Landon

Expendables 2 The action is better than the first. Jean Claude Van Damme makes for a cool villain. We get more Arnold and Bruce. There's one scene in particular that feels like biting criticism of the state of action movies. Overall I liked it a good deal more than the first one. At the same time it's a bit too tongue in cheek and self-aware for its own good. And Chuck Norris? Internet kiddies are gonna love his bit, but I really wish they didn't go where they went with his character.

New CBUB is cool in that people get to make their own matches. It isn't just one fight a week, with everything else relegated to message board conversations. What the old CBUB had going for it was the commentary written for each fight. It was fun and didn't take itself too seriously all while still being relatively true to the characters. The new CBUB seems to be more about the actual "debate" over who can win, rather than the fun of seeing characters duke it out. There was plenty of discussion on the forums, but the heart of it came down to the actual fight write-up rather than the debate. I've also seen far too many new CBUB fights not give a damn about the actual characters. Conditions will be added to give or take away powers, or to make characters more willing to fight to the death. That sort of thing isn't being true to the characters and, quite frankly, sucks. The official oldschool CBUB fights never did that sort of thing. So yeah, it's cool that the new CBUB is user-friendly and lets people do what they want, but I prefer the oldschool set-up.

Rather: Commas, they lead to overpopulation.

Picked up Persona 4 Arena today. Solid fighting game along the lines of Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. Bit too spazzy for my tastes (I prefer slower stuff like Street Fighter and King of Fighters over Marvel vs Capcom and the like), but decent fun.

The only good Gundam is G Gundam. Everything else sucks.

50 Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfic. The author rewrote it to get rid of those references.

Looked into this thing. It's a fan-made project. Has nothing to do with the actual Cartoon Network reboot. So basically some people are tossing together a bunch of their favorite shows, streaming them, and tacking on the toonami name.

Much like Inception's "Is it still a dream or not" ending, I don't think it matters whether Wayne survived or not. Either way, he'll never be Batman again in this version of the story, and either way he'll be remembered as a hero. It's the effect of his actions on Gotham City that matters the most, and Wayne's survival is irrelevant to that. That said, I don't trust Alfred's perspective on the matter. That's what he's always wanted to see. But yeah, it doesn't matter either way.

I would give my opinion of the movie, but since people automatically take the opposing opinion I wouldn't want to magically make y'all hate The Dark Knight Rises.

Video games ARE an art form. Anything that requires some kind of creative input in order to communicate some sort of message/theme/story/whatever is an art form. Anyone claiming otherwise is saying more about their biases than anything else. The better question to ask is "What games will be remembered 50/100/etc years from now, if any?"

Punisher War Zone is hilariously over the top. The bit where those parkour wannabes are running from roof to roof, trying to be all cool and shit, only to have one of them get blown to bits by a rocket launcher is perfect as far as comedic timing goes. It seems to be reveling in its excess most of the time, while not becoming offensively stupid like most Michael Bay stuff, and I love that sort of stuff.

Generic plot, yes, but the visuals are amazing. I love Tarsem Singh's stuff. The Cell and The Fall are also on my list.

Idiocracy has some neat ideas, but it isn't a particularly good movie. Once the premise is set up and we see how dumb the future becomes, the movie doesn't really go anywhere interesting. And yeah, Immortals is awesome.

http://mecha-guignol.com/top-movies-of-all-time/ Been putting together Top 10 Movie lists for every year where I've seen enough movies to make such a list. I posted everything from 1990 up to 2011. I'll post more once I get those lists done.

Durarara goes nowhere. It's 26 episodes of build-up with no pay-off. Polar Bear Cafe isn't over. It's gonna be at least 26 episodes long, possibly longer.

Deadman Wonderland: Where the main girl was a murderous Japanese high school version of Forrest Gump. Barf.

You don't notice things like plot, writing, acting, and all the other things that actually make up a movie? Yeah, the average movie-goer doesn't notice those things either.

Amazing Spiderman was godawful. The relationship drama was painful. The action was mediocre at best. The coincidences that allow things to happen are laughable. The way the entire movie hinges on Parker losing one father figure after another (four hit combo there) almost becomes a parody of itself. It was humorless outside of the attempts at witty quips Parker spouts while out fighting car thieves, and those quips weren't the least bit funny. The scenes at school with Flash Thompson played out like a bad re-enactment of Teen Wolf. The Lizard was an afterthought at best, as if they felt they had to shoehorn in a villain for Spidey to fight between scenes of him awkwardly, painfully courting Gwen Stacey. Yeah, I have nothing nice to say about the movie.

Been reading the Adventure Time comic. It isn't as great as the TV show, but it's a lot of fun. What makes it worthwhile are all of the little asides at the bottom of the pages where the characters comment and critique what's going on in the main story. It's also the first comic I've actually kept up with issue-to-issue since the 90s.

Prometheus looked good. That's the only nice thing I can say about it.

Didn't bother with Brotherhood since I didn't care for the original series. Everyone says it follows the manga more closely, and most people love it more than the original because of that. That's a sign for me to stay away.

Your anime fan doesn't have "odd" tastes, Marvel. Sounds like she's very much into the stuff the mainstream kids like. Saying an anime fan has watched Blood+, Fullmetal Alchemist, and D-Gray Man is like saying a comic fan is reading Walking Dead, some X-Men related thing, and some Justice League related thing. I wouldn't recommend any of those series, although plenty of people rave about Alchemist. It annoyed me big time, but I'm in the minority there. Mushishi is one of those series that a lot of fans play up as being all deep and meaningful. I never got around to it but lots of people seem to like it. Then again, these are the same people who like Fullmetal Alchemist.

Audiences aren't stupid. They don't need to see a character become who they are so long as said character does interesting things after the point we're introduced to them. While Uncle Ben's death is important to Spiderman's motivations, do we really need to see him get bitten by a spider and spend 30 minutes learning how to use his powers in order to "understand" that he's a dude with powers akin to a spider? Can't we learn that through paying attention to what he does? You could easily do a Spiderman movie where he's already been at it for awhile and we see one particularly eventful encounter with a villain, and in order to reflect on his motivations you could have Peter talk to someone about his uncle or something like that. You get the same information, and it has the same impact, but you don't waste the audience's time retelling the same Super Hero Origin Story you've seen in every other "origin" movie. The HOW isn't important, it's the WHY, and we don't need to have an entire movie dedicated to WHY before we get to the genuinely interesting stuff.

Origin stories are the worst kind of "character development." I don't want to see what made you into a hero, I want to see how you deal with actually BEING a hero. Characters can change after their first two days of wearing spandex. Stop showing those same two days over and over again for different characters. DO something with them.

That DC fighting game pissed me off. I'd love a straight-up DC beat-em-up. No vs Mortal Kombat. None of this Marvel vs DC stuff that fans dream about. Just DC heroes and villains duking it out Street Fighter style. Then they do this. They give us DC characters, but they gussy them up all Mortal Kombat style with power armor and spikes and gritty shit like that. It looks godawful. No amount of decent gameplay would make me want to play this.