What's the most unforgivable sin done in media that you're still bitter about?
I still can't stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That's a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they're fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it'd make the Hobbit films blush.
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When I was 11, I was annoying my mom a lot so naturally, she lunged at me with a butchers knife.
When I was 16, she beat me in the head with her fists.
I'm 55 now and she died when I was 30. You know what's weird? I wish she had stabbed me when I was 11. She would have had to explain that. Then again, if someone had seen her threaten me for once. My half-sister saw her beat me in the head with her fists and Mama suffered no consequences so she probably wouldn't have then either.
The Electric State movie.
Product placement along side fundamental changes to the tone and world.
"Second screen content"
In reference to books words->minutes of film
https://vweisfeld.com/?p=3944
Firefly getting cancelled.
The Expanse getting cancelled.
I’m not a dumb man but I never could figure out the expanse, I’d always get lost of what was going on
I had a hard time with season 1 because it kept jumping between so many different things. I gave up on it then tried again after a couple years after hearing. It got sooo good and then got even better. Then I read the books. In the show they needed to introduce a character earlier in the story whereas in the books it's not until book 2. So that contributed to some of that disjointedness.
I was upset about the expanse too. Talked to a coworker for a while about it and he said go read the books, just start at book 7 you really won't be missing much. So I did and immediately knew the 30 year time jump wouldn't have worked on screen. We still might get more a few years down the line when the actors age up. Also I'm glad I got into the books it was the spark that got me into audiobooks. Started listening to the expanse authors new series and I think that's getting picked up by Amazon as well.
CNN leaving the mics on so Elizabeth Warren could try and embarrass Bernie Sanders on national TV and hurt his campaign.
Star wars. I just have such a love/frustration relationship with it. This includes stuff produced by George Lucas btw.
I feel like it tries to appease all crowds. The family friendly crowd, the autistic nerdy crowd, the politics obsessed crowd and so on.
Andor for example is peak star wars, because it's made specifically for one audience. No one's taking their 6yo to watch this.
The problem is when a kids' show has the prerequisite plot for a show with a totally different audience.
Take the clone wars for example. It started as nothing more than a kids' show. Then, it ended dark. Same with rebels. Look at episode 3. Amazing amazing plot with the transformation of the Republic into the empire. And then you have jar jar binks.
Let's not even begin to talk about Disney.
Star wars just has so much potential due to its huge world and the Jedi/sith stuff. But it's just so frustrating to see how such art can be wounded by the will to earn money.
I know this isn't "the most unforgivable sin" or whatever, but I suppose it's definitely up there. It's the sin of painting an angry face emoji on top of a beautiful and detailed painting of an unimaginabley cruel monster, just so that more toys can be sold.
Eh, all 3 movies were pretty good.
A lot of the original episodes of Pokemon were never dubbed in Danish. I will never forget. Never forgive.
Almost everything JJ Abrams has touched.
I would agree but with the caveat- everything jj Abrams has touched that he didn't make originally
His original works are fine. Super 8 is up there with some of the better modern scifi movies, his work on lost is legendary. But then you have both star trek and star wars... what a failure to both.
I liked Lost for the most part, but he is way too fond of throwing out too many unresolved mystery boxes.
Aw. I actually liked his Star Treks...pretty much in the same way I like remixes or covers of my favorite songs, anyway.
They canceled season 3 of Outer Range and I will never stop being pissed about that.
The Sci-Fi channel canceling Farscape.
I think you are too late with that hope. If not directly Silmarillion, The Rings of Power does try to further exploit the story leading up to the age of LotR. And it is as bad as could be anticipated. I couldn't watch more than 3 episodes...
Crash of the Titans. Absolute travesty.
Media or entertainment? Kinda different animals.
Pretty much any book-to-movie adaptation. 90% are awful. It’s a rare case when they’re better or equal adaptations.
General media? The spinelessness of our news organizations across the board. A free press doesn’t exist, they bend a knee to their corporate billionaire overlords. They don’t tell the whole truth, they hold back, they don’t call a spade a spade. They should be part of the apparatus protecting the common person from the bullshit the rich and government try to sweep under the rug. At best, they’re complicit in their silence, at worst they’re active participants aiding the rich.
What I was going to say.
The "reputable" sources of information we were told to trust in school for our typical papers rate a solid F tier, with Wikipedia often providing both higher quality, accurate, and nuanced information despite being a tertiery source.
I can't name a single major news outlet in the USA worth watching or reading aside from maybe PBS.
Creating consent for the Gaza genocide
Anything star trek after ST:Enterprise
The movies were all dumbed down pew pew flare flare versions of previous star trek movies, the series were horrendously dumb and badly written, in a show that is about the stories, ethics, morale, etc.
It was awful and the only shining light was the series "The Orville" by Seth McFarlane who is a huge star trek fan and it shows.
People really need to start getting more brave with fresh new IPs. As much as I'd love to see old favourites rebooted/renewed you can tell when there's too many cooks in the kitchen and they ruin a good thing that's already reached a conclusion; good or not.
I like foundation, it gaves star trek vibes some episodes, more star wars lately
The foundation series is tough. It is simultaneously one of the absolutely least faithful and most disrespectful adaptations of science fiction literature of all time, and a really good show. I wish I could watch it without the lens of the books buuuut I can't.
Lower Decks was brilliant tho
Cable “news”. It is entirely responsible for the current state of things.
Propaganda, you mean. I don't think news actually exists anymore on US propaganda networks
Hence “news” in quotes.
Doctor Who going to Disney. I haven't even watched it. Maybe it's ok, but classic British shows never really survive getting Americanised. I lost interest about halfway through the Jodie Whittaker era - specifically The Timeless Child nonsense.
It sucks but it wasn’t Americanized, Chris Chibnall (English) just ran it into the ground
Didn't they bring back Russell T Davis for that series?
He came back after the Jodie Whitaker bit, for the current doctor, but I haven’t checked in.
I lost it at the moon egg
Yeah, the cracks were starting to appear, so to speak, in the Capaldi era.
It isn't.
The original plan was to make two Hobbit movies, but after the release of the first one they decided to expand it to three. I think two movies would have been alright, although the whole thing was way too intense and violent and digital.
Yeah I wandered in while my family was watching one of them, and there was a God of War bossfight on a frozen lake in the middle of the movie. Rotate left, watch the swing from above, dash in to get the strike...
My conclusion was that these films are more padded than a drag queen's ass.
I actually maybe wouldn't have minded two movies. Then again, I say it should've been one 3-hour long film and given the extended treatment the LOTR films got. It'd be one long, but eventful movie.
Check out the M4 Book edit. It reduces the trilogy into one 4 hour film and removes anything that wasn't in the book.
Or a short series, the story is very episodic.
I cannot forgive the fact that we had two times of writer strikes. They literally make your gold. What the fuck are yall doing
But they have to pay some of the gold to the people who actually make the gold! This is unacceptable, they need a system where they buy a computer that makes gold and then they just keep it all. That's why I can't fucking buy RAM so I can upgrade my PC to the current generation.
The Enders Game movie. Just WTF, every part of it was worse than the book.
Except possibly Harrison Ford. He is great as a gruff arsehole, past his prime, but still awesome.
Just looked it up on IMDb, how can it possibly have a 6.6?
Honestly, it was a book that should have been two movies. You make the first movie end with Ender's team winning in the academy. You them make the second movie's depiction of the battles more abstract so you prepare the audience for another triumphant win, just to find out that Ender committed a genocide.
The whole point of the book, is Ender wrestling with the fact that he was being trained to commit a genocide on the largest scale; then the bombshell, oh BTW that last 'training' was the real thing, "yay we won!!!!".
The next book is Ender coming to grips with and trying to find some recourse for his crime.
The movie glosses over all of the nuance and complexity.
Which is why I think a two book adaptation works better in this case.
The movie does a better job in the first half, where the use of Ender is more abstract and the movie can use the extra time to lay out some of Ender's ideas on when to use force. Then, the climax of the movie is Ender winning the final academy battle and setting up expectations in the next movie.
A whole movie focusing on the campaign, obscuring the campaign to make it seem to Ender and the audience that this is more training, and using the first movie's pacing as a way to set up audience expectations. It also gives time for Ender on screen to see this nuance and complexity so the audience comes into the final battle understanding Ender's viewpoint before the rug pull.
I would watch this. It sounds exactly like what it should have been!
Here, try this: https://m4studios.github.io/hobbit-book-edit/
Was gonna mention this. Cuts about half of each film into one 4 hour film, and is incredibly well done imo. I watch it a few times a year, if it didn't exist I don't think I would have rewatched the trilogy at all.
seems like someone put a lot of work into this (especially with all the available subtitles)
will have to check it out!
There are two edits that are worth checking out. My fav is the one that leaves only what was in the books. It's the only thing that's made the movie watchable for me.
This post seems like a sin. No details, no names, no links, no nothing.
The Hobbit fan edits that cut out all the crap.
Battlestar Galactica, and any other time the writers are just writing down the rabbit hole without having any clue what story they're going to tell. The writers of Battlestar introduced one mystery after another and worked to sell the audience on the belief that they were going somewhere good with all this. They had jack shit and I'm not getting that time back.
Some other offenders:
Star Wars sequels: how the fuck did that get greenlit for like a billion dollars without any living soul knowing what the plot was gonna be
Mulholland Drive: fuck you David Lynch, explain this shit or GTFO. If I want dream logic I'll go to sleep
Lost: J J Abrams you spoiled little rich kid fuckass
Times that didn't happen:
Andor: just an adamantine brick shithouse of storytelling
OMG, Lost! That show sucked and yet so many people I knew loved it. I wondered if it was sunk cost cause the first two seasons were captivating. The rest of the series just dragged on.
Lost and Battlestar Galactica aired approximately in parallel. Being a sci-fi fan, I watched BSG, of course, but many friends watched Lost. It definitely had more mainstream appeal and a higher profile. But from the sounds of things, it really lived up to its name! I’ve always been glad I got into BSG, even if it also went off course for a while.
IIRC BSG got screwed in part by the Hollywood writers’ strike. Did that impact Lost as well?
I'm certain it went exactly like this
https://youtu.be/tpLb7SsqXnM?t=4824
The song "I see fire" was good, if you think of it singing about a volcano eruption/nuke instead of Smaugh.
Are videogames media also ye? Cause I can think of many many examples that I could honestly just do a new post about it
The question was meant to be broad.
The worst part was if I wore any of my many Flash or Green Lantern shirts people would assume it was a Big Bang reference. I had to explain, that no, I was just a nerd.
Original source (down?) / Archived copy
(Love the meme)
My first girlfriend loved that shit. It didnt make it past a few months, because she constantly braught me in comparison to one character due to me having autism. Go figure
They just released yet another spinoff last month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Fails_to_Save_the_Universe
I watched a review of all the BBT series and their spin-offs recently, and they had pretty positive feelings about that. It sounds pretty fun, and how bad can it be if Brian Posehn is in it?
I was wondering that myself. I hate big bang theory with such a seething passion that I’m not sure I can give this a chance 😩
I guess a decade of slop media where nothing is sacred and everything must be exploited has hardened my heart from caring about anything anymore. A younger me cared about why the Star Wars sequels are bad or that they cancelled Firefly too quickly or that Community fired Dan Harmon. But all these properties are just tools of corpo oppression at this point. Art doesn't have the same impact if they are just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them.
I firmly believe that there are real artists trying to say things and tell cool stories in these companies, and real shit does somehow sneak out on occasion (see Andor, perfectly imperfect jewel), but the utter financialization and commoditization of media means there's so many filters a work has to push through before it's allowed to survive. Like mass marketability etc — stuff that non artists make up to justify their salary.
PS not hating on non-artists (kind of don't believe the category exists, but as a role) it's just that when the share of people expecting to get paid from a work is mostly admin, marketing, logistics, rather than the people actually making the thing, incentives and culture get warped.
I loved the early internet, where people were doing art for arts sake and funslop for funslops sake.
Then there was a tiny tiny period where people started making money doing it, and I was young and naive enough to truly believe we could have a kind of content-utopia where creative types would flourish etc etc.
The trend-chasing algorithm-humping stifling any chance of financial success for creativity and inventiveness was pretty inevitable in hindsight, but still.
The feelings gone and we'll never get it back.
I affectionately call this the "Peak Newgrounds Era."
Aside: Kudos that the place is still up and people are still embodying that spirit.
Yeah tbh there's actually been a bit of a revival in the movie space ever since the Marvel universe had its final moment. Everything Everywhere All At Once is actually legitimately one of the best movies I've ever seen. One Battle After Another, Eddington, even smaller movies like Mickey 17. So clearly creativity isn't dead.
I never watched Andor, not because I don't think it's probably good, but because it probably didn't need the Star Wars license to be good. I've heard there anti capitalist themes in there and I just have a hard time seeing anti capitalist themes in mass market media as being genuine. It's like buying a Che Guevara shirt from Urban Outfitters.
It definitely transcends its IP, which is why I feel it snuck through. If it wasn't actually rock solid on top of being obviously subversive it would never have seen the light of day. It's basically a manual on the dos and don'ts of rebelling.
Disney ruined the Star Wars sequels. All the money, all the talent, so much potential, and they pushed out those turds.
Disney didn't ruin the Star Wars sequels. They were a terrible idea to begin with. They were built from the ground up as focus-grouped corporate slop built to sell merchandise.
They also had access to a galaxy worth of new york times best sellers, and instead of taking the best ideas from already loved stories, they declared them as non cannon.
They were part of George Lucas's original intent. What Lucas had in mind, I think we'll never know, but what we got was certainly not that.
Is that true? I've never read that. I also think George Lucas shouldn't have made sequels either.
Apparently. Didn't sound better, either...
“The next three movies were going to go into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”
— George Lucas
Then Darth Maul becomes the new Jabba the Hut. It sounds... Like ideas I guess. Maybe a weird dream he had one night.
https://shapes.inc/fandom/star-wars-sequel-trilogy-george-lucas-plans/quotes
Edit: also, now we know that Luke wasn't special after all.
“By the end of the trilogy, Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she was [the Chosen One].”
— George Lucas
George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he'd been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.
Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like "how many movies," or "who's the central core to the narrative" or "exactly WTF are Whills" can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I've made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it's his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it's your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn't understand his own creation.
I feel for Lucas. I don't think he's fundamentally any different from most creative people, he just made a hugely successful franchise and had a habit of excitedly discussing whatever ideas he had in the moment.
Yeah, most of them sounded VERY ridiculous, but if we could see the ideas of any successful project's initial stages we'd be losing our minds over it too lol.
Any one of us would be the same way, but we weren't trying to keep the hyperdrive running on an already ultra-successful forever-money-printing cultural touchstone.
So, I dunno, I'd like some recognition and success but I never wanna be in his position...
For sure. I don't mean to say he didn't understand his creation, but rather he hadn't settled on a final version enough to shoot. It's Whills and microscopic world and crime boss adventure tale and Leia and politica and Luke with Jedi legacy and its... Whatever the last thing he was thinking about.
Which doesn't guarantee it would be better than the hot, festering shitpile we got. But it would be hard to do worse.
Many years ago I read the George's first draft of the original Star Wars, and boy-howdy was it a load of old nonsense. He works best when he has an editor prepared to tell him 'no'.
Okay then who ran those focus groups?
Disney I guess
They gave the star trek movie reboots to a director that didn't like or watch star trek.
I was rather excited when I heard about the reboots. And for the most part, I did enjoy the different takes on things. But I couldn't stand how small they made the galaxy. Few hours to get to Vulcan, a transwarp system that sent a man to Klingon space in a matter of days. No scale at all. But it took me years to watch the third one, and didn't like it at all.
Even in Star Wars, the one he claims to like more, he sort of broke the fuzzy-time that Hyperspace travel seemed to take.
They were never explicit about travel times (and fair enough, Star Wars is what it is), but clearly in ANH they had time to come down from the adrenaline-dump of escaping the Imperials at Tattooine and settle in, such that Chewy was playing board games with the passengers and Ben thought it was going to be leisurely enough to kick off history lessons and lightsaber drills. Everything about that screams hours-long flight at an absolute minimum, and to my mind more like a few days on a tramp steamer. JJ turned it into "HERP DERP INSTANT LOLZ! The implied passage of time is BORRRRRING!"
Every time a company does a tax write off and trashes the film. If they're canning it, it's ours. It's public domain. Take it as a loss, we subsidize it, then it's ours. Coyote vs Acme is the unicorn that got released. It should never have been thrown away.
I've felt this for a long time. Taxes are for public benefit, if you're writing off an intellectual property to avoid taxes that property is now for public use.
Fox screwing Firefly with that stupid broadcast schedule (although it was cancelled before Joss could make it weird)
Star Wars: A LOT of things, but I'll focus on Episode 9 being absolute dog shit
Game of Thrones, I don't think I need to expand on it
Probably the most unforgivable thing is the legacy and ongoing sexual exploitation of minors in the entertainment industry, but I don't think that's what OP had in mind
I didn't even bother with Episode 9 after the slap in the face that Episode 8 was. Ugh.
It would have gotten so weird with Joss! Now it gets to live in my brain where it only gets mildly weird!
The graphic novel sequels were actually pretty rad though...but those were sequels to Serenity, to be fair.
On the other hand, a drinking game based on how often there's a close-up of bare feet would have developed
LotR should have been 6 movies and The Hobbit should have been 1
There was enough material for 3 if you include the long part of mirkwood wandering around and then sneaking around the elf camp and Beorn.
The abdication of the 4th estate in guarding the public interests and freedoms people fought and died for.
Bill Maher has had a prime television slot since 1993.
That ignorant asshole has been pretending to represent the "left" for 33 years while being a smug reactionary idiot.
I'm super ignorant about celebrities' self-marketing but i thought Maher was a libertarian only pretending he wasn't racist. he actually claimed to be on the leftish region of politics?
In the skewed US scale, yes. He has usually described himself as a liberal, which is as close as anyone on mainstream TV got to being on the left until Bernie Sanders made waves in the 2016 campaign.
He recently had dinner with Trump while kissing his ass and said that he may vote for JD Vance next time because of the woke.
Podcast recommend: I Hate Bill Maher.
I haven't forgiven the fact that the Star Wars sequel trilogy doesn't include more of Anakin
I haven't forgiven the fact that the star wars prequels included him!
Everything star wars since disney has touched it. Mostly making the books non cannon.
It's quite the opposite.
The end of Battlestar Galactica.
They literally tied up all the loose threads into a bundle labeled "God did it" and then refused to speculate about God because that's distasteful.
It's sci-fi. You speculate. It's what the genre does.
Not a fan of the ending myself but c'mon, it's been a religious sci-fi since season one, dealing with prophecies, visions and existential questions. God was always going to be a part of the equation. Unless they revealed the nature of god being some machine or a more developed civilization, at which point they would never be able to finish the show because that wouldn't be an answer but a whole new set of questions.
You are 100% correct.
I have rewatched the series and come to some peace about it, but it is still the first one to come to mind for this thread.
Religion was always woven into the series, and the original was somewhat Mormon inspired.
But that last bit, the evolving nature of god and the whole new set of questions was what I was hoping it would touch on.
I can't tell if this is about the original or the remake. Didn't the original end with them getting to Earth?
It's about the remake.
We don't talk about that season.
My interpretation is that they landed on earth. The godS did it and the survivors would be the Greek population, hence all the mythological names (Apollo, Trace. Adama, Aghathon) The monotheistic plotline is a froreshadowing for what would happen on earth.
In a way they themselves become the gods, as knowledge of spaceflight dilutes and the old stories got retold. Eventually monotheims would rear it's head again. with a Gaius like person to kindle it.
But somehow some fear of foreign tricksters persist, it there in philosophy and in myth. The cylons keep a certain base level of fear untill humanity will develop them again, against it's knowing better.
I guess it's how you interpret it? I thought it was a good ending and spoke to an endless loop of humanity and meaninglessness.
I love/hated BSG ever since they expanded the number of Cylons for like the 3rd time. It was around that time it leaked that they didn't have any plan and Ron Moore had been lying to the fans for years.
After it was over he said, (paraphrased) "LOL, There was no plan. If someone suggested more hidden cylons and it sounded dramatic we would go with it and figure out what that would mean in the next writing session."
Yeah, if you put in the opening the line "They have a plan," you better damned well know what that plan is.
In the end the plan was "We're gonna kill 'em all!!"
Their plan was to scam the fans into believing there was a plan so they'd watch.
I thought it was pretty clear that Bob Dylan was God. Did I just read too much into it?
It’s happening right now.
The oligarch’s buying out the US mass media is fucking criminal and truly unforgivable.
Social media, print, video and television is all owned by a few elites that have been manipulating the minds of society, gaslighting and outright lying to our faces.
It’s why we have a fascist pedophile as president, our social support systems being dismantled and the right of women, minorities and immigrants being taken away.
I forgot that they made multiple The Hobbit films.
After watching the first one, I mentally erased their existence.
There's a fan edit that's pretty good that cuts all 3 into one 3-4 hour movie and removes the cgi orc
I actually enjoyed the beginning of the movie, but halfway through that stupid barrels down the river scene, I was over it.
ROTJ was the first movie I recall having seen in a theatre; I loved it, and I still have a very soft spot for it. I can slough off criticisms of Ewoks without completely disagreeing that they were the beginning of the end and a backslide from ESB. I think I'm on the other side of the same cohort as Simon Pegg. He would have been 7 when ANH (aka just Star Wars) came out, and would only have been 13 when ROTJ came out. Unless you got into your teen ennui and "cooler than thou" mindset a bit early, 13 is still young enough to take it in with no judgment. Add another 16 years of livin', and George pushing things even a bit farther, and yeah, JarJar is not getting the same leeway.
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I love the Ewoks myself. Never really had a problem with them :-)
The One Punch Man anime turning into One Frame Man in its third season.
From battles consisting of transparent PNGs sliding from the bottom left to the top right corner of the screen, to ludicrous censoring techniques like replacing a cigarette with a lollipop.
For the fourth season they just inversed the poster from the third season. Tbf it will be actually Season 3 part 2, but it shows they aren't even trying.
Juxtaposed to this is the Dorohedoro anime, that also dropped a new season this year, after six (!) years.
The long wait had a good reason. The animator loves the manga, but was busy working on the Attack on Titan anime and didn't want to rush Dorohedoro's second season. It's a huge improvement over the first season, refining its mix of 3D and 2D hand drawn content into a wonderfully horrifying experience.
One punch man really made me angry because the manga at these parts is actually the most interesting it's been for a while. Getting to see the other heroes and their abilities but more than that getting to watch Garou fight and grow is amazing in the manga.
After season 2 i already suspected we were not getting to see Garou's growth in a quality matching season 1.
After seeing the now infamous Garou slide right in the beginning of the season, i buried any expectations i had.
Did you still watch the complete season? I know many stopped watching half way through.
I watched it all and besides the drop in quality, i was left confused about how the anime will handle the retconned parts of the manga.
It's already an effort to keep up to date with only the manga and now the anime mixed it up. Some parts are adapted from the retconned version, while others parts are not.
It really seems that their decision depends on which version of a chapter will be lower effort to animate.
Yeah I watched it all. I just believe now that the manga is the only way to get the real story.
Or even the webcomic which is great in it's own way.
Holy shit, I now have a new plan for this evening
As a young person, I loved A Wrinkle in Time and the entire set of sequels.
And so I say a heartfelt FUCK YOU to Ava DuVernay, who crappified this masterpiece into vapid pap film that felt like it was written by Kellogg's marketing team in conjunction with the Ad Council of America.
Apparently the film lost $130 million. Thank God there is little chance of a sequel.
My wife loved the book in her tween years and encouraged me to read it... I'm not the intended audience for sure and some of the ideas were cool but that book sucks lol
I had a crush in middle school. Back then you signed your name on a physical card to remove a book from the library. I saw that she had rented A Wind in the Door just before me. I was so thrilled to ask her about it. She vaguely remembered losing interest and hadn't read Wrinkle. Heartbreak.
I got married to a completely different woman a few decades later. She had a long commute, was looking for audiobooks, ofc I suggested Wrinkle . Her take-away? "Couldn't get past what a whiny bitch Meg Murray is. Had to stop."
Jesus fuck what is with you people
I mean, I didn’t like the book either… and looking on goodreads we’re not alone. It doesn’t even have 4 stars.
LoL
It's strongly in the no go category of, "Don't ruin by reexperiencing it."
I really enjoyed the books as a kid too, and was disappointed with how bad the movie was. But--from what I remember of the book--it was pretty faithful. I think the book doesn't stand up to the scrutiny of adulthood.
did not know a movie had ever been made.
See the low-budget Canadian one from 2003. It's much more true to the books and is objectively better storytelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wrinkle_in_Time_(2003_film)
The proper movie of these novels has not yet been made.
You remember Highlander 2?
Yeah, me neither.
Editing to add: Eragon. The only, one singular, thing that film got right was the opening scene. The rest of the film was an epic, blot-out-the-sun middle finger to the book and the fans.
My biggest gripe with Eragon... It's Dragon, with the first letter switched out.
… goddammit, it’s been 20 years and I never caught that.
I read the series as a child so I didn't know any better, but Inheritance came out when I was in high school and it made me realize Paolini really isn't a great author. It was the sword forging, where he basically copy-pasted a step by step of how to make a katana that took MANY PAGES and I realized I really didn't give a shit.
To the very next letter, no less.
Could have had Bragon and Cragon as prequel's and Fragon and Gragon as sequels
And Highlander 2 isn't even the worst Highlander movie. Hell, I'd argue that on a ranking list of all Highlander movies and shows it would be right in the middle.
To be clear, I'm not saying Highlander 2 isn't bad. I'm just saying that the franchise has somehow managed to produce things that are far worse. There's a reason that basically every entry in the series is a reboot of one kind or another.
Highlander 2 was so bad you can't even find it anymore. All you can find is the Renegade cut, which is also very bad.
What on Earth is everyone talking about? There's only one Highlander movie.
That’s hardly the worst Highlander movie, at least it had Michael Ironside. The Source was garbage.
To be fair, the book was a middle finger to the book and fans.
The Halo games.
I think Bungie fumbled a bit but overall did a good job telling the story of Master Chief. Halo 3 really felt like it was intended to be his end because MC was right back where he started - A super weapon kept in cryo, only this time drifting indefinitely into space with very little chance of ever being found.
Then Bungie did Halo: Reach as a follow up and showed you could have a good Halo game without MC as the protagonist, telling a new(ish) story with new characters.
Then of course Microsoft ditched Bungie and kept the IP, now looking at now the vast amount of Halo novels and comics and other media, decided to dig up Master Chief again and shoehorn him into a bunch of other game plots.
I won't say Halo 4/5/Infinite are terrible or anything to that level but I don't think 343 nailed it.
Even more frustrating now that Microsoft seems keen to remaster the whole Halo Master Chief story arc (again).
Halo 4 was terrible to me.
I marathoned it blind, and I wasnt a Halo lore nut or anything, and I love me some space opera, yet it was just... a soap opera in a bad way? I couldnt believe it was a Halo game.
I heard even worse things about 5. And Infinite was such a waste of potential given the massive budget and the giant open world they barely did anything with.
So I say it was pretty dire.
That really sounds very similar to what the later modern Doom games did to Doomguy. Where he was such a threat to demonkind they just, sealed him away or something and only summoned when in need.
Apart from Master Chief Collection and Campaign Evolved, I haven't touched a post-Bungie Halo game, so I can't really comment on the quality of 4, 5 or Infinite. From what I've heard, 4 had a divisive campaign and horrible multiplayer, Halo 5 had decent multiplayer and a terrible story, and Infinite was heavily flawed.
What I can say is that 343 Industries fucked up hard with remastering the old games. Not even Rare (a development studio with a similarly bad reputation for pumping out shit game after shit game under Microsoft) have managed the feat of fucking up a remaster. Halo 1 Anniversary genuinely has updated graphics that do not align at all with the level geometry, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Truth & Reconciliation mission where you had to sneak past Covenant forces, and if you were playing on the updated graphics, they could see and shoot you through boulders.
The studio rebrand and switch to Unreal 5 was a huge gamble that clearly didn't pay off, because Campaign Evolved had terrible gunplay, glaring bugs, prequel missions with bad design and more exposition than a Shounen anime, and a redesign of Cortana where she has an incredibly masculine jawline and genuinely looks like Jerma985 wearing a wig.
I once saw a comment on Facebook about how the Halo Studios logo looks like an ODST being pounded in the ass with a giant dildo and I genuinely cannot unsee that image. It's also a very fitting metaphor for what they did to the Halo franchise.
Disbanding Halo Studios, waiting for Marathon to inevitably fail and then buying Bungie from Sony for chump change is probably the best thing Asha Sharma can do with the franchise right now.
I'm still kinda mad that they decided Cortana had to be sexy and ditched the purple/green pixie of the first design. The AI companion of an asexual super soldier doesn't need jiggly tits!
I think it was a consequence of them fleshing out the Halo lore after the first game became a surprise hit. To me Halo 2 Cortana will always be the best design.
I mean, it was fanservice to sell copies too. Even my child ass could see that back then.
I mean, do we really want the Destiny 2 dev working on Halo now?
I say give it to a studio with proven writing chops (Arkane, if they hadnt killed them?) or let it die.
Man, an Arkane Halo game...
Do what they did with Killer Instinct 2013 and Battletoads 2020. Bring in another studio but keep the main company associated with the IP in an advisory/support role. Rare clearly shouldn't be trusted with solo developing another game and neither should Bungie.
Or, do what Activision did with Neversoft when they effectively merged them with Infinity Ward and became one of the three core CoD developers. Merging Arkane with Bungie could make one hell of a team.
Bungie holds serious brand recognition with Halo fans.
I find the phrasing of this amusing. In my head, I'm picturing Arkane and Bungie in a room, and Sharma is pointing at Arkane and saying "Dont leave Bungie alone in a room with the cookie jar. Dont do it."
Reach was indeed the best Halo game. Bungie's last was thier finest in both tone, story and gameplay.
Did that one still have some Dunki DNA on it, or was she long gone by then?
But the Halo series was the worst. The opening scene had me, I will admit. It was bad ass to see it in real life like that, being part of some humans who had no chance in hell of survival. But the storyline from there... so stupid.
The engagement bait, algorithmic nature of social media is up there for me. Everything has to be the most extreme, divisive there's no room for gradients and equivalency.
Where also that nobody is allowed to be nuanced or central.
Things either are the best thing or the worst piece of shit ever. Being in the gray is a huge no.
I don't think many people will care about this series but Phantasy Star Online 2. I absolutely loved the first ones on Dreamcast, GameCube, Blue Burst on PC. It was my first foray into mmorpgs and shaped my teenage years. I was so excited that they were making a sequel and, of course, Sega fucked it all up as they always do.
I hate the way they made it all animu bullshit aesthetics and weird concepts like fighting tanks in modern day Tokyo or dinosaurs in the past. And so many micro transactions and weird credits to buy. Why couldn't they just keep expanding the story on Ragol?
How different and vastly inferior Ready: Player One the movie was compared to the book.
I've never been so confused and upset at a movie.
I have to disagree.
Ready Player One the movie is a dumb 5/10 flick I can throw on my second monitor while I get stoned and play video games while looking over and going “hehe” every now and then as I LOOK AT popular things doing stuff.
Ready Player One the book is an infuriating grind where each scene starts with Wil Wheaton (the audiobook narrator) listing off names of popular things for a few minutes before the incel-adjacent main character reveals that he actually spent months practicing the one specific popular thing he needed to succeed right now.
It did prompt me to try Joust when I came across it at a barcade though, and that was fun.
That's saying something, since the book was pretty bad to begin with.
The movie completely skipped over 2112. Total disservice to the young people who could use these tools from the Ancient Race to fight back against Earthly authoritarian governments.
I didn't think it was vastly inferior, but I had to split the two pieces of media in my mind. They're fine individually, just not when compared to each other.
Lost. I don't even wanna talk about it.
Was going to say the same!
I was never a big tv watcher to begin with but after that whole fiasco I realized the whole thing is a scam designed to string you along for as long as possible. They start with one or two good seasons and then just wing it until it runs out of steam and don't give a shit about the story as long as they're making money. So disrespectful to the viewer's time and emotional investment. It violates a basic principle in storytelling: begin with the end in mind.
I quit watching all TV after that, with the exception of the Walking Dead (due to the gf's insistence) which only further cemented my convictions.
You accurately described the TV series modus operandi and the reason why JJ Abrams creative philosophy is such a soulless hack that always leads to disappointing dead ends.
Shit man. Going from Lost to The Walking Dead is rough.
Yeah, that sealed the deal. On the bright side, it taught me a pretty good strategy that's paid off since: now I wait until a series is out and completed. If it gets decent enough reviews I might get a copy. That way I avoid the hype and inevitable let down when it gets cancelled or ends poorly. Like skipping the game of thrones despite having read all the books.
Series with stand alone stories are easy, like Black Mirror or Death Love + Robots. But I have caught a few good series over the years.
I don't have any streaming services. Hell, I don't even have a TV, so that's less temptation to starting something on a whim.
I think that alone is what really prevents me from being a watcher of tv shows, streaming or traditional. They want you to be addicts so that you'd binge-watch episodes, get into heated debates, worship the IP and eagerly await for anything related to it to be released.
Then when the show starts to die by the slightest, it's like a crushing weight mentally as to how lead on you were about it all. It just flatout deceives you to have wasted so much time and investment into something you thought was genuine.
The only shows I maybe would consider giving chances to and have watched, were shows that just knew where they were going and eventually found a way to end.
I hate watching Mexican telenovelas because they are not color graded yellow. Because there is no color grading and the cast is almost entirely white, I keep thinking everything is set in the United States. Super confusing.
Honestly, it gets real yellow outside in Texas. I imagine it must in Mexico too.
That’s from the wildfires because Texas, well, sucks at that.
When I was younger, the Star Wars prequel trilogy killed the franchise for me. Older me has grown more jaded and does not care as much anymore.
The 'Song of Ice and Fire' series by GRRM was bad enough. If the series had ended after the Red Wedding, I would have been at peace. Instead, an entire can of new characters and storylines was opened. The series is unfinished and if any new books come out, they have lost my interest. Now that isn't too bad, but the last seasons of the Game of Thrones series were so poorly written that it killed the books even further for me.
I read that someone mentioned Highlander. For a movie with the tag line 'There can be only one', it sure has many sequels. The original is bad, but in a very fun way. I hold it dear to my heart. The sequels are really forgettable. OTOH, the spinoff television series was not too bad if I remember correctly after 30+ years.
The prequel trilogy is like the original sin of 21st century cinema, spawning not only the era of online criticism as we took solace in our disappointment with each other, but also in how it really heralded the era of franchise film making where all decisions would be made by producers and no more offbeat creative choices by weirdy beardy directors (for better or for worse).
The TV series for Highlander was good. Had a few great scenes and characters. Think of it as an alternate timeline going a different direction, playing with the ideas the movie introduced on how immortality isn't such a great thing.
How about BNA: Brand New Animal using the last four episodes to shit all over its own moral? I've never seen a work of fiction do anything like that. I couldn't look away, it was like a trainwreck.
Been a while since I saw it, but it was basically "racism is bad, but also some people are genetically superior," right?
Yeah. And it turns out the oppressed class really does have a genetic inclination to violence.
Adult Swim creating 4 new FLCL series in a naive (at best) attempt to cash in on nostalgia for the original 6-episode show.
The original FLCL was a legendary show. Beautifully animated by Gainax and Production IG at their absolute prime, iconic soundtrack by the Pillows at their absolute prime, and a extremely well-told stand-alone story with a satisfying beginning, middle and end. A cult classic and a diamond in the rough! To me, as close to a perfect show as I think is possible.
Nobody was asking for more FLCL, and the story of the show was absolutely not calling for more. It was over and done. What's more, the group of people and the conditions that made this show possible had moved on.
But then Adult Swim, I guess in an effort to bring back viewers from the old days, decided to make not 1, not 3, but 4 new FLCL shows! The quality was pretty low, the stories were mediocre at best, and the heart and originally simply weren't there. It really was just a cash in, and I think that it has hurt the legacy of the original show.
That's actually really interesting. I remembered the whole reason the original FLCL aired on adult swim was related to a sweepstakes where the winner got to set the programming for the night.
They wrote passive aggressive bumpers about it so I got the idea nobody there liked FLCL. Finding out they were involved with the sequels makes them even more uncanny
That board meeting must have been like "Oh okay. FLCL sequel. What should it even be about?"
"I dunno man. Just sexualize some minors or something. I think that's what the original show was about so that's all it should take to make a sequel"
Thanks! I thought it was just me.
FLCL?
The anime short series FLCL, sometimes call Fooly Cooly or FuriKuri. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLCL
Violet Evergarden: The Movie
Major Gilbert is revealed to be alive. And she goes back to him. And it's implied to be romantic.
The whole series was about her escaping her past as a child soldier and learning to live a normal life, and they end it by having her go right back to him. But it's okay, he may have made her into a child soldier, but he was kind sometimes, so he's a good guy and definitely not an abuser! And he was the closest thing she ever had to a father figure, but now that she's all grown up she can love him and that's perfectly normal! This is a great finale that doesn't undermine the whole show that led up to it, and isn't fucked up at all!
The rest of the show is still so damn good, just pretend the movie never happened.
I had seen the movie was out, but hadn't gotten around to watching it. Glad to know it doesn't actually exist, thank you.
Had to stop watching at episode 5(?) cause of the arc where the little girl learns to accept and be happy with her arranged marriage to an old dude?! I figured it would be a one off "Japan being Japan" type thing but I searched it up just incase
Dropped it the second I found out the movie plot from that search. Such a bummer since I was super invested until that point :/
When I was a kid, an anchor on a major network news program called mosquitos “flying hypodermic needles”. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It absolutely terrified me.
I was just old enough to understand what the anchor was talking about, but too young to know that the TV news was often exaggerated and should be treated with skepticism. I’m still kinda bitter about that. Scaring the fuck out of a kid is NOT okay.
I'm still bitter about the first Spiderman movie (the Toby McGuire one). Like growing up, Spiderman was my favorite comic character and I spent a lot of time and money following it.
I almost walked out of the theater when Spiderman let the guy who killed his uncle fall to his death. Like JFC this is THE most important moment of Peter's life and what he always goes back to when he's in a moral dilemma.
It's made me sour on watching any of the other Spiderman movies.
I don't recall that but honestly after they introduced the multiverse and used that to tie all the different Spider-men together, I'd be able to forgive that. That was just really well done.
There was a "what if" series of comics that touched on it and the premise was what if Peter didn't save the guy. So it wasn't unheard of but still not something that a first run movie that's basically telling Spider-Man's origin story should be doing
I don't remember him doing that. now I kinda want to rewatch.
The dark tower film
Yes! Attempting to smash 7 books into one film was just stupid. It could have easily been a multi part movie or a mini-series but they just wanted to cash and run on the name. I could only watch trailers but could tell it was just going to be the essence of the plot of the book.
The true shame is that Idris Elba crushes it as the Gunslinger and could have carried even a halfway decent attempt at the books.
Where the hell was the giant robot bear and the talking train? You know, the kinds of things that made the setting engaging.
That movie was just a generic sci fi setting full of bad writing.
Also Konami dropping the P.T. game, which was being made by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro.
Despite being just a little teaser trailer, it quickly showed itself to be one of the most promising games and made many 'best-ofs' lists at the time. An extremely frustrating 'what could have been'.
Lightyear (2022) had a trailer that is straight up false advertising. The trailer shows him contacting Star Command, something that never occurs in the movie. Still bitter about that.
Battle Los Angeles (2011) probably the biggest gap between the trailer's quality and the film's quality I've ever seen.
Giglie (2003), a movie on a lot of lists for being one of the worst of all time. The story behind it is that Ben Affleck and J-Lo got together during filming. The problem is, it wasn't a romcom. J-Lo's character was a lesbian. But because the of their real life romance, they rewrote the ending so the two get together.
I've noticed this a fair amount. It seems like deleted scenes or dialogue unattached to the footage gets used to build the trailer. Seems especially used for heavily CGI movies.
Pretty crazy that happens six years after this scene from Chasing Amy (NSFW, gay slurs):
::: spoiler spoiler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EbSU5Zyx9Y :::
Edit: And someone made a docu titled Chasing Chasing Amy about how the movie treats gay issues: https://filmobsessive.com/film/new-releases/chasing-chasing-amy-allows-two-truth-to-coexist/
Edit: and you can watch it now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZTQbv1HUhg
The ending of warehouse 13, im just glad they gave saul rubinek that one scene near the end
" isn't my girlfriend." - CinemaSins
I loved watching the hobbit in the cinema, but i was a kid and I don't think I will ever sit down to watch it all again.
The first one felt okay to have as one long film, i.e natural, but it's weird that it would end with the eagle rescue after Goblin town.
If i think about it off the top of my head, some scenes they stretched out in film 1 ("An Unexpected Journey") were:
I've not thought about it before but it really is a shame because as soon as a shorter version comes along, people will prioritise that film instead.
Eh, I can forgive some of the extension.
Almost all of the third movie is the battle of the five armies, which is ~ a single page in the book.
Likewise they show Gandalf et al fighting Sauron, which isnt shown in the books, but is also extremely important for Saruman as it shows that he was once good. IIRC it was actually a request from Christopher Lee himself to show it and show pre-downfall Saruman.
That fight is in the appendices, but not the Hobbit itself.
Yes, that would be terrible. glances around
Just like trying to make a sequel to Highlander. Imagine that. The film had a hard ending, there's no place for it to go from there.
Geeorge RR Martin ruined fictional reading for me. Fat lazy fuck never finished and never will finish the series and the show torpedoed in quality of writing when they had no books to go off of.
Was going to comment that the ending of the TV series basically prevented the show from having long lasting cultural relevance. If it weren't for the current spin off, I think people would have forgotten about it completely.
Totally didn't think about blaming George RR Martin but you're totally right about that too.
GRRM did derail the whole thing into such a relentlessly boring clusterfuck of "white girl goes and tries to fix the middle east" that the books will never recover either. If there was even an outside shot of ever seeing another release, I mean, which obviously there isn't.
He's done the software engineering thing of turning the work into such an incredibly overdone piece of shit that it's not tempting to work on anymore, and therefore he evidently won't.
How dare you? Take it back!
The flaws are the theatrical release, which they rectify with the extended releases.
Exactly. The only flaw was not enough Boromir.
the new indiana jones shit
What do you mean? They only made three movies.
Not THE worst, but I hated Matthew McConaughey as the voice actor of the red samurai in Kubo and the 2 strings.
I love how long the hobbit movies were, all movies that are adaptations of books (not short stories) should be that long so they don't have to leave out anything that the books contained, otherwise they all feel rushed
The Hobbit movies jammed a ton of things not from the books in to pad the run time on top of completely changing the tone of the story from a light hearted adventure where violence is glossed over into a lesser version of LotR.
One egregious example of this is the battle near the end of the book. My memory is a bit fuzzy, so please forgive if I slightly botch the details.
Bilbo has no reason to care about the fight. The audience has no reason to care. So Tolkien doesn't write the fight, and just knocks Bilbo unconscious at the start. One of the movies devotes a significant amount of runtime to the battle, despite the fact that audiences still have no reason to care. But you gotta have the big setpiece, right?
The battle of the five armies is like Gandalf fighting the balrog, a huge and epic battle that was important to the story but not something that needed a lengthy description so both happen off screen. Bilbo, who was in way over his head in the Hobbit, gerting knocked out was the perfect way to handle it!
Yeah, they kept it in for audiences expecting a big battle like in LotR. It was such a boring slog, although we did get Beorn doing an arial assault off an eagle which was hilarious!
They jammed in a freaking elf and dwarf love interest angle somewhere in the movies.
In the entire Middle-Earth Legendarium, Elves and Dwarves were bitter rivals to eachother to the point where the idea of A elf and A dwarf would never work together in a conceivable fashion that constitutes a relationship to that extent. Legolas and Gimli I was okay with because they developed as functioning partners for the sake of the Fellowship when the call was heeded.
But what happened in the Hobbit, was once again a shining example as to how stupidly obsessed Hollywood is, with cramming romance into everything.
Agreed. For the life of me I can't figure out why Amazon bought rights to the Lord of The Rings for their 5-season epic instead of something like Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which offers a much richer text and history.
I don't remember the timeline, but perhaps they jumped on the bandwagon while LotR was still fresh in everyone's mind, thinking they'd get rights to touch other Tolkien sources, and then were told "hell no" so had to use a few scraps and make it up as they went.
Nope. They paid a shitton of money for the appendices of Lord of the Rings, but nothing from the Simarilion. As far as canon goes, it's fan fiction.
Some words from Tolkien about adaptations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIqc8FDndRY
The Battle of the Bastards.
In the "My Romantic Comedy SNAFU" anime, the 2nd and 3rd seasons were very disappointing after the 1st one. They changed the art style and it was far less funny.