WALL·E, worst animated movie of 2008

Yes, worse than Horton Hears a Woo!.

I don’t know where to start. Almost everything sucks. The only good thing is that it lasts only 98 minutes.

The robots are not realistic; they look like humans. It’s fine when Disney’s animals just look like humans, and it pleases their furry-fetish fanbase, but they could have made some sort of effort this time.
The discussions between the two main robots are completely unrealistic. They aren’t able to communicate efficiently, they have “robotic voices” (what a cliché) that suffer from the Kenny Dilemma: you don’t understand what he says, but it gets old; and sometimes you understand because the story needed it. But let’s ignore that and pretend it’s fun and kids might like it.
Their meeting looked like a bad remake of the Tarzan/Jane meeting. Still on their behavior: WALL·E sleeps. They “kiss” and hold hands. There is no robotic traits at all. They could have at least added some robotic characteristics…
Oh, and why on Earth a robot has to display blinking eyes on a screen?

The visuals are not impressive. Robots are easy to modelize (especially WALL·E‘s friend: no textures needed), backgrounds are very simple, and the humans were very lazily done (the plot helps, and the only good-looking human you will see is not a 3D rendering, it’s a real actor).

Talking of the plot. How come humans are able to build state-of-the-art maintenance-free spaceships to get out of their earth full of garbage, but can’t clean it, or just throw the garbage on another planet?). Oh, and they spend their time eating and throwing a lot of garbage in space too. This doesn’t differ from the usual “humans are bad” line of Disney’s, but this time it’s plain stupid.
One joke that was almost funny but was very typical: WALL·E throws a diamond ring and keeps the box.

It’s bad and ridiculous. Not as bad an ridiculous as Fight Club, though. And it’s not that boring. But don’t pay to watch a bad movie patently done by lazy people.

Transformers, worst movie of 2007

So I thought, why not watch Transformers? It has robots, it should at least be enjoyable for that. Well, no, not even that part is good. Here is my review.

There’s a hot chick, who is going out with a football player, him being condescending to a sort-of-nerd-but-still-good-looking guy (because we don’t want to show ugly people in a movie), her defending him, then drawn to him by the events that will happen. Never seen before.

Oh, and there’s techno-gibberish. One more or less incorrect (i.e. I’ve seen far worse) use of the term firewall, and the parts with the “hacker” is just laughable. Oh yeah, and the Pentagon allows high-schoolers inside, without even checking if they have some sort of storage device on them. Right. The high-school girl who saw what every NSA’s scientists didn’t see has an annoying accent, and her friend the hacker is an annoying, disgusting, stereotypical, fat black man. Don’t forget to add the cross-platform unstoppable computer virus propagating through magic to the mix.

There’s even a part with marines. An the Mexican guy from Prison Break, speaking Spanish (it was supposed to be funny, I think). One of the marines has a wife and a new-born baby he hasn’t seen in person yet. Why do we need to see this? Oh right, to care about him; the others marines’ lives are worthless. He will hence survive and have his five minutes of glory in the action (but not much more).

The hero (the one who will eventually get in the pants of the hot chick) tries to hide a truck and three cars in his backyard. And yet another set of stupid, overlong, painful and unfunny scenes. Oh yeah, and our stupid hero is afraid his parents are going to freak out because of the damage. Just think one second for fucking sake: what is more important, the end of the world or a few crushed flowers?

But still, it could have been half enjoyable if the robots were cool, with cool combats, etc. Bummer.
The robots don’t look like robots, they look like big robotized trolls. It seems the animators didn’t bother creating new kinds of body movements and just took them from some older movie that had big monsters in it. Continuing on the CGI effects, they’re lame and the filmmakers are obviously ashamed of them as the “transformations” are played very fast in a very short window of time, so that you can’t see how bad they are. Most of the time they don’t even show you the full scene but only closeups, maybe to hide some incoherence. There’s even parts where they transform completely off-screen. They weren’t even able to do something good with a simple cube (yes, there’s also a cube). I’m happy I didn’t pay anything to watch this crap.

Oh, and I watched it in 1080p on a big screen, so don’t tell me it’s a thing you have to see in a huge room – full of people eating pop corn and children crying – to enjoy it.

To sum up: overlong, painfully unfunny, boring and uncool epic failure.

Balls.CD

One of my favorite sources of music is being endangered by a take-down order sent by their local MAFIAA to their host. However, as they stated on their website as the news got out:

  • The MAFIAA has no legal basis, it’s just scare tactics.
  • Their host is not scared and will not comply (unless they have a court order, of course). Many hosts in the past were quickly intimated or bribed by the intellectual “property” police.
  • They run very frequent backups, to various locations in the world.
  • They have an idle server in an undisclosed location, twice as more powerful, just waiting in case of a police raid. Which would mean almost zero downtime, and a another waste of taxpayers’ money.1

The administrators who run these kind of websites – and I’m not only talking about piracy -, they are true modern heroes with big fucking balls. Thank you, guys.
And each time one of them is taken down, new ones, better, tougher, will emerge.

  1. Don’t think you pay for anti-piracy? Learn about “operation fastlink” and the other similar ones []

I love you, Hydra Head

Hydra Head Records is an independent record label, founded in New Mexico by Aaron Turner (the frontman of Isis) in 1993. Some of the bands signed to the label include Cave In, Pelican, Xasthur, and Jesu.

Botch, Khanate, and Harkonen were all signed to Hydra Head prior to their respective disbandings.

And they’re doing it again.
I just listened to the Pyramids self-titled double CD. It’s unusual and brilliant. They were classified as Indie (whatever that means) where I got it, but it’s much more than that. It’s a sort of post-rock drone with celestial voices… well, I’ve never been able to describe music, and it will clearly not start with them. Listen to them, and if you don’t like it you’re a faggot.

Gallhammer

Gallhammer is an all girl Black/Doom/Crust band from Tokyo, Japan.

Wow. Cute Japanese girls playing doom metal? I expected to LOLWTF, but I didn’t. Actually they sounded quite good. Moreover, they have a dead tree on their CD cover, and while it’s a big doom cliché, I fucking love dead trees. Well, by looking at the promo pictures it seems they invented some sort of “visual doom”, however they don’t look that ridiculous (not compared to some Norwegian true black metal band I will not name, but compared to the Japanese+women combo).

Let’s not forget the lineup:

Mika Penetrator – vocals, guitars
Vivian Slaughter – vocals, bass
Risa Reaper – drums, vocals

If you want to discover other extreme metal female vocalists, you should get this dusty but still good compilation.


Bear