The Usual Suspects (1995)
Meh
Meh
A perfect, innocent rap angel is oppressed and beset all sides by the evil devil people who surround him and live only to ruin and destroy him. An unbiased depiction of Eminem's early life.
First you watch a bunch of great-looking cutscenes, then create a save slot (press one button, looks really cool), then sit back for some more cutscenes. Then walk for about 15 seconds, then talk to a guy who offers to show you a long cutscene (psychically). Then your character walks across a large field. Then, after nearly an hour invested, the gameplay finally starts and it is awful.
There's not much going on in terms of level design or game mechanics, so they just made the controls difficult - hyper sensitive and your aim is constantly dragging - to disguise the fact. This is what happens when you spend all your budget on cutscenes.
I've not liked video games before, but this gave me a special kind of profound disappointment, not commensurate with the ~$5 I payed for it on the Wii Store (RIP).
I spent roughly twenty years hearing about how great this is and hearing it called a classic. It's the same boring Mario look and the same boring Mario plot (Bowser kidnaps the Princess... with a twist). It's the most tedious gameplay a JRPG has ever had, and in a genre that's driven by story, you can't do much with characters whose personalities are one word or less.
The second chapter, called 'Romantic Psychology', is a rambling essay about modernism that doesn't even slightly imply what it has to do with the romantics. And as far as essays about modernism go, it's terrible. It's completely unfocused, uninteresting, pointless, and apparently wasn't even glanced at by an editor. I stopped reading after that.
Ridiculous. And cowardly. If he'd made this movie about his own country's military, and not an country with fighting on its own soil, he'd have had his career destroyed. If Kubrick hadn't made it, no one would take this seriously.
This has my vote for worst James Bond movie. Even a silly movie like Moonraker has its charms and some good action sequences.
James Bond is completely out-of-place in a blaxploitation film. Roger Moore is bland and obnoxious; he was never the best Bond, but he's a lot more watchable in any other Bond film. Every scene is flat and tiresome and misses the mark. In the dramatic climax, the main villain gets blown up like a balloon (pictured).
In the very last scene, we find out the moral of the story is that Voodoo is real, even though Voodoo was only tangential to the plot. It's like if Godfather ended with Michael turning to the camera and saying, "I guess what we've all learned in these last few months is that oranges are delicious".
I must be some kind of idiot, because when I read about bored rich people being bored of boring situations, I don't quiver with excitement.
I got to the racist chapter, and that was a it for me.
Why bother trying to decode the author's intentions? Maybe he didn't mean it and was trying to say something about his characters? I tried to convince myself of that for the first few pages, but by the end of the chapter telling myself that would be nothing but wilful blindness. Maybe it was more acceptable back then - I almost always get a 'standards of the day' lecture when I write something like this - but does that mean we should shrug it off? Five years later Hitler was a quite popular writer and normal by the standards of the day.
Trash is trash, no matter how much you analyse it or pretend that seeing it through ten layers of witty detachment makes it any better.
Roughly the point where I lost interest in the game. You wouldn't believe how drab and sloggy and time-consuming and monotonous this stretch of map is.
When I was about 15, a friend of mine strongly encouraged me to play this. It's too bad, because I probably would have liked it if I'd played it back then. Now a complicated RPG feels like doing chores, and what teenage me would have thought was dark and edgy seems bland and brownish-grey.
A boring checklist of edgy things you've seen a million times.
This, along with the indie rock popular around the same time, created the obnoxious precedent that affluent white guys whining about breaking up with their girlfriends is culturally significant artwork.
This book is meant to make fun of Leibniz. It's fairly funny and I enjoyed it as a teenager, before I knew anything about Voltaire or Leibniz or most of what this book talks about. Teenage me just enjoyed the raw sarcasm and smugness.
Leibniz has a spotty record as a philosopher, but his contributions to mathematics go far beyond the calculus you normally hear about. His fingerprints are all over pure math and formal logic and computer science and computer hardware and engineering in general. Next time you're in an airplane and it doesn't crash, thank Leibniz twenty times over.
Voltaire, on the other hand, was a rich, sarcastic dickhead whose rants against Jewish and Black people were extremely racist even by the standards of the 18th century. Screw this book.
This painting accurately represents the pain of the boredom I felt when reading this book. I can't believe someone read Prometheus Bound and thought this was the direction the story was supposed to take.
At first I thought, "This is funny, but the main character is a bit of a Mary Sue." Then I got to the Nashville episode. The entire episode involves Aziz's character taking a girl out on a perfect date. The plot doesn't start till about minute 21 (75% of the way through the episode), when he makes a mistake but then makes up for it in a charming way.
Can you imagine being so self-absorbed that you would write an entire script about how attractive and wonderful and funny and kind you are, and then assemble a film crew halfway across the country so that you could have it broadcast to the world? I don't think I've ever been so embarrassed for someone I've never met.
This mess of a book is badly in need of an editor. The name alone hints that the author couldn't decide what book he was writing.
His observations on history are mainly uninteresting. His observations on historians range from boring to catty.