King of All Ratings Thread

u LOVE kunkka


i need to review another album, haven't spun 1 in a while.

been listening to mac millers new alb, i might do that.

Watched american werewolf in london tonight. Good movie. 2.7/10

wow not even a 3 geeze.. I would easily give that movie a 7. genuinely creepy at moments and actually funny on purpose

interesting contrast. makes me want to watch it.

man i wish i was in town, there's no one to go to movies with here. I really badly wanna watch Snowden

come to phleug i like movies

Italyins wrote:wow not even a 3 geeze.. I would easily give that movie a 7. genuinely creepy at moments and actually funny on purpose

I'm not even sure why I gave it a 2.7 lol. It was actually an enjoyable movie and I think I was just...trolling..? Idk

i watch the (new) magnificent 7. great flick, plenty enjoyable if you just wanna sit back and watch some gun slingin'. writing and characters could use a bit of work though. Acting was awesome.

7.0

that sounds good to me.

On a related note i re watched Unforgiven with my day over the weekend. Its basically Clint Eastwoods retort to old morally clean (no negative moral repercussion for murdering people, good or bad) westerns of old, including his own. Not to say the movie mocks them, the message of the movie is just really obvious and on the nose Killing people is bad even if they are also bad people. There is a recurring theme of who deserves to die and if its fair. overall great movie. Not perfect , I mean as much as I love the third act, it does just kind of end, dont go in expecting huge spaghetti western epic it is certainly not one of those movies. but very satisfying watch.

8/10

Damn I should check it out; I've always heard good things.

Have you guys seen the Departed?


Also I wanna review an album SO BAD. Idk what album to do though.

Italyins wrote:that sounds good to me.

On a related note i re watched Unforgiven with my day over the weekend. Its basically Clint Eastwoods retort to old morally clean (no negative moral repercussion for murdering people, good or bad) westerns of old, including his own. Not to say the movie mocks them, the message of the movie is just really obvious and on the nose Killing people is bad even if they are also bad people. There is a recurring theme of who deserves to die and if its fair. overall great movie. Not perfect , I mean as much as I love the third act, it does just kind of end, dont go in expecting huge spaghetti western epic it is certainly not one of those movies. but very satisfying watch.

8/10  

Man, the ending of that movie is amazing. I wont talk about it due to spoilers but it is very satisfying

The Divine Feminine by Mac Miller.

Mac Miller, though still young, has traced an interesting path musically in the last few years. Mac got famous on youtube for his "kool-aid and pizza" college style of Rap. After that period of his career (which is when he gained most of his publicity) he released the album Watching Movies With the Sound Off which was certainly his most daring and impressive endeavour at the time. That project was written and recorded as Mac started heavily getting into drugs, and his next project "Faces" was made at the height of his addiction, and depicted him crumbling under the stress of his situation. This new album, then, is the newly found focused direction of a now sober artist.


The Divine Feminine is Mac's newest piece, coming out in September of 2016. The album is driven mostly by jazzy autumn horns and synths while riding off the high energy of summery, snappy beats. Mac does dabble with more modern styles however, like, for example, on the tracks Cinderella and Soulmate. This album in particular features a lot more of Mac's singing, which was first executed reasonably well on his Faces mixtape.

The first portion of the album seems to be composed of pieces in which Mac confesses for past transgressions and attempts to make amends for the negative ways he's treated girls. Amongst this, Mac uses these first few songs to try and explain to his girl (or girls, idk) that he truly does love her and he begs her to stay and give him another chance.
Following this somewhat apologetic and self-aware intro, Mac writes mostly about sex. Sex and love. Not as two different concepts but as interchangeable and synonymous phenomena:

"I opened up your legs and go straight for your heart"
"Girl you my painting, you my art installation
Gonna fuck you, put you on the wall" (how sick are these bars?)

There's not much more to deconstruct. All the remaining tracks are essentially Mac praising his girl or girls in general. He describes his girl as though she is a goddess, and it seems like he's pronouncing himself very spiritually at times in the name of love.
There is one interesting exception, however, with the song We. We tackles the very relevant theme of 'labels' and the sort of obsession people seem to have with putting a label or a title on themselves or a relationship. This is likely a social anxiety that stems from the centuries-long tradition of marriage.
Mac tries to explain how he feels about his girl in this song without pinning a label to his relationship
"And you always wonderin' what we'll be,
I say We sound better than You or Me"
In the second last track, Mac turns back on the spiritual praising of his girl to bring the story full circle, as he claims that his favourite part about her is that she's oblivious to how beautiful, serene, and high she is.

There doesn't appear to be a particular centrepiece to me at first (except perhaps the last track: God is Fair, Sexy, Nasty) but there is an album climax in the song Soulmate.

Let me take a second to get into what I think this album really accomplishes. For a long time now in the western world (and likely elsewhere) it's been a cultural mainstay for sex to be seen as taboo. Sex is never considered an appropriate or cultured conversation topic, and a lot of relationship and sexual anxieties seem to be popping up in the recent generations of people due to this poor portrayal of love. Religion has played a massive role in creating this distorted view of sex, and Mac plays to this theme of Sex vs. Love == God vs. Satan repeatedly throughout the album.
This album is Mac's response to this portrayal, while not directly attacking the social norms that perpetuate this unhealthy stigma, he simply puts his heart and soul on the record while scrapping for every ounce of poetic and artistic energy in an attempt to intertwine the worlds of Sex and Love, as they should be.



Here are some of my favourite bars from the album that I think reflect this theme:

"Yeah, we be fighting,
we be reuniting
Kiss me, touch me,
tease me, me excited
God, the devil,
who is who?
I'm tryna get through to you"

"I'mma go crazy, girl, you saved me
Meditate me, get me piece of mind
It's only she and I, ocean floor, how deep we dive
We be high lookin' for another fuckin' tree to climb
She was playin' hard to get, I read between her lines"

"You started getting crazy, told me fuck you like a whore
I thought you was an angel, now you yellin' to the Lord"

"Well all my days now, they changin'
I got angels, no more Satan
Looks like God's on my side, this time"

"Your divinity has turned me into a sinner
God is fair (pleasure, pleasure...)
And your beauty can even make hell have a winter"

8.5 / 10

Mr. Robot (first two seasons)

7.3. Great, but also bad.

Interesting review rob! I wanna ask you guys what you think about this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGd764YU9yc?t=24m

I shall review this song later instead of doing time sensitive work

So I saw Dr. Strange yesterday. Gonna keep this short and avoid any spoilers in case you guys haven't seen it yet.

Hmm.. not sure where to start even.

The only modern marvel cinematic universe flicks I've seen are the Iron Man movies (with the exception of 3) and I can't say I'm a big fan. Avengers and Captain America never really appealed to me, same goes for Thor, so I never really made an attempt to see them. Because of this, I didn't really go into this movie with any expectations. I'll try and break the movie down into a few categories and give a few words about each.

Characters: wasn't too big a fan of the main character. I feel like his development was only observable through his actions and not so much through his personality or acting or dialogue. The best characters we're easily the mentor figure, The Ancient One, and "The Levitating Cape" or as I like to call it: The Existential Crisis Cape. I mean, that thing is fking sentient! The universe as it was constructed by the characters and their social interactions alone didn't really feel dynamic or natural. I suppose if I can say any good though it's that the casting was alright. 


Action: Quite spectacular. Obviously this is the selling point for the film. The fight scenes were great but the most enjoyable aspect of the movie was the unique ways they manipulated the setting in fight scenes. I did feel, however, that a lot was taken stylistically and methodologically from the work of Inception, but it was definitely more of a driving force in this film, and I'd say they even did it better.

Humour: Terrible. With underlying themes and daunting as time and self-awareness, I think this movie would have benefited much more from a darker angle. But instead, any time there was any hint of seriousness they had to follow up with some terrible slapstick joke. The crowd also laughed at things that I don't even think were intended to be funny (or if they were, then damn the screen play was bad.)

Dialogue: Also very bad. There was one, maybe two, lines I liked from the movie. Both came from the mentor figure. Some instances felt so scripted and emotionless that I couldn't help but actually laugh out loud. 

Set and Setting: Definitely interesting. I'd never seen a block buster film (or perhaps any film) play so strongly to eastern and new-age philosophies/ideas like astral projection, multiverse theory, chakras, zen. Seeing as how these are all things I've read quite a bit on I kind of enjoyed seeing them be used as the underlying source for a sort of superhero fantasy. At the same time, though, I thought putting them in such a radical/magical/clearly fictitious context could ruin the ideas for anyone who had no prior knowledge about such things. 

6.4

Very nice review there Rob! I don't expect much from the Marvel movies anymore so I didn't have too much hype over Dr. Strange. So I'm not really disappointed to hear that the movie is just.....OK. I mainly want to see it because I like the actor who plays Dr. Strange, a.k.a Benedict Cumberbatch.

It's nice to hear that the action is at least fun and interesting, but knowing that the humor is god awful is a major turnoff. That's my biggest gripe with the Marvel movies. THE HUMOR IS ALWAYS FUCKIN POO. The movies feel like they can never be too serious and always have to throw in unfitting and lame jokes that just fall flat. Most of the jokes made in those movies only exist for trailers and commercials and tend to only be laughed at in a movie theater setting. Oh well, I'll probably just watch the movie when it's out on DVD.

Don't get me wrong man, I definitely recommend catching it in theatres, some of the scenes are pretty dazzling.

but yeah, fuck whoever writes the jokes for marvel movies lol.

Moana 

Visuals:
Some of the visuals in the film are absolutely heartwarming. There's one scene that's aesthetically out to lunch, but other than that everything is an intriguing blend of smooth, colourful, and powerful. I only wish they were more daring, seeing as how visuals are probably the main selling point for modern non-pixar CGI Disney movies, I think I would have enjoyed it more if they had really packed every scene full as much dazzle as they could afford. 

Characters:
Pretty good, The Rock wasn't even bad. Characters were lovable and some even nuanced. Solid development both socially and personally from both of the main characters. 

Plot:
w.e... good I guess?

Songs:
Some were solid, some satisfactory, a couple nun2good at all. Don't think there was a single track that blew me away. You're Welcome is probably my favourite, sonically speaking. 

7.2

I noticed a lot of modern Disney movies have dropped the traditional method of songs and replaced them with songs sung my already existing artists or change the way they sound to match top 50 songs. I'm not really a fan of that, but it's clearly working for them. Just look at "Let It Go"s popularity

Dude let it go is like the only thing good about frozen imo.
do u wanna build a snowman is also sick af.

I agree that those songs are great, but the instrumentals are also different compared to older disney songs.

Here's a song from Tangled, sung by Mandy Moore:



and here's the "Little Town" song from B&tB:



There are totally different in style. Also a lot of modern disney movies lack songs at all. I watched Zootopia a while ago and it didn't have any. Same with Big Hero 6 and Wreck-It Ralph. I still like those movies though.

man imagine getting that tangled bitch in the sack. that would be either the most serene and beautiful love making ever or absolutely grotesque.

and you're right, the tracks from the older disney movies are much more inspired by traditional musical tracks. the newer ones are much more pop influenced, but i mean, who's to say the old musical style tracks aren't influenced by old school pop? they might be, they might not be, i'm not sure

Have I ever, like, actually talked at length about why I love Worm so much? If I have, sorry for repeating myself.

I don't really have a numerical rating for it, just a ranking of "Best".

Worm is a massive web serial novel (I'm talking, like, 1.6-1.7 million words; that's on par with the entire Song of Ice and Fire series. It's a literal epic) following the adventures of up-and-coming superhero Taylor Hebert.

In Taylor's world, people with superpowers ("parahumans") have been around for three decades now, with multiple organizations of superheroes around the world and plenty of villains forming small groups on their own.

Taylor has the power to command bugs; as in, control every one of potentially hundreds of thousands of bugs withtin a multi-cityblock radius. On her first night out as a heroic vigilante, she gets mistaken as a villain. She gets the bright idea to join a local group of young villains as a mole and essentially spy on them for the heroes.

What follows is a young, depressed teenager attempting to seize control of the city of Brockton Bay as tragedy after horrofic tragedy strikes. Always keep in mind: it always gets worse. If ALWAYS gets worse.

Worm just has a lot going on. There are so, SO many characters, and plenty of them have their own personal stories progressing along with Taylor's. There is a consistent theme of people blocking others' voices out of their lives, and causing themselves and their loved ones copious amounts of unnecessary pain because of it. Time and time again, characters take themselves on these personal crusades that warp their personalities. About 70% of the story is told from Taylor's perspective, while the rest is told in interludes from the perspectives of dozens of side characters.

And the powers are just so cool. Like I said, the main character can turn a swarm of bugs into a fully-functioning army of miniature soldiers. One of her villainous teammates is a psychic who can find information on a subject without actually searching for it. Another teammate can grow dogs into car-sizes monsters. And there's a whole category of parahumans whose powers are to invent super-advanced technology.

Worm is a huge story that goes to a lot of places over it's million-and-then-some-word span. It is easily my favourite superhero story ever.

Cephalo the Pod wrote:Have I ever, like, actually talked at length about why I love Worm so much?

I don't think so. I also don't think I've heard of this until now.

Keep in mind, Ty; you can either dance with people or dance against them.

loverrboi_626 wrote:man imagine getting that tangled bitch in the sack. that would be either the most serene and beautiful love making ever or absolutely grotesque.

While we're on the subject, I'd totally have tender and passionate intercourse with her.

About the actual subject though: I think you're right about the pop thing. It's not necessarily better or worse. Each animated disney movie generation has their own type of music