BitterToad
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Posts posted by BitterToad
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30 minutes ago, Festoon said:
Wonderful review. Spot on, I reckon about Wanda. And it also shares a patchwork quality with No Way Home of just bits that seem good stuck together in a way that doesn't make sense or is underwhelming.
The MCU movies now feel made in a chop 'n' bop style like the way chart hits are now written by finding loads of 'hooks' and sticking them together, rather than as a coherent narrative.
(I really liked No Way Home)
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So there was a lot to like about this in terms of take your brain away from what's actually going on "moments" and "sequences" but overall I wasn't a fan at all. Spoilered for length and... well... spoilers.
SpoilerThe storytelling is all over the place. It's naff macguffin after naff macguffin and everything flies around at such a pace that I'm still not really sure what was going on in the moment to moment for a lot of it, and certainly didn't care while watching it. We fly through Strange's motivation (barely), the fact that he tries to do everything on his own, there's a dark book, there's a light book, here's a very slight back story for Chavez, we're up a mountain now, forget about all of that here's professor X! Remember him!? And here's that thing that the internet wanted! Look the guy from The Office is wearing the thing! This is the movie Edgar Wright turned down. So squeezed full of connections to the past and the future that on a storytelling level it barely has a chance to be its own thing.
But in the few scant moments it is its own thing it's absolutely brilliant! It's this mad fantastic dark dark (for a 12a certainly) horror with Zombies and actual bespoke SAM RAIMI direction in a Marvel movie and, if taken at fact value, an awesome baddie that can make zombies of herself and crash through walls and is super powerful. If taken at face value...
But if you think about it for longer than a second? Hoo boy. Hoo deary boy. I really liked aspects of Wandavision. This whole idea of somebody grieving for someone and them trying to ignore their grief to that extent, to the point where as far as I'm concerned she invented those children purely as a symbol for what she felt for Vision and as a way of keeping him around. It was, very clearly, a show about how dangerous it is to pretend everything's fine when it isn't. It ended terribly, obviously. All of that thrown out for a big fight and an evil shot of Wanda to set this movie up, but the way it handed grieving and love as a thing was pretty cool and surprisingly deep for a Marvel thing. And if they'd built on that and explored Wanda further she could have made an excellent baddie here. However...
I don't think whoever wrote this understood any of that. At all. Because in this Wanda is just obsessed with being a Mother. That's it. Her whole motivation after all these movies is to mother two frankly incredibly annoying children. Vision barely gets a mention, Westview barely gets a mention. She is woman. Woman look after children. Woman so blinded by love for children she will kill and kill and kill to be woman. It's misogynistic if Wanda was a new character but considering we've spent all of this time in all of those movies building up to what could have been a really complicated interesting character it sort of fights against everything Marvel is in theory trying to do with the MCU.
And Olsen is brilliant which adds to how much of a shame the whole thing is. She's very good at the stuff we've seen her be very good at before but my God does she sell in the horror aspects. But when every other line is "my boys... I need to feed my boys!" who gives a shit?
With a few tweaks it could have been really special but as is it's bit of a mess.
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Ncuti's really fantastic in the properly excellent Sex Education. They're making all the right noises for the next series to be a good one!
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What time does actual qualifying start? Trying to juggle this with the Liverpool game!
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Maybe we do a commentary thread and just have this one as scores?
Anyway, still compiling my list but it's absolutely warming my heart to see a fair few high scores for Beatles: Rock Band. I think alongside Get Back it's about as brilliant a celebration of The Beatles I've ever experienced. It's also a truly, truly perfect video game and the clear high point of the late 00's plastic tat genre. In fact I'm hovering over an Xbox 360 on eBay to play it again...
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I really like the new album. It reminds me, weirdly, of Halo: ODST. A sort of all new "Greatest Hits" package that gives you something you like regardless of why you like them and then immediately moves onto the next thing. As a result of this there's a couple of tracks I'm not as mad on as the rest of it but it's the closest thing we've had to a really great Arcade Fire album since The Suburbs, which is such a viscerally important album to me, so I'm happy!
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A quest log would kind of ruin the very specific experience I'm having with the game. Which is so singular and different from anything else I've ever played that it feels kind of fine that it exists how it is and there are a million other "Gary's in the lava world go get him his 50 eggs" type setups.
In this, I have almost certainly missed hours and hours of quests and gameplay and other bits. But my journey feels real and interesting and singular to me. I've looked nothing up. And as I go around sometimes I'll be knocking about a castle and see someone I recognise and just basically explode. It's that dude! How cool! And the way they've designed the quests seems really intelligent in that you can, from what I can tell, miss bits of quests and catch back up with them later?
And there's just so much of the bloody thing that I've not worried about missing anything at all. I'm 100 hours in and still don't feel like I'm anywhere near the end. So what if I miss a couple of quests? It feels like that first magical 10 hours of Red Dead 2 before the games systems revealed themselves a little more explicitly, but spread over the length of The Witcher 3.
It's good. Good game. Don't change it. Good.
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Just absolutely astonishing really. Couldn't happen to a nicer oppressive regime.
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1 hour ago, Fatsam said:
My arm is aching this morning. In a good way.
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4 hours ago, Mr Do 71 said:
Fulham going up in style, by currently thrashing Luton 6-0!
EDIT: 7-0!
I know I said similar a few weeks ago when we secured promotion but football is the absolute best and I am going to be so so very tired at work tomorrow.
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How in the name of hell do I get behind Volcano Manor? There's a little fort looking thing in the North West behind it and I don't seem to be able to access it from Mt Gelmir or through Volcano Manor. Any tips?
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I think this will make a shed load of money and be great.
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2 hours ago, feltmonkey said:
Incidentally, it always makes me a bit sick whenever Marcos Alonso scores. That piece of shit should be in jail.
You heard of this Ronaldo guy playing in the Premier League?
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I think it's really interesting, away from accessibility discussions which I think we already have 35 threads for, to look at the From "fanbase" as if it's still a relatively niche product. From's games are so big now that there's part of the initial crowd of people who found a thing nobody heard about and loved it and now are turned off by quite how popular it is. The games are so successful and so varied that there are a whole load of people that like them for a whole load of different reasons. There are people like me who like them for a mixture of the exploration and the difficulty, I am trying to play the game without using the Spirit Ashes for bosses for example. But I'd never have a go at someone for using them or summoning or doing whatever else because it's all in the game so it's all fair play. And you might be playing just for the architecture, or just for the story; there's no wrong way to play.
I'm sure there are gatekeepers out there but it's so clearly not just a From thing. I think there are gatekeepers over literally everything. There are people who don't like MGS5 because it doesn't have enough story, there are people who don't like DOOM Eternal because it's too complicated and ruins the "flow" of the 2016 game. Hell I'm a Fulham fan and if you look on twitter there are people who hate that we give out cardboard clappers to our fans because it makes "applauding too easy and stops people singing."
But yeah, the games were marketed on how difficult they are for a bit and that's bound to bring a few edge lords in. I think personally rllmuk is generally a really supportive forum in terms of explaining things to people to help get through them. I'm not sure I'd have got through Dark Souls 2 in the heady days of 2015 without help and I've never felt talked down to when asking questions about the games. I've always taken the "git gud" thing to be pretty tongue in cheek rather than an attack on anyone's gaming prowess, for example.
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Have they removed car darts from this!? It was the best mode, what's wrong with them?
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I really really liked it but didn’t love it. Some great action set pieces, Skarsgaard was properly amazing as was Kidman, and the Eggers style worked really well within the Norse setting.
But the central plot was pretty conventional and uninteresting and I kind of felt like I was watching it and thinking “oh that’s cool, this is a cool bit, I wonder how they shot that?” rather than actually being enthralled by the thing.
Beautiful, incredibly well put together and acted, but missing that spark that made The Lighthouse such a special watch.
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It's just a huge shame all of this. It's clear that by the end 343 knew exactly what they wanted from a new Halo but they just didn't really know how to do it in time and on budget. The campaign is fine. Moments of it are a lot better than that and moments of it are a lot worse but as a whole it's such a clear cobble together of everything they've wasted time on over the last however many years that it ends up a mid tier Halo campaign at best. I maintain that there's the blueprint of something truly special in there. Those missions in the middle where you're actually interacting with the open world and it just plonks you in and says "here's 3 cannons, have fun and do what you want" are exactly what I wanted from all of Infinite, but the last few hours just feel like fan mods made in Forge.
And the multiplayer is brilliant! But God knows what they're doing over there that's taking so long. I'm so 100% behind the "we are not crunching our devs" message but you have to have something to add to your 2022 multiplayer shooter. And if none of that's ready to have a steady stream of content coming to keep people invested don't crunch but delay the launch! You're Microsoft! You own spreadsheets! One map every six months simply isn't going to cut it in a 4v4 Arena shooter that launched pretty bare bones anyway.
It makes me sad. I want Halo to be good and Infinite is so close to being really special but it's clear whatever happened behind the scenes has held it back from being that. I hope that in 2 years time they've given us a suite of new multiplayer maps and at least one new single player expansion set in a new biome that has several big open play how you want missions like the cannon one and, crucially, shuts its mouth for more than a minute at a time.
The basics are there. Iterate on them and make something great.
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15 hours ago, layten said:
This is fine.
Ricky Martin of the Kaiser Chiefs!?!?
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https://pitchfork.com/news/the-smile-detail-debut-album-share-new-free-in-the-knowledge-video-watch/
Album coming in less than a month.
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Fulham are up, football’s fantastic and I am going to be very, very tired tomorrow morning.
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I loved Ragnarok and have the utmost faith in this but that was... kinda bad? That central joke did nothing for me and a lot of the CGI looks like it's coming in pretty hot. As I say I think the film will be great because it's Taika and a really talented cast but as a film trailer that kind of stank a bit for me.
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Alright all? I've got a spare afternoon and have been up since 3am flying back from Barcelona. Any tips on a chilled out fun game to play that's on Gamepass. I'll probably drop it after today but just looking for something light that I can while away the afternoon on. I've already played Artful Escape and the space disc flinger that I forget the name of...
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Caine and Rinse is that nerd you get introduced to at the pub because you're also a nerd and they're a friend of a friend. And before you know it they've been talking about Chrono Cross at you for an hour and you're bored off your tits.
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45 minutes ago, Naysonymous said:
In other news Liverpool have just bought Carvalho off of Fulham for £5m. That feels like a piss take of a fee.
That's because it is a piss take of a fee. I'd assume there'd be some deal that we'll definitely get Nico Williams back for a reduced cost once we've secured promotion but Fulham tend to have a bit of a habit of nurturing talent and not being able to actually get any money for them when it comes down to it because they refuse to sign new contracts. I like Carvalho though, he's absolutely torn up the Championship a good few times this season and under Klopp could go onto be something really special. Hopefully he'll be more of a Harvey Elliot than a Patrick Roberts, anyway!
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - May 2022
in Film, TV & Radio
Posted
What you're saying is nonsense because it's two different things in the movie people are complaining about.
The mere presence of a pride badge and a character with two mothers is enough to send the right into a frothing mess. All people are saying on here is that the film's disappointing in its depiction of women. If anything it's worse because even though they're making these big strides towards progressive values up front, in the background they let their female characters down so badly just by doing the same thing Hollywood always does.
Men = Big fighters and clever thinkers.
Women = Sad Mums who just want to be mums.
The two angles aren't remotely mutually exclusive.