review: spiritfarer (farewell edition) (spoilers)

in the last year and a half i’ve been trying to get in the habit of viewing art as a social experience, so whenever somebody strongly recommends me something with or without my prompting i write it down on a list and try to prioritize getting around to it over something i’d naturally gravitate towards myself. this has been a really rewarding mindset; occasionally you will be punished and made to watch the entirety of stranger things or “spider man: the dragon’s challenge” and have to endure a torture session as they explain to you how you aren’t getting it but for every one of these i’ve been met with three more rang de basantis or sonny boys or darkness at noons or of the devils. even most people with bad taste have a few weird obscure pieces of good media in their back pocket that they can summon up and what’s interesting is that they almost always subconsciously tell on themselves when they give you something terrible, so you can take the risk away and avoid the shit if you learn to identify the signs.

i wish i could tell you concrete rules to follow but it’s different for everybody and just something you have to learn with practice. they’ll tell you to watch the entirety of school days and say it’s transcendentally good subversive media and they do believe this, at least they believe that they believe this, but the voice cracks just a little as they do and you know what’s up. those body language analysis crime people on youtube are cranks but the next time somebody tries to get you into the bear season 6 look into their dead eyes, really listen to how they say what they say. a smidge of subconscious honesty about their bad taste can’t help but reveal itself.

spiritfarer is safely in the category of things i never would have tried without the “reward” of getting to have a dialogue about it with a friend. i don’t like resource management games (does pikmin count? i guess i like pikmin), life simulators, “cozy” targeted media, open-world exploration games, almost anything with a sufficiently high hugs-per-minute ratio, or wind waker. spiritfarer is all of these and i was open about my skepticism as they described it as something i in particular would like (this is where i heard my friend’s inner voice crack), but it was three bucks last month so i figured why not. 

i’m mixed. i was right in that it wasn’t for me, but this was the first real videogame i played to completion in a very long time, so there is something to the sauce.

the pitch is excellent: you are the new ferryman of the dead. you must travel a fantasy sea on your absurdly big customizable boat collecting spirits of the deceased and help them sort through their final emotional baggage before delivering them to the other side. since “helping them sort through their final emotional baggage” universally necessitates building the spirits a sick ass new house for them and decorating it, you spend most of your time sailing around searching for new materials to expand the possibilities of your onboard crafting system while managing their hunger and emotional needs. 

as a gameplay loop, for the most part i thought this worked very well, up to a point: that point being about ten hours into a thirty hour game. i did not 100% the game but i boated around the entire map and finished every spirit’s central questline, which gets you close to doing everything the game has to offer anyway, and i was getting extremely sick of almost everything beyond dialogue and narrative events at about the 60% mark.

spiritfarer’s biggest mechanical issue is that it does not respect your time. most of the game is spent doing chores: farming, cooking, mining, smelting, logging, fishing, building, along with each spirit’s special customized chore game that is actually the same exact chore game every time (run around the ship and grab the moving object).

now, let it be said: there are people who like doing video game chores. stardew valley and animal crossing and dwarf fortress and shrek powerwash simulator sell like hotcakes for a reason. for some people the appeal seems to be that videogame chores often present tangible progression in a way that real life chores typically do not: i cannot level up doing the dishes and then get to do them faster, or get “dish coins” which over the course of a week i spent on better dishsoaps and then a dishwasher and then a set of progressively larger and more efficient dishwashers. (i guess that i pretty much could, now that i think about it, but i don’t want to.) for them there’s satisfaction to be found in the higher-order process of iterative improvement and optimization and automation and strategy of task-completion; these are the “think chore” gamers. but this element doesn’t seem to be the main reason that most chore gamers like their chores. in truck simulator i am sure you can get better at parking the truck and maybe you spend in-game money and thousands of real world dollars for dlc to progress to having the best truck but the core experience is being in the truck. you have to actually want to be in the truck to play, that’s the point. these are the “zen chore” gamers. they just like doing chores. they see the thing that needs doing and do it; the goal is the process. shrek’s swamp is filthy and we need to get it sparkling, oh boy!

if you are a zen chore gamer, i suspect you’ll love spiritfarer. this game goes out of its way to make chores as romanticized of an experience as they could possibly be. visually sf is gorgeous and special attention is given to all character movement, which is as fluid and addictive to look at as cuphead; this is maybe the best handdrawn 2d animation i’ve ever seen in a videogame. those copycat chase-the-moving-object minigames i was dogging on manage to remain fun for much longer than all the other chores simply because it is such a pleasure to move the character around and watch her zip. everything you do feels hyper-responsive and precise, again owing to that fluidity in movement. the music is also excellent, though i think it would benefitted from a greater song variety; like wind waker, there are a couple of excellent songs that become grating by the end from sheer repetition. (side note: there’s one song that plays at every fast travel stop (and you’ll be at those a lot, the game would be unplayable without constant use of travel stops) that’s so annoying that the developers had to patch in the specific option to replace it with silence. the seal who manages fast travel stops calls you a bitch if you turn it off, which was very funny.)

if you are a think chore gamer or even approach that on the sliding scale you will hate this game. it’s not as if there is no element of optimization but this game does not want to be fully optimized and i suspect the process of seriously trying to do so would make you miserable because you would be left with nothing but the large chunks of this game consisting of waiting.

you wait a lot in spiritfarer. there’s an abundance of almost all resources in the game (once you have a single type of any kind of log or ore, you are able to endlessly replicate it by just planting it on the giant avatar spirit turtle and waiting a short time) so spiritfarer is more about the management of time, but there’s no time limit either, so what it’s really about is managing your patience. i don’t think spiritfarer needed a pikmin-style time limit (and thematically it makes sense to give the player “as much time as they need”, so to speak) but for my money it needed less waiting, and it needed to make the unavoidable waiting much more stimulating than it is.

you mine frequently in this game; mining has a lengthy animation that must be timed precisely to avoid the punishment of an even lengthier animation where you accidentally drop the pickaxe and slowly pick it back up to try again. this four second sequence is very flashy (literally) and looks excellent but must be done two to three times to collect from a single rock and usually you are mining three rocks at a time off the turtle’s back. on average, factoring in the time it takes you to climb off the boat, hop on the turtle, mine the three rocks, replant more rocks, and hop back on the boat, it’s probably going to take you about two minutes every time you need to partially replenish your mineral supply (not including travel time, by far the biggest cost).

if i had to guess i did this whole process at least 30 times over the course of the game: more than an hour spent on something i wouldn’t even call an actual minigame, that already felt like a boring obligation the third time i had to do it. most of spiritfarer is spent doing boring chores like this. some of them are easy reaction button prompts, one is a slightly harder reaction prompt, many are the (very exploitable) collectathon games (which to be fair you do much less of than the rest, though again, they are the most fun activities you have assuming you don’t redesign your ship to cheese them) and the rest are literally timers you set. i mostly played this game in 30 minute increments every morning for a month and playing it this way makes it much more fun but i would have gone insane trying to marathon this. notably there is a co-op mode, but it’s local only so i was unable to play with the friend who recommended this to me. my instinct is that the co-op mode would help significantly with these issues but with so many of the chores being literal timers, only so much.

optimization is possible in spiritfarer but the process of doing it is not fun even for those who find that kind of thing fun, which i can confirm despite not being one of those people because this game that sold over one million copies has no active speedrunning community and hardly any speedrunners historically, where almost all activity occurred not in an any% run but a custom run challenge to see how quickly you can get rid of gwen, the first spirit (of fifteen) in the game.

there are three any% runs. there is no posted 100%. games that have more than five posted new 100% runs (or 100% equivalents) in the time since spiritfarer released include:

there’s no single fatal flaw in spiritfarer that decimates its speedrunning potential, like an inability to skip dialogue or too many unskippable cutscenes (and even those speedrunners have shown a depressing willingness to tolerate), it’s just a lot of boring muck that adds up enough so that even the maddest among us don’t want to sit through the sum.

but i am used to sitting through chores that i dislike almost whenever i do play games, for i’m not a chore gamer of either stripe: i am an anti-chore gamer (experts call this a “fake gamer”). my main interest in videogames as a medium is narrative. many of my favorite videogames are arguably not actually videogames. many parts of good games that people see as fun are, to me personally, boring. i typically see most gameplay as a chore to be endured to get to the plot. (i like cave story a lot, which is a real videogame, but i only played it because the title tricked me.) recall that i literally only started playing spiritfarer to unlock my friend’s dialogue tree.

i’m not bragging about this, i think it’s a little sad, and perhaps indicative of personal intellectual deficiency. most people are able to have fun playing super meat boy and i am not. this is a skill issue. but we fake gamers do exist and increasingly large numbers, and the market has begun catering to us. ostensibly.

this is what was sold to me as the selling point of the game: the story. my friend said it was one of the best-written games they’ve ever played. the game journalists and steam reviews laud it with the similar praise.

i agree. by the standards of the average indie game that is praised for having good writing, spiritfarer has good writing. 

which means it has a lot of bad writing in it.

every time you meet a new spirit, you have to do a small quest for them to convince them to join you on your ship. the first time you meet astrid, one of the first spirits in the game, she is leading a strike on a fantasy oil rig after the owner has reduced their time off, and you are asked to help negotiate an end to it. she requests a dialogue with the company’s boss, who has responded to the strike by barricading himself alone in his office and refusing to speak to them.

you walk across the map to the boss’s office. he tells you that there is no way he’d even be willing to speak with them. you walk back to astrid; she tells you they won’t stop striking. you walk back to the boss; he has spontaneously decided to agree to every demand. you walk back to astrid, she says that the reinstituted vacation days aren’t enough, and she wants more. you walk back to the boss. he instantly agrees and tells you that he really has to pee.

by this early point in spiritfarer it’s already been established that it isn’t that wordy of a game and that the place we are in is to some degree metaphorical or at least not compatible with the logic of our world, a la spirited away. when i see a quest pop up telling me i’m to defuse a ghost strike i am not expecting anything approaching disco elysium levels of complexity. but stuff like this is atrocious. “player needs to convince stubborn npc to change their mind” is a tried-and-true quest mechanic for a reason but what’s the point of having me bounce generic exchanges between two characters when i have no choice or influence on the outcome, no challenge, no risk of failure? what’s the point of taking the time to have me talk to them separately when it reveals no special information and we could have gotten the same thing better and faster by simply watching astrid argue with the owner herself?

this quest exists so that we can establish astrid as a revolutionary girlboss. fine. do the strike. we need things for the player to do to satisfy the chore gamers so help astrid get eight oak planks so she can craft a battering ram to knock the owner’s door down, and then show us the cutscene between her arguing with the owner. this is not genius redesign but it prevents needless backtracking and describes a conflict with conflict in it. a strike is an inherently interesting and volatile subject, even if it’s a tiny part in your story, why bring it down to the level of a guy repeatedly refusing to accept a parcel he ordered? it’s lame.

the original quest is only five minutes long, but the game is filled with this stuff, the narrative equivalent of waiting for the mining animation to finish; stuff like this adds up. there is an entire separate list of quests in this game called “shenanigans” and i did one by mistake (a delivery quest where you bring cds to three random people and then nothing happens and you receive nothing, the end) and then i learned that shenanigans is code for quests that suck and have no benefit. it’s dishonesty; the word shenanigans definitionally implies fun. call them shit quests in the menu. 

you can talk to every single background npc in this game, who often will say “hey” or “i don’t want to talk” or “i love this air”. why have npcs like this? better to delete them. it’s one thing to have your npcs spout useless boring exposition or shitty jokes (the game does these both too) but why give the ability to press space on a guy and have him talk to me if doing so is going to open the textbox that says “hello” and then close the box again. you understand that as soon as your game has demonstrated a willingness to do this i am never going to talk to a generic npc ever again unless i have to? why draw this incredible beautiful archipelago and giant fantasy montreal and destroy the illusion by having one-third of the characters speak to me with what i can charitably assume is untouched placeholder dialogue? why work so hard to have sexy italy lion tell me about his ww2 trauma in a fantastic optional bonus monologue but not take the extra ten seconds to write a custom sentence so he doesn’t have the same “man i hate the rain!” line as like six other people on the boat? it’s so easy to add realness to a game through good writing and it’s so easy to lose it through bad writing, and more critically, lazy writing. far too much of the writing in this game made me feel like i was playing poptropica.

however as i hinted by talking about the lion, the good stuff (which is, thankfully, the majority of the narrative element) is the companion spirit dialogues, some of which are excellent. with 15 spirits more than a few are “filler” (they do “sweet but prickly old lady who is slowly losing herself to advanced dementia” twice and only the first time do they have the benefit of her being an anthropomorphic porcupine) but the good ones are very good. my favorite is the pair of generic italian mob goon brothers who actively lower the happiness of every other person on the boat by bullying them for as long as they are around.

my favorite element of the spirits is that each one violates the rules of the core game loop in some way, usually in a manner that subtly reveals stuff about their character. (this is where i seriously begin talking spoilers, if you care or intend to play it). one spirit, a frog, simply leaves the boat himself after you progress his questline enough without letting you do the usual sad saying goodbye at the door of death cutscene, and it’s genuinely unsatisfying in a way that helps poke at the feeling of experiencing a death without being able to get proper closure. the goon brothers are only counted as one spirit, despite there being two of them; you only ever speak to an angry little joe pesci hummingbird perched on the head of the silent ox, who doesn’t say anything the entire game and has to be flown around by the hummingbird (the animations for this are incredible). at first you think they’re doing the “i do all the talking, he does the hurting” routine but you find out during their questline that the ox is braindead and even the presence of his spirit may be an illusion created by the hummingbird, who killed himself after his brother died and can’t function alone. this game is leaps and bounds more subtle with this stuff than every other bad emotional twist secret metaphor indie game i have ever played; it’s mostly comfortable hinting at really interesting developments without worrying that you won’t get it.

there’s a ton of tiny moments of fridge brilliance in this game intermeshed into the design and gameplay; the frog was able to go to the door alone because, duh, he’s a frog, the only aquatic  animal you ever get on your boat, and he swam there. one character cannot ever be brought to the everdoor and the game has a bunch of hints to why this is without it ever being explicitly stated. at one point you hear about the fakinhage and i immediately figured out what it was without the game needing to tell me and i was so proud of myself. i got real chills with the fakinhage , i’m not joking. whoever came up with the fakinhage deserves a medal. i’m going to spoil the twist of the game in two or three paragraphs but i still won’t tell you about the fakinhage is because the idea of ruining it for somebody breaks my heart. i could write an entire essay just about the fakinhage.

you are expected to cry playing this game. very often i hear the phrase “emotionally manipulative” when discussing media and i think it’s misused in the same way that calling something “propaganda” is. all art is emotionally manipulative; what we usually mean when we say that is that something is emotional ineffective, that it feels cheap or dishonest or predictable or poorly written in a way that makes the impact flaccid. there aren’t a lot of negative user reviews for this game (in large part because i think it’s excellent about immediately signaling the kind of experience it’s going to be and filtering out those who wouldn’t be into it) but i did see the phrase pop up a few times and i very often felt the same, playing spiritfarer.

i have spent a relatively minuscule amount of time volunteering, working, and personally grieving in palliative care centers so i was primed to be affected by playing this game (i groaned when i realized this is why my friend thought i would love it). spiritfarer is a hospice simulator. literally: the twist of the game, as dated indie game tradition dictates, is that you, the player, are already dead (or about to be); the world of spiritfarer is some kind of metaphysical construction or DMT delusion in your final moments about helping your character who was a hospice worker in real life come to terms with their own death. the spirits in the dream world are all based on real people the character knew, which is why they act familiar with her, but they are all already long gone and the whole exercise is actually about her.

this description makes it sound worse than it is; again, spiritfarer is comfortable being relatively subtle about all this, so the nature of the metaphor never constricts the object-level reality.

characters are often really annoying and needy, not only in dialogue but in the increasingly ridiculous and demanding tasks they ask of you. this is intentional. sometimes dying people are annoying and needy; working with the dying can feel like a thankless chore. the game is intentionally trying to cultivate this feeling and it succeeds, but the effect of this is muted because almost everything you do in spiritfarer feels like an annoying chore by the halfway point (which is when the “harder” more annoying characters start to show up) not just the stuff that’s explicitly meant to be.

it feels unfair to criticize the hospice simulator for sometimes feeling like a hospice simulator, but for me it didn’t work; it’s too boring. pathologic 1 and getting over it intentionally nuke their own gameplay for the sake of making an artistic point too but they are challenging; spiritfarer is tedious and time-consuming but never difficult.

i got misty-eyed at a couple of the spirits (goon brothers and the eight year old); with fifteen of them, you are statistically guaranteed to imprint on at least a few of them. there’s enough diversity in their backstories that at least one will remind you of somebody you know in real life who died, and that will probably “get you”. but you are guaranteed to dislike at least some of them too (again, this is sort of the point, but i need not elaborate forever on the weaknesses of “all the bad stuff is actually a subversive narrative choice”). if you play this game for long enough it will start to feel like a conveyor belt for forced, formulaic sadness; like with humor, the audience’s perception of authenticity and spontaneity (whether or not it exists, which it usually doesn’t) is a necessary ingredient for the emotion to hit hard, and i don’t think this game’s formula, especially given for how long it goes on, is good at repeatedly cultivating that illusion. i am in the minority here; every review of this game opens with an extended anecdote about the reviewer’s dead grandma and how this allowed them to finally heal. i want to say that i’m not a hardass at all. i cried just the other day listening to someone defend school days.

how could you fix spiritfarer? i suggest the following:

spiritfarer is, for a certain kind of person, the best game they will ever play in their life. i’m not that person, but it still came frustratingly close to being a great experience.

i will continue to try things outside of my wheelhouse. next up: gundam.

worst films of 2024

in early 2024 i was gifted one of those unlimited movie membership passes and i saw, as of my last counting, 102 movies that came out in 2024!

here are the worst five.

honorable mentions and why they avoided making the list:

onto the meat:

5. speak no evil. this is an american remake of a great danish social horror movie. there are a lot of “social commentary” horror movies that suck shit both as commentaries and horrors but speak no evil is actually about “social” horror, about the horrific feeling of not being able to grasp at that murky line of knowing when another has gone too far and broken boundaries, about when to end a friendship, a conversation, a double date; and how the wicked abuse that ambiguity and our unwillingness to act against it. netflix made a movie in 2015 with this same idea called the invitation with awful execution and i was delighted in 2022 when it was finally done well, which it managed to do by going full struwwelpeter and marrying it with the unhinged darkness of a medieval european fairy tale and a specifically scandinavian flavor of self-deprecation. 

this came out TWO years after the original movie! what possible reason but pure cynicism would you make this? mcavoy is a good actor but so was the man he replaces.

80% of this movie is competent, well-acted and shot but slightly worse than the original; the ending is atrocious, replacing a powerful dark ending with the obligatory hollywood pew-pew we killed the bad guys and everybody lives and we walk off into the sunset. it comes off as a literal satire of this type of americanization and you get the feeling that the movie is mocking you as it gutlessly apes the famous “because you let us” line from the first movie, all power it had neutered completely. it’s so exaggeratedly awful i genuinely wondered if it was parodying this trend and that’s how it was meant to be interpreted, as some bizarre in-joke for the people who’d seen the original, but no, it’s not, it’s just doing the thing. 

a special shout out to the horrible trailer of this movie, which spoils the entire movie even more brazenly and shamelessly than most do nowadays (for a movie where the whole gimmick is the surprise of gradual escalation). the movie itself at least preserves most of the magic of the midpoint reveal scene, which was ruined for a significant portion of the new audience, as this trailer was advertised very heavily.

4. unfrosted. pop tart movie. pop tart film. pop tart experience. jerry seinfeld's directorial debut (and the first movie he's had a substantial footprint on since the bee movie). there's an element of total subject content nihilism that works for "bees" but not "pop tarts and breakfast cereal". the joke is this satirical biopic is not even “pop tarts are silly” it’s “pop tarts are”, and this is indisputable, pop tarts are, but is this funny? can an incomplete logical declaration carry us through 93 minutes? can it make me laugh one time? jerry seinfeld is the richest comedian who has ever lived and is by many accountings the richest actor. he is worth at least nine hundred million dollars. he has no material creative limitations. if he wanted to he could create the most expensive piece of media ever made and he would not need to defer to the whims of another executive or producer, would not need to make a single infinitesimal compromise to anything except objective reality, would never need to have another conversation with anyone working on it who was not expressly and unambiguously at his beck and call. he has had this power for thirty years and he has used it to ask only three questions: (“what if bees became aware of their systemic oppression?; what if i was in a car?”; “what if my breakfast did january 6th?”)

this movie isn’t about the rise of kelloggs and post, it’s about the image of norman rockwell postwar suburbanite americana, a time and aesthetic that has consistently fascinated seinfeld. this interest is object-level only. don draper and walter cronkite and andy warhol and astronauts and silly putty and sea monkeys and small town diners and sod and milkmen and cereal, cereal, cereal, cereal. these nouns appear and interact with each other and are portrayed sillier than they probably actually were and from that we derive laughter.

seinfeld isn’t celebrating this time, he isn’t mocking it (remember that even rockwell who defined this aesthetic had plenty to say critically about the era beyond picket fences and boy scouts) he is saying howabout that. howabout that fifties, that sixties. what a time what a time what a time. it was wild wasn’t it? it’s wild now but wasn’t it wild, back then, back when i was a boy and the world like that, back then. what a time, that was.

there is a bit about chef boyardee having a ravioli mutant baby that i did like a lot; i suspect a lunch sequel may be in the works.

3. reagan. never seen a less critical biopic in my life, and not to get “political”, but there were perhaps things worth criticizing ronald reagan for.

this movie is exactly what you are imagining, with a few caveats. the framing of this movie is as a narrative told by a fictional soviet spy (played by jon voight doing a legendarily bad russian accent; this movie is like oppenheimer for outspoken ultraconservative actors in hollywood, it makes the point of namedropping oppenheimer and having reagan call him a commie, which i think is genuinely meant to be some kind of slight to christopher nolan) who was assigned to follow reagan around his entire life and ended up becoming reagan-pilled in the process. there are so many real people past and present who want to gobble reagan’s cock the idea that this movie still felt the need to invent fictional ones is hilarious, this is one of the most insecure films i’ve ever seen. an inability to properly critique the person being depicted is a famous problem (THE famous problem) for any biopic but this ethos defines this movie, where not once does he just do a bad thing and the movie says or implies that it was actually bad and should not have happened. everything is either not acknowledged or wasn’t a mistake or was well-intentioned (and we HAVE to hyperfocus on that well-intentionality instead of the act itself or its consequences, because to focus on anything else would be to hint that reagan may have done a bad thing at some point and we know that can’t be true). the biopic narcissist’s prayer.

i think of the film nyad, a recent biopic about the first woman to swim unassisted across the straits of florida. it’s a very frustrating movie because nyad (her actual name is nyad, chalk up another win for nominative determinism) is a slightly more complex and controversial woman than it implies (she may have accidentally cheated in an extremely minor way that would officially strip her of her record but that make her accomplishment no less impressive and nobody except the recordbook people would give a shit about, the movie decides to completely ignore this, ignoring the accusation instead of refuting it; she’s pathologically obsessed with victory and can be dismissive of people who are sacrificing a lot to help her, etc). the movie pokes at these ideas: my favorite scene is when nyad sees a television interview with the other woman trying to make the cuba to key west swim before her but has failed, gotten horribly injured by jellyfish, and is sobbing into the camera and swearing to quit; we smash cut to nyad screaming in sociopathic ecstasy at the TV at her primary competitor being gone. i find the real diane nyad to be a legitimately interesting and dare i say inspirational person (she was 64 when she did this!) and i feel that way about almost no one else in sports, but she’s also weird and flawed and the movie is only interesting when it’s balancing that dichotomy instead of suffocating us under platitudes about believing in yourself and the power of friendship and perseverance, which it doesn’t do nearly enough. until hollywood learns this all biopics will suck forever.

the desire to see complex flawed people is not out of some desire to see Great Men taken down a peg; it's because it makes for good stories, and because it’s representative of reality. reagan has no equivalent to that great scene in nyad, will not even pay convincing lip service to the idea of its titular character having a single flaw, either as a politician or a man.

saving this movie from being any higher is a genuinely cool and well-edited montage musical compilation of reagan’s detractors and depiction in the media, which unintentionally comes off as genuinely critical towards him and even beyond that is just fun. also there were two jokes that made me laugh in the way the film wanted me to which is two more than what follows.

2. borderlands. this movie is and will forever be the career low of every single person who worked on it. the original borderlands games are already the nadir of joss whedon copycat humor and this movie’s writing is substantially less competent than that. this movie is like a zoo for every shitty joke you’ve ever seen in a bad action comedy. they’re all here, hiding out in the piss canyons of pandora. this zoo should be shut down. it’s like somebody took guardians of the galaxy and triple-fried it in spoiled gutter oil. (this movie wants to be gotg so bad that you can taste the desperation, the envy. this movie is robin williams in one hour photo staring at the happy family through their window as they sleep. it wants to cut out the mcu’s skin and wear it to prom; this movie begins long after it has begun to rot in the sun.) how can you actually make me think “man, i know kevin hart is funnier than this” without a hint of irony.

eli roth is famous for his brutality and violence and the idea of getting him for your shitty ultra-gorey videogame sellout movie is not misplaced; it’s VERY clear watching this that he was told he would be allowed to make a rated R movie and then they backtracked and changed it after filming was finished (because what would be the point of getting him if that wasn’t the original intention?) and because almost every fight in this has dozens of shots where somebody is about to be hit in a way that would very obviously kill or injure them in a super bloody way and then the camera cuts away immediately before impact. it’s as if they were trying to maximize how unsatisfying a kill could be. between the color scheme, awful effects, and the camera constantly jumping the way it did this movie actually made me dizzy at several points. this movie had two weeks of reshoots with a different director and no reason was given but i really do think it was just to eke out that pg-13, something that unsurprisingly did nothing to help it commercially.

jackblack!claptrap is an atrocity, unquestionably the worst celebrity animated voiceover of all time; i say this as a certified kung fu panda/nacho libre/tenacious d liker, i’m unbiased (or biased in the wrong direction) and uniquely qualified to make this assessment. i don't want to hear about seagull awkwafina and beyonce lion queen, it's not the same, nothing reaches this, nothing ever will.

it wouldn’t surprise me if a worse video game movie than this gets made someday, but i don’t think one will be. unlike the slate of most terrible live action video game movies which are trying and failing to be serious action movies (and thus become unintentionally funny) borderlands is trying to be funny and failing, and nothing rots the way terrible comedy does. this movie is agony.

1. argylle. wikipedia says this movie is two hours and nineteen minutes long but this is a typo; this movie is eight hours and forty-six minutes. the cgi cat in this movie looks worse and is less funny than the entirety of garfield a tail [sic] of two kitties, a movie i’d rather watch twice in a row before having to look at a poster of argylle again.

i love the first kingsman movie. i don’t know what happened here. if borderlands is a zoo for bad jokes this is comedy’s death row. this movie has eight plot twists and the only ones that affected me in any way were the two that tricked me into thinking the movie was about to end, which is the cruelest prank that’s ever been played in the history of cinema.

thelma was a mission impossible spoof from this year with literally 1/66th the budget of argylle about a 93 year old woman trying to recover money from a phone scammer and it despite taking this premise 100% seriously somehow had more engaging action sequences than any moment in argylle and is objectively a better spy movie in every way. the will smith pigeon movie is a better spy movie than argylle. when i was seven i spent two hours inside a gamestop nervously standing around the nintendo section before gaining the courage to shoplift a used copy of dance dance revolution mario mix and then ran for a half a mile before discovering that they didn’t put discs in their display copies and that was a better spy movie than argylle.

whenever people see bryan cranston on the street they shouldn’t say “oh my god it’s the breaking bad man” they should say argylle argylle argylle and throw salt over their shoulders and run far far away.

i’m really, really sympathetic to dumb fun movies. that’s the defense of both argylle fans. i love dumb fun movies. my favorite movie so far this year is the fucking porky pig movie. this isn’t a dumb fun movie, it’s dogshit. its central inspirations are “spy kids 3: game over”, “jimmy neutron: jet fusion”, and an unplayable, haunted VHS copy of the manchurian candidate, all of which are better spy movies than argylle.

why i'm deleting chili and the chocolate factory: fudge revelation

this is not easy for me.

friends and dedicated chili fans will know that early 2021 was an especially difficult period in my life; in addition to the general struggles of that time we were all facing i was attempting to manage pre-production of the film that ended up becoming wonka. paul king had already spoken to me regarding a chili adaptation before the story had even finished its serialization and we started working together essentially as soon as it was finished. (this had, i'm ashamed to say, more than a little negative impact on the second half on the story; it's difficult not to let the knowledge of inevitable adaptation color the creation of a work. the oft-panned avengers-esque fight scene at the end was very cynically included with the knowledge that whatever literary failings it created would be justified once it was translated to the big screen. i added more than a few extra i vapes knowing that it'd be a cheap crowdpleaser... it's hard to fight this impulse.)

i still consider paul a friend and wish him all the best of luck in the future; he's a talented man and paddington 3: paddington in peru is worse for his lessened involvement. that said i won't sugarcoat that our time together on the project was horrible. this isn't a callout post, this was my fault more than his, but we did not gel creatively (to put it lightly). while our initial interactions were lovely, early on in the project i complimented paddington 2 as a phenomenal film (a masterwork, in fact!) but said in confidence that i thought the film would have been better if mr. brown was violently killed at the end and paul's behavior towards me changed dramatically after this. his interactions with me became coldly professional and i began receiving unmarked letters nightly from a man i cannot definitively prove was hugh bonneville; these were not strictly speaking threats but they were not kind letters either, let me tell you.

worse than any specific incident with paul was dealing with the executive producers, who had a laundry list of requested changes, among them:

after softly pushing back on some of these changes i was eventually removed from the project after a series of false accusations of stealing other people's lunches were manufactured against me (oh how they loved the poetry of the accusation, that added chili oil in his burrito would be what ended up "bringing me down"); i ended up parting with the movie rights in a court settlement. i wanted to fight but i was still dealing with numerous health issues at the time and simply did not have the energy for a protracted court battle, and to be frank i needed the immediate funds the (very unsubstantial) settlement provided for my own survival.

they tried to make chili work without my input but (not to toot my own horn!) were unable to pull through and ended up dumping the whole project and scrubbing my involvement almost entirely (it was my idea to bring chalamet on as mr. bucket, and i think had he been allowed to play a role that allowed him to reveal the depths of his ability to portray cruelty, he might have won that oscar). what you see in wonka is the cynical remnants. for whatever i think of the movie i'm glad it still exists, even if it's no longer mine in any way.

that would have been the end of it, but warner bros. recently sent me a cease and desist letter in the mail; it turns out there were clauses in the settlement contract that i misread, and i simply do not have the means to fight back. in three months time chili will be rereleased on steam as "chili and the chocolate factory: couverture edition" with new microtransactions but please understand that i will receive NOTHING from it. please do not support this; this is the theft of my life's work. i currently live under a bridge in madison wisconsin where i subsist on beans and a thin edible paste i derive from old copper wire. i do not need money, i like the paste, but it is infuriating to have been stolen from nonetheless. if not for me please reject this for the precedent it sets and all the others like me in similar situations.

an additional note: the eight other game studios/collectives/micronations claiming chili's artistic heritage are all liars and only MINE in real. tomorrow i will be releasing a forty-thousand word political manifesto which includes a digression about my feelings about "art", a well-designed graph delineating how our studio's copper is divided, and a reaffirmation of my proud commitment to never releasing a real story ever again.

i just got out of an early screening of the minecraft movie! (a minecraft movie), and i come to reveal, the mad oracle that i have become:

it will gross two billion dollars. you’re in a bubble if you think otherwise. this is NOT a 1/10, it’s a 3/10 that the average brainrotted american child will perceive as the funniest movie in the world and that’s all it needed to be to make two billion dollars. they play guns n roses and ac/dc. the white lotus lady shows up and plays the white lotus lady and has a minecraft dui. this will narrowly scrape a 50 to 60 critic score on rotten tomatoes. they will compare it to the lego movie (every review will mention the lego movie). “THE KIDS WILL LOVE IT AND PARENTS MAY JUST CRACK A FEW SMILES THEMSELVES!” the villains want to destroy creativity and there’s a line where the main villain says “we are only in this for the money and to destroy creativity” and every reviewer that miraculously doesn’t compare this to the lego movie will quote this line at the end and smugly cross their arms and mutter wow they sure are telling on themselves and the ones that don’t do that will say that it’s too woke.

i don’t have a critical take on a minecraft movie, i don’t have a real analytical thesis or an essay or an unfunny shitty single sentence pseudo-tweet letterboxd review i have a vision like the opening of a final destination movie. but i’m not going to yell at you to get off the coaster. i’m not going to get off myself. we go when we go. better this than the tanning bed.

he sings again. he sung as bowser and he sung as claptrap and he sings as steve. they’ll put him in fnaf 2 and he’ll sing as balloon boy and he’ll sing as tingle in zelda and he’ll sing as kraid and andrew ryan and big the cat.

nacho libre is a fake wes anderson film about class struggle and the glorification of god (and is better than every film wes anderson has ever made) and jack black sings in that movie and i laughed so hard at that as a kid that i pissed myself. not a dribble, i pissed my pants and sat there in the theater and didn’t say anything because i didn’t want to get taken out of the theater early because i was afraid i wouldn’t get to see the rest. i also pissed myself watching the minecraft movie this morning as an adult but it was a protest piss. the theater employees will taste the difference and i hope that my message works its way up the chain, in whatever way it can, and maybe someday jack black will be in a good movie again.

four and a half stars

i'm technically illiterate when it comes to computer hardware and i think it is an overall net negative on my life but there are times when it makes it very exciting. today i called my internet provider after i purchased what ended up being an unnecessary internet upgrade to fix repeated slowdown problems during video calls (i had 300 gamer points per second by default and upgraded to 1000 hoping it would do the trick but it didn't) and they said "are you using wifi?" and i said that i was, confused that there was anything else, and they told me there was a wire you can buy and plug right into your router and it physically pushes the internet into your pc. they figured out how to send the internet through a tube like electricity!

went down to best buy to pick up the gamer wire and they helped me find it and i plugged it in and it's much faster now, the entire experience was very enthralling to me.

pick at least a few areas in your life to remain totally ignorant about (not politics or driving) it makes the ride that much richer

there’s a scene in fat albert 2004 where live action kenan thompson fat albert, who has accidentally escaped the fictional television world of his cartoon series and become real à la barbie, meets his creator, bill cosby.

it’s a unique film. i’ve seen it about thirty times. the opening credits are in comic sans.

it’s the worst film in the tiny but horrible microgenre of films in which an established, questionably marketable character with diminished cultural relevance is mysteriously transported to our reality. rocky and bullwinkle, harold and the purple crayon, garfield, enchanted (it’s disney, which at the time was only beginning to toy with the cloyingly affectionate self-awareness that has since swallowed it whole, so an expy blend of all stock princesses is used in the place of any particular ip). if you loosen up the parameters of that definition a smidge you can easily come up with another fifty or so awful, bizarre live-action adaptations of various properties with similar narrative structures and plot beats, but i’m curious about this very specific type of hyper-meta fish out of water isekai movie, stories that are less interested in the characters they are ostensibly about and more about the modern world’s current reactions to those characters, and choose to discuss that in the most convoluted, literal way possible.

this type of story is simultaneously extremely high-concept postmodernist analysis and the laziest paint by the numbers shit it’s possible to create. live-action adaptations even at their best betray an inherent disrespect for animation, implying it to be a secondary medium that exists as a temporary placeholder or poor man’s substitute for reality, that characters are only worth caring about if they look as real as we do or exist in a world like ours. there’s no genuine artistic reason to make a woody woodpecker movie, an avatar movie, a death note movie, a live-action pinocchio, they’re all cynical soulless cashgrabs but they at least do attempt to adapt and actually BE what they purport to be. dan aykroyd yogi bear and light turner and matthew lillard william afton for the five minutes they wanted to pay him to be in the fnaf movie are simply poor facsimiles of themselves and they suck because of that bad mimicry, we see and hear the contrast and know immediately it’s not the same. the project of live-actionization is misguided because even before awful executive-driven creative decisions (which all these movies have in spades) very often whatever is being adapted simply can’t be translated properly to its new medium. you could give a film a 500m budget and airbending will still not look as good as it does in 2d, where one can easily and stylistically show the movement of invisible wind and have a character float and defy gravity in a way that is instantly believable in a way that a real human being moved by CGI is not. neil patrick harris and hank azaria as hard as they try, as talented as they are cannot legitimately sell me on the idea that they’re actually being hardcore smurfed in the way that an animated gargamel can. these movies reach for a perceived authenticity and fail to reach it, not understanding that the mediums they are stealing from almost always allow for a greater seeming realness than live-action can, especially when portraying the fantastical.

the isekai movies go one step beyond this disrespect because they refuse to even play the part. yes we’ll make a rocky and bullwinkle movie but we cannot simply DO rocky and bullwinkle, we can’t do a scooby doo and just make a bigger irl version of the formula, we must have this elaborate meta routine so we can continually point to the audience and share a laugh together about how dogshit and unimportant rocky and bullwinkle are. the people who make these movies are so embarrassed by the concept of taking these ideas seriously that they must even in-universe create further removal from the realness of this to insulate us from the possibility of caring. rocky and bullwinkle must be a fake tv show even in the movie, even in pretend land they must be from a deeper pretend land. it’s fine if you want to do commentary on the property (preferable, in fact, that makes it more interesting!) but this commentary is almost never allowed to extend beyond the singular joke of every gamer webcomic ever made: wouldn’t it be fucked up if fictional thing were REAL?

wouldn’t it be fucked up if rocky and bullwinkle were in a REAL car? you bet it fucking would be. (robert de niro produced this movie and plays the main villain)

obviously we’re in a post-barbenheimer world and the only movie of this kind worth comparing fat albert to is barbie, which is notable for being the only good execution of this premise (i would call enchanted competent; it’s funny but a mess). the barbie comparison is especially interesting because fat albert is a cracked mirror to barbie.

like barbie, fat albert and the cosby kids exist in a cartoon world where characters are simultaneously performers and platonic forms of themselves, and where they operate with an unspecified degree of awareness of their own fakeness; a background character in fat albert’s philadelphia mentions having done guest spots on the jetsons. like barbie, al is snapped out of his usual routine by the personal crisis of one of his fans, when her single live-action tear falls on the remote as she watches his show and magically falls into his fictionalized philadelphia. the magic tear allows him to hear her crying and a portal is rended between the two worlds; he enters reality, naively tries to solve her social and emotional problems with platitudes, and is forced to grapple with the tenuous nature of his existence and mortality and the complexity of the real world. 

i’m just ken is replaced with fat albert performing an extended rap cover of his own theme song. fat albert spends as much of this movie trying to help the main character make friends as he does trying to fuck her adoptive older sister (“my big al”, she calls him).

without getting into “barbie politics” barbie works because it wants to be a movie about barbie, the thing it’s named after. it takes “barbie lore” seriously. at least half of barbie actually takes place in barbieland, a world that the movie cares about making authentically fake and different and weird. the mechanics and nature of barbie’s existence and barbieland are the most important part of the movie. all of these bad adaptations have the obligatory familial infighting/accidentally thwarting a jewel heist/stopping the evil CEO from demolishing the neighborhood to build a megamall/helping larry bird get his basketball talent back from the aliens plot and so does barbie but it’s an excuse to talk about more interesting abstractions. there is a subplot dedicated to barbie helping to reignite a mother and daughter’s bond but this isn’t the core of the movie, it really is about barbie, literally and metaphysically. fat albert too isn't "about" helping a girl make friends and find herself, it's about fat albert, but it resents that about itself.

fat albert 2004 has about six minutes of actual animation, it rushes to get kenan thompson on screen as quickly as possible and stays there as long as it can (presumably a factor of cost more than anything else, as with all of these films). in barbie the ideas and philosophies of barbieland and real life both naturally affect each other, are reflections of each other, which is an obvious worldbuilding choice that makes intuitive sense; the media we consume is a reflection of the real world and vice versa. there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about the link between the two worlds, says barbie, though it is often the conduit for harmful ideas.

fat albert’s philadelphia and our philadelphia do not share this connection, albert’s intrusion in the real world is a perversion of the natural order and, we later learn, a physical impossibility in the long term. halfway through the movie, the cosby kids begin to be influenced by the real world: mushmouth gains the ability to speak coherently (“don’t call me mushmouth anymore! just call me… mouth!”) and dumb donald removes his ski cap, learns to read, and goes to the library and speeds through 22 volumes of african-american history. this is portrayed as profane; as dumb donald says before jumping back into the TV halfway through the movie: “"i've become smart enough to understand that... we've entered into a world where we do not belong. if you try to become something that you're not, you lose the essence of who you really are."

albert, still on his love quest, at first refuses to rejoin them; he goes off on a date with protagonist’s older sister, which goes well until a child recognizes him and shames him for not being in the tv where he belongs. “we need you! what would mr. cosby think if you don’t go back?” al’s stunned by this; he has no response, but it inspires him to seek answers. in the next scene he decides to find out. he walks up to bill cosby’s house and knocks on the door.

in barbie the discussion barbie has with her creator, ruth handler, is the emotional climax of the film. when barbie tells her she wants to stay in southern california, ruth warns her of the dangers of being human, but does not ultimately stop barbie from doing so; she points out that she is incapable of doing so even if she wanted to.

fat albert mirrors this discussion; albert is told of his conceptual origins. as barbie is based on ruth’s daughter, he is based on a deceased childhood friend of cosby’s, the grandfather of the girl he is trying to help (which is why the movie is careful to repeatedly stress the point that the older sister he’s fallen in love with is only his granddaughter by adoption). there isn’t a parallel moment to the one in barbie where handler winks to the audience about her criminal conviction but that’s probably in the film’s best interest.

albert pleads with cosby in the same way as barbie. more than anything, he wants to stay in the real world. cosby, like handler, encourages him to recognize his own power as an icon, but informs him that his fate is inescapable. if he stays in the real world, his colors will begin to fade and he will soon “turn into celluloid dust” and die. how cosby knows this is not explained; presumably little bill also visited him in the past and suffered a similar fate.

even when done cynically (as it always is) to adapt or remake anything to reject the source material in some way. it’s a paradoxical relationship, because to do it you have to both like (or at least be interested) in what you are recreating but find some aspect of it unnecessary or outdated or lacking or worthy of change. the animation to live-action adaptation often must navigate the additional paradox of wanting to make the unreal real, and the end result, formed by people who don’t care and are only in it for a paycheck, is usually bad art.

in the end fat albert acknowledges his own unreality and crawls back in the tv. the final scene is a saving private ryan style ending where all of the real life elderly inspirations for the cosby kids leave flowers on the real fat albert’s grave. here it hits you: the only moral of the live action fat albert movie is that a live action fat albert movie is a really shitty idea that would kill fat albert.

i agree.

13 Pitches For Ratatouille 2 (Rata-TWO-ouille)

With the success of Inside Out 2 (now only the second-highest grossing animated film of all time after being freshly dethroned by Ne Zha 2) Pixar has announced today that Coco 2 is in development, which will follow Toy Story 5, Incredibles 3, and “Hoppers”, a promising if controversial Bugs Life spinoff (time will tell if the decision to keep Kevin Spacey on comes back to bite them).

It seems we are firmly in the second major era of Pixar sequels; at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to see a future devoid of Ratatouille 2 (Rata-2-ouille). To that end I have taken the liberty of inventing several fresh directions for the series to take. Brad, if you’re reading this, my schedule is extremely busy but I am willing to talk if you would like to meet with me about expanding on any of these.