It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
The mortal kombat 2 movie that came out recently, it was an empty CGI fest, with little focus on combat or the gore from the original games
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?
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.
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.
It looks to me more like a high school project than a professional clmovie.
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.
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
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.
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
Yeah it sucks since around 1994
…of its own choice.
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.
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
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.
One Piece turned out okay.
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.
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.
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…
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 guess books fall in the “whatever” category :P I was majorly disappointed by The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. I actually enjoyed reading about 85% of it, but the ending completely ruined it for me.
Coming out of a world war vs going into one.
I still remember the opening of that book as being absolutely marvelous, but I can’t remember the ending lol.
Still Life with Woodpecker may be something you’d enjoy, different, but they’re linked in my brain.
Enter the Void, kept hearing “so deep” and “a journey” and “perfect stoner movie”
It was self-important navelgazing - the movie - one of the only movies I stopped watching cause it just pissed me off
And I’ve watched Nazis at the Center of the Earth, and Postal
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).
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.
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.
Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Loved the first one. Only negative I had seen about DD2 was the performance wasn’t great. It’s fucking dookie. Tons of great ideas that aren’t executed well or for more than a single, short-as-fuck quest and then never used again.
The best part of the game is the Sphynx; and even those puzzles are a bit stupid toward the end. Like needing to remember where the very first medallion thing you picked up was. By the time you’d realistically find the Sphynx without any external guidance, you’d have found a ton of those fuckers and you sure as shit wouldn’t think to mark down where after the fact.
Combat gets repetitive quick as enemies spawn constantly, and this includes big shit like griffons that can literally fly in while you’re approaching the end of a long journey and snatch you up and carry you across the damn world to their nest.
Every little thing you do has some long-winded animation you can’t cancel tied to it, and NPCs walking along roads constantly stop you to initiate meaningless dialogue; it doesn’t just not respect your time, it pisses on it.
And to top it all off the story is stupid, short, and ends abruptly before you even know what the hell is really going on. This is including what little extra you can get after a NG+ cycle which makes it even more annoying that you are required to do the whole fucking game twice to still get a shitty ending that doesn’t answer a single question you might have about the events of the plot.
I fucking hate this game.
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
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Jujutsu Kaisen.
Shittiest piece of shit to ever shit on my shitty tv.
It’s been recommended to me by multiple people as absolutely incredible, and halfway into the first season it’s just kind of okay.
I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I’m wondering if it gets better or if I’m just not getting why people like it.
I watched until the second season. I watched the first ep of 3rd season and decided I can’t anymore.
I was a bit too harsh in my comment. It’s not that shitty. It has incredible animation, for instance.
But other than that, I found nothing likable about the series. It has a thin plot which makes excuses for characters to fight each other. There is no really good message or anything. It’s just endless fighting. I understand it’s supposed to be action oriented. But it basically has nothing that makes it worth watching except the action. I watched it only cuz it’s super popular.
