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Messages - Professor Bear

#31
General / Re: Dredd's recurring enemies
03 April, 2021, 04:54:20 PM
Crime
Democracy
Aging
Capitalism
Authoritarianism
Anti-authoritarianism
John Wagner lessening his workload
Boots
#32
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
02 April, 2021, 01:09:43 PM
Statistically speaking, there were probably some people who got 110 minutes into Godzilla vs Kong - having just watched a giant monkey fight his way to the Earth's core so he can smash his way into the throne room of the Kong people to claim a magic axe powered by lightning so he can fight an evil robot Godzilla made from the reanimated corpse of a three-headed space dragon - and were thinking "well maybe if I stick with it, it'll change lanes in this last half hour".
#33
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
01 April, 2021, 08:41:57 PM
The Stupid Film Where A Monkey Fights A Lizard And It Cost A Quarter Of A Billion Dollars To Make - I enjoyed it overall, even if it suffers from the excessive runtime that plagues a lot of blockbusters and there's a lot of superfluous scenes that could have been dropped, but having said that, it might have benefited from a few more scenes to flesh out the characters, because even by monster movie standards, these are pretty thin caricatures, and there's a whole bunch of people just milling about and I just have no idea why they're even there.
The makers do, at least, give some thought as to how the monsters move around the screen, because this is the first of these big paggas I've seen where you can actually tell what the kaiju are doing at any given moment, even through all the cgi screen clutter, and there's even some nice touches like when Kong smashes his dislocated shoulder back into place by slamming against a building and you can see loads of people falling to their deaths - or when Kong puts his giant monkey axe - which he retrieved from a giant throne at the Earth's core where it was charged by lightning - in the side of a building for safe keeping and when he pulls it back out, you can see where it's set the building on fire and loads of floors are engulfed in flames and people are dying by the dozens, some even jumping to their deaths in a recreation of footage of the September 11 attacks.  Like I say, it's full of fun little touches.
I liked how Godzilla attacks from the water when he first challenges Kong, and how Kong attacks by jumping off buildings and swinging from things when it turns into a more stand-up fight and you think "ahhh - they are using the advantages offered them by their respective environments and now Kong has the upper hand!" [spoiler]and then Godzilla just gets right up and curb-stomps Kong and makes him his punk monkey bitch so badly that it only stops when Godzilla literally gets bored with it and fucks off home.[/spoiler]  Best bit is when Godzilla is randomly trashing Hong Kong (although it had "Kong" in the name, so maybe he thought this is where he'd be hiding) and realises that Kong is at the center of the Earth fighting giant bats (as one does), so just sits there shooting Godzilla lasers at the ground until he shoots all the way through the Earth to where Kong is, and then Kong looks into the hole on one side, and Godzilla looks into the hole at the other and screams (in Godzilla) "FUCK YOU!" and Kong screams back (in King Kong) "FUCK YOU!" and then he climbs all the way to China and they have a big fight.  Whatever my criticisms of the state of what I will for the sake of argument call modern cinema, I must admit that yes, this is absolutely the kind of thing I want to see and would pay the better part of 20 quid to watch.
I know some people prefer the - ugh - gritty realism of the first Godzilla movie and lament the move towards cg spectacle, but I liked this one, where they go to the Earth's hollow core and fight giant zombie cyborg monsters and do clearly identifiable wrestling moves on each other.  It's a completely, utterly, hopelessly stupid film that probably works better as a critique of capitalism, but Godzilla help me, I did enjoy that.
#34
Film & TV / Re: Kirkmans Invincible on Amazon Prime
01 April, 2021, 02:22:01 PM
I only watched the first one and it seemed pretty rote, but maybe it goes somewhere good in later episodes.  I didn't think it was particularly bad or anything, it just has a lot of high-quality competition atm.

The notion that superheroes have been around for ages and now a generation of kids have grown up accepting them as part of their cultural landscape was a pretty tired setup when the Invincible comics started, being pretty much the default backstory of every single teen superhero comic made by Marvel, DC and Image since the early 1990s - but Invincible is explicitly a story about fascist ubermensch, so the cartoon is arguably now relevant where the comics weren't, now that the MCU has popularised the concept of genetically-perfect body-armored, US military-approved interventionists and the dynasties they build despite existing within democratic entities.
#35
I've been waiting on the CW's Mars Project for five years.  The title is short for Untitled Mars Project because they haven't even given it a name yet, and for two years before that it was just a boardroom brain-fart from execs who saw The Martian had done well and reckoned they should cash-in... "somehow".
So, you know, seven years and counting for a Martian cash-in show that will undoubtedly be long past its window of opportunity to cash in, and no-one in the industry is even batting an eyelid.  Maybe it'll happen one day, maybe it's been cancelled already, but no-one in the know about such things seems bothered by the production cycle.
#36
With my old man memory that extends past 2015, I recall being slightly more burned over the years by productions with a quick turnaround.*  Don't get me wrong, though - if anyone wants to make "they should just make the MC1 show more quickly like they did with Rise Of Skywalker" a thing, I am totally there for it.



*And before any of you bitch-ass mother fuckers bring it up again, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze was the exception.  Just let it go already.
#37
Off Topic / Re: Day of Chaos 2: a.Covid-19 thread.
29 March, 2021, 01:29:31 PM
Quote from: Funt Solo on 29 March, 2021, 01:04:49 AMOf course, if there were no vaccine - and we simply had to rely on our natural immune system, these figures would be far worse. Obviously.

I can't help but feel that it probably says a great deal if the next step down from the government's actual response is "doing literally nothing".

Which, it goes without saying, they also failed at doing the moment they took any action at all, since the concept of "herd immunity" relies on the government doing nothing and letting the virus run its course, so... they even fucked this up by their own bullshit standards of logic.  I am pretty sure this means there isn't any possible timeline where they didn't fuck this.
#38
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
29 March, 2021, 12:52:47 AM
Sweetheart - never heard a thing about this one, and I like me some survival films, I do, and no, I have never watched Castaway starring Tom Hanks, a film which I hear is possibly the finest example of the survival movie genre, because why on Earth would I watch a film that is good and I will enjoy when I can watch Asylum movies featuring Kevin Sorbo?
Anyway, this was good, so of course I watched it by accident.
A young woman is washed up on a small deserted island with her mortally-wounded friend, and things just get worse from there.  Oh boy do they ever get worse from there.  There's a wild animal that attacks at night and before you start groaning about yet another allegorical duel between civilised man and the untamed beasts of the wild, don't worry, the "animal" is actually an evil HP Lovecraft fishman devil beast from a deep dark pit at the bottom of the ocean and he comes at night because he is READY TO FUCK.  Though not literally, I mean it's not a rapey thing, he just wants to tear people to pieces and eat them.
It's not rocket science or anything, it won't change anyone's life, it just gets in and entertains you for 90 minutes and then leaves before it gets weird because it knows the deal and this was never meant to be a long term thing.  You wanna watch a Robinson Crusoe movie where a lady runs around trying to stab a big fish monster with a stick?  Well this is for you.  If you don't want that... well, I wouldn't blame you.  It kind of sounds silly now I type it out.
#39
Games / Re: Last game played...
28 March, 2021, 09:18:42 PM
The Witness, for free as part of Sony's Play At Home thingy, so I didn't know anything about it and figured I'd pick it up as I went.  I still haven't a clue what the story is, but the game is a first person puzzler where you wander around a deserted island looking for join-the-dots puzzles to do.  Tremendously chill, and it's really fun figuring out the various puzzles from clues in the environment.
Classic action platformer Ratchet & Clank, which was also free from Sony, and while I have played this in various forms over the years, I didn't realise this was such a major overhaul of the original game rather than just a HD upgrade.  I never liked the gadget-switching or backtracking to older levels as a game mechanic in this or other games, but this is a serious chunk of entertainment for a freebie, neither too easy nor too hard and will likely keep you occupied for weeks.  The framing story and narrative device - based on the recent movie which was in turn based on the original game - is also impressive.
#40
Off Topic / Re: Day of Chaos 2: a.Covid-19 thread.
28 March, 2021, 09:06:07 PM
Considering the trouble getting the vaccine rolled out atm, I wouldn't have much faith in the establishment of a booster regimen for the entire country (even if you could get everyone to submit to such a thing).  I suspect that older patients will get a jab as usual, but the rest will be left to fight it off and eventually we'll be conditioned to think of the extra thousand deaths a year as the new normal.
#41
Hell Trekkers, even if it is just another riff on Damnation Alley.
#42
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
27 March, 2021, 12:17:12 PM
Maybe I'm getting too old, but I don't know if the Northern Independence Party are a real thing or yet another Reelpolitik podcast meme that's gotten out of hand again.  It's not even April and 2021 is giving me something that I genuinely cannot tell if it's a real political party or a shitpost.
Either way, it's great to see centrists filling their nappies with the old "but they'll split the vote and hand victory to the Tories for a generation!" canard, which as we know from the 2019 election isn't actually a problem for centrists when it's the LibDems doing it.

Quote from: Dandontdare on 27 March, 2021, 02:30:47 AM
I'm getting a little pissed off with labour activists who are outraged at a "Tory takeover" of Liverpool but never got outraged about decades of graft and corruption.

I imagine most were unaware.  I certainly don't recall it being national news, even when the media were publishing absolutely anything they could that painted Labour in a bad light.
#43
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
27 March, 2021, 01:40:50 AM
George Galloway 2.0 is online.

Content Warning for police violence: cops cover their names and badges before laying into protestors yet again.  ACA - and I cannot stress this enough - B.
#44
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
24 March, 2021, 07:22:13 PM
Apparently, Labour are actually more electable than ever now the grown ups are back in charge, and the real problem is people talking the party down and not keeping the faith.  Oh, and don't forget the all-powerful hard left Cultural Marxists who want Labour to lose*.

/clears throat
"NOT A CULT."



* Actually, they probably have a valid point with this one - I know I definately never want bootlickers and right-wing psychopaths to win elections.
#45
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
24 March, 2021, 01:42:58 PM
Utterly, utterly useless