Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12863

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    It never ceases to surprise me how many people don't understand the difference between "subjective" and "objective". There are a lot of disappointed grade school science teachers out there. "Objective" means "not influenced by personal feelings or opinions". Objective measurements are quantitative. Measurable. Not dependent on individual perception. An objective statement about a movie is something that can be demonstrated as an irrefutable fact like "It was made in <year>", "it was directed by <person>", "it made "x amount of money" at the box office". "Subjective" means "based on, or influenced by, personal feelings or opinions". Subjective measurements are qualitative. "Good" or "fun" or "enjoyable" are qualitative value judgements based on individual criteria and arbitrary scale and therefore subjective by definition. There's no unit of "fun" or "good" or "enjoyable" you can measure. It's based on individual perception and individual value criteria that are not universal or necessarily shared by any other person. Large numbers of people can come to the same subjective value judgement of a movie - like that Morbius was bad or that The Godfather was good - but that doesn't make that mass subjective value judgement objective because it's just a consensus opinion based on individual arbitrary criteria not something measurable. The closest you can get to an objective measure of "good" in a movie is its profit margin... but the quantifiable extent of its commercial success does not necessarily translate to audience enjoyment or artistic competence. For a great demonstration of that reality look no further than the Star Wars movies produced under Disney. Almost all of them made substantial profits, but are nevertheless judged to be bad movies by many fans. By the same token, people can go to a movie they find "bad" and still have fun with it because it's "bad" in a way they happen to find enjoyable. That's all subjective. Now now, don't blame the actor for the crimes of the writer and director. Even the very finest actors can only do so much if the script is an incoherent mess or the director's creative vision is in dire need of corrective lenses. Doubly so if they're stuck in the unenviable position of playing a character half a dozen other actors already have, with each director having a separate and distinct vision for them. Looking at the director, J.C. Chandor, he seems to be a relatively green but also relatively celebrated new director. He's only directed four prior films (Margin Call, All is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier), but his work does seem to be pretty well received when it comes to film festivals and small-circle sorts of critics awards. He seems green enough that he's almost an unknown quantity. The writers... are less inspiring. Richard Wenk's filmography boasts writer credits on The Equalizer, The Expendables 2, Vamp, American Renegades, and the remake of The Magnificent Seven. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (credited together) aren't particularly inspiring either. They worked on Iron Man, Punisher: War Zone, Transformers: the Last Knight, Men in Black: International, and Uncharted. Comic books are clearly not foreign territory to them, but the presence of titles like The Last Knight and Uncharted does not inspire much hope. I'd call it a coin flip whether Kraven: the Hunter will be fun or just funny looking.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone seen anything corroborating the rumors that the story involves the original Big Chap? I saw that while browsing and haven't been able to find a source.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    People watched it because it's fun... it's a tongue-in-cheek action comedy that's not afraid to take a few shots across the bow of the excessively serious MCU. Which makes it the perfect break from the MCU. "Good" is subjective... and what we see with audience fatigue is that people get less willing to tolerate "more of same" even if it's something they would normally enjoy. My favorite example of this is Star Trek: Enterprise, which went down in flames ratings-wise because it was more of the same product audiences had been getting for almost 15 years by that point. People came back to it years later and realized it was actually pretty good TV, but it was so much like what preceded it that audiences just didn't want it so it was judged "bad" at the time. Nah, I think a lot of folks got tired of Spider-Man pretty quick. He's not a very deep character - most superheroes aren't - but once you exhaust his 2-3 iconic villains (Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and I can't think of a third) and he gets the girl there's not a lot left for him to do. The movies can't exist in the same kind of eternal status quo the comics do, so he can only have a certain amount of character development before he stops being interesting. From what I understand, the comics keep doing this to him too... resetting him over and over because he gets boring once he's married, lands at least moderately stable employment, moves out of Aunt May's house, etc. I think Kraven here is something like an attempt to do something with the property other than just endlessly rehashing Peter Parker's formative years. They picked a decidedly un-super villain from Parker's rogues gallery, and seem to want to develop in a very un-cartoony direction. The trailer feels very John Wick to me, with the implication that Kraven is a badass quietly passing the time until someone ruffles his feathers... then it's everyone else's funeral, literally. It's enough that I'm actually kind of curious to see what direction it's headed in. It really doesn't look like a comic book movie even though it is one. I'll probably go see this one when it hits theaters, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else. (It'd have to struggle quite hard to be worse than Borderlands, and I voluntarily went to see that in theaters.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    He did. We've got multiple pieces of official art of the wedding. They even had a kid together before Megaroad-01 went missing in 2016.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In all honesty, I don't think Deadpool in any way disproves that the superhero movie genre is suffering severe audience fatigue. I'd argue its success is in no small part because of that fatigue. Most superhero movies are high-stakes serious business stories where the fate of the city/country/world/universe/multiverse depends on the heroes. Doing that all the time, without a break in the middle to de-escalate things, makes subsequent escalations less impressive and burns the audience out more quickly. Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and now Deadpool & Wolverine are that de-escalation. They're a breather episode that isn't afraid to poke fun of how grimly serious the other titles are. Sony's Spider-Man is a great, and related, example. They've never been able to get more than three movies out of Spider-Man before audiences get bored with the character. They have the rights to the series in perpetuity as long as they put out a movie every six years, and through that they have the rights to his rogue's gallery and supporting characters, so here we are with a movie about a member of Spider-Man's rogues gallery coming out three years to the day after No Way Home seemingly reimagined as Great Value John Wick rather than doing a more typical superhero story or supervillain origin story. That's the thing, though... those (bad) movies and the multiverse shenanigans are being done because audiences are getting bored with the most mainstream superheroes. The studios want to keep this gravy train going indefinitely because they paid a fortune for those acquisitions. So they're hitting up less widely known superheroes and trying to move into different kinds of stories because you can only sell the spandex brigade punching space monsters so many times in a row before audiences are just bored with the whole bit. Three movies seems to be the limit for any given superhero or superhero team... even extremely well-received ones like Guardians of the Galaxy.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's good all the way through. A title that solid is a rare prize indeed. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human continues to underwhelm. Honestly, the 3D CG animation in this looks SO BAD that it actively detracts from the action. It's really bad when the CG animated monsters have to talk, because they make almost no effort to match the lip flap. My Deer Friend Nokotan has kind of fallen off into a "well, let's just do nonsense" approach, and it's not really funny anymore because they only really have one joke now.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like the reviewers agree that Romulus is very much in the mold of the original, but just can't agree whether or not it's a good thing. For what it's worth, that makes me a bit optimistic about the film's prospects. I'm still worried it'll go too heavily towards the Aliens route and make the xenos unscary. I'm gonna wait 'til next week to go see it myself, my local theater suuuuuuuuucks, but I'm cautiously optimistic for this one.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I've never been a fan of American comic books, but looking at film industry-wide trends it looks to me like comic book movies and streaming originals have exhausted a lot of the novelty of the recognizable flagship comic properties and the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. The studios are branching out in the hopes of finding something fresh that can keep the money coming in, because audience fatigue is a thing and they (and every other corporation) made unrealistic promises of unlimited growth to their shareholders. That's how they hide the really bad CG and cheap set design in IMAX... make it too dark to see a ****ing thing.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Wow. You say he was a B-list villain, but surely with an outfit like that he was surely the kingpin of sartorial crime. I assume he wasn't always quite this... killy? This fellow is wearing a green fur-lined vest, leopard print tights, a tiger-print belt with fangs or claws on it, tiger-print arm warmers, green leopard-print exercise bands, and what appear to be either khaki pointe shoes or slipons. Put about a pound of concealer and eyeshadow on him and he's ready for RuPaul's Drag Race. I'd call the movie version a substantial glowup. The movie version of that costume looks like it was nicked from the set of Kevin Sorbo's Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, rather than looking like someone mugged Roy Horn at an Elton John-themed Halloween party.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So this is... basically just Marvel's John Wick or something? (Not being a smartarse, I literally have no idea who this character is.) It looks like it'll be solid as a summer "popcorn" action flick, if nothing else. "Violence isn't an answer, violence is the question and the answer is 'Yes'."
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Why would they advise someone to watch Alien 3 or Resurrection? There are only two Alien movies. Three if Romulus turns out well.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely haven't kept up with Transformers in the... wow that's a long time... since the original cartoon went off the air when I was a kid. This looks so much like the cartoon I remember from childhood that I'm getting a little nostalgic just from the posters. I might go see this just for nostalgia's sake. Maybe take the nieces and nephews. Everyone's a bit smoother, but even the chiseled corners on the faces are still there a little bit.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Not totally... but it's seldom wise to trust the critic scores because many news outlets that employ critics are owned by parent companies or subsidiaries of one or more of those major studios, and when it comes to franchises a lot of reviewers are not fans so their priorities tend to be very different to what fans are looking for in a franchise movie and they score accordingly. Audience scores are more reliable, but not the immediate audience scores because franchise stuff often ends up having its initial score tainted by agenda-driven review bombing (e.g. The Acolyte) and it takes a while to filter out the noise and get enough legitimate audience scores to truly reflect the quality or lack thereof of the work. Siskel and Ebert were no different, art in all its forms has always been political and art critics of every stripe have always waxed lyrical about it. People just didn't pay attention to it back in the day because art critics are longwinded nerds. It only gets attention now because people've discovered they can make money off of clickbait if they pretend to be angry about literally everything that doesn't fall neatly within their very narrow comfort zone. There doesn't seem to be much info about what it'll actually be about, but 30 years before the first film would tend to preclude any xenomorphs... which means we're likely back to the same "AI is the real monster" bone they were worrying in Prometheus and Covenant. That bar's a trip hazard in Satan's wine cellar... and considering how the last few installments went, I'd still be inclined to bet on them hosting a limbo contest.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies continues to be a fun little parody of the magical girl genre.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Ossan Newbie Adventurer has apparently decided it's bored with being One Punch Man: Fantasy Edition and now wants to be a boxing anime.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    He's certainly distressed enough... all he needs is a pretty dress and a prince. If it both is and isn't the Razor Crest, does that make it the Spaceship of Theseus? The Schrodinger's Razor Crest? Since it's got "razor" in the name do we start with the shaver jokes? Is it the Razor Crest Quattro Titanium? The Razor Crest Hydro? Maybe just call it the Gilette?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    What were you expecting from zombie versions of the guys who got lost a war to the coked-up stone age Care Bears? Din would still find a way to lose a fight with one. That's just how he rolls. If he's not getting roughed up by anything that he's squaring up with, it's not The Mandalorian.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there is... or perhaps I should say there shouldn't be. Din and Grogu's story has ended twice. First when Din returned Grogu to his people (the Jedi) and again when they settled down and got a homestead together. Anything more is going to require another Happy Ending Override, and I am certain you have not forgotten what happened last time they had to override a happy ending. That was the sequel trilogy. And few, if any, of us are going to argue that that was anything less than a complete fiasco. Nothing good will come from dragging them back into action a second time. True... Disney, like LucasFilm before it, will never let a satisfying ending get in the way of flogging a character mercilessly until everything remotely likeable or interesting about them is worn away by time and abuse from the writers. Not even death can free a character from the icy grip of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Maybe Star Wars needs a self-aware story like Star Trek's How Much For Just The Planet? where the characters can take digs at being owned by a huge, amoral corporation.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If you put it in the background and it doesn't matter to the story, why bother having it at all? Which isn't much of a story, if we're being honest with each other. There is nowhere new or interesting for Din and Grogu's story to go. Bringing in Thrawn just makes Thrawn a replacement scrappy for Moff Gideon, and takes the story back to where it was in seasons one and two. It's not going somewhere new, it's just doing the same thing again and worse. The Mandalorian had nothing left to show us before season three ended. That has not changed.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... having read the trilogy that bears his name and seen his live action debut, I would say Thrawn is oversold to a frankly comical degree by longtime Star Wars fans. Without the Man Behind the Man to prop him up and a healthy dose of Confusion Fu, he's not much of a threat. He's just the token competent Imperial officer in a sea of raving egomaniacs, complete psychopaths, and useful idiots promoted for their ability to blindly follow orders. Taking an L from "Distressed" Din Djarin and Grogu would be the deathblow to his remaining credibility. They're not gonna get into political issues in a movie like this... it's Din and Grogu, it's for the children.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Mine... well... I picked the first thing that popped into my head back when my friends first started using online forums back in my freshman year of high school. We'd been reading bootlegs of the first few volumes of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which had only recently started getting collected editions in Japan, and the villain's name was the first thing that came to mind when the time came to pick a handle. Reused it on most forums because I was too lazy to come up with different handles for each, so I've been stuck with it ever since. 🤣 My current avatar is from the second panel of a two panel Macross fancomic by Ranko Asai in which Quamzin struggles a bit with Earth's literature. The gag in the comic is that Zentradi is supposedly Japanese written upside-down, so he's initially shown reading Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human upside-down without issue, but is completely thrown by reading the script for Macross right side up.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's unnecessary is what it is. But I guess Disney feels compelled to milk it because it's the only well-received Disney+ original besides Andor and that one was spinning off a movie to begin with. Mando and the child's adventures have already ended twice. Once when Mando delivered the child to the Jedi (Luke) and once when they finally defeated Moff Gideon and got a house together at the end of season three. There's nowhere else for the story to logically go. Moff Gideon is dead. The Mandalorians are resettling Mandalore. Din's status with his creepy fundamentalist cult is restored and the child is officially recognized as his foundling. Going back to bounty hunting just means getting the child involved in stuff that'll push him towards the Dark Side, and there's really nothing else for them to do.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... sh*t that's a good one. Have you considered applying for a writing position with Disney LucasFilm? Honestly... that is a way funnier image than it should be. The mental image of Darth Vader choosing to live in a nice three-bedroom house in a quiet suburban neighborhood somewhere instead of brooding eternally in his lava-lit Doom Fortress on Mustafar like a video game final boss is inherently funny for some reason. Like, imagine buying the house next door not knowing that your new neighbor was Darth-freaking-Vader and discovering that the Emperor's merciless and universally feared enforcer keeps an immaculate lawn, decorates his yard with incredibly precise topiaries cut using his lightsaber, is a committed recycler and composter to reduce waste, and naturally chairs the homeowner's association meetings. Give us that show, Disney, instead of off-brand Star Trek: Prodigy. Robot Chicken made it work, I'm sure you can do it too.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... I dunno. Uwe Boll's House of the Dead is undeniably a bad movie. That said, I'd argue it has more to offer in terms of sincere entertainment value because the people working on it clearly understood the assignment. They knew they were working on a video game adaptation of an infamously campy, low-quality, arcade cabinet rail shooter with an excuse plot for a story. So they had fun with it by making it campy, over-the-top, schlocky zombie killing mindless fun. It's bad, but it's bad in a way that's fun to both watch and poke fun at. Eli Roth's Borderlands is also undeniably a bad movie. However, Borderlands is a bad movie that takes itself completely seriously. As I understand it, Borderlands the games are somewhat campy looter-shooters full of goofy, over-the-top characters and lots of comedic sociopathy. There's no such sense of fun to Borderlands the movie. The characters, excl. Tina and Claptrap, conduct themselves with grim seriousness at all times as they chase the poorly explained macguffin that is the Vault Key (which resembles nothing so much as a bedazzled buttplug) and then the Vault itself. That puts them heavily at odds with the movie's visual design, which is brightly colored and vaguely cartoony in almost every scene. That it takes itself so seriously despite how it looks is what really kills any "so bad it's good" entertainment value it might've had as a result of the awful writing, the terrible performances, and the mediocre digital effects work. If I were asked to pick which movie I considered more fun to watch... sorry, it'd be House of the Dead all the way. TBH, one thing that really doesn't help Borderlands is that Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis are all about 20-30 years too old to be in this kind of movie. It's not just that they're all clearly bored to tears working on this project, it's that they look absolutely terrible doing it. Kevin Hart looks very out of place trying to play a badass soldier. Jamie Lee Curtis somehow manages to look even older than her 65 years, possibly because her delivery comes off as senile 90% of the time. Cate Blanchett gets it the worst, though. The flame-red wig, the tight outfit, and the very heavy makeup intended to make her look young and sexy and athletic just make her look like a 50-something cougar trying way too hard to look young. IMAX resolution is not her friend here. They could've just cast some fresh-outs in their early 20's and the whole thing would've looked a lot more natural, and cost quite a bit less too. ... huh, I'm honestly not sure what that says about the games. Yeah, this is definitely one that would've been better off dying in development hell.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We should just be thankful the writers didn't give her one of Star Wars's signature on-the-nose names like "Sheez Gun Di" or "Perforat Eed". (And if you think that joke is too far, I'd like to remind you The Clone Wars had a Jedi Master named "Ima Gun Di"... literally "I'm Gonna Die".) Not just that, it's that suburbs have long been narrative shorthand for a safe (and boring) environment. Cities are stereotyped as dangerous places where crime, and especially violent crime, is far more commonplace (even when it's not actually true). The suburbs, on the other hand, are stereotyped as a safe space away from the dangers and stresses of the city. They're the epitome of uneventful living. That's why so many horror franchises are set in suburbs, because they're supposed to be safe spaces away from Bad Things and taking away that safe space is part of what invokes the fear. These kids crave adventure because they're growing up in the suburbs, a safe place away from anything exciting or dangerous.
×
×
  • Create New...