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Kevin Klemme
March 09, 2020
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Kevin Klemme
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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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December 12, 2023
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December 07, 2023
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River Wild Board Game Review

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December 05, 2023
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November 30, 2023
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Outback Crossing Review

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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

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01 Sep 2015 08:29 #209730 by SuperflyPete
This has been a crazy movie month.

Last night I saw "Out of the Furnace" which is easily the most overrated movie I've seen in years. Acting's fine, script is piss poor.

The night before, I saw "Rumors of War", which is a post-apoc "Book of Revelations" knock-off about the one world government, etc. I know what you're thinking, but suffice it to say that without any knowledge of any "holy texts", any sort of belief system, whatever, it's a decent movie. Not great, but one of the better Christian films I've seen in a long time. It's really a sort of mystery with lots of jumping around and a shitload of not-too-subtle plot twists that you kind of saw coming.

A couple days before that, I saw "If I Stay". Really good film. Touching. Totally recommend it if you need to earn points with the wife and don't want to watch something horrible and penis-hating.

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01 Sep 2015 08:35 #209731 by charlest
I didn't think "Out of the Furnace" was great, but it was an enjoyable watch, mostly due to the actors.
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01 Sep 2015 08:38 #209733 by SuperflyPete
I wanted my 2 hours back. It was basically watching this guy's shitty life unfold, and then it ended with a non-climax.

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04 Sep 2015 17:27 - 04 Sep 2015 17:29 #210005 by Michael Barnes
Whiplash was OK, I guess. What I liked the most about it is that it kind of flipped the whole "Mr. Holland's Opus" thing on its head. The teacher was not this magical font of inspiration and encouragement. He was total bastard. There was no uplifting, no overcoming. Just obsession and a battle of wills. I liked all the blood and sweat, I liked that the film didn't glamorize or romanticize brutally obsessive hard work.

But I didn't love the film. Probably because I absolutely hated the music. Jazz like Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong, Parker, etc. I can appreciate and I get it. That kind of jazz, I absolutely fucking despise. I do not despise much music in the world, but that I do wholeheartedly. Don't care how much talent/technique is involved...to my heathen ears it all just sounds like late night talk show music.

Simmons was good, but he wasn't really much more than a liberal arts version of R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. I almost felt like he was practically cartoonish at certain points. His "villainy" was just too extreme, and in the real world NO ONE would put up with some of that shit he pulled. They wouldn't file charges, they'd file complaints and his ass would have been out of a job day one.

I did like his hypothesis about "good job" though, and I did like that moment where he sort of revealed why he was such a dick. But then the film flips that over and, oh wait, no, he really is just a dick. WTF.

I actually had a teacher sort of like him once, in high school AP US History. This guy was NOTORIOUS at my school for being completely impossible. He was a TOTAL jackass to everyone. He made up names for everyone, made people cry, humiliated people...he got a lot of complaints from students and parents, but the thing is he was so god damned smart and a GREAT teacher that he was kind of untouchable. One time he asked me- out of nowhere- to memorize "Paul Revere's Ride". I think he thought I wouldn't do it. Next day, I recited the whole thing in class. And he said "well, you did it". I felt like I beat him. So I can kind of relate to some of the movie...and I will say that my finest academic moment in high school was when he gave me an achievement medal and said "you've done some damn fine work, Barnes". I didn't have to bleed for it or anything, at least.
Last edit: 04 Sep 2015 17:29 by Michael Barnes.
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05 Sep 2015 00:57 #210021 by Grudunza
I don't like that kind of jazz, either. Indulgent for the sake of sounding indulgent and impressive, but hardly musical. But I do love drumming, so strictly from the point of the drum playing and technique, I could appreciate that as the musical focus. The whole thing was an exaggerated reality, and the part with the kid crashing his car and still hobbling to the show was not believable. But most films are exaggerations, and as you describe, there are some teachers like that. The writer said it was based pretty closely on his experience in a jazz band like that. I actually think the kid's performance was more impressive, pulling together a much wider range than Simmons. I recall the writer/director admitted that he was influenced from Full Metal Jacket (and his jazz teacher) in crafting that character.

Speaking of music movies, whether you like the Beach Boys or not, Love & Mercy is one of the better music bios ever, showing two different periods of Brian Wilson's life; when he begins to deteriorate mentally in the 60's, and then in the 80's when he meets the woman who will hopefully have some influence in bringing some sanity back to his life. As a musician/songwriter, I especially loved the earlier period showing some of the way he worked to create those iconic songs, but the later part is also really interesting and has some good performances by Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack.

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05 Sep 2015 01:55 #210023 by Space Ghost
Tried to watch Birdman, again. Still hate it.

Also, was talking to some asshole who claimed the Twilight Zone with Forest Whitaker was the best version.
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05 Sep 2015 09:24 #210027 by Shellhead
I didn't have high expectations for Blade II. The box cover promised lots of action, and I assumed that it would be cool-looking thanks to direction by Guillermo del Toro. (Hey, who names their kid Bill the Bull?) But it was disappointing. Lots of ideas, but most were only partially developed. Lots of action, but it didn't have much impact because the characters were all unlikable, including Blade himself. Could have been trimmed down by at least 15 minutes. The only enduring legacy of this movie will be that it brought together del Toro and Ron Perlman so that they could do great Hellboy movies.

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05 Sep 2015 10:24 #210030 by Black Barney
it's funny cuz the jazz in Whiplash is the only kind of jazz i like. And that's probably because I hate jazz.

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05 Sep 2015 12:10 #210034 by stoic

Black Barney wrote: it's funny cuz the jazz in Whiplash is the only kind of jazz i like. And that's probably because I hate jazz.


After watching Whiplash I developed PTSD and had to enter therapy. Since then every time I listen to Jazz I break out in a cold sweat and shiver.
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06 Sep 2015 03:03 #210056 by Grudunza
Under the Skin is a sci-fi/horror mash-up that features ScarJo in all her glory as a seductive alien. Great use of music and imagery, and very provocative with an interesting premise. Someone here had previously compared this with Ex Machina, as being recent sci-fi thrillers. I think Ex Machina is the better film, overall, but this was also very cool.

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06 Sep 2015 11:03 #210067 by RobertB
Mad Max: Fury Road is out on blu-ray, and I watched it in the comfort of my own home. It's a lot better on the big screen, but it's still the best movie I've seen recently, by far.
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06 Sep 2015 16:31 - 06 Sep 2015 16:54 #210084 by Erik Twice
It's kind of hypocritical that Kingsman: Secret Service has this Watchmen-like plot in which the bad guy decides who deserves to die and who deserves to die because it implicitely supports that view through its narrative arc. It's one of those films in which the protagonists are assumed to be good by default and so all those times in which they awesomely beat up people are to be disregarded, while those who hurl insults at them are to be reprehended with extreme violence. It's quite simply a revenge fantasy, to the point that the last scene shows the now superpowered kid coming back home to beat the crap out of the people who did him wrong.

This would be forgiveable if the film did not go out of its way to present a moralistic viewpoint, which it obviously does. There's a constant stream of justifications of why all the people who the protagonist beat up are bad: They are wife-beaters, they read The Sun, they are traitors, they are chavs...The main villain is depicted as being a huge hypocrite for not being able to stomach violence in person when he's casuing a mass genocide off-screen, when the impression I got is that the main characters were even bigger hypocrites for being able to justify any sort of smug, needless violence as long as it's personal to them.

I also know several people have been bothered by the portrayal of women in the film, citing stereotypes and such and I have to say it did also bother me, but for a more different reason: Women in this film are not characters, they are female characters, defined by their feminity:

- The mother of the main character, who suffers domestic violence and has to prostitute herself.
- The sexy Asian assassin
- One of the only two fellow students that threat the protagonist well is a women. She dies.
- The other is another fellow student, the only female one remaining. She's supposed to be more compentent than her male colleagues and yet needs the support and help from the main character during most of the film. Also, she leaves the film by the end to fulfill a completely unimportant narrative point.
- The sexy pricess from Sweeden, which offers the protagonist anal sex in exchange of saving the world.

But enough with the moral analysis, it's just a boring film. Beneath its Bond film references and some short quips just lies a poor Bond film with a young adult protagonist. It's not structurally different from the stuff it lampoons, nor does it gain anything by lampooning it, it's just...there. "Better than a bare lighbulb" is not an adage I'm fond of.

Do you know what I wished I had seen instead? Read or Die. It has the same "brown note" plot and is ten times as humble if simply because instead of making some lame jokes about English tailors being secret agents it has giant insects, crazy superpowered clones of ancient samurais with lightsabers and a bibliomaniac protagonist that is actually likeable.
Last edit: 06 Sep 2015 16:54 by Erik Twice.
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06 Sep 2015 20:04 #210088 by Gary Sax
I felt the over the topness of the movie established it well into the absurdist fantasy camp. The only one of your points that really bothered me in that movie was the consistent misogyny.

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06 Sep 2015 20:38 #210089 by Not Sure
Reading The Sun is pretty unforgivable.

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07 Sep 2015 17:14 - 07 Sep 2015 18:40 #210124 by Grudunza
I found Kingsman entertaining enough to watch and enjoy at the time, but I can't disagree with your assessment there, Erik, and unlike other recent films like Fury Road, I have no desire to see it again, so it really was kind of junk food.

I have seen Birdman twice now and like it a lot, but as someone else said recently, I view it as more of an ironic dark comedy. Barnes, I disagree that it is snobbishly pooh-poohing the superhero genre in favor of the "theatah" esthetic... Sure, it definitely sets that idea up in some ways, but also knocks it down. In Riggan's confrontation with the theater critic, she was going to give him a negative review only because of him daring to bring his untrained, spoiled Hollywood Birdman self into the revered "real art " theater scene... she talks about Hollywood handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. NO WAY she is a sympathetic character to the audience of this film. We're all saying a big "fuck you" to her, as he essentially does.

And much of his inner dialogue as Birdman is telling him that his real value was as Birdman. Yes, he's constantly fighting against that idea, thinking that his real value now is with recognition in this oh so important theater show, but I think that can be taken more than one way; not necessarily as a deceptive hallucination, but serious. In a sense, he subconsciously knows that Birdman really was an important work that touched and reached so many people around the world in a powerful way. There's a parallel at work throughout, where the mass of people love him and recognize him for being Birdman, like in the first bar scene and the scene where he's walking through the crowd in his underwear, but he is essentially rejecting their adoration in favor of the snooty critic, whose approval he really is seeking. I don't take that disparagingly towards those people praising and recognizing him, though, and I don't think the film suggests that at all. That character has indeed had a huge impact on the world, in a meaningful way. He just can't accept that, with ego and recognition and approval-seeking (from the wrong source) getting in the way.

It's the kind of film that different people might take in very different ways, but I like that. It definitely had a resonance for me in a way that wouldn't be easy to explain, but parallels some things I've been going through personally the last several years. And having done theater for several years, I was amused by some of the depictions... again, not favorable... of characters like Ed Norton's Super-Method-Man. Really, if anything, the film equally examines, reveres and mocks the supposed superheros of both film *and* theater, and the pretensions and positives of both mediums.
Last edit: 07 Sep 2015 18:40 by Grudunza.
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