isomeri

Meg 2: The Trench (2/5)

They somehow managed to make huge sharks boring. Scenes were hard to follow, nothing was exciting and the middle third of the film comprised of a series of messy underwater scenes.

Here's a few quick ones from this week. Night Visions film festival screenings, additions to the collection and one from streaming.

Inni ludzie [Other People] (3/5)

An entertaining Polish rap-musical. Some character stereotypes were exaggerated and I was left unsure about what the message was supposed to be in the end. I was still quite drawn in by the story and the rapping wasn't too terrible.

Withnail & I (4/5)

My first time watching this British cult classic. Beautifully funny and sad and that dialogue is legendary for a reason. I'd love to watch it again soon with some UK buddies and will definitely keep it in the collection.

The Animal Kingdom (3/5)

An interesting take on the ever growing pandemic-scifi subgenre. Good acting, good pacing and good music. I also enjoyed the variety of themes and the overall message. The plot was very unsurprising though and I doubt I'll need to see this again.

Abruptio (3/5)

While clearly drawing inspiration from films like Mad God, the animation style in Abruptio is unqestionably unique. I've seen nothing like this in a long time and after the brutal violence and distorted story I saw in it I'm not sure I want to see it ever again. If you want to see something totally original and don't mind feeling a bit unwell while doing it, I might even recommend it. What on Earth was that ending though?

River (3/5)

Not as interesting or unique as Yamaguchi's previous films and the surprise is not there anymore. Still heartwarming and lovely nonetheless. Beautifully shot too. I don't have the same desire to instantly rewatch this though as I did with Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes for example.

Concrete Utopia (3/5)

This will probably grow to be quite popular, expecially consideting the modern facination with Korean cinema and post-capitalist societal themes. The plot was a bit too predictable and pacing was off in a few spots. Entertaining throughout though and I'd recommend it to almost anyone.

Vincent Must Die (3/5)

An excellent first third with good suspence and funny dialogue. It all kind of starts unraveling when character motivations become confused. I kind of felt that the film felt like it constantly needed to escalate things, but the way it was done was very uninteresting. Still a solid watch.

Mad Cats (2/5)

A couple of good laughs and it looked like this was a fun film to make. As an overall package a bit boring though.

In the latest Nextlander Ramblecast it was mentioned that @drewbert apparently just got married. Congrats duder!

Considering the amount of studios that Microsoft have acquired, this is one of the rare cases where incresing middle-management actually makes perfect sense.

This is the best game I've played on this generation of consoles. I'm about 8 hours in and if they don't fumble the rest of the game I could see this going quite high on my mental list of all time favorites.

The deed is done.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/10/13/xbox-activision-blizzard/

Barbie (3/5)

Mostly entertaining and in parts funny. However a majority of the humor leaned too hard into fourth wall breaking nostalgia and cultural references. Robbie and Gosling seemed to enjoy themselves and Ferrell and McKinnon slipped into their type-cast roles well enough. The set and costume design was a delight.

The ending felt quite sloppy and there would have been room to cut ten minutes off of the runtime. The long speeches, of which there are many, rarely said anything new and at some points I became a bit bored.

What pains me the most is that this is a two hour commercial trying to disguise itself in a smokescreen of a progressive political message. While I do agree with the general messages of the movie, it's not convincing at all to hear multi-million dollar Hollywood production like this based on one of the most successful toy properties in history preach how corporations and the patriarchy are evil. The shoehorned car commercial segments and other shining product placement bits made it all the worse.

I sincerely hope that Call of Duty will no longer be a relevant franchise 10 years from now.

Graphically the game looks great, but all these top racing games have looked good for over a decade now. I'm interested in hearing more about the "car-building career mode" tomorrow. The last few Forza games have doled out cars at such quantities that I never had a good sense of progression. Hopefully this new career mode will slow things down a bit in that regard and force me spend more time with a single vehicle.

I had no memory of this game existing and did not know it had come out. I guess the publisher had a good idea of the quality of the product long before release.