Why, hello, may I introduce you to “Na půdě aneb Kdo má dneska narozeniny?” aka “Toys In The Attic”, by Jiří Barta, legendary Czech director who made some of the weirdest and darkest stop-motion movies not made by anyone called Svankmajer or Quay? It is even on YouTube!

You know, thinking of “Avatar” as a really, really expensive and uncharacteristically un-wonky Luc-Besson-movie is a framing I kind really get behind.

As a lot of people have already mentioned, dumping on Avatar has become a sport of kinds. Which is why I actually liked reading this column — and I have come to trust Tom’s evaluations enough to think that maybe I should give it another go some time, when the movie is not carrying the burden of being “the most…

Hence, the Italian coffee maker mentioned in my other post. The frying pan would leave you terribly vunerable in real life. Whereas something about that unscrewing of the parts of the Italien coffee maker (prayer wheel-ish in its nature), or the bubbling sound the water makes as it rises, is so terribly soothing, even…

Oh, hi! Took me a while to remember what context my own post was made in. (Turns out I don’t remember random comments I have posted 7 years ago.) All the more happy to get your reply. Thanks for the information! The thing about feeling like loved ones are imposters will give me a whole new dimension of things to worry…

I feel you. I got by, but only so. And I was constantly surprised to see how the game managed to give me cold chills down my back all the way through, right to the end, even though it only has, like, 4 different kinds of encounters.

Let me be frank: I can’t be objective. I mean, its both literally and figuratively very close to how and where I grew up. (Basically, replace the goats with cows, the hayloader with a Steyr-Puch Haflinger and the coffee powder poured directly into boiling water with an italian coffee maker — we were rustic, but not…

Yeah, the birth of Sandman is what stroke me as the best moment in the movie even back when I was watching it in the cinema, and I still remember it fondly. Rewachting the embedded clip, I have to say that it has aged really well — probably one of my all-time favourite scenes in any superhero movie. It just makes one…

Which is frankly wild. I mean, he’s walking down a street in what seems to be supermodel town, and each and every woman looking at him does so cringing very hard at the minimum, looking at him in obvious disgust in some cases. How somebody could have read that scene any differently is bewildering.
(Or not — as…

I know where you are coming from!

Honestly, there are instances were not being rejected feels weirder. I remember being very irritated by the fact that in Persona 4, it was downright expected that you’d declare your undying love (or whatever intensity the teenagers in the game muster) to one romantic partner and then skip to the next without the…

I’d say that Deep Silver / Saint’s Row IV gives Bioware a run for their money. I mean, there’s literally nothing like being rejected by Keith David. It left me with conflicting feelings: On one hand, in a game that gleefully skips to the end with every romance, having one crew member who doesn’t want to hear about it…

While it was a TV movie and not a series, I can’t help mentioning the crossover the different Turtles iterations had with themselves in Turtles Forever — something that sits somewhere between Inception and incest, I guess, and is equal parts fascinating and alienating.

It was a weird year, game-wise. The trend of “playing not as much as I used to” continued and I really felt out of the loop. At the same time, the 2020 releases that I actually did play made it onto some lists:

Funny. The only film of them that I saw was Resolution. I liked it when I saw it at a festival, so much so that I read reviews about their later movies, noted their names in my “Watchlist”, but never got around to watching them. And still, when reading the somewhat vague title, I immediately knew that it was Benson…

OMG, I had totally forgotten about The Other Site. Thanks for the reminder! I just checked it out and... it’s alive! And kicking! I’ll gladly visit more often. (Even though I still like the weekly posts here.)

Thanks for the review — I’ll certainly add the book to my ever expanding reading list. It has a fair chance to not stay there too long, though. In fact, I’m currently reading Gilead, taking a lot of time doing so, because it’s just so wonderful and dense.

Hey, what are you doing in the Grays? Didn’t you use to be a regular commenter here? Anyway, thanks for the encouragement -- I think I don’t have to buy a new game again until... 2022 or so.

That’s interesting. Rogue Legacy was a rogue-like I didn’t spend too much time with (relatively speaking -- I probably still logged a good dozen hours or so). Because I had the impression that even the original game got more repetitive than a good rogue-like should, once you hit a skill-treshold that made progress…

That’s a good way of describing it. Though there’s a place for that kind of game, too, I think.