He really has no clue what he's doing, does he? He's just jumping around in location and time, trying to woo an audience who doesn't know or care about the Earl of Oxford, or Robert Cecil, or the Earl of Essex, or Thomas Nash, or any person in this movie who isn't William Shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth I. It's a paradox: you have to know the period to understand what's going on, and if you understand what's going on, you will hate what's going on.
The ability to take a concept that most people would laugh out of the gate and turn it into something great, giving me some food for thought about my own dickishness, is typical of all art that matters.
Nicolas Cage: Sucks for them!
"I simply don't care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it."
—A now-forgotten critic on the book O Pioneers!
Let's be honest: very few actually went into this show with an open mind. Upon even hearing the news that a series was gonna be made out of the GEICO cavemen, this thing was written off as trash before even one word was written into the script.
...explaining to non-gamers who don’t know Counter-Strike that you made a game in which everyone’s a terrorist is uh, pretty awkward.
—Stefan "Bad King Urgrain", Gmod Stories
"Seriously, who the fuck was this movie made for?! It's not for fans of the video game, it gets all the details wrong. It's not a good Christmas movie, it gets all the details wrong. It's not a movie for adults because of the sheer stupidity of it, and if this [Budweiser reference] is anything to go by, it's not a movie for kids either!"
"Whether it succeeds or fails, it's garbage on the premise alone."
"First, I should say that Return Of The Obra Dinn isn't for everyone. Wow, that's a fucking useless sentence, isn't it? Nothing's 'for everyone', except oxygen and maybe Pixar films."
"With a lot of old-school Trekkies (understandably) seeing Enterprise as an attempt to 're-do' TOS, and with a lot of new-school Trekkies (understandably) pissed that the new show wasn’t going to build upon the TNG-DS9-Voyager continuity, the show went on to polarize fans like never before. If you feel indifferent towards Enterprise, chances are you’re not really that into Star Trek."
"As for where the special goes from there....Picture #5 to the left sums up my opinion on it. It's still full of talking vegetables, but the crazy liberties are taken no more. It's a straight story from here until it ends, and it's aimed at girls. Marie falls in love with her nutcracker, and they escape to a fantasy world to stop the Rat King from possessing the star on top of Marie's tree. As is not explained (but you get the basic idea), whoever holds the star controls Christmas, and if the star were ever destroyed, Christmas would be as well.
The kind of audience that would come for that story probably wouldn't appreciate the farting beans, so it leaves The Nuttiest Nutcracker as a special without appeal."
The kind of audience that would come for that story probably wouldn't appreciate the farting beans, so it leaves The Nuttiest Nutcracker as a special without appeal."
I got a DVD in the mail, an animated film titled "Sita Sings the Blues." It was an version [sic] of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully filed it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.
"A cartoon about babies, particularly baby super heroes? The only times the baby formula actually worked was with Muppet Babies, and the Rugrats to a degree. Those only worked because most of the stories and adventures took place in the characters' imagination. But with Mega Babies, we’re supposed to take them seriously as actual world saving super heroes. We’re also supposed to laugh when they save the day by farting, drooling, or blasting snot rockets at their foes."
"I'm finishing up a script today from Somaliland that intricately details the fight against female genital mutilation. I don't know why I insist on making videos that drive viewers away, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stop now."
"How’s this for an evening’s entertainment: watching cartoon germs and human cells do battle inside the body of a fat, ill zookeeper played by Bill Murray? It didn’t appeal much to other people, either, and Osmosis Jones belly-flopped in 2001."
—TIME Magazine, Top 10 Disappointing Blockbusters
"Travel back to a time when Kevin Feige could still f*** up a superhero movie, as director Ang Lee presents a two-hour long brooding thinkpiece about a green guy who smashes things."
—Honest Trailers on Hulk
"I mean, who even came up with this thing? It's kinda like they picked the most annoying character from a popular IP and decided to make a game out of the stuff that was just too boring for the movie. They might as well have made it about Jar Jar Binks getting elected to the Senate."
"In this game, you play as the weakest, most pathetic character from the entire Lord of the Rings universe, Smeagol. A withering, shambling corpse of a creature just barely clinging to life. The whole intro of the game is Smeagol trying to catch a little beetle, but he cannot catch it, because the character that you are playing as is weaker and more stupid than a beetle. Because he is so dumb and incompetent at catching a beetle, like a fucking dumbass, Smeagol actually gets captured by orcs and turned into a slave. So the premise of this game is you play as a starving little gremlin, that can't even catch a beetle, doing slave labor for orcs in hell where everyone is coughing and dying, and nobody likes you, because you're a little slimy rat bastard, and everyone hits you and calls you names the whole game. Just at the idea level, this has to be the least fun idea for a game."
"To be honest, I'm hard-pressed to envision how a game about Gollum could have worked. On the narrative level, one can get behind a nasty, effective protagonist, or a nice, ineffectual one, but nasty and ineffectual? That's just depressing, even before I had to watch the little scrote die an average of fifty times an hour, knowing that his eventual lifelong peak will only come after he bites a finger off of nice, pretty Elijah Wood. In the first half of the game, Gollum's psychotic little muttering ass is enslaved in an orc mine, so he, and by extension we, don't do much more than what the orcs tell him to do, as they spit on him and remind him that he's a minute smear of bird plop on the rear bumper of the universe that's barely worth the effort of cleaning off. In the second half of the game, he gets rescued by elves who treat him nicely, and give him food, and a lovely place to live, so obviously he spends the whole time being a horrible bastard to them and trying to escape so he get back to his busy schedule of sabotaging his own life. So yeah, the prospects of the story are bleak even before we tackle the gameplay, and afterwards are more at the "suicidal" level."
"Even in this horrendous and compromised form, it probably goes without saying that a movie this risky and bizarre would never have been made with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in the lead roles—which is a shame, because a smaller, weirder version of this story with non-marquee names would probably avoid some of these compromises. Pratt is good, and Lawrence is great, but their collective charisma is at odds with the fundamental ickiness of the movie’s premise, because it makes it that much harder not to root for them to end up together. If you cast a couple of lower-wattage actors with the ability to embrace the movie’s creepier themes, you might have something. Instead, we got Passengers, a movie too unpleasant to please mainstream audiences and too cowardly to embrace the darker themes that might have earned it a loyal group of defenders—which means, of course, that it will please no one."
—Scott Meslow, GQ review of Passengers (2016)
of Passengers (2016)"This movie is...amazing. It actually goes beyond belief. In today's PC world for a film like this to get made, let alone for kids, it's scary as shit! How could anyone greenlight this? How could anyone sign on for it?"
"'Chained to the Rhythm' is a feel-bad song. It's a pop song about how pop songs are evil. It is almost designed to fail."
—Todd in the Shadows on Katy Perry's "Chained to the Rhythm"
"I think [Fantasia] failed because no one wanted it. It was Walt's great dream, but it's not what the audience wanted. The audience wanted another Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that's what they wanted; or another Pinocchio. And that's not only what they wanted, but it's what they expected, and that's the real problem. When they saw Walt Disney's name on an animated cartoon feature, they expected another fairy tale or, at the very least, some extension of what he'd been doing in the short cartoons. They didn't expect this. And this came off to them as being highbrow or, as they used to say, "longhair". It was just not what they were looking for. And the biggest problem was not that they saw it and didn't like it; the biggest problem was they didn't even come to see it. Something about Fantasia put them off."
—Leonard Maltin, Fantasia: The Creation of a Disney Classic
"If you think about it, if Popeye was focus-tested, it would do terrible. We've got this one-eyed sailor, and a really skinny girl that has limbs like spaghetti, and then there's this big fat guy, and they fight through the whole cartoon, and then Popeye eats some spinach and beats him up, and the girl ends up leaving both of them. That would focus-test terrible."
—Stephen Worth, Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story
"Quite honestly, there are no words to accurately describe how sickeningly offensive this fic is on every level of mankind. Nazism, the SS and all things associated with it are treated exactly like high school. Rounding up them Jews? It's a summer job! Speeches from Hitler? Rallies in the gym! Hitler speaking to said "rally?" Man, what a boring speaker for this school meeting! Could Roxas possibly be gay? Tee-hee, wait until the SS gossip column finds out! Heinrich Himmler? That old-fashioned parent who just doesn't understand their gay true love! Oh, how we wish we were just shitting you."
— snakesonasora on If I Was Your Nazi
"Who wanted to play live-service game number #163 that treated Batman like cannon fodder and made Superman no better than Homelander? Nobody? Exactly."
