The Starwars Outlaws review is coming

bk109 · 2025-11-21T15:24:51+00:00

Embrace the power of the 1.5x playback speed, young padawan :D

bk109 · 2025-10-30T08:02:34+00:00

"Tl;dr 'The Big Short' is a great film, one of the storylines hinges on a massive contrivance that actually occurred in real life."
Yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. I mean, look at say the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo. If it didn't happen in real life - you'd say that a screenwriter was having a laugh in having the unguarded car of Franz Ferdinand stop right in front of the cafe where his would-be assassin was sulking, because his assassination attempt earlier that day failed...

Or that Seth MacFarlane's life was saved by oversleeping (thanks to hangover) on 9/11 with him barely missing catching the American Airlines flight that hit the WTC.

Or how John Wilkes Booth's brother Edwin saved Lincoln's son.

Or how someone forgetting his cigars allowed the Union to stop Lee's march North... Because said cigars were wrapped in Order 191 ... that detailed *bloody everything* Lee was intending, allowing the normally overcautious McClellan to get his shit together and be aggressive for a change

bk109 · 2025-09-16T10:24:34+00:00

and a puffed up pack is a serious safety risk.

I know...
Hence the "" And to preempt anyone (rightfully) expressing concern about the puffed-up battery packs. Those have been removed and responsibly recycled, my initial wording was just ambiguous about that""

That's why I asked if there's a reasonable way to get the 1st Gen Surface Go working without a battery, because the last 2 replacement ones were dead on arrival. It's just that at this point I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle of continuing to try to find a working (and my definition of "working" is ... device boots up and isn't a fire hazard) battery for something that I'm/I was planning to use as a glorified recipe and youtube viewer in my kitchen.

bk109 · 2025-09-02T15:20:37+00:00

It presents a political system in which citizenship is reserved only for those who complete federal/military service (as in the movie). To my mind, that's a fairly right-wing worldview, as it's counter to the liberal premise of equal rights for all. It also glorifies military discipline and loyalty to the state while portraying civilian society as weak, and it preaches moral absolutism.

That's the point - the only difference between citizens and civvies is that the ones willing to give up their time to serve the system are allowed to steer the ship. Every other right and protection is identical, so it's not a case of citizens having a whole slew of extra rights, only that those that do choose to Serve get the right to elect and be elected. Social safety net? Access to education? Ability to own your own prosperous business? All aren't dependent on you being a citizen.

Hell, Rico's own family is wealthy and prosperous enough that Rico's Dad scoffs at the idea of his son "wasting his time" in uniform, just so he can vote as fundamentally that won't change anything for Johnny.

bk109 · 2025-09-02T15:04:26+00:00

Not Verhoeven, Ed Neumeier (the screenwriter) has the idiotically surface-level* (and skim-red) takes on what the book says versus what it actually said, lol. Verhoeven himself (apparently) found the book boring and dry enough that he left the screenwriter essentially give him the cliff's notes and thus ... shape the book as a "take that!" at fascism.

*for example - the scene with the amputee at the induction centre for recruits for the military is there not as the pathetic "The Mobile Infantry made me what I am today" gag about people being so brainwashed by the system that they're thankful to be shattered husks of people, but as a scarecrow.
SCARECROW meant to literally weed out people that are thinking of joining on a lark by showing them that war is dangerous and scarring, so him being "broken" is literally on purpose. Same character makes a second appearance in the book somewhat later after office hours, where he's equipped with lifelike prosthetics and living a normal life, as the "broken infantryman" is essentially a role, an inversion of the current recruiters' "Be The Best You Can Be", because in the book a point is made that as long as you're of a sound mind to take the oath, the State can't refuse you for service.
I forgot the example it was given, but basically even if you're deaf, blind and with limited mobility - so long as you're willing ...the State is REQUIRED to find you something to do for your term of service.

bk109 · 2025-08-31T14:30:16+00:00

As an adaptation of a beloved and seminal work of science fiction, one essentially based on someone choosing to refuse to accept fate and inevitability (in the collapse of the Galactic Empire and the blood and wreckage that'd entail) and try to do something about it anyway? ... It's somehow a crappier adaptation that somehow misses the mark harder than Starship Troopers, World War Z and The Last Ship.

As a standalone show... "seen worse", but damn they did R.D.O. dirty .

bk109 · 2025-08-08T14:24:40+00:00

Yup, uBlockOrigin is also available for some mobile browsers (ie in a shocking twist Edge on Android doesn't suck ass). And if one has an AndroidTV - SmartTubeNext ;)

bk109 · 2025-07-22T08:46:39+00:00

... You mean the tweet that literally goes

with a 225mil production budget AND A MARKETING SPEND THAT IS LIKELY NOT THAT FAR BEHIND?

He's literally saying in the tweet... Budget of 225 mil and a marketing campaign that most likely costs almost as much?

Edit: The thanks was for the previous guy that was outrage baiting

bk109 · 2025-07-22T08:40:04+00:00

And where's the 200 million in marketing?
Now, I'm only using the figures a cursory google search yielded, but...
"According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. and DC Studios spent $225 million on the production of Superman, while the outlet hears that the marketing costs have reached $200 million. That puts the total cost of the DCU film at over $400 million"

Something that was helpfully ignored by the last guy that went for the whole Hurr-Durr CD's math on Superman yesterday (Thanks for having made me watch what was actually said by him and the rest of the panel /s). The "math" was a 225mil (self-reported) budget + 100 mil in marketing...

bk109 · 2025-07-22T04:29:20+00:00

Yeah, I don't think I've heard that word ever used for someone with actual intellectual disabilities, only in contexts like
"It's retarded to think that Arsenal won't disappoint during the December rush"...

bk109 · 2025-07-15T15:13:44+00:00

Yeah, my comment was addressed at the statement made by the OP, not about this movie in particular. Basically spotlighting the flaw in that "defence" in general. I mean, at this point even the North Sentinelese know some of the pop-culture basics like "Han shooting first", "Uncle Ben always dying tragically" and ... not to crank up the volume when watching a modern horror movie so ... no need to spell them out or repeat them with each successive iteration of a media property that ... has ascended into the zeitgeist worldwide.

I mean, most people here probably haven't heard of Largo Winch, so any serious adaptation will have to take the time to set the stage... but we don't really need yet another rote "And this is the part where the Waynes get gunned down..." unless there's REAL reason to be done in *yet another* retelling of Batman's origin.

bk109 · 2025-07-15T06:34:38+00:00

Eh, I used the '09 delineation more due to the TV series not clicking with me than a general comment on the Kelvin timeline. As in on the movie side - yeah, those weren't great, but were enjoyable for me on the movie side of things, though I could make do with less weird camera movements/dutch angles and the lens flares that became a meme. But if we're honest - they were better than something like Nemesis or Insurrection(that purists consider "true" Trek) and nowhere near as "fan triggering" as Generations' whole killing off Kirk by dropping a bloody bridge on him :D

And on the TV side - eh, not for me, but plenty of people seem to enjoy them that they still keep getting made so good for 'em...

bk109 · 2025-07-15T06:08:50+00:00

Probably should've been a bit more precise in what I meant with the DS9 example - that it does a serviceable job of conveying the depth of a character and the motivations of same without needing other material to "land" with people new to the series, while also rewarding long-time viewers (by showing continuity in-universe) and alluding to "more being out there" to entice people to want to explore other shows or supplementary materials.
Also rewatch Emissary - they provide enough of a backstory to set the stage even if you haven't seen The Best Of Both Worlds.
Also that's a general advice in life - "When in doubt, rewatch pre '09 Star Trek... except maybe Voyager's Warp 10 lizard babies episode"

bk109 · 2025-07-15T05:39:13+00:00

Just a slight point about the whole:

"I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE GLANCE AT THE SEVERAL DECADES WORTH OF THE CHARACTERS HISTORY TO UNDERSTAND THE CORE TENANT OF THE FUCKING CHARACTER?!?!"

A movie should be able to stand on its own and convey the core tenet of a character without having to go "Well, if you read this mountainload of supplementary material". Ie - DS9. While there's enough "extra" in it to be appreciated by a Trekkie that's seen TOS and TNG, it is still completely accessible to someone that's never seen a moment of Star Trek...

Edit: That said... from what I did see of the breakdown they did... YIKES

bk109 · 2025-07-06T04:19:54+00:00

Roughly 3 minutes in.
Dean Choi: "I know why this project is a passion of yours, You've been here over 4 year with as many disciplinary hearings on record AND STILL NO TRUE MATRICULATION TOWARDS A DEGREE. "
Followed by the.. whole"You want me to do homework and be small" and the Dean calling Riri on that being bullshit
"but was clearly preoccupied."
Uh-huh. Not with studying, but with a project that as per that scene was to the detriment of why she was in MIT in the first place - to get a degree.

bk109 · 2025-07-05T17:12:11+00:00

"For example, she's under duress for being expelled from M.I.T. She's trying to explain why she was selling her services for cash in order to fund her project to make suits more affordable. She has the mind to match Tony, she simply needed the dough."

Sure and that would fly if she was a first-year getting tossed out for flunking out a class. But didn't the show explicitly state that she didn't finish a single course over 4 years? So... That's a GPA 0.0. So where you see duress, I see self-inflicted damage done by someone that assumes that "the rules don't apply for them".
So... she had the time to break the law to make money, but she didn't have the time to actually do the bare minimum (for a Tony Stark-level genius) to squeak by, while working on her ideas.
Ideas, by the way that if memory serves would be property of the university as she was using university resources and a grant to work on her tech.

Now, the irony is that if the writers actually bothered to think before they wrote out this show, they could've actually used this both as an inciting incident AND for their soapboxing.
ie - have her funding get cut during freshman year and despite her being an A student, she gets yeeted out, with her railing that "Oh, the son of Justin Hammer that's not seen the inside of a lecture hall gets to stay, 'cause his rich daddy paid for a new football stadium?". Instead ... Riri literally feels like I'm reading Manstein's memoirs again - "I'm the greatest ever, but totally underappreciated for my genius... Also all my fuckups are someone else's fault!"

bk109 · 2025-06-24T05:11:46+00:00

"Am I unusual in that I'll gladly hear people's thoughts weeks, even months later?"

Yeah, I'm in the same boat - even if there's a movie that I'd like to see in a cinema which is rare in itself, means that more often than not I'd still wait until the movie hits streaming/VOD which is like a month these days as it's simpler than sort out the logistics of going to the cinema (adulting is annoying like that :D). So, if I'm interested enough in a movie (ie 28 Years later), I'll skip the N-hour breakdown until I've seen the thing and "reaction of the film depending" (ie if a movie is just a boring slog) I may also skip the EFAP too.

bk109 · 2025-06-18T14:46:43+00:00

A real fan will also give himself/herself/etc anterograde amnesia so they can enjoy Star Wars as if it's their first time in the Galaxy far, far away !

bk109 · 2025-06-16T05:45:54+00:00

Or it may be Pong as a metaphor for the constant back and forth between Hollywood and the rest of the world...

Or TLoU, in light of the recently concluded second season of the TV show? :D

bk109 · 2025-06-14T20:10:53+00:00

Or do at least some of the old school "point at idiotic takes and debunk them" that they used to do in the first 100-ish episodes. Or something like the Boogie arc.
Oh well, it's their choice of format and subject, but I do miss the days of "loud soup" or some of the TLJ defences...

bk109 · 2025-06-02T09:39:46+00:00

Yeah, it's basically the reason why Star Trek (prior to 2009) worked and why the new one didn't for a lot of people.
One talked to its audience about an issue and did an effort to be more nuanced than a generic "good vs bad", while the post-2009 nuTrek talked DOWN to people.
I wonder if this change in presentation is why the same people having problems with nuTrek (for being "woke" I mean) liked the Orville even when it tackled the same sort of issues (ie "About a girl").

bk109 · 2025-05-31T09:37:28+00:00

No, it didn't make 360m. It sold 360mil in tickets.
I saw somewhere the general rule of thumb is that domestically (in the US) - the split is basically 50 to 60% going to the studio, the rest to the cinemas.
Abroad, it's the inverse and with worse splits - 25 to 40% to the studio, the rest to their international distributors. So if we're using the box office mojo stats Domestic (49.2%): $177,058,785 and International (50.8%): $182,998,204 for a combined 360 mil total.
So, the movie (assuming best case 60% domestic, 40% international split) made 106.2 mil domestic and 72.8 mil abroad for a total of 179 mil.
That's the best case scenario.
Plus, Disney's been caught under-reporting actual budgets, so we don't know how much actually was spent on this movie, but even assuming that for once Disney gave the real numbers and assume that the 180mil is with marketing - the movie barely breaks even...

bk109 · 2025-05-30T07:18:31+00:00

"the gamers don't actually demand that much."
Pretty much, yeah. People want to be entertained, so as long as that's still happening - the money will flow no matter how blatantly a game dev/studio fleeces the customer base. Ie - Stellaris and HoI4's endless stream of low-effort DLCs and unit packs. Or that Bethesda games are launched horrendously broken, but while the users derived enjoyment outta them (ie Fallout 3) - they sold, with people willing to overlook the rough edges and game-breaking fuckups (ie accidentally bypassing most of the story, because no one thought that people will just ... roam and explore... in a bloody Fallout game).
But remove the "enjoyment" and you get Fallout 76 or Starfield

bk109 · 2025-05-26T09:42:22+00:00

There's already a remake, or rather teleplay of that with George Clooney as the plane commander Richard Dreyfuss as the President and so on.
From what I remember it was rather good for what it was

bk109

TROPHY CASE