Patrick R

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Posts posted by Patrick R


  1. Below the line people have less financial safeguard against not taking jobs, less say in projects they get on, less ability to send any kind of message about toxic people by not working with them. I do not think this absolves someone of any moral responsibility (I have quit a minimum wage job when I found out my boss was a sexual predator and his superior said I was making a big deal out of nothing) but I personally don't feel the need to nor see what is gained by shunning the key grip on Wonder Wheel.

     

    Most above the line people (producers, actors, directors, screenwriters) have way more power in these situations*. Directors are absolutely in a position to say "find another stunt coordinator" and to convince any studio that it's also not in their interest to hire Joel Kramer either. It's not like he's being accused of making inappropriate jokes or something that can be rationalized away as no big deal. (Also it's not just Eliza Dushku.) My guess though, is that he's been a high-profile stunt coordinator for huge movies for decades and is 61 years old so he'll probably decide that this is a good time to retire.

     

    *A possible exception would be screenwriters who, once selling a script to a studio, often have no power in what happens to the project. If I sold a script to Paramount who then decided the perfect director for it would be Roman Polanski I can protest all I want, but it's now their property. The moral question then would be how much I protest the choice in public, how much I speak out about it, how much I'm willing to risk my career by doing so. I don't think there's any one answer to that but I would hope that, if in that position, I would feel a responsibility to wrestle with it and make some sort of stand.


  2. You can definitely refuse to see any movie he (Joel Kramer) works on and/or any director who would choose to continue working with him. Of course being vocal about it on social media will always make your intentions clearer (and encourage others to do the same). His last job, Blade Runner 2049, was done well before Dushku came out about the assault. The next director to choose to work with him will forever be suspect in my eyes.


  3. If you've never seen his films I'd recommend Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives! Weerasethakul's work is absolutely wonderful and warm, though you definitely need to be prepped for slow cinema and watch it in a way where you can fall under it's hypnotic spell, without having a phone out or pausing it too often. 

     

    I've started with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and I'm not sure I'm that into his thing. The only one of his films I saw previously was The Assassin, for which Hou won the best director award at Cannes. I saw in theaters in 2015 and realized about 15 minutes in that I hadn't been reading any of the subtitles. I decided to watch the rest of the film that way and appreciated it alright as a purely visual experience but, naturally, I felt distanced from it. This time I'm actually watching the movies properly but a lot of that distance still remains.

     

    Millennium Mambo, a film about a young woman disenchanted with the Taipei nightlife and her abusive boyfriend, has an interesting formal approach: every scene is done in one master shot in which the camera is almost always rooted in place but free to pan and zoom across the scene. It has a lot of the loneliness and long takes one would associate with a lot of slow cinema but not the stillness. It's restless without being too energetic, which fits the story perfectly. My problem is that it's a story that's way too familiar. Even as someone who isn't a dedicated Asian cinephile has seen this story of lonely alienated Chinese youth burnt out on meaningless pleasure on the fringes of the criminal world before in movies like Unknown Pleasures, Fallen Angels, and Rebels of the Neon God. And even with the main character narrating the film (from a vantage point of ten years later) the characters feel opaque and underwritten. The film's objective camera is too objective for me to form real attachment to them and I found the entire experience rather cold.

     

    (This trailer has a couple shots of a butt in a thong, so possibly NSFW)

     

    The same was true for much of one of Hou's earlier films, 1986's Dust In The Wind. However about an hour or so in there's a moment that recontextualized the vague directionless dissatisfied young adult narrative into something much more specific, large and sad. Overall I found the film much more rewarding, and it's milieus (mid-century Taipei, a small village in north-east Taiwan, and an army base) absolutely captivating. There was less formal rigor here as well, though most scenes still play out in a limited number of master shots with no shot/reverse shot kind of coverage. Taiwan looks absolutely gorgeous in this movie.

     

     

    I also balanced out all this graceful arthouse fare with the classic Godzilla monster mash Destroy All Monsters! The first Godzilla is a masterful sci-fi film, one of a few to perfectly capture national trauma in the guise of crowd-pleasing genre fiction, much moreso than any atomic anxiety in 1950's American sci-fi. The sequels I've seen, however, are usually pretty clumsy, clearly aimed at children and usually get way too bogged down in a bunch of boring sub-plots involving the humans on the ground. I was under the impression that Destroy All Monsters! corrected this last point, but this too has a whole bunch of scientists running around on the ground doing inane things for inane reasons. However the art direction in this film is INSANE, with tons of spaceships and alien technology and high-tech science labs that all look gorgeous. The movie pops like a four-color comic book and there's a LOT of monsters and miniatures to enjoy. I don't think I really like Godzilla movies outside of that effects work, though. I'm probably gonna give Godzilla vs. Hedorah (with the reputation of being "the psychedelic Godzilla movie") a shot sometime this year, though.

     

     

    I got one, maybe two more Hou films to check out (The Time to Live and The Time to Die & possibly The Puppetmaster) and then I'm gonna pivot into two other seminal Taiwanese filmmakers, Tsai Ming-liang and Edward Yang. 


  4. So I've finished up with Ringo Lam! I think when I finish with a director I'll make a personal ranking of the films I've seen, just so if people want to dip their toes in they'll have an easy guide to see where to start.

     

    RINGO LAM DEFINITIVE 120% OBJECTIVE QUALITY POWER RANKINGS FROM NOW UNTIL FOREVER

    1. Full Contact

    2. City on Fire

    3. Burning Paradise

    4. Wild City

    5. Prison On Fire

    6. Replicant

     

     

    Prison On Fire is a look at prison politics and brutality, but it suffers in 2018 because, since 1987, that topic has been covered frequently, with more depth, a keener eye towards social issues and more exploitative violence. It's a prison film in which rape and racially motivated violence are non-existent and snitches are punished not with death but punches to the stomach. It's a condemnation of our country's justice system to say it, but Prison on Fire almost seems quaint. Certainly, despite it's setting, it's the least brutally violent Ringo Lam film I've seen, and that's kind of his bread and butter. Chow Yun-Fat is super charming though as the lifer who takes the newbie under his wing and there is a riot at the end with some very well-orchestrated chaos.

     

     

    Burning Paradise is Lam's (only?) wuxia film, and it delivers everything you would want from Lam, with bloody comic book violence set in a fantastic magical world. It's based on The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, a lost silent film serial thought to be the first wuxia film ever made. It certainly shares the roller-coaster pacing of the serial-inspired Indiana Jones films and, more specifically, the setting and gross-out sensibility of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's not an homage to that film but the wonderfully elaborate sets were certainly influenced by it. If you can imagine Temple of Doom as a martial arts film couched in the real history of Shaolin monks battling Manchu forces, you get the idea. The story kind of grinds to a halt once they reach the Temple and the characters are thin, but the fight scenes and art direction are incredible and it's well-paced. Lot of fun.

     

    (The following trailer is NSFW: gruesome gore)

     

     

    I also watched Seeding of a Ghost. It's produced by the legendary Shaw Brothers Studios, who popularized kung-fu films, and is one of their "black magic" films, a sub-genre of supernatural horror movie known for it's nasty sensibility and gross-out gore. The only other black magic film I've seen is The Boxer's Omen and that was the best film experience I had last year, so I think it may have set expectations a little too high for this one. This still has a lot of great special effects work and bizarre moments (as you can see in the trailer above) but it lacked the imagination, pacing and conviction of The Boxer's Omen. The set-up is slow and misogynist while the pay-off is kind of the same scare sequences happening to an interchangeable series of people. Still a great bugfuck movie experience, but not nearly the masterpiece The Boxer's Omen is.

     

    ----------------------------------------------

     

    But that's enough disreputable exploitation cinema. Next up is arthouse darling Hou Hsiao-hsien! Think I'm gonna start with Millenium Mambo.


  5. 1 hour ago, Siromatic said:

     

    I think there is strong merit in having threads dedicated to moviemaking or creative works from specific regions, but maybe a general "foreign movies" thread would be welcome, as well? Thinking about the movies for this thread was yet another reminder of a fact I observed long ago: that creative works made outside of America on average are both of a higher quality and often more genuine in nature. Don't get me wrong, of course there are still many exemplary works that come from here, but I think many people from here, especially the more jingoistic among us, think that we excel at/are the best at everything, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth. Foreign movies (and most other creative works/other endeavors done elsewhere) have long been on average better than ones produced here, and this disparity in quality only seems to increase as time goes on. (For example: there isn't any American movie made so far in this decade that holds a candle to "A Separation," in my opinion.)

     

    With all of the appalling information that has come out about aspects of the American movie production apparatus in the last few months, as well as the fact we're apparently going to allow one company to control the majority of it, I hope beyond hope that more people from here seek out more and more movies and other creative works made elsewhere. (Of course there is no doubt that atrocious individuals are involved in movies made elsewhere, as well--Bernardo Bertolucci and Lars Von Trier are as reprehensible as Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, etc. But the overall higher quality and greater sincerity of the best works made elsewhere strongly indicate many of them are also made by nicer people, and I feel more comfortable supporting the best works made outside of America.)

     

    I agree with a lot of this but I think it's worth saying that, of every film made in Asia (a big continent that includes India, which makes way more movies than America), we in America only get exposed to those that western critics and distribution companies have deemed most likely to connect with a small market of discerning American moviegoers who have an interest in seeing films with subtitles. It may or may not be the best stuff out there, but I bet there's a lot of meaningless impersonal crap that gets made as well. One of my goals is to not just watch the work of criticially acclaimed Asian auteurs (I've never seen anything by Kore-eda, Hong Sang-soo or Edward Yang and I'm excited to change that) but also some random Asian movies that haven't been recommended to me by anyone. I'm a firm believer that you can't know why something's done well unless you've seen it done poorly, and trash is a regular part of my movie diet.

     

    17 minutes ago, Woodfella said:

    Hello, this is a nice idea for a thread and I have so many Asian films in my to watch list, I'm gonna commit to watching more too.  As for recommendations there has been so many great ones already. I love koreda too, nobody knows and Our little sister are my favourites of his but I think I'm alone in liking the latter so much. Last year I found out about the great Hong Kong director, Johnnie To. He's made some great action films, Drug War, The Mission and breaking news are ones I'd recommend. Oh I like castle of Cagliostro too only saw that the the first time last year, such a cool movie though as you are hit and miss with Miyazaki it might not be your cup of tea.

     

    To is on my list for sure! And I do like Castle of Cagliostro quite a bit, but I forgot to mention it because it's not Ghibli.


  6. 19 hours ago, Ben X said:

    It's been almost two decades since I saw them, but I remember Beat Takeshi's films Sonatine and Hana-Bi being great.

    Thanks for the rec! My local film society is showing a film print of Beat Takeshi's A Scene At The Sea at the end of April, so I'll try to time giving those a look around then.

    18 hours ago, juv3nal said:

    I’m a huge fan of Wong Kar Wai and I could recommend nearly everything of his except his foray into the west ‘My Blueberry Nights’ which I haven’t seen, but am given to understand is not good.

     

    Of the remainder, I probably have the least affection for Days of Being Wild because the budget/production quality on it is weaker, and 2046 whose plot kind of doesn’t hang together despite gorgeous production quality.

     

    Probably my top 5 in descending order would be

    In the Mood for Love

    Chungking Express

    Ashes of Time (redux, I guess, though I am not 100% sure what the differences are)

    Fallen Angels

    The Grandmaster

     

     

     

    I adore Wong Kar-Wai! I'm going to be rewatching some stuff this year, and In the Mood For Love (a close runner for my favorite film ever), Fallen Angels and Happy Together are definitely getting watched at some point. I've always avoided Ashes of Time because I heard the Redux is a downgrade but I suppose the original is forever lost and if you vouch for it I'll give it a look.

    17 hours ago, Simon said:

     

    That's seredipitous - those are the two Ozu films I picked up in a recent BFI sale and I'm planning to watch them soon! I wasn't really sure what to expect but I knew both were highly regarded. Thanks for the tip, I'll start with Late Spring.

     

    Sticking with Japan, do you know much Mizoguchi? I've seen Ugetsu and Sansho The Bailiff and found them totally absorbing moral fables, with beautiful cinematography. The tragic, epic sweep that Sansho crams into just two hours is pretty staggering, and I loved how Ugetsu blended ghost stories into a realistic period setting. The 'Late Mizoguchi' box set seems to be out of print, but I keep meaning to watch more of them because those two films are fascinating.

    I've seen zero Mizoguchi but my video store has both Sansho and Ugetsu so I'll give them a shot.

    17 hours ago, jennegatron said:

    Studio Ghibli, and Miyazaki in particular have some true bangers. I would recommend Porco Rosso, Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro as 3 great and pretty varied of his films.

    I know virtually nothing about Thai cinema, but I do know that Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior is one of the most fun movies I've ever watched.

    I run hot and cold on Miyazaki (though there's always something dazzling to appreciate), absolutely adoring KikiSpirited Away while mostly not liking Totoro, Howl's & Ponyo. I will make an effort to see Porco Rosso, though, in part because your recommendation lines up with my partners who said it's very much my kind of thing. Weirdly I have a better success rate with non-Miyazaki Ghibli films like Grave of the Fireflies, Whisper of the Heart, From Up On Poppy Hill and When Marnie Was There, which I'm all very fond of. Honestly I think one of my goals for this year will be to branch out into non-Ghibli anime, particularly from the 20th century. Maybe even a series or two, though I'm trying to keep the focus to film.

     

    The only Thai cinema I'm familiar with is that of slow cinema stalwart Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose work couldn't be further away from the bone-crunching action I've seen from Tony Jaa via YouTube clips. Ong-Bak is definitely a seminal 21st century Asian film, so it's going on the list!

    16 hours ago, TheLastBaron said:

    In a couple weeks I will be seeing Late Spring as it is playing at SFMOMA and I'm pretty excited (also the next day one of my local indie theaters is playing a double feature of Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke).  I would recommend at some point possibly checking out Tokyo-Ga, a film by Wim Wenders that is basically a documentary on Ozu, but also kind of a movie about Wim Wenders being really into Ozu.  I know it's included as an extra in the Criterion release of Late Spring, but I don't know how easy it is to track it down on it's own (there's always the internet though).

     

    Last year I saw Funeral Parade of Roses when it was showing in theaters after being restored and I liked it.  It's a film about the underground gay culture in Tokyo in the 60's.  It's pretty experimental and kind of blurs the line between documentary and drama.  The trailer does a pretty good job portraying what the movie is like (everything in that including the interviews about making the film are from the movie).

     

    I also watched Black Rain a little while back and thought it was great.  It should probably be noted to avoid any confusion that there are two films called Black Rain that came out in 1989.  One is an American film starring Michael Douglas as a cop who goes to Osaka to take on the Yakuza and the other, the one I am referring to, is a Japanese film about the aftermath of Hiroshima.

     

    I've been meaning to watch The Eel for a while, originally it was on my radar just because it won the Palme d'Or, but it was also directed by Shohei Imamura who directed Black Rain.  Maybe this thread will get me to actually do it.  

     

    For a while I've wanted to watch more modern Japanese films as I've seen a fair amount of older ones, but as far as movies made in the 21st century go I don't think I've seen any live action ones besides horror stuff which I'm not into.  Sway is one that I've picked up and along with The Eel might actually get played soon, and then after that I Wish is on my radar.

     

    I missed the Funeral Parade of Roses restoration when it played here and felt like a real chump. My partner is doing an LGBT film challenge this year and they were interested in seeing it so I'll try to track it down. The new release doesn't seem to be at any of Chicago's video stores so I may just buy the blu-ray sight unseen? We'll see!

    15 hours ago, Professor Video Games said:

    Kurosawa is an obvious recommendation. Seven Samurai is his most famous followed maybe by Rashomon, but there are plenty of other ones worth recommending. A few off the top of my head would be Yojimbo/Sanjuro, Ikiru, Throne of Blood (Macbeth set in feudal Japan), and Hidden Fortress (George Lucas cites this as an inspiration for Star Wars, but I wouldn't read too much into that).

     

    Harakiri by Masaki Kobayashi. A dark take on feudal japan...relatively slow paced but it's got some scenes that are incredibly intense. The other one of his I've seen is Samurai Rebellion, which I remember enjoying a lot. Harakiri got remade relatively recently by the absurdly prolific Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition, a million more movies). And now I'm looking through his list of films and see it includes the live action Phoenix Wright movie...has anyone seen that? Also a live action Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure just last year...

     

    You mentioned Branded to Kill, which I agree is totally weird but I completely love. Tokyo Drifter is another one by him that I want to say is more straightforward (it's been a while) but still has some really interesting visual touches.

     

    Mother and The Host by Bong Joon-Ho...he's gone on to do some well known english stuff (Snowpiercer, Okja), but Mother is probably my favorite of his.

     

    If you want lighter stuff, you could go into some old Stephen Chow movies. Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle are both goofy as hell and a lot of fun.

     

    I don't think I watch movies at the rate you do, but if you mention what you're looking at watching next, I'd probably try to go along at least some of the time.

    Kurosawa is definitely one of the major names I'll be tackling at length, though I tend to find his dramatic work too cloying and sentimental. The genre stuff like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, though, I am all about.

     

    Harakiri is on my radar for sure, and maybe I'll pair it with Miike's remake for a double feature. I never played the video games, but his Ace Attorney adaptation certainly seems...faithful to the experience of playing a video game on DS. Miike's a director I'm already quite familiar with (though it won't be until after he's dead that anyone in the West will be able to sort out his career in any kind of definitive way) so I don't think I'll spend too much more time on him.

     

    Tokyo Drifter is wonderful, and I like Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy even more, but Branded to Kill feels personal and subversive in a different, more complicated way that I just wasn't able to parse out this time. Right now the plan is to end the year with as many Seijun Suzuki and Yasujiro Ozu films as I can access. Those are going to be the folks I dive deepest into.

     

    I love The Host, Memories of Murder and Snowpiercer, so Mother is one I'll be watching for sure. I haven't seen Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle since Hustle came out in theaters, so maybe if I can track down God of Cookery and King of Comedy (both I've recently read very good things about) as well I'll make a real go of it.

    ---------------------

     

    As for my schedule going forward, I have two more Ringo Lam films to see (Prison On Fire and Burning Paradise) and one Shaw Brothers black magic film (Seeding of a Ghost) and then I'm majorly switching gears to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, director of subtle arthouse films such as Flowers of Shanghai, Millenium Mambo and 2015's The Assassin. From there I'll probably transition to my favorite Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, who directed one of my favorite films ever Rebels of the Neon God. I'm wholly unfamiliar with Hou Hsiao-hsien but I can recommend Tsai Ming-liang to anyone who has a taste for slow or unusual cinema. Rebels of the Neon God and What Time Is It There? are both A+ examples of films about loneliness, while Goodbye Dragon Inn is a maddeningly slow paced film that follows, nearly in real time, the final screening of a rep theater before it closes down for good. It's haunting and beautiful but it also tried my patience and feels designed to be specifically seen in theaters. 

     

    I'll probably follow up Tsai Ming-Liang with another action or martial arts director, but not definite plans on who yet.

     

    Also I rewatched Ringo Lam's Full Contact this morning and rather than wax poetic about it, I'll just link to the trailer which does a very good job of selling it as the ultimate action film via the music of early 90's heavy metal songbirds Extreme:

     

     

     


  7. I "completed" Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+, which is to say I've completed all the challenges and unlocked everything there is to unlock without paying (though there are 3 badges related to sharing your score on Facebook that I'm ignoring). I've put 11 hours into it but I'll probably keep returning to it for short bursts of play for a long time to come, or at least until I can S-Rank everything.


  8. I decided this year I would dive deeper into Asian film, a region whose cinema I've always appreciated but never explored very deeply. I think part of me prefers American films because I have more cultural context and when watching foreign films (particularly those from the east) I have a fear about missing some crucial bit of info that informs the entire work. Watching a bunch of movies in a row makes patterns emerge more clearly, so right now my approach is to mostly dive into the work of a single director before moving on.

     

    I started with Yasujiro Ozu, a seminal Japanese director I had seen nothing by. I saw (in order) Tokyo Story, Late Spring, A Story of Floating Weeds and Floating Weeds. The first two proved me out because, after watching Tokyo Story and Late Spring back to back, I saw that Ozu's work seemed preoccupied with a sort of post-war malaise, an anxiety about the dissolution of the family unit, traditions and which should be upheld. It took some work for me to really get on Ozu's wavelength but his movies look incredible and his deep meticulously arranged frames are stunning throughout. By the time I watched A Story of Floating Weeds (a silent melodrama he made in the 30's) and Floating Weeds (a color remake he made in the 50's) I was more comfortable with his work and could appreciate them without too much extra effort. It helps that the Floating Weeds story is more melodramatic than he's known for (there's actually outbursts of shouting and violence!) and that Floating Weeds was my first color Ozu film and his use of color enhances his already beautiful style in a way I didn't think possible.

     

    If you are like me and never watched any Ozu but are curious I would probably recommend starting with Late Spring instead of Tokyo Story, as the former is a little more "eventful" (whatever that means in the context of Ozu's quiet and gentle stories) and latter is a little tougher to crack emotionally. I also watched a documentary about Ozu's life called I Lived, But..., which is a Japanese documentary from the 80's on Ozu's life. I wouldn't say it informed how I watched his films (it's not a critical study) but it does feature a lot of movie clips and leans into personal anecdote rather than biographical facts, so I found it more interesting than most bio-docs.

     

    I'll be returning to Ozu later but for now I've switched over to Hong Kong action director Ringo Lam. Lam directed my favorite action movie of all time*, Full Contact, and I've enjoyed watching some more of his work. City On Fire is an amazing undercover cop movie that, like Full Contact, stars Chow Yun Fat and is probably most famous for being the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. The two films are actually quite different (Reservoir Dogs only takes place in the last 20 or so minutes of City on Fire's story) but there are about 4 or 5 moments that Tarantino ripped off (or homaged) wholesale. What makes City on Fire for me is Lam's vision of Hong Kong as a teeming city of chaos. Every part of the movie goes big. Every action scene happens in public, in impossibly crowded streets, every squib holds twice as much blood as you think it should, every cop in the country descends upon the warehouse the criminals hole up in at the end. The film gives a feeling of loss of control, where both cops and robbers are constantly screwing up. I've seen this (and similar feelings in Lam's other work) attributed to anxiety over "The Handover" (the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the UK to China that happened in 1997) but I couldn't speak to that. Whatever the political subtext, it's an awesome and intense crime movie and Lam is amazing at orchestrating public chaos in his action scenes.

     

    I also watched one of Lam's western films, the DTV Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Replicant, where Van Damme plays the clone of a serial killer (also played by Van Damme, naturally) tasked with tracking him down. It's not a good movie. It takes itself too seriously for such a monumentally dumb premise. But there is fun to be had with "newborn" Van Damme as a man-child trying to understand the world like Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element, and the action is good with a handful of stunts that look irresponsibly dangerous. My favorite is in the trailer, at the 0:55 mark:

     

     

    Last night I watched Wild City, a 2015 Ringo Lam crime film about two brothers caught up in trouble with the Triad (and some Taiwanese thugs the Triad is contracting with) over a woman on the run and a briefcase of stolen money. It's pretty good, with some good action, but it lacks the fire and intensity I associate with Lam. And there is a certain cartoonish sheen to Asian b-movie CGI effects that I've never gotten used to, and the climax of Wild City features a lot of very ugly looking CGI during the car chase.

     

    I also have watched a couple of Miyazaki movies due to a recent retrospective at my local arthouse theater (Princess Mononoke, which I really liked and Ponyo, which I really didn't) and Branded to Kill, which is a Seijun Suzuki yakuza movie that was way too wild and abstracted for me to parse out. I'll be returning to that, and his other films, later when I can get a better fix on his career.

     

    But if anyone has recommendations of other Asian cinema to check out, I'd really like to hear it. I'm flying by the seat of my pants here, and don't have long-term plans. And if anyone else wants to try to make a commitment to watching Asian films, this thread would probably be more interesting than if it was just me.

     

    *Unless you count Raiders of the Lost Ark (which is very different but undoubtedly better) as an action movie.


  9. On 1/3/2018 at 11:44 AM, Patrick R said:

    Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Nitro+ Blasterz Xrd HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is super satisfying but I have only played about an hour and I'm not sure what if any strategies I should be employing. The fun is that I'm flying by the seat of my pants (not unlike the original Pac-Man) but it feels like maybe there's more nuance to getting a high score than that, especially on the shorter time trials where the optimal route feels very obvious I'm not sure how I could do them faster.

    10 hours into the game later I see. Oh I see so clear. This game is awesome. Clearing out all the trials for the first time was a very satisfying, if simple, but now I'm at the point where I'm running the same challenge over and over again to shave less than a second off my time. 


  10. I read in an EGM that George Romero directed the commercial for Resident Evil 2 and I taped it off TV and watched it about 8 times in a row. I was so psyched about both Romero and that game. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he directed some Japanese-only commercials and the North American commercials were just hastily chopped together from that footage.

     

     

     

    And the NA counterpart:

     

     

    "THERE'S SOMETHING REALLY WRONG HERE." really creeped me out and I built this game into something so crazy in my head. Watching it again gives me real intense flashbacks to being 11 again.


  11. Axiom Verge had terrible writing but it was really fun and stylish and one of the few Metroid style games I've ever been able to beat. I had to refer to a walkthrough a couple times when I was lost and traveling around every nook and cranny I'd already explored was getting tedious but for the most part I had fun retreading ground and collecting power-ups I missed. The weapons were really fun too. I mostly stuck with the short-range Kilver because a lot of the enemies were fast and I didn't want to time my projectiles but every once and a while I'd stumble upon an encounter that seemed impossible until I played around with my available weapons.

     

    I'm kind of interested going through again and trying to 100% it, see what I missed.


  12. Cats Are Liquid is a platformer I bought on itch.io on a whim for a buck. It's very clearly made by someone teaching themselves a game engine (probably Unity but maybe Gamemaker or something else, I can't pick out engines that well) with bland amateur graphics (single colors and geometric shapes) a nonsense story that consists of text on the walls saying "The cat [that you play as] looked at this strange room and wondered how to get out." with little variation, over and over. 

     

    However, there is a slew of movement options that feel a little wilder and looser than your average platformer and you can really get some insane momentum going on the early levels and whipping past whole rows of obstacles when it doesn't seem like you should is a lot of fun. However later levels are tighter and more demanding and when it becomes that game it starts feeling tedious. I think I got my money's worth from it, though.


  13. I really didn't like Phantom Thread. It's an incredibly tedious movie with a boring great artist abusive to his muse plot, only to have a twist in the final 10 minutes that completely changes what it's about. Why PTA hides subtext necessary for most of the film to be at all interesting is beyond me. But I'm way in the minority on PTA and actually find him to often be a really bad screenwriter, so if you are a super-fan maybe you'll still like it. It seems to be getting a lot of really positive response. I think it's easily his worst film.


  14. Tuned into the stream at random and caught the Mega Man X race, which was absolutely incredible. 3 competitors who all, at one point, are in the lead, with only about a 10 second spread all the way to the very end. Worth checking out the archive later.