Omni's Random Video Noise

Look, I know what they're doing here, they're trying to establish Wyatt as being the sort of person who would go out of his way to correct injustices, but there are SO MANY LEVELS OF WRONG to this, I need a checklist.

POINT NUMBER UNO:
Wyatt Kurt doesn't logically follow through on his appeal to empathy.
So he's against horses getting whipped because they don't like it. Unlike WHAT!? Saddling them up, stabbing them in the sides with stirrups, and running them into gunfire purely because it suits your interests? You don't stop any of the carriages that pass you by whipping the horses pulling THEM. **** you, Wyatt!

POINT NUMBER DEUX:
The creators don't logically follow through on their appeal to empathy.
Could you BE anymore disingenuous? You want to act like you a have some sort of standards, but you're LITERALLY WHIPPING A HORSE IN THAT SCENE, JUST SO YOU CAN SAY IT'S BAD TO WHIP HORSES. That's like shooting someone in the face and going, "Okay, that's bad, right? I shouldn't do that. Now you know that I know that it's bad to do that." You're still subjecting horses to the rest of this ****ing movie! **** you, Hollywood!

POINT NUMBER 三:
The uploader of this video doesn't know how to recognize self-contradicting examples.
The video description reads:
By 'virtues', this video is obviously being taken to mean, "**** yeah! That's what you get for abusing animals!" when the video itself was only made BY abusing animals. This isn't an effective demonstration of justice when it requires creating injustice to demonstrate! That's literally feeding directly into the scheme where the villain causes a problem and makes themselves look good by solving it. **** you, attacksquirrel1982!

POINT NUMBER चार:
The one commenter on this video is an idiot.
It reads:
Are you kidding? PETA's been pulling this **** for ages. Them and the American Humane Association, the same dickwhistlers who gave movies like Tombstone that "No Animals Were Harmed In The Making Of This Movie" pass which has NEVER ACTUALLY MEANT ANYTHING EVER.

Stop calling them 'animal actors'. 'Actors' suggests an intention to deceive and 'intention' implies consent which is most definitely not what this is.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

Candy, Cream, Centipedes, Mink, Antlers, Bees, Geese, Chicken, Roast Beef, and Bratwurst.

It must seem somewhat hypocritical to praise Willy Wonka after condemning Tombstone when both movies feature on-set animals and Willy Wonka is ostensibly all about that kind of stuff.

However, to be fair, a large degree of it is abstracted out (giant intelligent geese that lay chocolate eggs?) and little is actually seriously said about anything to do with the production of anything coming out of the factory. Obvious disdain goes to the "Creepy Tunnel Scene" which nobody likes anyway despite having grown on me still features a chicken getting beheaded, I mean what the actual **** was that about? Wonka, get your **** together.

I'd like to think they used stock footage, but I can't really be sure and all it would have done is make a terrible scene slightly less terrible.

Even so, at least it wasn't played for laughs like that ******* scene in CHARLIE and the Chocolate Factory.


All that crap is in a sharp minority to everything else in the movie though, there aren't horses in the shot every 10 minutes and the movie isn't trying to make some sort of false moral distinction about what it's doing. And because of that, I can mostly focus on the story and still appreciate the characters.

REWATCH UPDATE:

I used to think that I don't watch very many old movies, but it never really quite occurred to me that the VHS tape I would pop in regularly was made in the early 70s and based on a book even older.

I had read the book, always stopping at the sequel where the Great Glass Elevator takes Wonka into space to fight meat monsters (yes, that actually happened) and it reminds me that Dahl never actually liked this movie and that maybe Dahl's exact vision wasn't exactly the most compelling in the first place.

It's also curious to consider the shocked response The LEGO Movie received when it, at base, is a marketing vehicle. Willy Wonka did it too, and it's an utterly perplexing paradox where the most standard movie has all manner of creativity sucked out of it in the raw spirit of greed only for it to fail when the most blatant of product placement movies are born passion projects and become cult classic staples of cinema. How in the **** do we let this happen?

Well it happened, and to be honest, while this movie naturally appeals to me as a musical for it's catchy songs and strong deliveries, it's also a comedy.

But I never really found it to be terribly funny.

Frankly, I'm not sure I ever even really laughed at the movie.

I'm noticing a very BIZARRE trend with my favorite movies. They're not exactly movies that seem like they would appeal to me.

I don't drive vehicles, yet I love Mad Max: Fury Road.

I don't celebrate holidays, yet I love Nightmare Before Christmas.

I don't even eat chocolate, yet I love Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Weird.


Anyway, despite numerous jokes in the movie, I don't think it's charms end at the punchline so much as the jokes it chooses to the tell and the way it attempts to deliver them. I'm not saying they're bad, though I might concede that many of them are weak, it's really the really the characters that are fun to watch interact with each other.

Charlie is about as easy to root for as you would hope for (even if he does have that one really off moment where he punks his whole family that he found a golden ticket, that was a pretty dick move) and Grandpa Joe is a classic archetype played to a T. He has his opinions, and he's rather stuck in his ways, even literally so, but lines like "when a loaf of bread looks like a banquet, I have no business buying tobacco" and then later dissolving suspicions of that claim really goes to show he's more 3-dimensional than he may initially appear. He's not just Charlie's hanger-on, he's a doting grandfather, he likes to live vicariously, and his relentless optimism has a tendency to manifest itself in negative ways.

The other kids, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Mike TeeVee, and Violet Beauregarde play the spoiled foils to Charlie very well and so do their walking doormat parents. Although Augustus gets comparably little screentime compared to the rest, they all seem rather distinct despite sharing space beneath the same umbrella. It's especially easy to hate Veruca who gets her own entitlement song "I Want It Now", but the movie mercifully grants us the mental image of her burning to death in a garbage furnace so that's nice. Good family-friendly fun here.

Naturally the star of the show is, perhaps unintentionally, Willy Wonka who steals his way into the title of the movie by virtue of the Vietnam War at the time (way to pussy out, guys). Wonka, who was at one point considered to be played by one of the Monty Python crew (can't you see an Eric Idle Wonka?) is played by Gene Wilder and he's just great at it. Gene's since ceded much of his comedic acting to good writing, but it's hard not to credit him for bringing a lot of life to this character.

Eccentric is the key word here. Wonka may not be funny in quite the way I that makes me laugh in other movies, but he's very eccentric and acts much as I would and do... or maybe I act that way because of this movie? I dunno. But I do know that it's easy to find a good bit of myself in Wonka's mix of passion, cynicism, wisdom, and random deadpan whatthe****ery just to see how people react.

Randomly speaks in different languages? Check.

Makes concerned references to Noodle Incidents? Check.

Casually shrugs off the probable violent deaths of children?


He's just fun to watch and contributes the vast majority of memorable quotes.

It's really just the same tone from his first appearance to last save for the ending when Charlie is denied the lifetime supply of chocolate and when Grandpa Joe inquires he totally flips his ****.

It's Charlie's predictable humility that gives us the happy ending, but I have to admit, I've always been a bit down on the ending, the Great Glass Elevator always did feel a bit anti-climactic, especially that "he lived happily ever after" line. Pfffft.

Altogether it's not really the story that pulls it altogether, and it's not even entirely the themes that I enjoy, though I do enjoy them.

It's the fact that this really heartfelt magical movie will stop dead as some bug-eyed creeper with a cart full of knives will suddenly sneak up behind Charlie to monologue about "fear of little men" and "nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out" before menacingly squeaking away that gets me. WHAT THE **** WAS THAT!?



Final Verdict:

[Friggen' Awesome]

Before The Game, to me it was "Eh... Michael Douglas", but after The Game it was "Hell yeah, Michael Douglas!"

The setup here is that a man named Nick Van Orten is far too engrossed in his business-minded life as a wealthy investment banker that he's become estranged from his brother and ex. When his birthday rolls around his brother, Conrad, shows up (kinda acting like a dick) and gives Nick a certificate to a mysterious company that promises a non-descript life-changing experience in the form of a "game".

Nick is initially resistant to the idea and gets little answers when he actually visits the company location, but on a whim agrees to submit an "application" anyway despite casually assuming that his brother is in involved in some sort of Scientology-style cult.

What follows is a mysterious sequence of events that pressures Nick into paranoia, suspecting everyone around him is in on "the game" before things become deadly and he struggles to throw off his stalkers and discover the truth of the organization that manages to disappear as quickly as it appears.

There are plenty of clues as to the nature of "the game" and it's operators known only vaguely as CRS (Consumer Recreation Services), but each one pulls you in a different direction as it goes along.

Is his brother in on it?
Are they trying to rob him?
Are they trying to prank him?
Are they stealing from him or aren't they?
Did CRS ever exist in the first place, or is it all in his head?

I would argue that one of the worst parts of the movie is simply knowing the twist because knowing the answers to these questions takes away a lot of the punch of the movie. To that end, it's a movie that isn't nearly as rewatchable as other psychological thrillers so it's one of those that you just have to put on the backburner for a while before enjoying it all over again.

It's like if the everything-is-planned-paranoia theme from Cabin in the Woods met the too-proud-for-his-own-good-businessman theme from Ink.

It'd be one thing if it was just an interesting story (if a somewhat generic one) or good actors playing good characters, but a combination of excellent pacing and focus along with a very tiny dose of backing ambiance helps maintain my orientation and engagement in the movie. It even kept me emotionally engaged.

My favorite moment in the whole movie is a very small incidental diner scene in which Nick's been thoroughly beaten down and demoralized and despite being a wealthy businessman, has to beg with what little is in his pockets for a ride.

HE LOOKS SO SAD, I FEEL SO BAD FOR HIM!

But I guess that's just my sadistic reflex. I get a huge kick out of seeing characters go from this:


To this:


And I feel too few movies involve me to the point that I feel like I'm taking that emotional ride with the character before we exit off on a satisfying resolution.

All told, The Game, though suffering from one of the most generic titles in existence, is one of my favorite movies and an under-appreciated classic in it's genre where I hold it up alongside the likes of Inception.

If you haven't seen it, WATCH IT! IT'S GOOD! GRRR!!!


Final Verdict:

[Friggen' Awesome]

First off:


Holy **** do I feel stiff. And not the erection kinda stiff, just the ordinary haven't-moved-in-over-3-*******-HOURS kinda stiff.

There's complaint number one for ya: This movie is nearly 3 and half hours and it had no business being that long.

What happens? A villager eavesdrops on a bandit patrol and learns that their village will be raided at the end of the season and so ventures out to hire seven samurai which help organize the village and defeat the bandit threat. That's not a story that needs to be 3 hours.

To Seven Samurai's credit though, it manages to spend that time wisely building on it's characters and developing further setup without ever being too transparently expositional which means even though it was a wicked marathon of a movie, I at least never got bored or tuned out. It really just feels like a movie where the main script was exercised in it's entirety without any anecdotal scene edited out.

None of our many many characters are ever really very deep either. We have intimate moments with most of our main characters, but it's not as if development is ever taken very far beyond their archetypes. We MIGHT have been able to were there not so many characters, but because there are we end up filling time by briefly touching on only some of them (sadly, two of our seven samurai are practically indistinguishable from each other).

Still, what we get in terms of character development is significantly better than what we had with Battle Beyond the Stars. Battle Beyond the Stars was very quick with it's character introductions and very casual with it's character deaths so despite their unique qualities, there really isn't much of any reason to care.


Flipping it once again, at least BBTS didn't take an age to get where it's going. I usually give a movie 15 minutes to introduce it's main conflict and arc, but Seven Samurai takes literally twice that amount of time before "we need seven samurai" is ever mentioned. That's the length of a 30-minute TV show episode, and if this were a TV series the first episode would be extraordinarily underwhelming for all of what it accomplishes with it's screentime.

I guess what I'm saying here is there's a middle ground between Battle Beyond the Stars and Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai HAS it's development, but it could be sharply edited to include only the most crucial moments. Scenes we absolutely DO NOT NEED would include:

1.) The entire romantic subplot. Duh. Obviously. This plot goes nowhere, never resolves, and only exists to create conflict with a man who insists on disguising his daughter as a man to hide her from the fiendish samurai that would... rape her, I guess? Oh wait no, because if the dice fall right, the moons align, and just one of those seven samurai SO HAPPENS to have sex with her, she'll become damaged goods.

( -_-) Sssssweet.

At least the general reaction to this guy is upset and disgust, but it's misplaced in my opinion. For one, the response, "remember when you were younger" plainly disregards this guy's real issue by dismissing it as sex drive. For two, BRAINLESS PROMISCUITY is a pretty sickening character trait in general, so that's entirely worth criticizing. This female character doesn't have any personality to speak of, not like the guy who courts her and for all we're aware of they're only into each other for their looks. The vast majority of scenes involving them can literally be summed up as:

"I just noticed you were here."


"I'm going to stare suddenly and meaningfully at you."


"I take a step forward."


"I take another step forward."


Does she even have any lines beyond wimpering, cowering, and getting beaten by her father? I SURE DON'T REMEMBER. It doesn't help matters when the samurai excuse it as being predictable given that they all might die in the morning. Umm... WHAT?

By this point the samurai have already defeated MOST of the bandits primarily thanks to the villagers spearing them left and right. What reason do you have to believe you won't just MIGHT lose, but PROBABLY WILL lose? The odds were worse yesterday!

Also, why does the concept of getting stabbed or shot to death in the near future make you horny enough to stick your dick in the nearest wet towel that screams like a Japanese girl? THERE'S NOTHING THERE, SHE'S A BLOCK OF WOOD WITH A FACE, SHE'S FLATTER THAN FLAT STANLEY!


Last thoughts: It seems overacting body language is almost unavoidable in Japanese movies, I don't know why, it's probably something dragged kicking and screaming from stage plays, but at least it's relatively mild here with the main exception obviously being Kikuchiyo who's just generally portrayed to be childishly energetic.

At least we don't have the ruthlessly dead exposition that we got with Battle Beyond the Stars, which is an unfortunate result because what BBTS seemed to take away from Seven Samurai most was just the basic concept, when Seven Samurai's greatest strength is it's varied and thoughtful character interactions.

Admittedly BBTS presents it's story in a significantly more digestable manner, but the same story is told significantly better in Seven Samurai, even down to maintaining unpredictability with character deaths.

I do have one question, though: How did that first samurai die? Did he trip and crack his head or something? He sorta flops over. Was he shot? I DON'T KNOW.


Final Verdict:

[Pretty Good]

REWATCH UPDATE (4/21/25):
Reading back my review, I think most of my criticisms were on point.

Heihachi's death, that is, one of the samurai who barely has a presence in the movie, is definitely edited terribly.

The way it appears onscreen is that he's fighting with Rikichi and gets knocked over. At the moment he impacts the ground there's a gunshot sound effect and everybody acts like he just got shot.

But he didn't act like he got shot, he acted like he fell over and shot himself... except he doesn't have a gun. So was it just a dramatic sound effect for stabbing himself? For breaking his back? That's a pretty shitty way for any character to go, to randomly fall over and severe their spine so loudly it sounds like a gunshot.

It's ****ing BAD. There's no other way to put it, there's no defending it.

As I also mentioned, Manzo, the character whose daughter brainlessly romances the youngest of the samurai and is paranoid of exactly that, is the worst character in the entire movie. He's just an irredeemably possessive scumbag character, in what is already a trio of shitty characters.

Shino, the daughter, as already no personality, and NO, I literally cannot remember a single line of dialog she speaks throughout the entire movie. She communicates almost entirely through a deer-in-the-headlights stare.

The samurai, Isao (whose name I had to look up), is also just annoying, not just for causing this dumb romantic conflict but also for being the archetypal watery-eyed aspirational character who'd sooner burst into tears or profess their adoration for their nearest senpai than do anything of actual value.

These three characters almost entirely comprise the romantic subplot and dilemma which is not only irrational from a modern day perspective, but it doesn't even make any sense in-universe.

Isao is allegedly from a "samurai family", whereas Shino is from a "farmer family", and these represent two separate classes. Is it NOT in the interest of the farmers to marry into an upper class family? Isn't that the whole dream scenario in these medieval/feudal settings, that a peasant catches the eye of nobility and nobility commits the faux pas of bringing them into their family?

Like, I don't get any impression from Manzo that he has any love for his daughter, women in these movies are almost all treated as chattel, so shouldn't he be pleased that a samurai takes a liking to his daughter? I just don't get it.

Arguably worst of all, the early scenes where Manzo expresses fear to the other villagers that their daughters are under threat from the samurai... never comes up again. It is super late into the movie when they pull the "I called it, our daughters are sluts for samurai!" card, but nobody cares. It doesn't affect morale in any apparent way, it doesn't disturb the trust that's been established, nobody takes his side... it just didn't serve a purpose at the end of the day. So it was literally just a complete waste of time and had no impact on the rest of the story whatsoever.

It's not even clear that Isao even gets the girl in the end.

The runtime, as already stated, is still pretty awful. Yojimbo is basically half of Seven Samurai's runtime. It is just so long and it doesn't need to be that long, especially when they waste a bunch of it on this vacuous romantic bullshit and animal abuse.

It takes 1 hour to recruit the samurai,
1 hour to fortify and train the village,
and the last hour is the whole siege.

For at reason, if for no other, I have definitely changed my mind about Seven Samurai being better than Yojimbo.

The cinematography's not nearly as interesting in this movie and while the music feels much improved over Yojimbo, I noticed that character dialog frequently sounds muffled and the overall leveling makes some conversations barely audible.

This is less obvious if you're only paying attention to the subtitles, but if I had to listen to them speaking Japanese, I'd have to turn up the volume in some scenes.

I'm mostly just repeating myself this time around, but this time time around I'm going to be a bit harsher with my rating:


Final Verdict:

[Okay]