TE Movie Review: Holidays

It’s smack-dab in the middle of summer, which is scientifically proven to be the farthest point in the year from any holidays that are worth celebrating. Canada Day seems like a distant memory now, and Thanksgiving is basically a lifetime away.

So what better time to watch a movie all about holidays?

I noticed the film simply titled Holidays on Netflix after burning through the first half of the new season of BoJack Horseman the other night, and though I tend to shy away from horror movies a little more now that I live alone (I’m a big scaredy baby), I knew in my heart that I needed to watch this one. And not even in a “put it in the queue” sense. No, I played that sucker right then and there.

holidaysban

Holidays is a horror anthology, a genre that I had never really warmed to until very recently. It is composed of eight short films, each themed around a different holiday, and each by a different writer/director. It’s a lot like The ABCs of Death, but a little more substantial, because you’re not splitting the run time between 26 bite-size shorts. The eight stories here definitely vary in quality just about as much as the vignettes in The ABCs of Death, though. I’ll go through them in order of least to most enjoyable.

Mother’s Day – I thought this was the weakest story of the bunch, but that’s not the most damning criticism, because it’s not really bad. It could definitely be more interesting if fleshed out into a full story, but it just pales in comparison to the rest of the stories featured in Holidays. What bothered me the most is the, uh, “effect” at the end, which… is hard to describe without spoiling it. But I rewound it a couple of times just to check it out, and there’s just some weird spatial issues. It wouldn’t be worth most people’s time to pick at a half-second shot like this, but it bugged me because it was it was just so slightly off. If you’re really curious, but don’t want to watch the movie, the shot in question is like the second result if you type “holidays movie” into Google image search.

St Patrick’s Day – Again, not really a bad tale, but just totally friggin’ weird. Not really that horrifying, either? There’s a disturbing bathtub scene, but that’s the worst of it. Actually, it’s a lot like the Mother’s Day short, but with a slightly different bent. It’s also longer, and the ending is completely bonkers. They’re both stories about women who end up pregnant with non-human babies. Babies is the wrong word entirely for both scenarios, but I am not smart enough to know what the most fitting word would be. Anyway, this one’s got a little more characterization in both the mother and the folks around here, whereas Mother’s Day is more about the events than the people involved in them. I typically prefer stories that are more about the characters.

Halloween – This short was written and directed by Kevin Smith. Which means that I was very excited to see it, but was unsure about where it would land on the quality scale (EDITOR’S NOTE: Ryan, you still need to watch Tusk). This is the story of three camgirls and their abusive boss. When he won’t give them the night off for Halloween and then attempts to rape one of them, the girls knock him out and then get even. Or, I don’t know, maybe a little more than even. Depends on how many times he successfully violated these women. Anyway, it’s pretty gross, and I don’t think it even makes sense? Also, there’s a really cringe-inducingly awful monologue about halfway through that really takes the cake. Like, uuuuugh, I know you can write better than this, Kevin Smith. It’s probably the actual worst short of the bunch, but those other two were just so tepid that I had to rank them lower.

Valentine’s Day – This is the opening short of the collection, and it really only ranks low on my list because it’s totally predictable from the first minute. It is the story of a young girl who has a crush on her swimming coach and is bullied by her classmates. Can you guess what happens yet? Yeah. I do like the way that the main antagonist’s shield breaks down as the story comes to its climax, how it strips away her toughness and shows her vulnerability when there’s nobody around to posture for. Said climax is slow and brutal, and the conclusion wraps it up perfectly. Quite opposite of Mother’s Day, this story definitely works best as a short, and would really lose a lot if it was stretched out any longer.

Easter – You  know when you’re a kid, and you start thinking about the holiday mascot stories that your parents tell, and start asking questions? That’s what this story is about. The first half is just a little girl pissing her mom off, asking too many questions about the Easter Bunny and Jesus and if Daddy is ever coming home. She’s unusually terrified by the thought of seeing the Easter Bunny, so of course, that’s what happens. Sort of. The second half is definitely surreal and feels a lot like the kind of thing that you’d see from Guillermo Del Toro. I enjoyed the creative twist they employed here, and the downer ending really stands out from the rest. Easter may only be halfway up the list here, but that’s only because the top four are almost all equally good. It’s all top-notch stuff from this point on.

Christmas – I’d just like to point out that the main character here is played by Seth Green. That’s already got my attention. In this short film, he plays a down-on-his-luck husband and father, who lost out on the year’s hottest toy on Christmas Eve when a shopkeeper sells the last unit to some smug douche. Said douche has a heart attack in the parking lot, and Seth Green proceeds to swipe the VR headset thingy and leave the man to die like a chump. It’s a very Twilight Zone kind of story, where the headset shows you content tailored personally for you, and of course Seth Green gets some very shocking visuals when he tries it out. Also, there are two twists! Both of them good! Great, even! The two shorts couldn’t be any more different, but I cannot for the life of me decide if I prefer Easter of Christmas. They’re both amazing, so let’s call it even.

New Year’s Eve – Scene: A schlubby apartment. A woman is bound and gagged in a chair. A clearly unwell man laments that their relationship is lacking, and has his gun jam on him twice before he successfully blasts her brains all over the wall. Cut to a young woman sitting in her apartment, bored and alone, browsing a dating website. She stumbles across the profile of the man we saw earlier, no way to know about his murderous tendencies. On New Year’s Eve, the two meet for dinner. This can not end well. But it kind of does? At its climax, the story folds in on itself and becomes darkly hilarious. The final shot is so entertaining, and makes for the perfect ending to this anthology. It is bittersweet, however, because I keep thinking about how much my ex-wife would love this short. Oh well.

Father’s Day – I said that the top four shorts were all pretty evenly matched, but that was sort of a lie. Father’s Day really goes above and beyond. It is amazing, and beautiful, and haunting, and I simply cannot stop thinking about it. Partly because it is amazing and beautiful and haunting, and partly because I don’t have the level of understanding necessary to really get what happened. Perhaps it is supposed to be ambiguous, though. All I know for sure is that it hit all the right buttons for me. It told a very affecting story with simplicity and elegance, with the kind of horror that makes you yearn to know more, though its brevity makes it all the more enchanting. I want to watch this short again and again and again. I want to read analyses of it from other enthusiasts. I want to have a service that can direct me to similar content. I loved it, and if a person could marry a short film, I’d be on my knee proposing to this one.

So there you have it. All of your questions about Holidays answered, and probably a lot of answers for questions that you didn’t have. Wait, no. I didn’t really go into the specifics of any of the segments, so you probably have a ton of unanswered questions. Welp, this is a dumb paragraph and we all know it, but that’s become somewhat of a tradition here, so I’m going to keep to it. Professionalism be damned! This is a hobbyist website, and I’ll write stupid conclusions if I damn well want to!

Skyward Sword Replay: Week 7

Between Monster Hunter Generations and the new season of BoJack Horseman, I barely touched Skyward Sword last week. Didn’t accomplish a whole lot, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

My first objective was to round up some treasures from Goddess Cubes. Which, of course, was a short nightmare because it required flying to and fro in the sky. I know I’ve said it before, but flying is super tedious. Absolutely the worst part of the game. The sky isn’t really that big, just enough to create a good sense of scale, but it feels so massive and empty when you have to fly from one end to the other. Gah.

I also discovered that I had secretly gotten a new power: the ability to dowse for certain types of collectibles. I learned this after collecting a few more gratitude crystals and visiting Batreaux for a prize (rupees). Fi popped out afterward and told me I could now dowse for gratitude crystals. Then she popped out again after I upgraded a few weapons and gave me the ability to dowse for upgrade materials. I suppose it’s a good power to have, but most of the time, random materials lying around are just amber relics, which I already have like thirteen million of.

The best one, when I went back on plot, was when Fi let me start dowsing for Goddess Cubes. Which is mostly great, because they’re the big treasures, which can be great things like power-up medals and heart pieces but are sometimes less helpful things like rupees. Maybe extra ammo satchels? I kind of hope not. I just spent a lot buying and upgrading a new quiver because 20 arrows isn’t really enough. It’d be a shame to find one for free now.

Continue reading Skyward Sword Replay: Week 7

Talking about Ninja Turtles: Volume 2

My journey through the entire series of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon continues. Last time I made a big wall of text about it, I had just finished up the fifth season: the halfway point of the series. Let’s go over some stray observations I have about seasons six through eight.

  • The turtle colour/voice flubs are still out in full force. I would have thought that this was a problem that would have been ironed out by this point, but I think it might actually be getting worse as we move on. At least I’ve been noticing more instances of it. You never see such egregious errors in other cartoons, so I can only imagine that it’s the result of having four characters that look exactly the same.
  • Season six was basically just your normal average season. Though a run of 16 episodes is positively quaint after the massive number of episodes in seasons three and four.
  • The first half of season seven was produced for season four, but held back for whatever reason. So that means that you’re rolling back a couple years worth of animation improvements, and it’s visibly uglier than the latter half of the season.
  • Also, it goes back to using the original intro sequence, which IMO is the better of the two.
  • By this point, Michaelangelo has permanently traded in his nunchaku for a grappling hook. Which I suppose is more useful, but way less cool. And it’s all thanks to those super-lame Europeans who thought nunchucks were too violent.
  • But swords and laser blasters were okay? Get bent, Europe.
  • The first half of season seven also happens to be a hole “TMNT visit Europe” series, which makes for a nice change of pace and allows for a little cultural edutainment, but the stories go to pot. It made sense that when Krang and Shredder were constantly attacking New York, the Turtles would always be there to stop them. But then somehow they always manage to be attacking exactly the European location that the Turtles just happen to be in at the time. Why not attack New York when you know that the Turtles are away in Europe and won’t be there to stop you? Or vice versa? You guys have a teleporter that can take you anywhere. Steal something from anywhere else in the world.
  • It would make way more sense if the Turtles simply faced other villains while on their vacation.
  • The other half of season seven not only goes back to being more visually appealing, but the storylines also get a hack of a lot better than ever before. Well, some of them. The episode where they travel back in time to an ancient Japan where everyone speaks perfect English was a little silly. Overall, though, much better stories.
  • The episode “Invasion of the Krangazoids” shows us a glimpse of what Krang’s true form looks like, when he creates clones of himself that evolve into giant reptilian monsters. But it also made me consider that it doesn’t make any sense that Krang’s brain was removed from his body as a punishment for his war crimes. It’s more than I want to type out, but just think about it a bit for yourself. No wonder that’s never mentioned in any other incarnation of the TMNT.
  • Tokka and Rahzar show up in season seven. That’s cool. Except that Rahzar got a significant intelligence boost while Tokka remains kind of a stupid baby.
  • Everything goes way off the rails in season eight. The intro and theme song change. The visual quality improves considerably, but the visual style goes to poop. April gets a new costume. TMNT now wants to be X-Men. It’s crazy. Complete insanity.
  • Let’s start with the intro. The theme song has gone from awesome to some kind of gross 90’s rock abomination. It also seems really long. Or maybe it just feels that way because it’s awful. Oh and also it intercuts footage from the cartoon with footage from the live-action movies. It makes zero sense.
  • And on a separate point, all the cartoon footage is pried out of the episodes, rather than being completely unique animation like the other intros. It’s so lame. I just can’t get over how lame it is.
  • It’s kind of fun that the season is a single long storyline, rather than Shredder’s capers mixed with random other one-off villains.
  • Oh right, X-Men. Channel 6 is now calling the TMNT (all mutants, really) an evil scourge and the people of New York are terrified of them, even though they’re obviously out to do good. Also there is an organization of mutants that are trying to take over and establish mutants as the dominant species. Sound familiar at all?
  • The art is way darker and more detailed, but not as good. I hate the change to the Turtles’ bandannas, specifically. Their more angular appearance isn’t too bad, and makes them look a little more in line with the 2003 TMNT. I mostly just dislike that the New York sky is now constantly reds and purples, and that even the water is rarely ever blue any more. The attitude shift is not selling me, especially since the scripts are still pretty hammy, so there’s a very noticeable mood dissonance.
  • I like April’s new jacket and shoes. So much less garish than the yellow jumpsuit and white boots.
  • I was actually really shocked when Shredder asploded the Channel 6 building. Like, this is a Saturday Morning Cartoon. It’s not supposed to have major events that don’t get magically wiped away at the end of the episode. But it does, and it influences the entire rest of the season. Like I said before, there’s a much higher level of continuity in season eight, to the point where it could almost be a stand-alone mini-series, much like the first season.

I am already aware that things take another sharp turn in season nine, but I don’t know all of the specifics. I guess we’ll just have to start watching and see!

Skyward Sword Replay: Week 6 (for real)

It was a mad rush to burn through the last few dungeons of Skyward Sword last week, as Monster Hunter Generations came out on Friday and, well, Monster Hunter trumps all else for me. Even then, I only had Tuesday and Thursday evening to play, and those were also shortened by the need to prepare food and engage in physical activity. Needless to say, I did not make it to the end.

To begin, here’s one of those stray observations: Fi is super creepy when she “sings.” With those big, dead eyes and a mouth that flaps open and closed like a wooden dummy, she is right up there with the Five Nights at Freddy’s animatronics on the Nightmare Fuel scale. Considering that the design docs in Hyrule Historia suggest that she’s supposed to come off as a shy teenager, they really missed the mark there. Simply animating her mouth better would have solved the problem, but it slides up and down so mechanically, and not at all synced with the music, that it just comes off as unsettling.

Continue reading Skyward Sword Replay: Week 6 (for real)

The Steam Backlog Reduction Initiative

It has come to my attention lately that I have a whole buttload of unplayed games on Steam. Like, so many. I’ve been keeping a running tab of all the games I purchase since April of 2015, and here’s a snippet of it just to give you an idea.

gameslog

There is a ton of grey on this list, and so many entries are marked with the B for Bundle. If I were to remove all of the game that I’d purchased in bundles and from Steam sales, it would be significantly shorter. Keep in mind, of course, that nearly all of these came at dirt-cheap prices. But those small dollar amounts do add up, and I’m left wondering how much I’ve spent on games that I’ll likely never even install, much less play.

While free time is at a premium, and I don’t necessarily think that the best use of my time is playing games that I don’t care about, I am bothered by the copious blocks of red on my spreadsheet. It’s a problem that could be easily solved by simply deleting said spreadsheet, but I can’t help it. I love the data.

There is some merit to trying out new games to see what clicks, though. I’ve spent much of my life playing through demo discs (ahh, the good old days) and random demos pulled from the various console shops. There was a point in time where a friend and I would randomly load up SNES ROMs in hopes of finding some hidden gems. Not to mention way, way back in the day when one could rent whole video games for a few days at the measly cost of $5. So there is a bit of a precedent for booting up random games for a few minutes to see what they’re all about.

That’s the mentality I’m going to take here: I want to at least try out a large portion of these games just to see if any of them stick. I don’t necessarily need to beat them. Heck, I don’t even always beat the games that I really like. I just want to comb through the list and find out what kind of games are hiding out in there. And of course, I’m sure that at least a few of them will be worth writing about.

So that’s where we’re at. These projects that I start never usually last very long, so expect this to end probably by the fall or so. But I’m going to try anyway!

I should probably do this as a podcast or video series or some other more current format, but whatever. I’m old-school, so I’m just going to write about anything that tickles my fancy.

A cute little babby!

So Nintendo announced this thing out of nowhere this morning:

nes_classic_mini

It’s a little baby NES! With 30 games installed on it! You know damn well that I’m now lusting over this thing more than anything else in the world. 30 games for $60! Okay, it’s going to be more like $75-80 Canadian, but that’s still a way better deal than Virtual Console! And I only have like 8 of the included games, so it’s basically a completely justified purchase.

It’s got Mega Man 2! And Final Fantasy! And Kirby’s Adventure! and Bubble Bobble!

And it’s so darned cute! That’s the best part!

(Seriously I am unrealistically excited about this little novelty box.)

Feel the burn

Should you happen to follow me on Facebook, you probably already know that I’ve taken up running as a way of trying to get into better shape this summer. In my case, it’s really closer to awkward jogging, but that still a lot better than my usual zombie-like shambling. I’m putting a lot of effort into it, too. I try to get out at least every second day, and if I really feel like I can’t push myself that hard, I’ll still make sure to go for a walk, just so that I’m doing something.

Results are mixed thus far. While my legs are pretty much constantly sore from being put through the most activity they’ve seen since I was a child, I do typically feel really great after a run. Oddly enough, despite my massively increased exercise and not eating any differently than I used to, my belt is actually feeling tighter. Which sucks. I’ve also gained a couple kilograms, but I’m going to chalk it up as muscle (I’ve also been working my dumbbells harder than ever). If I accepted it as fat weight, I’d instantly lose all motivation to keep going.

Also, when I was out yesterday, I slipped in a puddle of sludge and tore up my knee a little. I didn’t realize it right away, but it got pretty bloody! Check it out!

Continue reading Feel the burn

Junk Food from Solo Market

solomarket

Some number of weeks ago -I’ve forgotten already because I’m a senile old fart- I had taken a vacation week off work. And when the cards of fate line up so that my parents and I are on vacation at the same time, that can only mean one thing: a day-long road trip to some places around rural Manitoba.

“Day-long” may be puffing it up a bit, though. It’s more like half a day at most. Truth be told, we all get bored of seeing a whole lot of nothing fairly quickly.

This year’s road trip began with a tasty brunch out at a funky little place just outside of the city. I don’t remember what it was called, but it’s squirreled away behind two golf courses. It was so pretty and rustic and woodly, I immediately brought up how I felt like I had wandered onto the set of Gilmore Girls. To which my father let out an exasperated sigh, and the rest of us enjoyed the rest of the day making Gilmore Girls references.

That’s not really relevant to this post though. I just needed an excuse to bring up Gilmore Girls.

Continue reading Junk Food from Solo Market

July’s token post about music

I’ve got to keep this blog from being entirely about video games, right?

So, I bought another Ninja Sex Party album. It’s called Under The Covers, and it is, appropriately, a cover album.

Ninja_Sex_Party_-_Under_the_Covers_(Artwork)

I’d say that it’s split about evenly between songs I know really well, and songs that I’d never heard before. On one hand, you’ve got age-old favourites like “Take On Me” and “Jump.” And there are two Rush songs. Two! That’s so cool! Then there’s stuff I’d never heard, like “The Burning Down” by King’s X. Probably my favourite track on the album, in fact, is the cover of “We Close Our Eyes” by Oingo Boingo, which I had absolutely no familiarity with before this album.

I swear to you that I’ve never heard Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” in my life, but I knew deep in my heart that it was a Michael Jackson song the first time I played it.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty solid as far as cover albums go. I can’t deny that I just love Danny’s voice, but they also make some interesting changes to each song. Like the bass solo in “We Close Our Eyes” that I love more and more every time I listen to it, or adding a piano to “Wish You Were Here.” I don’t feel that they really go so far as to make any of the songs their own, but that’s alright. The point of the album is to pay tribute to the bands that NSP loves, not to make a name for themselves through these covers.

The thing that really makes this album stand out (for better or for worse) is that in a way, it’s not really an NSP album. Their usual thing is comedic lyrics with fun electronic pop music. This is… it’s like the complete opposite. It’s still a lot of fun, but it just doesn’t feel like NSP at all. Not a single swear. Not a single explicit reference to sex. No Danny singing about his junk. These aren’t bad qualities, but like I keep saying: it’s not really NSP.

Regardless, I love this album and listen to it constantly. I don’t know how many times I’ve been sitting at my computer and go to play one song and then end up listening to the whole album. It’s great, and I would absolutely force my loved ones to listen to it if I had any avenue to do so.