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RULES (updated 01/22/25)
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I've got a small group of friends and we've watched every single Steven Seagal film. You might think it sounds fun. "So-bad-it's-good!". Well, there's a limit. Some films are truly truly awful to watch. Sometimes they genuinely leave us all in a slump. We had to make a rule that we never watch 2 Seagal films in one day because it's too much for our mental health. My partner doesn't understand why we do it. I don't understand why we do it.
We're currently watching them all again
I actually liked Exit Wounds tbh
No idea what's wrong with me. But tbh I like DMX and Anthony Anderson so that might have been a contributing factor.
I write a few notes at the end of each film. It helps when we're trying to remember e.g. "which film had the giant fish tank with naked women in a restaurant?"
Anyway, Exit Wounds:
This is the start of Seagal being black. Good tiddy bar scene.
Lots of decent scenes involving people who aren't Seagal. Story was almost decent with a twist with DMX being a good guy
Seagal blows up a helicopter by shooting it with a pistol.
Great credit scene: “I love big women. If you want to feel the heat, you gotta have the meat”
It looks like my opinion of it is vindicated!
What's been the least horrible Steven Seagal movie for you?
Bonus fun fact: in Estonia we sometimes call him Steven Seakael which means Steven Pigneck. Besides an obvious play on the name, it's also because he's a bit on the heavier side for a martial artist so he's got a bit of a thick neck
I see the Seakael.
Obviously Under Siege and Executive Decision are both legitimately good films so I don't think they count. There are some films which can be enjoyable and have their charm, I'd include Out For Justice, Fire Down Below, Exit Wounds and Half Past Dead in this category. If you want to watch a bad film and laugh, my go-to is General Commander.
Love the bonus fact! I'm definitely bringing this up at our next Seagalathon
Suckers for punishment, huh? I... cannot say I relate. At least to that level of self-harm.
Many amine endings are like that for me. I'm hooked with fun action, adorable creatures, and badass robots, and then it just derails into endless monologuing.
But watching something when I'm not into it? Sometimes, just so I know what happened in the end. If I like some element of it enough, like the setting or one of the actors. Other times, a wiki plot synopsis will be enough to sate the curiosity. I'm getting better about not forcing myself to finish something I'm just not into.
The funny thing is, the monologuing is what I enjoyed. The fun action, adorable creatures and badass robots are what put me off about most anime and why I haven't seen much of it. I get very easily overstimulated by a lot of stuff happening on screen and anime often manages to trigger that stupidly easily in me. Death Note got around that by it just being a battle of wits so everything was slower and the only hyper-active moments I can really remember was the "I take a chip and I eat it" scene.
One Punch Man does the monologuing well and the fights are mostly over before they begin because the entire schtick is the guy beats things in one hit. The B story is what will grab you: the introspective exploration of what it means to be a hero and how to help people who may not understand you, will not support you, but who need you nonetheless.
The entire first season is some of the slickest satire of anime ever and if you don't have a big attachment to other anime titles then you may enjoy it more than traditional anime fans. It pokes a lot of tropes directly and is built around subverting the "hierarchy of power" that is pervasive through anime as a genre.
The isekai anime Overlord does something similar but lingers on the fights. The premise is a guy gets stuck in a fantasy world that he thought was a video game - one in which he hit max level and nothing is a challenge. He is now the most powerful individual in a world and all he wants are friends. But he is so powerful that he is left with the assistant NPCs who are one dimensional and no friends. He is desperate to find his old MMO friends and starts to conquer his local area as a way to advertise his presence to the guild members who would know him. It's a good time but relies a lot on genre tropes, sometimes subverting them but usually leaning into them.
So One Punch Man has been suggested to me before. What you said about the B Story is partially why I'm not interested in it.
I've become real fuckin' jaded. I am so tired of heroes. I grew up on Bond who is hella flawed and has serious problems but then its just like everything got saturated with that. When I was watching Death Note I was enjoying it because the main character was the bad guy for once. Not to mention the point at which I quit meant that the bad guy won. I'm tired of heroes and of the conflict within and having to cope with that. Also I'm a Superman stan and that's the majority of his shtick when you analyze it so I'm familiar with it as a story.
Overlord I've heard mentioned a lot and might sell me because he's not necessarily a good guy. He's just a dude.
Yeah, you will like Overlord.
Not anime but def check out M. Night Shyamalan's Trap. It is such a breath of fresh air!
I find if it's a good story i don't careless what medium its in. I don't watch things because they are anime but i also don't watch thing because they are not anime. The story is the most important.
Same. I never watched anime until I found out about Steins;Gate and DeathNote.
Steins;Gate is because of time travel, and I kinda have an obsession with the idea of time travel.
DeathNote, well, a murder notebook, already hooked.
Its not the medium, its the story.
I used to like anime, and I'm a reformed weeb. But what was true for me 20 years ago still holds true for me now: I generally don't enjoy the mainstream most popular ones. Not because I'm a contrarian, but mostly for the same reasons I generally don't like pop music: What makes something have mass appeal tend to not be things I enjoy.
I did enjoy Death Note for a little while, but the concept didn't stay interesting very long;
Demon: Haha
Protagonist: I'm not the villain
Weirdo: I think you're the villain
Protagonist: I'm not though
Goto start
I liked it up until L dies but from then on it just doesn't make any sense at all and is so contrived. I mean not like the 'plans' that Light was coming up with were anything short of fuckin insane.
I saw Perfect Blue on top anime lists over and over again for literal years. The synopsis had no appeal to me at all, as I am not really into jpop or celeb culture or anything like that. I knew it existed, but assumed it wouldn't be for me.
Earlier this year I just decided to dive in on it. I didn't quite understand everything about the culture presented, but I still found myself engrossed, loving the story and basking in the visuals. Then the final act sealed it as one of my favorite animes, too. Wild ride of a film.
Edit- I agree with you regarding ending death note "where it should have ended", after that moment just feels like half assed trying to recreate the magic between Light and L.
Paprika was made by the same guy (Satoshi Kon) and is a whole lot trippier.
Ah we wanted to watch that too, but couldn't find a eng dubbed version anywhere! I know, I know - absolute heresy - but dubbed is the only way I can convince my partner to watch foreign lang films with me haha.
If I ever find one though definitely plan to give it a go.
I've seen both. Paprika was cool but I definitely preferred perfect blue. Paprika being more trippy than perfect blue was its weak point, IMO. It was a lot harder to follow the story and feel an emotional impact from Paprika because they leaned too hard into it being trippy. Perfect blue had a good balance of story and trippiness.
I will consider it. Death Note snuck by me largely for reasons unknown but I can nail down a couple. One is that it was very head-y with not much in the run of visual action. One of the things that puts me off about Anime is that it can be extremely flashy. Not a complaint, again, just a thing that personally puts me off. Like a lot of stuff happening a lot on screen is visually overwhelming for me. Battle sequences in space in like Trek or Star Wars also I struggle to get through. Sometimes they're some of my favorite things but I have to push through it because I get overstimulated really easily. Death Note just... wasn't that. Barely any visual action and it was primarily a battle of wits.
Yeah... I quit after Watari sends a signal to an orphanage. At that point I just went "Well the rest of this is idiotic. This seems like a great point to stop."
Go watch OddTaxi. Masterpiece of the 2020s era IMO.
It's about a murder. The Taxi Driver (main character) has all the knowledge because he remembers all of his customers. And a set of his customers is related to the murder.
The episodes are formulaic:
New customer gets picked up
Minutes of talking in the Taxi.
A side note from another characters perspective (nurse, Pop Idols, comedians on the radio, etc. etc). Kinda random, but it's surprisingly helpful context for the murder mystery.
You'll find that the Seinen genre is low key and more emotionally mature. Sienen are made for adults after all. Death Note is still a Shonen at the end of the day (Teenager Anime)
I cannot stand anthropormophized characters. I don't know what it is and well aware that it's a personal thing but it drives me absolutely insane. That also feels way too... cutesy. Death Note I liked because it's dark. Whether its for teenagers doesn't matter so much to me as the tone of it. All the shows that I watch are usually pretty darker in tone, mysterious as hell, and with a plot that you've gotta figure out. Stuff like Severance, Westworld, Hannibal, The Expanse, even How to Get Away with Murder. Character driven stories that have a mystery with wits being involved more than strength but that also are dark. Death Note surprised me because it managed to hit every single one of those things but with the added benefit of something I'm always looking for but can rarely find. The main character being the bad guy. I am so overwhelmingly bored of the good guy winning, especially when it doesn't reflect reality. I like stuff that subverts expectations to an extent and the expectation for me is good always triumps over evil.
If you want a more standard grimdark about bad guy main character pillaging and conquering with his army of Demons, I guess Overlord is for you.
I found OddTaxi to be far more emotionally mature than Overlord though. But Overlord hits at the more immediately obvious bad guy wins tropes.
I don't consider Overlord to be of masterpiece quality. But it does scratch the itch
I still say OddTaxi is worth it. It's probably darker than you think it is. I'd argue that most of the characters in OddTaxi were smarter and better written than Death Note even (the intelligence level of Death Note was basically 'I know something you don't know'. Meanwhile in OddTaxi, the flaws of each perspective makes far more sense and nuance)
Overlord purposely flips the script. Every new arch a new set of heroes is introduced and then BRUTALLY MURDERED by the demons / in the glory of Ains Opal Gown. You watch the steady progress as this group of villains takes over the new world under the name of the God of Death, Overlord of Undeath.
The joy of Overlord for me is how hard the author reverse engineers villainous monologues or other stereotypical effects. Ains places gold at the top of his base to test the greed of the heroes. They took the money yet continue to explore, clearly they're greedy pigs and liars who must be destroyed. If they were only invading his home dungeon for the money, they should have been satisfied with the riches on the first floor yet they explore deeper. They must be punished.
Sounds like you're specifically describing battle shounen. Keep in mind that anime isn't a genre, it's a medium, and there's such a wide variety of all kinds of shows and movies that happen to be animated.
The pacing of anime is often excruciating, dialogue awkward, and expressions annoying. I particularly hate how often they ooohhh? Huhhh? Vocally how no real people do.
Just doesn't work for me most of the time, even if the concepts are interesting.
I'm pretty sure there's an anime out there that you'd enjoy, if only because the genre is so wide and deep.
That being said: my anime 'why did I finish this??' is Aldnoah Zero, as well as A Certain Scientific Railgun. Kinda bad in the great scheme of things but I kept going for some reason.
I think Aldnoah Zeros physics-accurate fighting got me to enjoy the fights even if the story was utterly trash. It's like seeing a spec of gold in a pile of shit.
Ex: I forgot why they were fighting the lightning mech. But the main character tethers himself to the lightning mech then hovers. As long as he's at the same electric potential as the mech, it's impossible for the lightning to hit him (and as long as he's not touching the ground or other large sources of electron storage, he's insulated from the effects).
Did it matter much? No. This was like a 2 minute fight and the story otherwise sucked. But some anime director put a LOT of thought into the physics of this anime. And I was here to enjoy the 2 minutes of that per episode lol.
As a Trekkie I do appreciate when they go hard on the small details like that. This is a book series but Lightbringer by Brent Weeks for that insane magic system also gets my love for the same reasons.
To be fair, there's so much Garbage anime.
Gotta fill the seasonal line up timeslots somehow.
Overlord, Re-Zero and Frieren are some more recent series that make me have feels. If I laugh or cry, it is a nice change from my normal melancholy/numbness.
Meaningful character development and all that.
To Your Eternity, made me bawl my soul out, great show to help process complicated grief.
Mothers' Basement does good reviews.
I watched a YouTube video of a 75 year old guy who does minimal workouts. No idea why I clicked on it at first as I'm somewhat fit as it is and I don't work out or really care about that stuff, but now I'm doing those workouts too lol
What channel pls?
I'll see if I can find it, but I'm on mobile and watched it on my PC. It was literally some "old YouTube" type thing where it was just an old dude sharing some information. Not too many videos and not trying to sell anything.
Edit: that was fast, thankfully he has an easy name to remember lol
Thanks for looking this up. I watched it. The dude is in better shape than I will ever be, but it's a good goal for me to focus on in my 40s. Hopefully he will post more. Compound exercises are the way to go. I liked his diss to Altheon-X and all his bicep videos. 😂
I'm not terribly into anime but my friend got me to watch Cromartie High School and I couldn't stop laughing. Do suggest smoking a bit of the funny herb first, it'll be even better.
I wish I could've gone to high school as Freddie Mercury on a white horse.
Tbh, i didn't think Death Note was that good. I watched it because it's a classic.
It was fun at first but then got old after a while. By the end i was well-and-truly annoyed. lol
Honestly, I don't know why light didn't just order the government to capture L and keep killing world leaders until L was found and killed. He had no trouble killing law enforcement and in the Manga he even
spoiler
Killed the president of the US
Seems like the story was written for the sake of a story.
I like anime (cartoons in general) because I find it lends itself to the fantastical better than live action. To me, it feels way more immersive than CG, which gives uncanny valley vibes. Like Iron Man was one of the better MCU movies but the suit just wouldn't work, the inside the helmet shots with the hud reflection - absolute bullshit. Similar things in Ghost in the Shell S.A.C 1/2 absolutely convince me.
You know, I've only ever had anime do that to me. I will struggle to finish any other medium but damn does an anime keep me until the end most times. Even if it's not "good" I think it's just so pretty I'll live with it most times.
It has to be truly, god awfully bad before I go "nope I ain't doin' this"
I remember watching this ping pong anime and it wasn't that great, still finished it. I also wasn't that engrossed in Angel beats but still watched it to completion.