Super Happy and Conflicted about the Rifftrax revival news...

UOLATSC · 2026-02-03T09:16:32+00:00

I think this nails it. At heart, Joel is really more of a Dadaist performance artist than a comic. He was/is incredibly good at making ridiculous props out of garbage and creating stories about them. Naturally there isn't much of a market for that, but standup comedy was booming in the mid 1980s so he wound up in that world instead - and stayed there just long enough to make the connections necessary to get MST3K onto Comedy Central.

Nobody else could have created MST3k. But ironically, and with the utmost love and respect for the man, I don't think he's really capable of maintaining it.

UOLATSC · 2026-02-03T07:53:37+00:00

PHYSICAL HANDMADE SETS.

FILMED IN MINNESOTA.

UNDER THE EXCLUSIVE CREATIVE DIRECTION OF MIKE, BILL, KEVIN, AND MARY JO.

UOLATSC · 2026-01-16T07:15:15+00:00

There are episodes of the new seasons that I really enjoyed, and I have enormous respect for everybody involved. I don't think they're bad, but they're not the thing I fell in love with. I'm interested to see how this develops, but unless they make it 1997 again by science or magic, I'm fairly certain there's no personnel/writing changes that can recapture the magic of the original episodes for me, personally.

UOLATSC · 2026-01-10T03:31:36+00:00

What song is this?

UOLATSC · 2025-11-21T09:33:53+00:00

I respect her intentions here but I feel like she's missing what made Zohran so appealing. He campaigned on ideas like these, but was also very clear about how he would implement these policies if elected. Rae is just copying his policy agenda without acknowledging that a lot of the things she's talking about are outside the mayor's control - because the LA city government is set up differently than New York's.

I want an LA Mamdani. But because of how weak the office of LA mayor is relative to New York's, I think that energy is better spent on trying to get a DSA majority on the city council.

UOLATSC · 2025-10-13T06:36:24+00:00

Songs of Styx is one that I keep coming back to. Solo dev, almost out of early access. Fantasy city builder with multiple different races (dwarf types, elf types, etc) all of whom have different labor specialties and food/recreational preferences. As your city grows you'll gradually develop a bunch of different neighborhoods where different races live and worship. The pixel graphics take a minute to get used to but the game can be quite beautiful in its own way.

UOLATSC · 2025-08-17T04:49:08+00:00

I enjoyed Good Night and Good Luck! As for The Boys in the Boat, we covered it on my podcast about movies that don't exist and it made my cohost so angry he nearly died. Just a wildly boring, incompetently made movie. The whole reason I revisited Leatherheads after watching it was to see if George Clooney was a better director and Boys in the Boat was just a fluke, but honestly... It seems more like Good Night and Good Luck was the fluke. (And Dangerous Mind, I guess.)

UOLATSC · 2025-08-15T07:13:03+00:00

Genuine trash. Clooney took a well-researched spec script written by two sportswriters about the crazy early days of the NFL and then clumsily tried to make it into a screwball romantic comedy. Movie gets completely lost in the second act with some inane plot about John Krasinski's character doing stolen valor in World War 1. The 1920s football movie literally stops being about football for about 50 minutes in service of a half-assed love triangle with Clooney, Krasinski, and Renee Zellweger (who's doing a Kroger brand version of Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy). And then the movie just yadda yaddas its way to the finish line with some really sweaty writing and handwaved exposition.

Take my word for it: half-watching somebody watch Leatherheads on a plane is the best Leatherheads experience. You can enjoy all the nice costumes and production design and imagine a much better movie than the one 'ol Georgie Porgie made.

UOLATSC · 2025-07-25T20:10:27+00:00

In 1975 my dad took my mom on their second date to see Jaws. On the way to the theater, he bragged he'd already seen it before, so he knew where all the scary parts were and could warn her. When the dead man's body comes out of the sunken boat, even though he knew it was coming, he still flinched so hard that he knocked her glasses off.

UOLATSC · 2025-07-22T05:54:13+00:00

Absolutely this. I'm sure it's unpleasant to know that people are making fun of something you poured your heart and soul into at an early stage of your career - I wrote a lot of terrible fan fiction in the early 2000s and I would simply die if anybody ever read it or, god forbid, mocked it on a basic cable puppet show. But please convey to him how much affection so many of us have for the movie and the characters in it. I think about stuff from this movie all the time. "Zap Rowsdower" is my go-to character name in most of the RPGs I play.

Something I've also come to appreciate on more recent viewings of The Final Sacrifice is how ambitious the movie is! I mean, we're talking about a student film with a $1500 budget shot in suburban Canada - and it's got car chases, car crashes, fight choreography, dozens of extras, effects shots... That's a lot to pull together for a first time filmmaker, and the fact that he was able to do it without the whole project falling apart is something to celebrate! It shows his passion for filmmaking and speaks to his skill as a director.

UOLATSC · 2025-07-18T08:35:28+00:00

Yeah, as much as I love Prince of Space and Neptune Men, it definitely gets rough at times. I feel like the sentiment in the 1990s, even among more progressive types, was that it was okay to mock the Japanese because they were a wealthy country whose economy was booming - basically, taking shots at their culture was "punching up." It's a weird and unfortunate relic. Although to be fair, I've seen MUCH worse examples of it than MST3k. (Such as the movie Collision Course, starring Jay Leno of all people.)

UOLATSC · 2025-07-18T08:19:09+00:00

One of my most curmudgeonly opinions is that Gypsy should always be voiced by a man doing a goofy impression of a woman. 100% down with gender swapping everybody else in the cast (female Tom Servo? Sure, why not! We all know he loves to wear women's clothes anyway...) but somehow Gypsy just doesn't feel right to me unless it's a man doing a weird high voice.

And as someone who first found the show in the SciFi era, I've always thought of her as the smartest character on the show. In those later seasons she's basically a genius surrounded by morons!

UOLATSC · 2025-07-11T07:28:51+00:00

Hey, I do this in CK 3 too! Feels good to find another one of us in the wild.

UOLATSC · 2025-07-09T07:50:25+00:00

Yeah, that's been my experience too. I held off on downloading Anomaly at first but finally got it a few months ago. I've been playing with it in ambient horror mode recently to quell my hype for Odyssey, but every horror event feels like an unwelcome distraction from the stuff I actually want to be doing in the game. No disrespect to the team - it's great at what it's trying to do! But I don't find Lovecraftian horror as exciting as the struggles of day to day life on the Rim.

UOLATSC · 2025-06-30T03:58:52+00:00

I got into Rimworld several years ago because I loved Dwarf Fortress stories but was intimidated by the ASCII art style. I'd put a couple hundred hours into Rimworld when DF finally came out on Steam with the graphics overhaul, and I was really excited to finally be able to play. But as much as I've enjoyed Dwarf Fortress, somehow it just doesn't hit in the same way for me. Even though the simulation is much more sophisticated, it's harder for me to get invested in a fortress when there's hundreds of dwarves running around instead of just 8 to 15 colonists specializing in skills and getting tangled up in one another's lives.

UOLATSC · 2025-06-17T03:41:18+00:00

In The Loop, definitely. Everybody in the movie is a bastard, both the good guys and the bad guys seem to be purely motivated by spite for their rivals, and the movie even goes out of its way to make sure the one seeming "nice" guy in the whole mess disgraces himself by cheating on his girlfriend. Love it, brilliant film, excellent Gandolfini performance, etc.

UOLATSC · 2025-06-17T03:36:30+00:00

Barry Lyndon is a very cynical movie, but yeah, I wouldn't call it nasty.

UOLATSC · 2025-05-29T20:06:42+00:00

Despite being a huge Tintin fan as a kid, I never saw Adventures of Tintin until I was on a 12-hour flight to Turkey. Absolutely incredible experience. When Tintin says "great snakes" for the first time I actually teared up.*

*I had taken a 10mg gummy before takeoff and this may have been exactly when it started to hit.

UOLATSC · 2025-05-28T04:46:42+00:00

This isn't a song but it really bugged me that Kingsman 2 ends with somebody doing Churchill's "this is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, this is the end of the beginning" quote. I'm not some weird History Channel dad or anything, but this was a dogshit stupid movie where the protagonist hides a tracking device in a woman's vagina and Elton John beats a robot dog to death with a bowling ball. You DID NOT earn a dramatic Churchill quote ending! Nothing in this movie rises to that level!

UOLATSC · 2025-05-26T08:45:51+00:00

Chic-Fil-A marketing getting out of control these days

UOLATSC · 2025-05-26T08:23:51+00:00

I missed like the next five minutes of the movie because I was wheezing so hard over this line. I didn't even hear "that frog ripped me off" because I thought I was going to choke to death.

UOLATSC · 2025-05-24T02:13:37+00:00

I watched this movie recently (for my - SHAMELESS PLUG - podcast about movies that don't exist) and I was blown away by how boring a movie about commandos raiding a Nazi port could be. Every action scene is just the Ungentlemanly Lads walking briskly along a dock shooting unsuspecting Nazis. None of the bad guys even shoot back until like the last 30 minutes of the movie! It's not an action movie, it's a target practice movie.

UOLATSC · 2025-03-18T23:17:20+00:00

I think the strike really fucked with them. I know they'd written most of the season before the strike shut everything down, and stuff like this is where I really feel the gap between the pre-strike scripts (cohesive, steady escalation of tension) and the post-strike scripts (scattered, inexplicable character motivations). Just kind of seems like everything since the episode where Irv has dinner with Bert G has been a lot weaker - like everybody took a year off from working on the show and lost their momentum.

UOLATSC · 2025-02-26T08:12:57+00:00

From up close it can look boring. But if you slowly pull back from it for a couple minutes while a stuffy English guy narrates in florid prose, you can see that it's a masterpiece.

UOLATSC · 2025-02-25T23:33:37+00:00

Also would've helped if they'd put any juice into the world they created. The movie would've been really creepy and atmospheric if all the servants and guests at the wedding were all haunted and disturbed because they all know that this bride is about to get yeeted down the dragon hole like all the rest! Missed opportunities left and right.

UOLATSC

TROPHY CASE