Review The Last Thing You Watched

[Apollo the Just]

Anyone who knows me will know I do not take what I am about to say lightly.

I rate Kubo and the Two Strings:

HTTYD/10.

time to lie down for ever because of how much I love this movie good night

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

Dragon Ball Super Episode 55.

Goku and Zeno's interactions were fun to watch, so is watching Zamasu's growing hatred. I'm also liking [spoiler]Black's Super Saiyan Rose form[/spoiler] quite a bit, I think it matches him really well. I'm thinking it must be a unique form for him specifically or perhaps he obtained through unusual methods, because I don't see any other way for him to suddenly go straight from base to that, unless he was holding back before and actually had different forms at his disposal.

Next one's going to be a really good one by the looks of it, but I don't think we're going to get into the meat of the action until after it.

[CaptHayfever]

Some episodes of Cupcake Wars on Netflix:

So, they were doing a Tim Burton theme, & all the contestants were like "ooh, I love Tim Burton!", & one of the special ingredients was beef, & somehow nobody thought to make a Sweeney-Todd-esque "meat pie" cupcake. (Meat gets used fairly often on this show, so that shouldn't have been a turn-off for the contestants.) But of course they were all over the freakin' absinthe, as though absinthe had ever shown up in a Tim Burton movie--one of the contestants was genuinely surprised that the absinthe caught freakin' fire when she tried to cook it on the freakin' stove. And somebody made cupcakes of Violet Beauregarde (blueberry) & the Queen of Hearts (red velvet), because when I think of "good Burton movies," of course I think of his crappy remakes. And someone else kept rambling about "the crooked staircase with the door at the top" as though we're supposed to know what the hell that means.

In short, great episode theme, but horribly uninspired contestants.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Booyakasha]

'Violet Beauregarde' for a blueberry-flavoured thing is fairly clever, except I'd entirely forgotten Tim Burton did that garbagey Willy Wonka redo until just now.

And cooking with absinthe would be a terrible idea even if absinthe weren't so flammable. I mean, it's anise-flavoured. Black licorice, man---------it's a strong flavour. Tends to overpower other flavours. And most people don't care for it overly much.

[CaptHayfever]

^Yeah, one of my favorite restaurants has a blueberry waffle dish called "Violet Beauregarde", & it's delightful. They were probably thinking of either the book or the Gene Wilder film, though.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Calamity Panfan]

i am currently watching how to be single and it's a bad movie

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

I can kinda tell that by the title.

Just watched "Johnny VS Star Fox Adventures" on YouTube. He said it was passable. *shrugs*

[Random User]

Heyyy, I just watched that same video. I mostly agree with him from my time playing it.

[Deku Tree]

Watched Stranger Things. Pretty cool. Lots of Spielberg and Stephen King in there. Good acting, and a neat concept.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

[QUOTE="Random User, post: 1606115, member: 35827"]Heyyy, I just watched that same video. I mostly agree with him from my time playing it.[/QUOTE]

Most of what he said was accurate but I still really enjoyed it a lot, none of the issues bothered me. I think the game came together pretty well and was a good adventure.

[Apollo the Just]

Mentioned in the other thread, but I re-watched Kubo in theaters yesterday. Having seen it twice, I feel like I have a good enough grasp of the content to review it more in-depth. I love all of the symbols in this movie. 10/10.

[spoiler=basically spoiling the entire movie as comprehensively as possible right here]
I think it's really cool how Kubo's mother comes from a family of moon spirits, associated with the moon, and that the legendary armor that the Moon King fears (and that Kubo's father Hanzo wore) is emblazoned with sun imagery. And how his grandfather began to value blindness once sight - specifically, seeing Hanzo - is what led his daughter to betray him. I like all of the dichotomies between Kubo's father and his mother, and how Kubo physically embodies both sides with his half-blindness. And I **LOVE** how Kubo's mom brushes his hair out of his blind eye, and the second time (at the end), he lets her.

There are also a lot of very, very good parallels. The most memorable one IMO is how when Kubo's parents met, his mother was supposed to kill his father but when their eyes met she spared his life and they became family -- and then at the end, Kubo thought he had no choice but to kill the Moon King, but he finds a way to spare him, and then their (single) eyes meet and they become a family. I also love how Kubo takes one of his grandfather's eyes in the fight, mirroring how his grandfather took one of his as an infant. And then of course there's the cool visual parallels of all the statues broken in the left eye, Kubo's mother's scar on her left eye, etc etc.... good ****.

I also love how musical storytelling is used. Kubo talks about how he is really good at telling stories but bad at ending them; Monkey talks about how the end of one story is just the start of another, and how stories never really end but just change form; as long as a story or a memory (the strongest form of magic there is!) persists, the life of its subject does also. Kubo tells his stories with musical accompaniment, in the context of a greater work which is telling a story about him, with musical accompaniment that borrows themes from Kubo's stories. I could probably write an essay if I wanted to on the use of music in this movie, but tl;dr it's a story about storytelling which is VERY WELL WOVEN and it makes Kubo's "the end" at the end of the movie so powerful. Because he finally learned what it means to "end" a story, and that even with endings, stories and their subjects live on.

Aaaaaannnnnndd of cOURSE I adore the meaning of the two strings. That is my favorite symbol in this movie by far. How the beginning of the movie with Kubo's story, and the quest he follows in his father's footsteps, sets you up to think that the final battle will be a fight to the death, but in the end he uses the magic passed down from his mother, on an instrument strung with the memory of both of his parents as well as himself, to bring about a peaceful end. It's so good.[/spoiler]

I'll stop talking here because I can sense myself able to go on for hours, but. I firmly believe that this is the kind of movie I will get more out of the next like 5 times I watch it. A lot of its storytelling isn't just verbal, but is told by visual and musical elements (much like the stories that Kubo tells in the movie). It's so good. 10/10. 10/10. 10/10.

[Apiary Tazy]

Binge watched Episodes 15 to 20 of Steven Universe last night. It's a real 10/10.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

Dragon Ball Super Episode 56

This is likely my favorite episode of DBS as a whole. It had everything, even Future Yajirobe and it was just great.

[spoiler]rip vegeta[/spoiler]

[Apollo the Just]

^ Damn.... I need to catch up..........

[Calamity Panfan]

Watched a bunch of late season 5-early season 6 of It's Always Sunny. Definitely one of the show's best runs.

[CaptHayfever]

Girl Meets World #2.18 "Girl Meets World of Terror 2":

This is a show that relies heavily on nostalgia & cuteness. In that regard, it works most of the time.
Shoehorning in a cameo from another show (that a very significant fraction of your target audience has never seen & will never see), thereby making not only this show but also its source series canonically connected to all the other crappy Disney Channel sitcoms, which in turn makes all the crappy Disney Channel sitcoms canonically connected to the freaking Tommy Westfall Universe, is neither nostalgic nor cute.
Also, Auggie's friends are completely terrible.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

[Calamity Panfan]

I watched Chikara: Days of the Phoenix

I've always liked Chikara as a wrestling promotion but never dedicated much time to it. So I decided to pay the $7.99 for a month's subscription so I could see some Heidi Lovelace, Princess Kimberlee and Dasher Hatfield matches. This was the first show from this year and while it wasn't perfect and had some weak finishes, it was pretty fun.

[Apollo the Just]

Watched Coraline because I told the friend I watched Kubo with last week that I hadn't seen it, and he was like, that's illegal you're coming over and watching it I have the DVD.

I'm so glad I did. It was so good. I love how it incorporated a lot of different elements from old Western faerie tales (the well, the fairy circle, the witch, etc etc etc......) and used them all so well. It was also just incredibly interesting visually. I loved it.

[Booyakasha]

^I was actually thinking a bit about 'Coraline' and 'Kubo' at work last night. Did you get a little of a video game feel from them? Like...'make haste! You must go on a quest to gather the three magic thingies together, in order to flout the will of the bad guy and trigger the end cutscene!'

Like, not that it was detrimental to the story in either film. They were fine. Only I've kind of seen that plot hundreds of times before, and it always stands out to me. 'Coraline' did it far better than most by turning it into a game the bad guy challenged Coraline to; 'Kubo', by making the bad guys a frequent and obvious threat, rather than some distant looming Ganon-esque presence.

[Apollo the Just]

Yo Kubo and the Two Strings felt super video game-inspired, I thought. Not in the "wow this narrative was obviously made for a video game and looks awful on the big screen" kind of way that makes 99.9% of video game movies terrible, but rather in the way some of the environments felt almost like dungeons and there are symbols and items that the hero collects (and the way music and musical motifs were used in Kubo is very similar to how they are used in Ocarina of Time and other video games, rather than movies). I like it.

Coraline felt more like one of those riddle scenes in fairy tales to me, but I do see where you're coming from here.

[spoiler]I also thought the common theme of villains wanting to steal the eyes of children was very, very interesting.[/spoiler]


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e: apparently 2009 Val agrees with you wholeheartedly, Boo. Just went and read the old Coraline topic from when the movie came out and that was one of his main points.