Characters who transcend their media

Wtf does that even mean? I'm wondering about fictional characters from movies and tv shows who have infiltrated our reality and became personalities in their own right. A few examples of wtf I'm blathering about:


Garth Merenghi of Darkplace was an actor (Matthew Holness) playing a character (Garth Merenghi) playing a character (Rick Dagless, MD), so this meta approach is already inherent and part of the charm. He's broken through to our world with written works. Novels. Crap novels hopefully, true to the character. Author. Visionary. Dreamweaver. I guess Matthew was in character of Garth while writing them, so these books exist. I think.

And then there's the "fictional" band Spinal Tap. The movie has an album's worth of original music, but that would still be more of a soundtrack, right? Well, the band released a follow-up album without a movie. "Break Like the Wind". It made it on the charts. Some chart in some joke of a country...

Also, there are the Trailer Park Boys. Originally from the late 90s with a short film and a B&W feature, then a slew of shows and specials. The actors maintain personal lives, but the characters are constant personalities too, featured in podcasts and live on stage. The youtube channel Epic Meal Time featured them, and as usual, they never break character.


Can you think of any other fictional things that have taken on a life of their own, so to speak?

Guns Akimbo 2019

Daniel Radcliffe plays an internet troll who gets abducted by some darkweb group that livestreams people pitted against each other in assassination plots.

This movie has many parallels to the 2016 movie Nerve, which was about extreme dares. A fun movie in itself, but not nearly as violent as Guns Akimbo. Radcliffe is a decent actor, but Samara Weaving is always a blast. Especially when she spends half the movie trying to kill our protagonist.

Sometimes, I find myself in need of a violent shoot 'em up movie. If that's the mood you're in, this movie will do it.

#Review

The "different genre every week" challenge 2023 - RESULTS ARE IN

Didn't really know what else to call it 🤔. But anyway for the month of July, I thought why not mix up a few "popular" genres that we don't usually cover in a whole month. The idea is to watch as many movies (or TV shows if you can fit it in) of that respective genre in a week and add up the cumulative total at the end (they can also score them individually as 4 mini-challenges): 1 point per minute watched, as usual.

Here are the dates to put in your diaries:

War challenge: Saturday 1st July @ 00:00 until Friday 7th @ 23:59


Western challenge: Saturday 8th July @ 00:00 until Friday 14th @ 23:59


Comedy challenge: Saturday 15th July @ 00:00 until Friday 21st @ 23:59


Action challenge: Saturday 22nd July @ 00:00 until Monday 31st @ 23:59•
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-44d5acfeca0825908d40995cc1674f51

•Yeah, we all love a bit of action, so it can have a little longer.

Grab a spot below!

Twitter to X

Elon must really hate Twitter. He bought it out, fired everybody, refused to pay rent on the headquarters, and now he's changed the name. Not like I ever use Twitter^X except to view sluts, but it is weird. I guess it's cool that he bought it out only to stomp it into the ground. Classic Elon.

I don't understand his desire to turn X into an everything app. That kinda defeats the whole purpose of an app, being a program to perform a specialized task (ie email, camera, calendar, etc). Plus, an everything app would take up all your storage.

Note: I'm going to remove some old imdb boards

Eventually. There are too many. Half that shit doesn't get talked about here anyway. I'm pretty sure most people don't even pay attention to the boards here, but I do. Sometimes.

Posts will not be deleted, but moved to a similar board.

Return of the Living Dead Reboot

Well, this was just announced. On July 4th, I remember telling ballz that I was surprised they haven't tried to remake/reboot RotLD yet, but they be listening!

Now, I haven't even seen part 4 & 5 since they seem to have little to do with the first 3, and they don't even have the right zombie type in there. I guess those movies killed the franchise for a while, but they're bringing it back to life. Or at least they'll try.

Is the zombie genre too lame and exhausted for this to work again? Will the comedy be too stupid? Will the movie be punk enough? Will we have another tar man?

Justified: City Primeval

FX's Justified ran for 6 seasons from 2010 to 2015. I was drunk off my ass when I watched it, so I barely remember anything about it, except that I liked it. Set in Kentucky.

We're 3 episodes into the new season and it's pretty good, and pretty standalone with Olyphant being the only returning character (thus far). Set in Detroit, and we all know scuzzy Detroit makes for a great setting.

Boyd Holbrook is an antagonist in the show. He always plays a good scumbag. Typecast as a villain most of the time, so he gets to be an asshole most of the time. Sweet deal.

Bonus: +Keith David



And to revive an old issue, I always feel iffy about classifying revivals of a show. Sometimes, they're the same thing, but sometimes they aren't. But then some shows make it easy, like Full House vs. Fuller House. The title is different, so it's boolean.


I enjoy it, therefore it was JUSTIFIED.

Do movies still mean anything?

As a film buff, I wanted to collect all the classics. Cinematic achievements, good performances, groundbreaking for this or that reason. It seemed a doable task because there weren't nearly as many being released as there are today. I can't keep up with all the shit that comes out now.

I still support my local movie theater because I'm a sucker. I see movies. And while I see movies I like, will I ever see a movie that moves me? Have all the stories been told? Has technology made it too easy for people to generate this content on the fly to the point where it means nothing?

We all grew up with a slew of movies that we have an irrational sentimentality toward. Nostalgia turns these movies into your friends, always there to cheer you up. Do you think there will ever be another movie made that can land on your all-time favorites list? Or are you set in stone at this point?

Kids and violence in movies

So something my dad said got me thinking about this recently. My eldest son, who will be 11 next week, stayed over at his grandparents' house recently and because his grandad had never seen the movies before, he wanted to watch The Dark Knight trilogy with him. A few days later, when I was chatting to my dad he said to me: "So you let Zack watch The Dark Knight then?!" as if it was something he should never had seen at that age (well actually he was 7 or 8 when he first watched it). Well it's a 12 certificate movie over here (PG-13 in the US) and it's a Batman movie. Of course I am going to let him have watched it. But I knew exactly why my dad was surprised. He is of course refering to the scene involving a "magic trick" and a pencil and another scene involving what we know as a "Chelsea smile". My son even warned his grandad: "I don't like this scene coming up". Now these scenes are not particularly graphic of course, but it's the case of sometimes what you don't see is worse than what you do see. And in all honesty, that movie probably should be an 15/R certificate for those scenes and the overall "dark" tone of that movie. And Two-Face's first appearance is pretty frightening too.

On a separate occassion, I remember I was sitting in bed one night and watching Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, a movie which is an 18 certificate over here. My son was not yet asleep at that time, he was lying in bed in the room across from mine asking me "what are you watching dad?". I told him to go to sleep but he got up, came into my room and sat next to me on the bed. Again, I told him to go back to his room and go to sleep but in the end I gave up and just let him sit and watch the rest of the movie with me. During most of the "death scenes" he would laugh or chuckle at the absurdity of it. Yeah it was bloody, gory in places, but it was so over-the-top and ridiculous, how could anyone including a kid possibly take it seriously. There is a scene where one of the female characters gets her head "twisted" off. My son didn't cower at Jason, he just laughed at the stupidness of it. He cowered at the Joker though. Having said that, my old man probably wouldn't be too impressed that I'd let him watch a Friday the 13th movie either.

So you probabaly know what my point is going to be: There are some 12/PG-13 movies which contain violence that is less appropriate for kids than many 15-18/R-rated movies. Other examples of PG-13 movies include a couple of the Mission: Impossible movies and scenes of torture. A couple of James Bond movies too. However, movies like Aliens and even the original Halloween, which famously contains zero blood or gore, are apparently less suitable and still get slapped with an '18' by the BBFC. Is the scene in the The Terminator where a "rubber-face" looking Arnold Schwarzenegger cuts out his eye with a scalpel any worse for a kid to watch than the aforementioned "pencil in the eye socket" scene from The Dark Knight. Again, what you don't see is sometimes worse than what you do...

Indiana Jones 5

Harrison Ford has still got it. The opening is a prequel bit, and there's a lot of hoopla about him being de-aged. It looks okay. There are still little ticks that look fake, and while he appears young, he still sounds old.

Cut to the present. 1969, NYC. Indy is actually old and ready to retire. However, there's always some asshole artifact that prompts a larger than life globe-trotting adventure, but it was fun. Not gonna lie, I have no beef with this movie.

Mads is a template Nazi villain here, but he's still classy. Indy has a new female sidekick who has her own child sidekick, because sidekicks are an Indy tradition. For anybody wondering about Shia's character Mutt, don't worry. He's dead.

#Review