Jingus

Thanks, will do. And you must be getting the weather we got here in Texas a few days back... don't expect it to dry out anytime soon

I stopped ever trying to watch Syfy Channel Original Pictures a loooooong damn time ago. Have they finally become watchable? Because the few I've caught over the years weren't anything close to cheesy awesomeness, they were mostly just so-bad-it's-not-good-it's-just-fucking-worthless. Lousy pieces of joyless shit which were trying and failing to be real movies, and usually managed to smother the actors I liked into giving sullen check-cashing performances. They were NOTHING like what you're describing here, especially the aforementioned Brooke Hogan moment.

Alright, I stand corrected. I have no idea what the racial demographics of the Netherlands are (nor Belgium nor Luxembourg), it's just not the sort of thing that they ever mention in school or on the news. In history class, they mostly tend to talked about the American slave trade and kinda skip over its effects on the rest of the world. I've never known anyone from the Netherlands, never been there, never known anyone who's told any stories about going there. (No, not even the standard college stoner trip to Amsterdam.) Sorry, wasn't trying to sound racist, I just didn't have the tiniest bit of education on the subject and honestly thought the country might be overwhelmingly fishbelly-white and that's why I asked the question.

DMZ is fine as long as you don't mind incredibly exaggerated satire which is such an extreme parody of its subject that it gets hard to swallow at times. It's one of those books where the authors seem to be saying "this is what the real world is really like, man!" and my response is "...over on Earth 2 maybe, buuuuut, not here". I read the first TPB of Saga and it's a hell of a lot of fun, a fantasy/scifi/horror/adventure/comedy mashup with a really unique voice and a strong sense of practical realism for such an out-there speculative bit of fiction. ("Am I shitting? It feels like I'm shitting!") Anyone else a fan of Chew? Easily my favorite indy comic right now, one of the funniest funnybooks I've ever read. It's got SUCH a deep playbook of GREAT running jokes that it almost rivals stuff like Arrested Development in that area.

I didn't like a few of the changes they made. The main one is how slowly all the elemental guns' bullets move in the sequel, that pisses me off SO much. I always prefer to use an elemental gun in the first game, and having the shots move so slowly that the enemies frequently just casually stroll out of the way of my line of fire is controller-throwingly frustrating. The lack of health-restoring shields is another headscratcher as well. And some of it is just total whiny nitpicks, such as disliking the new graphics for the menus or wondering why the hell they switched the Fire and Grenade buttons from the first game. Can't tell you the number of times some enemy jumped me and I accidentally hit the wrong one, bounced a grenade off a nearby wall and blew my clumsy ass off.

His early stuff was mostly 3-minute Russo specials where still he rarely had enough movez to finish without having used a chinlock, so not really. He was mostly working in the shitty Attitude midcard without good opponents, too. I'd argue for Andre > Henry. Much more expressive face, a better promo even with his accent (that's the only time that French ever sounded menacing), worked better around larger limitations, covered better for his occasionally flimsy-looking offense (Henry all too often looks like he's afraid he's gonna break his opponent), and for my money a better seller as well. Andre had some of the best timing for psychology and pacing that I've ever seen anyone have, he knew EXAXTLY when to do what he needed to do in order to make the crowd go fuckin' ballistic.

I know what you mean. Borderlands is that oh-so-rare perfect mixture of action and RPG elements, and is one of the more fun experiences I've ever had when it comes to grinding and collecting lots of loot. It's a game which can genuinely be played in a lot of different ways, and no strategy is necessarily superior to the others. (Although if you get REAL good with your rifles, probably the easiest way is to simply keep your distance and try not to let the enemy get close to you.) Mordecai is obviously my favorite, even by the time they made they DLC they already realized how overpowered his special weapon was compared to everyone else's. It's also got a ton of great voice acting, a fun irreverent sense of dark humor, and I didn't even mind that practically every mission is a repetitive fetch quest or that the plot was practically nonexistent just because the gameplay itself is so tremendously entertaining and well-designed that it easily covers up any holes. It's probably my favorite game from this entire generation of consoles. Now if only I could put down part 1 long enough to finally finish the (slightly inferior, imho) sequel...

I used to listen to quite a few podcasts before my computer died, now I've kinda fallen out of the habit. My favorites were the general Wrestling Observer family of casts, several of Kevin Smith's Smodcast spin-offs, a few casts by the ubernerds over at That Guy With The Glasses, and sometimes some Prairie Home Companion or some equally classy NPR stuff. I've also helped several different wrestling podcasts over the years, but they were all bush-league stuff with audiences in the dozens (on a good night) and I would be absolutely shocked if anyone had every heard of 'em. I caught the Birdemic episode, and it was quite awesome. They did a long interview with the lead chick who starred in the movie where she told all these awful stories about what a trainwreck the shoot was, and had Weird Al Yankovich onhand to crack random jokes too!

I was a massive NES fanboy back in the day, and still am. Hell, one of my favorite ways to kill half an hour is simply to say "well, I guess I could beat Defender of the Crown for the quadrillionth time". Aside from the easy gimmes like the Castlevanias and Super Mario Brotherses that everyone loves, some of my more obscure favorites were Pirates!, Ghosts and Goblins, River City Ransom, Bionic Commando, Strider, Rocket Ranger, Silent Service, Kung Fu, Rolling Thunder, Metal Gear, Shadowgate, Rygar, Faxanadu, North & South, TMNT 2: The Arcade Game, Guerilla War (which is basically Ikari Warriors: This Time It Doesn't Suck!), the original Pro Wrestling (STILL my favorite wrestling game, and Roderick Strong King Slender is my man) and yes indeed Maniac Mansion. (Side note: anyone remember the bizarre Family Channel TV-show adaptation of that game? What the HELL was the deal with that bullshit?) ...WHOA. Like, a Keanu Reeves level of whoa. If I were wearing a hat, I would literally tip the brim in your honor right now. I had no idea that was even possible to finish that game anywhere NEAR that quickly. How long did you have to practice in order to do that? And I laughed when you immediately picked Bernard, he's so useful for SO many different things that it practically doesn't matter who else you pick, just having Bernard makes the whole thing way easier.

What? It's a serious question, I honestly don't know. I have no idea what the racial demographics of continental Europe are when it comes to the numbers of people of other races who live there. I assume it's a much lower percentage than you'd get in America (our country was the ultimate destination for the majority of the slaves in the genocidal meat grinder that was the Triangle Trade, and far fewer Africans were kidnapped back to mainland Europe), I just dunno what the actual figures would be and am curious. Legitimately, if the country has problems with racism against black people, how likely is it that your average Dutch person actually knows a black person on a close basis?

(does so) ...so in Holland, Santa Claus has a black sidekick? And people dress up as him, including blackface. That's pretty harmless. I know exactly why the American tradition of blackface has garnered such an incredibly-well-deserved low reputation, but the Dutch equivalent sounds like it's more clueless and naive than anything else. (How many black guys is your average European going to know personally? They probably only see them on television...) There's gotta be more to this Dutch Racism meme than just that.

Yeah. We don't need to belabor the point about what happened to him; hopefully he got the message that his shit does indeed stink just as bad as everyone else's. And having him go crazy on you and throw an articulate tantrum was pretty much the same thing as "you ain't a real rassler until you've been chopped by Gypsy Joe" sort of initiating process.

Also, since you poor folks need content badly, here's a few recent reviews I had lying around: Julien Donkey-Boy (1999): 4/10 This is the second film I’ve seen from independent maverick Harmony Korine (not including Kids, which he wrote but didn’t direct). It’s a lot like the first one, Gummo: the kind of indy-artsy films that give indy-artsy films a bad name. It’s a plotless, slow, opaque, inscrutable mess. It’s essentially two hours of Weird Shit Happening with practically no rhyme or reason to any of the proceedings. Odd people do inexplicable things for inscrutable reasons, all shot in a Natural Born Killers-style whirlwind of distracting camera effects, and this is pretty damn far from my idea of an entertaining night at the movies. Julien (Ewen Bremmer) is a middle-aged manchild with severe schizophrenia who looks kinda like Jerry Seinfeld with Down’s Syndrome. He lives at home with his madly overbearing father (played by Werner Herzog; yes, that Werner Herzog), his weak and codependent brother Chris (Evan Neumann), and his pregnant sister Pearl (Chloe Sevigny). And then… shit, I dunno even what to say, man. Weird Shit Happens. Julien wanders around being crazy, his asshole father berates him a lot, and everyone else mostly just mopes and broods and doesn’t say much. All the dialogue is entirely improvised, and it shows. A tiny smidgen of plot finally appears in the last fifteen minutes, but it’s far too little and far too late. This movie was made under the rules of the European film movement Dogme 95, which had a bunch of pretentious ideas about “purity” in cinema. They’re stuff like using only natural lighting, no fake props or makeup, no guns; you know, all the things that make movies fun. There are a few interesting bits here and there: a few people do some interesting Stupid Human Tricks, like an armless man who does card tricks with his feet and another guy who does a stunt with cigarettes that is so goddamned unbelievable that you’d have to see it for yourself, I can’t even describe it. Ewen Bremmer as Julien is absolutely convincing as a man imprisoned in his own head by insurmountable madness. And even when he’s stuck in a lot of pointless scenes, Werner Herzog has so much coldblooded charisma and has such a great reptilian presence that he makes his part work by sheer effort of will. But the rest is an incomprehensible jumble of ponderous symbolism and other pretentious crap. Finally, the way that Korine frequently exploits handicapped people in his movies in a “gawking at sideshow freaks” manner is really offensive and needs to stop. Black Death (2010): 4/10 What a bummer. Black Death is one of those downbeat flicks that is in SUCH a damn hurry to reveal to us just how awful it was to live in the Middle Ages. I’ve seen a few of these movies now (In the Name of the Rose comes to mind), and they’re always the most depressing thing in the whole goddamn world. There is nary a spark of life, joy, or hope within the entire picture; it’s all blood and dirt and misery and despair. I guess you could make a great movie out of that, like the best adaptations of Victor Hugo’s books, but Black Death doesn’t even come close to sniffing that level of quality. The story is set in medieval England, in the opening stages of the horrifying epidemic of bubonic plague. As entire nations are being quickly depopulated by the hideous disease, a young monk named Osmund (Eddie Remayne) lives in an abbey and is secretly in love with a girl, Averill (Kimberly Nixon). When Osmund learns he is being sent on an urgent errand near his old hometown, he sends Averill to hide in the woods near there so they can be together and safe from the sickness. The journey involves guiding a knight named Ulrich (Sean Bean) and his men to a mysterious secluded village, where rumor has it that there is no plague… but there might be witchcraft and demons. Various gruesome shit ensues. One big problem with the movie is that we’ve simply seen it all before. If you’ve watched The Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, or Flesh + Blood, then you’ve pretty much already seen all of Black Death. And the movie’s unrelentingly grim and pessimistic tone really got on my nerves. The heroes never really achieve anything, never win any important victories; every time it looks like they might succeed, they’re merely kicked in the nuts once again. Yet, all of their enemies and opponents (and even all the innocents they meet) aren’t happy either and generally come to miserable ends. This continues all the way to the finish, which pissed me off with the most unbearably unhappy ending you could possibly imagine. One odd thing is how a lot of people in this movie are typecast in roles which are similar to their best-known parts… which hadn’t happened yet! Eddie Redmayne’s sensitive star-crossed intellectual is awfully close to his Marius in Les Miserables, Sean Bean’s gruff no-nonsense soldier with a hand of steel but a heart of gold is damn near a palette swap for Ned Stark on Game of Thrones, and the actress who plays Melisandre on the same show is once again here essaying the role of a mysterious and seductive witch of uncertain powers. Yet, Black Death was made before all of the above. Strange, huh? The actors are all trying very hard and some of the production design is pretty sweet, but the story is so fucking depressing that it’s not worth watching. Haywire (2011): 6/10 Gina Carano sure can kick an ass or two. The chief pleasure in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire is simply watching her beat the everliving shit out of various villains with a dizzying array of lightning-fast kung fu and MMA-inspired grappling. I was about to say that she could easily stand toe-to-toe with the great cinematic female warriors like Michelle Yeoh; but, hell, she could probably keep up with Jet Li just as easily. She is absolutely believable in every scene as a world-beating secret agent, which more than makes up for the fact that she’s apparently such a bad actress that they had a different woman dub all her dialogue (which, thankfully, is pretty seamless). Hokay… how am I gonna describe this plot? The biggest problem with Haywire is a stupidly overcomplicated storyline, much of which is told out of chronological order. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a freelance operative with a for-profit secret agency that outsources government black-ops jobs and is headed up by her ex-boyfriend (Ewan Macgregor), with whom she’s still cordial. Mallory is considering retirement after a recent botched job, but her boss talks her into going on One Last Mission to collect a final paycheck. But then Mallory is framed for murder, and is quickly pulling a Jason Bourne as she’s hunted across the world. We’ve also got a damn fine supporting cast: Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Angarano, and Bill Paxton as Mallory’s dad (who looks WAY too visibly young for the part, but oddly in real life he could easily be Carano’s father). They all do about as well as you’d expect, especially Banderas who finally gets a subtle little dialogue role to show off his less melodramatic talents. But maaaaaan, that plot is confusing as all hell. I know it sounds fairly simple the way I described it, but in practice it’s bewildering. The story is told in a nonlinear fashion, jumping back and forth like mad between various seemingly unconnected plot points; there’s a massive exposition dump at the end to explain several loose threads, but I’m still pretty sure that I couldn’t pass a test on who did what or why. It’s nowhere near as clear and comprehensive as for example The Limey, another film from the same filmmakers which was told in nonlinear out-of-order fashion and made much more sense. Finally, the MPAA gave this film a really undeserved R rating “for some violence”. Yeah, there are several beatings and shootings, but it’s no different than you’d see on every single episode of 24, let alone the really ultraviolent shit like The Walking Dead or HBO original programming. There’s no sex in Haywire, no nudity, no drug use, and I don’t even remember much if any cursing. I think they simply rated it R because the fight scenes are somewhat realistic and gritty rather than being ridiculous and spectacular. As always, the MPAA thinks it’s their sacred duty to expose children to plenty of silly consequence-free violence that looks like it doesn’t hurt (but in real life would be agonizing), while bravely shielding them from the reality of what actually happens when two people try to kill each other. It’s an offensive and useless double standard which probably has something to do with why America’s kids are such desensitized little sociopaths, but it sadly ain’t changing anytime soon. Grave of the Fireflies: 9/10 Why are some of the greatest works of art also some of the most depressing? Because while Grave of the Fireflies is possibly the greatest feature-length anime movie that I’ve ever seen, it’s also probably the most depressing. The whole thing can be summed up as “Watch two children starving to death while nobody helps them!”. By the end of the movie, you’ll pretty much feel like killing yourself in the most quickly-available way, like a character from The goddamn Happening. But after you get over the “What. The FUCK. Was that?!” shock, the movie almost feels kinda inspiring. Rather like the greatest tragic plays and novels, the sheer nihilistic brutality of the story makes you ultimately feel almost uplifted. The setting is in Japan, in the latter days of World War II. 14-year-old Seito and his 4-year-old sister Setsuko are in a tight spot. American bombing raids are a near-daily fact of life, almost like hideous foreign dragons that mercilessly Godzilla the living hell out of everything in their path. The kids’ father is overseas in the Japanese imperial navy and has been incommunicado for some time, and their mother has recently been maimed beyond recognition by a firebomb. The children stay for a while with a cold and uncaring relative, but are eventually kicked out onto the streets. And despite Seito’s best efforts to find food and Setsuko’s almost inhuman ability to remain ever-cheerful… bad shit happens. Bad shit happens forever. This movie is adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, who wrote the book to try to exorcise the horrifying memories and guilt he had from surviving the war when so many others did not. Despite its obvious power as an anti-war message, the movie version is oddly not intended to be that; animation director Isao Takahata has explicitly said that it’s not supposed to be anti-war, but is rather a Message Movie directed at the Japanese teenagers of the 1980s, when that country saw an explosion in juvenile delinquency. It’s supposedly “shut up and be thankful for how great your lives are, you young punks!” rather than “bombing the living shit out of civilians is wrong”, although most viewers would immediately spot the second moral and totally miss the first one. As an anti-war movie, it’s hard to think of anything that could possibly be more effective or moving. Which is odd, when you remember that the Japanese Empire was possibly the single most evil government in the history of the planet. They killed a LOT more people than the frigging Nazis did, making the Holocaust practically look like a domestic disturbance in comparison. They killed SO many innocent civilians that we still don’t know HOW many, because the number was so unfathomably huge that it’ll never be properly counted. But Grave of the Fireflies is all “hey, no matter how evil their leaders were, how many poor helpless women and children were blown to smithereens or burned alive by Allied bombs?”. And it’s right. War. Huh. Good god, y’all. EDIT: one last odd postscript. This film was produced by Studio Ghibli (one of its few productions which was not a colorful upbeat fantasy), and was in fact originally released in Japan as a double-feature with, of all goddamn things, My Neighbor Totoro. Anyone who’s seen that fluffy piece of ecstatic escapism is probably already open-mouthed in shock, because it’s nearly impossible to think of two flicks that have less in common. Imagine if E.T. and Schindler’s List were originally released as a double feature, it’s THAT fucking weird.

Alright, the whole Lone Ranger fiasco makes a LOT more sense now that I heard the "sorry, despite this movie costing about the same as Avatar, we don't have the capability to show you the kind of special effects that happen every week on True Blood"! Of course, one wonders why they'd do something as silly as werewolves in what's essentially a straight Western. (Did the Lone Ranger franchise ever really dip into the occult like that? I wouldn't be surprised if they did it once or twice in some Very Special Episodes, but you wouldn't think there would be much of that sort of thing.) Dumb damn studio interference, too many cooks ruins the broth, etc. Huh? Please tell us more. I don't know anything about Dutch racism. ...in your spare time, do you stomp on kittens, attend Nazi rallies, and trick people into decade-long indentured servitude careers in telemarketing? Why must you hat EVERYTHING that I love. (Silver lining: good on ya for trying some relatively independent movies which are a lil' more obscure than the typical big-budget Hollywood stuff I've noticed you tend to like. Baby steps, baby steps.)

If you hit the Quote button on a post (which immediately puts the entire quote in the Quick Reply box automatically) but then hit More Reply Options, the special "quotiness" disappears once you get to the next screen. The quote is just typed out in plain text, as if you wrote it yourself.

Hey, should we make a thread for the book club project? I don't see one, and I dunno if this board has the same "you need admin permission to post a new thread" deal as the old one, I've mostly been reading a giant stack of comics recently. (I almost typed "graphic novels", but I've long found that term to be a wee bit defensive and pretentious, as if the term "comics" didn't get across the entire idea of an illustrated story told in sequential panels.) Batman's Hush storyline has aged pretty well, aside from how incredibly obvious in hindsight just who Hush is. The entire Batman RIP extended saga made practically no damn sense whatsoever, and seemed to contain a lot of below-average artwork. Whedon's Tales Of The Slayers/Vampires still rules. Scott Pilgrim still has an issue where some of the characters just look too damn much alike and I lose track of who's who (although it's otherwise a sparkling lil' diamond). And all the others are too mediocre or forgettable for me to even remember what they are. I still dunno why I haven't read more Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five is one of my all-time favorites, and Timequake was pretty damn brilliant itself. I guess it's just easier for me to retreat to my unchallenging literary equivalents of comfort food, rather than try something a bit more intellectually demanding. I guess it's like how I never get around to watching the seemingly dozens of Werner Herzog movies I still haven't caught, and instead popping in Shaun of the Dead for the millionth time. Do you (or anyone else, but you mentioned it first) have any general recommendations for steampunk books, for someone completely ignorant of that genre? The visuals and ideas of steampunk are something that I find fascinating to the point of wanting to play around with them in stories myself, but it seems like the books suffer from the same problem as the fantasy genre, which is simply a bad case of Sturgeon's Law with countless untalented hacks who somehow bluffed their way into authorial careers. So, what's a good short list for beginners? Go with John Dies at the End, sir. An amazingly wonderful book. The sequel, This Book Is Full Of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It) is pretty damn good itself. And my favorite King book is Skeleton Crew too. I much prefer "get the damn story over with as quickly as possible" King to the sadly more common "drag this stuff out for thousands of pages consisting mostly of pointless filler about characters who get arbitrarily killed off anyway, and then a shitty Deus Ex Machina ending" King.

Same. Not much, but I'd be willing to throw in twenty bucks in a month or so. And I totally expect to receive my own personal key to the Elite Member's Gold-Plated Spa & Pool, pronto!

Oh hi Will, haaaaah, how's your sex life? ...what, not everyone gets references to The Room? Ignorant bad-movie-hating philistines! Ditto. I once paid him for some ROH bootlegs after he got all indignant at the RF sex scandal some totally legal videos which were in the public domain and he had every right to sell, so I'm assuming that I can totally post a LOT of snuff-kiddie-bestiality-scat-porn and get away with it like George Zimmerman.

Can I get my "DVDVRMC Official Grump" title back?

I finally polished off the new season of Arrested Development. And, while I did "like" it for the most part... did anyone else find the new tone of the show to be incredibly disconcerting and depressing? It's like the Bluths all suddenly became radically stupider and more amoral than they already were, especially Michael. The last scene of the last episode was excruciating to watch; since when is Michael a total fucking sociopath who doesn't give one tiny shit about his son? Buster and Job are the only ones who're allowed to have any sort of growth or improvement (not much, because it's fucking Buster and Job, but still) while everyone else is a SIGNIFICANTLY worse person than they were in the original series. Having most of the family go for months or years without ever seeing each other was an awfully strange decision too. And the REALLY bizarre "it doesn't really matter much what order you watch the episodes in, they're kinda all happening at the same time" conceit seems like it's little more than a bald attempt to get everyone to re-watch the season in order to get all the jokes they didn't get before. Jeez, that doesn't speak well for the show. Who the hell took over afterwards who can claim to be an even shittier writer than the hack-of-hacks Williamson? (Oh please say it was Ehran Kruger...)

I haven't changed my username since I started with it on local indy boards way back in 2000. Don't fix what ain't broken, I says. Similar opinion on my uber-ancient avatar pic; aside from briefly changing it to Akira Taue after an mind-meltingly retarded debate with Chris Coey about the aesthetics of Taue's chokeslam, you'll have to pry the same ol' Mr. Pogo pic out of my cold dead hands.

I'm not gonna read nine goddamn pages about this, but this last page makes it look like this place is refreshingly sane about this issue. A grown man profiled, stalked, and killed an innocent unarmed kid, period. I've actually blocked two or three people on Facebook for saying incredibly offensive shit about this case. Some of the lies aren't just insulting in their attitude, but insulting in their deliberate ignorance of the facts: which conservative talking-head started this omnipresent meme about Trayvon weighing 220 pounds and being a gang member? Or we could just decriminalize the weaker drugs and only keep enforcing on the real hardcore shit like meth, heroin, and crack. It worked marvelously well for Portugal when they did it a few years ago, there's been absolutely no rise in crime rates. As we found out during the 1920s after the Volstead Act, prohibition doesn't stop drug users; it only creates a criminal underclass of drug cartels. (BTW, I love how the new software puts the entire quote box right in the quick-reply, rather than fucking around with board code.)