Omni's Random Video Noise

THERE, 1 hour, 30 minutes, 4 seconds, that's exactly HALF of the movie and the movie is divided into two chapters so I can review THE FIRST CHAPTER. I DON'T CARE IF THE NEXT SCENE IS HOT LESBIAN SEX, I'M DONE.

This movie...

Dude...

This movie...

Bring back the doggy gimp suits.

Milk, Waffles, Crepes, Gyros, Chicken, Ham, Shrimp, Oysters, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, I DON'T GET ANYTHING OUT OF THIS KISSING BUSINESS! STAWP IT!

It's even worse when you attach dramatic weight to it too: Bait & Switch kisses Main Girl, Main Girl kisses her back, Bait & Switch says she wasn't serious, Main Girl cries.


And look, it's not like I don't know what they're trying to do here, they're trying to portray angst with some subtlety. Main Girl is plagued by the gay dreams and feels isolated thanks to a combination of blowing off the one guy who liked her (pun acknowledged) and social stigma, so when a random girl says she thinks she's really cute she goes all stupid and throws herself at her.

I get that, 'cept I don't get that.

I don't like this character. That behavior does not reflect well on her and what behavior that's already been assigned to her I don't like.

She's in high school still yet she smokes, boozes, eats her feelings, ****s guys after one day (awesome job getting pregnant dipshit), visits bars, ****s girls after one day, is just generally a wet towel of a person, and has some of the most intellectually fulfilling dialog I've ever heard:

Where the **** are you learning that ********? OH YEAH, her teachers:

WHAT ARE YOU ON, LADY???

We're just tryin' to read a book here, why do pretentious filmmakers always gotta get all existentialist on us? It's fricken' dumb! NOTHING you are saying tracks reality in the slightest!

You're better off tellin' all these kids they got **** friends, cause save for the one Gay Guy ('cause all straight kids are evil, you see), Main Girl's friends are just THE WORST kind of people.

"Did you have sex?"


"You had sex."


"I can smell it on you."


"She ****ed, I can smell it."


"Afternoon sex?"


"I don't believe you."


"I saw you walkin' with that blue-haired girl. Kinda dyke-y, huh? You **** her?"


"Are you a lesbian?"


"You're a lesbian."


"You've slept naked in my bed, you like pussy and asses DON'T YOU!?"

God in heaven, I ask you grant me a bazooka with which to punch a gory hole in these invasive prying catty bitches' faces.

Not like they weren't transparent unlikable to begin with, as soon as the movie drops us in to their conversation and they're poking and POKING AND POKING at Main Girl to shack up with Nearest Penis I already knew I wasn't going to like these characters.

On would hope that blue-haired "Bull Dyke" would offer an appreciable character to the proceedings, BUT NO, she's nearly a caricature. She's an artist who plays way too ******* coy to serve as anything other than the viewer surrogate's ideal lesbian fantasy. She's not even likable and there's no given reason why she, with nothing in common with Main Girl (save an interest in rugmunching), even likes her beyond some shallow plot to "break in the virgin".

And that DIALOG reaches it's zenith.

That was supposed to be romantic.

SLAY ME NOW I CAN'T GO ON.

*1 gay pride parade later*

*60 seconds of continuous facesucking in the park later*

*at the oyster dinner with Bull Dyke's parents*

Well that was HELLACIOUS.

Couldn't possibly get worse, BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!

Yes, this movie was TOO SEXY, that was it's problem.

Oh, this is gonna be gold.

I hate that word. It's a dirty word. You dirtied it. Now they're gonna remake The Bourne Identity and Jason's gonna find out he's a puppy trapped in a man's body.

Not that that IN ANY WAY should discredit the movie, but it's pretty obvious that this is pretty underbaked for such an overdone concept.

They're both fricken' boring. Just soft talking about NOTHING. Nothing consequential or literal nothingness, either way it's still boring and it's not "social class".

They really are dull ****s.

Oh god...

It's almost as if you can assign any color any meaning without any degree of consistency or inferrable explanation. This is Schindler's List all over again! HOW IS THE COLOR RED SUPPOSED TO TELL ME TO DESTROY TRAINS?????

DONE.

Eat a dick.

Dogs, Apes, Creme Puffs.

*open mouth gibbering* Duh duh duh duh duh huhwut?

What in the HELL did I just watch? This sets a new standard for whatthe****ery. This is like Eraserhead, if Eraserhead was interesting.

This is probably the weirdest fricken' movie I've ever seen in my life.

Guy wakes up to find a movie theater hidden in his wall, we never see the screen.

Cut to Main Guy in a limo who gets driven around to different "appointments" where each time he exits the vehicle in a different disguise and pretends to be someone pre-established in that setting such as an old beggar, a tantric mocap actor, some crazy sewer leprachaun-type dude (soak up all that full frontal nudity), the husband to a family of apes, I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

As the movie goes along it drip-feeds the very smallest of clues as to what's going on when Main Guy meets and kills his multiple doppelgangers, miraculously survives gunshot wounds, various people around him seem to be trying not to break the fourth wall, we talk about performing in front of cameras that have become too small to see if they exist at all, and you get to wondering if we're watching some whacked out version of The Truman Show, but hey, we'll find out soon enough given that we are in fact learning, albeit slowly, what's going on.

The Limo Driver drops Main Guy off with a family of apes (because seriously, WTF) and drives off to a facility labeled "Holy Motors". A-ha! So HERE is where we're gonna learn what this big weird thing is all about!

Limo Driver parks, puts on a mask she pulls out of her ass, and walks away at which point all of the limos in the garage start WHISPERING TO EACH OTHER.


WHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT THE FUG.

All we learn from this scene is that the limos are invisible. Credits.

What. The. BABALOOMALOTKAPOWSKAWTIZSHLIEZAH!!

Let's look for an explanation online or something, ah, here's an interview of the creator:

*blink* DUHHH... what would you suggest be interviewed? Women? Elephants? Plants? Do you just disapprove of interviews in general? Why? That answer doesn't make any sense.

*eye twitch* ...you're differentiating men and artists... men can be artists... artists are implicitly "men"... are you contrasting talking artists with talking men? Are you suggesting that it's only an artists's business to make art, not talk about it? If the question is if they "should" that's clearly an unwarranted imposition.

You know, we're here to ask if you can contribute anything that could make your movie worth a damn, but I can already see this isn't going anywhere.

Wow, so... outright lying that you're competent in the industry and then generalizing about people who actually are. And they do a better job explaining their intentions behind different aspects of their movies than you're doing now.

You're saying this movie was rushed???

You spitballed this entire project. Can't say I'm the least bit surprised.

This man is insane.

The whole range of human experience includes talking cars, invincibility, and a caveman who kidnaps models to eat their hair?

Ah, but you're an "artist", GOTCHA.

Well, there you have it. This movie was just a cluster**** of ideas thrown together in under a month.

At least it was an interesting cluster****.

Mosquitoes, Horses, Cows, Milk, Ice Cream, Steak, Chocolate Bars, Kisses.

When the movie opened up to "co-written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow", I was optimistic. I liked Point Break, I liked Hurt Locker, and I liked Strange Days, I was pretty confident that this female written vampire story would be far and away superior to Twilight at the very least.
And it's true, Twilight's got nothing on this movie, but I was pretty disappointed with it overall.

Firstly we set up an Overnight Romance between an ironically predatory Main Guy and secret Vampire Main Girl before he gets bit and we blunder headfirst into the age-old problem: Vampire Syndrome or what I think I'm going to start calling Vampire Hedonism. You can't make a protagonist likable if they prey on innocent people.

Fortunately this movie avoids total amorality by not insisting that Main Guy's new condition actually warrants killing and he refuses to kill at every opportunity, however we fall way short of the likes of Blade and Vampire Hunter D when he still thinks he can get in good with his confusing new vampire clan just by helping out and leeching on the blood they steal from others.

What we have is not a perpetrator, but an enabler, and that's hardly an improvement.

He also fails to establish any sort of cognitive dissonance between the killing he doesn't want to be a part of and Main Girl who's been doing this for years. That she kills people or even helps killing people never infiltrates his radar, even when he's demonstrably cured of vampirism by the almost insultingly simple solution of a transfusion, she still backs out, apparently preferring the company of killer maniacs over the virtuous Love Interest.

Dude has a little sister and dad he wants to see again, you socially stunted shrew.

What I don't get is how or why undead Bill Paxton (whose easily the best part of the movie) and his little crew are SO ******* OBSESSED with getting back at him for leaving.

WHY IN THE **** did they need him anyway?

He saw their faces? SO WHAT? Nearly everyone you meet you kill anyway, you change vehicles every day, Main Guy's been living peacefully alone on a farm for days and there's no evidence that the police have been after you and yet these guys literally kill themselves in attempt to get at him. Where's the cost/benefit analysis in this stupidity? How did he cross them?

This on top of baffling plotbeats like when Main Guy takes a bus home and turns around to go back to the vampires for no ****ing reason as well as just general contrivances like broad daylight popping right the **** out of nowhere don't help carry what is otherwise a very tired and uninspired love story involving redneck vampire ********.

At the very least it kept me engaged, again, Paxton was fun and the effects used were kinda neat, but this movie's already got one foot in the grave.

There's this idea called "remix culture" wherein it's considered generally acceptable to take other peoples' ideas, change them, or mix them together, to produce something new, different, or even better.

This says nothing of the problems inherent to charging people for such experiences, given that the brunt of work can be absorbed by a creator, and the brunt of the profits absorbed by a remixer, but in a free and open melting pot of ideas, I wholly and sincerely support remix culture, especially in an era in which an industry like video games is utterly PLAGUED by developers poaching consumers for pre-orders and then shoving an utterly garbage product full of lies out the door, padded with paywalls, and bandaged with Day 1 Patches.

This is a world in which a developer will sink millions of dollars into making and selling a product that is fundamentally broken if not for that one single person who hacks their game and redistributes a copy that they managed to fix in a matter of hours.

It's ILLEGAL, but it's DAMN WELL JUSTIFIED.

Take this for instance, EA shoves out SimCity 2013, insists that it can ONLY run online, that it's so designed that it's literally inextricable from being played online, it's just won't work otherwise. COMPLETE ****ING LIE as it turns out.

And in that vein I find no end to difficulty in rationalizing companies like Nintendo who pull copyright and monetize or outright take down peoples' videos just for talking about their games, even when they have nothing but good things to say about them, literally promoting their product.

You know, if you're gonna take your ideas and selfishly squirrel them away into a vault somewhere to rot for decades on end, I don't feel too bad about stealing them.

And so here we have Monty Oum, an incorrigible insomniac geek animator who, after making a splash with epic crossover fight animation Haloid (Halo vs Metroid), he made Dead Fantasy, which is a series of videos in which a select cast of Dead or Alive characters battle it out against a select cast of Final Fantasy characters.

Why?

Because why the **** not?

These videos, perhaps more than any other, seem to really reflect Monty's interests and the combination of the complex and fast-paced fighting of Dead or Alive with the superhero-level abilities of Final Fantasy makes it more than a treat to anyone whose enjoyed either series, or simply likes fight animations along the lines of old school web classics like Xiao Xiao (god, those were the days...).

There are a LOT of creative liberties taken with the source material and it certainly doesn't stay contained to the two eponymous franchises, but it's divided into 6 parts, so let's just get into it.

Part 1 (4 out of 5):
The scene opens up to an old ruin somewhere where X-2 Yuna encounters Kasumi and they start fighting. Why? I believe you have this confused for an actual plot, we're here for the fighting, son.

And the fighting's pretty good, especially given that X-2 Rikku and Ayane swing in the crank up the action. All of the characters, with limited exception, have a fairly specific range of abilities. Everyone is circumstantially limited to the creative boundaries that their personal weapon(s) allows; Yuna dual wields pistols for gun-fu (never reloading unlike what we saw in Haloid), Rikku is armed with unique daggers, Kasumi has a katana, and Ayane uses a... "two-sided beam staff", but in addition, Yuna and Kasumi can be timely use of a charge shot and short range teleport respectively which spices things up while still keeping in line with their characters.

It's all pretty well done with a lot of complex character intermingling, environmental traversal and destruction and it all ultimately ends with a tease of Advent Children's Tifa stocked up to the brim with materia (you're gonna become increasingly confused at this point if you don't know what that is).

I will say that this part suffers from occasionally cracked momentum between shots, but most of all it plays at an unfortunately safe speed, this seems like the speed it would play it at if you were demoing it in the client window, so it's not quite hit it's pace.

Part 2 (5 out of 5):
THIS is where Dead Fantasy hits it's pace.

Corrected for speed and featuring an edit of Tokyo Drift by Brian Tyler, it just gets sick. Tifa is immediately the most OP character on site, but she's paired with Hitomi who lacks her super powers, but matches her blows. FF team, now outside and on the top of the ruin (which I'm guessing is from a game I just don't recognize) are just wrecking face, but when Ayane is cooperatively smuggled away to safely ninjitsu the **** out of the building (which some neat deterrence thanks to Kasumi's teleport) resulting in what I think is the Crowing Moment of Awesome when the battle is taken vertically as all 6 characters battle it out while sliding down the side of the ruin at terminal velocity.

Tifa whips out numerous powers including Firaga, Blizzaga, Stop, Thundaga, Gravity, Hastega, ALL of which are recurring FF abilities (apparently tied to her materia) and after Rachel from Ninja Gaiden comes out of nowhere with a battleaxe to shift the battlefield once again to a platform on a river of lava, Tifa even gets an awesome Drunken Master moment when Yuna tries to recoup her with a couple potions.

The insanity doesn't end and I do think the excitement wanes at this point when they're cast off into the lava and saved by Rinoa (making that 3 different Final Fantasy games we're drawing from), decked out in angel wings and two of the most bizarre weapons in imagination alongside Kairi from Kingdom Hearts armed with keyblades, which are also incredibly bizarre weapons.

There's a pretty cool tornado fight to follow that unfairly promises resolution in the form of multiple one-on-one showdowns, but I think I should mention at this point that all of the characters are a collection of directly ripped character models (as in DOA) or made-from-scrap replicas (as in Tifa and Kairi). There's a plain effort to make them appear consistent with one another, but it's also noticeable that some of the characters just don't actually have appropriate rippable 3D character models.

It's distracting, but it's one of pitifully few nitpicks I won't even bother bringing up. This was friggen' cool. If the rest of the videos maintained this peak it' be an easy 5 out of 5, but their quality seems to vary experimentally.

Part 3 (4 out of 5):
Tifa duels it out with Hitomi in this one alone and it seems like an unfair fight given Tifa's materia advantage, but as demonstrated, the DOA characters have been massively beefed up to be a fair contest.

Opening, excellently, to Devils Never Cry from Devil May Cry 3 (indicating yet another source of badass inspiration, GO PLAY THAT GAME) the two throwdown in a burning building and when Hitomi gets blinded by blood, she goes all Sight Unseeing on us and manages to punch the materia out of Tifa, steal them, and turn them back on her.

There's no indication that this is ever possible, but whatever, it makes the fight way more interesting and actually ends with Tifa losing, surprisingly.

Part 4 (3 out of 5):
Following the trend that will end, X-2 Yuna fights Kasumi who's backed a legion of Alpha clones which triggers her to revert back to X and summon the big 5 summons from that game to wreck face, Valefor, Ifrit, Ixion, Shiva, and Bahamut (love Bahamut, too bad he gets zerged right away). It quickly builds up to the close and personal showdown Summoner Yuna isn't suited for when CLOUD kicks in...

...and it just ends.

WTF!? You introduced Cloud and he only gets a single swing in? That's it!?

This one was really short, and it's way overly dramatic intro actually highlights a somewhat annoying attempt to mimic Kingdom Hearts' intros which just don't work in this context. Kingdom Hearts has always been partly metaphorical, but even then it wouldn't pull that stuff in the middle of a story, especially one without any regular dialog.

Helena shows up in the previous part too, but her purpose seems purely to serve as some voiceless supporting character involved in the machinations contriving the battle. This is just insinuating a narrative without actually writing one.

Part 5 (4 out of 5):
Things change up again when we return to Tifa, now materia-less as she's dogged by Hayate and what must be some incredibly incompetent ninja (they circle around from behind her just to approach her from where she can see them).

Unlike the rest of the series which is as bloodless as Soul Calibur (which may well have inspired the staff sequence in this part), this one gets bloody as hell as Tifa dukes it out in a garage going full-on Boromir, and dismembering ninjas with the swords she pulls out of herself.

It was cool, Monty obviously really likes Tifa, but I will admit that I thought the train was a wasted opportunity and I am utterly baffled why it is that Hitomi, who had just previously tried to kill her, slaps Hayate for almost doing so.

Part 6 (4 out of 5):
I don't think this is even an official Part 6, but an similar-in-length teaser for the next part of the series. It features Ryu and Momiji from Ninja Gaiden turning on Kairi who inexplicably transforms into... Namine? And Namine's got a cast of keyblades that she can manipulate almost identically to a Murkamuo Unit from BlazBlue (all kinds of cross-references!) save her inexplicable ability to spam lasers and turn the into guns (an idea which Square Enix is now stealing BACK from Monty).

It's easily the most visually impressive of the series and the sudden reveal of Vincent and abrupt cliffhanger ending lends the series back to history.

Some compilations of Monty's Dead Fantasy series on Youtube include a hilariously abrupt transition to some of his unrelated dance animation videos which include many of the same characters that appeared here just shaking booty to a song.

I think it's actually very appropriate in a way given how clearly it telegraphs Monty's interests.

Hyper intense and creatively complex fight sequences are obviously a huge interest of his, and it's the defining recurrent theme across all of his major work, but two other interests I can't help but recognize and share with him is his appreciation for syncronizing music with action, and body art, specifically the attractive ways in which the human body can be animated.

Now, you could just look at his videos and conclude that this is just some geek who found his favorite video game characters, stuck them in provocative outfits and had them shake their ass cause it turns him on (and I won't even try to argue that that wasn't a contributing factor), but it really doesn't seem that way to me. I truly believe that there's an element to movement that he finds enjoyable, because I find it enjoyable too, it's that really difficult to describe sense of... "kineasthetics".

That moment in Part 2 where time slows down, the camera zooms in, the frame lightly vibrates, and Ayane drives her fist into the ground just as the music climaxes, or that moment when Tifa takes Ayane aside in profile and rhymthically juggles her into the air with a flurry of kicks like an anime fighting game. It's really satisfying and I honestly don't think dancing is that far off, it's why I really like watching martial arts movies that incorporate breakdancing like Raging Phoenix, THAT'S JUST SO PERFECT!

So you can brush it aside as fan fetishism if you want, but I think it's very telling how big a fan of Dance Dance Revolution Monty Oum actually was in real life.

And yes, I said WAS, because if you're not aware, after the amazing work he did on Haloid and Dead Fantasy, he was hired to do action sequences for Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue series and after earning a name for himself professionally he was encouraged to finally put forward his own original web series RWBY, which continued to climb in quality and popularity into it's 3rd season before he suddenly died at the young age of 33 from a severe allergic reaction.


Celebrity obituaries get regular threads on these boards, but if there's any creator I've been genuinely sad to hear died, it's little-known Monty because he was a honest inspiration to me and I'd have watched anything if his name was on it.

Such an promising career cut mercilessly short. If you haven't seen Dead Fantasy, do yourself a favor and watch Part 2 here.

Chickens, Ducks, something else, I forget.

The Look of Silence is the aptly titled follow-up documentary to The Act of Killing, which I haven't seen. Both are centered around a different person, in this case 44-year-old Adi, as they one-by-one confront the "heroes" of the Indonesian military coup of 1965-66.

At the time, the military overthrew the government and enacted a campaign of slaughter in the name of eradicating "communists" which were thought to be guilty of irreligion and sleeping with each others' wives (fairly low bar for evil here, all things considered). Wikipedia puts the death toll between half a million to a million or more dead, with the movie stating around 500 to 600 being outright executions taking place at what it referred to as "Snake River". Adi's older brother, Ramli (whose deafblind father is now so old he can't remember), was one of the victims at Snake River.

Today, it is relatively peaceful, the old guard of the military are now retired heroes and the government ensures that children are taught as much in school, that the communists were so evil as to pluck out your eyes if you disagreed with them. In the spirit of reconciliation and returning a degree of truth and regret to these old men, Adi visits them one by one, anonymously, and under the ruse of a glasses salesman, to ask them questions.

The responses are mixed, self-contradictory, and thematic consistent.

Those who are not plainly disturbed by the questions are forthright if not enthusiastic of explaining in detail or even re-enacting the method of killing "communists", how it was all in defense of the state, how you had to do what you were told, and how they lead people down a bloody path to Snake River where they gruesomely killed them and dumped their bodies.

Two of them re-enact in video, specifically Ramli's death, who after being stabbed repeatedly, escaped home only to be recaptured by the military to "take him to the hospital" which meant dragging him to the river, slashing his throat, spilling his intestines, and finally castrating him before dumping him into a river which would become so polluted with dead bodies that people wouldn't even fish in it anymore.

Adi describing how his older brother was killed to various members of the death squad including it's leader, it's commander, and the legislature that covered it up all get a somewhat similar response:

"You can only cut humans once." *throat slit motion*


"Two cuts yeah, well they were bad people, bad people you can hack to pieces."


"Yeah, Islam is against killing, Muhammad never killed... but killing your enemies is okay. Why so many questions? You ask too many deep questions. Too deep. Always politics. I don't like talking about politics. Everything is safe now. Past is past. Luckily I drank blood so I won't go crazy."

"Past is past" is the most common excuse to get out of the conversation, but "politics" is as well which the legislator describes as something to the effect of "doing what is necessary to achieve your ideal" before contradicting himself by saying he never intimidates his voters immediately before threatening Adi with a repeat of history.

The main commander himself, after backpedaling and outright denying credit for the murders, in turn accuses Adi of being a secret communist. "America taught us to hate communists."

Not before it ends do we see the news broken to several of the children of said military members who react with the ever-present and awkward "look of silence" the movie is titled for.



My thoughts on the movie are 2-fold:

First, it's not quite as was promised. As a sociological phenomenon it's certainly interesting. Once-sung heroes, now disarmed in an era of peace, are confronted with the crimes of their past and asked to look past the rose-colored glasses which have worn into their face with age. Those who are not blatantly detached from the tone of the ideas they're discussing are visibly agitated and uncomfortable by the questions. There's a lot of nervous twitching. But alas, little to nothing appears to come from the movie and the creators themselves do little else but ask what happened, say what happened, and wonder aloud if there are regrets to be had. None are had, and I was disappointed that the moral quandary wasn't explored in the movie, let alone as deeply as it was in the podcast.

Secondly, whereas others may feel intellectually stimulated by the movie audibly absent of these ideas, I was left bored. There's very little interconnecting the majority of the conversations, and it has the style of presentation where it would rather show you a landscape shot or an extreme close-up of something completely unrelated to the tune of dead silence before cutting to another conversation or some other innocuous interaction intended, I would assume, to contrast with it's mood.

I dunno, it was hardly the striking contrast you got with Denethor during the siege of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings, it's all just talking after the fact. The conversations can get a little tense, but there's nothing in the way of actual physical intimidation to really set the stakes against Adi, nothing beyond a whisper of the idea that they might poison him with a drink or want to know where he's from so they can find out where he lives.

It was pretty dull. I've seen better documentaries. There's certainly an interesting discussion to be had on the topic, it's just not in this movie.

This movie is terrible.


This movie is terrible to review.


This movie is terrible to review because I've seen it so many times that other people have seen it so many times that to judge it and it's use of comedy objectively is difficult. The movie itself has become a joke.



Anyway, as far as the comedy is concerned, I felt that Holy Grail verged on being slightly cruder than ANFSCD. They deliberately try to show filthiness and it doesn't shy away from the low-brow when it comes to the "French taunting" and eventual dumping of feces on people.

Granting that, it's never graphic, even what I would otherwise condemn as Blood Geysers are permissible because the movie is a comedy and every sequence involving them are deliberately and ridiculously fake.


That much I can give a pass, and I can even give a pass to the regular animal abuse jokes which range from not having enough budget to afford horses so they clack coconuts together and mimic riding everywhere to beating an obviously fake cat against a wall because that serves some sort of ambiguous purpose to peasants (why are they out in a field collecting mud slop?)

I spotted Chickens, Ducks, Doves, a Cow, a Horse (they could afford a single horse for approximately 1 second of footage apparently), a Rabbit, and of course a [probably real] Herring. Putting aside, once again, the probably endless amount of actual fur and leather that went into costume design, this movie is surprisingly below-par when it comes to trashing animals in movies. I thought it would be higher, but they often don't appear or are implied to exist. The scene in which animals like a cow and sheep are thrown wholesale over the castle wall down at Arthur and his knights are clearly fake mock-ups, but there are clearly real chickens or ducks to help sell the idea.

This displeases me.

This rewatch I also paid fairly close attention to the jokes in general, and a few of them were pretty dumb. Arthur confusing the number 3 with 5 is just part of some nonsensical overarching gag of misunderstanding each other for no explicable reason. The entire scene in which Swamp Castle King has to explain to his guards how guarding a room works is really only amusing with respect to the degree to which it's taken, there's really no good reason for it, Guy A says one thing, Guy B repeats same thing back only wrong. That's not funny and there's really no justification for it, it's not like what Guy A says could be comedically misinterpreted for the purpose of some sort of word game like you'd see left and right in the movie, Clue, it's just nonsense for nonsense sake.

...and that's fine, I just... would prefer funnier jokes.

Not that it doesn't deliver of course, the "Not Quite Dead" running gag does wane a bit by the end, but it's certainly charming and genuinely well acted. To say nothing of the absolute laundry list of funny quotes starting with the opening credits of the movie.

But I guess that's also sort of the problem with reviewing something you've already watched to death. I never really got a kick out of the anti-climax ending, but then I didn't even laugh at any part of the movie just cause I could probably parrot it word for word. Guess you could chalk that up to being memorable at the very least.

I still enjoy the movie, I think it's great. And in some ways I do think it's an improvement over the first (fewer WTF Terry Gilliam animations for one).

I give it a 4 out of 5, but it certainly earns a place amidst my personal collection, if for nothing else but for how it's inspired my own sense of humor.