The_Triple_Lindy

I'd love to think that the shark just sucked the meat off the bone like a damn chicken wing.

People need to leave animals the fuck alone. Did we learn nothing from the tragedy of Hank Hill's La Grunta dolphin encounter?

Yeah, about that ... isn't the lagoon man-made? The thieves say something about the lagoon having "the good stuff" that sells in Miami, but what kind of reef can grow that fast in a man-made lagoon? Does this even make sense? Also, it makes me think of Dr. No and how Honey Ryder goes to Crab Key to collect conch shells to sell in Miami. Exactly how thriving is Miami's slightly illicit sealife selling industry?

Maybe. The movie seems to go out of its way to set the IRL kid up as "The Creator" (just look at that haloed close-up him sitting in the jail cell at the end), not "The Modder." Everything you describe could happen to an original game build. Plus, this movie really wants to explore the whole God-creation-personhood aspect, which I feel like relies somewhat on the IRL kid being the creator.

Any Star Trek: TNG fans on this board? If so, do you remember the episode "The Big Goodbye" when Picard goes into the holodeck to cosplay as a Prohibition-era detective but the holodeck malfunctions and the gangsters become self-aware? At the end the question that gets asked is, "what happens to the holodeck characters once the holodeck is turned off?" Because the gangsters in the simulation are programmed with families and lives beyond the crime that Picard is trying to solve and the characters wonder if they'll just disappear once the game ends. I think this movie is positing that once a video game universe is created, it just always exists, whether or not the console or computer is running and the game is being played. Sort of like the old cartoon Reboot, where all the characters are arcade CPU opponents who just live normal lives until a human puts a quarter in the machine. The gang was flummoxed by the "In Plymouth, no one ever dies" tagline, but it makes sense if you consider that a video game character's life never really begins or ends, and if the player-character or an important NPC dies in a game, you can just load an old save and restore everything that got ruined. They're sort of like a Mr. Meeseeks from Rick and Morty ... they appear fully formed, ready to perform their task, and then disappear once they're done. I'm also not bothered by all the scenes featuring Karen and her husband without Dill because video games these days are so complex that many NPCs can live full lives and run-routines beyond interacting with the player-character. In games like Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, and Hitman, you can follow just about any NPC around for hours just watching them live their lives without ever interacting with them.

Why does this movie not know how cars and traffic work? He drives a car with a right-side driver's seat, but since the movie is set in Florida, everyone still drives on the right side of the road. Plus, toward the end of the movie, after he decides to go through with the murder and rushes back to the boat, he stops at a traffic light that turns red-yellow-green, and I've literally never seen that in real life, but the movie makes a point of showing this to us. On the other hand, one of the best video game world shout-outs is when he gets in the truck and tries to back out and turn around, but ends up having to do about a seven-point turn to get turned. Video game cars can be hell to handle, but any gamer knows that you just hold brake and gas together and do a donut to 180 in a car.

Love tzatziki but I hate the store-bought and need a good recipe. Anyone care to tell me ... [taps mic] how does tzatziki get made? #hdtgm?

So then, what do you guys dip your raw veggies in? Because you don't have to say ranch, but if you say bleu cheese, I'm having you all committed.

While wearing a t-shirt with a bulls-eye on it as he lists all of his allergies.

Ultimately, the hero of the movie, and the one that the audience is supposed to really sympathize with, is the IRL kid who kills his stepdad. The stepdad says that the kid wants to kill him, so that desire already exists. I don't think there is any question that the movie is saying yes, sometimes murder is "Justice." EDIT: To be fair, art and morality are not the same. A work of art's whole purpose is to just be art, not necessarily to teach a moral ... so maaaaaybe the movie is taking that stance.

I posit to this forum that there never is a moment where Dill actually becomes sentient. By necessity, he is always doing exactly what his coding as a video game character tells him to do. The salesman character says that the game used to be just about fishing, but then slowly became about committing this murder, which implies that the IRL kid has changed the focus of a game he's creating. Fair enough -- the evolution of a piece of work is a natural part of game development, and artistic creation in general. But if the game has been changed, so too must Dill's coding also have been changed. The murder of the stepdad avatar is the game's new critical path. If Dill and Plymouth Island and all the NPCs are in existence, this means the game must be turned on and someone is playing. If not, it can only be that these characters are just alive and functioning of their own freewill in the game, in spite of what the player is having them do. And that is what is known as a "broken game" -- when the character doesn't do what the player tells them to, the game is broken. What this must mean, therefore, is that Dill's "coming into awareness" is part of what he's programmed to do as part of the course of gameplay. He is still doing what his code is stating he should do. This is classic determinist philosophy. Freewill is predicated by one's ability to choose and then act upon that choice. If the choice is made for you and if your actions are not of your volition, you don't have freewill. IRL kid is essentially the god/creator of the in-game universe. Nothing happens in the game that the creator doesn't know will happen. If Dill's awakening is something god knew would happen, then it isn't really sentience. He's still just doing what he's programmed to do. He has the illusion of freewill, but not actual freewill because he doesn't transcend his programming. If Dill has any consciousness, it can only be in a Get Out-type scenario, where Dill is aware of himself and somehow still being carried along on the game's path against his will or better judgment.

The nerdlinger salesman guy says that, at one point, the game was just about fishing but then became about killing the virtual stepfather. So, my original take is that the salesman represents a character in the game whose role became obsolete as the focus of the game's critical path changed. The salesman seems to also become sentient because he is constantly showing up late to meet Dill when meeting Dill is his only purpose in the game, so the fact that they keep missing each other confuses him, he somehow starts to question why this is the case, and BAM! nerdlinger comes online as a sentient being. But the movie also portrays nerdlinger as a "The Architect" from the Matrix type, in that he says "I am the rules" and somehow knows what the overall objective of the game is ... or at least, what it used to be when it was just a fishing simulator. Placing him in both roles -- a standard NPC for Dill to interact with and also the embodiment of the game's overall AI -- is perhaps the worst aspect of the way this movie was written.

Considering that this movie opened with 5 different production company logos, my guess is that, at one point, the script was pretty good, but as more and more producers were brought in, more things started to change and things deteriorated. With movies and video games both, the more producers, the more of a mess things become.

It was actually a polar bear. I'm dead now.

True story of today: I was about to tee off a round of golf this morning when a yearling bear ran across the course, and they closed the course for the day while they tried to catch it. But I instantly remembered "Black, fight back. Brown, lay down." Thanks, June. That'll be in my head forever now, and it might've saved my life today.

I think it's more like, they realize that the humans in a panda's life tend to be conservationists who spend all their time trying to get the pandas to mate. So the Country Bears are just hella jealous of how laid pandas are getting. And I think some sort of bear rights activism must've taken place for doors to be built bear-sized and bars to have back-scratching posts installed.

I'm in, too! I've missed the retro movie nights. I voted 88 Minutes in honor of Country Bears' runtime, but since CB beat Pluto Nash, we could honor it that way, too

Robert Evans (from Behind the Bastards podcast and Cracked, at one point) wrote a book called A Brief History of Vice that talks about "The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis" that suggests alcohol from fermented sugar from old dates helped monkeys evolve because the higher calorie count in the sugar/alcohol combo helped sustain early humans living along the coastlines. Is it possible that the same thing has happened to the bears in this film's universe ... that some kind of meadlike fermented alcoholic honey helped ignite the higher consciousness of bears?

I dig this as an explanation ... WB's is the main universe where sentient animals are still sometimes forced into their animal roles. Bugs Bunny is intelligent and capable and holds down jobs in the human world and has conversations and relationships with humans, yet still lives in the woods and has to deal with being hunted. These bears are chart topping celebrities, and the world around them is built to accommodate them, yet somehow you can still trap and domesticate them, just like Elmer sometimes mounts a talking Daffy Duck head on his wall.

Since he's the drummer, he's more like their Animal.

Somehow I think that any non-robotic live-action Minotaur in this flick would've been some kind of half-bull, half-sexy lady. She looks like a raver from the 5th Element. What do you think, Zorg? My yes, that fringe is ... unfortunate.

Pictured: Classed-up iguana porn My guess is, she was supposed to be part of the Super Mario Bros movie as a Koopa Troopa love interest but got written out for being too garish. Tell me you couldn't picture it:

I know this has been mentioned, but since you bring up Daedalus again, I don't understand why they did what they did with Daedalus' character other than they had a sexy disco iguana goddess costume and had to use it because of union rules or something. But also, does anyone else think that they missed a huge opportunity, since they were dealing with King Minos and the labyrinth, to bring in the minotaur? Since aside from trapping Daedalus and Icarus in the labyrinth, Minos' whole deal was that he controlled the minotaur but it ended up killing and eating him in the end. Daedalus created the minotaur, so it could've even been one of those stupid robots.