Reviews

Only 5 min into this and i already knew it was my favorite episode of the season.

Not not just bc this season was very late simpsons vibes but it's a really good ep comapred to earl ones too.

The way they handled the simulation felt very new and real and not dumbed down and is exactly what futurama does at its best.

This episode was credited to David X Cohen, idk if he just worked on this episode or the whole season, i assume the latter, but boy the other episodes were so mid i almost refuse to believe he was writing on them.

Oh well overall was this the best season of futurama? No way, was it the worst? Maybe. But it exists and i'm grateful for that. I also liked the first ep too!

I think, there are so many to choose from, but Matt Berry ripping through the same poster twice has to be one of the funniest things ever.

...It gets so insane that I have to continue watching. Seriously the writing in this episode is so good that I wasn't even thinking about whether I agreed with its philosophy on American interventionism, I was just plain cheering for bartlet and it felt awesome. So so so well written. I love it.

Besides the rest of the stuff that is going on in these two episodes, I really enjoyed the Richard Linklater esque plot of navigating through the countryside with nothing in particular to do. Also kind of reminded me of Harry Potter 7: Part 1. Really Enjoyed :)

Seriously that just has to be one of the best lines in tv ever, and delivered so perfectly too. This is why Sorkin is the best I guess!

I don't know what it was exactly about this episode, but it felt so meaningful to me all of it together. And I loved it!

I loved this episode so much, the sequences in The Volume are _mindblowing_.

Also I loved this episode a lot. Jay and lola seriously do work very well together, I was kinda liking the beginning of this season but I really LOVED the second half.

When everyone is sitting on the stoop and just shooting the breeze it's amazing! I love what Josh says to Toby, could be referring to do many things and likewise Toby's response

I especially liked when the president just appears behind Joey, and also everything with Joey and the interpreter in it, and also when Joey is talking to the president in the oval office.

The writing just flows so well. Esp in the oval office scene with Joey.

I really liked the Dipper and Pacifica interactions they were adorable. Plus the main story was also really cool.

I was really taken by surprise by the twist here, and it was just perfectly carried with the instrumental version of life on mars.

It was definitely very very good. Like very good. 👍👍👍

After the first episode this season I thought we had seen the best Rick and Morty episode. But then I watched Rattlestar and I was confident it, instead, was the best episode. Now I sit her again saying to myself, this is the best episode...right? Like it has a story circle. In the show.

To me, Steven Universe is all the good things people have said, and further it is a celebration of earth.

Being a sci-fi fan, when I first started watching Steven Universe I wanted them to activate the galaxy warp so bad, so the gems could explore the galaxy, and we could find out more about what space is like and so that the Gems could explore other planets! A little while after the galaxy warp is first introduced, I suddenly didn't want them to leave the earth at all, they showed, maybe something we all know to be true, the earth is special - even in a galaxy teaming with life.

This is something I have never seen in Sci-Fi books and films, usually its the aliens which interest me. IN Steven Universe - it's us!

So I don't think I can spell out exactly why this episode is so special to me, but it is. I think part of it is that we are literally watching someone who has spent the better part of this series trying to murder two characters, now going on a rollercoaster with them. But, that's not all.

I think a large part of why it's special to me is the tablet. The extent to which Peridot appreciates the tablet Steven gives to her is just beautiful to watch. You can tell it means a lot to her, and I think it would mean a lot to me if I were in her position. Not even a technoalien stranded on another planet, but just someone that's lost and doesn't haven anything. It's as though, when Steven gives her the tablet Peridot is becoming herself again, she is reconstructing her identity, and it is so wholesome to watch this happen at a theme park, and so sad to watch amethyst trying to take it away from here.

This is just my best guess though, I think that the true answer is hard to put into words, but there is definitely something special about this episode - to me at least.

This was such a good job episode. I can't believe how bad the ratings are on here

There is just so much in this episode that as soon as I finished it I immediately watched it again. It has an incredible storyline, it's is legitimately interesting as ScFi but also hilarious. What I especially love about this episode is that nothing is dumbed down. On my first watch I could not understand how the crystal works. When Rick was hiding behind the rock and getting shot at, I just could not see how the crystal told him when to avoid danger. But whatever, I just went along with the episode believing that it could. It was only on my second watch that I really understood how the crystal worked, and maybe I'm just dumb, but I really appreciated that they did not make it so superficial that the entire gimmick of the crystal would be instantly obvious. The best way I can describe it is that watching this episode kind of felt like playing a video game. Where on my first watch it was like the tutorial and I was just getting to grips with the mechanic of the crystal. But in my second watch I understood much more about the crystal and could see how it was being used and could be used.

Plus the ending was just so cool. The whole time I was thinking about how it reminded me of arrival in the most twisted possible way. I guess it just comes back to the fact that there are certain sequences of word and numbers which could technically make you a god of knew them, even without knowing the actual content those words and numbers represent.

Holy crap the ending was so good. The cine was amazing the music was awesome and idk what but something about it felt very garden state. Can't explain, just beautiful

Was so awesome to hear Logan mention garden state. This show's references are off the hook, everyt knows that dude.

SPF-18 is a bad movie but not bad in the same way Fast and the Furious; Geostorm or any other mainstream movie is bad, it's bad almost exclusively because making movies is hard and this is the first movie Alex Israel has made.

In fact, I almost feel empathetic toward Alex Israel, the film now hitting Netflix is going to result in a barrage of negative reviews and some really amazing negative reviews like the one above mine. We might even see this movie join the ranks of "Troll 2" or any other "so bad it's good movie." Yet, when I watched this movie it had a strangely positive effect on me. I think this is because I watched SPF-18 while taking a break editing my own short movie. In fact, it was exactly after I had finished the first cut of my movie and felt nauseous after seeing how unwatchable it was. Taking a break watching a "nice" movie - I thought - might make it easier to edit and distract me from the the reality of what I had made. Instead what I watched was SPF-18.

During the movie there was a lot going on in my brain, the first scene played with the main character doing a type of Vlog or whatever and I thought the movie was shaping up to be interesting. Then the film proper started. I noticed the bad acting first, as it's the most noticeable, and to begin with I considered stopping the movie - but instead I continued watching it. As the movie played, I started just feeling bad for Alex Israel. I thought of what went into making my own movie; how hard it was trying to find good actors; how long it took to film; how high the hopes we had going in were and how mediocre and quite frankly unwatchable the results were. All this while watching the cringe delivery of lines frankensteined together with drone footage made me imagine Alex Israel on set trying to explain each character's motivation in the hot sun, when probably he was unsure himself; the millions of takes it took to get a shot of a Jeep turning off the road that was ultimately for a scene that turned out to be so unnecessary i'm surprised it even came up as an idea. But most of what I was thinking is that Alex Israel knows SPF-18 isn't good, just like I know the movie I'm currently editing isn't good. Not only that, anyone watching the final cut of SPF-18 knows it's not good. The actors, the grip and Pamela Anderson doing her completely necessary cameo - they all know it's bad.

And yet here we are watching this movie on Netflix. This is certainly not what Alex Israel imagined in his brain when thinking of the movie and I can feel that deep deep deep down the movie has some goodness in it. If the script had better dialogue, if the acting was better we might have been watching something like Garden State, instead of what the film now is. But that's not what happened and this is what we are ultimately left to judge the movie by. What we are left with, while probably not what Alex Israel wanted, had a profoundly positive effect on me. As soon as SPF-18 was over I went back to editing feeling invigorated, for one reason alone: However bad my movie was, it wasn't going to be SPF-18 bad. I felt permission to suck. To a further extent, I, like Alex Israel, am going to make tons of bad movies before I make a good one. This is ultimately why making movies or choosing any creative pursuit is hard. Not because it's hard to technically make the film - though that too - but rather because it's hard to make bad things when you know that they are bad during the production of the bad thing. The slow and tortuous dynamic of making something bad and then getting a little bit better and then making something bad again but being a little bit better is how art works. You only get better by sharing it with the world. While there are certainly savants who have made perfect movies on their first try - that is not an accurate picture of how ordinary art is made. David Bayles and Ted Orland highlight this extremely well in their book "Art and Fear." Ordinary art is a skill that you get better at by getting humiliated most of the time. This message of "Art and Fear" and others like it, is hard to remember on it's own and it certainly is easier to remember when you are in between projects and harder to convince yourself of in the process of them. But to me SPF-18 provides the perfect reminder of "Art and Fear", "The War of Art" and others like them. Pressfield puts it best in this single sentence:

"It's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot."

SPF-18 is exactly what Pressfield meant by that line. Being in the arena is not pretty, but it's worth it, because eventually; after getting knocked down enough times you will have made something worth making.

I look forward to Alex Israel's next movie because I know that it will be better than this and, perhaps, in a couple years we might be looking back on Israel as a talented director.

In the meantime I'm going to get back to editing my movie and perhaps, in the future sometime, watch SPF-18 and read this review again - when I need reminding of this message and how crucial it is to any creative endeavour.