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Reviews
Arby 'n' the Chief (2008)
Master Class in Satire and Deuteragonists
An irreverent comedy, a dramatic thriller, a buddy adventure and a psychological horror all at once: "Arby 'n' the Chief" is a series that frequently and expertly glides between genres. The series evolves from momentary situations and petty squabbles into a visceral, satirical saga that touches on grievous problems with society, pushing further and deeper into existential dread and soul-killingly reality than any fictional series to date.
Jon Graham's growth as a filmmaker over this series' 15-year run is apparent and impactful. Beginning as a simple Toy Story parody where he takes digs at common online gaming problems, utilizing action figures of Master Chief and The Arbiter as proxies for rowdy and respectful gamers, respectively; "Arby 'n' the Chief" concludes as a surreal and grim tale that truly is on-par with Arthur C. Clark's "2001: A Space Oddessy," but is conveyed in a manner that is easier to both consume and understand.
Master Chief and The Arbiter are the greatest pair of deuteragonists to be published, ever. Chief plays the role of an irreverent, bull-headed realist that exists only for the stimulation of his animal brain, while Arbiter exists as an overanalytical, self-deprecating existentialist that craves validation for his sapience. Neither is a protagonist: the protagonist of the series is the turbulent relationship between the two of them. Them simply being them actively does not progress the plot, it is only when our two deuteragonists are going through an experience that ruins their relationship that they are ushered onward.
In Seasons 1 through 4, which are wholly episodic, we only ever see minor rifts form between them. As more rifts take place, we see a progressive lengthening to the story; with episodes gaining multiple parts in a season. By the time we reach Season 5, we witness larger and larger breaks in their pseudo-friendship that result in season-length story arcs and ever-mounting consequences, all bought about by the clashing of Chief's heedless need for thrills and Arbiter's self-destructive pursuit of meaning.
Every episode, with very, very few exceptions, uses satire to outright assault a point of the entertainment industry or society. Using a blend of thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness, an episode tends to surgically deconstruct a point and take a look at every part of it, not just its core. This machinima series has wrestled with concepts that more well-known projects have never dared to step near; including survivor's guilt, black-pilling, and the ethics homicide.
This series is easily approachable by any, but Seasons 6 and onward are only for those that are not feint of heart, as they tackle numerous, heavy topics that can shake even a cynic like me to the core. There were points that I needed breaks in my viewing experience, because of how haunting the later plotlines are.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Genuinely Fantastic Adventure Film
Finally a good Dungeons & Dragons movie, one that actually feels like it was a genuine campaign. The dialogue is well-written, the humor hits great, and the plot progresses naturally. There's a neat balance between tropey and unique that lends itself well to a film about a TTRPG.
I honestly didn't expect them to give as much focus as they did to the non-humanoid races in D&D, let alone all of the obscure monsters and creatures they included. The CGI wasn't groundbreaking, but the team behind it clearly had both the passion and skill to make a pretty good effort at bringing D&D's fantastic fantasy feeling to the big screen.
Every character but the druid were given arcs, the barbarian's was especially great. The wizard's was a bit tropey and the bard's was just absolute tropetopia but that just works to better sell you on the idea that this is a real campaign between friends.
Don't listen to anyone dragging this film, because this really is the first Hasbro vehicle in ages that was given to people that actually wanted to deliver quality cinema.
Ryû to sobakasu no hime (2021)
Best Animated Film to be Released in Ages
It's a tragedy that, like other Moraru films, Belle is going to be crushed under the weight of the movie industry only to be dug up a decade later to get its rightfully deserved time in the light.
Belle is understandably a disappointment to Beauty and The Beast purists because it takes the source material, both the story of the book and the familiar designs of Disney's animated adaptation, and shows neither of them any respect as it uses them only to establish and follow Belle's theme of digital facades. The pacing was perfect for the actual story being told and the emotional beats kept a natural tempo, striking the right chords at the best possible moments to hit the audience with powerful waves of emotion.
The blend of 2D and CG animation is carried out beautifully, with the 2D animation being used to represent the familiar and comforting ground of the real world and the CG animation showing the depth, color, and vastness of the digital world.
Belle was clearly made by people that actually understand what the Internet is and how it works, this is the most accurate representation of the Internet I have ever had the pleasure of watching. It represents both the greatness and vileness of the web and the beauty that lies somewhere in the middle.
Escape from Tomorrow (2013)
Fantastic Journey in Self-Importance
This director has the highest Ego/Fame ratio of any individual on the planet and loves to brag about how he secretly recorded this without Disney's permission when it was acted out so meekly that anyone would've just thought it was an extremely trashy family on vacation.
Don't Look Up (2021)
Don't Look At All
Director Adam McKay was clearly on a Wes Anderson marathon before directing this. Don't Look Up has all the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson film: from the intermittent visual cuts to the over-the-top main characters to the comedic mocking of a serious topic while responsibly handling the topic's severity. McKay takes all of these hallmarks and miraculously fumbles all of them by making the intermittent cuts as bizarre and irrelevant as possible, making everyone except the main characters unnaturally over-the-top, and having no respect for the topics parodied to the point that one can safely say Don't Look Up was designed for the express purpose of exploiting American angst to make a quick buck. All of this incompetent bumbling works in heinous disharmony to create one of the most tone-deaf, out-of-touch and blunt student film projects ever shown to the public eye.
Don't Look Up's most glaring issue is how extreme the tone changes mid-scene. There are sharp turns from depressed to snarky, shattered hope to joking about a character being cheap, and instantaneous political flip-flopping. The worst part is all of these instances mentioned are not the parody characters, these are the main characters experiencing these emotionally unintelligent abrupt changes in mood and behavior. The parody characters are subject to so many moments like these that it would likely crash IMDB if I were to list them all here, so I'll just mention the outlandish Trump parody and her genuinely Jafar from Aladdin level of vile son, the racist military veteran, and the 30-years too old Elon Musk parody.
The doomsday scenario of Don't Look Up is clearly intended to mock the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. First off, there has not been enough time between the pandemic and now for even a good parody director to mock the event or the people involved, especially with the emergence of the Omicron variant and how the first wave of shutdowns is still hurting many people. Don't Look Up feeds on the anger and dread of those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic by dangling the idea that the pandemic could have been handled better in peoples' faces. One would think that Adam McKay did this intentionally to antagonize a still divided USA, and one would likely be right with how many other social issues are mocked.
A particularly poorly handled pair of elements of society that Don't Look Up mocks are Big Tech and social media and it handles both with all the tact and understanding one should expect from a cast and crew dominated by people above and beyond the age of 40. The simple message, as direct as the movie itself gives you, is "big technology is bad and you should feel bad for supporting it and social media is a cancer on society that is making everyone stupid." While I personally agree with most of the latter sentiment, actually having the experience required to believe such, this message has been beat to death by every filmmaker since the late 2000s to resonate with other technology-fearing middle-aged people.
Speaking of the age of 40, Casting Director Francine Maisler has brought has-beens from the 00s to be paid to phone in nearly every line. I feel horrible for Leonardo DiCaprio because he at least seemed to try to act to the best of his ability, but nobody else came close to delivering a pizza let alone a performance. Jennifer Lawerence seemed genuinely confused with how her character was supposed to emote at most moments and Jonah Hill honestly could not fail acting in-character given how the character was clearly tailored with the intent that Jonah Hill would be playing him.
Overall, don't watch Don't Look Up if you have any taste, even as a bad movie it's not a watchable bad movie like The Room or Twisted Pair, it's just an ignorant and emotionally stunted unwatchable disaster. I know I was hard on Adam McKay, but he has a long list of significantly better movies than this atrocity against filmmaking. Pick any other Adam McKay film and you'll likely enjoy it, but as it stands only Adam McKay fanatics and politically-excited nut jobs can possibly enjoy something like this.
The Many Saints of Newark (2021)
Too Much Plot, Too Little Time
This is a movie that should have been a 3-4 season series instead. I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that The Many Saints of Newark attempts to compact a multi-plot line story that would have been 1-2 seasons in the Sopranos into a 2-hour runtime and completely flops. If they just picked the main plot line and ran with it they may have made something watchable, but they simply tried to do too much to give any reason for the viewer to pay attention, let alone emotionally connect to any characters.
Absolutely nothing of consequence happens until around the 20-minute mark and by then they've almost entirely phased out one of the characters and shifted focus onto a character that has nothing to do with the Sopranos. This character goes on to be an antagonist for about 30 minutes and those thirty minutes are the only intense minutes of this entire film. It scrambles to shift focus back to the phased out character near the end but completely bungles the ending and makes the Sopranos end scene look like the most satisfying thing ever made. It feels as though they began to film 2 seasons of a TV series but cut out all the scenes that would have established the characters and ended the second season's footage at the penultimate episode.
The failure of this film isn't on the actors, the writers, or the director, it's whoever gave funding to a movie prequel to a TV series known for its long drawn-out storylines.
The Nostalgia Critic: The Wall (2019)
Channel Awesome's The Wall
People always talk about how Doug Walker missed the point of Pink Floyd's The Wall, but I think they are the ones missing the point. This is not Pink Floyd's The Wall, this is Channel Awesome's The Wall: a deep, beautiful piece on how self-centered, emotionally stunted, morally bankrupt, and nostalgia-drunken Doug Walker is and how little he cares about the deeper message of anything because all he can see is the surface of what he "reviews."