Category: Recap

Staying Alive Recap

Jamie

Sigh, we are coming to the end. We are a Sly Stallone based venture. We operate on the Stallonian calendar which promises a Stallone flick every year with 53 Thursdays. Last Thursday of such a year is Stallone Day and celebrates all things Sly. This is all detailed on the website. Anyway, we are nearing the end of unique qualifying films and when we run out a question will arise that can only be answered by the BMT Council of Elders( BMTCoE). Some might be asking why I’m mentioning this before diving into Staying Alive. To those people I will simply say, “Get out! Shoo!” and throw pebbles at you until you leave. Staying Alive is the only film that Sly directed but did have a role in (not counting his uncredited appearance in the film). He’s also written two Statham films that he wasn’t in, but neither of them qualified. Truly unique. So keep in mind that this is a very special episode.

To recap, our hero Tony Manero is trying to make it in the Big Apple. He teaches dance classes to make a buck while going on audition after audition. It seems like he will never get his chance and it’s incredibly frustrating. He’s got a cool girlfriend, Jackie, but he even takes that for granted, sleeping with a star dancer that has blown into town for a new show, Satan’s Alley. At the auditions for Satan’s Alley they all get parts. Tony is very excited but also doesn’t love how small a part he has. Realizing he’s done Jackie dirty, he apologizes and asks for help practicing the lead dance in the show. He seems the main dancer is struggling and wants to take a shot at replacing him. When the time comes he pretty much botches it and the demanding director is like “ha, you suck.” This makes him feel like quitting, but Jackie is like “you can’t” cause she’s the coolest. He’s like OK and gives it another go and dances like a god dang star. The director? He’s like “Wow. OK. You have the part.” At the premier, Tony dances like a star again and the star dancer is angry because he’s using their chemistry against her. But this explodes on stage in the second half in what can only be described as literally the sexiest dancing scene in the history of cinema and in no way is it dumb and silly. By going off script, Tony becomes a hero of dance and the whole cast celebrates his one-of-a-kind achievement. Tony wins. THE END.

Hahaha, the crux of the problem for Staying Alive is that it is incredibly silly. Like no holds barred silly ass shit. Siskel must have been so disappointed! They really turn their back on pretty much everything the first (very good) movie was all about. He heads into the city at the end of that film (a pretty depressing film at that) because he knows his unserious life can’t last forever. Sure he’s hot shit in one club in Brooklyn, but at the end he’s given a trophy he doesn’t deserve because the judges are racist and it’s a moment of devastation. Just glaringly obvious that this stuff he’s been working on is meaningless. He heads off to Manhattan to become… a super silly Broadway dancer? Lol, what? A perfect example of the unnecessary sequel that should have been abandoned immediately once it was clear that the breakout star from the first film was just too famous to make a sequel where his loser character was still a loser. His character had to be dope as shit. That sucks. One final note: Travolta is a good dancer… but he is not a Broadway dancer level dancer. Crazy choices all around. Bravo. As for what the plot should have been? Easy, he should have been living as the arm candy for a stable of rich Manhattan ladies. Taking them out dancing and stuff while doing some modelling and commercial work. Acting is ultimately where Tony ends up if he is to succeed.

Hot Take Clam Bake! This was all a dream. It was a dream he had maybe just before a cab ran him over in Manhattan. Dreaming that, despite struggling with his art, he is able to break through and take over a Broadway show and demonstrate to the world that he is actually The World’s Greatest Dancer. Because otherwise the entire concept of the film makes no sense and is built on a tower of lies. And this was written and directed by Sly Stallone… so that would be blasphemy to suggest. Hot Take Temperature: Satan’s Alley.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me dancing. Hard. On Broadway. Everyone is watching like “Holy shit that guy can dance … hard!”* Let’s go!

The Good? Travolta’s body man … he is in incredibly good shape. The dancing is pretty incredible, even though at a high level, would this be on Broadway? Like … would people watch this on Broadway? I think the answer is yes. As a matter of fact I think I could figure out that the answer is yes because I bet I can find ads in the New York Times for shows EXACTLY like the weirdo one they put on in the end where a dancer dances his way through Hell or whatever.

The Bad? The film is soooooooooooo boring. And Travolta as a character is sooooooo shitty. He was shitty in the first too, but at that point he was in a shitty situation, and trying to even figure out what it meant to not be in such a situation. Learning what ambition even means. In this though he kind of seems like a dick, and did I mention the film is incredibly dull?

The BMT? Nope. It is nice that we finally did it because it has a very bad Rotten Tomatoes score, and is one of the last Stallone films we needed. But it is boooooooooring.

So … continuing what I was doing last time, can Google Gemini grounded search get Rotten Tomatoes scores from imdb links more easily than just scraping? Last time it wouldn’t provide answers for more than 10 when given 100 films. So I chunked them into ground of 10 and … nope, still, it mostly cannot find anything below the top 50, and for all but the top ten it gets somewhat random results. So no, this is not something I can use in any way. It is very disappointing. I really thought it would work, and given how I tend to use Google (to get IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes links mostly) this was the first time I thought something could work that would be quite useful to my BMT work. Alas. It just isn’t ready for primetime.

This is a huge Setting as a Character (Where?) for NYC, just Broadway and Brooklyn all over this piece. I think that is it. Sure his dream of being a Broadway star could be considered a MacGuffin I suppose. And his inevitable rise to stardom is a twist of a kind. By naw, just the setting here. This movie is ultra-dull and is the epitome of Bad even if the director and its status as a legendarily bad sequel screams out to be good-bad, it just ain’t.

What can we learn about dancing … hard? Find out in the Quiz. Cheerios,

Sklogs

Stay Alive Recap

Jamie

I have literally been waiting years for this moment. Stay Alive is one of a relatively small set of films that have me stop in my tracks and say, “Hold up… that qualifies?” These are major releases that are so crazy in concept that it’s a real wonder that they appear to have made no cultural impact. So little that I assumed they were straight-to-video. The year was 2006 and a film came out about a killer video game and I… have no recollection of it. It wasn’t even a massive bomb. If anything it was a modest success. Anyway, I always have to take a moment and celebrate when one of these films finally breaks through BMT rulez and finds a spot in a cycle. Now it just has to live up to the lofty standards (pun actually not intended, believe it or not) that The Loft set.

To recap, Loomis Crowley and his girlfriend, Sarah, are cutting it up with a new spooky video game. Even spookier, after the game ends they are killed just like their characters were. Hutch, Loomis’ friend, and Abigail, Sarah’s friend, meet at the funeral. Hutch ends up being given the game they were playing, Stay Alive. In memory of Loomis and Sarah, he and a bunch of friends get together to play the game. They are duly spookified and Hutch’s boss is killed in the game… and dies. Stay Alive! Like in Tarot, the police are like “so how many people in your lives have died in the last week?” Already pretty much knowing what’s happening they begin to research the subject of the game: Countess Bathory. One of the friends ignores the warnings and plays… and dies. Stay Alive! One of the detectives ignores the warnings and plays… and dies. Stay Alive! Hutch and the gang head to the plantation where the game is set and try to subdue the Countess’ ghost. They realize that the game can play itself (horseshit lore) and also that one of them can play and the help provided appears in real life (weird, but I’ll allow it). A climactic showdown occurs where all the very important game lore is used to kill the spirit. THE END. (Or is it? (They desperately want that to not be the case)).

Franchise Man has no right to comment on this movie until it unexpectedly becomes a franchise twenty or thirty years after the original. But… if he were to comment he would say that the rulez and lore in this movie are a travesty. The game plays itself? The game… just can kill you without you actually playing the game. Uh… I thought the tagline was Play It To Death. Operative word there being “play” as in play the game. It looks like shit and is total nonsense, so I don’t accept the claim on wikipedia that this is some cult classic. You know what would have made it a classic? More creative video game kills and making it so that to stop the curse they must, you know, play the game. I actually need them to make a sequel to right the wrongs of the past.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m brave enough to say it. I don’t think that video game was even haunted. I think there was a cool as hell serial killer out there pulling all the strings. A Jigsaw type character who was never stopped because they thought it was the video game all along. Some dopey ghost did all that? No way, man. It was this Jigsaw character trying to teach you all a lesson about life. In fact, I think it was actually Jigsaw. I also think Jigsaw is real and not a character in a movie franchise. How’s that for hot? Maybe I am Jigsaw. Hot enough for yah? Hot Take Temperature: Jigsaw

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me playing a spooky video game and getting all spookified* Let’s go!

The Good? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. I mean, is there anything? I don’t think so. Not since I learned that Anna from The O.C. has turned into a religious film actor.

The Bad? Everything. The acting is bad, especially the main guy. Frankie Muniz is doing something, but that something probably made more sense when he was an actor instead of a racecar driver. And it isn’t a scary film. The only thing it really has going for it is that idea that it is a killer video game film.

The BMT? Hmmm. I think it is. Partially because if you watch the Director’s Cut they have a bunch of stuff in there which look wildly different than the rest of the film because they had to get it (seemingly) off of the B roll or something. The film is such a terrible, and yet unique version of that 00s horror that it almost inevitably will be a film we’d return to in the future.

A little bit of a curve ball on the AI journey here. I did a good number of experiments, which at some point I’ll continue, but I also was curious whether I could use it to get Rotten Tomatoes scores for a list of IMDb links. In other words … could it genuinely replace something annoying that I tend to just arduously scrape? Let’s do this naively. I used the Google Gemini “grounded” search, and decided on something straightforward: given the top 100 1980 films IMDb links, could it return a dictionary of all 100 rotten tomatoes scores? Naive answer: helllllllll naw. Well, that is a little unfair, it seems to have a hard limit on 10 searches per query. So when you give a list of 100 links it will only return 10 of those values (the rest are null). So in a way it can’t, but perhaps it still speeds things up 10x? That is for next time.

Definite Planchet (Who?) for Frankie Muniz playing an aggravating character who everyone tells to shut up a bunch but obviously ultimately lives. Super Product Placement (What?) for a sweet Alienware laptop all up in this piece. A huge Setting as a Character (Where?) for a very very New Orleans film. I think the cursed video game is a MAcGuffin (Why?) for sure. And I love the Worst Twist (How?) whereby the end of the movie is them releasing the killer game despite them breaking the curse. This film is crazy bad looking but hugely entertainingly bad and thus a BMT through and through.

What can we learn about killer video games? Find out in the Quiz. Cheerios,

Sklogs

Under Siege 2: Dark Territory Recap

Jamie

I often try to reflect on the imprint that the latest BMT films had on the younger me who experienced their release in real time. Jury Duty is a perfect example. Huge in my mind. Tiny tiny in the actual cultural impact. Seagal represents an inversion of sorts. I’ve found that many people have a real connection to watching Seagal films on cable growing up. Something like Under Siege 2: Dark Territory can loom larger in their minds than the original. Not so for me. I don’t know if it was good upbringing or our exquisite taste, but Seagal almost had no actual presence in my mind. I don’t think I had ever seen a Seagal film until BMT… not a starring vehicle at least. Despite now having seen quite a few, we still have a lot to catch up on.

To recap, Ryback is back, Jack! And he’s cutting it up once again. Still a chef (obviously), but he’s a bit sad. His brother died in an airplane crash and left his niece an orphan. It’s all up to him to take care of her, but he hasn’t seen her in a while. He also has to take a train from Denver to LA with her to attend the funeral because she’s now scared of air travel. I’m sure this will be an uneventful train ride for good ol’ Ryback, right? Wrong! That’s because some big bad terrorists are along for the ride ready to hijack an earthquake satellite and hold the world hostage! This is real. This is happening. Travis Dane is the disgraced creator of the satellite who is going to use his big brain to get it back and he’s going to use… dark territory to do it. What’s that? Thanks for asking, it is the area that this train will go through where it won’t be in contact with the operators and they can keep things secret. Anyway, Ryback’s niece is taken hostage and so he recruits a porter, Bobby, to help take down the terrorists one-by-one. And boy, do they. They are chopping them. They are shooting them. They are tricking them. The terrorists are shaking in their boots at the mere mention of Ryback’s name and Ryback is able to help the hostages escape. But with Dane’s haxxors skillz he’s also able to destroy all kinds of stuff and sets the satellite on the Pentagon. With his job done he attempts to escape, but Ryback catches him, destroys his laptop (allowing the government to destroy the satellite), and right before the train crashes is able to jump into a helicopter, leaving Dane to plummet to his death. THE END (or is it? (isn’t it?)).

Boy, this is a tricky one. On the one hand this is an objectively shit film with a terrible plot and a star that cannot act his way out of a paper bag. Seagal was deep into his extended Difficult Period and you can tell. There are literally scenes that make no sense and shouldn’t be in the film, but you get the sense that he insisted and the filmmakers were like “whatever.” His scenes with Heigl are… fraught. There is not a female body that they don’t dare to ogle. All that being said, this is straight-to-video brain candy unleashed on the big screen. It’s kind of the precursor to films like Moonfall and The Beekeeper where you have to admit that there is something to a film that is unabashedly pure entertainment. I’m not going to say it’s good and if I were a serious critic I would be like “no way, no how.” But I’m not. This was fun to watch.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m going serious on this one. There is a scene in this film where Morris Chestnut is recruited by Seagal to take on the terrorists and he reacts in disbelief. “But, you’re just a cook!” he exclaims. How does he know this? Well earlier in the film he and Chestnut are cutting it up in the bar area and Seagal tells the bartender not to give Chestnut all the brandy because he needs it to bake a cake. Smash cut to him making a cake in the microwave as Chestnut looks on. This scene is… well, extraneous is probably even being too kind. It’s insane that it’s in a major motion picture. My hot take is that Seagal only clocks the brandy to make it make sense that Chestnut is then watching him bake said cake, which in turn allows Chestnut to gain the knowledge of Seagal’s background. It is entirely constructed because someone, somewhere was like “Wait… how does he know he’s a cook?” It’s honestly beautiful. Hot Take Temperature: Microwave Cake.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me hanging off the side of a train and totally akidoing people to death* Let’s go!

The Good? I mean … there is kind of an argument here that this is a good Seagal movie. That isn’t saying much, but it is an incredibly wild film. As you watch it you want there to be hundreds of these types of films available. And yet, there isn’t. Out of every 100 VHS releases there is generously one Crackerjack in the bunch. Under Siege 2 is a bad wide release film (an absurdity even), but a VHS rental? An afternoon HBO film? Uh … cha, it does it for me.

The Bad? The film is absurd! The bad guy is absurder! He might be the most absurd actually. Is that a bad thing? Well, depends on your perspective. There is the Seagal of it all, and the harrowing experience of watching him interact with a young woman in the form of Katherine Heigel. But all of the bad can, in a way, be good.

The BMT? I mean, is it the best train film in the BMT canon? Maybe. It is a great train film. And of all the Seagal films when you actually think about it, it might be the third most entertaining. For a trilogy just smashing out Under Siege, Under Siege 2, and Executive Decision (and pretending like they filmed the actual tragic death of Stephen Seagal) is a decent option.

Oh snap, time to continue down the AI analysis journey. Last time I was looking at whether the order of the posters mattered when trying to pull out the ones that feature a clown. This is just about the same analysis, except I just ran 100 permutations, just to see if there was a pattern to when zero, one, or two posters are pulled out:

The green dots are both, the red none, and the black is Quick Change but not Child’s Play 2. The only real pattern is that Child’s Play has to be very near or after Quick Change to be ignored, which is interesting. In the end it does indicate the position mostly doesn’t matter, but you probably want to permute and run more than once to get accurate results. I would also say you should do more posters not less, I think it very much cuts down on the false positives … although maybe if you were looking for something common it would end up having more false negatives or something. I guess I’ll have to test that.

A Kinda Planchet (Who?) for Morris Chestnut who is kind of hapless throughout, but he is integrated into the hero crew™ pretty quickly. I’m going to go with a recently rare Product Placement (What?) for the sweet Panasonic Mash XBS boombox featured in the lone sex scene of the film. I do love the Setting as a Character (Where?) for the titular Dark Territory which appears to be in the Rocky Mountains just west of Denver, I think. Not really any MacGuffins or even twists amazingly. This is one of the most BMT films I’ve ever seen.

Oooooo what can we learn about satellites and dark territories? Find out in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Jury Duty Recap

Jamie

Have I told the story where I thought the quote “That’s nice, Peanut” came from this movie because the dog’s name is Peanut (even though that doesn’t make sense)? But turns out it came from an equally quality film Celtic Pride? Yes, only a million times? Great. Just wanted to make sure it was clear that those two films were prominent enough in my cultural upbringing that I could mix up a quote from one with the other because I remembered (for eternity, apparently) the name of the dog in a Pauly Shore vehicle. The only other thing I remembered vividly from this film was the conjugal visit scene where Shore dresses up like a woman in order to see the man on trial. They then have a series of homophobic mix-up’s which results in the implication that they make love… which as a child was totally bewildering.

To recap, Tommy is a loser. He doesn’t have a job and even when his family tries to help him out he can’t help himself. When his mom and her boyfriend take the trailer and head off to Vegas, Tommy is left homeless and remembers that he has an opportunity to earn some quick cash (and a place to stay) on jury duty. He heads to the courthouse where after some searching finds a death penalty case for a serial killer, Carl Wayne Bishop. After getting himself on the jury, they head off to a swanky hotel that isn’t so swanky as most of it is being renovated. To make matters worse, Tommy is sharing a room with his high school principal (ha!). To get around this he convinces the manager of the hotel, who is struggling to book rooms during the renovation, to put him up in the nice part of the hotel in exchange for free advertising. At this point he is fully enjoying himself (and fallen in love with a fellow juror, Monica) and so when they head to the jury room he gets himself elected foreman and proceeds to plant the seeds for a drawn out deliberation. But the more he argues the more he is convincing a number of people that something is off. Just as they are ready to find Bishop innocent, the jurors find out about his dope digs and a mistrial is declared. Later, as he’s collecting trash with his stepfather, Tommy realizes that the connection between all the victims in the trial was styrofoam and that the killer was a deranged environmentalist. He tries to call Monica, but she won’t talk to him, so he tracks down Frank, another Juror who was a deranged environmentalist… wait a second! That’s right, Tommy walks right into the real killer, who was on the jury the whole time. A climactic action scene commences which results in good vanquishing evil and Tommy finding his purpose in life: the law. THE END.

I certainly have a fond recollection of Jury Duty. My new recollection of the film is less kind. The opening scene is actually kind of funny. Everyone appears disgusted by Shore and he doesn’t totally understand why. So it starts out at least recognizing that not everyone would be game for the Pauly Shore experience. From there the logic in the film makes almost no sense. There is the primary twist: the murderer was serving on the jury the whole time after tricking another potential juror to let him take his place. But like… this requires the murderer to have planned to frame the dude on trial. Did he find an insane person who threatens everyone he works with and follow him around killing his coworkers. And then when it came time to frame him his tasered him and left him at a crime scene and the cops were like… cool with that? And then he got on the jury and… did nothing? All for the environment? It is incomprehensible if you allow yourself the luxury of trying to understand it. As it is, it just feels like a low-grade spoof film they turned into a Shore vehicle. Also the conjugal visit scene is even worse than I remember. It is one of the worst things ever put to film.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Do I even have to say it? Pauly Shore does not make it through law school no matter how much this jury duty experience may have inspired him. As a result, I hate to say it, but Monica and Tommy… they don’t make it or the long haul. Sad, but true. Finally, despite what they show at the end of the film, Peanut does not have a successful run on Jeopardy. This isn’t an Air Bud scenario. I’m willing to bet there is in fact a rule against a dog (who has no way of effectively communicating with humans) being a contestant. Hot Take Temperature: Milk Man Scene.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me laughing as my father-in-law watches this film with me and keeps on saying “ugh this is awful” over and over* Let’s go!

The Good? Hmmmm … nostalgia. This was like slipping into a warm bath and remembering all the good times watching Comedy Central on summer vacation between stints at the tennis courts. This might genuinely be the worst film I have a decent amount of affection for.

The Bad? Everything about it if I’m being honest with myself. Pauly Shore is quite an annoying character (across all of the “weasel” films). The acting is really bad. And the worst crime of all: the court case makes zero sense. The actual killer gets on the jury of his own crime (Juror #2 style) and then doesn’t really even try that hard to get the guy convicted, and then, craziest of all, he is only ultimately suspected because he was on the jury! If he hadn’t gone on the jury there would be no reason to suspect him! … Even while on the jury there was no reason to suspect him! It doesn’t make any sense at all. Fun stuff.

The BMT? Hmmmmmmm … maybe. Of all the Pauly Shore films I think Bio-Dome is the pinnacle with the right balance of kind of fun dumbness with some decent laughs and fun actors. This is probably the third of the major Weasel films (after Son-in-Law and Bio-Dome), but it is the only one that is pretty boring.

Well, now that I kind of know that the batch imaging can work consistently, I wanted to test if there would be trouble with longer sets of images or with the order of images. Obviously the answer is yes. I ran ten experiments where I did a position permutation for each of the ten and then ran ten queries on trying to find clowns in the set.

Well, cool, I suppose. It isn’t getting false positives as much with the larger set. I would mostly know because I got a bunch when I ran 10 posters (I do wonder if sometimes the model is giving back the most likely poster with a clown, so when the set is smaller you get a lot of random posters flagged). Experiment 10 does give me pause. In that case the permutation happened to put both clown posters in the back third. I sure do hope it isn’t just reading N images and giving up in those cases … Well, that is something more to test.

This actually genuinely might be the Worst Twist (How?) in the history of BMT with the illogical reveal that the Fast Food Killer is Stanley Tucci because he is some eco-terrorist who for whatever reason doesn’t want anyone to know that the murders are due to ecological reasons. It makes no sense. This movie is actually just Bad, it is very boring compared to the high lunacy of Bio-Dome and the actual genuine goodness of Son-in-law.

What could we learn about juries and jury duty? Find out in the quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Kraven the Hunter Recap

Jamie

It was Morbin’ Time with Morbius. We dined out at Madame Web’s. If you thought for one second we weren’t going to go cuckoo for some Kraven bits just because it was out in theaters for the end of year cycle then oh ho ho! You must not have been paying attention to the dining experience at Madame Web’s. Now… this had a lot to live up to. Last we saw of this “franchise” (Franchise Man Note: This is obviously the Spider-man Villain franchise, so Jamie is correct here, however it also unfortunately includes the much more successful Venom films… which kind of spoils the fun of these one-off disasters… that’s just a Franchise Fact) Madame Web was donning the dopest sunglasses in the universe so… may as well pack it in and not even try, right? Pretty much.

To recap, Kaven is a hunter. He totally hunts people. Bad people, I guess. We see him hunt a dude and it’s cool and then we flash back to when he was a kid and that is decidedly less cool. Kraven’s dad is also a hunter. He also kind of sucks and everyone hates him. When his mother dies, he and his half-brother Dmitri are taken back to live with their father and become total baddies. On a hunting trip where there is a legendary lion that their dad is just jonesing to kill, Kraven is attacked by the lion and nearly killed. A young girl, Calypso, heals him with a magical serum which turns him into… Kraven the Hunter. Afterwards, his father is like “I totally killed that lion,” and that makes Kraven sad and he leaves Dmitri behind to go live in the wilderness. Flash forward and he’s still living in the wilderness. He’s a protector of nature and only ventures to London to see Dmitri and his father on occasion. During Dmitri’s latest birthday, Dmitri is kidnapped when people come to try to capture Kraven. Their father refuses to pay the ransom sent by the Rhino, the man behind the kidnapping who wants to overthrow the family’s criminal enterprise. It’s time to hunt. He’s tricked into heading to a secret hideout where the Rhino ambushes him, but Kraven escapes. The Rhino then sets the Foreigner on Kraven and hunts him to his sanctuary. During this whole thing Calypso is again helping Kraven… as a lawyer… like just a regular person now pretty much. Ultimately tracking down the ultimate hunter backfires as all the baddies are hunted and killed. He then kills his dad because he was in on it and is dismayed to find Dimitri is now a villain. Nooooooooo. THE END. (Or is it (you bet it is)).

There was a moment about 30 minutes into the longest intro that any film has ever had ever where I thought perhaps they had stumbled into another disasterpiece. I didn’t understand why they were doing this to us… and that felt right. However, after that it all just kind of fell apart. Definitely more Morbius than Madame Web. A couple cool set pieces and a bad guy that is at least serviceable can’t really save a rough script that at times completely lacked logic and an ending that was gobbledegook (see, once again: Morbius). It does feel like these films lacked a coherence that is startling. These are supposed to be the supervillains that populate the Sinister Six and yet… they are pretty much good guys? Why? It would have been a lot more refreshing if Kraven at least played the part. Make him a super hunter who is not afraid to go after the more dangerous game: poachers. He’s recruited to kill a supervillain and agrees because he’s intrigued, not because he thinks it’s right. Not that simple, I guess. Instead this was easily the blandest of the films and definitely felt like the end of the line.

Hot Take Clam Bake! I don’t think that Calypso serum did anything. This was all a Dumbo’s feather scenario and Kraven was Kraven the Hunter the whole time. He just had to believe in himself. His dad was making him feel like he wasn’t the Hunter, but just a hunter, and what you feel is what you are (you know?). But when he felt that serum touch his lips and this future lawyer said it was magic he totally was like “Yeah, yeah I do feel a little magic, now that you mention it.” All in all, what I’m trying to say is that he was never Kraven the Hunter anyway. He was just Kraven the Man. Thank you. Hot Take Temperature: Rhino.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me in a totally rad fur vest just loungin’ on a throne like “what? You don’t know all about Patrick The Hunter?”* Let’s go!

The Good? Some of the performances are fun. I do like the character / villain of The Foreigner, that is a pretty weird performance, but at least interesting in the grand non-Spiderman film villains. I think that’s it.

The Bad? The film is very scattershot, often looks like crap, and doesn’t have a particularly good motivation for existing. We are asked, essentially, to care about late-stage Russell Crowe being a bad dad drug dad and keeping his drug empire from someone who quite literally transforms into a Rhinoceros? It is just something I don’t really care about. The DeBois character also feels completely superfluous, she doesn’t even really get a costume. The whole thing seems like them trying to put in the absolute bare minimum amount of work just to finish off this Sony contract once and for all.

The BMT? I think so. Madame Web is glorious. This isn’t quite that, but I still think there are bits there where you are like “oh like he’s literally a rhinoceros huh?” that does just enough for me to keep me going. It is really borderline, but I have a tough time thinking it is merely a bad movie. There is some there there, you know it when you see it.

The final one of the year (phew). So Last week I submitted the top 150 posters from 1990 in an attempt to find posters with clowns. This time? I’m doing the same thing, but splitting it up into groups of 10. My hypothesis would have been that this would result in more false positives since the model won’t lose context / get overwhelmed by stronger clownish posters.

And indeed that is basically what happened. Index (1,8) is Child’s Play 2 and (7,1) is Quick Change. But then it also thinks Drop Dead Fred (10,8) has a clown (it doesn’t, although Fred does appear quite clownish), and Child’s Play 3 (15,7) which I assume is just because Chucky looks crazy in that one. The other false positives are just busy posters as usual. I don’t know, it feels like it did pretty well with 100+ posters, but at the same time am I confident it isn’t missing false negatives? I’m not sure. Do I care? … I’m not sure about that either. Stay tuned in the new year.

Setting as a Character (Where?) for far eastern Russia, which is definitely a place I don’t remember seeing many films set before. Obviously, all of these things need a MacGuffin (Why?), in this case it is all about Nikolai Kravinoff’s drug empire (obviously). And a great Worst Twist (How?) for the ultimate reveal that Kraven’s brother has been transformed into Chameleon, which is a villain we’ll never ever see again I assume. This film isn’t as good as Madame Web, but I still think there is enough there to be BMT worthy in the end.

Read all about hunting I guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Joker: Folie à Deux Recap

Jamie

It’s possible that Joker is the biggest BMT film of all time. There are Transformers films, sure. There are Jurassic World, Pirates of the Caribbean, and DC Comics proper films. But there is nothing quite like Joker and the immense popularity of the first film. It was a box office smash and in the Oscar race. It was so huge that not only was a sequel obviously going to be made, but Todd Phillips was given a blank check. A blank check that he used to turn it into an uber expensive jukebox musical. It’s almost impossible to think of something even comparable to this catastrophe. So suffice to say I was pretty excited.

To recap, Arthur Fleck is in prison. He is a real saddo and generally treated as a joke. A musically inclined guard, though, decides to convince the higher ups to let him in on music therapy where he meets Harley Quinn. He’s taken by the idea that she is obsessed with his TV movie and his exploits as The Joker. During a film screening she sets a fire and they attempt an escape, which lands him in solitary confinement. Harley meets with him there and helps him have sex with her (yes, what happened is exactly as I wrote it there… it’s very funny). He then goes off for a softball interview to try to help his case that he is mentally unwell, but instead launches into a song that begins to incite people again. As his trial begins, Harley is upset that he isn’t doing more press as The Joker, but Arthur’s lawyer reveals that Harley is a liar and has made up all kinds of lies to get close to him. She admits to that, but also claims to be pregnant with their child. He dismisses his lawyer and begins representing himself. As his defense takes a disastrous route and he and his friends are abused by the guards, Arthur reflects and denounces his Joker persona and is found guilty. At that moment a bomb explodes outside and a group of his supporters help him escape. Eventually he runs from them and finds Harley who is like “nah, no thanks.” He’s taken back to Arkham where he is stabbed to death by the real Joker. THE END. (Or is it?… well yeah, it probably is).

I think I probably like Joker 2 more than most people. The idea that he made the entire thing as a fuck you to fans fo the first one I don’t believe for a second. I think this is always what he wanted to make. For sure making him a hilariously pathetic “villain” was quite a twist for those that held Joker up as some matinee idol. But I wasn’t one of those and there was something nice to how you watch this character and the whole time (even the first film) you’re like “this is the guy who becomes Batman’s archenemy?” Only for that to pay off exactly as that absurd concept should: a second straight year where Joaquin Phoenix wins Funniest Sex Scene of the Year Award (last year he won for Beau is Afraid). His sex scene with Lady Gaga is hilarious and is meant to be so and quite an accomplishment. My big problem is that the film was too small. Even the songs are small. They should have had Joker and Harley escape and then we could have romped through the city. Would have made it more fun. As constructed you sure do spend a lot of time talking away in a courthouse and interviews. As for Rebel Moon: Part 1 & Part 2, is it possible for me to kind of enjoy the daring of a film, but also think it represents the downfall of the medium? This and Carry-on were the two Netflix films I watched this year and boy howdy, what the hell is going on over there? The story structures are like children’s films. Still, some crazy sci-fi settings and kooky alien design? The main villain appears to have a sexual relationship with a squid alien? There are things to point to in Rebel Moon and say, “He tried.” Visually at least.

Hot Take Clam Bake! What if Arthur Fleck was the Joker after all? Sure at the end of this film we see him get stabbed. And sure that guy carves a smile onto his face implying that he becomes the Joker. But you know what we didn’t see? What happens right after that. Arthur ninja flips himself off the ground and karate chops that dude in the throat. He then reveals that he was wearing a bullet proof vest that also is knife proof. He then runs to tell Harley what happened but is shocked to find that his assailant killed her and their unborn child (which was real and definitely not a lie). Then as the guards rush him, Arthur leaps from the window into a vat of chemicals below. He is… The Joker. Hot Take Temperature: Acid Burn.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me dancing down some stairs but then I trip and fall all the way down and my face goes directly into a big pile of dogshit, I start crying, and then Lady Gaga walks by and laughs at me* Let’s go!

The Good? Whenever the films get close to actually being a DC film you start to see pieces of what really works. In the first film it is the bits and pieces of seeing how Joker like figure would generate a following, and there are pieces of Bruce Wayne set up that kind of works. Here, all the stuff concerning Two-Face and maybe how that could go is by far the most exciting stuff.

The Bad? Unfortunately the rest of the film is filled with aggressively mediocre Jukebox Musical numbers and/or is just very dull scenes of Joker wandering around a prison, or sitting in a courtroom, or being a big old saddo. It is a truly strange follow-up to an okay film with a great central performance.

The BMT? This movie is just bad. They really hamstring themselves with the singing. Whenever it started to happen I groaned because … they aren’t singing well? What is the point? It makes Joaquin Phoenix look kind of dumb. It is quite unfortunate to behold. And I didn’t even really like the first one that much.

To pair with the glory that is Joker 2 we had to go for the double dip of Netflix slop with Rebel Moon – Part 1: A Child of Fire, and Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver. Wooooooooof these films are wild stuff. Imagine the most derivative Star Wars garbage you’ve ever seen, but also very stilted and cut up because the production is Netflix weirdness. It was a surreal experience to watch like five hours of quite bad science fiction. The positives? The world building was fun, it is nice sometimes to be dropped into a space opera with interesting aliens and governments and space travel and junk. The negatives? Every time a battle scene came up I would basically lose track of what was happening and fall asleep. It is the anti-James Cameron. Cameron has an eye for action which makes those scene exciting, but the Avatar world is a bit derivative. This is occasionally interesting world building with some of the worst action scenes you’ll ever seen. Can’t wait for Part 3 and 4. C+, something about watching the absolute worst Netflix has to offer every year is fun. Electric State here we come!

Ah, finally, a little test on the batch image processing. What shall we look up? What about movie posters with clowns in them? I used the top 150 films from 1990 and ran it 10 times. The answers were: 10/10 Quick Change, 5/10 Child’s Play 2. The second is interesting. I chose the top 150 from 1990 because I knew Quick Change was in there (at #146). There is a little toy clown in the Child’s Play poster. Why does it only hit 5 out of 10 times? … I don’t know. But I like the correct indexing. In a way, possibly, 5/10 could literally mean the model is only 50% confident that a toy clown counts. I’ll have to explore this more.

You know that his is a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Gotham City baby. And I do think this has a Worst Twist (How?) potential with the reveal that he probably isn’t the actual Joker, but instead is stabbed (probably not to death, I assume the plan for a third would have involved the other Joker taking his mantle and him being a big saddo about it) by the actual Joker in the end. This is a Bad film, although I do admit it gets close to BMT in its weirdness, I just don’t think I would ever watch it again.

Read all about DC villains I guess in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

The Strangers: Chapter 1 Recap

Jamie

What an interesting choice. I’ve become much more of a horror watcher as the years go on. I think part of it is that most of them are just about 90 minutes long. Really hits the sweet spot. So I do have a sense of the horror landscape. So if you were to tell me that a franchise (two films is still a franchise to Franchise Man) was looking to produce a trilogy to put their franchise-ness into hyperspeed and asked me who was the director of such a trilogy, I would immediately presume it was some up-and-comer. Some director who maybe had a low level hit on Shudder that had people wondering what their next project would be. If you said that I was wrong and that the director was in fact Renny Harlin of Cutthroat Island fame, I would say you were a lying liar who lies to me. As I said, what an interesting choice.

To recap, Maya and Ryan are two lovers just loving being lovers. But oh no! Maya is moving across the country and Ryan is a saddo! They stop in a small town to have lunch where some of the locals look at them creepy. But could it be more than that? Maybe, because suddenly their car is having engine trouble and a couple of the creepsters say it’s gonna be a while. The waitress recommends an Airbnb in the woods and soon they are loving being lovers in a lovely cabin in the woods. Ryan takes a motorcycle into town to get his inhaler and while away Maya is stalked by Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Masky or whatever. Ryan returns and says it was all a hallucination caused by smoking the reefer (tight) but soon they are both being attacked. Stranger! They evade and elude their tormentors and get a gun (he’s got a gun!) which they promptly use to kill the owner of the cabin by mistake. Oops! (Oh, and Stranger!) They try to take the dead guy’s truck but Masky smashes it up and Maya escapes into the woods and calls the police. Eventually they are both tracked down and brought back to the cabin where they are tortured. Ryan is killed and Maya is stabbed just for being there, but then the Strangers have to flee as the police are approaching. Ultimately, Maya survives. THE END (or is it? (You kidding?))

Ha! Now we’re talking. This movie sucks. I can’t believe they filmed a new trilogy concurrently. The second will definitely come out. That’s for sure. The third… I’m sensing the possibility of a straight-to-Shudder backroom deal. That’s if the trend continues. The trend of these movies totally sucking. It’s just a cheap version of the original with less interesting and more annoying main characters. They also jettisoned the drama aspect. Now The Strangers are like… part of a community that feeds people to The Strangers by luring them to a cabin? That’s terrible. At the very least when you have a franchise like this you have to double down on what people like. Like I see the structure as: a family or couple are having some drama, as a result they end up somewhere they usually wouldn’t be, The Strangers strike for no reason other than to kill! This breaks that. Kind of like that dumb Friday the 13th movie where some rando was the killer. Dumb.

Hot Take Clam Bake! What if… what if it isn’t just because Maya and Ryan were there. Yeah. What if Masky is Maya’s brother. He’s insane and mad because the family abandoned him in an asylum. Oh, and Dollface’s mask resembles Maya because she was a woman in the asylum with Masky and he forced her to play as her sister. Yeah, yeah! And she’s angry because she’s in love with Masky so she has to kill Maya to be with him. Yeah, hell yeah! And Pin-up Girl is Dollface’s sister who pretends to also hate Maya, but really is trying from the inside to save her sister from the Cult of Masky. She knows if she can kill Maya then maybe the spell will be broken. Lore! Lore, baby! Hot Take Temperature: Lore.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me in a totally spooky mask and creeping around the woods and … wait, is this a prequel or a remake of my other gif?* Let’s go!

The Good? Hmmmmmmmm … nothing? It is weird to say it, but it feels like they took the first two movies, jammed them together, declared it as “not a remake”, and then were flabbergasted that people didn’t accept this.

The Bad? This movie is like the first but worse because the main characters are somehow even more unappealing. And the movie is like the second but worse because the setting seems like it should be cool, but pales in comparison to the trailer park from the second. The fact that they trot out “The Man in the Mask” / “Scarecrow” and the two ladies in all three films as if I care about those characters specifically is nuts. The film is almost certainly better if they started to mix that up a bit. Am I going crazy or is it undoubtedly better if there are a bunch of masks and it is made clear this is some strange multi-state conspiracy to get away with mass murders or something? Why are these same characters in Oregon now? They were in Ohio before, and prior to that I assume somewhere else. Why are they wandering around? Again, the biggest condemnation of the franchise is that while I ask these questions I genuinely do not give a shit about the answer.

The BMT? Hell naw. We’ll see how the rest of the trilogy works out (the films do make money, I would be surprised if they don’t get all three out eventually), but like what I expect with The Purge series these are made for a particular type of fan and tend to be focused on kills and rarely end up being fun in a real capacity.

Heyooooo. The saga of the image batch processing with Google AI Studio is complete. Well, there is at least something that seems to work and is worth checking out on a larger scale. Ultimately, by placing the stub (e.g. tt0085750 for Jaws 3-D) at the top it avoids issues with the model trying to figure out the indexing:

There were no issues of throwing errors or missing out or shifting stubs or anything. So really, this should set up for a good test on something like the top 100 posters from a year. I guess stay tuned.

I’m going to give Crap Boyfriend (Who?) to this goober in the film, he could not possibly be a bigger sourpuss the entire time. A Setting as a Character (Where?) for Oregon. I do like the MacGuffin (Why?) as to the inhaler specifically which goes from vital to worthless several times during the film for no good reason. And Worst Twist (How?) for the reveal that the main girl lived to the end, but is now going to be haunted by baghead or whatever. This film is Bad, it isn’t scary and in general, like the rest of the series, is dumb.

Read all about bags and junk I assume in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

The Strangers: Prey at Night Recap

Jamie

For some reason in my head the second Strangers movie was very well received, while the first one was kind of a squandered opportunity. So I had no idea I would actually be recapping and reviewing this film. Wasn’t this a well received film? No. In fact it is perfectly at our threshold for qualification. So perhaps one day we’ll look back on this film and chuckle about what a waste of time it was to recap the film as it so clearly does not qualify having achieved 50 good reviews out of 125… that’s just one more good review, BTW. And, spoiler alert, if I had it my way and BMT was a nationally recognized contributor to RottenTomatoes, then, indeed, this would not qualify any longer.

To recap, Cindy and Mike are struggling with their daughter Kinsey. She’s a girl on the wrong track and they are sending her to boarding school. Or are they? Not so fast, because once they arrive in Cindy’s uncle’s semi-abandoned trailer park they are in The Strangers’ world. Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Masky or whatever are going to kill them… and that’s basically what happens. Kinsey and her brother Luke go off on a walk and discover the aunt and uncle murdered. They’re totally grossed out and get their dad. Luke and Mike go off to figure out what’s going on and Cindy and Kinsey are attacked. Cindy helps Kinsey get out of there and is murdered. Strangers! Luke and Mike escape Masky and find Cindy dead. While searching for Kinsey they are attacked and Luke gets away while Mike is murdered. Strangers! Luke and Kinsey are now on their own and run to the general store where they try to call 911. Luke is badly injured, but the kids are starting to kill some of the Strangers too. Strangers! The police arrive but are killed. Strangers! Kinsey kills one of them. Strangers! Masky is basically Michael Myers and won’t be killed. Not yet Strangers! But then he’s killed. Strangers! Kinsey and Luke live and the stranger die (or do they? (don’t ask me)). THE END

I thought this was a fun movie. The climactic pool scene in particular I found to be very visually engaging (you taking notes, Night Swim?). What a whirlwind it was watching these two movies. I didn’t even really like the first (and best reviewed, it turns out) The Strangers film. I can see why actors found it interesting. It starts like a drama and then dives into the horror and you’re thinking “oh wow, does this have to do with that drama?” The answer is obviously “no” dummy. The movie is called The STRANGERS. The point ends up being that they are doing it for funsies. But I guess that’s where I kind of throw my hands up. So the drama is meaningless and the kills are also meaningless. So it’s all just a trumped up regular slasher film? Anyway, I didn’t much care for it, although I got some chills from it. The sequel, though, as I said, was much more polished. I thought it looked great and I do think it smoothed a bit more of the theme of the films. People with drama aren’t thinking clearly and get themselves into weird situations. These situations are where The Strangers strike because all it takes is for you to be alone. No other reason. I liked it.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Splurge for a Holiday Inn, dummies. I know you want to see your uncle in his creepy abandoned trailer park, but also… continental breakfast? Ever heard of it? In fact, why doesn’t your uncle make a day of it? Date night at the Holiday Inn. Money’s tight, I get it. You have the unexpected cost of sending your problem child to boarding school. You know what’s financially prudent? A Holiday Inn. Do you know what’s not? Getting killed in an abandoned trailer park. Hot Take Temperature: Full Body Burn.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me in a totally spooky mask and creeping around the woods.* Let’s go!

Fun fact: We didn’t realize this qualified until after we watched it. So now I’m begrudgingly writing about a movie I didn’t really plan on having to remember stuff about.

The Good? Out of the three movies I think this one had the most interesting stuff in it. The first had issues where I just thought they acted dumb and in general they were kind of unpleasant. This one had a few good set pieces (like the swimming pool) and in general I think the final girl ended up being much better. I don’t particularly like horror in general, but this was on the okay side.

The Bad? Franchises like this I think are just lame. They have three bad guys from the first one and then don’t really add anything? In a way they dare the viewer to wonder if any of them will be killed (they are). But still, unlike Freddy, they really don’t have a personality. In fact, the series draws some of its eeriness from the explicit face that they _don’t_ have personality despite intriguing masks. It doesn’t really work beyond the first movie, they should have had totally different bad guys in my opinion.

The BMT? I don’t think any of the franchise really transcends what it is, which is a mostly brainless series of jumpscares.

I had two additional idea on how to pull out images from a batch process accurately. The first was last time (just a number, seemed to work). My second idea was a hash. Well that also worked:

The issue is that it couldn’t quite translate the hashes properly (in that it would mix up the letters). I have a feeling it would also be a problem with using imdb stubs (the next test) or large indices, but that would need to be for a larger test.

Dumb Bad Guy Names (Who?) goes to Pin-up Girl and Doll Face, just terrible horror film villain names. According to Wikipedia this is a Setting as a Character (Where?) for somewhere in Ohio. And a Worst Twist (How?) for the final scene which (much like the third film) teases that she is going to be attacked again in the hospital, but that doesn’t seem like it is going to be resolved. The film is Bad I think, but a lot of that is just that I don’t like horror films, so it has to be very BMT or very Good to get my vote for that.

I guess we’ll probably learn about dumb masks or something in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

The American Society of Magical Negroes Recap

Jamie

The American Society of Magical [Shut your mouth!]. You could see this movie coming a mile away. It feels a lot like a Black List script. These are scripts that circulate Hollywood and get high marks but for whatever reason don’t get produced. They used to have a podcast where they would act them out and I have to say… it was usually pretty clear why they didn’t get made. As I recall one of them prominently featured Tom Cruise playing himself in a kind of Nic Cage style action-comedy (note: can we use Nic Cage instead?). Another was a rude-crude comedy that seemed like it was written when Porky’s was all the rage (note: do you have a time machine?). Another was a lesbian romance set in the Hasidic Jewish community of NYC (note: how good are you at marketing?). This… well, I think you can see why I might think that would fit the mold.

To recap, Aren is an artist. More specifically he is a struggling artist. He’s struggling with his voice and standing up for his art. Roger, a bartender at one of his shows, takes a liking to him and lets him in on a little secret. He’s part of the American Society of Magical Negroes. Like the trope from film they are tasked with saving the world from sad white people. Sad white people do terrible things and make terrible mistakes. The happier the white people are, the safer the world is. Ultimately, Aren takes on the task of making Jason, a tech bro, happy by helping him get together with his work crush, Lizzie. Easier said than done when Aren realizes that Lizzie is pretty cool and maybe he kind of likes her. Also Jason, while affable and well-meaning, is also selfish and self-centered. He idolizes the idiotic boss of their tech company and is prone to taking credit for things that he didn’t do. It becomes harder and harder for Aren to justify helping this dope get with this super cool, smart and talented girl of his dreams. However, Aren is reminded that they are saving the world. But when Aren is invited to co-present a new diversity program with Jason, an off-hand offensive remark by Jason emboldens him to set the record straight on their companies bad policies. Before he is kicked out of the Society, he ends up revealing the secret to Lizzie by using his powers to teleport her. Ultimately, after Lizzie is able to return to LA following the teleportation, they get together and smooch hard… also she’s part of her own society or whatever. THE END.

I actually think this movie is better than fine. It’s bordering on good, even. I read a lot of reviews that were like “really pulled the punch. Should have gone further.” I mean, I guess if you mean it should have been 100% biting satire and not be a romantic comedy. Sure… but I liked the two leads well enough and as a rom com it was perfectly serviceable. I don’t know. I was unexpectedly taken with this film and actually thought they went pretty far with the idea. I mean, their meter for whether they are doing a good job measures white tears. It’s a bit of a fluffy movie. Definitely feels like a streaming movie. But I actually thought it was fun enough, the acting was fine, and they took the concept where it needed to go. My primary critique would be that the girl almost certainly should have been part of the American Society for Manic Pixie Dream Girls. If there was one pulled punch, I think it might be that. It’s so obvious and the character fits the stereotype. But given how the term has fallen out of favor it feels like it was  abandoned for something else that made no sense. So why even do it?

Hot Take Clam Bake! So like… now the guy he was supposed to help becomes a mass murderer or something? He failed, right? The dude is super sad because he was called a racist on a public live stream… fine, he wasn’t exactly called racist, but it was implied. The white tears were a-flowin. That’s not good. Or at least that’s what I was led to believe. So pretty sad movie in the end. Hot Take Temperature: Warm wool sweater art.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me definitely, totally watching this film. I definitely totally watched it* Let’s go!

Fun fact: I didn’t watch this movie until March 2025. For real. Just never really felt like or of felt the need to as we ended up very far behind on the emails. So there it sat, burned onto my phone, waiting for me to watch it.

The Good? I mean, the movie? It is wild that this is considered (by most metrics) one of the worst films of the year. It’s fun. I suppose it depends a bit on how much mileage you get out of all the Justice Smith of it all, but for real: the movie is fun and kind of good. If you are up for it and go into it with a clear mind.

The Bad? The movie isn’t funny per se. It is a comedy that is clever. It makes you go “that’s funny.” Or maybe smirk a bit and think “that’s funny.” And even those moments are few and far between. The two main characters I think are very good though and I think both are going to end up doing things in the future. Well, Justice Smith already is, he’s quietly one of the biggest young movie stars we got.

The BMT? Hell naw. I’m never watching this film again. I’m never thinking about this film again. This film was a checkbox for 2024 and that is all. Good luck to everyone involved. Personally I think your movie was pretty funny and good.

So if you are following the recaps you’ll know the saga of the batch image processing. Well, I’m almost there … maybe, kind of. Anyways, the current issue is that the models don’t seem to be able to accurately bring back indices. So let’s help them along:

Besides the one instance where it was probably like “I’m busy” or something, this worked flawlessly. As in the example, all I did was add the index to the top of the posters. There is a slight concern still (what if the title is quite near the top and also has a number?), but that feels quite fixable (which I’ll explore next). I am quite close to getting this to work.

In a way there is Product Placement (What?) for VR stuff in general, so I’m going to count it. A very Setting as a Character (Where?) L.A. film. I do think the whole movie has a MacGuffin (Why?) of the dream girl in general, which they play off of in the end. And in the vein I liked the twist actually, I thought it was clever, although it was a bit too little too late. The movie is Good, don’t at me.

Read all about uh … secret societies? Probably, in the Quiz. Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Back to Black Recap

Jamie

What is there to say about Back to Black? Nothing, that’s what.

To recap, Amy Winehouse is not yet a star. She’s just a girl that loves singing. Loves playing guitar. Loves her grandma. And yes, she loves drinking. When her demo ends up at Island Records she begins her road to stardom and releases her debut album. But then? Not as much as should happen. They want her to be more pop. She wants to be Amy Winehouse. In an ensuing break she meets Blake at a bar. They start a torrid, messy, on-again, off-again love affair. After things get particularly messy, Blake leaves and Amy is left heartbroken. This is exacerbated by the grief of finding out her grandma is dying of cancer. She channels all this into her second smash hit album Back to Black. In the wake of this success, she gets back together with Blake and they elope. Ultimately this turns tragic when Blake is arrested for assault and Amy is left to deal with her demons on her own. A series of messy, drunken performances ensue. By the time Blake gets out of prison, Amy is a drug addict and he is in recovery and so he asks for a divorce. She spirals even further and eventually admits that she needs to go to rehab. She battles recovery for several years while Blake moves on. Eventually she loses the battle and passes away. THE END.

Before commenting on the actual quality of this film, I think it should be made clear that I am not a particular fan of Amy Winehouse. I have no special connection to her music. It’s good. I remember hearing it when it came out and there were some bops. I also never saw the documentary. I don’t know much about her life and death. I don’t know much about her husband or her dad. Alright… this film is fine. I don’t see what the big hubbub was about. Perfectly middle of the road movie. Some good music. I thought the acting was better than fine. A tragic story. I think everyone comes off poorly, which is mildly amusing as I believe the controversy surrounding it was that it’s too closely connected to the family and so lets them off the hook… so… this is letting them off the hook? Eeesh. Anyway, It’s not particularly good, but there are good things about it. One particularly bad thing about it is that it forces me to take recapping and talking about the film very seriously when this whole enterprise is meant to be a joke. And I don’t like that. I prefer to have a larf.

Hot Take Clam Bake! Oh man, I got a white hot take. But it would be in bad taste, right? Like this is a heat seeking missile. An absolute sizzler. A complete Uno Pizzeria & Grill. If I dropped this scorcher you would think you were in the Scorch Trials. You would take one look at my take and ask where Dante was because you done found yourself in the Inferno. It’s the full body burn of takes. And everyone knows that if you are going to have a full body burn in your movie you may as well have two (you already got the full body burn guy on set). Well guess what? This is the equivalent of a film with three full body burns. I can’t drop it though. Bad taste and all. But if I did… oh ho… watch out! You’d be burnt. Hot Take Temperature: theoretically intense. 

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me singing my little heart out and just loving bad boys, you know?* Let’s go!

The Good? The singing is quite good. And as a person who has never seen the documentary Amy this was a good excuse to wiki a bunch of stuff about her and get to know something about someone I really didn’t know much about before.

The Bad? Arguably this film is propaganda. I’m not saying it is either way, but it does feel like the involvement of the family, as usual, throws into question the objective nature of the film. And given the ultimate conclusion of the story that feels a bit gross. The film is pretty long and everything but the singing is either bland or sad. I don’t like that. People who know me always say there are two things Patrick doesn’t like: things that are bland, and things that are sad. (Editor’s Note: that’s true, that’s what I always say)

The BMT? Hell to the no. Why would I ever watch this film again? Why did I watch this film at all? I wonder if in the future we’ll have to replace the Romance category like we replaced the Sci Fi category long ago and very explicitly call it the Romance/Drama category. I do think it is much more likely we could find good Dramas in the end, at least those are more likely to be bad because they are weird instead of dull.

I said I had some thoughts on how to get indexing done in the last Recap … but that isn’t for today. Instead, I just wanted to look and see if using smaller images would do anything drastic. Why smaller? Well, there are two paths according to the documentation, one for images of size <300ish pixels, and one for larger. I, by default, tend to use 280×420 as my poster size when saving stuff. But I did wonder whether that was contributing to the indexing problems. So I decided to test it with 140×210 posters instead:

Nope. Didn’t help. Onwards and upwards.

Obvs this is basically a Where’s Where or Setting as a Character (Where?) for bits and bobs of London. I recognized a ton of places, mainly because Camden Town is quite a good vegan neighborhood in London. I’ll leave it at that though. This film is Bad, in that it is boring, but it is closer to good than BMT in the end regardless because at least the singing is pretty good.

Read all about dark things I assume in the Quiz,

Cheerios,

The Sklogs