Doctor Suessicide

Also, while making that compilation I noticed Gnorm's kryptonite: glass doors. Bullets are no big deal, but two of his escapes are foiled by transparent bonk walls.

I made a compilation of Gnorm's assaults, because yeah!

Are you a pudding pack? Because I want to snack on your skin.

When she said this I was fully expecting it to be a joke that the other cronies react to, like "that was a suggestion not a law!" But if it was supposed to be a joke it was dropped on the floor.

A broadcast is for broad people, a pod cast is for pod people

I am convinced Gabbi wrote this after watching Welcome Mr. President (wiki), a genuinely funny Italian film from 2013. Welcome Mr. President is about a kind librarian from the country who gets elected to president of Italy as the result of an mistake by corrupt party leaders. Just from that summary you can see the similarities, but the shared plot points go way further: The establishment immediately picks up the protagonist and drives them to a resignation speech... But at the last minute they change their mind and decide to use their power to change the status quo. The modest leader gives away their new wealth to the needy. The carefree leader falls in love with their straight-edge assistant. The low-class leader annoys their Italian chef by wanting pizza instead of fancy food. A mishap leads to a bunch of officials eating pot, which happens to make everyone like the leader more. (In WMP this is a real mistake instead of an intentional poisoning, and at least the weed is cooked instead of sprinkled on raw.) The corrupt politicians tap the leader's phone and misinterpret a conversation as blackmail material. When that doesn't work, the antagonists go after the leader's best friends, which finally makes the leader step down. After the leader steps down at the end of the movie they get a "what comes next" call from an even bigger authority asking for help. (VP in Gabbi, Pope in WMP). Of course, every one of these plot points is executed better in the full-fledged film, from writing to acting to production. I almost find it impressive that with so much of the plot already accounted for, Governor Gabbi isn't able to insert a single intentionally funny element into its runtime.

I was very disappointed their birthday was some random day in April instead of February 22nd.

Slopping up some Woods on a Blowy Evening

I would like to address how mad Guy Pearce when he finds out that the tech guy used Open Source Software as part of their project. This is about as absurd as yelling at a chef when you find out there's salt it your meal. Sure, you could get by without it but no one does because it would be more work for a worse product. It's safe to say that the machine you're reading this on would not exist without open source software. Also, in scientific research it's considered bad practice to keep your source code closed as it prevents others from testing your results. That's for peer-reviewed journals, though, and maybe this organization plans on killing anyone who criticizes their work. I guess Guy Pearce doesn't know much about how his science/tech actually works, so he's more of an Evil CEO than a Mad Scientist. In which case, I wish the final act of this movie was KT & Wiggins digging through the nitty-gritty of software licensing law and having Vin play a cyborg lawyer.

Heh. Bush.

I'm a little teapot, short and stout. You're a big D-bag, get the fuck out.

I came to kick bubblegum and chew ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.

Sex and drugs a straight baby?

I've got sixty nine problems, but erectile disfunction ain't one.

If you believe in prayer, and I pray you do, then you'll pray that I pray that you pray too.

This reminds me of a common trope in "Is the world crazy?" plots: the character receives ambiguous information and doesn't ask follow-up questions. When Daker Bill is unsure whether he's inside a game he has that conversation with the bait shop lady. He asks some abstract, twisty nonsense and she goes back to asking about bait. This could be a sign she's an NPC... or just that she wants this unhinged, rum-soaked soon-to-be-murderer to buy some shit or get out of her shop. Dill Pickle could ask her follow-up questions to test her sentience. Like how Edward Norton in Fight Club finally starts asking people to explain exactly what they remember about Tyler Durden, instead of speaking in vague, cult-y code words.

As a programmer, I have a thick skin for software nonsense in movies. So when Mr. The Rules was explaining the twist I was ready for some strained metaphors, and it wouldn't be too interesting to hear about the painstaking process of a thirteen year old googling "how to program a game". However, one metaphor that drove me crazy was this bit that Mr. Rules shoehorned into his Catch The Tuna explanation: "The lighthouse. Light/dark. One/zero. The fundamental process." I understand that "ones and zeroes" is a 75% of what people know about computers, sure. What I don't like is how it misconstrues lighthouses! A lighthouse doesn't blink on and off. Even in the background of that scene it's clear that the light is always on while it rotates in a circle. So it doesn't have two states of "one/zero" at all. You could argue it has at least 360 states, one for every degree of rotation, or more depending on how high-fidelity the kid has made the graphics in his MILF-banging simulator.

Learn to speak Spanish, learn to talk German, soon you'll be Spermin'.

I would like to point out that immediately after they pick up Fred Bedderhead they go to Nuttville.

Several people have brought up the question of the handwriting at the end. I think this movie is pulling a brilliant Minority Report style ambiguous ending: if you want the handwriting to show that the daughter has gained a new respect for her deceased mother, then you can walk away without thinking about it any further. Stop reading if that sounds nice to you. However, if you want to think about the real consequences of a grown woman who has been trapped in her dead daughter's body, keep reading. So you have just been busted doing drugs by your husband/dad who is having his own emotional breakdown over the question of what is going to happen to his family. You've just had a vision in which you see your own dead body fading out of existence. You now realize there is no going back. You finally understand your daughter's life, and you finally understand that she is gone. What do you do? Do you try to convince your husband to face this fact? He has rejected your attempts to remain a wife, and he has rejected your attempts to find a new life for yourself with this new body. He'll only accept one way out: the daughter's return. Conveniently, this is an outcome in which he: Accepts your life choices Doesn't try to bang you Supports you financially while you restart your life Trying to be honest with him would just result in a bizarre divorce, and he would probably try to have you committed to an institution. So, you convince your hus-dad that the daughter is back. You don't get hit by car, or struck by lightning, or anything. You just wake up one morning and pretend to faint dramatically. He wants to believe you, anyway. And then you carry on with your new life. It's a little tricky that you can't help but use your old-style handwriting, but you pass it off as an homage to your late mother. But at least you can bang that hot photography teacher on the regs.

Don't slide into my DMs unless you're playing baseball with my Dungeon Master.

About that, I was annoyed by the quality of the slow-mo. Was it just my copy, or did it seem like they shot the movie at too low of a framerate to produce smooth motion?

The in-universe language barriers in this movie drove me insane. I've seen enough Jackie Chan movies to know that he can deliver lines in English, even if he has a strong accent. And yet, when he's speaking to John Cusack he has obvious grammatical errors. I'm pretty sure he's reading the script correctly, and that the writers of Dragon Blade wanted to emphasize that Hua An and Lucius speak different languages. Ok, except... The dialogue in this movie is already so bad. The only thing that could make Hua An's monologues less inspiring was the addition of grammatical errors. Were we supposed to think Huo An had never heard Latin before? In that case, is Lucius teaching him the language by speaking louder and gesturing? Or, are we accepting that Huo An has to have learned some Latin to get by as a Silk Road Protection Force Captain? Well then it would have been so easy to put in a line explaining his near-fluent speach instead: "As more Romans are traveling the Silk Road, I decided to learn Latin." Or, just gloss over it and write the best dialogue you can! It's not like they're trying to explain why the Roman centurions speak english, except for when the sing in actual goddamn Latin. Were the modern-day scientists actually speaking Latin?

The amount of light fixtures in Layeo's rooftop garden drove me insane. I asked myself, does it not rain in Little Italy? Then I remembered it was pouring rain the day Nikki arrived! Was Luigi spending his days reinstalling rain-drenched lamps?