Jekyll2022-07-23T17:16:52+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/feed.xmlBiased Movie ThoughtsRead some interesting biased thoughts about movies!
Alex and Brandon Walker“Inside Out,” “The First Law Trilogy,” and the Two Types of Sadness in Stories2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:002020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/main/movies/2020/03/30/inside-out-first-law-and-sadness-in-stories<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://www.dailydot.com/wp-content/uploads/77a/59/531d8ad605118eadacace118d755c7f5.jpg" alt="Inside Out Family Hug" /></p></div>
<p>As a self-professed expert on sad moments in books and media, I want to talk a little bit about different ways stories approach making you feel the big feels. Ok, only two different ways. Sure there’s much more nuance than dividing sadness into two categories, but sometimes people just like to generalize, so here I go doing exactly that. When it comes to making you feel sad, I think stories often do it in a way that’s either warm or cold. The warm sadness is one that makes you cry, and smile, and reminisce about great things that are gone, and feel some sort of cathartic response in letting everything go for just a moment. These are the moments rooted in good people and good things, and maybe something bad happened that makes it sad, or maybe the world pushes good people apart, but ultimately this sadness is warmly rooted in your love and affection for well-written characters. This is the famous montage at the start of <em>Up</em>, it’s Hiccup letting Toothless go in <em>How to Train Your Dragon 3</em>, it’s the end of <em>Undertale</em> when you say goodbye to your friends, and it’s episode 10 of <em>Violet Evergarden</em> seeing a mother’s letters shape her daughter’s life. It’s pretty much any time you cry and think to yourself afterwards, “wow, that was really well-done.” Yes, there is a tragedy and unfairness to it all, but ultimately there’s a feeling of warmth beneath everything as well.</p>
<p>Let’s break down a scene from <em>Inside Out</em> to get a better look at this in action. The scene I’m talking about is, of course, when Riley returns home after running away and has a heart-to-heart with her parents. Riley is dealing with the emotional trauma of having to move away from her home, her friends, and everything she used to love, something almost anyone can deeply empathize with. Throughout the whole movie she has pent up her feelings, but when she finally talks to her parents it all comes flooding out, and she feels the catharsis we feel while watching and empathizing. All her happy memories from Minnesota are tinged with sadness as bawls and hugs her parents…….but then she smiles. This very process is how catharsis works in all these warm sad movie moments, even the ones that don’t end with some sense of happiness afterward. You have all these good, warm memories of characters and events, and then those warm memories are tinged with sadness as tragedy unfolds. You love all the interactions between Hiccup and Toothless, but those become melancholic when faced with saying goodbye. In the end, however, there remains a cathartic satisfaction in the bittersweet memory of it all (in <em>Inside Out</em>, represented in a literal core memory orb being half happy and half sad).</p>
<p>…And then there’s the cold sadness.</p>
<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/the-first-law-trilogy-joe-abercrombie-slice.jpg" alt="The First Law Trilogy" /></p></div>
<p>This is the sadness that doesn’t make you cry or feel any sort of warm catharsis, it just leaves you numb and cold and desolate inside, wondering what good humanity is and if there’s even a point anymore to anything. There aren’t a lot of easy examples I can pull from here because generally this isn’t the way media wants to make you feel. If you’ve seen the anime series <em>From the New World (Shin Sekai Yori)</em> that’s the sort sadness I felt watching it. What else…I guess those Oscar bait-y movies that you sometimes just don’t want to see because you know they’re going to make you feel terrible the whole time. <em>Sicario</em> comes to mind, even though I really loved it as a movie. (Side note: I’ve kind of hit a point where I just don’t want to see those types of movies anymore—war movies, failed relationship movies, harsh dramas about terrible people being terrible to one another). Anyway, to the main the inspiration for this post, Joe Abercrombie’s <em>The First Law</em> trilogy! It pulls off frozen depression better than anything I’ve read or watched in recent memory, and I still don’t know if I like or dislike the fact that it does this. On the one hand, I greatly admire the craft, but on the other hand, seeing the final outcome for all these characters I’d grown attached to…it hurt. A lot. So what makes Joe Abercrombie’s tragedy so much more frigid and potent than all the rest? (Spoilers ahead for the series) on the surface, it comes from Abercrombie’s collection of morally ambiguous characters trying so hard to be better and improve themselves, and ultimately failing and reverting back to their worst selves. However, what makes this world truly cold is discovering that there was never any point in characters trying to do good things in the first place. The overbearing message at the end of the series is that the world sucks, humanity extra sucks, and doing good things will only get you killed. Or worse, expelled. Or worse, subservient to the most manipulative asshole in the history of storytelling. I hate you, Bayaz, so freaking much, with every fiber of my being. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve hated a character with such ferocity in a long, long time.</p>
<p>The one character arc I really want to look into, though, is Jezal’s in <em>Last Argument of Kings</em>, because I think it’s emblematic of an entire mode of presenting sad moments/arcs in a way that directly opposes everything I mentioned in the first half of this post. Jezal is a set up as a narcissistic, unlikeable, racist jerk whose only ambition is to hold more power in society. Throughout the trilogy, however, he shows signs of changing and improving himself, especially in the second book. This invites you to hope that he will finish his journey a changed person, see the errors in his ways, and go about fixing all his past mistakes. Jezal’s character arc itself is quite common, from Ebeneezer Scrooge to (my favorite of the bunch) Zuko from <em>Avatar the Last Airbender</em>. So the setup is there, and you’re rooting so freaking hard for Jezal to turn that corner and fully commit to being a better person. And then comes Bayaz. Bayaz, who always seemed to believe in Jezal and encourage him to leave his comfort zone of vain narcissism. Bayaz, who then gives Jezal the political power he always wanted, gives him the hope of using it to do good in the world, only to turn him into a puppet figurehead without the ability to do anything at all. Now with his power stripped away, his relationships stripped away, and an all-powerful wizard dictating his every move, Jezal reverts back to his old self and gives up on doing anything at all. So what makes this tragedy work? Is it simply that bad things have happened to a likable character, and we can look back at the good memories now tinged with sadness? No, not in the least bit. We feel sad and cold and hopeless about it all. There was a branching point in Jezal’s journey where Abercrombie could’ve chosen either a warm fuzzy tragedy or cold empty tragedy for poor Jezal. He could have chosen to have Jezal commit to his convictions as a new less racist and narcessistic person—he could have let Jezal confront Bayaz only to be struck down, thus sacrificing himself for a worthy cause. Sure that would still be sad, but it would let us feel cathartic about Jezal dying a changed man. Instead he lives a reverted one. Abercrombie made this sort of decision with each and every one of his character arcs, and it just left me feeling so numb and empty at the end of it all.</p>
<p>I don’t really know where this is going, so I guess I’ll just end this post is with a question. Why does this work? How can I complain about how cold and empty Abercrombie’s finale to the <em>The First Law</em> trilogy is, but still feel like it somehow just plain works? The vast majority of stories would let Jezal complete his redemption arc, and the vast majority of my favorite ones do exactly that. The vast majority of fans would also get disappointed when lovable characters revert to their former selves and fail to follow through with their potential. So why does it work for Abercrombie to present such a depressing futile reality throughout his writings? I legitimately don’t know the answer. I can at the very least articulate why I enjoy feeling sad during cathartic moments in stories—–why I can rewatch the “I miss Minnesota” scene from <em>Inside Out</em> over and over and release of all my own pent-up emotions. But all I know with <em>The First Law</em> Trilogy is that I like it in spite of the way it makes me feel.</p>Alex WalkerBiased thoughts on the “Chaos Walking” adaptation and the problems plaguing its production2020-02-26T00:00:00+00:002020-02-26T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/main/movies/rant/2020/02/26/chaos-walking<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://lightsallaround.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/chaos-walking.jpg" alt="Chaos Walking Book Covers" /></p></div>
<p>So I was feeling nostalgic the other day and decided to reread one of my favorite childhood books “The Knife of Never Letting Go” by Patrick Ness, and I was just as blown away by its emotional power as when I first read it as a middle-schooler. As an avid film lover even back then, I distinctly remember the story capturing my imagination as I dreamed about the different ways I would approach a film adaptation were I to make it myself. As one does when they rediscover something from their childhood, I immediately looked into whether or not any studio had bought the rights to it, thinking “no, there’s no possible way anyone would want to tackle such a ridiculously difficult movie to make,” only to see a release date for one “<em>Chaos Walking</em>” for.…2021? Next year? What? Directed by Doug Limen, coming right off of his <em>Edge of Tomorrow</em> acclaim? What?? Starring Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland??? Excuse me, what?!?!? I’m just now finding out about this?! And it was shot all the way back in 2017? And it was supposed to release in 2019 but got pushed back 2 years? And it was deemed unwatchable by test audiences? And it is now being completely overhauled for a…uhhhh…oh no…..<em>January</em> release date? You know, the place movies go to die quietly? What.</p>
<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/chaos-walking.jpg?w=681&h=383&crop=1" alt="Chaos Walking Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley" /></p></div>
<p>There’s a lack of information about what exactly is going wrong with the film right now—we know that there are reshoots, but what movie isn’t in the news for reshoots these days? So, having just found out about this debacle yesterday and as a huge fan of the source material, I’d like to throw my voice into the mix and divulge the true reason why the adaptation is having so many problems (ok, anyone who has read 50 pages into the book could figure this out as well): the sound design would have to be one of the most ambitious undertakings in cinematic history if this is to succeed. Hyperbole aside, this entire project hinges on Oscar-worthy sound design, and no amount of reshoots are going to change this fact. So let’s talk about sound in <em>Chaos Walking</em> for a bit.</p>
<p>The story takes place on a planet on which the population has been infected by a virus which causes all the men’s thoughts to be heard out loud. This “noise” is a constant presence radiating from every male character throughout the book, and it’s predominantly what’s going to make sound design for this project a nightmare to pull off. For reference, this is what said Noise looks like in the books.</p>
<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://deathbytsundoku.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/the-noise.jpg" alt="Chaos Walking Noise" /></p></div>
<p>Ok, but movies have represented overwhelming thought jumbles like this in the past, so why is this such a problem now? While I have no doubt that a good sound designer would be able to nail the feeling of this mess of sound, there are a few extra problems when considering how to design this effect within the context of the rest of the movie. The first is that this Noise is always present when a male character is onscreen, and should even be present offscreen in the environmental sound design. Therefore Noise needs to both be intense and overwhelming at times (as shown above), but not so overwhelming that it can’t blend into the background when it needs to. Sure, the characters themselves would always be hearing and understanding each others’ thoughts, but an audience can only be subjected to so much before hitting an information and sensory overload. So the movie’s Noise effect needs different levels of intensity and different sizes and shapes it can take in order to suit a given scene. That’s difficult (and a ton of work to customize it for every character at every moment in the film), but doable.</p>
<p>Next there’s the narrative role that Noise plays in communication between characters onscreen. Since the other characters can always hear each others’ Noise, they’re constantly responding both to things characters actually say as well as to things said in their Noise. For example, Todd (Tom Holland’s character) might say one thing while his Noise is saying three other things at the same time, all of which need contribute to the conversation in some way. This creates a difficult tension in the audience’s focus between the actual words being said during conversations and what a character’s Noise is saying at the same time. As assessed earlier, it’s essential that Noise can recede into the background, letting you put all your attention into a given piece of dialogue. However it also becomes necessary for Noise to contribute to that conversation in spurts before fading back to the background. This push-pull of the audience’s attention between two different sources of voices would need to be a highly delicate process, and one which happens during every single conversation in the entire movie. I’d imagine the sound designers would have to perfect whatever filter they put on the Noise effect so that it’s easily distinguishable from regular dialogue. Then they’d also have to balance the ebb and flow of bringing it into and out of the foreground in a way that is comprehensible by the audience. Again, an extraordinarily difficult task, but one that is not impossible.</p>
<p>The last problem is a bit of an extension from the previous two, namely that this adaptation literally requires voiceover as a narrative tool, and constant voiceover often makes for bad filmmaking. Hearing a character’s internal monologue out loud feels tedious in a medium who’s strengths lie in showing, not telling. In a book this works just fine—–internal monologue is a novel’s bread and butter. Furthermore, a book can choose when and where to show Noise, and then let your imagination fill in the rest. In a film, however, Noise needs to be a constant presence, and the constant presence of internal monologue is just hard to pull off. I could see it getting really grating really fast. Even in movies that do voiceover monologues well (<em>Fight Club</em>, for example), it’s not nearly as omnipresent as it needs to be for something like <em>Chaos Walking</em> to function. Once again, is it possible to do this well? Yes. Will it be a ridiculous amount of work? Yes. Will Hollywood want to invest said effort into a young adult adaptation after the Divergent series’ final installment released direct to DVD and the young adult genre lies wounded and dying? We’ll just have to wait and see. I want this to be good SO BADLY; it’s the sort of adaptation I’ve literally had dreams about since I first read the books. But if the January release date is any indication, there’s a good chance that the film is just going to be thrown to the wayside.</p>
<p><strong>Side Note</strong></p>
<p>Here’s the secret #1 reason why Doug Liman’s adaptation is doomed to fail, though: it’s live-action. Before you say anything, yes I know I’m an animation fanboy and yes, I know that “make it animated” isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems, but I really think it’s the answer to this one. We’re living in a world where <em>Into the Spider-Verse</em> was able to capture the feel of comic book sound effects through it’s visuals in a way that only animation could accomplish. This opens up so many options for representing Noise visually in a way that would break a live-action movie’s sense of realism. Having trouble keeping Noise in the background while characters talk in the foreground? Show it visually buzzing around characters like sound effects in a comic book. Maybe have it flare up when it needs to be seen and heard, and have it recede when it doesn’t. Maybe have different fonts and colors to represent each character’s unique Noise. Then in intense moments flood the background with the jagged text you can see in the pages of the book. Animation would make this entire project not only easier, but also more comprehensible and even more interesting and emotionally powerful. Live-action does have its moments, but here I really think that the strengths of animation can fully shine.</p>Alex WalkerBiased Thoughts on the How to Train Your Dragon Sequels (and a bonus rant about villains in animated movies)2019-10-30T00:00:00+00:002019-10-30T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/main/movies/rant/2019/10/30/HTTYD-Sequels<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTU1MDM5NjUwNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMzE1MDc2NTM@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,743_AL_.jpg" alt="Hiccup and Toothless" /></p></div>
<p>Ok, let’s bounce around between a number of different thoughts here. First off, I adore <em>How to Train Your Dragon</em>. And when I say adore, I mean that I once spent a full week watching the first movie every night, and every single time it made me smile and laugh and cry and just feel so many things. The first movie is without a doubt my desert island movie, the one movie I could rewatch for the rest of my life and all that nonsense. Yet as much as I love the first movie to no end, I have only ever seen the second one once. Just once. It was good that one time I saw it, for sure. It still had the same outstanding music and breathtakingly beautiful moments, and it even added some adorable interactions between Hiccup and Astrid. Yet I still only saw it once (even if I rewatched the Jonsi flying scene on youtube an embarrassing number of times). Then sure enough, the third movie came out and largely maintained the same mood and atmosphere as the second. Sure its ending left me bawling my eyes out, but up until that point I had felt a great deal of frustration with the film.</p>
<p>Let’s start with the easiest thing to point my finger at and progress from there:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>The side characters get way too much screen time in the sequels and cross the line from endearing to downright annoying. With each sequel’s time skip, our main characters grow and mature. It’s all the more frustrating, then, to see the side characters keep up the same immature unfunny jokes as before. In the second movie, the line was crossed with Ruffnut’s obsession with Jon Snow’s muscles, and in the third it was crossed with literally everything (all the childish bickering, Ruffnut’s continuing to be grating any time she’s onscreen, and Snotlout’s posturing that comes across as cringy instead of amusing). This wouldn’t be as big of an issue if the movies didn’t give these characters specific arcs and extra screen-time compared to the first.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>With a greater focus on the side characters, it only follows that the sequels focus a bit less on Hiccup and Toothless than the first movie did. This is understandable, of course, since Hiccup and Toothless already did all of their growing and bonding in the first movie. Yes, their relationship still develops in the sequels, and the scenes in which it does are far and away the best moments of the movies. However, their friendship goes from the absolute core of the first movie to a one of a few key focal points of the sequels.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The sequels feel much more fast-paced, with all the story events unfolding in just a day or two. This isn’t an inherently bad quality, but it feels distinctly different than the first’s pacing. It also makes us unable to linger as much in the emotional moments. The plot has to keep moving, and we need to move on with it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>There’s far less conflict between the characters we feel sympathetic toward and far greater conflict between entities of pure good and pure evil. In the first movie, the major sources of conflict are between Hiccup and his father, Hiccup and Astrid, and Hiccup and his village. With the entire village now on Hiccup’s side in the sequels, the writers instead opt for the far less dynamic conflict between good and evil. Once again, not an inherently bad conflict to build a movie around (plenty of amazing movies make it work), but one that feels very different than the first’s. And before you mention it, yes, there is a big evil dragon at the end of the first movie. However, the question is not “can Hiccup defeat this massive evil entity” but “can Stoic and Hiccup finally learn to trust each other?”</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>You’ve likely guessed where this is heading already (if only from the title of the post) so…</p>
<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA3NDU2MDQ1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjE1MDc2NTM@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,749_AL_.jpg" alt="HTTYD2 villain" /></p></div>
<p>When it comes down to it, the HTTYD sequels are stories about heroes fighting villains to save the day. Their entire structures are built around villains who drive the story forward and force the heroes to take time-sensitive action, a quality that the first one very much didn’t have. The original movie was structured around Hiccup and Toothless learning to trust in one another and bridge the gap between humans and dragons. It was only at the end that a big evil monster was introduced, and that big monster was never the agent driving the story forward. Characters like Hiccup, Toothless, and Stoic maintained full agency and caused all the story events to unfold. Furthermore, without the looming threat of an evil bad guy in the foreground, our feelings for the characters can easily grow and develop with every bonding moment between Hiccup and Toothless. In the sequels, however, we get those endearing slice-of-life moments amidst an externally-motivated plot that sweeps our characters up in it. We must deal with “insert villain here” or else he’ll take away our dragons. Sure, it’s not a bad reason to kick the plot into gear, but it leaves less room to linger in HTTYD’s fantastic character moments and captivating world. Then there’s the fact that both of the sequels take place over the course of 2-3 days, which gives us even less time to just hang out with the best duo in cinematic history. Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of these villain plot-lines that are handled extremely well. The two big bads are able to push Toothless and Hiccup’s friendship in some really interesting ways. However, the emotional core of the series is, and has always been, character relationships. We don’t care about Hiccup and Toothless because they fought off some guy who was after them (or even because they ideologically overcame him), we care about them because of that time Hiccup ate a fish that Toothless threw back up, or that time they both tried to fly and Hiccup had to abandon his cheat sheet and trust in his newfound friend, or that time when they raced across the sky with that Jonsi song playing that makes me want to cry and wow their theme is SO. FREAKING. GOOD. But yeah. That’s what makes us care. We don’t need a villain. For crying out loud, the third movie could have JUST been looking for the hidden world, finding another night fury, and Hiccup having to wrestle with the idea of Toothless wanting to be with his own people. Um, dragons. His own dragons. That’s internal conflict, that’s emotional drama, and that’s a movie all on its own. Just look at Ghibli movies like <em>Totoro</em> and <em>Kiki’s Delivery Service</em>, neither of which have any remote sense of a villain and manage to be all the better without one. You don’t need a villain to make a movie work, and often shoehorning one in comes at the detriment to the story being told. It’s high time Dreamworks (and Pixar for that matter) realized this.</p>
<p><strong>Bonus rant!!!</strong><br />
Please, Pixar, for the love of everything that is amazing about animation, stop shoving villains and action scenes into movies that don’t need them. It always feels forced, it’s always the worst part of the movie, and it always leads to a lackluster final act. So please just stop. What’s the best part of <em>Up</em>? The opening, Carl and Russel exploring the island, and funny interactions between the two of them and Dug. What’s the worst part? The stupid action scene at the end where you have two old guys fist fighting and dogs flying prop planes. What’s the best part of <em>Wall-e</em>? Seeing Wall-e’s daily life, watching him try to woo Eve, watching the captain learn about Earth, and seeing Wall-e and Eve dance together in space. What’s the worst part? The chase sequence at the end and the fight between the captain and the evil autopilot. Sometimes it’s not even a villain problem but a last-minute action scene problem. <em>Inside Out</em>, <em>Coco</em>, <em>Monster’s Inc.</em>, and even <em>Finding Dory</em> suffer from this. I love most of these movies to death, but sometimes I feel like Pixar doesn’t think kids would stay interested if there wasn’t some sort of hectic and action-packed to keep them interested……which is strange when considering Pixar is already the best at respecting children’s intelligence with their kids movies. There are exceptions of course, with <em>The Incredibles</em> integrating its villain extremely well into the whole story and <em>Ratatouille</em> having a decidedly not action-packed but really satisfying climax. However, the trend still remains, and it never fails to annoy me.</p>Alex WalkerMy Hollow Knight Experience2019-09-20T00:00:00+00:002019-09-20T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/main/video%20games/2019/09/20/my-hollow-knight-experience<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="http://wordpress-ms.deakin.edu.au/dscribe/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2019/03/20190329163305_1.jpg" alt="Hollow Knight City of Tears" /></p></div>
<p>After playing Hollow Knight for its first 6 hours, and after losing all of my money to the same boss for the third time in a row, I felt a more intense urge to vent and scream and smash my controller to tiny fragments than I’ve ever felt before from a video game. Intead, to save my poor joycons from harm, I wrote—and here is the product of my delirious state.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Ok, this game makes me soooooo mad. I hate that whenever you die you lose all your money and have to kill your ghost to get it all back, but if you die along the way well then oh no you lose all of it. It clashes so hard with the game urging me to explore, and in exploring maybe I died super far from a save point in a place I don’t have the map for so it’s an incredible pain to get everything back. And what’s more, this mechanic forces you to continue the same specific part of the game over and over rather than letting you be like “ok I need a break and want to explore over here now as a breather.” And god forbid the game puts some save points near the bosses.</em> (**future me: in retrospect, the game did–—I didn’t find them.**) <em>Wouldn’t want to miss out on the rage-inducing 5 minutes spent just getting to the boss fight again. And then suddenly all my money is trapped in a boss room so I can’t even improve my character to make the fight easier. Seriously, there’s a point where being rage-inducing for the sake of being a “souls-like” rage-inducing game is not fun. Like, at all. I’m all for hard games and boss fights. Just look at my Breath of the Wild Lynel fight replay for verification. I died like 30 times in a row and kept on trying. I absolutely don’t mind dying a lot to a boss and brute forcing my way into figuring it out. But don’t make it so inconvenient for me to try again, and certainly don’t make me lose all my money so that I can’t even buy anything anymore!!!</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>- Alex Walker, seconds before putting down Hollow Knight, probably for good</p>
<hr />
<p><br />
Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games of all time. One year ago, when I ever-so-gently and totally nonviolently threw the game aside, I would’ve never thought that this would be the case. However, people grow and change, and eight months after letting the memories of the pain this game brought me fade, I decided to give Hollow Knight another go. And it all just clicked this time. I fell in love with the game’s fluid controls, its creative combat, its ever-so-satisfying exploration, and most especially its beautiful world, music, and atmosphere. Sure it was still frustrating at times, but never overwhelmingly so.</p>
<p><em>So what changed?</em></p>
<p>Well for one thing, I found the save point near the dung beetle boss room, which was what made me rage quit before. That helped. I also discovered that money doesn’t matter too much, which made it a bit more ok when I inevitably lost it all. Overall, though, I just understood the game’s systems and design so much better this time, which allowed me to enjoy everything that was already amazing in it. I was also able to play patiently and overcome my desire to just push through enemies. (Can you blame me though? Give me a sword and I’ll just want to swing away as much as I can.) I certainly don’t blame my past self for being stubborn—I was just playing the game how I wanted to play it. But sometimes you need to step back and reframe a game in order to understand it better. For me that took time.</p>
<p>Anyway, I guess the lesson here is that if there’s that one game you know is beautiful and well-made and fun and intriguing and you just couldn’t deal with it at the time…</p>
<p>maybe give it another shot.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Random Note: I just realized that the real difference-maker was switching the button layout to what I’m used to for Super Smash Bros. Surely if I had done that the first time I would have never rage quit.</p>
<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OmeDgQ5d3pI/maxresdefault.jpg" alt="" /></p></div>
<p><strong>But wait, there’s more</strong></p>
<p>As a little addendum to this post, I’d like to mention some of the many things that made this game so special. Maybe in a separate post I’ll go into greater detail. (Also, some spoilers ahead.)</p>
<ul>
<li>I love how varied the regions in Hollow Knight’s world are. Each has its own distinct visual style, tone of music, and enemy design, all of which add up to some crazy levels of atmosphere. The backgrounds are so fantastic, too. Walking around the City of Tears, hearing the melancholic music, and seeing all the abandoned locations and backdrops all drenched in blues and purples…it really sucks you into the world.</li>
<li>The story of the world is surprisingly interesting, and I found myself invested despite there being barely any actual story that happens while you’re on your journey. Most of it is just hidden in the details of the world, there for you to discover if you want to.</li>
<li>The DLC title screens are amazing, especially the Godmaster and Grimm Troupe ones. I spent a good 20 minutes after beating the game switching between the different themes just listening to the title music.</li>
<li>The interconnectedness of the world is really well-crafted, even compared to other great metroidvania games.</li>
<li>The blending of hand-drawn animation with CG effects was handled extremely well, to the point where you don’t even notice that there’s a difference between the two.</li>
<li>The platforming sections were surprisingly fun and really highlighted how tight the controls were. It’s a blast just running about as the knight and using all of his movement options.</li>
<li>The boss fight against Nightmare King Grimm was one of the most satisfying video game moments ever for me. It’s so ridiculously difficult that when you finally figure out the patterns you feel like you’re unstoppable. Again, the music and atmosphere of the boss fight is top notch and its pace never gives you a chance to breath. The best part about this fight, though, is that as a dream fight you can instantly restart it as many times as you want. Also since it’s so fast, you die nearly instantly, making each death feel less consequential. Without this, I don’t know if I would have retried the fight the 200 some times it took me to finally win.</li>
<li>The boss fight against the Hollow Knight is staged and executed perfectly. It has a brilliant lead-up where you enter the black egg and have to slash away the chains holding him down, then it jumps into the fight, in which his initial speed and range makes you feel overwhelmed Then finally there’s the tragic moment you realize he’s just a shell of his former self trying to destroy the void that has corrupted him. The music here is actually just the best track in the game. It tells the story of the fight perfectly, and leads directly into the amazing cutscene that caps it all off. If you have no intention of playing the game, go find this fight on youtube and watch it. It’ll be well worth-it.</li>
<li>The fight against the mantis lords had such a fun rhythm to it. I got obliterated on my first attempt, then figured out the mantis lord’s patterns and felt like a genius…a feeling which immediately fled once I realized I had to fight 2 at one time. Looking back at it now, it’s actually quite easy compared to many of the other ones, but at the time it really took everything I had to weave through their attacks and get attacks of my own off at the same time.</li>
</ul>Alex WalkerGame of Thrones Season 8 or: How I learned to Stop Caring and Love the Train-Wreck2019-09-12T00:00:00+00:002019-09-12T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/main/tv/2019/09/12/game-of-thrones-blog-post<div style="text-align:center"><p><img src="https://s2.r29static.com/bin/entry/aed/720x405,85/2162352/image.webp" alt="Game of Thrones Dragons" /></p></div>
<p>(Spoiler warning for all of <em>Game of Thrones</em>)</p>
<p>There are some movies and shows that mean so much more when you’re present in that specific moment of cultural history. The final <em>Harry Potter</em> movie, <em>Avatar</em> (the blue people one), <em>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</em>, and <em>Avengers: Endgame</em> all immediately spring to mind. However, I can’t think of anything quite as captivating as witnessing the entire world sit down week after week, hoping with all their hearts that this next episode of <em>Game of Thrones</em>—this one for sure—would be the one to fix everything. Week after week this would happen, and week after week the already derailed train would tumble further and further from the track. Yet still we hoped.</p>
<p>Now that the dust has settled, this is the image that remains in my head, more than any specific moment of the show and more than any of my individual gripes with it. <em>Game of Thrones</em> season 8 occupies such a unique place in pop culture. I can’t remember a time when such an enormous audience has been so accutely aware of the authorial intent behind the writing of the series. Part of this comes down to the drastic change in writing as the show moved away from George R.R. Martin’s original material. Then there’s also the fact that following each episode there’s literally a segment where the writers sit down and tell the audience why they made the decisions they made. On top of all this, there’s the global engagement on social media, where people then trash every one of those decisions in great detail.</p>
<p>…and all of this is important because it invites you to engage with <em>Game of Thrones</em> not as someone invested in the fiction, but as someone detached from it.
<br />
<br /></p>
<p><strong>My story with <em>Game of Thrones</em> and how it came to this</strong></p>
<p>First-off, season 7 before this was the season where I fell out of love with the show and felt the disappointment everyone is feeling this season. After a fantastic season 6 finale, season 7 brought out (still) the dumbest plot-line of the show, where Jon goes to the north to capture a wight and bring it back to king’s landing. This is the part of the show that ruined my favorite characters while solidifying the fact that the writers no longer cared about internal logic and consistency of their world. But that last season was 2 years ago. In that time there were so many other worlds and characters I fell in love with, from books like <em>The Wheel of Time</em> series to video games like <em>Xenogears</em>, <em>Undertale</em>, and <em>Final Fantasy VII</em>. I experienced so many amazing stories and more or less forgot about GoT by the time the first episode of season 8 hit…and I didn’t watch it. I remembered all of my favorite moments from the series (The Mountain vs. the Viper, Tyrion’s trial, the battle of the bastards, Cersei blowing up the citadel) but I also no longer felt invested in finding out what happens. Episode 3 landed and I still hadn’t watched anything, so I figured, “eh, might as well read the spoiler thread on reddit to see what people think.” And that’s when I discovered the beauty that was this season’s writing. People were complaining left and right, the memes were everywhere, and I was so intrigued that I had to start watching—and it absolutely did not disappoint.
<br />
<br /></p>
<p><strong>Things I Loved</strong></p>
<p>There is an extremely thin line between good bad writing and just plain cringy bad writing, and I am so happy that this is the good kind. There’s something so tragic yet entertaining at seeing the show write itself into a corner and then do something completely unjustified to dig itself back out. Then, on the production side, it’s also funny to notice the parts where reality pokes through amidst some great production design. With that in mind, here are my favorite moments from the final season of Game of Thrones.</p>
<ul>
<li>I love the shot of Winterfell in season 1 that looks as if they green-screened Winterfell from the show’s title sequence into the background.</li>
<li>I love the juxtaposition between some incredible shots in the battle with the Night King and its incomprehensibly dark cinematography the rest of the time.</li>
<li>I (legitimately) love the shot of the Dothraki’s fire swords fading out in the night and (ironically) love how stupid and pointless their charge was.</li>
<li>I love the random zombie stealth scene. How did Arya get into this situation? Why is it so quiet when there’s a giant battle going on everywhere? It’s such a strange non sequitur, but it’s also a very well-put-together non sequitur.</li>
<li>I love the total randomness of Arya flying out of nowhere to slay the Night King. I also love how heavy-handed Melisandre’s prophesy was (the eye color one), despite the fact that she only really kills the blue eyes guy and doesn’t bother to think about the other two for the rest of the season.</li>
<li>I love how Euron shows up completely out of nowhere, hiding his fleet from dragons in the freaking sky, and snipes two of them with pinpoint accuracy.</li>
<li>I love how there are literally no consequences for fighting the Night King since no main characters die (Jorah doesn’t count) and army sizes no longer matter (a running theme this season).</li>
<li>I love how pointless Bran is in this entire season, especially during all of episode 3’s battle. The show is completely done with him, ready to toss him aside and forget, and then he just shows up in episode 6 and gets made king. We don’t learn anything about the three-eyed-raven, the Night King, Bran’s plans, Bran’s motivations and actions…..he just shows up acting like he’s been manipulating things the whole time. It’s so freaking dumb and stupid and not set up and amazing at the same time.
<br />
<br /></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>In Conclusion</strong></p>
<p>I know this all sounds like I’m listing things that are actual problems and then saying, “wow that’s so dumb it’s funny,” but that’s not exactly the whole picture—part of it for sure, but not the whole. Something can be dumb and just plain bad, like that extra one-liner in a Marvel move that pushes your cringe tolerance over the edge. No, this season of <em>Game of Thrones</em>, more than anything I can think of in recent memory, draws back the curtain covering the artifice of TV writing. Ok, that’s a bit of an understatement, it shreds the curtain, burns the pieces, and then gives a guided tour of everything behind. And, to the show’s credit, it does so in a way that is legitimately engrossing. You have self-aware movies like Deadpool that wear their artifice as a badge of honor, but it takes something special to approach itself so seriously and still achieve the same thing. It’s what makes <em>Birdemic</em>, <em>The Room</em>, <em>Plan 9 From Outer Space</em>, and so many other bad movies work. With this season of <em>Game of Thrones</em>, you get a clear view of the writers as they throw question after question at a whiteboard, and you get to watch as they struggle desperately to answer them again and again. For me, that is drama, storytelling, and entertainment in and of itself.</p>
<p>The title of this post aside, it’s not that I stopped caring. I still care about this world and characters, and it still hurts to remember how they were treated. At the same time, though, there’s a certain poetic tragedy in the construction of this season and how it allowed me to be both detached from and invested in it. At the end of it all, amidst all my conflicted feelings, I can’t help but sit back and enjoy the entertainment that’s there.
<br />
<br /></p>
<p><strong>Extra Side Note (not super related to the rest of this):</strong></p>
<p>Let’s talk about everyone’s new favorite phrase to hate, “subverting expectations!” Contrary to popular internet belief, subverting expectations is neither necessarily bad or necessarily good. “Oh no, it’s trying too hard to subvert expectations and that has made it bad!” Ok, but entire point of twist ending movies as a genre is to subvert expectations, and that’s what makes them good and memorable. The key however is setup and justification. A good twist needs to make you think “wow this changes my view of everything,” not “ok that was really random.” This is where movies and shows like <em>Star Wars: the Last Jedi</em> and GoT s8 run into some problems. There was either minimal or no setup to all of GoT’s twists this season, and part of that is what made moments like Bran becoming king and Euron sniping the dragons so entertaining—–terribly written, but entertaining. Unfortunately what makes it intriguing and entertaining for me is what makes it disappointing for everyone who is still watching at the show at face value. I’m not a screenwriter, but it seems to me that if you think to yourself, “hehehe no one could possibly guess this ending,” it’s probably the wrong ending for your characters. There needs to be setup for proper justification, and proper setup will always hint at what is to come. Do you really think nobody guessed who Kaiser Soze was in <em>The Usual Suspects</em>? There are only 5 main characters in the movie and it has to be one of them. If Soze turned out to be some random guy you never saw onscreen, you would be surprised for sure, but unsatisfied. That’s Scooby Doo 101. Someone on the internet is always going to guess what’s going to happen, and sometimes that just means that you set things up properly. Meanwhile you have GoT saying, “Haha, you were so busy focusing on Dany, Jon, Tirion, Sansa, Arya, Grey Worm, and Davos that you forgot about……Bran!!!” That’s because you did too, Game of Thrones. You forgot about Bran, and that’s why this twist is a problem in the first place.</p>Alex WalkerVice2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:002018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/trailers/movies/2018/10/03/vice<div style="position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g09a9laLh0k" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;left:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
<p><br /></p>Brandon WalkerMission: Impossible - Fallout2018-04-06T00:00:00+00:002018-04-06T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/trailers/movies/2018/04/06/mission-impossible-fallout<div style="position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wb49-oV0F78" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;left:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
<p><br /></p>Brandon WalkerTrailer Tuesdays: Zero Dark Thirty2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:002018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/trailers/movies/2018/01/09/trailer-tuesdays-zero-dark-thirty<div style="position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k7R2uVZYebE" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;left:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
<p><br /></p>Brandon WalkerTrailer Tuesdays: X-Men: First Class2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:002018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/trailers/movies/2018/01/02/trailer-tuesdays-x-men-first-class<div style="position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UrbHykKUfTM" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;left:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
<p><br /></p>Brandon WalkerTrailer Tuesdays: Moonrise Kingdom2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:002017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00https://biasedmoviethoughts.com/trailers/movies/2017/12/12/trailer-tuesdays-moonrise-kingdom<div style="position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7N8wkVA4_8s" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;left:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
<p><br /></p>Brandon Walker