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Post by Lizica on Sept 27, 2022 0:06:56 GMT -5
So I finally saw Mean Girls for the first time. XD
(Fun fact, this movie's been evading me for ages. Back in middle school, we went on a field trip to go see 13 Going On 30 in the theatre, and they accidentally started playing Mean Girls before realizing their mistake after the first five minutes and then switching out the film. Kids moaned in protest when they stopped it, and that made me curious. Then, there was a period where people online made video edits of the Mean Girls trailer audio combined with other movie characters. Then, when we first got Netflix, I was excited to see it was on there, but this was before we knew that Netflix content wasn't permanent, and they took it down before I saw it.)
Basically, after all these years, I was able to see all its memes in their native habitat.
Prrrrrobably wasn't a great movie to have watched with my parents. XDD I inwardly cringed every time they used rude language and dealt with Awkward Topics, which was, y'know, pretty often. X'D Still, though, my mom and I got some good laughs out of it, and I caught my dad smiling several times, too. (Once was definitely at least during the "she doesn't even go here!" bit.)
I somehow avoided major spoilers all this time, and I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the ending was? Like, good for all of you! Being more open and finding less toxic friend groups and finding more positive outlets.
Overall, though, probably not a movie I'll watch again, but I am grateful to have at last witnessed pop culture, and it does also make me extremely thankful that as much as I hated high school, it was at least WAY better than THAT. X'D
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Post by Twillie on Sept 27, 2022 20:12:34 GMT -5
That's a funny coincidence because I just started watching Mean Girls for the first time yesterday! xD Haven't finished it yet, but with how much the internet references I felt I should give it a try lol. Rip at the awkward moments with your parents, but that's good that you still got some laughs out of it! :3
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Post by Lizica on Sept 27, 2022 22:09:32 GMT -5
Oh, that's such a fun coincidence! XD I hope you enjoy the rest of it, Twillie! =D (I also wanted to add a small postscript to my earlier post that I'm disappointed this part isn't one of the parts I hear referenced all the time, because we thought it was hilarious. XDD I guess it's not as standalone quotable, but still.) (from memory, anyway) "We'll be here all night if we have to!" *whisper* "We can't keep them past 4:00." "...We'll be here 'til 4:00 if we have to!"
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Post by downrightdude on Sept 27, 2022 23:10:35 GMT -5
Lizca and Twillie are both fetch!
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Post by Gelquie on Sept 28, 2022 0:20:54 GMT -5
Stop trying to make "fetch" happen, downrightdude, it's not going to happen!!
...Okay, but seriously, overall agreed with Lizica. xD I watched it a few years ago to see what all the fuss was about. And there were funny moments and things I laughed at and still laugh at. And I was also pretty pleased with the ending and the message from it! But I also definitely winced at some of the language (and kind of wish I had a heads-up about). And it was pretty obvious that it was a movie in the 2000s given how... delicately it treated some topics. (Not that I expected much else for a movie about mean high school cliques. xD But even so.) Overall, I'm glad I experienced it and I still remember good moments from it, but I probably wouldn't go out of my way to re-watch it either.
Also yes, I'm very glad my high school experience was not like that. I'm really glad that the cliques I dug myself into were the ones with the music and AP nerds. xP
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Post by Liou on Nov 20, 2022 18:50:42 GMT -5
A Review Of: that Quicksilver Scene from that X-Men Movie uuuh I think it was called Days of Future, I don't Know the Rest of the Movie, this is Only About That One Scene
Hello hi, you remember that scene with Evan Peters as Quicksilver running in slow motion while the world is frozen around him because he is being Quicksilver who is very very ridiculously fast, with music, and all the kitchen objects suspended in midair around him because Magneto was upsetting a whole lot of things with his Xman powers just before Quicksilver started running, and that looks darn good on screen and that scene got a lot of attention after the movie came out?
The Quicksilver kitchen scene is good because it brings the viewer close to the character. Instead of seeing the Quicksilver character disappear from our sight in a blur of superspeed because he is too fast to be seen, we see him at his speed and the rest of the world appears frozen. That is good because it shows the viewer something that only Quicksilver himself can see, because only Quicksilver moves at that speed. The viewer and Quicksilver are alone together in this bubble of hyperspeed. It is very intimate, almost voyeuristic. The music adds to this intimate, lonely point of view because we are hearing what only he is hearing through his headphones.
The Quicksilver kitchen scene is good because it characterises him in very little time with no dialogue. This scene shows us a time when Quicksilver has several guards unaware of his presence and helpless to stop him, while there are many blades at hand. He has many opportunities to inflict grievous harm with no witnesses or interference, and each time he chooses to spare lives and to cause as little damage as possible, this displayed through small and subtle gestures. He incapacitates the guards and causes them to duck below the attacking metalware at the same time. He does all this with a sense of humour, indulging in little jokes like playing with a hat.
While he begins by taking down the guards and preventing Magneto from harming them, he saves the bullets targeting Magneto for last, pausing in his running to rearrange them in more deliberate gestures than anything he was doing before. This makes it seem like he saved himself just a little bit more time to consider what to do for Magneto before making his decision and getting to him, and just hints at more complex feelings there. At the end of his rearranging of the room he gives a tiny smile like an artist stepping back, pleased with his work.
All this good stuff packed into two minutes.
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Post by Lizica on Dec 15, 2022 1:21:16 GMT -5
I treated myself to a movie out today. I saw "The Bad Guys," and I thought it was a good, cartoony romp, I really enjoyed it. But what I really came here to point out was... Guinea Pigs!!!! Yes, I still get unreasonably excited over guinea pigs. Finally got to see The Bad Guys myself, and I kept thinking about your review of it! XDD And, I concur. Me, near the beginning: Oh yeah, guinea pig character for sure!
Me, at that one heist sequence: OHHH yeah, definitely "GUINEA PIGS!!!!"
Me, at the climax: ASFKJDKJAFJADHLAKLL GUINEA PIIIIIIGGGSSSS XDDDD Anyway, I really liked the movie! Kid-friendly heist movie with fun, lovable animal characters with a really great dynamic! =DD Also, the animationnnnn. I spent a large part of the movie just admiring how they animated Snake to be so expressive.
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Post by Twillie on Dec 23, 2023 17:30:16 GMT -5
After stumbling upon a scene from this movie that still made me tear up despite it being out of context, I saw The Suicide Squad (2021) on a whim today, and wowww I'm glad I did =o Superhero films largely fell off my radar a few years ago, so I forgot about this one pretty quickly despite its good reviews, but I definitely understand the hype now. The humor is very funny, the main team is endearing in their unique ways despite (and sometimes because of) their flaws (I think the only one I didn't quite connect with was Rick Flag), the visuals were good, and the ending villain actually filled me with dread at points. And like I mentioned earlier, this movie had me genuinely emotional, and not just for the one scene I saw ahead of time. This movie will probably stick with me for a while after seeing it, and in the best way. Some spoiler thoughts: Ratcatcher 2's flashback to her father while defeating Starro got me tearing up, but everything about Starro rips my heart in two xD When they descend into Jötunheim and learn what Project Starfish really is, the whole scene was honestly kind of sickening (meant as a compliment to the film) because you can't help but think the US government might actually do something like this if such an extraterrestrial creature existed. And then there's the build up to Starro himself, first with the old footage showing him small and foreshadowing his ability to grow with each host he gains, and then we get to the lab and see the extent of the experiments from the past 30 years, and just as we're settling into the horror of the scene, Starro's giant arm slams into the window, the size of a building. It just gave me a real existential horror of what did you people do. And then Starro's dying words of how he was happy and peaceful in space.... heartbreaking ;;
On that note, it was also interesting just how anti-US government this film was compared to other superhero films, and how much it criticized US imperialism both literally with Corto Maltese and metaphorically with Starro. I felt like it could make the film uncomfortable, but not in a bad way. It's a hard R with a lot of gore, so do exercise caution with that, but yeah I think it's a great film and I'd recommend it to anyone curious!
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Post by Liou on Jan 5, 2024 18:05:05 GMT -5
Our Flag Means Death
The pirate show. Two seasons, eighteen episodes, half an hour each. Very manageable for a binge.
The premise is simple. It's funny, but it's not a haha comedy. It's a romcom. Take it as a romcom. As any romance, the story is kept going by things that get in the way of the romance, including miscommunications and nonlinear character progress. It's fun, sweet and casual and a bit dramatic and absurd and campy. It's the kind of show that I would have loved to watch as a teenager if only shows back then had been this good and inclusive. It's quite inclusive.
A nice point I really want to highlight: there is a character who has a speech impediment, and at no point, not a single time in the entire show, is it played for laughs. Not even implicitly. They just exist and go about their business like the rest of the characters, and they happen to have a speech impediment, and that's it.
Q: Any queerbaiting? A: No, guaranteed not! Go in without fear.
I would like to thank Vico Ortiz for gracing the universe with their existence at the same time as I am alive to witness it.
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Post by Breakingchains on Jan 27, 2024 14:43:58 GMT -5
I picked up the current controversy game lol.
Palworld's previews impressed me when they first came out ages ago, so I wishlisted it and then bought on launch day. It is, essentially, a creature-catching adventure game combined with an open-world base-builder. The game has gotten massively controversial since launch for two reasons: (1) A bunch of the creature designs are noticeable Pokemon stand-ins; there is a very obvious "Oh that's supposed to be Lucario," "Oh those two are clearly supposed to be Eevee," "Oh that's Meganium as a biped" sensibility to the designs. (2) The game openly allows you to kill, butcher for food, overwork, and otherwise mistreat the Pokemon "Pals" and even other humans. (To actually do so is nowhere near optimal gameplay, any more than killing entire Skyrim villages would be, but it's mechanically present as an option.) This has lead to criticisms that the game consists of "slavery jokes" or is promoting animal cruelty, etc.
Having played it for a good while before starting to dip my toes into the controversy, I think what people are missing is that the game is a Pokemon parody. This is the missing piece that makes the thing make any sense at all. Pokemon has been subjected to 20+ years of uncomfortable questions about things like "Isn't this just dogfighting?" and "Do people eat Pokemon? How intelligent are Pokemon? Is there any clear boundary between a Pokemon and an animal, or a person? Is any of this ethical at ALL?" and Palworld very deliberately takes all of those questions to their logical conclusions, then presents the resulting world as comically terrible. Irreverent, yes. A hateful screed in favor of forcing gerbils to perform sweatshop labor, not exactly.
Also, it's fun.
(As a footnote, I'm not touching either the AI part of the controversy or the claims that they ripped assets directly FROM Pokemon, bc both are currently unfounded twitter hearsay, and from what I've seen of the game I'm fairly sure they're false.)
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Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Feb 22, 2024 16:26:27 GMT -5
Cities: Skylines (2017)
Full disclosure: I was gifted the base game and three expansion packs (Natural Disasters, Snowfall, and Mass Transit). If I hadn't gotten them for free, I probably wouldn't have thought about trying the game. But now that I have, I'm very glad I did; I've since sunk over 200 hours into the game over the past few months, and have purchased more expansion packs when they went on sale (Sunset Harbor, Industries, Green Cities, and Parklife). I'll probably purchase the entire game eventually. The full price of the entire game including all expansion packs is about $300, but sales seem to happen semi-frequently now that the game is nearly eight years old. It runs fairly smoothly on cheap hardware, too.
Now that that's out of the way: The gameplay. Is. Amazing. The closest Neopian equivalents are probably Habitarium and Island Builders, and some other well-known titles in the genre include SimCity and Age of Empires; but CS is so, so much deeper. The funny thing is, it's tagged "economy simulator" on Steam but it could not be more different from the Neopian economy simulator. In Neopets, you play from a first-person perspective and have to compete against other players (who are essentially your antagonists gameplay-wise) - if someone bids higher than you on an auction, you don't get the item. If someone wins more in-game wealth than you for whatever reason, you can't bid as high, etc., and the point of the whole thing is to... collect, and amass more wealth, and collect some more, ad nauseum. In CS, by contrast, you play from an omniscient perspective. You can zoom in to look at individual people in the city and watch them traveling to work and so on, but most of the time you're thinking about the well-being of the entire city, and your main antagonist in the game is not other people, but the environment. The game also kind of erases all conflict between people and provides this comforting illusion of a community working together, which is such a refreshing change from the cut-throat nature of real life that I find it very relaxing.
There is a huge diversity of maps to choose from. Some have more hostile environments than others (lack of trade routes, lack of resources, steep terrain, extreme temperatures), while some are more beginner-friendly. I started by playing on an easy map, and after mastering the basics, I am now building a CS version of Terror Mountain on a snowy map. xD I named my residential areas Happy Valley and Chia Oscuro, and my commercial organic food zones Mr. Chipper's and Super Happy Icy Fun Snow Shop. I named my leisure zone Tarla's Mysteries, and my farm industry Meri Acres Farm. Having to design traffic routes, plan zones, position key buildings and so on has also made me more mindful of how real cities are planned, and I have a new appreciation for the transit routes, garbage-collection routes, mail delivery etc. I depend on in my real life.
The only downside to this game is that it's not easy to get into - but that's also arguably its greatest strength. The people in the community are extremely smart. They create in-game assets (like traffic intersections and special buildings, and story-mode missions called scenarios) that they share with others. Player-made mods are also a thing and officially supported by the devs. Feels like the good old days of Neopets avatar-collecting when people would pool their intellectual resources to support and help one another.
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Post by Kat on Mar 1, 2024 19:13:24 GMT -5
Watched the Avatar: The Last Airbender 2024 remake.
I don't think it deserves a lot of the hate and vitriol it gets? Its weakest points are storytelling/writing decisions as I do think the cast can really run wild with a better script. Combining various plot points to narrow the series down to 8 episodes really doesn't do the plot justice, and there's a lot of "telling" instead of "showing" especially considering that the original mastered the art of "show don't tell", fueling so many discussions on implied details and parallels scattered throughout the episodes. I get wanting a more goal-oriented take, but a lot of the ATLA filler episodes served significant purposes especially in building the characters' relationships.
But noticeably the best parts of the series are usually centered on Iroh and Zuko. New scenes (with references to the OG that WILL leave you tearbending) breathe new life into their relationship. Iroh is different from the OG but still has the same soul, for me. Unfortunately a good number of the cast members, especially the kids, are held back by the script.
The bending makes use of really good effects, there's some very nice set pieces...but ATLA for me is all about the plot and story so that's REALLY IMPORTANT for me.
Honestly I want a season 2 if only so the folks can learn from their mistakes in season 1. While the release of the series has reignited ATLA/Legend of Korra discussion, it has unfortunately also unearthed unsavory types who aim their vitriol at the young actors, especially at the actors' appearances.
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Post by Breakingchains on Mar 19, 2024 11:40:29 GMT -5
Okay I cannot believe I waited this long to read Dungeon Meshi. I am punching my desk this is so good
Silly charming worldbuilding ideas all taken up to 11 + a strange fascination with the intersection between biology and food + sweet character moments AND gross scary moments AND hilarious gags and every single one of them feels earned + this is Very Gay + unflinching portrayal of neurodivergence + everything runs off RPG rules which is funny as hell
I can't stop reading. 10/10 this is amazing
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Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Mar 28, 2024 22:11:25 GMT -5
Snowpiercer (2013)
This movie is violent. >.< It does have its moments of absurd humor, though, and overall it's very philosophically provocative. I watched it with my parents.
The premise is that humanity tries to reverse-engineer the damage done to the environment by pumping an artificial substance into the atmosphere to cool the Earth. The attempt backfires and Earth is plunged into an ice age that wipes out nearly all life. The only survivors are on board a circumnavigational train called Snowpiercer, an "Ark" designed by the mastermind Wilford.
Wilford has a perverted interpretation of the concept of sustainability, or what he calls "balance." The entire train is a closed system (economically, emotionally and biologically), with zero waste. The front passengers live in luxury. All the waste gets fed to cockroaches which are processed into protein blocks for the people at the tail end of the train. The "tail" passengers live in crowded bunks, and are routinely rounded up and counted. Sometimes their children are taken to the front and never return. We learn that four years ago, there was a failed revolution resulting in many deaths.
The story follows Curtis, a revolutionary from the "tail" who tries to fight his way to the "front" to overthrow the mysterious Wilford, who has never made an appearance but rather always transmits propaganda through his subordinates, telling everyone how they must remain "in their place" and worship "the Sacred Engine."
I enjoyed it. It's a pretty incisive critique of human arrogance and greed. There are also acts of pure love under even the most desperate circumstances that offer hope in an otherwise grim movie.
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Post by Lizica on Apr 22, 2024 23:24:27 GMT -5
(Definitely not the first time I've seen this movie, but for ages I've been wanting to write a mini-review for it the next time I watched it. =D So!!) Paddington 2 has got Mc-freaking- everything. <333 Found family! Comedy! Drama! Heart! Mystery! Kindness! Community! A high speed train chase! Heists AND a prison break! Prison reform! So many good hero moments! Live action with 3D animation! Even a little 2D animation! 3D pop-up book animation?? *gently shakes your shoulders* It's just!! so good!! and so much fun!! and so sweet!! AAAAaaaaughskdjfasjfslfjsgskj ;w; At some point, I'm absolutely gonna try to rope more of you folks to watch it with me, and you better hold me to that.For the record, I didn't grow up reading the Paddington books, and the first time I saw this movie, I hadn't even seen Paddington 1. ((And when I eventually did see the first one, found it disappointing in comparison.)) I think literally the only thing that confused me that needed prior knowledge was that it's an established plot thing that Paddington keeps a marmalade sandwich under his hat for emergencies. I can't choose a favorite part because there are so many, but I LOVE the bit where Mary realizes that Phoenix is the culprit and mentally overlays every single costume over his blue eyes. It's just so visually cool, and narratively succinct and satisfying, and augh! *chef's kiss!* And there are so many other chef's kiss moments. This movie leaves me with such a good feeling, I love it. <3 ...Also, this is Hugh Grant's greatest role, don't @ me. xP
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