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April 30

3 hours ago, Boxofficerules said:

Didn't they rerelease The Phantom Menace before and it did poorly. I remember the plan was to re release all of them in 3D but Phantom Menace did so poorly they scrapped the rest.

They were cancelled because of the Disney buyout. 2 and 3 were still supposed to come out in the fall of 2013 up until Lucasfilm was made to shift gears to focus on Force Awakens.

April 30

After we saw Fall Guy my brother theorized that the film's low interest may be down to it being a movie about making movies. I wonder if there isn't some truth to that and why even the overwhelmingly positive reviews aren't having any real effect.

I think the movie has a strong message when it comes to filmmaking and recognizing stunt performers in particular, but the initial pitch doesn't seem to be incentivizing people to check it out.

April 5

Monkey Man was acquired by Uni for just $10m, so if it opens to like $15m it should still be in the black before long, and should have a solid life on streaming.

I do wish it could’ve done more but if casual moviegoing is a thing of the past like @Cmasterclay and @reddevil19 said then fwiw it’s not a bad result for something like this under current circumstances.

March 29

Berserk: The Golden Age

*major spoilers below*

To say this film is a mouthful would be putting it lightly — and I mean that in more ways than one.

Sci-fi/fantasy epics are nothing new in CAYOM, and Lager Pictures is no stranger to them either. In fact, they’ve produced what I personally think is the most defining one — Matt Reeves’ Odyssey trilogy, with its middle chapter, Counsel of the Dead, ranking as one of my favourite entries in the entire game. While that trilogy got to ride high into the sunset, with its final entry winning Best Picture in Year 4, Lager hasn’t quite been able to recapture its magic since. A spiritual successor of sorts came with Year 7’s Attack on Titan, but despite good reviews and strong box office, the story of Eren Jaeger and his titan-killing comrades ended up stalling before it had a chance to really take off, leaving its cliffhanger ending unresolved. I bring up Titan because it’s a film that, despite the reservations I had, is one I keep coming back to in one way or another. For good and for ill, it was an undertaking that I think was trickier to pull off than it might seem on the surface, and one I maybe wasn’t giving as fair of a shake as I could’ve. Not that I was being disingenuous with my initial assessment, but I feel like I was being a bit too harsh on it, and if I ever do a full reevaluation I might come out with a more nuanced second opinion.

Fitting, then, that Lager Pictures is back three years later with their second stab at a bloody, R-rated fantasy epic based on a hugely influential anime property. I can’t say I know too much about Berserk, but I can tell that The Golden Age was done with sincere love and respect for its source material, going as far as to include a solemn tribute to its late author at the very end. Across 54,000 words of text, there’s not a sentence in this that feels cynical, or thrown together on a whim (although I did notice the writing quality faltering slightly in the second half, which may have understandably been due to time constraints. Not something I intend to hold against it, anyhow). As someone who’s written his share of beefy texts, I’m honestly impressed that something this big and sprawling holds together as well as it does, as it could’ve very easily been a much worse chore to get through.

But passion aside, does the film itself hold up to scrutiny?

See, Berserk isn’t just any old fantasy epic. It’s based on a long-running manga. It’s animated. It’s gory and grisly to the point that some of its bloodier moments become nearly farcical. It contains multiple sequences strongly implying sexual assault against underage characters, and it uses those sequences to illustrate the dichotomy between power and powerlessness.

And it’s all under the guiding hands of Zack Snyder.

Snyder’s involvement in The Golden Age is one I was looking forward to seeing how it would play out. Turns out, it’s both a blessing and a curse.

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from Snyder and his highly controversial run of films, DC Extended Universe included, is that his interests lie in depicting his characters as mythological figures existing in a world that is as raw, unsanitized, and yet hyperreal that we can easily distinguish it as vastly different from our reality yet doesn’t provide that kind of clean escape you’d otherwise find in most genre blockbusters. There’s very little inviting about the world of Berserk, a medieval setting torn asunder by a seemingly never-ending conflict where either side will stoop to the worst of lows just to ensure their victory over the other, and demonic entities crawl along the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to throw a giant wrench (or in Zodd’s case, a blade) into the proceedings and cause even more chaos. Forging your own path might as well be a death wish, for it is a world where unquestioning loyalty and your willingness to plough through opposing forces at the behest of brutes, manipulators, and abusers matter above all. ”Justice” exists in the eye of the beholder and not by the rule of law, provided you don’t have the wealth, blood, or influence to simply bend the law to your liking. Many of the characters in Berserk seek an escape from this permanent state, but even in their attempts to change the world they still perpetuate the cycle of violence and suffering that shaped who they were to begin with.

Where I think Snyder tends to go off the rails, other than applying moral murkiness to characters and stories that I don’t think should be ensnared by it (see: Superman), is that his photography is often too gleeful of its subjects for what they actually represent, and that sometimes comes with some highly unfortunate subtext. The endless lionising of Leonidas and the Spartans in 300 becomes chilling when you realise that the only way the movie can make it work is if you then portray their opposing force, the Persians, as demonic, perverted entities hellbent on destroying all that is good and pure. In Watchmen, Snyder took a work that made no mince about the fact that its costumed vigilantes weren’t to be idolised and made them look as slick and cool as possible, regardless of what they were doing or where the story was actually headed. Even Man of Steel got in on this; the writing going to great lengths to portray Superman as the aspiring, hopeful figure people he's often depicted as, only for Snyder to film that same figure ramming Zod through collapsing buildings with thousands of people still inside, because he’d rather defeat Zod than save them. Mind you, a culminating scene in that final act is Clark and Lois making out while the centre of Metropolis, the city Clark was supposed to protect, lies in ashes in the background.

Now, I’ve read and seen enough about Zack Snyder to know this *probably* isn’t intentional. Snyder rarely if ever talks about whatever subtext his work’s supposed to have (one of the rare moments that stood out to me was when he admitted to giving Xerxes effeminate traits in order to make young male audiences uncomfortable and intimidated by him, which could be the topic of a whole other essay) and seems way more interested in making his films look ”cool” at any given moment, audience interpretation of it be damned.

I bring this up because Berserk has much of that same glee. Most of the film’s action scenes don’t go ten seconds without an enemy opponent getting cleaved in half like they were butter going up against a hot knife, and if you’re squeamish about seeing horses bite it on the battlefield this movie will probably leave you deeply traumatised — even if it’s an animated film so there was no chance of animals ever being harmed during production. Guts and his bandmates tear their way through hordes of enemies with swipe and precision to a sometimes ridiculous degree, turning the named members of the Band of Hawks into near-invincible superheroes that nevertheless have the restraint of angry teenagers on adrenaline highs. Even their downtime in the first half of the story is mostly taken up by them yelling at, pranking, or being oddly mistrustful of one another, even though there’s never a moment when any of them betray their friends, and any break from the ranks is momentary and rarely detrimental to their outcome in battle. The one character that differs from this crowd is Griffith, but we’ll get to him in a second.

For the most part, however, Snyder’s approach doesn’t have the same chilling effect here as it does in something like 300 or Watchmen. That’s probably because the world of Berserk is complete fantasy instead of being drawn from real-world history or meant to deconstruct the genre it represents, and so the gleefulness of its ultra-violence is much easier to swallow. The protagonists in Berserk also come from suffering and injustice themselves, and so them taking their anger out on their enemies is more about catharsis rather than upholding some sort of ideological standard — although Griffith is unquestionably ideologically driven, but like I said, we’ll get to him in a bit.

Guts, as a protagonist, is less concerned about the world around him than he is about what’s immediately in front of him, whether it’s his friends being in trouble or an opponent trying to kill him. There is an internal conflict of him being a hound for Griffith that culminates in their duel at the very end of the film, but it doesn’t get much play outside of him saying he feels like a slave to Griffith’s will. On the battlefield, he often takes his own incentive for one reason or another, and it rarely ever backfires on him or his relationship with Griffith. Though he challenges Griffith’s authority over him at first, he comes to more or less just accept it until all the work is finished. He rarely seems to stop and question who he’s fighting for and why. In a way, that’s kind of the point, as it’s the story of a man struggling for his free will in a world where that’s in short supply, but the contrast between him on the battlefield and him outside of it stuck out to me nonetheless.

There is one moment, however, where I think Snyder’s gleefulness and Guts’s character collide in a way that I think came close to causing the whole enterprise to collapse underneath itself, and that is a seemingly pivotal moment towards the end of the first half. After an assassination attempt on Griffith on behalf of a rival of his, Julius, Guts is sent to exact bloody revenge on him on behalf of Griffith. Guts, without ever hesitating, does exactly that, slicing an unarmed Julius’s chest open in the middle of his living room, turning Guts into an assassin as opposed to a soldier. The murder, however, doesn’t stop there, as in a panicked frenzy to cover his tracks he ends up shoving his blade straight through an innocent young child—Julius’s son, Adonis—whom he had witnessed just minutes prior being mistreated by his father, not dissimilarly to how Guts was mistreated by his own father figure in the film’s copious amount of flashbacks (which we’ll get to in a bit).

The first time reading it, I assumed this was going to be a big turning point for both Guts and the overall story. He has just murdered an innocent, and he can no longer excuse it as having been an enemy on the battlefield or a superior who badly mistreated him. His penchant for violence and his loyalty to Griffith have finally come of great consequence. Is his relationship with Griffith irrevocably changed now? Is Guts going to break from his ranks and try to flee? Will he confront Griffith about this head-on?

The answer to all of the above, it turns out, is… not really?

I couldn’t help but think of the highly debated ending of Man of Steel, where Superman snaps Zod’s neck in order to stop him from killing innocents (not that it seemed to be of great concern to him before, but whatevs). By all accounts, this SHOULD be a moment of great consequence, one that’ll reverberate across Superman’s arc not just for the rest of the movie but for future entries in the DCEU… but it doesn’t. It’s filmed by Snyder and performed by Henry Cavill like it is, but it’s forgotten about in the very next scene and never becomes an issue again — even in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice where Clark confronts a resurrected Zod that’s been malformed into Doomsday.

The child-killing moment in Berserk has a similar effect. It’s a little less egregious here since Guts DOES try to confront Griffith about it almost immediately after it happens, but he’s stopped by Casca and so he never gets the chance to. One intermission and a time skip later, Julius is only brought up again once, and Adonis isn’t at all. I can’t recall a moment past the intermission where having murdered an actual child in cold blood places heavily on Guts’s conscience, even when we learn of his own childhood trauma at the hands of Gambino and the two brothers. Maybe this comes back at a later point in the manga, I wouldn’t know, but it feels strange how such a seemingly pivotal moment ends up having so little impact. It’s a scene that’s shocking in the moment, but the reverb you expect it to have just isn’t there, at least not to my liking.

I think perhaps part of this stems from the story feeling a bit overly serialised in parts. This is something most anime adaptations in CAYOM suffer from in one way or another (Attack on Titan and New Journey Pictures’s Megalo Box mostly managed to avoid this), and while Berserk is far from the most egregious example, there are points in both halves that had me a bit lost as to where any of this was even going.

And then there’s the bloat. Now, a three-and-a-quarter-hour Zack Snyder film based on a serialised manga was inevitably going to have at least some bloat — I mean, we’re talking about the guy who added what felt like twenty extra minutes to his cut of Justice League for a teaser that no one but the most delusional of his fanbase thinks will ever pay off. Berserk is mostly self-contained, with only a few hints as to what may happen in the future, but that doesn’t mean it doesn't have its fair share of lengthy sequences and subplots that could’ve used some trimming in the editing room.

One part that stood out to me was the flashbacks. Not that they’re unnecessary, but many of them feel overly long and create a bit of a lull in the pacing whenever they happen. A pivotal one occurs right in the middle of an action scene, stopping said action in its tracks for what feels like five minutes when doing it in quick flashes would’ve been a lot more effective and kept the pacing up, at least in my opinion. I don’t know if it plays out like this in the source material, but given that it was a serialised manga doling out installments on an intermittent basis it probably worked a lot better there as opposed to a film where you expect the pacing to be a bit more consistent.

The serialisation also results in the lack of a strong central antagonist, as most of the conflict is instead taken up by a series of boss fights until a pair of characters from the past decide to show back up for the final battle. It makes the film feel overly crowded in the villain department, and though the last major threat (Boscogn) is the knot that ties the flashbacks together with the main story, he feels a lot less impactful as a threat than he otherwise could’ve been. This is perhaps where streamlining a few more elements (I say “more” because I’m not sure how much of this was streamlined from the manga already) would’ve made the focus tighter and created a threat that felt like it lingered as opposed to just sprouting up when it was directly relevant.

I didn’t want to harp on this initially, but an unexpected bloat honestly comes from a fair amount of the dialogue. Not during conversations between characters, as those flow just fine, but whenever either the villains or the heroes have to stop and make big, declarative speeches right in the middle of battle, it feels like it drags. Not just because many of the speeches are so over the top — it’s an anime, so of course everyone’s going to talk like an anime villain — but they go on way longer than I feel they should have, again creating major lulls in otherwise flowing action sequences. Dave Bautista’s Adon is particularly egregious in this department, as his constant shouting becomes more grating the longer it persists. Boscogn suffers from a bit of this too, particularly during the final battle, but at least his monologues are a lot more bearable.

Speaking of grating, some of Guts’ companions were neither the most developed nor the most endearing. This is me saying that Corkus sucks and I hate him, and I kept wishing for him to die whenever he jumped out and whined about petty bullshit. I get that you need some comic relief, but there are way less annoying ways to go about it.

I said I was going to circle back around to Griffith eventually, so let’s do that now. Griffith is honestly where I think both the story and Zack Snyder’s approach to it works the most, and not just because Pattinson really sells his calm messiah-like presence with his vocal performance. Snyder’s mythologizing is effective when it comes to photographing Griffith, and the relatively little we know of his origins creates an air of mystery around the character while still allowing enough trinkets of information for the audience to understand why his fellow bandmates look up to him the way they do. His relationship with Guts, where he’s allowed to be the most human, is one of the film’s more compelling aspects, which does mean that the second part of the film where they’re mostly separated is struggling to be as compelling as the preceding half. Not that Sophie Wilde’s Casca doesn’t make a game effort in making up for it once she enters the spotlight, though I kinda wish she did it earlier since most of her role in the first half of the film is just her being angry at Guts for one reason or another, which does get repetitive when it’s the fifth scene in a row where she’s yelling at him.

While most of the characters are appropriately cast, there are a few names that do end up underutilised. Thomasin McKenzie doesn’t get a whole lot to do as Charlotte except being either a damsel or giggling and swooning whenever Griffith’s around, and there are a bunch of recognizable names like Patrick Wilson, Paul Mescal, and Mathew Goode that take up bit roles that could’ve been filled by smaller character actors and the effect would’ve been negligible. This is a minuscule comment in the grand scheme of things, but some of it did stick out to me.

Since it’s an animated film, I guess it’s fair to also talk about the animation. It’s impressive, no doubt, and the film using panels from the manga to depict some of its more pivotal moments goes a long way towards crafting the atmosphere and scale that’s needed for a story like this. That said, the influences feel a bit excessive at times, as combining the manga, the 1997 anime adaptation, Golden Age cinema, Kurosawa, 80s dark fantasy, and various eras of Disney animation into one giant blender turns some scenes into of a stylistic mush. Perhaps limiting the influences just a little bit would’ve created a clearer but still vibrant image. From a technical perspective, the frequent battle sequences are some of the most impressive action animation ever done in CAYOM, so no complaints there.

I spent some time thinking about how I was going to wrap up writing about a behemoth like this (I had quite a few more paragraphs that I decided to cut since I felt like they didn’t add much). Berserk: The Golden Age is a work of passion in every corner of the frame, but it’s also one that comes with a long list of flaws. That’s almost inevitable when it comes to something of this scope since there’s so many moving pieces that it’d be impossible for all of them to hit bullseye 100% of the time. It’s also why I’m not as critical as I could’ve been because, as I mentioned before, the fact that the film doesn’t catastrophically collapse under its own weight is an achievement in and of itself. Berserk is a gigantic epic that nevertheless has the anger and emotion of something much smaller, and while not all of it works, I couldn’t help but appreciate the moments that did. How high this’ll end up ranking on my list come the end of the year remains to be seen, since there’s still a lot I feel like I have to mull over, even nearly a week after reading it, but I can still call it mission accomplished on most of its fronts, despite the plethora of warts that crop up along the way.

March 17

The Boy with the Green Eyes (*spoilers*)

Spoiler

Oh, good, after delivering a consistently solid entry with Room 131, the Poison & Wine cinematic universe has dived straight back into insane trainwreck territory. That brief reprieve was fun while it lasted.

The Boy with the Green Eyes starts with promise, but it quickly unravels once the "horror" elements rear their head in the second half. The musical approach, even if it causes quite a few tonal neck snaps, is actually the film's strongest aspect, mostly with the upbeat, energetic song numbers that litter the first half. Once the plot goes off the rails those song numbers become a little more hokey, but at least they provide relief from the car crash of an endgame reveal that unfolds around them.

That's not even to say that the finale is awful, just that it's... bonkers in a way that I don't think entirely works to its intended effect. I think the issue for me is that the impetus Giovanni's backstory is centered around (his stepfather violently and sexually abusing him) being resolved with magic, time manipulation, and an eventual wizard duel that ends in Giovanni ripping his opponent's heart out of their chest I'm likely going to find iffy almost regardless of how it is executed. I don't want to say the filmmakers were wrong for trying, but mixing those two elements didn't entirely gel for me. It's a bold swing, even by the standards of a series that's known for exactly that, but I personally would've gone for a slightly different approach.

And then there's the post-credit scene...

...You know what, fuck it. If the endgame for this cinematic universe is going to be Giovanni, a resurrected Nicole, and (I presume) Jordan forming a perverted Legion of Doom to presumably take revenge on Hunter and Tyler, then I can't say I fault the franchise for embracing its own madness. I just hope we get a few more semi-subdued works like Room 131 to go along with it.

March 16

Well... We made it. Ten years of CAYOM. Somehow, we outlasted 2.0., if only by a year. Let's drag this belated sh*tshow kicking and screaming through another decade, shall we?

No grades for any reviews until after the top 25. This is to allow for some suspense, and also allow me to change my mind on this or that film once I actually grade them. I'm also reading everything in posted order, so if things are off chronologically, that is why.

Without further ado, let's get reviewing...

The Second Water War

Spoiler

Tammy when shooting a flare gun at a mountaintop to cause an avalanche causes an avalanche:

The Second Water War weirdly takes a while to get to the actual, you know, water war, but it's harmless kids fare while it lasts. Not much to say about this one, honestly.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Spoiler

Well… This was probably not an easy book to adapt.

Cloud Cuckoo Land very much follows the structure of something like Cloud Atlas, but I think compared to that film, my emotional investment in the narrative wasn’t as strong.

That isn’t to say the film is lacking in emotion or that the individual storylines leave too many things to be desired. However, Cuckoo Land isn’t just five interwoven narratives tied together by telling the journey of a fable from its conception, to its fall into obscurity and disrepair, and its eventual restoration through nearly a thousand years — it is a film where each of the five storylines are littered with their own timeskips, with many scenes lasting for what feels like less than thirty seconds, meaning it eventually becomes somewhat meaningless to try and get too invested in individual characters given much of their development is going to be hurried past (one of the five leads, Anna, even unceremoniously dies before the last act). This kind of structure, at least in my opinion, works much better in a novel since it’s up to the reader to set their own pace, but when played out across three hours of film feels like I’m getting the cliff notes version of an even longer film played back to me. It does make me relate to the character of Konstance in a sense; spending much of my time trying to unwrap the story from a distance, but since I don’t have her urgency, I’m at the same time feeling like I’m being left at the waysides emotionally. This is something I feel Ridley Scott has struggled with when it comes to many of his films lately, and unless you have a singular protagonist in an easily rootable situation like Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, his approach to scale and spectacle over emotional resonance isn’t really helping things here.

Scale and spectacle, however, is one of the things Scott is best at, at least when it’s appropriate, and he brings ample of it here. Cloud Cuckoo Land never feels small, even when that is to its detriment, and some of the film’s more stellar moments are when it focuses on singular setpieces that place their characters in either peril or at a road’s end. These setpieces become more frequent towards the back half of the film, fortunately, and the two climactic sequences of Seymour’s attack on the library and Konstance’s escape from the vault are some of the film’s highlights. The film is also smart in casting lesser names in central roles, meaning you’re able to slink into the characters more easily (whenever the film allows you to and isn’t preoccupied with timeskips) when celebrity faces would’ve been far more distracting in those roles.

Speaking of distracting, though, I’m not entirely sure if the film’s approach to constantly ageing and de-ageing everyone works to its benefit. Seeing Jake T. Austin strot around as an octogenarian in the final act is more than a little silly, especially when he then has to carry an entire action sequence looking like that. Some of the ageing/de-ageing also comes across as a bit unnecessary when only a decade or so differs from the character and the actor’s age, such as Julie Delpy throughout most of the film. I’m not gonna say that the effect is poorly executed, but it often stretches it in terms of necessity to the point it just feels overdone.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ambitious film, no doubt about it, but it's also one that left me moderately intrigued rather than enthralled. It’s not a bad film by any means, and that the film manages to pull it off at all and not fall flat on its ass like another Cloud Atlas-inspired sci-fi/fantasy film that graced CAYOM a few years back (do I need to say anything other than ELIXIR BAD?) is remarkable in and of itself — but ambition alone doesn’t make a film great. The film, as it is, is solid but could’ve needed a fair amount of tweaks to make for a stronger final product.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

Spoiler

This is why you don’t do straight adaptations of video game plots — because they often don’t have any.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile is a ”film” in the sense that it has visuals, audio, and a beginning, middle, and end, but the fetch-quests-leading-into-boss-fights structure it utilises just doesn’t serve it well, especially when your protagonist is bland as a cracker and any sense of worldbuilding is either dumped at you through mounds of exposition or just not addressed at all. All of this is fine in a video game because you’re distracted by the gameplay, but when you see it play back as a movie it just becomes annoying, tedious, and at times overly confusing. That’s before the film suddenly pulls a last-minute twist that leaves the protagonist subject to a seemingly ambiguous fate, which is probably not going to go down all that well with younger audiences. Klonoa has the cutesy visuals to distract its main demographic for the allotted runtime (albeit, 110 minutes is pretty long for a movie that doesn’t have that much going for it), but anyone older is probably going to check out long before its end twist leaves them scratching their heads.

Pac-Man

Spoiler

Feels more like a sanitized episode of Bupkis (and not just because Pete Davidson’s in it), only it doesn’t end with Pete waking up having imagined the whole thing in a drug-induced haze. Pac-Man is incredibly slight, even for its 88-minute runtime, but it is harmless family entertainment, and at least has more to offer story-wise than the preceding Klonoa, even if it’s not much.

Room 131

Spoiler

It wouldn’t give anything away to say that this ties into the infamous Poison & Wine trilogy that certainly had a, uh… lasting impact on the early years of this iteration of CAYOM. What is a spoiler is how exactly this ties into that series, and it is a bit of a left turn for a franchise that, while it certainly got absurd by the end of its brief existence, didn’t involve the supernatural as far as I recall. I suppose you gotta do something different if you seek to breathe new life into it, so I’ll give the filmmakers credit for trying at least.

To Room 131’s benefit, while it ties into Poison & Wine and its increasingly ludicrous sequels in a rather unexpected way, it’s smart enough to avoid many of that trilogy’s downfalls. It certainly becomes melodramatic to the point of near-farce in its final act, but the preceding film is tightly plotted and involves a fairly decent mystery, even if the resolution isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The main characters are all fairly grounded and relatable, and the film’s approach to depicting homophobia, both internal and external, are done commendably and effectively. The eventual supernatural explanation did get a little much for my taste, and the post-credit scene, as hilarious of a reveal as it was, left me with way more questions than answers, but I can see a path forward for the franchise that embraces the camp horror in a way that doesn’t overdo it. As a return to the Poison & Wine universe, Room 131 is quite solid of an entry, and may even be its best instalment, but where exactly the story goes in the future may have to be the deciding factor. As it stands, it’s a welcome return for O$corp Pictures to CAYOM.

Adam & Cindy ft. Cersei in: Guinea Piggest

Spoiler

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As far as crossovers go, this might be the most unnecessary in all of existence.

Not just because the Adam & Cindy series’s gentle charm didn’t need to clash with the nonsensical trollpasta nature of the Guinea Pig franchise, but also because Adam and Cindy themselves felt like they had no reason to even be there. The result is a Guinea Pig threequel featuring two embarrassed guest stars that ends on a dumb climactic fight scene that doesn’t actually resolve anything the film was setting out to do, yet the movie wants to pretend somehow ties up Cersei’s story in a neat bow. I don’t often say this, but I seriously question what the point of this whole exercise even was — outside of squeezing a few more dollars out of a franchise that should’ve been put out of its misery once we found out what ”the power of fresh lettuce” meant by dragging an otherwise harmless series down with it. Just a complete, utter waste that may end up killing Adam & Cindy via collateral damage. Do not recommend.

March 8

The Set-Up

Best Actor - Noah Centineo

Best Actress - Lana Condor

Best Original Screenplay

Best Original Song - ”can’t be done” by Olivia Rodrigo

January 31

1 hour ago, Speedorito said:

It’s honestly kinda that Vaughn said the budget isn’t 200M (without saying what it actually is) but the trades just ignored him.

$200m is what Apple paid for it, so it's a $200m expense as far as they're concerned.

January 20

The IT provider to Filmstaden's sales channels has been hacked and now all means of selling tickets throughout the chain are currently unavailable, whether online or on-site. If grosses in Sweden end up way down this week this would be why.

https://www.filmstaden.se/nyhet/NCG39997/tillfalligt-avbrott-i-filmstadens-forsaljningskanaler

January 13

As long as international markets follow it should have the advantage of back-to-back holidays in Europe (Ascension Day on the 9th and Whit Monday on the 20th). Could boost OS numbers a bit.

January 5

On 1/3/2024 at 11:57 PM, CJohn said:

Wolf Man is totally getting replaced by FNAF2.

One of the Blumhouse producers said just this week that FNaF 2 hasn’t even been greenlit yet. We’re not seeing that before 2025.

January 2

On 12/28/2023 at 9:30 PM, Ezen Baklattan said:

AND THE OSCAR LINEUP WILL BE....

The Boy and the Heron

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Elemental

Nimona

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

RIPbot Dreams

December 27, 2023

12 hours ago, CaptainJackSparrow said:

Maybe the new Ghostbusters should move up to February? At least then the frozen/winter connection would be much stronger. Plus, that move could help theaters during the dry month.

I doubt it’d be ready by February, tbh. Production seemed like it was pretty rushed already.

December 11, 2023

Film by me: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Year 1

Films by others: Birdwing by @Blankments, Year 7; Yin by @SLAM!, Year 5

December 11, 2023

38 minutes ago, Reddroast said:

Film by me starlight

Film by others: notes from the otherverse @Ezen Baklattan

Scavenger wars 1 @cookie

He said Scavs couldn’t be requested since he was going to read it anyway.

December 11, 2023

Film by me: Everything We Miss, Year 8

Films by others: The Parvelli Reunion by @Ezen Baklattan, Year 2; LucIId by @Blankments, Year 5(?)

December 10, 2023

The Set-Up

Genre: Romantic Dramedy

Studio: Nicely Packaged Films

Distributor: Cookie Pictures

Director: Claire Scanlon

Cast: Lana Condor (Monica), Noah Centineo (Kitt), Jordan Fisher (Felix), Israel Broussard (Rick), Bailee Madison (Ophelia), Lily Chee (Alice)

Original Song: ”can't be done” by Olivia Rodrigo

Budget: $17.5m

Release Date: May 22nd

Theater Count: 3,475

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude humor, sexual references, and brief strong language

Running Time: 99 minutes (1 hour, 39 minutes)

Plot (5.3k words):

Spoiler

Monica and Kitt have lived next door to each other their whole lives. They were childhood best friends for the longest time, even spending their free time together doing all sorts of children’s activities out in Monica’s front yard. That is until they both joined junior high, where Monica joined the popular crowd while Kitt began to rebel and pull pranks around school, constantly landing him in detention. Kitt’s rebellious behaviour keeps driving the pair apart until senior year where the two act like they barely know each other, despite having been friends their whole lives previously.

Nearing the end of their senior year, Monica devotes much of her time and energy to planning their high school's centennial dance. She expects to go to the ball with a hockey player named Rick, but Rick falls in love with a cheerleader from a rival school and ends up asking her to the dance instead of Monica, breaking Monica’s heart and plunging her into a depression. Kitt, meanwhile, is dating Ophelia, though she ultimately leaves him for a socially conscious college student after another one of Kitt’s pranks go one step too far and gets her in trouble as well.

While Monica remains brutally shaken by being rejected by Rick, Kitt’s regret over his falling out with Ophelia is a lot more subtle. Monica finds out about Kitt’s quiet treatment towards his breakup and, desperate to make Rick jealous, decides to call Kitt up one night and asks him to the school dance. Kitt is taken aback, asking if Monica is serious, but Monica is honest and tells him that it’s all a ploy to make Rick jealous, and maybe it’ll be enough to get Rick to try and win her back. Kitt agrees to her scheme on the condition that there’s an easy way out should things go south, and they both agree to have a clause in the relationship so that it can end at any time with no hard feelings.

Monica gives Kitt a makeover so that he fits in better with her friend group. She takes him to events where he becomes friends with the popular kids, all while he keeps insisting to his fellow pranksters-in-crime, Tom and Felix, that the whole thing is just a scam and that Monica isn’t changing him, though Felix is quick to point out that she just might be. This gets Kitt to wonder if Felix might have a point, and so he starts treating the activities Monica drags him to with a lot more suspicion.

While Kitt does all the activities Monica asks him to with little resistance, he eventually points out that everything they've done so far is what she wants and is only to her benefit. Monica replies that “of course it is”, since the whole ploy was to get Rick to notice her, and there’s really nothing in it for Kitt other than having a girl to hang out with. Kitt doesn’t take to this very well, and so he starts demanding that Monica goes along with him with whatever he wants for the next few days, or they’re through. Monica goes “fine,” and Kitt takes her to a club he used to frequent with Ophelia, where Monica is introduced to his friends and whom Monica actually gets along very well with and even start to bond.

During this night out, however, Kitt has a run in with Ophelia and her new boyfriend. When Monica notices that Kitt is growing increasingly jealous of Ophelia smooching with her new guy right in front of him, she runs to his aid and kisses him, which makes Ophelia jealous in return. This kiss turns out to be a mistake on Monica’s end, for it makes her remember the good times she had with Kitt when they were children, and it eventually sparks some real romantic feelings for him within her. Kitt, however, doesn’t seem to reciprocate them.

Monica keeps her new feelings secret for Kitt, hoping they’ll go away before she gets the chance to try and win Rick’s attention. Ophelia, however, catches on to the ruse and, sporting a resentment towards Monica, decides she wants to seduce Kitt at a party that same weekend. During this party, after feeling somewhat weirded out by Monica clinging onto him more than what would seem necessary for a ruse, Kitt slips away to the backyard only to run into Tom and Felix, who are in the process of setting up a prank meant to humiliate some trust fund kids who happen to be present. Realising that people are going to assume he was involved in the prank as well, Kitt tells the two to drop the scheme and either leave the party or start behaving like adults, which makes Felix come to the conclusion that Monica did change him, and she’s made him soft.

Kitt, pressured by the accusation, decides to pull off the prank by himself just to prove he’s the same old Kitt, which does succeed in getting the trust fund kids humiliated, but also catches Monica in the crossfire, leaving her embarrassed in front of everyone. Realising Kitt’s behind this, Monica drags Kitt to a back room in order to yell him out, ending up confessing the feelings she had for him that are now gone again because she’s reminded of why they drifted apart in the first place. Kitt, only now realising that Monica’s clingy behaviour earlier was because she was falling for him, gets weirded out even more (“This wasn’t part of the deal!”) and demands they exercise the “way out” clause, dropping the charade and go their separate ways.

Monica, already pent up with anger, goes “FINE!” and “breaks up” with Kitt then and there, storming out of both him and the party. She only makes it a few blocks before she starts regretting everything she just said, and against her better judgement she decides to head back to the party, thinking she can talk things over with Kitt so things at least don’t completely end on a sour note. The whole point of the deal was that there weren’t supposed to be any hard feelings between them — although secretly, she hopes she can somehow win him over still.

Back at the party, Kitt is approached by Ophelia, who starts seducing him. Thinking she’s doing this because she wants him back, Kitt decides not to tell her that he just “broke up” with Monica and instead plays along. He starts making out with Ophelia just as Monica walks back in, catching them in the act and getting upset all over again. She runs away before Kitt gets a chance to explain anything, and Ophelia suddenly starts laughing at him, revealing her seduction was all a ploy and that she’s gleeful she’s ruined Kitt and Monica’s “relationship”.

Kitt is both embarrassed and infuriated. He calls out Ophelia’s manipulative nature and storms off, deciding that since literally everything about his social life’s gone down the toilet in a single night, he might as well spend the rest of it getting completely wasted. He calls Felix to pick him up, since he is too drunk to drive, but Felix is angered over how Kitt’s been acting and reminds him that they used to be his friends and not Monica. This angers Kitt in return, causing him to say in slurry voice; “She’s not my friend? No, you’re not my friend. Fuck you,” and hang up on him. Kitt is then forced to stumble his way home drunk, knocking over several trashcans and getting himself into trouble with the local police along the way.

Back at school on Monday, Kitt has a talk with the school principal over his run-in with the local police over the weekend, as well as the prank he pulled on the trust fund kids at the party. The principal tells Kitt that he’s been giving him as many chances as he could for him to better himself, and yet he still reverts to the same old troublemaker. He says it might be time Kitt finally receives repercussions for his actions beyond detention and the occasional letters sent home to his parents, and so he plans to expel him from the school. Kitt is naturally devastated over the news, but he tries to take it in stride in order to prove to the principal he’s willing to atone, and he manages to argue his way to being given one last chance, promising he’ll behave like a saint from now on.

Later that day, Kitt learns through school gossip that Rick broke up with his girlfriend at the same party Kitt “broke up” with Monica at. He also learns that Ophelia got into a fight with her new boyfriend over her seducing Kitt, resulting in them breaking up as well, and he expresses amusement over Ophelia’s misfortune.

The news of Rick being single again, though, gets him thinking about Monica. He decides to call her, trying to explain to her what happened last weekend and that he still wants to help her out despite everything that got between them, since he too remembers the “no hard feelings” that was supposed to be part of the deal. He expresses hope that getting her together with Rick would somehow smooth things over between them.

Monica’s reluctant, tempted to hang up on Kitt since she’s not sure she can push her feelings for him aside. She ultimately errs on the side that if Kitt can help her achieve her original goal (getting her together with Rick), then maybe they can still end things on a way that leaves neither of them unhappy. Monica gets the boyfriend of her dreams, and Kitt gets to walk away without any lingering guilt.

The night of the school dance arrives, and in a heist-movie style preparation scene, Monica lays out her plan to Kitt. Together, they will make use of Kitt’s tendency for pranks to pull off a stunt so big that all eyes will be glued onto them for the entire evening, forcing Rick to notice Monica and become jealous. Kitt, realising this’ll get him in trouble with the dean again and result in him getting expelled, tries to sway Monica towards a more subtle approach, forcing Monica to adjust her scheme on the fly.

At the dance, Kitt and Monica enter hand in hand, drawing the attention from the other students and start a gossip chain amongst them. Things seem to go well for the first hour or so, as news of Monica being Kitt’s plus one reaches Rick’s ear, who had arrived late the festivities without anyone accompanying him. Kitt decides to spy on Rick for a bit, noticing that he is indeed getting more and more jealous of seeing Kitt together with Monica, and he relays the information to Monica via a whisper that may seem seductive to an outsider—which is the point, since he deliberately does it while Rick’s staring at them. Monica gets all excited, and she loudly proclaims she’s going to step away for a bit to “take care of business”, hoping Rick’ll hear it and follow her.

Kitt and Monica separate, and Kitt starts feeling confident things will work out in each of their favors. That’s when he suddenly runs into the principal, who happens to be overseeing the festivities, and he becomes visibly nervous in his presence. The principal wonders why Kitt’s all sweaty, suspecting he might be up to something, and Kitt is forced to confess that the threat of expulsion keeps him up at night, and he’s never felt more pressured than he is now. The principal, seeing the nervous state Kitt’s in, concedes that he may have been hard on him, but he defends it by claiming that Kitt would never have listened otherwise. He still commends Kitt for admitting to the pressure he feels—even if the school dance isn’t the ideal place to do so—since he rarely has students come up to him and actually admit to their faults and willingness to improve. “That alone takes a great deal of strength.”

Feeling generous since it’s near the end of the school year, the principal decides to cut a deal with Kitt—if he can keep his record clean until graduation, and work as hard as he can on improving his grades until then, he’ll slip a good word for him to one of the fancier colleges in the state. Kitt is surprised that the principal would do that for him of all people, especially since it’s unlikely they’ll accept him at his current grade level. The principal confesses that he used to be a bit of a rapscallion too when he was younger, but is quick to point out that Kitt shouldn’t think he’s going easy on him because of that. “You’ve still got a long road ahead of you, kid.”

The principal leaves Kitt to be by himself. Tom and Felix then come up, saying they overheard what the principal said to him. Felix admits he was being an asshole to Kitt during the party, but Kitt apologizes to him back for telling him to go F himself. The three decide to bury their hatchets and be friends again, and Felix even confesses that he thinks Kitt and Monica would make a great couple.

This gives Kitt pause. He asks Felix to clarify, and Felix starts listing off a bunch of stuff he’s seen Kitt and Monica do together over the past few weeks, and how happy it seems to make them both. Kitt reiterates that this whole thing is just a ruse and they aren’t actually a couple and never will be, but Tom starts concuring with Felix that Kitt and Monica actually go great together, and that it may be a mistake to let her slink away with another guy.

“Don’t be stupid, Tom,” Kitt again refutes, “Just because a guy and a girl like to hang out together doesn’t make them a couple, it just means they’re good friends—”

Kitt suddenly freezes. Finally, his thick skull realises something he should’ve thought of weeks ago. He decides he needs to tell what he realised to Monica, but since she’s busy chasing Rick, now might not be the opportune time. Both Tom and Felix are confused over what it is that’s going on in Kitt’s head, but Kitt is seen deliberating to himself over wether this whole ruse may have done more harm to his relationship with Monica than if they never attempted it at all.

Suddenly, the cheerleader that used to date Rick comes up to Kitt, introducing herself as Alice. Kitt asks what Alice wants, and she tells him she’s aware they’ve been eyeing Rick all night, and that Kitt and Monica are doing a con so Monica can win Rick’s attention. Kitt, not wanting to let the game up, tries to pretend he doesn’t know what Alice’s talking about, but Alice tells him that she didn’t come here to start a fight—rather, she came to warn them.

Kitt and his friends tilt their heads in confusion. Alice tells them that the reason she and Rick broke up in the first place is because Rick is actually an incredibly toxic person, bordering on abusive, and that Monica is making a big mistake going after him (“If I were her, I’d run away as far away in the other direction as I could.”). Kitt wants to make sure Alice’s not just saying this as a trick to try and scare them away, and Alice shows him numerous texts she received from Rick while they were dating. These texts show Rick making unreasonable demands over when they should hang out, who else she should or shouldn’t be hanging out with, and even what she should be wearing (calling the dress she intended to wear to the dance “too slutty”). Worse yet, near the end of their relationship he began demanding she be sexually available to him even when she can’t or just doesn’t want to. She knew she had to end things with him, but Rick only got worse after the breakup, to the point that he stalked her on numerous occassions. He only stopped after Alice threatened to call the police on him, and now it seems like he’s out to make Monica his next victim.

Realising the danger Monica’s in, Kitt tells Tom and Felix to spread out and find her before Rick does, though given how long it’s been since Kitt and Monica were last seen together, Kitt fears it may already be too late.

We cut to Monica, who intentionally bumps into Rick outside the washroom. Monica acts like she didn’t know Rick would show up to the dance, asking why he’s here while secretly hoping he intends to woo her in some fashion. Rick, who’s unsettlingly infatuated with Monica at this point, does exactly that, delivering a few compliments to Monica’s looks in not-so-subtle ways. It only takes a few lines of banter before Rick asks why she’s dating a guy like Kitt, given Kitt is known for being a troublemaker. Monica puts on a lie and says she’s only dating Kitt because she feels sorry for him, especially after he got dumped by Ophelia, and that she’s actually gotten tired of him even before the dance. She intentionally says things in a way so as to gaud Rick into confessing his attraction to her, which a few more double entendres between them helps do the trick.

Less than twenty minutes after them meeting, however, Rick suddenly tells Monica she should ditch Kitt and come with him to a party on the other side of town. Monica is actually startled by how fast Rick went from simply flirting with her to then telling her to ditch her plus one, and for the first time, she starts to feel that something’s not quite right. She suggests the two stick around at least until the dance’s over (”Wouldn’t want to embarass Kitt by ditching him right in the middle like that.”), to which Rick suddenly backs away from her and says it’s a limited time offer; he’s heading to the party anyhow, and if she doesn’t want to come with him, that’s on her. Pressured, Monica thinks she should at least tell Kitt about it, but Rick claims it’s better if Kitt’s left in the dark. After all, what if he got jealous?

Monica ponders. On the one hand, she still really wants to go with Rick, but on the other hand, she can’t shake the feeling Rick might be taking her someplace she doesn’t actually want to go. She sidesteps the proposal by asking Rick about him and Alice, inquiring on why they broke up so suddenly right before the dance. Rick, visibly frustrated, claims he found out Alice was cheating on him with a football player from her own school, and after he caught her in the act, she immediately ended things with him. The breakup left him questioning the type of relationships he should be pursuing, and after some ”soul searching”, he seemingly realised that Monica should have been the one he asked to the school dance, not Alice. He confesses his attraction to Monica on the spot, assuring her that it’s not because he’s desperately looking for a rebound girl, but that he’s looking for someone he believes he can trust—someone he knows has been into him for a very long time.

Monica’s stunned by Rick’s confession, but not because she finds it romantic. Rather, it just accentuates her feeling that something’s off, and that he’s not being honest to her about the breakup with Alice. Rick is giving her increasingly bad vibes, and she realizes she might’ve been chasing the wrong guy this whole time. ”I should get back to Kitt,” she says, picking up her stuff before promptly trying to leave, but Rick suddenly grabs her by the arm and asks where she’s going.

“You’ve been crushing on me since freshman year,” Rick says in a threatening voice. ”Do you understand this might just be your one chance at finally getting what you’ve always wanted?”

”Do you understand I’m wearing heels?” Monica retorts, right before she STOMPS on Rick’s foot with said heel!

Rick suppresses his yelp of pain while still trying to restrain Monica. That’s when Kitt comes running, causing a scared Rick to let go of Monica and act like nothing happened. Kitt, however, quickly notices that Monica is basically standing on one leg, as the heel she’d just stomped on Rick and snapped off, becoming lodged into his shoe. Realising what Rick was trying to do to Monica, he confronts Rick about it, cornering the guy and speaking bluntly to him about the things Alice revealed to him earlier.

Rick tries to assert that Alice is making all of her claims up, that she’s trying to get back at him after he broke up with her, calling her a ”crazy chick who just can’t let things go”. This sets off further alarm bells for Monica, and she points out to Kitt that Rick claimed just minutes ago that Alice was the one who broke up with him and not the other way around. Caught in his own lie, Rick starts fumbling his words and folding in on himself, breaking down crying like a toddler.

Monica, more embarrassed by Rick’s behaviour than angry at him at this point, tells Kitt that she’d rather him take her home than them spending another minute in the dance hall. Kitt agrees, and they leave while a wailing Rick is left with Monica’s heel still stuck in his shoe. He pulls it out, seeing it punctured straight through some rather expensive sneakers, and he gets angry.

Out in the parking lot, Kitt helps Monica into his car, seeing how she’s basically hopping around on one leg after snapping her heel. Kitt apologises for not being there to help Monica earlier, but Monica says there’s no need for him to say anything, seeing how there’s no way he could’ve known about who Rick really was and that its her own insistence that got them into this mess. If anything, she should be the one apologising to him for this whole fiasco.

”I thought I knew what I wanted,” she says, ”But chasing that dream nearly came at the expense of everything I should’ve realised I had all along. I’m sorry.”

Kitt is confused as to what Monica means by ”had all along”, fearing that she’s about to confess her love to him and make everything awkward between them again. Monica goes in for a hug, doing little to ease Kitt’s worries. Monica notices Kitt’s uneased expression, and she asks him what’s wrong, forcing Kitt to confess.

The pair decide to sit down on the pavement while Kitt explains how he feels, saying that he believes the ruse was a mistake from the start. He says the risk was always there that one was going to fall for the other, and he wasn’t going to reciprocate the feelings Monica would likely develop for him. Monica asks Kitt what it is he really wants then, saying she won’t judge him for it, and Kitt replies that he wants Monica to be his friend, like they used to be. He acknowledges, however, that the past few weeks has probably made that all impossible, especially after they kissed that one time. He admits that he may come across as a jackass for putting his own feelings above Monica’s, and if what he’s saying is breaking her heart all over again, then he’s truly sorry, but he feels like he can’t just sit and pretend everything’s fine. ”Eventually, things would break down between us and I would just hurt you in some other way, and probably way worse. I don’t want that.”

Monica’s pensive. She admits to Kitt that, at the moment he stepped in to protect her from Rick, there was a part of her that thought maybe the two could end up walking hand-in-hand away from the dance as a couple, and she’d get the happy ending she wanted still, just in a revised manner. ”Then again… that would be the ending of every rom-com ever, wouldn’t it?”

Kitt chuckles, saying it probably would. They both then sit in silence for a bit, before Monica asks what they should do instead. ”Should we just go back to acting like we barely know each other?”

Kitt admits he doesn’t know the answer to that, and Monica concurs she doesn’t either. Perhaps it’s something that can’t be answered while sitting out on the parking lot pavement on dance night.

”…You know, I’ve got some leftover fireworks in my dad’s garage…” Kitt then says. ”You want to go and light some off at the beach while we think about—”

”YES!” Monica responds with haste, surprising Kitt. ”I mean… sure. Let’s do that.”

Kitt smiles. He helps Monica back on her feet and into the passenger seat of his car, and he’s about to get into the driver’s seat when Rick suddenly shows up, holding the broken off heel in his hand.

”You owe me for what you did to my Jordans, you bitch!” he yells at Monica, clutching the heel in his hand like he would the grip of a knife. This spurs Kitt into action, and he tackles Rick to the ground before he even comes close to Monica, leading to a brief altercation between the two on the pavement. Tom and Felix come rushing out, saying they had seen Rick leave the dance hall with what looked like a sharp object in his hand, and they help Kitt restrain Rick before he could hurt anyone with the piece of broken heel. Felix throws the heel out onto the street where it’s run over and demolished by a speeding car, though Monica points out to him seconds later that she’d rather have the heel be given back to her than it be launched out onto an open road, where it could’ve easily caused an accident. Felix shrugs off her comment, saying he did what he thought was the right thing at the moment. ”Well, you’re an idiot for thinking that,” Monica replies.

Rick is held in place before school staff, including the principal, arrive and ask what the hell’s going on. Police are called, and everyone on the scene are questioned before Rick’s taken into custody. After hearing Kitt and Monica’s side of the story and having it corroborated by Tom, Felix, and later Alice, the principal ends up commending the boys for disarming Rick, but also says to them they really should’ve let school security handle the matter. ”How?! There was no one else around!” Tom yells at him, but Kitt signals to Tom to not get into a fight with the principal over it, at least not out in the school parking lot.

Cut to a couple of days later. Kitt and Monica had decided to hold off on their fireworks escapades after the incident with Rick, but now they’re on the beach just after sunset, lighting a few rockets and watching them go boom against a magenta sky. Kitt tells Monica about the deal he made with the principal, and how, if he does well enough to actually get into a good college, there’s a chance he may have to leave town for it. He’s had some time to think in the days since the school dance, and he thinks he might actually try and aim for that, just so he’ll have a chance at a fresh start.

Monica wonders if it isn’t so that he can avoid being around her during this strange and awkward phase of their relationship, but Kitt insists it’s nothing like that, for he intends to keep in touch with her as long as she allows it. It’s more that he thinks getting some distance will allow him to figure out what he really wants in life. Monica expresses her doubt that getting some distance will be the solution to all of Kitt’s problems, but she obviously can’t force him to stay either. Kitt makes her a pinky promise that he’ll keep in touch, regardless of where they both end up. Monica accepts it, saying there’s a part of her that’s at least glad he’s trying to grow as a person, even if it’s not in all the ways she would’ve personally preferred.

Kitt then flips the question back at Monica, asking her what she’s intending to do now that she’s no longer chasing Rick. ”I’ll probably end up chasing some other creep,” Monica jokingly replies, but then admits that she doesn’t really have a plan going forward. Kitt jokingly suggests that he’d set her up with either Felix or Tom, and Monica retorts that she’d rather be stabbed with her own shoe heels than dating either of them, causing Kitt to burst out laughing. ”You do like them, though,” he then says, forcing Monica to admit that hanging out with them isn't as bad as she first feared it would be. ”Tom needs to work on his odor, though,” she then comments, causing Kitt to laugh once more.

Kitt walks Monica home after the fireworks. Arriving at their doorway, Monica admits to Kitt that, had they become a couple, this would’ve been the part where she’d want them to have their big kiss, since it ”would’ve been the right place for it”. Kitt rolls his eyes and sighs, asking Monica if she ever thinks about anything other than boys and relationships, and Monica is forced to try and convince Kitt that she’s got other things going on in her life than just chasing love interests. Kitt teases her a bit, saying he’s not so sure about that, making Monica roll her eyes at him in return.

They both laugh, and Kitt then wishes her goodnight before heading back to his car, which he just now realises he stupidly parked back at the beach. He turns back one last time to see Monica give him a longing, loving gaze (as a means of teasing him back), prompting him to yell ”oh, knock it off!” and cause her to laugh once more.

Once Kitt leaves for real, though, Monica stands at her porch in silence, wondering if she’s making the right choice letting him just walk away. The camera pulls out, and we hear Monica’s voiceover start narrating about how Kitt was the one boy throughout her life in high school who left her questioning what the point of being in love with someone even was. Not in a defeatist way, but rather reflecting over how it isn’t a one-way street. She tells the audience that she ended up graduating from high school single, and is now on her way to a university upstate. Kitt did end up graduating with better grades than it looked like at first, but he’s having to move out of state for his school, meaning he and Monica will only be keeping in touch via social media for the foreseeable future. She expresses optimism they both find what they’re looking for in life, but she doesn’t regret the short time they spent together as a ”couple”, no matter how messy it got. ”In a way, it’s what high school’s all about. It’s all just one big mess.”

Monica is seen smiling, and she then heads into her home, closing the door on the camera before the film cuts to black.

December 5, 2023

@SLAM!

Just want to point out that it’s the wrong title for the Hilda re-release on October 16th. It’s a re-release of the first movie, not the yet-produced sequel. Just want to make that clear to avoid eventual confusion.

November 29, 2023

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- Remastered -

Studio: Cookie Pictures Animation (external production aid by Endless Animation)

Genre: Re-release / Animation (Worldmeander) / Fantasy / Adventure / Comedy-Drama

Director: Jill Culton

Producer: Sebastian Peters

Executive Producers: Luke Pearson, Dana Terrace, Xander B. Irving

Composer: Thomas Newman

Original Song: "Brave Giants" (end credits theme) by Smith & Thell (inspiration)

Animation Style: The film adopts the visual style of the original graphic novels (day scenes are in burnt orange and maroon like permanent autumn, and night scenes are icy blue and dark teal) and uses software based on the "Meander" technology that allows hand-drawn animation tools (brushstrokes, thick, emotive lines, drawn to camera) to be employed and rendered in CG animation without sacrifice while including the added depth and stability of the latter.

Based on: Hilda and the Midnight Giant (2011) and the Netflix animated series Hilda (2018 to present) created by Luke Pearson

Budget (re-release): $5m (original budget $130m)

Release Date: October 23rd

Theater Count: 3,000

Rating: PG for sequences of peril, crude humor, and instances of mild language

Running Time: 118 minutes (1 hour, 58 minutes)

Format: 2D, Dolby Cinema

Original Release: April 7th, Y7

Plot:

Re-release of Hilda and the Midnight Giant, remastered for Dolby Cinema with updated animation and visual effects.

Quote

Hilda has spent her entire life living as a carefree adventurer out in the woods and valleys not far from the city of Trolberg, but when tiny elves attack her and her mother Johanna's house in order to drive them out, Johanna starts having second thoughts about the valley being safe for a young girl like Hilda. Unwilling to give up her home, Hilda embarks on a quest with elven citizen Alfur in order to convince the elf government to let her and Johanna live in peace.

A greater conundrum soon emerges in the form of the Midnight Giant, a creature tall as the mountains he wanders past, and now the race is on to uncover the giant's origins while the elf prime minister begins plotting a nefarious scheme.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xR9vyYv9UoJpM_IV9QR2tigue04dMbQN3LZEq4Ay_X8/edit?usp=sharing (~22,300 words)

November 18, 2023

New predict:

Elemental

Heron

Robot Dreams

Spider-Verse

TMNT/Chicken Run 2/Suzume for the last slot

November 14, 2023

9 minutes ago, Barnack said:

In this case, if they are showing it and trying to sale it to streamer, it will be hard to argue the anti-competitive aspect no ? Specially a movie no else could have made being an WB IP.

The argument isn't over them selling CvM, it's about them trying to scrap it in the first place. That's what Castro is calling predatory and anti-competitive.

October 31, 2023

27th

July 5, 2023

On 7/9/2022 at 4:44 AM, SLAM! said:

Cookie:

Voltron *

Dinosaur (the Disney movie)

The Legend of Zelda

Hilda*

Kid Icarus

Metal Slug

The Wicker Man

Everything We Miss*

Bounty Hamster

Tron

Team Fortress

Florence

Felidae

His Face All Red

Anya's Ghost

John Carter/Barsoom novels

The Mummy

Donkey Kong

Mr. Bean

Goodbye, Chunky Rice

Rollercoaster Tycoon

A Plague Tale

Dropping the rights to A Plague Tale, Goodbye Chunky Rice, and Felidae.

June 26, 2023

3 minutes ago, LegionGPT said:

Can’t wait for the 3rd movie, The The Suicide Squad

The Suicide The Squad

June 25, 2023

The Scavenger Wars

- Remastered -

Studio: Cookie Pictures

Genre: Re-release / Science-fiction / Epic

Directors: Matt & Ross Duffer

Producer: Sebastian Peters

Music: James Newton Howard

Cinematographer: Steve Yedlin

Budget (re-release): $5m (original budget $225m)

Running Time: 162 minutes (2 hours, 42 minutes)

Release Date: January 9th

Theater Count: 3,200

Formats: 2D (4K HDR), Dolby Cinema

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, drug references, and brief strong language

Original release: July 19th, Y3

Plot: A theatrical re-release of the Y3 science-fiction epic The Scavenger Wars, remastered in 4K HDR with updated visual effects. At the tail end of a twenty-year-long war between the last remnants of the human race and an extraterrestrial species called Scavengers, the Scavenger princess Tamara enlists the help of human veteran Joel, his sister Kira, their adoptive father Commander Barks, and the dashing Captain Lucina to stop a plot by the human Grand Admiral, James T. Packer, that would lead to the assured destruction of both species.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SsaPQQBs_mHWwAjSrM4fyrbiJ5JLdthnAX9rgHbLGfQ/edit?usp=sharing (~28,000 words)

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