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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

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27 Dec 2019 21:40 #305581 by Josh Look
That one saber fight (you all know the one I’m talking about) in 10 years time will be a moment that both fans and detractors of TROS agree is an iconic moment in the franchise.
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27 Dec 2019 21:47 #305582 by hotseatgames

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27 Dec 2019 23:39 #305584 by Jackwraith
I watched The Two Popes on Netflix. I'm currently an atheist, but have always been fascinated by religious zealotry and have watched the current pope's attempts to bring the Catholic church into modernity with some degree of fascination. So, I enjoyed this film, even if the pace was decidedly languid. I thought they did a good job of delivering a fairly complicated story about two complicated characters.
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28 Dec 2019 16:20 - 28 Dec 2019 16:21 #305597 by ChristopherMD
The Rise of Skywalker was a great sequel to The Force Awakens. Remember when everyone had all kinds of crazy theories after that movie? Now that wasn't a waste of time because some of them panned out. I'll even go so far as to say Rise is exactly the final movie Star Wars fans deserved to get.
Last edit: 28 Dec 2019 16:21 by ChristopherMD.
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28 Dec 2019 21:53 - 29 Dec 2019 01:16 #305609 by Cranberries
I've read so much about Skywalker Rising that I don't remember what my own thoughts are at this point, except I remember when it ended, there was a long pause, and then people clapped, more out of duty than anything else. I give it $4.50, which is how much I felt I should have paid to watch it. It was a fun diversion with some cool scenes, like Zombie Palpatine. Josh Look just mentioned "that one light saber fight" and I can't even remember which one he was talking about. In response to Senor Barnes' comment, this movie felt like a collectible card game where someone got greedy and introduced a bunch of overpowered characters and broke the game. So from a functional perspective, a boardgamer perspective, it's broken to pieces.

From an Ameritrash perspective, it lacked any emotional weight. Why should I care about Space Keri Russel? I didn't even know it was her until after I was home and got on the internet, but I sort of recognized her as she was walking away, having faithfully watched The Americans. Yes, that is creepy that some lecherous part of me memorized her silhouette.

I was telling one of my kids that the first movie dropped us into this weird and interesting place, and every subsequent movie just explained everything to death, then I came across Tim Kreider's take, which is way better written:

"Subsequent sequels, tie-in novels, interstitial TV shows, video games and fan fiction have lovingly ground this charm out of existence with exhaustive, literal-minded explication: Every marginal background character now has a name and a back story, every offhand allusion a history. But Mr. Lucas’s universe just doesn’t have the depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth; it was only ever meant to be sketched, not charted. Sequels and tie-ins, afraid to stray too far off-brand, stick to variations on familiar designs and revive old characters, so there’s nothing new to discover."

JJ Abrams' inclusion of new stuff, however, felt kind of haphazard. Flying storm troopers! Yet another robot! The omissions were weird too. Was R2D2 even in the movie?

Like Endgame, I mostly felt relieved that I no longer had to care about Star Wars. Like the cheering Sith in the stadium, I've been way too over-invested in a reanimated corpse with grand ambitions for far, far too long.
Last edit: 29 Dec 2019 01:16 by Cranberries.
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29 Dec 2019 11:28 - 29 Dec 2019 12:32 #305616 by Josh Look
EDIT - I’m done.
Last edit: 29 Dec 2019 12:32 by Josh Look.

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29 Dec 2019 14:48 #305621 by Michael Barnes
Ha ha! The cheering Sith...WTF was that all about? It was so vague and lame...

I’m really done with talking about it too, but the more I think about the less I like it and the more I think it is a disaster. Walking back all of the advances of The Last Jedi was such a mistake but to make it worse it’s like they parade the fact that they caved in to the trolls...when Finn is all like “no Rose, you stay here”. WTF?! Kylo Ren in TLJ- “Let the past die, kill it if you have to”. In RoS though- “well, maybe not”. TLJ starts with Luke throwing the lightsaber away, in RoS he’s talking about treating lightsabers with respect and they actually get a fucking BURIAL.

Let’s face the truth. This was a movie that was made for racist, sexist trolls and the “you destroyed my childhood” kind of fans. It was not made with a directorial vision or a desire to tell a specific story. It is the most cynical and defeatist Star Wars product -ever made-.
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29 Dec 2019 18:18 #305624 by Sevej
If anything RoS, a good movie _and_ is the most cynical and defeatist Star Wars product -ever made-. I enjoyed it. It loved The Last Jedi, and I think it's a worthy finisher for the trilogy and closure for the saga.
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29 Dec 2019 18:56 #305625 by hotseatgames
Not a great movie-watching weekend for me. I started with Rise of Skywalker, which sucked, and ended with the newly released Netflix disaster, Doom Annihilation. This movie is TERRIBLE. So bad. It's so bad that it makes the Doom movie that stars Karl Urban seem GOOD.

I will say one nice thing about it. The CG space ships look great. The CG overall is pretty decent.

Example of the cornball factor going on with the script... the first victim discovered is a soldier. The main character checks the ID badge. It's BJ Blazcowicz.
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03 Jan 2020 12:19 #305731 by Grudunza
RoS started kind of fun, and then when Chewie died, but then immediately didn’t, it all started to go south. I mean, I love Chewie, but that moment could have had real emotional dramatic impact... if they didn’t pull it right out from under you, and in a very clunky way. And then three other people died but didn’t. Eye roll.

And it was such an obvious reaction to and pull away from Last Jedi, which was so sad to see. Force Awakens had the same old plot, but also brought a lot of fun with new energy and characters, and then Last Jedi brilliantly charted a wider course to what could have been a more expansive future for the franchise, which Rise of Skywalker almost totally dialed back.

I suppose my reaction to RoS may have been colored somewhat by having just seen episode 7 of Mandalorian, which delivered all kinds of Star Warsian goodness in a tight 40 minutes.
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03 Jan 2020 13:36 #305733 by ChristopherMD
The most annoying part about any bad Star Wars movie is how easy it would have been to make a good Star Wars movie. All Abrams had to do was take a Samurai story, recycle it into a Western, then recycle that into Sci-Fantasy. Jon Favreau could do it in his sleep.
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03 Jan 2020 13:41 - 03 Jan 2020 13:42 #305734 by Ah_Pook
My wife and I watched Hobbs and Shaw, and it was maybe the stupidest movie? Enjoyably so, for the most part, but weren't these movies about cars at some point? Admittedly I haven't seen a new Fast & Furious movie in a while, but I wasn't expecting cyborg supersoldiers and a weird death cult trying to destroy the world. The Rock and Jason Statham are great and have solid chemistry, but it was a pretty bog standard big modern action movie around then. I dunno, we enjoyed it on the whole but aside from it being a lot further out there than either of us expected there's not much memorable about it.
Last edit: 03 Jan 2020 13:42 by Ah_Pook.

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03 Jan 2020 15:09 - 03 Jan 2020 15:11 #305739 by Sagrilarus
I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker because I can't get any of my family interested enough to go and see it. It's the same way with the Avengers movies, where we've just burned out on watching them as they all more or less dip into the same pot.

So I can't speak to it.

That said I've been on this ride since 1977 and I'm going to stop one shy of the finish? Seems strange. Presumably it will be on Disney+ at some point and I'll be able to see it there when I re-sign up.

There's a need financially to give the audience what they ask for, not what they want or even what you think they will be most moved by. I think that's increased with the global conversation that's now available but it's always been there.

There were a couple of aspects to movie #8 that stayed with me afterwards, particularly the idea that Rey's parents were nobodies. That was a profoundly good choice in my view, expanded the concept of the story, even of faith. My suspicion is that they don't leave that alone in #9, that everyone in all the movies is related, and that we're more or less just watching a royal spat play out. If that's the case it's just as well I don't see it because I mean, jeeze, I've seen it a hundred times. "Luke I am your father" has become a core construct of way too many modern films. And books. I keep running into it in science fiction titles, to the point where it's the genre's equivalent of "the butler did it." Always a turn-off.
Last edit: 03 Jan 2020 15:11 by Sagrilarus.
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03 Jan 2020 15:58 #305743 by Gary Sax

Sagrilarus wrote: My suspicion is that they don't leave that alone in #9


They, uh, do not leave this alone. It's probably my biggest beef of the whole thing.

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03 Jan 2020 16:51 #305745 by jpat
I wrote a five- or six-page review of Rise of Skywalker the next morning after the movie, but it was mostly for me, because I was exorcising it. I don't begrudge anyone who liked it, but I found it utterly not worth talking about, which is a little shocking still to me considering how SW crazy I was as a kid. But I bought an Interdictor for Armada when they were super cheap and played a couple of games of Risk: Star Wars over the holidays, so I'm not really holding on to resentment.

Uncut Gems, which we saw on the day after Christmas, was entertainingly stressful, and well acted. It will probably make my "top" list somewhere, as I've been tending to favor movies that "do" something for me rather than stately bores.

I, too, found The Two Popes pretty good, and/but I was raised Roman Catholic though have long since left the church. Again, it was very well acted and at least operated at both human and philosophical levels, though I'm disinclined to either humanize Benedict or give Francis too much credit.

I had to work my way slowly through Marriage Story. Adam Driver in particular was excellent--his best in the four(!) 2019 movies I've seen him in--but it's all a bit much, and it seems as though the narrative deck is heavily stacked against Scarlett Johansson's character, though others may disagree. (Johansson, too, is quite good with what she was given script wise, but I think she was better in Jojo Rabbit.)

I'm still waiting to see Little Women and 1917, and maybe The Farewell, and that will round out my 2019 movie seeing for the most part for the year, at which point I can do a bit of ranking/rating. I've probably seen more films in 2019 than in any prior year, and I've become something of a cheerless completionist with regard to seeing some of these.
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