Could be worse, I’ve only seen Transformers: the Movie!
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Hehehe. I still haven’t seen it. It’s got a high rating on IMDB, though whenever I read about it, it’s people who saw it as a kid reporting trauma from it killing off a bunch of major characters.
-Wade
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Wait, I thought the Transformers movies were Michael Bay. Not that I’ve seen any of the Transformers movies or Citizen Kane… and honestly, I’m bad at connecting movies to directors and characters to actors.
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The live-action ones are, but there was an animated one in the late 80s - Orson Welles’ final role was voice-acting the bad guy, a giant planet-eating robot named Unicron.
It did scar me a bit as a kid; I saw it again when I was around 20 and still found it pretty amusing though it really doesn’t hold up!
I rode out two of those before I told my moviegoing friend I refused to go to any more. I think of them as overlong, bloatware megacrap. My friend was more into Transformers as a kid so he has a softer spot for them.
My favourite electronic group Autechre were asked what they thought of the sound design in the latest Transformers film. One of them said, “It sounds like what it looks like. Giant piles of rubbish fighting each other.”
The current Transformers: One animated film also looks bloody awful to me – basically young Transformers are now like the wisecracking animals from every animated Hollywood film from the last fifteen years.
-Wade
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Might also watch Sonic the Hedgehog. Video-game adaptations don’t usually tempt me, but I’ve heard that Dr Robotnik is one of Jim Carrey’s best roles.
I haven’t much liked the clips I’ve seen of the first two films, but I’m interested to find out what they do with the third movie.
Sonic Adventure 2 has always been one of my favourite games and I can’t imagine they’ll stick too closely to the original story. Even if they do, it’s probably impossible to fully recapture the original game’s sense of progression from division to unity.
It sounds stupid but it really is that good. The part where Shadow remembers he was meant to help humanity is the most important part, but I’ll never get tired of Robotnik taking charge and uniting all the characters solely because all of their lives are on the line, leading into the final mission where you play as every character. And I’ll never get tired of the touching non-sequitir water-cooler conversations that the characters have during the credits.
All of that depends somewhat playing a bunch of varied missions that don’t really connect to one another or make much sense at all plotwise. The experience of having it all come together after good but disjointed gameplay is a reward that a movie can’t really provide (unless it goes heavy on theme and structure, which a family movie probably won’t).
I even like the game’s voice acting and weirdly pantomimed motioncap cutscenes. I may be seeing it through rose-colored glasses, but it’s not just nostalgia — even when I go back to it, I still like it. (The way it’s presented, not just the game, I mean.)
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Sonic Adventure 2 is probably my favorite of the 3-D Sonics I’ve played. Granted, I’ve never played Shadow the Hedgehog despite playing a ton of Gamecube, and by the time of the PS360/Wii era, Handhelds had become technically unrestricted enough that I lost interest in playing on hardware that keeps me metaphorically chained to a television and unable to see fine details(and I was recovering from retinal reattachment surgery that ultimately failed when the WiiU launched)… Plus, I loved Shadow before what Heroes and his own game did with his character and I love Chao(To the point I’ve tried making a demake as a text game, though it’s been years since I last worked on it and my code, while having functioning backend code, has borked interface code that makes compilation impossible…)… Though as far as Sonic movies go, I think I’m more interested in revisiting the OVA than I am in Hollywood’s re imagining.
Honestly, my Interest in Transformers peaked with Armada(the one with human-sized Transformers called Minicons the larger Transformers could use as equipable power-ups or weapons, though I did see bits and pieces of 2000’s Robots in Disguise(the one that made Optimus a Fire Truck and Energon(the direct sequel to Armada) and Unicron(the not sequel to Energon that the dub tried to rewrite into a Energon sequel to form the Unicron trilogy). Never saw the Bay Movies, Classic Transformers was before my time, and Beast Wars either aired on a channel I didn’t watch regularly or conflicted with the timeslot for something else, though I’m mildly interested in giving Beast Wars a go since I’m a big Reboot Fan and they are by the same studio.
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I’m kind of surprised there aren’t very many IF virtual pet games.
When they were kids, my younger brother and his friend made a Chao garden in Frontpage, Microsoft’s little-known, defunct-since-2007 web design tool.
Their website wasn’t especially complicated — just MS Paint drawings and no interactivity — but they did post it to our ISP’s free web space so that people could see it. It was cute.
It seems weird to say this about Orson Welles, but I feel like he’s underappreciated. Citizen Kane is great, but his other stuff usually gets ignored. And even Citizen Kane has an “only stuffy film snobs care about this boring old movie” reputation. But it’s not a boring old movie! It’s incredible.
I’d say that Orson Welles wasn’t just ahead of his time, but also our time. The Other Side of the Wind just came out in 2018, and the world still wasn’t ready for that movie.
Anyway, if people want Welles recommendations: Chimes at Midnight, The Magnificent Ambersons, F for Fake, Touch of Evil.
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I’ve only seen History of the World Part 1, lol. I didn’t know Orson Welles was the narrator 'til I saw the credits. XD
Ironically, I’m more familiar with Maurice LaMarche’s parodies of Orson Welles than Orson Welles himself.
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I should really dust off Micro Chao Garden(the title is a play on Tiny Chao Garden, the mini-game version of the Chao Garden that could be downloaded from SA2BGC and SADXGC and included in Advance 1/2 and Pinball Party, figuring if a handheld mini-game version of a console virtual pet is Tiny, a text version is even smaller) and at least get it into a compilable state(protip: if you’re trying to learn a new interface toolkit, don’t ditch existing interface code until you have the new interface working. in the case of MCG, I had a working, but clunky, interface using C++'s standard cout and cin commands for printing to standard output and taking keyboard input and was trying to streamline the interface with ncurses, which went horribly wrong and killed momentum on the project)… Though, if there are existing virtual pet parser games, I’d love to hear about them.
That sounds neat.
We never had a Game Boy Advance but I remember seeing the Tiny Chao Garden online and in magazines.
As for parser games…I actually don’t know of any, but there must be some.
Maybe they’re not so popular because virtual pets are often games that are partially “played” when you’re absent from them. (Looks like SA2 only counted time in the Chao garden, but collecting animals and chaos drives took place outside of the garden.)
@HanonO Can mods split this off into a new thread about virtual pets?
Yeah, 1 chao year is about 3 hours of unpaused in-garden time, and Chao under go evolution into adults at around age 1 and die or reincarnate around age 5(the actual mechanics of chao aging are more complex, but those are the rules of thumb) and there’s only so much to do in the gardens themselves, so I spent many an hour back in the day standing in the water in a Chao garden(to short circuit the Chao’s attention seeking behavior and avoid losing happiness points for ignoring a Chao’s attention seeking) while the television is tuned to something other than the input for the Gamecube because evolving and reincarnating Chao would take forever actively engaging with the little darlings… and the TCG stripped out the age-related mechanics altogether… if memory serves, for MCG I simplified aging down to what’s effectively a turn counter though I’d have to actually review the code, probably cursing pass me for poor commenting in the process, to remember the details.
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I saw a horror film I’ve been aware of for decades but had no opportunity to get at until Tubi. The Wax Mask, 1996/1997 Italian period gothic horror film directed by Sergio Stivaletti, better known for doing the FX for tons of Dario Argento films. Stivaletti stepped in when Lucio Fulci, who was to have directed this, died.
It’s hardly perfect but this is a truly lush production, nothing that anyone would get the money to make in this genre today, let alone fill with adults. The saturated photography, gliding camerawork, authentic locations, costumes and grotesque practical FX are all amazing. Sometimes I’d reel just because the colour palette changed. I think the computer FX have aged well, too, because 90s CGI doesn’t look like an uncanny attempt to replace reality; it just looks like 90s CGI, which doesn’t look like anything else.
The myster-thriller plot connects two murder case streams, one a family massacre committed by an iron-handed man in the past, the other involving people disappearing in and around a Parisian wax museum in the present.
There are many twists, yucky shocks, unbelievable-looking women – not really fairly balanced by the very believable-looking men – and a fine orchestral score. Some shocks are at the expense of sense, which is okay for me in this kind of film. Also, some of the flashbacks and sleuthing are clumsily handled. But if I’d seen this back in the 90s, I’d have been stoked. I’m pretty stoked now.
This is Severin’s recut of the trailer, worth showing over the original because its shows off the quality of production. Contains gore, sex, some grotesquerie and needle attacks:
-Wade
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I went to the opening night of Terrifier 3. I was excited. And the director did not drop the ball from Terrifier 2 at all. There’s nothing else like these films, let alone that makes it to cinemas. A unique combination of supernatural mythology, off-the-charts gore, absurdity, and the perfect and always terrifying performance of the miming villain, Art the Clown.
For part three, they shot on 35mm film. I slightly missed the hyperimminent quality of the HD-looking first two parts, especially on cloesups of the clown, but overall, a move to film brings film’s unifying magic.
A lot of reviews seem to be unable to get past the gore, or the films’ stomach-testing qualities. I think there’s a weird brilliance to all the scenes of Art The Clown imposing himself on slice of life situations, like drinking with a Santa in a bar (this episode is set at xmas) or acting as Santa while the real mall Santa’s out on a break. Some characters immediately perceive him as a weirdo and a threat, others as amusing, and others don’t even notice. This always seems to be the central joke of these films to me, these bizarrely poetic and weird reenactments of daily situations via the imp of the perverse. Part three does these for xmas as well as part two did for Halloween. The demonic figures in these films also make competition like Evil Dead Rise feel pretty limp in comparison.
Trailer contains some gore. Barely any compared to the film.
EDIT - Switched link to the ‘nice’ version of the trailer. i.e. not age-restricted. I watched them back to back and barely noticed.
-Wade
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I kept up my Orson Welles kick and re-watched The Magnificent Ambersons the other day. Truly outstanding movie. It was famously butchered by the studio, and butchered it certainly is. But some bits and pieces got into the final product intact, and they make the movie a masterpiece despite the butchery.
One scene in particular – the cake-eating scene – is one of my favorite scenes in any movie. Such a rare moment to capture: a late-night kitchen raid. It’s down to earth, yet dramatically heightened. The most curiously charged mix of theatrical and realistic acting, with characters speaking over each other, interrupting, and dialogue that’s alternately profound and mundane – and profound for being mundane. Almost five minutes for a single uninterrupted shot! Just sitting there in the kitchen, during a storm, eating a cake. To think this was made in the 1940s! There’s nothing else like it. Nothing that I’ve seen, at least.
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I’m a huge fan of the first Terrifier film. Good lord, that was a dandy of a movie.
The second one was okay. I enjoyed it, but not anywhere close to the original. I have forgotten some of the details, but I thought the girl was criminally underutilized. She looked so creepy, but I wanted to see her showing Art “how it’s done”. 
It could have even gone to a father imparting his wisdom trope, like “No, Sweetpea, the knife goes here, then up to the rib cage.” They could have had some fun times where she makes goofy faces holding a victim’s eyeballs over hers and such, making Art laugh. And then the audience might actually feel invested in the two characters. I just think the movie was too basic. Lots of missed opportunities.
Still, I’ll see the third movie when it comes to DVD for sure. Art the Clown might just be my favourite horror villain ever.
So you saw them in order? I saw Terrifier 2 at the movies when it got the buzz, knowing nothing about it. I was surprised by this 2 hr 20 epic with a bunch of mythology and dream sequences etc. Then I went back and got 1. The clown was already as good as ever, but the film inevitably struck me as much simpler after the epic of 2.
They might have kept the girl out of things to not traumatise the child actor 
I do remember some talk about this aspect of making the film on the T2 commentary I watched. But I probably prefer that she was out of it. I feel like I don’t need two Arts. Her weird caretaker role made her the adult figure in the child’s body, while Art was the immature brat in the adult’s body. I agree, she was definitely mega-creepy.
-Wade
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Yeah. I saw them in order.
When the second one came out, I was so stoked. I just found it a wild departure from the first, is all. I really liked the original’s grittiness. It tried to go supernatural and it just didn’t land for me, but I’m not a big fan of mystical horror. Even Nightmare on Elm Street doesn’t do much for me as a premise, even though some of the movies are well done.
I think I like simpler, seemingly grounded movies though. For example, I absolutely adored the remake of Friday the 13th (2009). What was so special about it for me? The concept of Jason living in a network of tunnels underground all around Crystal Lake. It makes perfect sense as to why he’s able to spring up unexpectedly and disappear with ease. Brilliant! It was a simple, well designed concept from a plot/plausibility standpoint and stepped further away from the “magical” aspect of Jason.
They might have kept the girl out of things to not traumatise the child actor…
I thought about this too, but then why write a child actor’s part into an ultra-gory movie? Seems like it would just compromise scenes with Art, in a way.
Anyway, when I think of Art the Clown, I envision the scene in the diner with the 2 girls. That’s Art… and art. 
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Have you seen any of The Archers films? Powell and Pressburger. I think you may experience similar “This was made in the 1940s?” surprises with their 1940s films. Especially I Know Where I’m Going! The Red Shoes, my favourite of theirs (not that I’ve seen even half, they were prolific) is almost fantastical. Black Narcissus is famous but it landed on me with a thud. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched it pan and scan. But just these three already show great variety of subject matter, the main commonality perhaps being that they looked forward for ways to tell whatever story they were telling, resulting in films that show or develop techniques out of their time.
-Wade
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