHILDHOODS AND EXPECT IT TO GIVE IT SOME SORT OF GRAVITAS. Wow! This thing I love must be just as important to the studio as it is to me! Because they plunked around the theme on a piano! This is going to be everything I ever dreamed it could be! This and the " " tropes HAVE TO GO. NO MORE.

In that video they say "Puns are like conversation's candy. And sure, too much candy will rot your teeth." Well, my best friend has a genuine compulsive behavior which is to say every single possible half-assed pun that comes to his head all the time, forever. Things that don't even rhyme, things that don't even make sense, things that have nothing to do with the conversation. So you can say my teeth have fallen out at this point, and I can no longer chew.

I just saw Krull in 70mm. Krull! There is no film I have ever seen that more resembles a D&D campaign than Krull, in that it is leisurely paced and arbitrarily about fetching things and there's a battle with a giant spider and a childish sense of humor.

On an old Idle Thumbs episode Sean talked about how bummed out he was by seeing suggestions for DLC inside of the world of Arkham City because he was reminded that instead of a cool interactive narrative experience it could be, it was just a toy. I feel the same way about lame puns and jokes in animated movies. I love animation, and so want to buy the common rhetoric that "these movies are made just as much for adults as for kids!" but every time I see a belabored odorent gag, I'm just reminded that these are primarily directed at 5-year olds. Howdy Howdy Howdy shark is an MVP for sure, though. The fact that they don't really give him the same level of facial animation as the rest of the toys is what really nails it.

I'm not going to continue this game of 20 questions because I'm getting pretty depressed but no, I have no college degree of any kind.

I am underemployed with one job and looking for a second. I make it stretch by running up my credit card and living with a partner who has a government job. As a social worker, actually, so they've been helping me apply when they can. I've also been applying to retail work but have never gotten as far as an interview there. You can say what you'd like about the ease of finding minimum wage work. That is your experience. This is mine.

Second weirdest Spike Lee ending.

Hi, guy here who has spent months looking for fast-food and dishwashing jobs in my area (since I can't afford a bus pass) and have come up empty. I've interviewed at Chipotle 4 times, actually, and this is with food prep experience. Maybe that just means I'm the biggest most useless piece of shit in the world though!

On a whole other level, and I think I may have said this on the other tipping thread, don't tip percentages on delivery. It doesn't really make sense. A small cheese pizza and an extra large 5 topping pizza take the exact same work to deliver. When I delivered pizzas there was this one guy who always ordered five 2-liter bottles from us on Grub Hub, and always left a 15% tip that came out to basically nothing. Giant pain in the ass. Tip smart. Think about how hard it is to find your place, or if there's parking trouble, or if it's far, or if it's snowing out or raining. How many bags the delivery person will have to carry. How heavy they will be.

Saw Monster's Inc! Random Thoughts: Great Saul Bass-inspired credits sequence! I had no memory of this! None of the Pixar movies so far have full cast and crew credits sequences. Does that ever change? Boo is wonderful but the laughing kid at the end still has a touch of creepy Pixar human face. The fact that I even like Billy Crystal in this is kind of a miracle, considering how loathsome I find him outside of it. Annnnnnd then the terrible jokes start. The worst part of these early Pixar movies. A sampling: "Yeah, didn't I see you on Monsteropolis' Most Wanted?" "STALK/DON'T STALK" (seriously, I think about STALK/DON'T STALK sometimes randomly during the day and get so mad), "BABY BORN WITH FIVE HEADS! PARENTS THRILLED!" (why is this in the newspaper?) "GAIN 10,000 POUNDS PER WEEK! SCARE YOUR NEIGHBORS!" (why would someone in this universe want to scare their neighbors?) "Can I borrow your odorent?", "I'm gonna take her to a monster truck rally." (is this a regular truck rally in this world?) etc. etc. etc. etc. Between the iron fist of the CDA, and the civil engineering disaster that is designing a city for a population who all have completely unique and varied bodies (including blob people who fall through sewer grates and monsters who set things on fire when they sneeze) Monsteropolis seems like a dystopian nightmare. The furry monster who gets shaved is the best. That little dance as he backs out of the door and goes "I'm on a rolllllllll" is the best. Randall feels like a weak villain. I don't understand who he is, or how he invented this other scream machine. Door chase is as good as advertised. "We can't leave her here! This is the men's room!" "That is the weirdest thing you have ever said." Best joke in the movie. I love the Simpsons teen-voiced janitor guys. All in all it's pretty good. I think more could have been done with the story, particularly between Sully and Boo. As is, it feels like it gets close to telling a story about growing a sense of responsibility through fatherhood, but it never quite gets there. Maybe because Sully isn't developed enough. As is, I guess it's just about green energy? But even as an environmental story it's so facile (It's nicer energy and it's ten time better!) it doesn't really mean anything.

!!!! I forgot that San Fransisco is famous for it's burritos (at least, that's what years of listening to JJGO has taught me)! I will definitely need to eat a San Fransisco burrito while I'm there. Are there any specific places that are known for having the best burritos or is it just a city-style sort of thing? Or is it a fictional thing invented by Jesse Thorn because he pines eternal to live back in SG again? My parents are very excited about Fisherman's Wharf, so I will live it vicariously through the dozens of pictures my mom will take.

I saw Upstream Color with Shane Carruth doing a Q&A afterwards and a lot of people asked questions along these lines. He maintains that Upstream Color is also a concrete narrative film, and that it's not as symbolic and surreal as people think. He even went as far as asking if we wanted him to explain it, but luckily everyone in the audience shouted back "No!" All he definitively said was that it came from wanting to tell a story about two people "not being able to view their experience in objective terms". As someone who's watched Upstream Color about 6 times, it means a very specific thing to me thematically (how survivors come to grips with their trauma through love and empathy) but there's still several narrative points I cannot explain at all, mostly involving the thief.

So Jimmy Screamerclauz, the guy who made the juvenile but still completely unsettling & transgressive animated "horror" film (link to NSFW trailer, which basically just plays like a random selection of cutscenes from the most completely fucked PS1 game ever) has a new film, When Black Birds Fly. (This one is a little more SFW than the last trailer, but still totally fucking crazy) Looks like he's jumped from PS1 to PS2, but the "video game story gone wrong wrong WRONG" aesthetic still applies and unnerves the hell out of me. I don't know if I'll ever watch these movies (from what I understand Where The Dead Go To Die isn't just creepy, it's also really despicable in it's "shock" depictions of child abuse, pedophilia, rape, incest etc.) but they certainly tap into unclaimed territory for anyone who grew up playing video games. It's like how I feel watching clips from Harvester.

They're both films that grow a lot with repeat viewings, but Upstream Color has the advantage of being more emotionally-driven and overtly surreal, so anything you don't understand you can still appreciate on a gut-level. Also, Primer has really rough sound which hurts some key moments of exposition towards the end. I've seen it 5 times and there's always a point where it loses me and I can't follow it. There are sites that have diagrams that, if you wanted, you could have open while watching it, if figuring it out is important to you. Me, I love that the point where the characters find themselves hopelessly over their heads corresponds with the point in the movie where I lose the plot. And the fact that there is actually a logical explanation for it all (give or take a few lovely evocative details like their deteriorating handwriting) makes me appreciate getting lost even more. A good follow-up to Primer would be Coherence. A really smart improvised sci-fi thriller about...well, part of the fun is slowly realizing what it's about. But here's the trailer.

Didn't Jake Rodkin just make this thread? Where did that go?

The Mirror is my MVP, though I think Ivan's Childhood is actually my favorite. It's just that I find my idle thoughts drifting towards The Mirror all the time, even though watching it often felt like a bit of a slog. The first 30 minutes of that film are quite literally unbelievable. Where'd you see the last 4?

If this is all going to dovetail into a speech about how grown-ass people shouldn't watch cartoons, I'm for it.

It comes down to the problem with the first film, where a world in which toys are sentient creatures defies all rational thought.

Do you think Toy Story 3 is better than Toy Story 2?

Yeah, I'm not getting more into it. I said that your characterization of the broad subject of religion bothered me, and would probably bother anyone else who has faith in one, whether they are an Evangelical Christian protesting an abortion clinic or a Buddhist who volunteers at homeless shelters. It's a sneering dismissal of a majority of the world's population. If you don't care, I'm not going to try to hound you into caring. I just think it shows a lack of empathy and a myopic view of what religions are.

You can do whatever you want if you don't care about how other people feel. There's nothing stopping you.

I'm not gonna get into the situation because I'm not a parent and I can't really speak to how angry I would be (my guess: a whole fucking lot). But I will just say, on a different tact, it's probably not great to assume there are no religious people reading what you're saying on this forum and that you can just freely disrespect the concept of faith in any way you want. You're blowing off steam, I get it, but there's no need to be nasty. And, to jump ahead of it, I'm an atheist. But religion (many different religions!) is a core part of the lives of many people who are very important to me, and it bothers me when people sneer at other people's faiths. Anyway, this is all I'm going to say because the debate over the damaging effects of religion in this country and others is a sticky and complicated one that I don't want to get pulled into. If you believe faith in any religion boils down to silly made up stuff that people embrace due to fear and a history of child abuse, that's fine. I just think it's incredibly unkind and rude to belabor that point in public spaces where you don't know who believes in what.