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Emhilradim
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Shuumatsu no Harem (2021)
The typical anime lead who avoids women
So World's End Harem is a series about a man who wakes up in a world where the MK (Man Killer) Virus has decimated the population of men by 99.9%, there's like 1 million men remaining in the world. This is explained in an exposition dump. Our character wakes up, and is surrounded by women. Many women who barely wear clothing.
They start off introducing him into the world where they take him outside, where a woman throws herself at him only to be hit by a taser. I don't know if that was meant to be comedic or horrifying, it just came off odd. Our protagonist is put off by this, and right away you just know how it's going to be.
Women are constantly approaching him, coming onto him, even the woman who is supposed to be his caretaker wants him, but no. This is an anime man, so he refuses as much as possible. If you watch the uncensored version there's a lot of breasts, but that's really all there is for nudity. At one point the protagonist suffers a scratch and one of his bodyguards rips off the bottom of her shirt to wrap his wound, which exposes her breasts. This series is pretty much H, but because they don't show (or blur as is usually the case) genitals, it's classified as ecchi instead so it can be played on TV (in Japan that is).
Pretty lame loophole, and pretty lame anime. It's got nice art, but the story exists only because it's expected to be there, and this is pretty much just borderline adult material that goes soft to avoid the adult rating.
My Name Is 'A' by Anonymous (2012)
It's not the story you were expecting for the subject matter
When you hear that this film is about the real-life murder committed by Alyssa Bustamante, you'd probably think that the film would center around that event. And you'd be wrong. Instead this movie tries to explore "who is Alyssa Bustamante?" and I'm not sure how much if any of it is accurate.
The weird thing is that the movie has a lot of awkward sequences that seem to be there to pad out the length, and don't seem to in any way service the story. At one point there's a really awkward shower scene, and at the halfway point in the movie we have to watch a music video in what I assume to be Russian?
The real story of Alyssa Bustamante is disturbing on its own, and it would have been better to tell the story of the actual events. The lying, the manipulation. Pretending to help look for her victim, all the while keeping entries in her diary about the thrill she got from it. That would have been good subject matter for a documentary of a murder. Instead we follow a girl with a terminal obsession with Russia.
Honestly, I would recommend to avoid this.
Searching (2018)
A suspense mystery that feels like a rollercoaster
From the start of the film I didn't really know what I was getting into. I saw a few things here and there that I took note of, they seemed mostly irrelevant. But I remembered them all the same. I thought I'd seen Chekhov's gun at some point, and I knew where this film was going. I didn't expect it to end the way it did, but I was glad that we get closure as the viewer. We know what happened.
I've never seen Cho outside of a Harold & Kumar film, but his performance in this is fantastic. Thankfully not typecast into stupid stoner films, we get to see just how deep into the well Cho can reach to pull out a great performance. The whole cast was convincing on this film, we see a father go from being the cornerstone of a family to the close yet still distant single dad to a man desperately trying to find and hold onto the treasure that means most to him. It's a great whodunnit that doesn't make us sit through melodrama with actors exaggerating performances to seem emotional. I felt like the emotional element was actually realistic, this wasn't Twin Peaks levels of corny.
I guess I would be remiss if I didn't mention that yes, like everyone else says, "hooray, this film got the technology correct for the real world," and it's kind of a drag that people have to compliment the film for being refreshing about THAT. Not the film's fault, clearly.
Would I watch it again? Maybe in a decade. This is the kind of film that takes you places you might not be prepared to go, and does so unapologetically. I feel enriched for having watched it, nonetheless.
Shûmatsu nani shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte moratte ii desu ka? (2017)
I loved most of it!
WorldEnd was for me enjoyable, but I didn't like the ending.
For the first six minutes (ignoring that first minute sequence, that is) it tells you a lot about the world! After a young woman asks a would-be savior to help her find a location, the dialogue gives way to a beautiful love song (a unique rendition of "Scarborough Fair") and a sequence of their adventures in the city. WorldEnd is most definitely a love story, or at least, the anime covers the parts that could be called a love story. I haven't read the light novels or the manga, so I'll only be covering the anime.
So this is the introduction we get into this series, it's about 6 minutes of saccharin storytelling. After a brief conversation where she thanks him for a life changing experience, she says fondly that she can now easily die with peace for having shared the moment. And then our two characters part ways, not having given each other names, and the girl asking him to forget ever meeting her at all. But it is obvious to the viewer that their fates are linked. I won't go into details on that first minute sequence, and I feel like it would have been better if they hadn't even put that there. The story is about Willem, one of the last remaining humans and Cththolly the leprechaun.
This is a pretty short series at only 12 episodes in length. The music in the show is pretty good, "Scarborough Fair" for example is easily recognizable (though the lyrics are a bit different from the original, sung from a female perspective instead). When the show uses the term leprechaun they refer to the Gaelic myth of magic-wielding fairies, and not so much the American idea of a little tiny human wearing green and granting wishes.
Living a life of subsistence and mired in debt, the goblin Grick offers to Willem a job. Willem is hesitant to take the job once he finds out it's for the military, as he is incapable of fighting any longer. Though he relents when he finds out it's just a job of "watching over some weapons in a warehouse." Those weapons, as it turns out, are fairies.
The story is sweet. I enjoyed it immensely. But then the ending came and I was really left scratching my head. Is this really it? Is there no more to the story? The anime has no second season, nor is one planned. I'll probably try picking up the manga and see if something changes there, and barring that, possibly the light novel. If you're looking for a lot of intense action, you're not really going to get that here. This is about characters discovering their humanity in a world where there's very little of that left.
I certainly wanted to find out how it all ends, but you won't get that from the anime alone.
DARLING in the FRANXX (2018)
A very different type of story
Whether it by Final Fantasy VIII, Mobile Suit Gundam or Evangelion, Japan has a real trend of the child soldier story. Darling in the Franxx begins in a post-apocalyptic Earth where the remnants of humanity have fled the Planet's surface to live in Plantations and educate child soldiers in Gardens. Much in the same way as say Pacific Rim, the Franxx are robots which require a pair of pilots to operate, and much like Pacific Rim, a synchronicity is required.
The story relies on an in-universe children's fairy tale "The Beast and the Prince," about a beast who sheds her wings to be with her husband until she must leave forever. I don't know if that's a real folk tale or made up for the show. The characters begin to discover that they're more than just weapons, and to not follow orders blindly. They begin to combat vanity, jealousy, obsession and most of all their own naivety. Yes, at its core the story is a coming of age story with mecha and monsters, though unlike Evangelion, without the religious overtones.
My favorite character from the get go and by far was 02. She starts off incredibly one dimensional, and the story continues to make her unlikable, until things turn around and she becomes one of the best characters in the show almost instantly. Hiro (our hero) starts off really predictable, and stays predictable most of the way through. That said, I do feel like things tend to come to him a little too easily. Every form of tension that comes his way lasts very little time and then it disappears, his journey to build trust and overcome his obstacles seems to be constantly undercut by those same obstacles jumping out of the way and disappearing.
The music was good as ambiance, but I wouldn't say that I can even remember any of the songs. Were I to hear one, I think I might recognize it, but nothing in the score jumped out to the point I think about it right now. One thing I did find cute about the OP is the way 02 seems to be "singing" the track at the end of the OP.
The series should have expanded the length of its stories out to a larger number of episodes in my opinion, maybe even 10 more episodes to give the story time to breathe? The final episode starts off 70 days after the previous episode, and then rapidly progresses to 2 years after the previous episode. I feel as if this could have been really expanded upon where we get a little bit of time to experience some of what's going on in there.
I feel like, despite taking inspirations from other sources, Darling in the Franxx was a mostly unique and interesting story. Its failings were forgivable and perhaps if the series had gone on 10 more episodes, I might feel it went too long, but I wanted more. It's notable that there is a manga based on the series, I have no idea if anything in the manga is changed from the anime (I'm sure there is).
And the ending was a lot better than Hi-Score Girl!
Gurankuresuto Senki (2018)
Over time my opinion of this has changed
I've loved Ryo Mizuno's previous works, Record of Lodoss War and Rune Soldier. So I expected that I was going to love this series and that it would be pretty much Lodoss War without elves and dwarfs. And it kind of is that in a way, but I don't know if I would say I loved it. I watched the whole thing, though. Ryo Mizuno's works seem to have several typical tropes, the protagonist who wants to protect everyone including the enemy and whose father paid the ultimate price for that goal, a desert-based tribe who are very skillful but also very violent and ruthless and a secret subplot in the background involving an ancient witch and a magical major player that will be revealed only nearing the end of the story.
That said, I didn't really enjoy the pace of the series nor did I much care for the way that the show treats its characters as pieces of convenience. Not only do characters who seem like they're critical die, but a lot of the times, they die with only a mundane line of dialogue to even let you know that they're dead. Characters get introduced as if we're deep into their story, and their stories end completely abruptly.
The final plot line of the show, which is introduced IMMEDIATELY before it is 'resolved' is so overused and in anime and video games, and once it happens you'll no longer need to wonder why it is that everything seems a bit off in this world.
The Boys (2019)
The Boys is something new in an otherwise stagnant genre
Garth Ennis penned a great series indeed.
So how do we make a big flip on the superhero genre and make it fun again after the comic fatigue has set in? We make the series about non-superheroes who hate and want to kill the superheroes of course! This is not your typical cape story, this is about the public at large around the superheroes in a world that's written realistically about how superheroes would exist.
Hughie was having an ordinary typical day with his girlfriend, the future seemed bright. Only for everything to change in a quick flash of red, his girlfriend is no more, leaving him standing on the sidewalk, unable to even comprehend what is happening. He watches as an intoxicated superhero stumbles away, and is left with the aftermath. Understandably upset, he is approached by a man named Billy Butcher, and if he'd been in the right state of mind, he'd probably have told Billy Butcher to tottle on. But this is where the story begins.
This series is intelligently written, and downright hysterically comedic. There are so many elements that I'd love to write about, but that'd be spoilers. Hughie is played by Jack Quaid, whom I've never seen before but has a great delivery that makes the role believable, and his father Hugh is played by Simon Pegg (who is always amazing). Billy Butcher is played by Karl Urban in what I would say is possibly his best performance to date. This series is not about superheroes, this series is about the people who are disillusioned and despise the superheroes. The superhero characters are the driving force of the plot, but they are not the main characters by any means. And our antagonist is Homelander, played by Antony Starr, who basically comes off as the Christopher Reeve superman if he hated humans and lost the fight with his evil half in the junkyard. He's great in the role.
If you're a fan of the comics, you might have a few nitpicks here and there, the series is a DRASTIC contrast to the comic books. Some of the base elements are unchanged, but the actual events tend to be drastically different. When the series reveals how and why there are super "heroes," and then reveals how and why there are super villains it really elevates the entire thing.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
I couldn't stop laughing
Word around the water cooler is this movie did not originally start off as a Cloverfield movie, I can believe that because there's things in the background that show this to probably be most likely true. That said, this movie was not intended to be a comedy, but I couldn't stop laughing at the plot developments. The big plot twist at the midway point is too obvious, and the plot reveal at the end just came seemingly out of nowhere, there was nothing to set it up at all so it seemed like they just tacked it on for the last 5 minutes of the film.
Hai Sukoa Garu (2018)
I loved this series, despite one nitpick
The series is a loveletter to the 90s era of arcades and a coming of age tale of love between two girls and a boy. Harou is a young boy in elementary school in 1991, he's bullied by both teachers and classmates alike, told he's worthless and has no skills. So he seeks escapism in the fantasy of the game centers of Japan, while it would seem like he has little skills in life, at video games he's a pro. But one day he comes up against an opponent that utterly destroys him in his favorite game (Street Fighter II), only to find out that his opponent is a classmate of his .. and a girl. What's more she's a rich girl who he sees as an outsider in his world of escapism, so he uses exploitative strategy against her which starts off their love-hate relationship.
Her name is Oono Akira, a mute girl who feels like she is being crushed under the responsibilities of being the heir to the family business, and also seeks escapism for this reason. The two of them form a bond together, but her future has been planned since the day she was born with talk of an arranged marriage when she reaches maturity. Can Harou and Akira survive together? What's more, entering into the mix is another girl named Hidaka who, like Akira, resents and even hates Harou at first, but is also touched by Harou's kind (if stupid and oblivious) nature, and learns to stop worrying quite as much about the hardships of life and have fun... And along the way loses her heart to him. But what about Akira? Well that's up to you to find out.
Described as a "love comedy" as opposed to "romantic comedy" by the author, the series plays through cycles which is frustrating until finally beginning in the third cycle the protagonist finally asks himself "why do I keep resetting to zero?" at which point I couldn't help but exclaim "YES, WHY?" There's a greenlit second season in October of this year (2019), though the series is already completed in manga form at a rather light 63 chapters at 10 volumes. One could probably read through the whole thing in a single day if they were truly inclined. Which I set out to do, I did not successfully read it in one day, but that's neither here nor there.
Having watched the anime and not wanting to wait til October (though I'll watch the second season anyway), I decided to investigate the manga. And I was rather shocked by what I found. While the anime was mostly faithful and unswerving from most of the anime, the anime actually omits contextual scenes from the manga. For example, Akira who is mute and thus is never able to say words to express herself has a few scenes in the manga where her thoughts are conveyed. By denying her thoughts, she is denied of any real agency in the anime and thus we're forced to try and understand her reasoning when she blankly looks at something. Perhaps they will go back in season 2 and reveal these scenes of agency, but I felt the need to deduct a point for this because I found that to be frustrating.
The two characters I enjoyed most were Hidaka and Akira (not in any particular order, it'd be hard to pick one over the other). Harou's otaku (obsessive) nature makes him a character that I found hard to like, as he misses the obvious all the time, and when trying to express himself can't help but go into a roundabout conversation about some video game. I get that it's exaggerated on purpose, but that doesn't really make it better.
The OP I didn't much care either way, but that outro song is so good that I found it frustrating when Netflix kept trying to skip it. If you like love stories, this is quite possibly the most unconventional one I've ever seen. I liked it so much I decided I wanted to read the manga so that I didn't miss anything. Definitely worth a watch. Hidaka is lovable, and Akira are adorable, and any time they're on the screen you'll find yourself rooting for them.
Also of note, this anime does not rely on sexuality or fanservice of any kind. There's a couple of throwaway jokes here, and in the manga Hidaka's point of view on the sexism in the Game Centers makes sense, but Netflix chose to leave that particular scene out and focus on character development, if only they had taken the time to keep Akira's agency intact, considering how little of it there is.
The Greasy Strangler (2016)
Laughing so much I had tears in my eyes
I watched this movie because it was mentioned by RedLetterMedia once upon a time, and to call it a "weird sex film" is not inaccurate at all. The greasy bits of the movie are the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in a film, and I couldn't help but laugh about that. "Big Ronnie" is a strange man, he lives with his middle-aged son "Big Brayden" and has an obsession with grease. He's always applying liberal amounts of grease and oil to his food (honestly the grease scenes nearly made me vomit, which just made it even funnier to me). Every day they take tourists on walking tours of their city to tell them fabricated stories about disco bands. But every night Ronnie ends up covered in a thick layer of grease and takes out his anger on people, which results in him becoming known as "The Greasy Strangler." The film makes no attempt to obscure this fact, it's pretty much a prevalent theme throughout the entire film, which could make one wonder if maybe they should have had some restraint or made it a mystery -- but then the movie wouldn't be so cheesy if it did!
There's plenty of awkward sexuality and nudity in the film, complete with hideous prosthetic pieces for everyone. The film goes far out of its way to be as disgusting as possible, and it definitely works to comedic effect. The characters say such absurd things and act extremely awkward. In the end, the film is about a father and son in the late years of their lives, trying to cope with one another and how their choices tear them apart. The ending is as awesome as it is strange, and I'd actually love to see a sequel, but I'm just not sure if a sequel could live up to the legacy of the first.
Kingdom (2019)
This was actually really good
I'll start off by saying, I have not read Kingdom of the Gods, so I don't have a personal bias or history with the IP. That said, this series is really enjoyable. So first and foremost, we have something written and produced in South Korea, so that means a few things. Respect for history, no need to throw unnecessary nudity or sexuality in there, the closest we get are awkward romance scenes. And they're totally fine, not cringe at all.
Now, I'm gonna say, there's a lot of predictability in this. And some things that seem predictable, but are actually true red herrings. From the get go of the series, you can kind of figure a few things out right off the bat. Yes we can predict exactly what they're doing from the first five minutes, yes the plot reveals are predictable. But to the show's credit, those reveals aren't really meant to surprise an American audience who is used to the zombie genre. This is a show trying to introduce Koreans to zombies in a period drama method.
So of our main characters, we have six to deal with. These are your typified archetypes, there's the altruistic prince. He wants to do things differently. There's the prince's best friend (only friend it would seem like). The prince's former master. The vagabond whose skills belie his lowly stature. The herbalist/doctor who wants to try and cure everyone. And I suppose there's the bumbling buffoon coward who will eventually man up and become a power player if he lives long enough. This is your typical hero's journey where the hero loses everything, and has to risk life and limb to save everyone, while also trying to take back his birthright. But it's still such a good series.
As I said earlier, there's no nudity in this series (so far anyway), and it's very tasteful. The villains at first seem fairly 2 dimensional and we can guess what their motives are, and why we should hate them. But appearances can be deceiving, and there might be more than meets the eye. But you probably will still end up hating them, because they're your typical vile archetypes who see people as disposable and have a plan. Now unlike American television where they'd reveal those plans, they don't tell you what their goals or their motivations are. The Queen seems like a mere puppet just doing what she's told, but is she? What is the Minister's plan? Is everyone the hero travels with trustworthy?
I really really hope that there's a season 2 and that it arrives expediently, because I'd love to see what happens next. And hopefully more than 6 episodes!
Bleach: Burîchu (2018)
This film muddles its way between story elements, but misses the mark somewhat
I don't know how much of the script was cut from the final edit of the film, but I imagine that they could have kept some of that material, and expanded the length a bit with some scenes that were fairly important. It's hard to discuss why I have issues with this film without talking about spoilers, thus why this is a spoilered review. I feel that people are too quick to say "THIS IS DYNAMITE" and have even seen some people with criticisms who still gave the film a 10 star rating, but 10 stars is perfect and this film ain't that.
--Costumes--
The costumes for the characters are somewhat acceptable. For the everyday character scenes, it's pretty much what you'd expect a group of Japanese students to look like. But things fall down a bit when you get into hairstyles for female characters, and costumes for the shinigami. The biggest example that stands out to me is Abarai Renji. Renji at this time should be wearing a pair of goggles, but instead they seem to have went with a sleepwear night mask, and it was such a huge piece too, so it covered a good deal of his head to the point of being distracting. As to hair, several characters stood out to me, which is Masaki, Ichigo, Yuzu and Orihime. These characters are supposed to have orange/blonde hair. Masaki's hair is black, Orihime's hair is black, Yuzu's hair is black and Ichigo's hair is black with blonde highlights. Kubo said he was "concerned about the idea of a Japanese character with orange/light hair," but these characters aren't really supposed to be fully Japanese.
--Casting--
Casting for the film was .. interesting. The Shinigami could be almost any age really, as these characters are supposed to be hundreds and even thousands of years old, but the bulk of the cast are supposed to be high school students. The youngest of the high school student actors/actresses is 20. These are supposed to be 15 year old students, and one of the actors is 31 years old. He certainly doesn't look 15. As for Renji and Byakuya, I did wonder which of the two was older between the two actors.
--Characterization--
This is where I had some real issues. While the brash and carefree Karin was somewhat accurate to her character, the Yuzu character actually came off as the more crass between the two, which flies in the face of the original character (who is supposed to be sweet and sensitive). Isshin is fairly accurate, but lacks a bit of his freespiritedness. Ichigo is fairly accurate. Chad was fairly off, being aggressive in a way that didn't make sense for his character (in the manga he never throws a punch at a human, instead defeating his opponents by absorbing their blows until they collapse in exhaustion). Orihime was very different, acting more like a boy crazy girl, and Ishida lacked the haughtiness and scorn that characterized his character at this point in the manga. The shinigami on the other hand were mostly perfect, although Urahara was almost completely skipped over in the film, having less than two minutes of total screen time. Many supporting characters were omitted, but this was of course for run time sake, as there simply wasn't enough time. Also a really odd change of tone was the Rukia-Ichigo relationship, which comes off as almost romantic, with Rukia having an otherwise inconsistently emotional moment with Ichigo.
One thing this really lacked was Ichigo's sense of propriety, he makes a reference to the fact that he's not noble enough to sacrifice his life for others, but also isn't able to stand by and let those around him be bullied or killed needlessly. But they go nowhere with it. Also for some reason they changed the gender of the ghost from female to male, no idea why they did that, though I guess it doesn't really matter.
--Length--
The film comes in at roughly 1:45 in length, and I would have liked if they had gone for another 45 minutes. There was probably plenty of material that they could have included to complete ideas they started, but didn't really finish or even explain to the audience. If you know Bleach, then you have an understanding of what is supposed to have happened, and how certain things get resolved, but this film lacks those elements. An example is the soul bait plot, the element is introduced, but is pretty much discarded after only 5 minutes without any real resolution or explanation to an uninitiated audience who might not have read the manga as to what the heck just happened. I'm not saying that they should have spent 2 hours on this plot (like they do in the anime), but I feel like they should either have more adequately covered this plot, or cut it in favor of more important scenes. Also the training montage could have been cut completely.
--Story--
So far as story goes, this film is somewhat true to the source material, but it spent too much time condensing down all the material in the first arc, and it changes certain dynamics and characters (and completely cuts out supporting characters who are fairly important). Certain story elements are revealed early, but without context for the audience to understand what's going on, and I don't think your average viewer really understands some of what's happening even when they try to give it context. An example of this is the size of Ichigo's zanpakuto, they mention how big his zanpakuto is, but they never establish why it's that big or why it matters that it's that big. And in the final battle, the enemy shinigami don't even seem to notice or care about its size; to explain this, a zanpakuto is typically supposed to look like your standard Katana but for Ichigo his started off being triple the size of a normal Zanpakuto, this is because of the raw amount of reiatsu or "spiritual force" (power) that his character possesses, though we find out later that size isn't everything, and that captains would wield Skyscraper sized zanpakuto if they weren't controlling the size and density of their zanpakuto. Also that Renji and Byakuya have their spiritual power reduced by 80% while in the normal world to protect the spirits around them from being influenced, thus why Ichigo is able to defeat Renji. For that matter, they don't really discuss spiritual power or why Ichigo breaking the demon magic spell in the beginning matters...
For pacing concerns major chunks of the story are omitted (although I can't imagine why). I feel like they should have kept the original shinigami hunter and omitted Renji/Byakuya until the very end where they appear as a cliffhanger to pique audience interest in the manga/anime (and maybe future movies), and left off with Ichigo defeating (but certainly not killing/destroying) Grand Fisher, and Rukia accepting that she's currently stuck in her situation. Instead we get left with a pair of cliffhanger elements that might very well never be explored, and completely flying in the face of the entire story of Bleach. There's no real reason to even have the Soul Society arc with the way that this story wrapped up, and nothing to set up any of the stuff that's supposed to come next.
I feel like there was an abundance of ideas, and a bit too much ambition that went into the film. But on a budget of $3 million, I suppose time wasn't the only thing that the movie needed more of. I was pleasantly surprised with how accurate the hollows were, and at times it was hard to tell which effects were practical and which were completely CGI, which to me is a good thing.
I didn't hate this movie by any means, but I felt like they really killed a lot of the film's potential by rushing through things too quickly, and trying to shoehorn in plot pieces that just didn't fit. The film could have done with half of the material for the first arc, and merely allude to the second half to open up potential sequels (or just get the audience to read the manga), but instead they took a semi-complex story and boiled away some very important elements to try and create a neat and tight little package; but this package is neither neat nor tight. They set up plot pieces, and then they leave them hanging with no resolution. They tried to cover too much with not enough.
This isn't a bad adaptation, it's just a very poorly executed one.
Thaco (2008)
Meanders far too much in search of a plot
So far as comedic scenes goes, THACO has some chuckles here and there. But there's not a whole lot else going on here. The movie namedrops a myriad of roleplaying games, and then blasts them for a quick laugh (which falls flat). The optimistic Bill must wrangle the impulsive Duck and the obsessive Jon while they wait for the neurotic Aaron to show up. We watch as they go to the local comics and gaming shop for their various reasons, discuss their backstories as gamers, argue over their hangups in regards to Tom Hanks and Peter Jackson, and try to play Dungeons and Dragons free from interruption in an age of cell phones.
The movie has some real inconsistencies when it comes to audio levels, characters will be whispering and barely audible only to be seconds away from shouting their shrill voices. Characters seem to be almost completely ADR throughout the movie, thus things like background sounds don't really exist and it sounds somewhat unnatural. As far as acting goes the four characters can be adequate and believable when not shouting, and there's even a cameo appearance of Neil Gaiman! The humor is often exaggerated and more referential than original, and listening to the scenes of them around the table is like a game of trivia, where you try to guess what the next line is referencing.
What we don't get much out of this is an actual movie about the hobby or the players, instead we get anecdotes and urban legends told as if the characters themselves have experienced it at one time or another in their lives. Perhaps the most annoying portion of the movie is when the characters decide to go on a 5 minute riff on magic/cursed items, and it becomes unnecessarily raunchy.
It's an alright movie, but you can get much better out of the genre from The Gamers. Too much time spent on making references, and not enough on actually showing what an actual gaming session is like.
Riddick (2013)
The third film, but seems vaguely familiar
As fans of the franchise, having played the games and watched the films, we went into the movie with expectations that it would fall victim to sequel lag where a third movie literally crawls its way from start to finish. Not entirely wrong, but definitely not right at all, the third film does a pretty good job. It felt Riddick, it felt good, and it was most definitely exciting. But if you were expecting something "new" then you're probably going to say "what the hell was that?"
Seemingly a blend of two parts Pitch Black, and one part Chronicles, we see a return of Richard B. Riddick. The film feels just like Pitch Black, and that's probably because it has almost the same plot behind it. Riddick is stuck on a desolately hellish world, and is being pursued by some mercenaries who decide that they want to try their hand at the Riddick grand slam. The catch, however, is that Riddick is valued higher dead than he is alive -- something we the audience know from the start, but Riddick doesn't until like the end of the movie.
Just like in Pitch Black, things don't go according to plan, and we're thrust into another "long darkness." Now most of us who have seen Pitch Black start scratching our heads and wondering "why would Vin Diesel do the same thing twice?" You got me, but whatever, it works for the character I suppose.
Sadly the film doesn't really go anywhere up until the last 40 minutes, and let's be honest, just like the first one it doesn't really go anywhere. It's a nice film if you weren't expecting much in the way of character growth, because we've already had Riddick defined for us in Pitch Black and just like in Chronicles of Riddick he doesn't really progress as a character. It's just Vin Diesel running around finding inventive ways to kill people and hostile creatures alike.
So if you want something deep and meaningful, you should probably go see The Butler instead, but if you want to see something exciting and adrenaline filled then Riddick may be your cup of tea. It definitely pushed all of the boundaries of the R rating. But if you're going to watch it, you should probably watch the first two movies first so that you remember what the franchise is all about.
The World's End (2013)
Smashing, absolutely smashing
Having watched the previous films in the "Blood and Icecream Trilogy," as it is dubbed, I went into The World's End assuming it would be business as usual. Your typical dialogue-focused comedy movie, with one or two action sets, while the comedy stands alone. I was gravely mistaken, but for me, it worked out really well.
Normally I don't care about this kind of thing, it's not a martial arts film to be certain, but honestly the choreography for the fighting scenes was masterfully done. This is in part, because the fights are not static in any sense of the word. Instead every fight was alive, and there were things going on in the foreground, in the background, and the fight scenes really flowed like water. These guys have been doing this for a while, and they have most definitely mastered their style with World's End. I'd love to see what Pegg, Wright, and Frost could pull together for their next film (and of course, I hope there will be a next film).
This movie is the stuff of adventures, and definitely works to keep you both excited and laughing. A definite "must have" for any collection. I wasn't expecting to find a new favourite film, certainly not in a movie about five men trying to go between 12 bars in a town so small you'd be surprised there's more than one or two, but this movie really sells it.