Smitty

It's all very yawn, this constant public posturing. It's Dead or Alive: Babe Sim, and it isn't going to end the world. Sexual content is just as valid as any other content. Hetrosexual men are 50% of the population. It's getting extremely tiresome to see people pretending that all expressions of heterosexual male sexuality is this disgusting thing that must be hidden away. People can buy and view porn. They can buy and view this. In a few years you'll see this as laughably quaint when people are all watching POV porn on their VR headsets, having sex in VR with sims, fucking sex bots and all the rest. Most of us here enjoy various films and games where people are brutally murdered or what have you.That's ok, but sex isn't? Most of the men here, including the OP, are statistically likely to watch porn. Whatever.

I think we'll make it, somehow. Also copying Kirby in is childish.

The good old NTSC-UK days!

BOOO! Booo! The one thing i'll give it is that it looks and sounds incredible. Oh my god, those shots of the Death Star rising over the horizon. Visually, won-der-ful. It's just....the rest of the movie.

Sure, i'd never pretend that all OG fans are of one opinion on this film or any of the others. Some like them, some really really don't. All I was saying is that it's that kind of Star Wars fan, the people nursing that love for 30 years, who are the ones who get REALLY angry/upset about these movies when they don't like them. I'm just saying if I took the view they did in the context of their fandom then I'd probably be really mad. As it is I can just say 'didn't really like the portrayal, found it unsatisfying' instead of really going off on one. I'm criticising it here, but it's not personal for me. I'm not emotional about it. Those guys are. I still have all kinds of problem with the film but if you took the Rey/Kylo/Luke scenes (notwithstanding my criticism of them) in isolation and cut out of the rest of the stuff out then you'd have a much better accumulated quality of scenes. I agree those are better scenes, and interesting ideas and relationships. But for me they'd just have to exist in another film, another story entirely. As it is, the whole thing just doesn't hang together for me. It's weird because on one intellectual level I appreciate some of ideas, on paper (as i've said) it sounds great. On the page i'd appreciate the symbolism of Luke 'fighting' as a force projection and then dying from it; in reality I found that I was pretty much nonplussed by it. Again, I didn't feel anything when Luke died. My reaction: ok, Lukes dead. I feel like that's a dramatic failure. As I've said before the reason why I'm so harsh is because I enjoyed parts. I should be here saying that the Kylo/Ren showdown was legendary, a brilliant scene. Because in many ways it is. When I see potential dashed, when I see fois gras next to dog shit I tend to react quite badly. I felt very odd afterwards, confused. What was that, I asked myself. It's both good and terrible. I think, judging by the very strong backlash in some quarters that I am not the only person who had this reaction. For me its the weirdest Star Wars film there is. The artistry, the performances, the technical aspects, the direction and everything all so far above the level of the prequels (as with TFA) but its given me kind of prequel-level enjoyment. To my mind it just shows that you having the right story, told in the right way with the right way is crucial. You can be a way better film maker than pre-era Lucas and still make something that doesn't deliver.

There are qualitative differences in how different activities stimulate the human body and mind. Do you know what a super-normal stimulus is? You might want to look it up. Are you seriously going to claim that talking to someone face to face has the same neurological, social, physical, and psychological effects as talking to them via text on a screen? Are you going to claim that hiking for 3 hours is biologically, neurologically, psychologically the same as sitting and playing a game for 3 hours? These things are not at all like each other. The fantasy of the techno-masturbatory mindset that is fairly commen nowadays is that the difference doesn't matter. It's really strange because generally when you talk about other animals people can inherently understand that certain environments, conditions, stimuli, diet etc are much more suitable and good for their physical and mental health than other ones. So if you stop feeding zoo gorillas artificial processed feed and start feeding them them fruit and veg they stop getting heart disease. If you don't live a bear in a concrete pen alone for ten years it won't nod its head in a deranged way. But when it comes to humans people entertain this fantasy that we're essentially above our biology and our evolution. It's hilarious. There's so many examples of how laughably false this is that it's hard to know where to start. You could start with the fact that we're undergoing a crisis of sleep deprivation in developed countries because of modern factors like 24 hour electric lighting, hyper-stimulating media like internet/smartphones and so on. How we live effects us. We're animals too. You're living in a fantasy where human beings have total control over ourselves. But there's a reason why so many people stare at their phones all day and it isn't because it's good for them. Human beings are not just built to do things that are good for themselves. We don't eat an entire can of Pringles because they are good for us. It's because they're a super-stimulant to our biological setup and they have been explicitly designed to short-circuit it. Lots of very clever food scientists were employed to use our own biology against us to develop an irressitibel food of the kind that nature could never, ever create. Our systems can be and are overwhelmed by stimuli that are far and beyond any stimulus that we could encounter in the natural environment that the very structure of our minds evolved in. Coca is a mild stimulant when you chew the leaves - how they are in nature. When you apply industrial processing to them then they become crack, an extremely addictive substance which destroys lives. And no, sorry, I am not responsible for the potentially addictive, habit-forming nature of modern technologies. I did not design or engineer any of them. I did not choose to be born in the 21st century. What you state about whether things are fundamentally less valuable is irrelavant. The question is whether it is actually good for you. People love their precious phones, no doubt. Almost to a suspicious degree. But is their use of their phones good for them? There seems to be a strong uptick in mental health problems amongst the young. It's not going to surprise me at all if that turns out to be because they're looking at their phones for 5 hours a day, followed by 3 hours looking at a video game, and 2 hours on the internet. It's an epidemic. My BF tutors music privately. He told me that a new 12 year old student told him that she'd decided to take up lessons so that she could escape from her phone. A 12 year old! And you can find many more such examples of the digital generation themselves talking about how technology is making them unhappy. People always turn around and say 'its' because you're old' but when you see very young kids doing drawings with sad faces and saying how upset they feel that mummy is looking at her phone all the time then you know there's a problem. For now a lot of people are just content to loudly deny there is a problem. But when former engineers of apps, hardware and platforms come forward and say 'of course they're engineered to be addictive', when you have child neurologists saying that babies always look at whatever their parents are looking at then they're just trying to plug their fingers in their ears in the midst of the 1812 overture. The reason why Silicon Valley bosses send their children to tech-free schools, the reason why Steve Jobs kept iphones and ipads away from his kids, is the same reason why I wrote what I wrote.

I can level it at the MCU because its true of the MCU. The MCU and the comics are definitionally different things, and i'm not bothered by what is the case in the comics when discussing the MCU. I've started to miss the sense of characters being truly exceptional in superhero films, something which happens because every superhero films must exist in a universe for the purposes of marketing and making money. I like that in the Fox X Men universe the only super individuals are those who have been randomly genetically mutated. It makes the idea of their social reality more compelling. The MCU is so bloated and so overwhelming in its cultural saturation, it's reached almost Star Wars levels of it in just ten years. I'm not happy to see yet more characters get sucked back into it. There are other ways of handling the material other than the Marvel/Disney way. Aside from that issue, this is just going to give Disney so much power. It'll be too big and it'll be bad for consumers and potentially for creatives.

Generally character design in games like this is a laugh riot.

Sure, but i'm not talking about how it feels.

Hilariously the progressive movie du jour Black Panther - which people like you were virtually tripping over their own feet in their rush to praise it - depicts its many black characters as Africans who wear tribal/traditional outfits of various kinds. How terribly regressive. Looks pretty dodgy. The 1930s? African people living ancient trible lifestyles exist today. Today, now, in 2018.

LOL, it only took one post for the inevitble accusation of racism to occur. Of course it's from a very an extremely shook white person.

Anyway, it seems to me like the two big issues with the Switch are the upcoming release schedule and the cost of the games.

No worries. I started writing that post before you replied and it took me a little while.

I know the WiiU has lower specs. The point is that in improving the graphics and performance between the two platforms that nothing has been lost from the visual style. The game just looks better. So arguing that the game couldn't or wouldn't look better is wrong.

I just found a lot of his stuff somewhat unsatisfying, and his performance uneven. I don't think he acted in character sometimes and that his character and role weren't used in the right way. I'm definitely not saying it was terrible though. At other points in the film he performs well and communicates quite a lot with his face and expressive eyes. Looking around a bit at different critiques a I think a lot of people unhappy with Luke's portrayal were really hoping to see more of this kind of Luke we see below and even I, someone who's not a serious fan of these movies (the sort who would get angry about the use of the old characters, rather than just mildly critical), did feel the Star Wars magic returning in scenes like this. That managed to pull at my withered and cynical old heartstrings. I think that's the thing: I WANT to feel the power and romance of this story. He generally feels so different in the film from when we last saw him that its sometimes hard to feel the connection from the past to the present. I think that I just want more sense of the old Luke, more of that character coming through. I think of Hamill saying 'who is this guy' in an interview about when we first see him, because he often does feel like someone else. I don't think it's a surprise that Hamill has intimated multiple times that he's not really happy with the role of Luke in TLJ. It's not without its moments, but overall I feel like its a wasted opportunity. I'm just glad i'm not as invested in these characters as some others are (OG fans who fell in love back in 1977) because I think i'd be bitterly disappointed with how they have been used. I think Han was used poorly in TFA, and I felt basically nothing when he was killed. I knew an OG fan from my last job who was livid about that.

???????????? What do you mean 'not you, people in general', you're obviously directing this at me. How are RLM influencing me, skip? Why do you think that liking any commentator is a matter of just subsuming their opinions into your own? That's not how it works. What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Listening to and like movie review podcasts is no different to watching and liking RLM (or anyone else's) videos. You seem to think you can listen to critiques for entertainment and not be 'influenced' by them, but for some reason people who listen to critiques for entertainment that are made for a different medium aren't capable of doing that? I've disagreed with RLM plenty of times. Mike rated the Jurassic Park reboot! I don't watch them because I agree with everything they say, I watch them because I know i'm always going to get an interesting and funny discussion of a movie. Whether or not I agree is neither here nor there, because i watch to be entertained. Wow, weird. You think liking some funny movie critics on Youtube is like some sort of mind-control cult or something? It's odd that this line of criticism continues to be a thing. If you don't like RLM that's obviously fine, but to start talking about people who are fans of literally any Youtube critics as being somehow under their nefarious 'influence' is bizarre, especially when the idea that being influenced by someone else is assumed to be a bad thing isn't even evidenced or justified. Sorry to tell you but all of my opinions are my own. This is an odd new genre of interpersonal criticism. No-one would post what you have in response to a, say, Mark Kermode video. It only really happens with very popular sources or very controversial sources. I posted the video because I find it a very funny (it's also a send-up and not entirely representative of their actual opinions on the movie itself) way of illustrating my own opinion about the film. Obviously! But you're speaking as if I pointed to it as a source of objective truth, my 'gospel'. This keeps happening in relation to RLM. It really is hilarious how angry they make some people when the show itself is a very light-hearted and often silly discussion of movies. But, oh no, they have different opinions to me! And they're popular - ON THE INTERNET! Oh my god!

This kind of stuff is so silly. Why? WHY? That said, if somebody was interested in just writing a screenplay that aims to fix some of the problems with the film, i'd be interested in that. I think a talented writer could come up with a very compelling story.

Here's one line that summarises a major problem I have with TLJ: what do you want me to feel, Rian? That's something that I kept thinking throughout the film. When discussing the film later with my BF he agreed that was a good way of highlighting the rapid and uncomfortable tonal shifts of the film. What am I meant to be feeling right now? That came up again and again.

It happens in it. It happens in the very first optional tomb. Lara says something like 'I think I can set that on fire'. Because we're all too stupid to work that out for ourselves, in this dinky simplistic little room.

Oooh good one Columbo. Why is that at all relevant? If i'd played and finished the game you'd still be in here trying to undermine my opinion because you're one of the forum's most notorious Nintendo fanboys of all time. I can see the evidence of the game graphics from photos and videos.

Get off the throne, drama queen.

What, even the bad acting when he was being comically grumpy? How do you feel about them choosing not to show his reaction to Han dying?

Dude, what the fuck does this mean? Humour is subjective, instead of just accepting that you start talking about 'being influenced by Youtube'?