Dragon Ball Z Uncensored

[Mike Dunn]

Mike Dunn

[Mike Dunn]

This is my journal thread, and also the thread where I will write reviews of things.

[Magic Juan]

There is no God.

[Servbot]

Sonic Youth is/was a pretty horrible band.

[Mike Dunn]

I like them, but I know where you're coming from. I like really noisy, abrasive music though, so they're right up my alley.

[Servbot]

We should become friends. If you like Sonic Youth you should check out Symphony X, or Blind Guardian. Both are equally awesome.

[Magic Juan]

Those bands are completely different from Sonic Youth.

Anyways, the only good thing Symphony X has ever done is their ODYSSEY epic.

[Magic Juan]

Also, did somebody say music?

[Servbot]

That was the joke, Magic Juan.

[Magic Juan]

Since we are all such devout fans of DRAGONFORCE, there was little context there to make me think that you might be kidding and trolling.

[Mike Dunn]

God, I'm tired of metalheads trying to push this Blind Guardian shit on me. That shit is gay.

[Servbot]

Wow everyone here likes DRAGONFORCE? This truly is the mecca of all things awesome.

[Mike Dunn]

Ok, first of all, I don't know why they translated the title of this movie as "Pan's Labyrinth" when it is clearly "The Faun's Labyrinth", but whatever. In the weeks leading up to my seeing this movie, I saw it move up into the 80s of the imdb top 100, get added to several of my friends' "Favorite Movies" on facebook, and read dozens of dick-beating reviews which garnered it a 96% on rottentomatoes. I can't remember the last time I saw that much hype for a movie (probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy), so naturally my expectations were hell of high.

Jim Emerson, the retarded faggot douche who writes reviews for The Chicago Sun-Times while Ebert's cancer destroys his trademark piggyness, and who actually put "The Road Warrior" into his list of essential movies for film literacy, wrote about Pan's Labyrinth:

"Whole worlds open before our eyes and then fold back upon themselves; dimensions of time and space are creased into shape as if the movie was an elaborate origami creation."

Emerson, like many other critics, wrote about Pan's Labyrinth as if its special effects and fantasy sequences were like nothing any human being has ever seen before, like the fantasy genre, nay, the film medium, had been completely reinvented with Pan's Labyrinth. But you know what? In the entire movie, not once did a whole world open before my eyes. Once, a whole room opened up, and another time the whole inside of a tree opened up. The part with the baby-eating monster with eyes in his hands was admittedly pretty awesome, but entirely too short. As a fantasy movie, "Pan's Labyrinth" disappointed me in the same way Silent Hill did: The events unfold in a limited, cookie cutter fashion, and any sequence which begins to interest me ends much too abruptly. I'm pretty sure that the eye-hand baby-eater had even less screen time than Pyramid Head, and I didn't even like him as much as Pyramid Head.

Luckily, unlike in Silent Hill where the underwhelming monster sequences were interrupted by an even more underwhelming real world plot, the non-fantasy storyline of Pan's Labyrinth is gripping and totally rad. I was so interested in the RAGTAG BUNCH of guerillas fighting the heartless yet badass fascist soldiers that it made the story of Ofelia and the faun seem like a nuisance. How can she even compete with a fascist captain who does anime-esque shit like cave someone's face in with a bottle just for back-talking him, or sewing his own cheek up after being fishhooked?

I understand what Guillermo Del Toro was going for in making this movie. There are overarching themes in both Ofelia and the guerillas' storylines of disobedience, choices, and guilt and innocence, and these themes wouldn't be conveyed as well if he hadn't decided to mix genres (film professors love this kind of analysis, [gay!]). However, his execution was a little off, and what we are left with is a great war movie and a ho-hum fantasy movie, combined to make a somewhat muddy allegory.

My rating: B+

[Vinny]

The Road Warrior is awesome!

[Mike Dunn]

Yeah, but it's no Citizen Kane. This is what he said about his list:

"...they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate."

It's pretty outrageous to claim that if you haven't seen a movie about dudes wearing loin cloths driving trucks and beating the shit out of each other then you can't have an informed discussion about movies.

[Vinny]

It inspired Fist of the North Star, so it's obviously pretty important.

[Theldorrin]

Dragonforce is terrible, that's why people here like it. Because they have bad taste.

[Mike Dunn]

I was always under the impression that, aside from Spamdini, everyone here liked Dragonforce in a purely ironic way.

[Theldorrin]

"Whole worlds open before our eyes and then fold back upon themselves; dimensions of time and space are creased into shape as if the movie was an elaborate origami creation."

That is such terrible writing. It is a sentence entirely devoid of meaning.

[Stupid Fucking Faggot]

The Road Warrior was hugely influential in ways that LITTLE BABIES don't seem to understand.

It basically created the post-apocalypse genre.