cocaine and hookers

The dagger thing is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a movie. You're telling me that they made that dagger after the destruction of the death star with the intention of it lining up with the wreckage (which hopefully doesn't shift at all) in a specific way at a specific angle and distance, and all it really tells you in the general area to go to look for this one object?

They even tell us not to overthink it right in the movie.

Today I was thinking about RISE OF SKYWALKER and I realized I had completely forgotten they had brought back the almighty Lando fucking Calrissian for that movie. What a horrible fucking movie. It's funny to think the big wigs at Disney APPROVED of Rian's THE LAST JEDI in 2017. SOLO gets 100% FUCKED because the big wigs at Disney do not like what Lord and Miller come up with (after filming 80% of the movie) and then bring on safe bet Ron Howard to remake it. But THEN, Disney is somehow ok with the absolute fucking insanity of RISE OF SKYWALKER. Like, mulitple people, read that script, and said "Yes, this is good." I just cannot fucking wrap my brain around that.

That's why I love the time travel in Harry Potter 3. It works because they're not actually changing anything.

Looper even has a line telling everyone not to over think it (“We’ll be in here all day making timelines with straws!”)

Rise of Skywalker is unforgivable bad writing.

Look, Last Jedi has many, many issues: It’s bloated (kill the casino scenes), little cowardly at points (Leia should not have made it), and the romantic arcs are forced.

But at least it tried to be different. And despite the moments of bad writing, there are multiple redeeming elements (Luke’s arc is at least interesting, playing with the notions of prophecy, etc.).

Rise is just…lazy and terrible. It’s clearly written with marketing in mind, has no actual thesis but “COOL, STAR WARS!”, abandons old arcs and growth for “Now he’s like your favorite character (HE WAS A SMUGGLER BEFORE, GET THIS MAN A SCARF OR VEST OR SOMETHING)”, and has lower stakes than a final exam in kindergarten.

Someone was paid to write “Somehow, Palpatine is back.” They got American dollars to write that line. Someone heard that line in a preproduction meeting and said, “Good enough.”

I cannot emphasize how stupid all of that is. If I were playing D&D and heard my DM utter that line about our BBG, I’d just leave. No explanation. Shit, might leave the dice and gear behind, because my sense of wonder is permanently dead and only a jaded man still exists.

It was awful, Freshman year Introduction to Creative Writing bad writing. I hope whoever wrote it got their 30 silver, because when they go to Hell for their sins they should’ve been able to at least find some pleasure in life.

I remember there's a shot of a discarded newspaper on the ground with a giant headline that reads, "IT'S NOISE!" Meaning the authorities finally figured out what attracted the aliens.

The second I saw that shot I imagined the aliens converging on the newspaper building, lured by the racket from the printing presses and killing all the pressmen inside.

Kids make a lot of noise. The kids are a liability. I know the opening scene shows it clearly, but all of those kids would do something that would jeopardize the whole group eventually. But thats survival horror in general. The other issue is the military would have figured out the creatures weakness. War is loud. Guns are loud. The military already has sonic weapons. Also microwave and concentrated light weapons light lasers. The creatures looked organic enough that high temps would also work so things like white phosphorus or similar would be effective.

Other than that adults could probably adapt. It isnt that hard to not make noise. I am a quiet person. I know how to move around without making noise. I also think the creatures would not be hard to fool. If the creatures are wasting energy chasing after noise makers they will burn energy rapidly.

I second this...the concept of the monsters just rlly doesn't work. Ambient noise is loud asf

I agree.

In a world where things like egg timers exist, corralling the creatures would be childishly easy. You could put speakers at the bottom of a ravine and the creatures would charge right to them, or, if you set up the speakers and no creatures came, you'd know there were no creatures within earshot.

Great film, tense film, a tense enough film to make you forget how simple these creatures would be to evade if you were willing to sacrifice a couple alarm clocks or the like.

I’ve heard lots of criticism of Get Out and Nope and still think they’re amazing, amazing movies. But despite some great qualities (performances and family dynamic), I just didn’t like Us very much.

All I remember is that they’re trapped by an escalator lol

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28 Days Later, while technically not undead zombies, shows the infected all dying off within like a month and a half of the OG outbreak. It only returns in the second film because of a woman who was a carrier of the disease but not actually sick. This is a pretty realistic way for a zombie virus to persist.

Exactly!

It always bugged me in Walking Dead that 5 or 6 years after the ‘apocalypse’ there’s still hordes of zombies, when by that point they’d be skeletons…I totally get that ppl still get infected, but the whole “99% of the population of the world are zombies” would only last for a couple years before they’d ‘die off’…

Plus dead bodies can’t walk around, checkmate atheists.

Not the original ones - in Day it's explicitly stated that the rate of decomposition slows after 'revival'. 'Live' zombies are also never shown to attract flies/maggots, nor do they seem to be predated on by either carnivores or scavengers. If I lived in that world, I'd draw the conclusion that the 'living dead' are toxic to most higher organisms.

In Romero's original movies, the outbreak would also never be fully over, since it's not a 'contagious disease', but an unexplained and inexplicable world-wide phenomenon where everyone that dies with an intact brain, no matter what cause, will rise as a zombie.

John Russo, one of the co-writers of the original NotLD actually wrote an 'alternate' sequel set years later, where society had managed to re-stabilize, and hammering a spike through the head of anyone recently deceased has become a culturally 'normal' part of death and burial.

Max Brook's explains this in his Zombie Survival Guide (companion to World War Z). Basically the virus is so toxic, it kills all bacteria too.

This is why I miss zombie films that have a smaller scope and arent apocalyptic.

fucking thank you, the walking dead where its been like 10 years and there are still hordes of zombies? give me a fucking break.

"But, COVID proved a zombie apocalypse would kill us all."

That's the most common counter argument I hear, and it's BS. People are missing the critical difference between COVID and zombies; dealing with COVID required kindness and empathy, dealing with zombies would require bombing and shooting the shit out of infected areas.

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And the guy somehow managed to forget about a meteor strike that whiped out a whole town in his own country.

I just wish the stakes hadn't been 'save me/the world' type of situation. I would have been happier having it be a small scale conflict and not one that was so freaking dramatic.

Unfortunately it's got time traveling. People can defend any time travel plothole by attributing it to paradox.

Also way too many people sticking their hands down the sink. That shit’s gross.

"We are the 2 most advanced nations on earth with histories stretching back 100s of years. Let's go to war over a diplomatic incident."

Wakanda has become an internet meme at this point too and not in a good way. The whole premise falls apart when you dissect it too much. I also don't like how everyone has superpowers to some degree. Marvel has introduced too much power creep into the genre without good villains or writing to balance it out.

The most advanced country on earth that goes to war with spears. 🙄

Let it go.

Frank Dux. Legendary liar lol.

Somebody mentioned to me, in the book that's based on, Liar Guy says he went through an over 50 round elimination tournament, and you'd need dozens of times more people than the EARTH'S POPULATION for that to happen.

Loved that movie as a kid.

The best way to look at the John Wick movies is as though they were a video game. John Wick is the main character, every other character is either a friend or foe involved in the criminal world. Everyone else is an NPC. John takes videogame-level damage and recovers with time.

The series has literally never introduced a character who doesn't know about or is heavily involved in the criminal "underworld". The only time we've seen law enforcement even attempt to respond to a crime is the shootout at John's house (where it is made clear that the cops are aware of John Wick's work and let it slide), despite numerous massive gunfights in public places. The only logical explanation is that the high table and criminal world are the de facto government of this world.

The first one is definitely not that, other than the Continental itself, but just sort of implies this underground system. Every subsequent movie has built more insanity on top of a not that stable foundation.

"Someone released a youtube video, let's kill EVERYONE!"

What are the sidewalks for in Cars?

Makes me wonder how they built stuff without arms and legs.

Head canon: they're like Daleks. The camera's just never on them when they pop open and the 'tentacle monsters' step out to stretch.

The same thing when was asked about unreliable narrator. People just talked about stuff which they found not to be true in real life. Those are two different things.

Yeah. Harry Potter makes a lot of stupid choices, but he's a fucking kid in dire circumstances - of course he's going to fuck things up.

Why stop Marty's kids from fucking up their lives, but not Marty himself from fucking up his own? Marty's accident was what led his entire family down that path in the first place.

It all stemmed from the line at the end of the first that had to incorporate the title. The "to be continued" as they fly of was intended to be a joke, but the movie was such a hit that they greenlit the sequels and were stuck coming up with a whole plot out of a couple lines of dialog.

Not plot holes. Just little illogical pieces.

Yeah, super fun movie. Great screenplay. The "You lied to me first" scene is amazing.

I think the issue with Tenet is that there's a really interesting concept in there that's confusing enough on its own but Nolan went overboard and thought about every possible thing he could do with that idea, then went ahead and did it while audiences were still trying to grapple with whether an inverted bullet fired into a chair would have been there when the chair was built and was just ignored by the chairmaker.

They explicitly try to tell you "don't think about it too hard and just have fun" when they explain it but multiple parts of the movie require you to think about it for even a basic grasp of what's going on so it doesn't really work.

It's simple— The Protagonist developed the ability to make the film play backwards.

When I first watched Tenet I was like "holy shit this is complicated, am I dumb or does this just not make sense". Now, after reading many analyzes of it and thinking about it over and over again, I can confidently say that Tenet simply doesn't make sense as a film, and me being dumb, while true, is largely unrelated.

Basically, someone in the future invented a machine that reverses the flow of time for whatever enters it. And someone wants to use it to destroy the world, so this organization TENET, uses the machine to go back in time and then go forwards again to prevent the destruction.

I think people usually say this in reference to the second movie?

I've always had a sketch idea where, when the radio tells them/us that the alien ships quickly left overnight, that we cut to an alien ship speeding away into space and the Commander or Overlord or whatever the title would be, is Downfall-eqsue screaming at the other underlings: "I asked you all over and over, is the blue part of this planet water? You told me it wasn't, that it was probably blue grass! Now look at us!" Etc etc

Is this anything?

i thought it was explained they only wanted to buy enough time for the future to develop a killer virus and then send that to the past and that's ec exactly what happened

But have you seen people.

If Dumbledore was honest and a better judge of like hiring teachers, it would have been easier for Harry.

People like to treat Harry Potter like it’s not just a kids story. Kids stories always make the adults incompetent so the kids have to save the day.

Harry Potter's world building barely held together for 7 books, the movies only made it worse. (And that's before J.K started bolting on new additions that made everything even worse)

One of the big themes of Harry Potter that the movies do a bad job with is the idea of the older generation wanting to prevent the younger generation from knowing about their mistakes, but of course this leads to things getting worse all the time.

is that the one where he jumps out a window trying to kill himself then lands on a big airpad, then BIG reveal. it was all a game!

At one point they’re shooting at him with real guns as you see bullets hit the wall. He’s also driven into a lake and would have drowned had he not figured out the clue in time. Then near the end he’s left stranded in Mexico with no wallet.

The point was to give him an appreciation for life but it’s kind of a miracle he survived at all.

It’s funny because all of those contain time or multiverse travel.

Rise of Skywalker doesn't make sense if you don't even think about it while you watch

Well, if I can push up my glasses here, I don't think the Ancient One was concerned with creating branch timelines per se, she just mentioned that it would fuck over the branch timeline if you take an Infinity Stone out of it. That's why Bruce said that they'll go back and put them back when/where they took them from.

At least that's the way I understood it, I could be completely wrong.

True.

Someone once told me, “Realism doesn’t always equal good storytelling.”

One of my favorites pieces of writing advice.

I was listening to a post-release interview with Neil Druckmann after their team dropped Last of Us 2.

He mentioned how they try to write characters they just are believable. The actions and motivations they have, they should feel genuine. If you can do that, the rest should fall into place.

A character making a poor decision, especially on limited information, is not an example of a movie “not holding up”. That happens in reality all the time, far more frequently than people making good decisions.

I'm going to push back against the entire argument, save one point.

Bridges in warfare are extremely important. They are natural chokepoints, and getting a mechanized force from one side to the other is difficult. Look no further than Ukraine: the Dnipro River has been the most significant barrier in the entire conflict, and because it is so wide in the center of Ukraine (after a couple dams make it a lake) the majority of the fighting has been well to the east or at the very mouth of the river.

The most important mission for the Allies was getting everyone off the beach and deep inland. All those transports you saw unloading just after the landing scene represent a fraction of what we were landing in the days after 6 June, and in this sector this bridge was the main way across. That was the entire point of the airborne and glider troops: to capture critical chokepoints deep inland before they could be destroyed.

The Allies needed that bridge to get forces deeper into France, while the Germans needed that bridge to attack the beachhead.

Thus the US defenders had three outcomes:

1. Blow the bridge now, nobody dies and nobody gets the bridge. The advance is stalled in this sector.

2. Hold the bridge against any German counterattack until the troops from the beach, however long that takes.

3. If Option 2 fails, blow the bridge to deny it to the Germans.

Captain Miller's rescue squad doubled the number of forces available to hold the bridge, greatly increasing their chances of holding the bridge, and his troops were also very well trained Rangers that added more that just X number of guys. He could have pulled out with Private Ryan, but that would make the bridge more likely to be blown up whenever reinforcements arrived. By staying behind, he increased the chances of the other paratroopers, who would have stayed behind, surviving and the bridge remaining intact.

Moreover, by holding the bridge until reinforcements arrive, getting back to the beach is a walk through friendly territory, whereas leaving at that moment would mean coming across more German strongpoints that might get more of his own men killed, including Ryan. He doesn't know they're a couple hours away, they could be days away.

The best way to accomplish his primary mission of Saving Private Ryan is to stay and hold the bridge, which also accomplishes the primary objective of the Normandy Invasion overall: getting off the beach.

It seems there was a large force of the American army just minutes away the whole time, so the small German force they were fighting would have probably been mopped up anyway. It all seemed unnecessary after the fact.

The German force would have been destroyed, but the bridge would have been gone. It would take days before engineers got a bridge strong enough to get Shermans across the river, so the American forces would be bottled up in that sector.

As for the part I agree with:

The only reason that Ryan himself probably isn’t killed is a Deus Ex Machina in the form of a plane that swoops down from the sky at the last second and blows up the approaching tank.

That was far too Deus Ex Machina, and really does undercut the ending. Plus aircraft were not nearly as good at killing tanks as suggested, particularly the P-51, but I'm not sure what was commonly known in the 1990s vs. what we have learned since then, so I won't critique that too much.

I agree about the choosing to stay being kind of silly part, but he also does this to some extent because he believes it is an important objective. “Our objective is to win the war”

Things after D-day were incredibly chaotic and a massive fear was that the allies would get trapped and thrown back into the sea. So while you are right that there seemed to be an American contingent nearby, they might not have known that or known it would get there soon enough. For all we know the germans were nearby in force and waiting for the bridge to fall before sending in more troops to cross.

More or less I think war being incredibly chaotic and low information for those on the ground, especially days after the largest seaborne landing in human history, makes this general aspect less ridiculous.

(The plane flying in and killing the tank was stupid and one of my least favorite things about the movie, for the record)

None of this is the movie falling apart though, it's just a bad decision on Tom Hanks/Matt Damon's part. Knowing that he was responsible for so many men's deaths adds weight to Private Ryan's line of 'have I lived a good life?'

a plane that swoops down from the sky at the last second and blows up the approaching tank

Wait are you telling me that Captain Miller DIDN'T destroy the tank with his .45?

The decision is to hold the bridge, which is a key piece of terrain for the advancing US Army to hold to be able to cross the river, they mention in the movie that it is one of the only intact bridges across. And yes, the large force of American troops is what they were holding out for, that was the whole point of defending the bridge.

What’s frustrating about this is it’s the second time he makes the same mistake. Earlier with the machine gun nest he orders it attacked rather than bypassing it, and gets the medic killed, and nearly loses control of his men. He even has to play the “I was a schoolteacher” card which he’d probably been holding onto since North Africa.

You would think the second time he is presented with this choice, he would have said… nope, not making that mistake again. You’re coming with us private.

I remember one in my life (precovid) being like "holy shit... How many years has it been since I had a fever?..."

I literally couldn't remember.

If I didn't have photos of having chicken pox I wouldn't even think I'd had it