This was so surprisingly good. The Splinter flashback scenes and the puppetry in general are fantastic.
Sam Rockwell!
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – ★★★★
Theater Camp – ★★★★
The last production pulled this from a 3 to 4 for me. Overall pretty funny and some good songs. Molly Gordon is great. Not sure my theater kid is old enough to get most of the humor but we will see.
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Braves clinch 6th straight NL East title
Braves beat the Phillies to clinch their sixth straight National League East title.
Texas knocks off Alabama in Tuscaloosa!!
Been a looooooong time Texas played a complete game like this against anybody, let a lone on the road against a top 3 team.
The one white guy in K-dramas
You think I can get a role as the one white guy in a K-Drama? I have no acting ability, but based on being in the room while my wife has watched 900 different series that does not appear to be a requirement for the job.
Bloodsport – ★½
The first 10-15 minutes of this may be some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen and they somehow don’t bother to start bloodsporting until like 40 minutes in to a 90 minute movie.
The bit at the end where they claim Frank Dux did all these amazing things just screamed “lol, sure you did dude.” Went to Wikipedia and yep, shady as heck and likely mostly all made up including any military history.
Rating: 1.5 stars
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Little Shop of Horrors – ★★½
I don’t know how old I was when I first saw this (or more accurately small parts of it) as a kid but to this day I remembered being totally terrified of Audrey II. Turns out still totally creeped out by it.
Finally decided to actually sit and watch it on Max after watching the really great Howard Ashman doc on Disney+. Music is great and so is Rick Moranis but man it is just so, so weird.
I don’t know what to call the style of humor from late 70s to 80s but “whatever fully weird Steve Martin thinks is funny” I just don’t personally find funny at all. (I like a lot of Steve Martin movies from this era just not when he goes full Steve Martin.)
Had hoped my musical loving kid would be into this but she’ll definitely think it’s too scary and “old”. Oh well. Glad I finally caught up with it.
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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – ★★★★
Took the kids to watch this in the theater today as part of Studio Ghibli Fest. First time for me to ever see a Miyazaki movie on the big screen.
This was one of my least favorites when I originally was running through my Miyazaki blind spots back in 2020, but giving it my full attention now I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I was pleasantly surprised how much both my girls liked it considering how “old” it is and how relatively few laughs there are. They were probably the only 2 people under 30 in the theater today.
Nausicaä is such a fantastic character as are all the other valley residents, but boy do I hate every single Tolmekian and Pejite moron. And they remain pretty much completely irredeemable for the entire movie. (I know we’re supposed to dislike them but still.)
It is bit depressing how little progress we’ve made as a society in 40 years towards the Nausicaä’s basic themes of environmentalism, empathy, and pacifism.
It’s early so not quite as breathtakingly beautiful as some of the films that followed it, but it sure is imaginative and interesting to look at. It is also remarkable how much imagery from this have influenced (or share influences with) current Japanese video games including Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. TotK’s “depths” areas seem like a mix of Nausicaa’s forest and the gloom from Mononoke.
Buying tickets now to go see Mononoke in a month.
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? Buy Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-ray
I wish I had 1/100th of the creativity & imagination of the artists behind the visuals of Across the Spider-Verse. ?
MLB to produce, distribute Padres games starting today
The shoe (guillotine?) has finally dropped on the exceedingly unstable relationship between the bankrupt Bally’s Sports/Sinclair Broadcast Group and Major League Baseball: MLB to produce, distribute Padres games starting today
As an MLB.tv subscriber and Braves fan, this whole Bally-hoo has of course had me generally interested in what will happen with all this. Pleasantly surprised (and interested in the legal/contractural details) that MLB was able to keep the Padres’ announcing crew for the new broadcasts. (via Six Colors)