Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  1. Posted

    I finally got some time to play a bit more of this. I just played another huge chunk of it and holy shit I'm still only about 75% through (I just fought Elizabeth's mother in her ghost-ish form in the graveyard). It's feeling really repetitive and the balancing of the powers/weapons/health really does not encourage experimental play or proper use of the levelling-up system, especially the two-weapon system. I also never find the ziplines particularly useful or fun in a firefight because I can never tell where the hell I'm going.

     

    I'm tempted to quit, but as I'm not actually stuck and they're still throwing lots of production value at me, I might push through to the end...

     

    What was the infamously garbagey bit, @Merus?

  4. Posted

    Apparently Hemsworth was complaining a lot about the patch in Ragnarok interviews, and they started CGing it on at some point.

     

    Re Valkyrie, apparently you don't see the Taskmaster's ship at the start of IW, so that combined with the "Thanos killed half my people" line has led fans to assume she got away on that ship along with the Kiwi alien and the remaining Asgardians.

  7. Posted

    On 11/28/2017 at 3:48 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

    The Director's Cut - A DGA Podcast - directors interview other directors about their films. If you like inside baseball this is really great stuff. Highlights include Martin Scorcese interviewing Steven Spielberg about Bridge of Spies; Christopher Nolan interviewing Quentin Tarantino about The Hateful Eight; Christopher Nolan interviewing Edgar Wright about Baby Driver; Rian Johnson interviewing Denis Villeneuve about Blade Runner 2049; and Spike Jonze interviewing Greta Gerwig about Lady Bird. Other interesting ones include William Friedkin interviewing Darren Aronofsky about mother!, which at one point devolves into Friedkin yelling at Aranofsky about belief in God; and Richard Donner interviewing Patty Jenkins about Wonder Woman, which is a good argument for setting up a Logan's Run sort of situation in society where we kill all men older than 45 or something like that.

     

    I'm glad I got that Soundcloud download working, because this 'cast is great! Thanks for the recommendation.

  8. Posted

    I didn't like Infinity War either.
     

    Spoiler

     

    My main problems were:

     

    1. I couldn't tell what was going on at any level. In individual shots it was often too dark. In action sequences it was dark and full of close-ups and blurry pans - a lot of Marvel movies have this issue, especially the Russo Bros ones, but this was beyond the pale. There were so many fetch-quest plot threads that I lost track of who was where and why. I guess the only thing that was clear was the over-arching story - Thanos is chasing the stones, the heroes are trying to stop him - but only because it consisted wholly of that.

     

    2. We didn't really get to spend time with the characters - we got to watch Kevin Feige pushing chess-pieces round a board. Almost none of the characters got an arc or any moments; a lot of them were interchangeable. That wasn't Steve Rogers, that was just some dude who showed up for a few minutes to punch things. Probably the only exceptions on the heroes' side were Bruce Banner - he at least had a comedy bit - and Gamora. The villains were all sneering/grunting grey CG splodges, except for Thanos. I was expecting his sole motivation to be power for power's sake and  for him to be utterly emotionless, so I was pleasantly surprised that they gave him a little depth. I also liked his design and thought his CG mostly made him feel like a physically present character.

     

    I could pick at loads of other stuff - Peter Dinklage's character was goofy as shit, we got three separate 'Thanos is dead/defeated! Oh no he's not!' scenes, any Thanos fights consisted of the heroes getting some ineffectual hits in, then him blasting them with random glove power, over and over - but those were the big problems with the movie for me.

     

     

    It made me appreciate what a good overall job Avengers 1 did despite its flaws, though one could argue that movie had an easier time of it with far fewer characters to juggle.

     

    So my Marvel opinion remains 'Iron Man 1, Thor 3 and Jessica Jones 1 are fantastic; the rest of it is a mix of good, solid and awful.' It's telling that those three have very little franchise baggage to deal with...

  9. Posted

    18 hours ago, Patrick R said:

    Being so nakedly over-exposed to his thing makes it feel way less spontaneous and endearing.

     

    I've been having similar thoughts. But I suspect that his acting career is fading enough that it won't really be a big issue...

  10. Posted

    On 4/22/2018 at 7:48 PM, Patrick R said:

    The downside is that stage actors don't really think about continuity and don't match their actions from take to take. Once I picked out the takes I thought had the best acting a lot of the editing process has become trying to edit around the ways they don't match-up at all. On that note I wish we had shot a couple of inserts of objects around the room, a sort of emergency way of linking two disparate shots. That's how we ended up using cutaways to what's playing on TV.

     

    This reminds me of an anecdote Robert Rodriguez tells on the Dusk Til Dawn commentary (or making of doc, perhaps) - when he was shooting a conversation scene for El Mariachi, he got a ton of shots of a dog watching the actors, knowing that he might have to use it to paper over continuity cracks in the edit. While shooting a similar scene on DTD, he shot a ton of George Clooney reactions, but not before telling him about the El Mariachi trick and that in this scene, George was "the dog".  (To Clooney's credit, his reactions are great.)

  13. Posted

    Yeah, I found the 'title song' segments very self-indulgent without the songs actually being funny or, uh, 'musically good' - needed clever verse lyrics and some different musical styles at least.

     

    I generally agree with the defense of the show, but I can totally understand people bouncing off it hard. The thing about Mickey's flaws vs Gus's is that his are all about denial whereas hers are out on front street, so it takes longer for Gus and the other characters to really define his issues - Mickey actually starts dealing with her shit a lot sooner and more honestly than Gus. But this can sometimes feel like the show is not equal in its acknowledgement. 

     

    I did consider it as an example of a "comedy show interested in nurturing it's characters humanity where they don't come across as immature all the time" which Patrick mentioned as rare in the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend thread (I didn't want to bump that thread with it though as my partner and I have given up on the show). The characters (who I guess are early to mid thirties?) at least act like 22 year olds rather than 12 year olds...

  19. Posted

    You seemed to think that happened in season 2 when you posted about it in the Crazy Ex Girlfriend thread. I didn't notice the change, but that's probably because I skip the titles every time because of the nauseatingly chipper theme tune.

     

    Anyway, turns out I am enjoying Ash Vs Evil Dead season 2 more! It has a lot of the same problems, but the

     

    morgue and possessed car

    sections were fantastic. Hilarious, gruesome and inventive. This is what it's been missing! (Now if it could just chill out on the lore and the ham-fisted character arcs...)

  22. Posted

    Yeah, watch the last four or so episodes of season 2 and continue from there (the start of Season 3 has a sum-up of the previous two seasons to fill in the gaps, but I don't think there's anything you wouldn't have figured out already and certainly nothing important). I asked the same question as you elsewhere when I was bouncing off season 1, and that was the overwhelming consensus.

  23. Posted

    On 4/1/2018 at 11:23 AM, Problem Machine said:

    Also, I expect that the number Chris was thinking of as being larger than the amount of atoms in the universe is the googol: " One googol is presumed to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which has been estimated to be approximately 10^78 "

     

    I think he may have been trying to get to "there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all Earth's beaches and deserts".

  24. Posted

    I'm not going to click on that spoiler until I've finished S2! Yeah, it still has enough good stuff going on that I can enjoy, I just feel like it's still finding its feet (maybe I'll disagree with JKO and find it massively improves in later seasons!).

     

    Anyway, I happened to stick my head into the Thumbs Discord yesterday right when someone was slagging me off for shitting on everything all the time. So in the interest of balance, here are some shows I am watching and enjoying:

     

    Two that have been discussed already are Bojack Horseman and Parks & Rec. The former is so dense with different modes of humour but also brings the pathos, the latter is very broad but lovable and feel-good (at least once it suddenly improves a ton towards the end of S2).

     

    Two that haven't are Frankie And Grace and Love. The former is a comedy drama with an amazing older cast (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterson, plus a strong supporting cast and some great recurrings like Ernie Hudson, Sam Elliot, Craig T Nelson). It doesn't have a lot of bite, but it's a cosy watch. The latter is a Judd Apatow production and basically feels like the second act of one of his movies carrying on indefinitely (which Bojack would tell you is what his second acts feel like anyway). It's more of a Funny People/This Is 40 vibe than a Knocked Up one; that is to say, it's not so much gregarious and laugh-out-loud funny,  more well-observed character stuff.

  25. Posted

    Yeah, you know what, I watched another episode and there are a lot more practical gore effects than I'd thought. I think either the occasional obvious CG effect overshadowed them in my mind, or it was more CG heavy in the early episodes. I'd still like to see a good practical headsplosion though!