Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  2. Posted

    Really great interview. Hocking seems a little spiky at times, but gives some great stuff. Did I understand correctly that there is a part three planned?

     

    I agree with him about games often trying to pack too much story in. The Half-Life games may have wholly scripted narratives, but their storytelling works so well because they know not to bog it down in tons of pedantic detail.

  5. Posted

    Gave up on Ghostbusters The Game, as it was dreadful. Simply busting a ghost is so fiddly and messy, and despite all the pointless different weapon modes it's pretty much all you do, just trying to wrangle the systems into alignment over and over again.

    The storytelling's really clunky as well - dull video gamey shit, boring dialogue, badly directed. Also, the player-character, "Rookie", looks like a first pass attempt at a Dan Ackroyd model, it's weird.

    I feel like what they should have done was make it tricky to get the ghosts in your beam, but once you do it's simple to get them to the trap, so the real challenge is to catch them without doing too much damage to the properties and therefore making a loss on the job. With some light RPG stuff it could have been like the movies where it's basically just a regular extermination business.

  6. Posted

    Trailers are out for the sequel. Interestingly, (spoilers for stuff in this trailer)

     

    Spoiler

    they're fully lampshading the 'male chosen one gets to be the hero even though they're less proficient at everything than the lead female character' trope that showed up in the first movie. (However, this directly leads to her being a damsel in distress, so...)


     

     

  7. Posted

    Saw Into The Spider-Verse today and while it's more tenuously connected to the MCU than Homecoming, it's still i"n association with Marvel" so may as well put it in here.

     

    It is, for my money, hands down the best Spider-Man film ever (bearing in mind I wasn't a huge fan of the Raimi ones). Effortlessly blends a variety of visual styles and riffs on the audience familiarity with Spidey's backstory while using all of the character's (characters') iconography to full effect. Funny, exciting, touching and intricate without being over-worked.

     

    EDIT: oh, and Venom was laughably bad.

  8. Posted

    Saw Aquaman. It's visually gorgeous, Momoa is charming and that Sicily action sequence is great, but overall this is a mess. Scuppered by the lead character being introduced in a previous film and yet still having a ton of origin stories, lore and Atlantean politics to get through, the narrative is all over the place. It's filled with tropey beats (in the wrong order) and characters and most of the action is either rote post-Kingsman punching or rote CG battles. Even the music can't decide what it wants to be, flitting between wailing guitar, orchestral and 80s electro.

     

    Amusing sidenote (spoiler for incredibly obvious reveal):

    Spoiler

    Nicole Kidman is digitally de-aged at the start of the movie. When she reappears in present day, she is no longer de-aged but because of all the work she's had done she still looks so uncannily smooth that they had to put a grey wig on her to age her up a bit!

     

    Definitely better than Green Lantern, but I thiiink I'd still rather watch Chronicles Of Riddick again over re-watching this.

  10. Posted

    Managed to see Sorry To Bother You at the local indie cinema and was quite disappointed. It's a load of moderately interesting ideas thrown at a tired cliche of a plot, and it doesn't get going for at least the first hour - this really could have done with at least twenty minutes trimming off. As others have noted, it has touches of Idiocracy, Kaufman and Gondry about it, but the thing I was reminded most of was Gremlins 2 - that's the level of satirical sophistication it was playing at. Not necessarily a bad thing, but here the story drags too much to make up for it.

  16. Posted

    On 8/16/2018 at 9:09 AM, twmac said:

    Jumanji - I think I was too old for jumanji by the time it came out and it felt like yet another sugary Robin Williams vehicle alongside Mrs Doubtfire, Patch Adams and Hook.

     

    The sequel can go in this thread too. Outside of about ten minutes of legit good body swap comedy, this whole movie is overworked and empty. (And I actually don't think the original is that sugary; it has a feeling of real danger and mischief, and Williams' character is dealing with PTSD, racial guilt and father issues - but y'know, for kids.)

  17. Posted

    Shockingly, there seems to have not been a single discussion of Doctor Who on these forums.

    Well, I was at the in-laws' for a couple of days recently and took advantage of their tv licence to watch all of the Whittaker episodes so far. Spoilered not for plot but for those who might get upset reading the mainly negative opinions of someone who's never been a huge fan of the series but has seen a fair amount of New Who anyway:

     

    Spoiler

    Same as always, really - some promising ideas and visuals let down by clumsy writing and bad acting. A couple of times it felt like they were hitting a really nice Arrival or Pitch Black (the good atmospheric bits, not the cheesy B-movie bits they ripped off previously) vibe, but then some cheesy face-makeup-only alien shows up doing their standard angry/momentarily confused by the Doctor's wackiness acting and it all just ebbs away.
    The new Doctor is fine - very Tennant-y, perhaps to the point of feeling a little stale. Hopefully they'll find more individuality for her soon. The companions are okay, though the young guy is doing a ropey Sheffield accent, and I don't know why they decided on this - it's not like when Capaldi came along they set it in Scotland and had everyone doing their best drama school Glaswegian.
    The new music is definitely better than Murray Gold's, though occasionally overwrought when they're doing their reverential episodes about noble historical POCs.
    Overall, very Russell T Davies, which is definitely not the direction I was hoping for.

     

    Any Whovians or casual fans here?

  19. Posted

    I backed Broken Age and Psychonauts 2. The latter seems to be trotting along nicely (Simon: I don't think we're getting any extra vids, but that's fine by me - the BA backer community always voted overwhelmingly to share everything with the public) , and I was extremely pleased with the former. As mentioned, the documentary on its own was worth the money, along with a great community experience, and we got a new Tim Schafer adventure game as well! Yes it was pretty easy, but then so was Full Throttle; BA was gorgeous and full of Tim's usual excellent writing (even if the ending was a bit rougher than his previous high standard).

  21. Posted

    MI2 is also very auteur-y! It came at the point where the idea for the franchise was to have a totally different directorial style for each entry, and has all of Woo's strengths and weaknesses on full display. After that, JJ Abrams delivered a slick modern feel that the franchise pretty much stuck with going forward.

  22. Posted

    I've added one of his vids to my watch later list, thanks! I'm always on the look out for film crit channels that don't a) revolve around hating on stuff, sunglasses) come with a load of memes and tired schtick, c) spend five minutes making one simple point over and over.

  23. Posted

    Yeah, I thought about it a little more after I posted and I think you're right. I guess when they said

    "a new timeline" they meant a new version of the same one rather than a separate one. Seems a bit unfair to people who suddenly get a shittier version of their life in the new timeline thanks to the changes + butterfly effect, and also seems like a cosmically huge action to take just to do a test, but then I guess it fits with the show's ongoing motif of the afterlife system being completely fucked up.

     

    Thanks!

  24. Posted

    I'm a little unclear on something (spoilers for at least S3E4, probably up to S3E6):

     

    The judge said that the gang are now in an alternate timeline, right? Initially as a test to see if they had changed as people. But now they know the whole deal and they're going around trying to save other people. So, is this actually the only timeline? If not,  how do any of their actions and changes relate to the original timeline where those people remain unsaved?