Light-Rock

I like how the cars still have high fidelity and aren't completely cell shaded. Paint jobs and different materials are important to car culture. Also new logo, which means this trilogy is complete, with 2015, Payback and Heat. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a fan of cell shading outside of what Ark System works does, but if they manage to write real characters, like they did in Heat, but make it longer and more in depth, maybe I can dig it.

I really loved what they did in Heat, I loved the sister, the brother, the villains were excellent, and I liked how the created character wasn't a mute, but actually reacted to the events. I beat it to completion twice, one with each gender, and I really enjoyed their performance, the animation was excellent all around. But it was short though. Holy moly was I shocked when the credits rolled. This new one can't have that. It's like a scratched disc but it's real, they need to at least attempt to live up to Most Wanted 2005. They just have to. Driving for driving sake isn't enough for me anymore. I need an actual campaign.

I can count the number of books I read in one hand, not proud of it, nor ashamed of it, but yeah, I read The Lightning Thief. I saw the movie first, it was cool, but nothing that made me wanna see it a second time, yet I found enough interesting stuff in it that when I saw the book at a book store and the back of it said it was a best seller, I just bough it. It was a great read, first time I had first hand experience reading something that was made into a movie, I'll always remember how interesting it was seeing what was maybe just a shot or a short moment in the film being described in detail in written form, and reading the main character's inner dialogue made me appreciate the movie a little more when I eventually saw it one more time.

Years later I listened to the Harry Potter books, narrated by Stephen Fry, and it was something else entirely. I liked the movies fine, even seeing a couple of the latter ones in the cinema, the third one being the first of the series I even saw and the one I've seen the most since. After "reading" the books I went from someone who rather liked the movies to someone who was a big fan of the books and extra critical of the movies. I guess you could say I'm something of a snob as far as HP goes.

The first time I read the "books" first was with Scott Pilgrim. I begged my mom to buy me the first volume when we were at the book store, I remember flipping though some pages and I though it was really mature. Lol And it was, it's just kinda funny to think that that was the reason I gravitated towards it. It was black and white too, but that didn't bother me as I had read some manga before. The Scott Pilgrim volumes were a real success in my home, my sister loved it, and even my dad read the whole thing, all 6 of them. I didn't even know there was a movie, the same day we found out about it I wen't out and rented it (rentals were still a thing) and me and my sister ate that movie up. It was so fun. We weren't sure if they were gonna adapt a single volume or the whole thing, and yeah, they did the whole thing, which we weren't too terribly upset by, since what they did keep was totally on point.

I ended up writing a lot.

I'm so thankful to dad for introducing me to Wallace and Gromit. He rented a videotape of A Grand Day Out, which being a short, we managed to watch it quite a few times over a weekend. These weren't exactly mainstream, and before we had internet, finding a new short of theirs was really rewarding. The next one we saw was The Wrong Trousers, mild nightmare fuel from that mouthless penguin. I have a vague memory of having watched A Close Shave around that time, it must have been on tv, which would explain that one not being as nostalgic to me.

Me, dad and my sister are still fans of claymation to his day, we loved Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and more recently me and my sister lost our collective shit when we stumbled upon A Matter of Loaf and Death on a DVD session in 2014. My ranking goes like this:

#1 A Matter of Loaf and Death

#2 The Wrong Trousers

#3 A Grand Day Out

#4 The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

#5 A Close Shave

I think the The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is much better when it's doing the surprisingly straight, mostly serious horror in the first half. I'm always deflated after we see Wallace transform into the dopey looking beast, and I'm never usually excited by lengthy action scenes in animation, or some live action flicks were it's all very noticeably animated, which is why I'm usually checked out for a good portion of the finale.

But again, the mystery, the slow turning on the heat in the first half is really golden, and I wish it had carried out to the end. It probably would have been better as a short, like the others. My favorite, A Matter of Loaf and Death is only 30 minutes long, but I get loads more out of it than the feature-length entry. Like Jay & Bob, I think these two work a lot better in brief spurts.

Just saw it today. My god, people are calling this one a goof, a joke of a movie. Not me though. I thought this was much better than Ragnarok, for instance, I though the jokes in that really overdid it, whereas here, not so. Here the jokes are not only funnier, but they actually land, and they're serving a purpose. You know, one of the main character is dying of cancer, and the other one has a near crippling depression. The humor is needed here, and it didn't cast a shadow over the drama like in other MCU movies. It's reined in. Taika, you're right up there with James Gunn now, and honestly, this is better than either Guardians movie. Not dissing them. Saying something is better than something else doesn't make that other thing bad. Mc Donald's vanilla ice cream is what I get every time, but I don't reject the chocolate flavor, if it's all they have.

I mean, with this and Pinocchio, I just can't agree with the reception, even from sectors I'm usually attuned with. Yeah, I liked Pinocchio, and I loved this movie. I also liked Multiverse of Madness, but mostly it's style and ideas, not so much the execution, and that screenplay needed at least two more passes, mostly second act stuff, the beginning and ending being damn excellent. I mean, even if they fail a lot, Marvel Studios, and they most certainly are failing a lot these days, I honestly don't think this is one of those mistakes. This is golden.

This movie is epic as hell. I rented it a few times growing up, which if you are old enough to have done that, you know that's high praise, picking the same movie again and again instead of something new. Bizarrely enough, despite it being very explicitly a musical, that's not at all what I remembered about it, and I was kind of shocked re watching as a grown up realizing there could be such a huge gap in my own memory.

Again, I saw it many, many times as a kid, but the thing that kept bringing me back was the adventure, the spookiness of how they portrayed humans being like aliens to the penguins, how a cargo ship was like a spaceship, and how we only got a good look at one of them very near the end, that girl behind the glass, who had a bit of a forehead, and with the lighting, and the way her hair was done, looked a little otherworldly to me. That stuff and the feeling I got when I first saw it really left a lasting impression on me.

This movie is great, grand, and even after seeing it with new eyes and new appreciation as an adult, I still thought the sequel, Happy Feet Two looked dumb, and I didn't see it for years and years. Turns out, Happy Feet 2 (2011) is just as good, in places even better than the first. Who would have thought? It goes harder in the existential contemplations through the krill characters, has a more direct and somewhat overt environmental message and the overall themes are more stated. The line “Sometimes you've got to back up to go forward.” is when the subtext really becomes text in a not so subtle, not so gracious fashion, one of my few issues with it, the other being it's length. I love most everything that's in it, but it could do with some trimming.

Thank god for George Miller. These two movies are so much like Mad Max. I re watched Happy Feet after being amazed by Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, I wanted to see what else that director had done. I mean, I haven't seen Babe: Pig in the City yet, but who knows, it might be amazing too. I'm sure he put a lot of what he had learned with animation to good use in Fury Road, and I can hear a lot of that biblical, Mad Max style of dialogue in Happy Feet. George is a wordsmith with a versatile, but nonetheless particular voice.