Which MCU movies are worth watching?

Not a day goes by that I'm not disappointed by what Wikipedia turned into. It went all the way from trying to be "sum of all human knowledge" under "neutral point of view" to cutting everything not "notable" enough and just mindlessly parroting establishment view.

That's tolerable when the establishment knows what they're saying, like in science articles. Well, mostly. Unfortunately this policy gets extended to domains without anything resembling genuine experts, and nowhere is it more ridiculous than with "film critics".

It's one thing to mindlessly parrot some social scientist who fudges statistics and uses questionable methodology, but is at least pretending to do science. Treating someone speaking out of their ass as a "reliable source" just because someone gave them a newspaper column to publish at is a mockery of what Wikipedia used to stand for in its early days.

There is an objective measure of film quality - enjoyment by the audience. And we have pretty good metrics of that - like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Such metrics occasionally suffer from issues like vote stuffing, demographic imbalance of voters compared with movie watching audience, less representative sampling for very old or foreign movies, and occasional overrating of most recent movies before it regresses to the mean, but it's insanity not to take these aggregates as starting points.

Even these issues are mostly overstated. IMDB filters handle vote spam quite well, voter demographics while imperfect tends to be far more representable than film critic demographics, and as for questionable early ratings due to hype, just check out how many completely forgettable movies managed to win an Oscars somehow. That reminds me, what was the Oscar list for the year of The Empire Strikes Back? It's hilarious in hindsight.

So what Wikipedia's doing? Ignoring all real data, and just parroting establishment of course!

MCU Movie Ratings

So here are the objective ratings, in chronological order:

• Iron Man - 7.9
• The Incredible Hulk - 6.8
• Iron Man 2 - 7.0
• Thor - 7.0
• Captain America: The First Avenger - 6.9
• Marvel's The Avengers - 8.1
• Iron Man 3 - 7.2
• Thor: The Dark World - 7.0
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 7.8
• Guardians of the Galaxy - 8.1
• Avengers: Age of Ultron - 7.4
• Ant-Man - 7.3
• Captain America: Civil War - 7.8
• Doctor Strange - 7.5
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - 7.7
• Spider-Man: Homecoming - 7.5
• Thor: Ragnarok - 7.9
• Black Panther - 7.5
• Avengers: Infinity War - 8.7
• Ant-Man and the Wasp - 7.6

I don't always agree with all them - for example I tend to enjoy superhero movies which don't take themselves too seriously more, so personally I find Doctor Strange overrated, and Iron Man 2-3 underrated.

But don't mind me, statistically speaking you're far more likely to enjoy what other people enjoy than what some cat blogger or film critic likes. All I can do is provide a bit of context for those numbers.

The best one

• Avengers: Infinity War - 8.7

Pretty much everyone agrees that the best movie of them all is Avengers: Infinity War and it's not even close. If you plan to watch a lot of MCU movies, definitely include this one somewhere.

However, it might not be the best movie to start with. It's really good if you're invested in the story, and know at least half the characters. Otherwise, it will probably be too confusing.

Really good movies

• Iron Man - 7.9
• Marvel's The Avengers - 8.1
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 7.8
• Guardians of the Galaxy - 8.1
• Captain America: Civil War - 7.8
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - 7.7
• Thor: Ragnarok - 7.9

There's a lot of options where to start. Movies establishing new characters like Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, which are also really good on their own, are probably the best place. If you're completely new to MCU, these are just the two I'd recommend starting with. If you don't like them, I doubt you'd like the rest anyway.

Thor and Captain America have some good movies, unfortunately their first movies are rather mediocre. So you can either start with their first weak movie because it gets better eventually, or just read its plot summary and get straight to the better ones. Nobody will blame you for skipping early Thors, honest.

Watchable movies

• Avengers: Age of Ultron - 7.4
• Ant-Man - 7.3
• Doctor Strange - 7.5
• Spider-Man: Homecoming - 7.5
• Black Panther - 7.5
• Ant-Man and the Wasp - 7.6

These movies are still pretty good, and they mostly don't require watching anything before.

Notable here is Black Panther, which due to the nearly all-black cast became inevitable battleground of culture wars. It's decent movie, but it's massively overrated by the overwhelmingly liberal film critics, and this generates a bit of audience backlash. It's definitely far better than the trainwreck Wonder Woman was, but every single MCU movie is far better than Wonder Woman, even Thor 1.

Forgettable movies

• The Incredible Hulk - 6.8
• Iron Man 2 - 7.0
• Thor - 7.0
• Captain America: The First Avenger - 6.9
• Iron Man 3 - 7.2
• Thor: The Dark World - 7.0

Unless you're really invested in the MCU, it's probably best to skip them. Personally I quite enjoyed Iron Man 2-3 movies, but I definitely have preference for sillier movies that most people don't share, and I can totally see why they did not get universal aclaim.

None of them are key to anything, and a huge added benefit of skipping them all is avoiding Natalie Portman, who according to some is the most annoying actress in Hollywood ^{[citation needed]}.

So that's it for today. If you know of anyone who's working on an encyclopedia which follows Neutral Point of View, please let me know.

Wonder Woman review

The movie is bad. Everything about it is bad. Like Star Wars prequels tier bad, but there won't even be any memes.

It's not about Wonder Woman

First of all, it's not even about Wonder Woman, it's all about her boyfriend. He's driving the whole plot, and she just tags along, without any sense of what's going on.

Diana (the "Wonder Woman") doesn't make any choices in the whole movie. The closest she gets to doing something on her own is choosing an outfit in a pointless shopping scene, and then she decides to dress up like him. Just wow.

Every time she suggests something (usually "omg, we got to help those people"), he just shuts her down, and then she does things his way.

The world makes no sense

Obviously the movie shits at actual Greek mythology.

As far as I can tell, the Amazons on the island are just some mortals. They have no children, and seem to be aging, so between ancient Greek times and World War 1, they should all be dead, right? Or is it some Star Trek time bubble? And how do they even speak English and all the other modern languages if they've been isolated from the world for who knows how long?

Then there's a framing device with pointless email from Batman. Like, what the hell? Greek Gods and Batman do not belong in the same movie in any way whatsoever. The comics tend to be stupid like that, but it served no purpose whatsoever.

And of course there are unexplained black Amazons, Hollywood has racial quotas to fill.

Action scenes are few and bad

There are three action sequences in this 2h 21min "action" movie.

Early on there's German army landing on Amazons' island, where the Amazons dance-fight, doing bows trick shot, and combo moves with spears, leashes, and such. Wearing the kind of "female armor" everyone has been making fun of for last 30 years. It's all rather silly, but probably still the best part of the movie.

Then about an hour of bad acting later there's storming of No Man's Land. Wonder Woman runs into machine gun fire, and the movie gives up on any internal logic. I couldn't tell - is she bullet proof or not? If she is, then why the hell is she tying to block bullets one by one with whatever piece of token armor is on her forearms? It's ridiculous every time she does it. And if she's not bulletproof, then how isn't she dead exactly? There's a lot of bullets out there, and she's not exactly waving her arms to block.

Anyway, leaving extent of her powers aside, somehow here mere presence makes all bullets miss everyone in the whole British army, who all decide to run after her, without anyone getting even a scratch.

Another hour of bad acting later, there's final boss fight which is basically shitty CGI, and least entertaining of all three.

The villain

Invincible superheroes are inherently rather boring, and decent superhero movies rely on an interesting villain to work. Wonder Woman's is about the worst, as the main villain gets like a minute of screen time within the first two hours before an obvious surprise plot twist reveal.

Villain's two henchmen get a bit more screen time, one of which Wonder Woman decided to kill, the other one to spare, for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

So instead the fighting is mostly against random German and occasionally Turkish conscripts who have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on around them. Then again, there's not that much fighting in the movie.

Morality

I think the movie attempts to have some moral message about violence being bad, but delivery is so ridiculously poor I'm not even sure what they've been going for. In the end, she ignores her moral intuitions and does whatever her boyfriend asks for. Is that the message perhaps? Do what your boyfriend says?

Sidekicks

At some point the boyfriend and his sidekick Diana assemble a team. None of them does anything. Some Native American "chief" sends smoke signals at some point, it's not very clear why. They try to do some fighting, but Wonder Woman does all the work anyway.

Acting

The only person who got any kind of character development is the boyfriend with his heroic sacrifice. Diana starts the movie as Wonder Woman, ends the movie as Wonder Woman, and her character development is, I guess getting her first boyfriend?

All the acting from Gal Gadot playing Wonder Woman was bad, so maybe they tried to salvage the movie by giving somewhat more tolerable Chris Pine playing the boyfriend more to do, until he took over the whole movie?

Conclusion

The movie has are no redeeming qualities. I watched it yesterday, and it's already rapidly fading in my memory other than the silly dance fight scene.

The only thing you'll achieve by watching it is convince yourself that critics (who for some reason love it) are all idiots, but you should probably know that by now.

Review of Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

"Save the Cat" is a guide on how to be a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. As you might have guessed, I have no such ambition myself, but it's always interesting to get some basic idea what it's like in different parts of the creative world.

The book is extremely focused on practical matters. It gives you minute-by-minute breakdown of what is supposed to happen in a movie when, exactly what plot devices are necessary in what kinds of movies, how to structure each scene with mandatory emotional change and conflict, how to entwine primary and secondary story, how to write, how to pitch your screenplay and so on.

Normally you'd expect similar books to be really vague and full of banal generalities, with maybe a small sprinkling of practical advice. Save the Cat is nothing remotely like that - it's extremely content-dense and provides a framework that seems to be ridiculously specific. In a way, it reminds me of Getting Things Done - another short book with extremely specific framework, that stands completely apart from the ocean of feel-good vagueness which is productivity books.

Anyway, the book is supposedly all the rage in he Hollywood, and I can totally believe that. The problem with it is that  it looks like a really good guide to making totally mediocre movies.

The author - Blake Snyder - is supposedly a huge screenwriter star, but what is his actual filmography? Here's the complete list:

• Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot - 3.7 on imdb
• Blank Check - 4.7 on imdb

And that's it! So basically he's a talentless hack as far as screenwriting goes, and all his life's achievements seem to be two godawful movies, and yet somehow making millions selling ton of screenplays (none of them ever getting made into movies), and convincing the entire Hollywood that his way is the one true way to make movies. No wonder I like so few movies these days.

Now the book is really nicely written, and its advice might be extremely helpful to new screenwriters for all I know. At least some of the advice rings true, but then vast majority of examples he gives are from either old mediocre movies everybody already forgot about (and I've never seen) or more recent mediocre movies, some of which I've seen but can recall only vaguely. The only success criteria for the author seem to be box office sales (and both of his awful movies made about $30m each in States). If you put together all sentences about movies which were actually good, that's going to be less than a page, probably.

Anyway, it's a great book for an aspiring scriptwriter, or for an aspiring self-help book writer. For someone who loves movies, it's just too depressing.

Tastes of movie critics and tastes of the public

Continuing last week's post where I noted that Transformers 2 was quite enjoyable even if unremarkable action movie, I'll continue with some analysis of tastes of movie critics versus tastes of the public.

In case you missed the story Aircraft Careers 2 is a movie with huge box office success, decent public reaction, and completely hated by pretty much every single movie critic. Go to the cinema and watch it to see what the controversy is all about ;-)

As proxy for taste of the public I'm going to use The IMDB Top 250 list. I'm interested in what the public actually liked, not just what they were duped into watching by pretty trailers and marketing buzz, and this list is pretty much it. Top 250 list contains movies that were both very highly rated and rated by large number of people, to exclude ones that nobody cares about other than the director and the lead actress, who both voted 10/10.

As proxy for taste of movie critics - The Tomatometer, or more or less a weighted percentage of movie critics that liked a particular movie.
And... it turns out movie critics and public agree most of the time. 18.8% of the top 250 has very rare perfect 100 tomatometer score, 77.6% has extremely good score of 90 or more, 91.6% has still very good 80 or more score - perhaps critics are not as amazed by the movie as the audience, but they liked it anyway. There are just 19 (7.6%) movies with scores in their 70s, and 2 (0.8%) in their 60s - where we can genuinely says the critics were largely unimpressed. Not a single movie has a horrible score like Transformers 2's 19.

Here's the entire list:

Tomatometer	Movies
61	Changeling (#219)
64	Public Enemies (#215)
71	Snatch. (#156), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (#190)
72	Forrest Gump (#43), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (#188)
73	V for Vendetta (#176)
74	Léon (#35)
75	The Prestige (#83), Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (#114)
76	Braveheart (#102), Crash (#223)
77	La vita è bella (#87), Sin City (#98), Gladiator (#115), The Big Lebowski (#155), The Thing (#174), Big Fish (#232)
78	The Green Mile (#111), The Hangover (#138)
79	Requiem for a Dream (#64)
80	Gran Torino (#76)
81	Fight Club (#21), Oldboy (#120), Dial M for Murder (#200), In Bruges (#204)
83	American History X (#39), Donnie Darko (#130), Into the Wild (#146), Casino (#195)
84	Se7en (#32), Batman Begins (#106), Brief Encounter (#166), Magnolia (#235), Harold and Maude (#248)
85	The Sixth Sense (#140), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (#142), Gandhi (#164), Scarface (#171), The Exorcist (#209), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (#230)
86	The Matrix (#27), Platoon (#144)
87	The Shawshank Redemption (#1), The Shining (#52), Twelve Monkeys (#189), Mystic River (#238)
88	Nuovo cinema Paradiso (#88), Harvey (#181)
89	The Usual Suspects (#23), American Beauty (#37), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (#108), Heat (#133), Judgment at Nuremberg (#143), The Graduate (#159), Trainspotting (#170)
90	Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (#45), A Clockwork Orange (#51), The Apartment (#84), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (#150), Hotaru no haka (#196), Network (#226), Arsenic and Old Lace (#236)
91	Saving Private Ryan (#54), Der Untergang (#81), The Elephant Man (#86), The Great Escape (#93), The Sting (#96), Blade Runner (#112), Per qualche dollaro in più (#118), The General (#126), There Will Be Blood (#129), The Deer Hunter (#139), Ben-Hur (#141), Million Dollar Baby (#149), Letters from Iwo Jima (#203), Ed Wood (#212), Bonnie and Clyde (#220), Little Miss Sunshine (#239), Glory (#240)
92	Cidade de Deus (#17), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (#20), It's a Wonderful Life (#31), Paths of Glory (#44), The Departed (#53), Hotel Rwanda (#105), Amores perros (#167), The Lion King (#169), Children of Men (#192), Safety Last! (#218)
93	Memento (#29), Das Leben der Anderen (#56), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (#61), Once Upon a Time in America (#91), Det sjunde inseglet (#103), Mononoke-hime (#128), The Bourne Ultimatum (#151), Le scaphandre et le papillon (#216), Rocky (#244)
94	The Dark Knight (#7), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (#13), Raiders of the Lost Ark (#18), Slumdog Millionaire (#67), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (#68), Touch of Evil (#100), No Country for Old Men (#109), Die Hard (#122), Fargo (#124), Smultronstället (#131), Stand by Me (#161), The Ox-Bow Incident (#194), Duck Soup (#197), The Day the Earth Stood Still (#233)
95	Star Wars (#12), The Pianist (#59), The Bridge on the River Kwai (#69), Reservoir Dogs (#70), El laberinto del fauno (#71), Ladri di biciclette (#94), Star Trek (#99), High Noon (#119), The Big Sleep (#123), Sleuth (#178), Spartacus (#250)
96	Pulp Fiction (#5), Schindler's List (#6), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (#9), Goodfellas (#15), The Silence of the Lambs (#25), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (#34), WALL·E (#42), 2001: A Space Odyssey (#89), Full Metal Jacket (#92), Back to the Future (#95), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (#97), Unforgiven (#113), Ran (#137), Les diaboliques (#145), The Killing (#162), Ratatouille (#163), Groundhog Day (#175), The Princess Bride (#185), Umberto D. (#186), Stalag 17 (#193)
97	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (#10), Casablanca (#11), C'era una volta il West (#19), Up (#22), Psycho (#24), To Kill a Mockingbird (#48), Alien (#49), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (#57), Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (#60), Some Like It Hot (#79), Amadeus (#85), Strangers on a Train (#110), Notorious (#117), It Happened One Night (#132), Yojimbo (#134), Le notti di Cabiria (#147), 8½ (#152), Dog Day Afternoon (#165), Gone with the Wind (#168), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (#172), The Wild Bunch (#173), The Hustler (#182), The Best Years of Our Lives (#183), The Incredibles (#187), The Lady Vanishes (#198), La strada (#211), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (#213), His Girl Friday (#214), Rope (#217), All Quiet on the Western Front (#222), Patton (#229), Wo hu cang long (#237), Good Will Hunting (#243), In the Heat of the Night (#246)
98	The Godfather: Part II (#3), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. (#4), Sunset Blvd. (#26), Apocalypse Now (#36), Vertigo (#40), Lawrence of Arabia (#41), Double Indemnity (#47), Raging Bull (#73), The Wrestler (#104), The Manchurian Candidate (#116), Annie Hall (#136), Life of Brian (#153), The Night of the Hunter (#158), Finding Nemo (#160), Låt den rätte komma in (#191), A Streetcar Named Desire (#206), The Conversation (#207), Rosemary's Baby (#221), Manhattan (#227), Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (#241), Roman Holiday (#242), La dolce vita (#247)
99	L.A. Confidential (#65), Metropolis (#82), La battaglia di Algeri (#201)
100	The Godfather (#2), 12 Angry Men (#8), Shichinin no samurai (#14), Rear Window (#16), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (#28), North by Northwest (#30), Citizen Kane (#33), Taxi Driver (#38), M (#46), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (#50), The Third Man (#55), Chinatown (#58), City Lights (#62), Aliens (#63), Das Boot (#66), Rashômon (#72), All About Eve (#74), The Maltese Falcon (#75), Modern Times (#77), Singin' in the Rain (#78), Rebecca (#80), The Great Dictator (#90), On the Waterfront (#101), Jaws (#107), Cool Hand Luke (#121), The Wizard of Oz (#125), Witness for the Prosecution (#127), Kind Hearts and Coronets (#135), Le salaire de la peur (#148), The Grapes of Wrath (#154), The Gold Rush (#157), The Terminator (#177), The Kid (#179), Toy Story (#180), Shadow of a Doubt (#184), The African Queen (#199), Anatomy of a Murder (#202), The Adventures of Robin Hood (#205), King Kong (#208), The Lost Weekend (#210), Sweet Smell of Success (#224), The Philadelphia Story (#225), Frankenstein (#228), Great Expectations (#231), Laura (#234), My Man Godfrey (#245), The Red Shoes (#249)

If you hoped to see some overmarketed garbage among the public-beloved-but-critically-panned movies, sorry to disappoint you. I'm surprised by how many movies that won Oscars for the Best Picture are there - Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and Crash, plus some nominations like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I haven't seen all the movies critics disliked, but for the ones I've seen I have no idea what was their problem. In particular - Fight Club? Léon? V? The original Matrix? Kill Bill? In Bruges? What the heck critics? These are masterpieces of the modern cinema!

To summarize:

IMDB's unwashed masses and Rotten Tomatoes' distinguished critics mostly agree, and when they don't IMDB tends to be right, so keep using IMDB.

Plan 9 from Outer Forks

I love IMDB. For one, it might be one of the very few non-personalized recommendation systems that actually work. Scores on IMDB correlate very highly with likelihood of me enjoying a movie, especially if I apply a correction for genres that are overrated (like very old and very long movies) or underrated (like zombie flicks). In any case IMDB is vastly more accurate than professional critics' reviews.

The most drastic example of IMDB and pro critics disagreeing was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which I absolutely loved! It got an okish 6.5 score from IMDB - which is accurate enough, it's a really nice action-packed movie vaguely following Transformers canon, with as much concern for the plot as a typical action movie (that is not terribly much), and perhaps far higher aircraft carrier to robot ratio than you'd expect from the title.

It was also universally panned by the pro critics getting Rotten Tomatoes metascore of just 20%. Seriously, critics? Is it really one of the worst movies in existence? Have you expected anything else than robots meaninglessly fighting each other and destroying valuable stuff? It's almost as if critics panned Transformers 2 to signal their sophisticated taste, not to provide good service to the audience.

Anyway, back to my point. IMDB not only provides great recommendation service, they also make a lot of the underlying data available in convenient formats. Yes, they charge huge money for some of the data, but even the free portion is very useful.

Some voting patterns are very interesting. Here are two examples. First, one of the "so bad it's good" movies - Troll 2. Normal movies have sort-of Gaussian distribution of votes. OK, not really Gaussian but with a fairly definite single peak. Not so with the "so bad it's good" movies - these tend to have mostly 1s and 10s, with perhaps a few 2s and 3s, but amusingly very rarely many 9s and 8s - it's either very low, or a 10!



The second interesting bit is a demographically polarizing movie like Twilight. People of different ages and genders tend to like pretty much the same movies.

Top 100 for men, and Top 100 for women contain virtually the same movies, just slightly rearranged - neither stereotypically feminine chick flicks nor stereotypically masculine action flicks get into top lists, and movies rarely have very different male and female scores, or much different scores by age group. But exceptions do happen, here's one:



Under-18 men scored it almost 2 points lower than under-18 women! I have a perfectly good explanation for the Twilight ratings effect - normally movies are watched by people who like the genre, so only men who like chick flicks and only women who like action movies watch them. So there will
be very little discernible gender-genre bias. But with Twilight, millions of girlfriends worldwide must have forced their boyfriends to watch Twilight against their wills, to what the aforementioned boyfriends reacted in a passive-aggressive way by downvoting Twilight on IMDB. I don't have any way of
testing this theory, but I watched Twilight on my own free will, and liked it a lot.

Anyway, back to "so bad it's good" movies. I really like the genre, but it's difficult to tell the "so bad it's good" movies from straightforwardly bad movies. So like a good hacker I am, I decided to grab IMDB's database, and find out movies. Here's the list, criteria being - at least 10% of votes are 1s, at least 10% of votes are 10s, ordered by number of votes.

	Votes	10s %	1s %	IMDB score	Title
1	77257	12.6%	11.0%	6.2	The Blair Witch Project
2	69978	24.6%	12.7%	6.1	Twilight
3	68560	30.4%	10.5%	7.6	Fahrenheit 9/11
4	38459	20.0%	19.2%	5.5	Sex and the City
5	33628	15.0%	10.1%	6.0	Halloween
6	24265	31.7%	23.0%	5.1	High School Musical
7	24044	10.6%	10.3%	5.1	The Pink Panther
8	22873	14.9%	12.1%	5.6	House of 1000 Corpses
9	22324	18.6%	27.5%	3.9	Freddy Got Fingered
10	21704	15.3%	12.4%	5.0	White Chicks
11	19898	14.5%	10.7%	7.6	Midnight Express
12	19418	11.0%	26.0%	3.7	Norbit
13	19230	10.6%	43.9%	2.8	Crossroads
14	18410	11.6%	10.3%	6.3	Funny Games U.S.
15	17779	12.2%	10.0%	4.7	Queen of the Damned
16	17606	10.5%	27.9%	3.8	In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
17	17103	25.3%	10.4%	5.7	Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
18	16840	13.6%	54.9%	2.5	You Got Served
19	16743	14.7%	35.0%	2.8	Spice World
20	16706	10.5%	74.0%	1.6	From Justin to Kelly
21	16596	17.2%	10.8%	5.7	Southland Tales
22	16338	16.2%	31.9%	3.6	Plan 9 from Outer Space
23	16191	19.1%	11.8%	5.5	Step Up 2: The Streets
24	16179	15.1%	40.5%	3.8	Get Rich or Die Tryin'
25	15728	22.4%	44.0%	3.7	High School Musical 3: Senior Year
26	15417	12.5%	38.1%	3.4	Little Man
27	15177	15.0%	11.0%	5.6	Alvin and the Chipmunks
28	14938	13.5%	16.0%	3.7	Super Mario Bros.
29	14431	10.8%	14.6%	5.4	Star Wars: The Clone Wars
30	13960	11.0%	10.4%	4.9	DOA: Dead or Alive
31	13812	41.3%	10.2%	8.1	Ikiru
32	13643	23.6%	27.6%	4.5	High School Musical 2
33	13377	35.3%	61.5%	1.3	Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
34	12764	11.2%	43.2%	3.3	Dragonball Evolution
35	12625	10.5%	62.6%	2.0	Glitter
36	12596	18.3%	26.7%	4.2	Stomp the Yard
37	12560	17.8%	11.3%	6.1	Cannibal Holocaust
38	12554	11.6%	11.2%	4.8	Caligola
39	12382	13.8%	23.6%	3.8	D-War
40	12168	10.7%	12.7%	4.9	An American Haunting
41	12006	13.0%	11.9%	4.4	Stay Alive
42	11770	14.0%	18.4%	3.5	Grease 2
43	11740	20.3%	29.5%	4.1	Postal
44	11554	29.3%	10.4%	8.3	Le salaire de la peur
45	11383	14.9%	13.9%	4.6	Honey
46	11257	12.2%	10.4%	5.0	Just My Luck
47	11150	10.6%	24.7%	3.7	Prom Night
48	11054	11.4%	18.9%	4.5	The Marine
49	10942	11.0%	44.5%	2.4	Kazaam
50	10742	10.9%	77.7%	1.7	Who's Your Caddy?
51	10589	11.7%	16.7%	4.7	Meet Dave
52	10397	19.2%	11.9%	6.1	Sal? o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
53	10378	13.2%	16.6%	3.8	Bio-Dome
54	9774	12.4%	20.6%	4.0	Big Momma's House 2
55	9255	45.0%	10.2%	8.1	La passion de Jeanne d'Arc
56	9234	15.3%	10.9%	5.8	Georgia Rule
57	9145	11.1%	71.9%	1.9	Troll 2
58	9121	13.1%	11.0%	5.1	Strange Wilderness
59	9085	12.2%	16.9%	4.3	Black Christmas
60	8906	12.0%	13.0%	5.3	The Ten
61	8888	17.9%	15.8%	4.7	The Lizzie McGuire Movie
62	8840	12.0%	19.9%	3.3	Universal Soldier: The Return
63	8678	18.4%	45.3%	2.9	Material Girls
64	8654	18.5%	22.8%	3.8	Pok?mon: The First Movie
65	8486	21.4%	12.2%	5.8	Gummo
66	8419	10.1%	17.5%	3.8	On Deadly Ground
67	8378	13.3%	13.4%	5.7	Last Days
68	8210	12.7%	76.4%	1.4	SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
69	8179	20.1%	58.3%	2.9	Hannah Montana: The Movie
70	8103	12.0%	52.7%	3.1	Beverly Hills Chihuahua
71	8045	12.2%	29.0%	3.6	Soul Plane
72	8030	20.3%	13.6%	4.5	Aquamarine
73	8013	41.1%	11.9%	8.1	Idi i smotri
74	7898	14.6%	32.4%	2.7	Hercules in New York
75	7854	23.1%	11.6%	6.4	17 Again
76	7804	20.6%	19.5%	5.2	What the #$*! Do Wenow!?
77	7726	26.4%	10.9%	7.1	The Birth of a Nation
78	7714	13.8%	10.4%	5.0	Annapolis
79	7684	10.7%	23.7%	3.3	Problem Child 2
80	7643	25.6%	15.0%	5.1	Raise Your Voice
81	7605	12.6%	11.2%	5.0	Eight Crazy Nights
82	7588	25.4%	12.4%	8.1	Du rififi chez les hommes
83	7563	11.4%	51.8%	2.7	Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour
84	7499	12.6%	20.3%	4.0	Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
85	7417	14.1%	12.6%	6.2	Gerry
86	7237	12.7%	55.4%	2.7	Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
87	7169	11.7%	10.2%	4.4	Superstar
88	7095	31.4%	10.4%	4.9	Good Burger
89	7093	28.6%	11.3%	8.1	Z
90	7093	11.7%	75.1%	1.7	Crossover
91	7043	44.5%	10.2%	8.0	Les enfants du paradis
92	6930	23.9%	18.3%	3.9	Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
93	6925	23.2%	13.1%	5.8	Pink Flamingos
94	6915	45.5%	16.8%	5.8	Kurtlar vadisi - Irak
95	6766	13.5%	12.9%	4.4	Yours, Mine and Ours
96	6744	10.5%	10.5%	4.2	Cyborg
97	6714	12.9%	40.7%	3.1	Are We Done Yet?
98	6687	20.9%	57.1%	3.7	Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
99	6586	27.9%	11.6%	8.1	Tengoku to jigoku
100	6555	11.4%	36.8%	3.3	Zoom

Trivia from the list:

• Transformers 2 almost got to the list by having 9.9% 1 votes.
• The most controversial movie in every way is Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience with 35.3% 10s, 61.5% 1s, and only 3.2% everything else. It also has huge 5.0 to 1.3 under-18 gender gap, but as you can see even most teenage females aren't huge fans of it. It's also the worst scored movie on the list, with score of just 1.3, what suggests IMDB's filters think most of the 10s are attempt at ballot stuffing, and get thrown away.
• The highest rated controversial movie is Le salaire de la peur with IMDB score of 8.3 and somehow still more 1s (10.4%) than Transformers 2.
• The highest rated controversial movies that seem popular (by number of votes they received) are Fahrenheit 9/11, and Twilight, both of which I liked, and not because of the "so bad it's good effect", and The Blair Witch Project, which I hated with passion for being so unbelievably boring.
• The lowest scored movie from the list I watched was Troll 2 and I liked it because of the "so bad it's good" effect.
• Celebrity movies are huge on the list, like Crossroads, Glitter, Spice World, Hannah Montana: The Movie, and the aforementioned Jonas Brothers' movie. The only one I watched of them was Crossroads, and I genuinely enjoyed it, in semi-ironic way.

Code Geass sucks. Most of anime sucks.

I've seen the first few episodes of Code Geass on Baka Y2K6 and I loved it. There was a dystopian world with a pretty facade, and a guy who somehow acquired special powers and decided to use them to completely rebuild everything. It felt just like Death Note except with mecha.

Unfortunately instead of a morally provocative anime with an interesting plot, Code Geass quickly turned into just another awfully boring mecha anime with every single character being a walking cliché, and the plot consisting mostly of filler material and randomly generated events. Things happen not because of some world logic or actions of characters, but because the whole thing would collapse under its own lameness otherwise. Having run out of plot ideas the authors should at least have the decency to finish the series, but no - apparently the second season is already scheduled.

What's happening with anime anyway ? Other than Death Note I haven't seen anything interesting lately. There's a lot of generic "cute" and "funny" stuff like REC and School Rumble, but almost no series is trying to do anything original. And the competition in form of live action series is far better than in the 1990s - almost each new series manages to create a new genre or radically redefine an existing one, just like Heroes did with the superheroes genre.

Anime needs to change fast or it will become irrelevant outside of Japan and a narrow Western otaku circles.

Movie reviews

Movies I watched recently, more or less in order of enjoyability, all from IMDB Top 100:

• Blade Runner (1982, 8.3, #99) - This movie is absolutely great. In fact much better than the book. Unfortunetaly there is no way I can tell you what's so great about it without spoiling - just be sure to watch the director's cut (hint hint).
• Singin’ in the Rain (1952, 8.4, #68) - Normally I have low tolerance for musicals, but this one is wonderful. The characters of Don Lockwood, Lina Lamont, and Kathy Selden are just great compared to what is typically being served in the romance/commedy kind of movies. If you want to see just one musical in your life - check out this one.
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, 8.5, #41) - A movie that at the same times exists in a highly unreal world filled with magic, and does serious social commentary on the 1930s' American South. Like Dogville, except for being much less dark.
  
• The Maltese Falcon (1941, 8.4, #57) - Noir classic. Multilayer conspiracies, murders, ruthlessness, big money, and evil women all over the place.
  
• The Sting (1973, 8.3, #81) - a classic of the "con artist" genre that we all love so much. As usual, there are conspiracies within conspiracies, and nothing is quite the way it seems. Definitely a fun watch.
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, 8.5, #52) - A bunch of guys go search for gold in the Sierra Madre. But sitting on bags of gold worth more than they ever earned in their lives can easily lead to paranoia ...
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, 8.3, #87) - yay, a very early movie about corruption in national politics. Some naive guy gets to become a replacement senator, when the regular one dies during the term. Then when he tries to actually be a senator and not just a puppet, he gets confronted with the power of some rich guy who controls all politicians in the whole state. Pretty funny.
• On the Waterfront (1954, 8.3, #84) - the workers and a priest struggle against exploitation by mob-controlled labour unions. Mildly noir, somewhat enjoyable. Oh yeah, and the director was an asshole.
• Modern Times (1936, 8.5, #66) - some Charlie Chaplin stuff. Watchable, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The Great Dictator was somehow more enjoyable.
  

And in category anime:

• School Rumble - Hypergenki high school commedy. Harima loves Tenma, Tenma loves Karasuma (the whole network of unreturned love interests is getting even more complex later), everybody is totally weird and doing absurd things all the time. Plenty of fun to watch.
  
• High School Girls - Ecchi high school commedy. It proves that there is such things as too many panty-shots. Totally awesome.
  
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha - Totally ubercute (and they did actually say "mahou shoujo" in the title, congratulations). One feels there wasn't enough plot for the whole season, and the characters are rather bland (except for Fate, who is actually great), and ubercuteness may not be enough to save the series.
  

More movies

Some recently watched movies, in approximate order of coolness:

• All about Eve - A great movie about how evil can people be in their quest for fame and greatness. There are well developed characters, great acting, and even an actual plot.
  
• Hotel Rwanda - A genocide story. It's much more realistic and interesting than all the lame Holocaust movies. The characters actually feel real, completely unlike Schindler's List cardboard.
  
• Chinatown - A film noir classic. It is evil, it is sick, it has complex plot, and it is fun.
  
• Touch of evil - Another film noir classic. A little less twisted than Chinatown, but with more cool camera effects. Like the must-see opening scene.
  
• The Great Dictator - I thought Charlie Chaplin movie would be idiotic commedy about slipping on banana peels and stuff like that. Surprisingly it wasn't. The movie tries to be serious and funny at the same time, and it kinda works.
• Rebecca - I kinda liked it, but it was so slow. And the characters somehow didn't seem very believable.
  
• 2001 A Space Oddyssey - A "hard science fiction" classic that is lamer than Star Trek: The Original Series as far as realism is concerned. Were people back then so scared of the computers or what ? And the monkey scenes are not even silly, they are plain dumb.
• The wizard of Oz - Now who the heck voted that to IMDB top list ? The movie throws away all social commentary from the original book, and replaces it with a children story. So lame.
  

Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid

Some more recently watched stuff - Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid is more like the original series, and not like Fumoffu. It is sometimes a bit darker than the original and I'd rather they didn't add those parts to an inherently cheerful series like FMP.

This is quite funny - in Full Metal Panic the best part I like most is the filler and the main plot is passable, but not all that great. My favourite series is Fumoffu and it consists of 100% filler and pretty much no plot.

Oh well, there is enough filler in TSR too, so it isn't that bad :-)

Evangelion rip-off

This is not an Evangelion



This is not an angel

I'm just watching a really fun anime - Soukyuu no Fafner: Dead Aggressor.

The anime itself is kinda cool, but one thing that is really striking is how much they ripped off Neon Genesis Evangelion.

So we have:

• Evangelions (or Evangelion-looking huge robots)
• and their teenage pilots
• angels (or angel-looking huge angels)
• NERV (or NERV-looking huge secret organization fighting angel-looking huge angels using Evangelion-looking huge robots piloted by teenagers)
• one of the teenagers who pilot the robots is son of the boss
  
• cabalistic symbolics
• traditional military trying to fight the angels and getting their ass kicked even though they knew perfectly there's no point is using traditional military for that purpose
• even those weird insect sounds in the background
• probably a lot more stuff like that
  

So far there haven't been any pet penguins, but the series is just taking off ;-)

Don't get me wrong - it's a cool anime, and not everything in it is Evangelion rip-off ;-)

Flame hair and red-hot eyes

Some recently watched stuff:

• Shakugan no Shana - cute red-haired girls with swords. Is it not a reason enough to watch the series ? Oh well, I guess I may have a bit of a cute-red-haired-girls-with-swords thing. And the main character dies in the first episode, because a series with an alive main character would be so 1990s.
  
• Stellvia of the Universe - a bunch of high schoolers piloting mecha to save the world. In the mean time, hacking into space station's servers, trying to erase the logs, and having this kind of fun. One of the funnier things - they tried to get the physics right, now the one trying to destroy the Earth is a supernova explosion, instead of the typical stuff like aliens, demons and vast right-wing conspiracies.
  
• Plone Propaganda - because not only Ruby-on-Railers can bash Java. 35 minutes of real fine J2EE bashing for download. Or you can watch the Rails propaganda instead.
  

Some older movies reviewed: here (Full Metal Panic Fumoffu...), here (Ed Wood...) and here (Bowling for Columbine...).

The will to fight God.

I've watched so much cool stuff in the last few days.
So let's start, in rough order of coolness.

• Full Metal Panic Fumoffu (2003). Take Full Metal Panic, get rid of the plot, and replace it with overdone commedy. Plenty of stuff like battle teddy bears helping one yakuza gang beat another, weapons of mass destruction in a Japanese high school, and full scale battles to get a peek at girls at onsen. I think it's much better than the original series.
  
• Amadeus (1984, #79 on imdb top list, 8 Oscars). Don't get fooled by the title, it is not a Mozart's biography ;-). Well, at least not any more than Ed Wood is a biography of Ed Wood. Actually I've seen the movie just after Ed Wood, and the similarities between Mozart and Ed were truly astounding. Anyway, the movie is about a Salieri, who at the same time is Mozart's greatest admirer and one that wants to murder him. Really awesome character development (F. Murray Abraham got a Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar for the role of Salieri). Movies like that are one of the reasons why you should follow the imdb top list's advice.
  
• Scrapped Princess (2003). I am the last dragon, who was hidden in a fold of space to aid you...when you gained the will to fight God. Really cool anime series about a girl that is destined to destroy the world. Loads of swordfights and explosions, cute girls with magical powers, stuff like that. And the plot is really cool. I haven't finished it yet, so I don't know how high should it be an the coolness scale.

Ed or Wood

In the last few days, I've seen a few IMDB top 100 movies.

In order of coolness:

• Ed Wood (1994, actually #188 on the list, not in top 100). A must-see for all the fans of Ed Wood (of Plan 9 from Outer Space fame). A totally over the top commedy about one of our favourite movie directors. Sorta beating a dead horse feeling with regards to how the movie treats Ed Wood, but hey - he directed Plan 9, so who else deserves it more ?
  
• Apocalypse Now (1970, #38). Based on Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, but taking place in Vietnam and much more psychodelic. All the brutality and absurdities of the Vietnam war, an interesting story and well developed characters. Definitely a must-see, unfortunately it's hard to tell much meaningful stuff about this kind of movies, they're just too weird.
  
• Goodfellas (1990, #23). This one was kinda cool. It was based on facts, so they couldn't add too many over the top scenes of the kind that one sees in most of the mafia movies (especially in the Tarantino stuff), but it was still pretty extreme at times. This mixture of realism, and occasional overplaying made it one of the best mafia movies I've seen. The characters actually have some personality, not like everyone being "just another gangsta" like in many other movies. Oh, and the action is pretty cool. Definitely a nice movie to see.
  
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962, #28). A long (over 200 minutes) movie about the war. The plot is ok and the main character is interesting, unfortunately the movie is excessively long for no good reason. Oh, and the secondary characters are rather boring. I say it's overrated.
  
• Schindler's List (1993, #6). Did it really have to be 195 minutes long? Most of the time it was "just another Holocaust movie", y'know the one where there are evil Nazis doing all kinds of bad stuff to the innocent Jews, with little attempt of character development or social analysis of the war or such kind of the things. The idea is to completely dehumanize the Germans, because if they've shown otherwise "normal" guys taking part in the genocide, it could make some of the Americans uneasy about My Lai or Abu Ghraib or whoever the American Army have been murdering recently, and that would be bad for ticket sales. Oh, and they simply had to put the few completely unnecessary scenes to make it look like the Polish were ok with the killing. Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth are the only characters in the movie with any kind of character development, and they're both rather flat. I have no idea how did it get 8.8 on IMDB, I wouldn't rate it any higher than 7.0.
  

A very secret quest

Do you know about this very secret quest in live, when after you watch the last movie from the IMDB best 100 movies (or the IMDB worst 100 movies, but I'll try the former quest) you get an instant level-up ? ^_^

Well, but more about it some other day. I've just seen a movie that isn't on either of these lists and I think it's the best movie I've seen since, like, TNG 4x25 (don't ask, you're either getting it already or you just won't get it ^_^). The movie is Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and it's at the same time absolutely hillarious (I almost fell down of my chair during the bank scene, just 2 minutes into the movie) and quite insightful. Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn't bad, but it doesn't even come close to the Bowling.

Now I can't tell you much about the movie without spoiling too much. But here's one that I just couldn't skip. The dog you're seeing here, some redneck hunters dressed it in a hunter wear and gave it a loaded gun. Then the dog used the gun to kill one of the rednecks. I'm sure the dog knew what it was doing. Like, a great service to the mankind, by getting some of the dumb genes out of the gene pool. Dog, the humanity thanks you. ^_^