Patrick R

I was talking with my partner last night and I think I really hate Finding Nemo. So much dopey humor and I think animated fish are really boring to look at. And now they're gonna do a sequel focusing on the worst character? Cool cool cool, Pixar. I don't agree with the complaints about Up being tonally inconsistent but ultimately I think the things people complain about are why I think it's such a great film: it's a mainstream adventure movie that utterly disposes of formula. There's nothing surprising about the world of Monster's Inc. because you know everything's just going to be about monster equivalents of our world. By that same tact, there's nothing surprising about the worlds of Finding Nemo or or Bug's Life or (to a lesser extent) Inside Out, because they all operate on the same basic premise: What if ___________ was a world like our own? As someone who didn't watch any trailers or behind the scenes stuff for Up, it was consistently surprising. You don't expect the story of these two kids to turn into one of the greatest depictions of thwarted dreams ever depicted on film. I expected the house to fly because I had seen the teaser poster, but I was NOT expecting it to happen the way it did. (Once a house flies into the air via balloons and you're still watching you've forfeited your right to complain about it not being realistic.) Then when it finally lands a dog runs up and starts talking. What? That's not a formula, that's not an obvious corny joke, that's strange. It's unusual and weird and whimsical. I think a lot of people go into movies with expectations and like to see the best version of what they expect the movie to be. They want to be promised a superhero movie about family and go in and see a good version of that. They want to know "this is the one where emotions are alive and working in a factory-like setting of your mind" and then see it. Me, I want to be surprised. I want my expectations to be subverted. That's why I love Ratatouille and Up so much. They totally dispense with formula to do other crazy things, while still very much being anchored by strong ideas and good direction. And I think the fact that they aren't endlessly repeating the "GET IT, IT'S LIKE THE TOY EQUIVALENT OF A SPEAKER SYSTEM" kind of jokes means that their humor is stronger as well.

Presto is still my favorite short but on the other hand, "lava" sounds a lot like "love" with the right accent, so good on Pixar for recognizing that and then only doing that for an entire short.

I like the concept of "A dude that can have all of his extremities controlled perfectly by a rat pulling on different parts of his hair" being "dumb goofy shit that plagues almost every other kids movie". Like, a world where THAT is a cliche, where every Madagascar and Ice Age movie has scenes of rats controlling men via follicles...that's a world I'd like to live in. That's a world worth being proud of. Again, I acknowledge the line between "whimsical" and "corny" is a subjective one. But personally I think both Up and Ratatouille land way way way on the side of whimsical. Meanwhile in Monster's Inc. INSTEAD OF A WALK AND DON'T WALK SIGN IT SAYS STALK AND DON'T STALK DO YOU GET IT, POO-POO PLATTER DO YOU GET IT. ODORANT. ODORANT. WHAT FUN.

Maybe if I get some free time next year I'll watch through them all again and start a big Pixar debate thread. And Ratatouille is so gorgeous. A great middle finger to the Disney sequel machine that's made tragic in retrospect because Pixar eventually got sucked inside it. The only thing I don't like about it is that the Gustav monologue at the end is bullshit. Critics in every medium have shaped them in countless important ways, and bad reviews are only fun to write if you are an asshole who doesn't care about people.

Maybe. Does he bring up how Toy Story 2 was already about accepting mortality, making the entirety of Toy Story 3 not just redundant but a betrayal when they have that fun little "Yay, they actually will live forever!" ending?

You should definitely see Inside Out because it's damn near universally beloved. My ranking is: 1. Up 2. Ratatouille 3. Toy Story 2 Honorable Mention The rest of them Dishonorable Mention The Cars ones I haven't seen the Incredibles since my first viewing on DVD maybe ten years ago. I remember thinking the action scenes were surprisingly good. The Ayn Randian aspect of it (and most of Brad Bird's work) has been brought to my attention since and I don't know how cool I'd be with all that. I should say that I generally cannot abide American animated films. "Children's film" often just feels like a euphemism for "bad sappy comedy that is animated", and that includes a lot of movies people seem to love like How to Train Your Dragon and the Kung-Fu Pandas. But of the Pixar films I've seen (I've avoided all Cars & Planes movies, as well as the Monster's Inc. sequel) there aren't any I've actively disliked. But I just think they are kinda good. It's only compared to the thirty truly dogshit animated films that come out every year that they seem at all remarkable.

The actual best Christmas movie is Meet Me In St. Louis. Career best film for both Judy Garland and Vincent Minelli, it surveys a year (in four seasonal vignettes) in the life of a St. Louis family in 1904, ending on Christmas with Great film, funny, emotional, great to watch with your family and always makes me wistful thinking back on the previous year. It's tone and structure were hugely influential on A Christmas Story.

I don't mind whimsy so much (still think Up is one of the greatest movies of this century) I just hate corny humor. Which is an incredibly subjective distinction, I know. Actually my main problem with Inside Out is that Riley's story is so incredibly minor and dull. I basically think the movie would be a hundred times more interesting if it opened with them installing the puberty button. But that's just one of a thousand more interesting possibilities. Imagine a movie with this structure examining a child developing a mental disorder like depression or OCD. Imagine if it was about their parents getting divorced. Imagine if it was about a traumatic physical accident. Imagine if it was as simple as Riley just liking the same boy as her friend. But I doubt any of this would appeal much to children. And while I initially assumed that this metacognative examination of emotional maturity wouldn't appeal to kids in the first place but I've heard a lot of stories about kids really loving this, and helping them process their emotional lives. If that's widespread then God bless Pixar for making this, even if I wasn't into it. EDIT: Also I think Ratatouille is one of the three Pixar movies that are actually as good as people seem to think they all are.

This all just reinforces my belief that the the central metaphors of this film are belabored and clunky as hell. EDIT: But that isn't even my main problem with the film, so I get it that other people have really embraced this.

I wasn't that into Inside Out, for a variety of reasons, but I have one big question: Is it just me or are the personality islands a terrible metaphor? One bad practice and Hockey Island crumbles? So it's automatically not part of her personality after one hiccup? Except that she's playing hockey again two days later? So did they just re-erect a huge island in that time? So do the super dramatic crumbling personality islands not actually matter? Because they seemed to be wrecking serious shit, and the emotions were freaking out and they even knocked a whole structure of memories into the abyss. Was this the first time Riley ever encountered adversity? Or do the islands crumble all the time and does it not mean much and the emotions just forgot about all the other times they crumbled?

All I can say is good luck! It sounds like you understand programming a bit more than me, but I tried to incorporate audio into Twine for the last Wizard Jam and could never get it to work.

Wrote the first twenty screens. I'm happy with how everything is turning out, but the hardest part remains finding ways to give the player choices that feel expressive while not actually disrupting the entirely linear nature of the story. There's a few more "gamey" set-pieces I have planned but they are totally deterministic and loop-based. The whole structure story is cyclical so I'm trying to figure out more ways to incorporate that motif on the micro level as well as the macro. I already have a tendency to lean towards ham-fisted metaphors with my writing so I've put a strict "no circle symbolism" rule on myself. I am going ahead with the title I was leaning towards before: Christmas Trees.

Mistress America is one of the funniest movies of the year. Imagine the world and people of Frances Ha, but dialed up a notch and thrown into a screwball comedy. I LOVED it.

This is maybe a really dumb question, but where is the New York Times app? I got a digital subscription for my birthday that included a phone subscription, but I can't find the actual NYTimes app on the app store. There's an NYTimes Breaking News app (which I can't even download because I have an iPhone 4) but I just want to read the newspaper on my phone. Do I have to do that in browser? I was under the impression there's an actual straight-ahead NYTimes app, but I can't find it anywhere. EDIT: Nevermind, I guess upon looking further into it the Breaking News app is the NYTimes app. And I can't use it. Awesome.

This fake screenplay Twitter whose address I can't remember. I saved that image on my computer years ago and it always comes in handy when talking about big budget Hollywood sci-fi.

Magic Mike XXL is like a beacon for masculinity, a wonderful fantasy where women have inherited the Earth, everything you want out of that kind of movie, except that it's still just a little too heteronormative. EDIT: And continuing the catching up on 2015 Channing Tatum movies train, the sensation of watching Jupiter Ascending is basically this:

I don't even really like Jurassic Park (I watched it too much as a kid and all the hand-wringing at science & Grant learning to be a father stuff makes me cringe) but Jurassic World is the kind of bad that really makes one think about how much craft went into that.

Based on it's box office take I am guessing I am the last person on Earth to see it but HOLY SHIT is Jurassic World bad. Can not believe how totally awful it is.

Top down action arcade game where living snowballs get larger and slower as they roll around, but then get smaller as they pull off chunks of themselves and throw them at their opponents.

Or just have one character and have the game be the game. I like the game! The unlocking character stuff is just a distraction and gets in the way of me starting the game over again,

I think a forum is a tool to be used as it's users deem it appropriate to use. Clearly, for whatever reasons, the Idle Thumbs fanbase has optimized towards a megathread situation. Works for me.

I think the only hypothetical instance where F2P would add to my experience instead of detract from it would be a free version of Rock Band (game, you'd still have to pay for instruments) that just charges a buck a song. Or something along those lines. Actually, I guess Pinball Arcade is a good version of this. Download the game for free. Here is a single classic pinball table you can play as much as you'd like, so you can get a feel for our pinball simulation. You can play any other table we have available on a strict time limit. Pay to unlock them. That is it. There are plenty of F2P games I like (Crossy Road, Team Fortress 2) but I think they'd all be improved by removing that element.

Pretty traditional kind of ghost scares you'd see in something like The Conjuring, except with a Slenderman kind of monster instead of a ghost, and then all that mutates into a psychological thing because, without spoiling anything, The Babadook is a metaphor for _______________. It's the fact that it's actually a movie about something (in addition to being really scary) that pushes Babadook over the top. Then again, a lot of the customers at the video store I work at complained about how "unrealistic it is", so you do have to be able to give in to a surreal tone.

Matching socks is also a very silly custom, but I exclusively wear long pants that cover up my socks anyway. Maybe it's different if you wear shorts or skirts or dresses.

Fair enough!