Review The Last Thing You Watched

[Bomby]

Moonlight

10/10 would Oscar over bLa bLa Land again. Apparently the three actors who played the main character never met or saw each other's footage, which is incredible since they all gave consistent performances.

Regardless of whether or not people liked this movie as much as I did, it's great to see a low-budget LGBT themed movie taking place in an impoverished, drug-fueled area in Miami with a pretty much entirely black cast win Best Picture. Cue Anti-SJW eyerolls, but at least you have to appreciate how unlikely something like that is when given the Academy's tendency to reward pleasantly inoffensive standard Hollywood fare.

Also, on a sleep-deprived 3am tangent involving a cast member, I want to be Janelle Monae's boyfriend.

[Galefore]

Looooots of good stuff in between chunks of Breath of the Wild. The highlights include 5 seasons of the Sopranos, new Rick and Morty, the first two episodes of new MST3K (loved them both, Reptillicus was right up my alley but the bigfoot film was possible top 5 episodes of all time material for me, agree that maybe they over-riff maybe but love Baron Vaughn too much for that to matter to me), Louis CK's new special (another classic, but who's shocked) and a lot more. Another daring movie spelunker and I watched this awful film called The Windmill that I actually want to write a lot about, but with the distance between this post and the last, I have waaaaay too much backlog to do in-depth roundups of every single thing I watched. Suffice to say, it checked every box on Jake's "What Isn't Actually Scary But Is Actually Lazy **** ********" list regarding horror films.

That said, I did watch a few more that I had strong opinions on. I caught Fantastic Beasts and wasn't incredibly into it unfortunately, though I'll elaborate on why in a fuller review sometime maybe. I finally watched Taxi Driver today, and it ran me through the intense ringer it does tend to run one through.

[Bomby]

^ Taxi Driver is one of my favorite movies.

All About Lily Chou-Chou

Because I needed to have my heart shattered into a bajillion pieces tonight, I felt like revisiting this 146-minute onslaught of uncut high-potency teenage angst and melancholy dream pop. Like, imagine if the monsters from Neon Genesis Evangelion were junior high bullies. That's this movie. It's also just as confusing as Evangelion if you're watching it for the first time.

Oh... poor Tsuda. If only things like this didn't also happen in real life.

Real talk though, the soundtrack is incredible.

[Booyakasha]

Man. Steven Bomb #6 went way off the rails.

[Booyakasha]

Changed my mind. I like 'Family Guy' again. Good show.

[CaptHayfever]

^It seems to go through cycles of being great versus being intolerable, with very little in between.

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

[Booyakasha]

^I kind of swore off it after that horrible writers' strike season. In retrospect it was dumb of me to assume the writing would just stay bad forever after the strike ended.

[Galefore]

Memento. Well, **** me running, it's a goodass movie. I loved watching the story weave and anything that plays with perception as reality interests me. The performances are great too, and everything is so neatly executed that, like the Ito work I just reviewed over in the Literature forum, I wanna keep this experience pure and not nitpick too much just now. Suffice to say it worked for me.

[Galefore]

Better Call Saul Season 3 Episode 1, which continues to dazzle me. I intentionally saved up episodes to binge, but I may still space these out to let the pacing do its job proper. Better Call Saul is as elegantly paced as Breaking Bad so far, and it also shares a love of really cool montages with it's father show. Mike Ehrmantraut's spy games during this episode were as engaging as always, and further solidifies why I always sell this show as "The Funtime Adventures of Saul n' Mike". Gotta also praise the acting between the brothers McGill in the scenes near the beginning of the episode.

Come and See. Wow. This was an intense work. I'm not really sure what to say here, as I feel like my words fall short of describing the sinking feeling this film gives you, but I'll try anyway. It digs deep into the psyche of one central wartime Belarusian boy, whose perspective is vividly rendered through audio design and shifting tone. The film is understated and slow to build, but it takes its quiet march into a truly horrifying set of events near the end. The raw facial expressions and use of non-shaky, almost dreamlike first-person gets us into the hellscape of World War II like almost no other film I've seen. This film was so truly unsettling, and easily one of the best war movies I've seen. It's horrifying to see patterns in the film's focused portrait of the war repeat through history, which gets even more under my skin. This is a story that will stick with me.

[Bomby]

Z - 1969 movie directed by Costas-Gavras

10/10, A++ **** excellent political/crime thriller. Would watch 20 more times.

[Random User]

I watched Scream the other day with my girlfriend. It was actually one of the best horror films I've seen, especially for the time. What makes that even funnier is that it's mostly just parodying the genre.

[Booyakasha]

^Right on, man. I mean, Wes Craven clearly knew and loved the genre, even the sillier aspects of it------------I think it takes someone like that to do an affectionate parody really well.

-------------------------
Man, but SU: Wanted threw a monkey wrench into the canon.

Spoiler.

Clearly the Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond situation is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it seemed.

I like the new gems we've been seeing lately. Aquamarine, Topaz, the Zircons, all the Off-Colours...the designs have been getting pretty wild and imaginative.

...I hope SU doesn't end before we get some resolution on earlier arcs. I mean, nobody's ever said the fifth season was going to be the last, but...this is Homeworld, man. It's hard not to see this as a ramp-up toward endgame. I don't know.

[Apollo the Just]

Binged all of Mob Psycho 100 again bc the gf hadn't seen it yet.

Still **** excellent. Love the art style and soundtrack, the way they visually interpreted ONE's loose style is **** spot-on. Fight scenes are sooo good. Animation is absolutely incredible. God it's a fantastic anime.

Re-watching after having read the manga, though, I think the narration is a little intrusive at times - it works better in a visual manga format than anime - and I think that the way they re-arranged the order of some events made Ritsu's arc in particular feel a bit rushed. I get that they changed stuff around to fit the story more succinctly in a 12-episode anime series, and they did that very well, but the manga has a lot of different plot arcs building up all at once and it makes some of the longer payoffs and character development stories a lot better imo.

10/10 as an isolated anime, but 8/10 as an interpretation of the manga.

((I just caught up on the manga again because I was behind for so long, btw, and hOLY BUTTS WOW WAY TO CATCH UP ON A CLIFFHANGER WHOOPS. RIP me. Last arc was **** hilarious and current one looks like we are close to wrapping up the series.....))

[Calamity Panfan]

i saw a movie called cybergeddon which was apparently like an internet series or something? it went exactly as you would think a movie called cybergeddon would, but it was nice to make fun of while drinking and that's all i needed

[Apollo the Just]

Marathoned a bunch of One Piece. So **** good. Dressrosa arc was absolutely 100/10.

[spoiler](Was Gear 4 intentionally or unintentionally making fun of / emulating SSJ4? Just wondering.)[/spoiler]

.....may or may not be buying fabric tomorrow to make a Sabo cosplay in time for AX.

[Apollo the Just]

Binged a **** ton of Detective Conan episodes. I managed to find the place I left off in the manga like a million years ago and just started from there... which was sick, because it's just before the Bourbon reveal.

Granted it loses some of its impact since I already know all of the spoilers about Bourbon, but still an interesting point to get back into the series. I've been meaning to take the plunge and catch up again for a while and now is as good a time as any.

Also, no offense to One Piece which I absolutely love, but its dragged out pacing issues are making me appreciate the fact that SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS in every episode of Conan. Not necessarily plot, that happens maybe once every 50 episodes, but if nothing else someone dies and there's a stupidly convoluted trick to it, so that's interesting at least.

10/10 best anime ever made.

[Apollo the Just]

MOOOOORE DETECTIVE CONAN EPISOOOOOOOODESSSS~~

The Detective Takagi Kidnapping Case is by far the best of the metropolitan police love story saga. I heckin love Sato and Takagi. I'm wondering what Amuro's connection to it is, considering all the reveals about him happen after the point where I was previously caught up. I know the biggest spoiler about him thanks to a couple of the movies but nothing else. Reveal will probably be a good 80 episodes from now anyway.

Still best anime ever made, 9/10, would be a 10/10 but there have been too many episodes without an appearance from Kaitou Kid so I had to dock a point.

[Apollo the Just]

Watched a 2 hour long video essay of this guy just absolutely dragging the BBC Sherlock TV series. It was very thorough and well-research and gives credit where it's due despite spending almost all 2 hours roasting the **** out of the show.

I have a very soft spot in my heart for Sherlock Holmes, not because I actually care about the source stories that much - although I have read some of them and enjoy them - but because I absolutely LOVE the modern detective/mystery genre and most modern installments pay homage to Holmes and therefore it helps having read the stories to appreciate references. (Detective Conan's various references to the stories was what first got me reading them.) This soft spot in my heart was what made me incredibly salty about the **** RDJ Sherlock Holmes movies, most especially the second one in which they did the BS where it's like "THE ANSWER TO THE PUZZLE WAS THIS THING WE DIDN'T TELL YOU BEFORE SO THERE WAS NO WAY FOR YOU TO FIGURE IT OUT, THE MOVIE OUTSMARTED YOU HA HA." Literally they took out the one thing that makes mystery WORK, that being them actually giving you all of the necessary heckin clues. I'm still so salty about those movies. 0/10.

Anyway this video essay rags on Sherlock and one of its main points is that same gripe I have with the RDJ movies so I was feelin it. I admit I was a huge fan of Sherlock when it first came out. I was like, bro, this **** awesome. I was mainly contrasting it with the RDJ movies which I hated and still hate with a fiery burning passion. But like.... the more I think about it, yeah, this video essay guy is right. Sherlock starts doing that same crap more and more as the series progresses. Ugh. Salt is returning. I am so salty about Sherlock Holmes interpretations, guys. (I enjoyed the BBC series because I felt it was a good take on the character contrasted with other interpretations, and I do still feel that way, but after Dai Gyakuten Saiban no other Sherlock-the-character interpretation will ever be as good sorry.)

I honestly love the mystery-solving genre so much and I take bad mystery storytelling very personally and so did the guy who made this video so 1000/10 he gets me

[DarkZero]

Last thing I watched was The Simpsons episode "Lisa The Treehugger" which I believe is a season 12 episode? It's S11 or S12 I don't remember which.

[SPOILER="long summary"]So the writing in the episode does have a lot of problems that this era of Simpsons seems to suffer from. For one, the plot starts out with Bart trying to earn money for a game console and eventually gets a job handing out menus for a Thai restauraunt. This is the sole focus for the first 10 minutes of the episode, until Lisa finally appears and Bart's plot is not brought up again except for a couple of throwaway jokes.

Then they meet the shallowly-written environmental protestors and blah blah blah the point is that Lisa is recruited by them to camp out on a tree so Evil Texan Conglomerate doesn't cut it down but then she gets homesick so she leaves her post to go home and she falls asleep but GASP the tree was hit by lightning and the whole town assumes she's dead. But the forest is being perserved in her honor and Homer and Bart can reap the benefits of "grieving" so it's in everyone's best interest that they let people continue to assume she's dead.

But then Evil Texan Conglomerate decides that he'd rather honor her memory by tearing down the forest and building an amusement park, to which Lisa announces that no she's not dead and nobody questions this whatsoever anyway then the big tree with her head carved into it gets loose and slides down the hill and destroys various parts of the city and at the end of the episode it's revealed that it's still going and hasn't slowed down after all this time which admittedly is kinda funny in it's absurdity.[/SPOILER]

Despite it being a pretty weak episode I still kinda liked it. There were some good jokes here and there and I feel like the characterization is pretty pleasant for this era of Simpsons; there wasn't any "Homer is a jerk for sadistic humor" stuff aside from making Moe pour onions down his pants which is honestly pretty mild.

[Apollo the Just]

After my salty late night rants from last night, I re-watched the Great Mouse Detective to see if it holds up. It's definitely still one of my favorite Disney movies, but it's also far from the best Sherlock Holmes adaptation of all time ((because that's still Dai Gyakuten Saiban always and forever)). It's more about the story and characters than any sort of mystery, which is fine and it does that well, but is subsequently a bit Good-Guy-Vs-Bad-Guy formulaic. Also why Disney always gotta queercode their villains.

Has some wonderful animation and I still really do like the main characters, Basil is one of my favorite OC Holmeses, so solid 6-7/10 overall.