After my Nethroi and Umori combo I started to think about other potential companions. Lurrus of the Dream-Den seems like a very antithetical companion for EDH, so hypothetically what would one do with it?
There’s only two options for commander.
Although they do pretty much the same thing, I decided to go with the latter.
YouTube has been pushing a lot Borderlands lore videos for me lately, so I’ve watched some of them. Everyone hates Ava and the story of the third game in the mainline series sucks. But this got me thinking: What if I hadn’t spent something like 1200 hours playing the previous games when I started this game?
Spoilers. Spoilers. Spoilers.
Just making this more complicated for myself by including Umori in all this, but why not? The format is supposed to be about fun, right? Also, I don’t really play white, because of reasons (it’s my least favorite color, which lead me into not really investing in white cards, which has saved me a lot of money over the years), so this is going to be Golgari despite Nethroi’s color identity. I’m not going to stay away from free white sources, so technically you can cast Nethroi without mutating, but that is not the plan.
So, Pre-Sequel, which I enjyoed much more than most, had six playable characters, who all have had roles in the other games. We had Athena, who was a major character in the General Knoxx DLC for the original Borderlands, we had Nisha and Wilhelm, Jack’s allies from Borderlands 2, and Fragtrap, the only remaining Claptrap as of Borderlands 2. Later, Aurelia and Timothy were added, who both feature in Borderlands 3. Based on this, who would I like to see if the pre-sequel would receive a sequel? (Which I don’t think it will, as it really was poorly received by the fans.) I’m not necessarily talking about something that happened between second and third games, but a spin-off.
I was watching EDH and Chill, where they had a video game theme. What game would I use for such a purpose? I’ll probably make a series of this at some point, because games like Binding of Isaac and Dishonored (both of which I actually like more than the game I’m about to go into) would make interesting decks as well.
But, as I’ve been playing plenty of Borderlands 3 lately, Borderlands it is. But with a very specific view of the world.
And we are finally here… My favorite movie.
Okay, so what does it even mean to have a favorite movie? These often come with various understandable caveats. I mean, I set the list earlier this year and if I did it again right now, it might look very different. Many of the top movies would probably be the same, but the order might change quite a bit.
When watching a movie from the Alien quadrilogy, you can immediately tell who directed each of them. Well, except for the first one. Ridley Scott has been working for well over four decades and has directed 25 theatrical features and a bunch of other stuff during that time. How many of those 25 movies could you name? Okay, Alien, sure. Blade Runner. Gladiator. His movies range from 25% (A Good Year) to 97% (Alien) on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s quite understandable that you don’t immediately remember all the completely forgettable or mediocre movies.
The movie that prompted me to talk about this was Drowning by Numbers by Peter Greenaway. I sort of picked it up from my piles of unwatched movies and just put it on without too much thinking. There’s a lot of movies on those piles I’ve bought for some specific reason, but don’t exactly remember why, so I wasn’t aware that the movie was by Greenaway (although I probably was at some point), but that became apparent pretty much immediately. The long shots, the angles and compositons of the shots, the music, the dialogue all just scream Greenaway.
Obviously, I’m not a professional critic, so this is largely just an outsiders view, but let’s talk about them anyway.
It’s probably tough being a movie critic. At least for the good ones. The bad ones… they can just go on and spew garbage about movies. The good ones are educated people. They often have degrees on this stuff. This stuff meaning something along the lines of film theory. But how does that help as a critic?
It doesn’t. At least not as much as one might want it to help. Actual criticism requires the hindsight of historical context. Imagine you had to go out and watch Citizen Kane on premier night. Whatever you would have written about it would seem ridiculous now, almost 80 years later.
In continuation of the topic from yesterday, let’s talk a little bit about how much movies cost to make.
Irishman was one of the Best Movie Oscar nominees this year. DeNiro and Scorsese have talked openly about the problems of finding a financeer. And I get why. The budget was $158 million. That’s not an unusually large budget these days, but it is unusually large for the kind of movie they were making. On top of that, Scorsese is one of the most respected working directors, but his box office results don’t really reflect that. Usually he’s movies do fine. They just about make their money back in theatres, so they are probably profitable in the home market. His previous movie, The Silence, was made with a much smaller budget of $46.5 million, but only managed about half that in box office.
Here’s a graph of the movies on my list per decade.
While the change hasn’t been consistently up throughout the century, the general direction clearly is. Of course, this is only me and my perspective, but I do believe the overall quality of movies has been rising.