Ask Lemmy

Eyes Wide Shut, Billy Bat, and in general every thriller story that ditches the text in favor of the subtext

Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.

The movie version of The House with a Clock in its Walls.

FDR American Badass.

It's a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.

The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.

You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)

We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.

The Hobbit movies

One of my favourite books as a kid, I don't think I'll ever watch the movies again by choice

I think the Eurovision Song Contest has lost the innocent magic it once possessed.

Dr Who after Peter Capaldi left.

The plots went to crap. The retconning destroyed decades of canon. I've nothing against the actors involved but the writers should be taken out and beaten.

Avengers End Game - after years of build up and creating the entire MCU, it felt like a cop out for them to fix everything with a time travel plot that they set specific rules for. It was just lazy writing.

my two favorite media franchises are Star Trek and Sonic. how long have you got?

I know I will get hate for this... Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - "it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good". It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something... else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the "give it a chance" phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I'll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.

For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it's possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me "you should watch it, it's decent", I'd might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a "cool bad-ass", which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.

I know it's ancient history, but I still can't get over the spectacular train wreck of Star Wars Episode One. So much hype, so much hope, and then you get a two hour arcade game promo with Jar Jar Binks. It was like George Lucas had picked every single terrible trope of 90s movies and packaged it neatly into a movie.

Everything Everywhere All At Once. People hyped it, I watched it and thought it started out OK and then just became a stupid mess. And I really like off beat movies.

Episodes 7 through 9 of Star Wars. Yeah 7 was a retelling of the same story almost but we also live in a world where we're repeating history so... It provided some New Hope for the series but 8 was total subversion of everything though I doubt it was all that well planned out to begin with. There were some questionable decisions and characters in that movie. And 9, I didn't even bother to watch it after I found out Palpatine is back. Just...yeah.

Dragon's Dogma 2.

Loved the first one. Only negative I had seen about DD2 was the performance wasn't great. It's fucking dookie. Tons of great ideas that aren't executed well or for more than a single, short-as-fuck quest and then never used again.

The best part of the game is the Sphynx; and even those puzzles are a bit stupid toward the end. Like needing to remember where the very first medallion thing you picked up was. By the time you'd realistically find the Sphynx without any external guidance, you'd have found a ton of those fuckers and you sure as shit wouldn't think to mark down where after the fact.

Combat gets repetitive quick as enemies spawn constantly, and this includes big shit like griffons that can literally fly in while you're approaching the end of a long journey and snatch you up and carry you across the damn world to their nest.

Every little thing you do has some long-winded animation you can't cancel tied to it, and NPCs walking along roads constantly stop you to initiate meaningless dialogue; it doesn't just not respect your time, it pisses on it.

And to top it all off the story is stupid, short, and ends abruptly before you even know what the hell is really going on. This is including what little extra you can get after a NG+ cycle which makes it even more annoying that you are required to do the whole fucking game twice to still get a shitty ending that doesn't answer a single question you might have about the events of the plot.

I fucking hate this game.

Great Expectations. It just wasn't all I'd hoped for.

2001; A Space Odyssey

I generally like older, slower paced movies. The Bridge over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Guns of Navarone are all great movies, despite them being very dated in some regards. With that in mind, I decided to give the movie a try, it being a very famous classic and all. Despite that, my expectations weren't unrealistically high, but the movie still fell very short.

So, it consists of four chapters/acts, basically. The first one (with the monkeys) was very "meh" and could have been shorter, but I didn't mind it too much because, again, old movie. The second act on the moon was better, but honestly was "OK" in my books. The third act, now that was really good in my opinion. I though; "looks like the story is really taking off now!" And then came act 4...

I thought that, while the beginning wasn't great, it was still perfectly salvagable if the ending was decent. Here is where it fell really short, in my opinion. It is, in essence, just a light show with music. Now sure, I bet that for the time that was all very advanced, so I want to give them credit. But it didn't need to last for 15 fucking minutes! Even for that time, that is extremely long. I found myself starting to skip ahead to see if anything else was going to happen. And it did, I guess. Wasn't exactly blown away though.

Now what I think they were trying to achieve was what we now typically describe as eldritch horror, to see something we simply cannot fathom. And I think they did that very well with the tools that they had. But it was just way too long, and that thoroughly put the nail in the coffin for me.

The Dark Tower movie.

One cannot fit a 9 books series into 1 movie. What a just terrible idea to begin with. Also, if you haven't read the books and want an amazing Stephen King adventure, this is your series to read!

I think I speak for us all when I say the Eragon film attempt.

The Netflix version of Cowboy Bebop.

The cast was great but the script was just horrible and really ruined the show.