It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
FDR American Badass.
It’s a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.
The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.
You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)
We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.
You quit too early! It totally redeemed itself by the end!
Just kidding, I’ve never even heard of it, but your review of it made me want to check it out right away. It’s sounds like my kind of movie.
I, Robot.
I’m a huge Asimov fan, and pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist.
pretty much the only thing it shared with the story is the name and that robots exist
Same with the Foundation show. Could probably have been a nice science fiction show with any other name and with different character names, but for some reason (probably marketing?) they just had to ruin it for Asimov fans.
Nitpicking a bit, though, I Robot (the boo) isn’t a story, it’s an anthology of short stories in which Asimov plays with the three laws, mostly to torture Powell and Donovan in entertaining ways (I’d kill for a good Powell and Donovan miniseries!) or to show how smart and unemotional Susan Calvin was, so it’s hard to see how it could be adapted except as an anthology series.
Same with Foundation, really, though at least that one has an overall storyline. Possibly even more difficult to adapt, though, because other than Sheldon’s hologram once an episode and possibly Eto Demerzel / R. Daneel Olivaw if you’re being excessive liberal with the adaptation there’s no characters to get attached to… (anthology series with no persistent characters have worked occasionally, though, so maybe just do that).
Ah, it’s been a hot minute since I read through all of his works, I the story/anthology backwards.
I haven’t watched Foundation yet, but I’ve said for years that a live adaptation would be almost impossible to pull off.
But an anthology series for I, Robot would have been amazing.
I watched 2 episodes of the foundation and was so frustrated on how completely different it was that I just can’t watch more. I also get mad when I think of it. Ugh…
Same. It’s doubly disappointing because there’s clearly material for an interesting science fiction show in there (what they did with the Cleon clones would have been quite interesting in another series), but it’s all ruined by the completely wrong Foundation references.
They managed to ruin what could have been a great adaptation of a great classic and what could have been an interesting original series at the same time, the bastards.
Spirited Away was too cringy and it had no consistent worldbuilding and therefore no consistent stakes, it just felt like a list of things happening for no reason, kind of like a dream.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for your opinion.
Personally, I don’t think you’re wrong, but that’s also not really the point of the movie. It’s not trying to make a spiritual world with hard rules per se. It’s more about growth and uses the spirits to set the stage for conflicts for the main character to overcome (with the consistent stake of losing herself/her identity)
Like many studio ghibli films, it’s about facing pivotal times in our lives and overcoming fears so we can better face the challenges of everyday life.
My neighbor Totoro has the kids moving to a new place and dealing with a sick parent, spirited away is about moving to a new city, whispers of the heart is about first love and how to decide what to do with your life, Kikis delivery service is about heading out into the world. In many of these movies, the fantastical is used to present these challenges in a more approachable way, but the “stakes” are almost always internal and personal.
I don’t get his criticism for inconsistent world building. Like you said, it lacks hard rules because it is based on Japanese folklore that is mostly mysterious in its inner workings, but it doesn’t mean it is inconsistent.
Like many any media tied to a specific culture, it assumes a familiarity with the culture - in this case shinto beliefs and japanese folklore. If you’re unfamiliar with those things then a lot of the rules and situations seem to be random and come out of nowhere.
A similar scenario would be like watching Scream or Scary Movie without having seen the movies they make references to. You might still enjoy the movie, but without the context of the films they satrize/parodize you won’t fully appreciate what the movie is doing.
It makes it an understandable criticisim, accesibility of a movie is a valid complaint. However, I don’t think it’s one that necessarily reflects on the quality of the movie, but rather is a warning about who will appreciate it.
I think familiarity affects how much it meets your expectations, not necessarily how consistent the world building is. Saying it is inconsistent either means the guy doesn’t understand what inconsistent means or they think only things that meet their expectations can be considered consistent.
How old were you when you watched it or how long ago did you watch it?
I watched it at around 17/18 I think?
Oh. Maybe watch other studio Ghibli stuff. They have some more grounded stories like
- From Up on Poppy Hill
- Whisper of the Heart
- Only Yesterday
- Ocean Waves
- The Wind Rises
What is inconsistent about its world building?
There are just no rules, anything can happen for no reason
Not having clear rules doesn’t mean it is inconsistent. If the same thing happens and the result is different, that would make it inconsistent. I don’t remember anything like that happening in the movie.
I think the Eurovision Song Contest has lost the innocent magic it once possessed.
Yep ,go back to 80s
…of its own choice.
Yeah it sucks since around 1994
The TV adaptation of Preacher. The comics were more like a western but with a dark sense of humour that popped up when the moment called for it. The tv show was ‘wow, this is so wacky and wild!’ I get the impression Seth Rogan liked the comics but didn’t actually understand them at all.
The Netflix version of Cowboy Bebop.
The cast was great but the script was just horrible and really ruined the show.
I have zero hope that there will ever be any good live-action remakes of anime. I remember how everyone was excited that the Ghost in the Shell live-action was just mediocre.
If that cast and production crew had made an original show about a dark funky future and bounty hunters and whatever, clearly inspired by Bebop but not trying to be it, they could have knocked it out of the park so hard.
They would, of course, have had to get some decent writers instead of just feeding the original anime scripts to crack-smoking monkeys and then smearing their poops onto script paper.
Perhaps controversial but I don’t think animated shows should ever be translated to live action, at least where fantasy, sci-fi, and exaggerated action are pivotal to the story or art style.
Especially when they try to make it available and shoe-horn it to a wide general audience that probably haven’t seen the original show.
One Piece turned out okay.
On a related note, I was really underwhelmed and disappointed by last year’s new Shinichiro Watanabe anime series, Lazarus.
As a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo (and to a lesser extent Space Dandy) I was really looking forward to another serious anime helmed by Watanabe. What we got was, for various reasons, not the least of which being the untimely death of Bebop writer Keiko Nobumoto, really boring and subpar at best.
I struggled to finish it, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered it it wasn’t by a creator that I like and respect.
it was genuinely baffling how superficial and shallow the writing was, how underwhelming the direction was and how uninteresting the character designs were (I genuinely can’t remember a single one). The animation and music were great but overall it basically felt like a painfully average Netflix flick rather than a Watanabe.
Yes, I agree. To me it is almost like they ignored the original storytelling and the story and instead wanted to make something more “hollywood”.
It is the deep background and how the stories are told along with the awsome music, that makes Bebop so good. Not flashy one-liners
I can’t think of a better example of disconnect between source material and output. Just… What happened? It’s like it was written by a focus group.
it’s quite fresh in my mind, but the last season, and especially the last episode, of The Boys was nothing compared to what it could’ve been.
It was still entertaining, but they really turned the propaganda up to 11 and the rest of the show suffered for it
boys 3-5 seems to have suffered, as kripke got lazier in running the show. vastly different from the first 2, usually he does very well on 5 season shows, like with supernatural, but boyz? spn 6-15 had nothing to do with kripke, thats why the show was so bad.
i thought 3 and 4 were great, but 5 was really rushed by the second half. they didn’t use the Gen V cast barely at all in the finale and the last episode is just a mad dash to tie up as many plot threads possible. a really lackluster finish to what was otherwise an amazing series!
Great Expectations. It just wasn’t all I’d hoped for.
I thought 2 Great 2 Expect was fun, at least.
Yes!
And is Great Expectation: Tokyo Drift part of the same franchise? It wasn’t clear…
The Last Airbender 2010 by Manoj Nelliyattu “M. Night” Shyamalan.
He ruined it. Nearly everything but the costumes were wrong. He should try again out of his own pocket to make amends.
How did you feel about The Legend of Korra?
Overall I liked Korra. It has two big moments though that rubbed me the wrong way.
spoiler
The part where they broke the Avatar cycle was a awful direction to take the show. Also making platinum the most plentiful resource was a brain dead villian arc.
I was extremely excited in the beginning because the setting felt very well-constructed. I thought that bending contributing to rapid technological progress made a lot of sense to me, and I really like that there wasn’t excessive exposition regarding the state of the world.
So much of what they did from that point just felt so corny.
spoiler
- When Amon took her bending only for the Avatar ancestors to pull up and return it like five minutes later
- Raava and Vaatu being just one-dimensionally “good” and “evil”
- The fucking kaiju fight
- Introducing the dictator lady, Kuvira—can’t remember how to spell her name—like three episodes before the next arc, telegraphing that she was the next villain focus so hard
- Kuvira then doing the trite “you saved me, but why” and just completely folding on her entire mission
It was just so disappointing for me. I don’t know if they got creatively restricted, or if something happened with the original writers or what. I don’t regret watching it, but I just wish they had taken or had been able to take more risks.
Yeah I agree, overall the story was bad. I really enjoyed the characters and slice of life aspects of the show. I felt some of those points you bring up were big weaknesses to the overall experience. It felt like the team was targeting a younger group than before. (Or I just got older haha)
I can corroborate your last point because I watched both of these series relatively recently, and I also have little to no nostalgia associated with the subject.
I actually used to despise when ATLA came on. At that age, I could never commit to following plot-heavy shows, because I didn’t really watch TV a ton (I thought I watched a lot, but I’m learning now as I talk to peers that it was not lol), and the show felt like it was on forever, eating up time on Nick. I finished it up around this time last year and ATLA is now among my favorite shows ever. I continued with TLOK shortly after, and yeah, those were my feelings.
So from my experience, I’m not gonna say it’s the whole “growing out of it” thing. TLOK just is a less interesting story, the way I see it.
I hated the above Avatar movie but I loved TLoK. She is such an awesome character and has tonnes of growth and development, along with the fantastic lgbt end of the series. It was definitely a little difficult in the first few episodes but a big part of that was the transition from a rural setting to a city setting decades later, so it went from the backwater technology level to the cutting edge near a century later.
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His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Concept was great but I really didn’t like how the story developed past book 1. I know the series has its fans, but it’s a big nope for me.
I’m certainly one of those fans.
I read His Dark Materials way back, when I was perhaps 13, and that was probably the right time in my life to read it because I’d never been as emotionally invested in a character before as I was in Lyra.
I genuinely feel like reading that trilogy made me a better person, weird to say.
I haven’t read the books in a long time, but they have place on my bookshelf in recognition of what they meant to adolescent me.
Dr Who after Peter Capaldi left.
The plots went to crap. The retconning destroyed decades of canon. I’ve nothing against the actors involved but the writers should be taken out and beaten.
I keep trying to give it a chance and don’t understand what the fuck happened, but I feel so bad for Jodi Whitaker and Ncuti Gatwa. The writing is so awful it’s like they don’t even get to play the same part.
The Hobbit movies
One of my favourite books as a kid, I don’t think I’ll ever watch the movies again by choice
You could tell those were going to be a gongshow just from the production process. LotR had years of prepwork to make sure everything was sorted out and ready for filming, so they had a relatively smooth time filming. The Hobbit films were rushed and you could tell. PJ apparently was finalising scripts and storyboards the night before each shoot.
LOTR was bad to me, I absolutely loved those books as a kid, I even enjoyed the animated ones from forever ago, but the movies were far too long for what they showed.
When The Hobbit came out as a trilogy movie series I was a bit confused but gave it a try.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a LotR fan whose favourite film adaptation was Bakshi’s. That’s really interesting.
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Eyes Wide Shut, Billy Bat, and in general every thriller story that ditches the text in favor of the subtext
Eyes Wide Shut was such a good movie though. Do you like other Kubrick films?
I know it’s ancient history, but I still can’t get over the spectacular train wreck of Star Wars Episode One. So much hype, so much hope, and then you get a two hour arcade game promo with Jar Jar Binks. It was like George Lucas had picked every single terrible trope of 90s movies and packaged it neatly into a movie.
The funny thing is, having been born several years after it was released and having probably played the lego games before seeing the films, I liked it! Hell I loved it!
But if i put myself in the shoes of, well, you for instance, then I can see that it’s as dissapointing as the disney sequel trilogy. And then I can see how lame some aspects are on further rewatches
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
It has really low rewatchability too. The in-universe gap between phantom menace and attack of the clones is reallly long, making it less relevant to the rest of the trilogy. And it has huge swathes of boring stuff in the middle. Politics stuff, very hard to follow.
Jar Jar doesn’t bother me as a character.
I say this everytime phantom menace is mentioned, but the original plans would have had appropriately aged characters and been really fun.
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
I find this a fascinating thing to think about.
I’m the same age as the original Star Wars film and grew up on the Original Trilogy. Those three were some of the best stuff ever to my kiddie brain. The older I get, the more I feel like the OT was pretty much just as childish as the prequels when it comes down to it, just without access to 1990s cartoony CGI. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, I still enjoy the OT, but it’s clear to me now as an old fart that the prequels felt more kiddie than the OT when I watched them in the theaters because I was watching the prequels for the first time with a grownup’s brain.
I still enjoy the OT, they poke those childhood brain cells that have been hooked on them all this time. I can enjoy the prequels a bit, but it’s mostly in the form of memes and cracked-out fan remixes. The sequel movies, though, always struck me as a goddamned mess and I still haven’t figured out who they were meant to be for.
I was born the same year episode 6 came out, so I was 16 when Phantom Menace came out, and grew up loving the original trilogy. And my teenager brain enjoyed the Phantom Menace too. Yeah, Jar Jar was annoying and the CGI was jarring sometimes, especially growing up watching the practical effects they used in the originals, but I still loved it. I just really think they should have aged Anakin up in TPM though, he should have been a teenager instead of a kid because it just made the scenes with him and Padme really weird.
Man, Phantom Menace being the worst Star Wars movie when it came out is like George W. Bush being the dumbest US president: those were simpler times, somehow.
I’ll say the prequels aged better than I’d remembered them, though. And they get a lot better with the existing fanedits, especially HAL9000’s take on Episode I, which trims a lot of the dumb humour, dials down the Jar Jar antics significantly and tightens the plot a nice bit, to make it more of a classic Star Wars adventure.
Yeah, at least the prequels had an actual story to them and were cohesive with each other. The sequels are just a jumbled mess with each director doing their own thing. I’d take the prequels over the sequels any day.
I think Topher Grace was behind an edit that only used about ten minutes of episode one.
Yes! That’s what actually got me into Star Wars fanedits and fanedits in general, he made the whole prequel trilogy into a unified experience. Saw one based on his editing notes and liked it, but through the years I’ve come to enjoy other takes from the movies, as well.
I haven’t witnessed the edit you mention, but it sounds like it fits in 20 minutes. 🤣
I’ve seen it twice. I bought tickets to two showings on opening day because after sixteen years of waiting there was finally going to be a new Star Wars movie. I had one for the very first showing in the morning and the other for that night. There hasn’t been a more exciting moment in a movie theater than when I saw the Lucasfilm logo and “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” and then that blast of trumpets. And then the movie happened. After the closing credits rolled, I spent the next few hours debating on whether or not to use the second ticket. I bit the bullet and went, surrounded in the line outside by all of these hopeful, happy people. I didn’t have the heart to warn them.
Nobody would have believed you, anyway. Expectations were so high, you would have just come across as a hateful troll.
The movie birdman!
I read about it as an piece of art and what I saw was simply boring.
I might not have understood it or have been in the wrong state of mind, idk.
