I don’t know if its validating or disappointing to be seen so thoroughly by an article like this. On the one hand, I absolutely identify with the memes that are like “men will live like this without issue” and it’s just an arm chair and TV in an otherwise empty room. Aesthetics, while noticeable to me, are simply never much of a priority. However, at the same time, I also feel like taking ownership of your living space and having the confidence to imprint aspects of your personality on it is a mark of maturity in some ways.

So, I find myself stuck in an increasingly silly feedback loop of not caring about aesthetics -> feeling bad for not caring -> trying to brainstorm some ideas for how to spruce things up -> having anxiety over the infinite combinations of possibilities without a “correct” answer -> throwing my hands up and returning to not caring.

We work on it in therapy, I guess, lol.

Honestly, that makes about as much sense to me as what I think the actual rules of rugby are.

…is that what goes on in the middle of a scrum?

Is this what activating a trap card is? Everything I’ve ever learned about TCGs has been done unwillingly through shitposts.

(mostly facetious) irrelevant! The last time a TCG tournament player spent a few hours in the sun, we were building decks out of clay tablets!

I don’t know what direction would be funnier, the friendly local game store tournament field getting thrown onto a rugby pitch, or the All-Blacks throwing down a Blue Eyes White Dragon (don’t @ me, this is the extent of my Yu Gi Oh knowledge) during a haka.

…thank you.

You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I beat you with until you follow my ruttin’ commands!

I agree. As you mentioned, the quality of Statham’s filmography varies wildly, but I don’t think his performances are ever the determining factor in what the final result is. Idk, if someone wanted to call the 6th consecutive movie where he plays a gruff guy with a checkered past mixed up eith some baddies on someone else’s behalf a ‘slop movie’, I guess I couldn’t fight them on that. However, given that genre is a perennial favorite of mine, I’m not looking for a wide emotive range from that experience. I want cool fight choreography, inventive cinematography, and badass stunts. If I get that, but Statham gives a wooden performance, I’m still going to think well of the movie (not least of all because it’s largely the same performance as what he gives in his ‘good’ movies too lol).

I guess when I think of the prompt, the actor that comes to mind is like a Ben Kingsley type. Someone who won awards for their acting prowess, but who wound up shoveling out direct to video crap in the twilight of their career.

I don’t know. Blaming Statham for Ghosts of Mars feels like blaming a waiter for the Titanic: he was just along fir the ride.

Only if he’s from Britain, anywhere else and he’s just “sparkling self-satisfied”

Fighting fire with fire, they’ll never see it coming

“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”

“So…seven hot dogs a day.”

“Yeah, probably safe.”

I mean, I can’t speak for everyone, but I do.

Eating a mint to deal with bad breath seems like the equivalent of a 15 year old boy dousing himself with Axe body spray to deal with their BO. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just temporarily masks it, and usually to a lesser degree than you think or hope.

In OP’s defense, I checked out both movies’ Letterboxd ratings, and Blade 1 is rated at 3.5 out of 5, and Blade 2 is sitting at 3.3, so maybe it is just an echo chamber thing. That being said, I really believe this was not the case 10, 15 years ago.

Having sat with it for awhile now, I’m kind of coming around on the notion. I’d have to do a back to back viewing to confirm, but my current hypothesis is that Blade 1 is an excellent urban action-horror picture. It does everything you’d expect it to do pretty well. Blade 2, being a product of Guillermo’s interests, has this weird, quasi-Shakespearian family drama between Nomac, lady vampire, and the patriarch serving as the emotional spine of the picture. It’s fine, but I remember a lot more about their dynamics than I remember about Blade’s arc, which is maybe not what you want from a Blade movie. Plus, all the extra vampire lore and whatnot makes the picture feel less like urban action-horror and more like a fantasy film, which just so happens to have guns and the occasional unwitting human. Not bad, but it does feel like a dry run for ideas Guillermo would do better in other movies.

I was gonna say, how is this entire thread skipping over the take that Blade 2 is a step down from the first? It’s not the craziest movie take I’ve read on here, but it definitely flies in the face of what I understood to be popular opinion.

I’m not saying it’s a brilliant name. Im arguing it is an inconsequential detail that does not matter in the context of the story, and it should be treated as such. You called it “possibly the stupidest artistic choice in cinematic history”. I guess I just find that to be at least as ridiculous as “unobtanium”, if not moreso.

I agree with you in all of the particulars of your argument, but am ultimately unphased by the use of the term. Cameron stopped one step short of calling it MacGuffinite, and I can understand why that would annoy some people. However, within the context of Avatar, it just doesn’t bother me.

If I wanted to conjure an in-universe reason for it, I can do so without straining my credulity too much. Aerospace engineers in the 50s develop a term for a hypothetical wonder material that they can’t get their hands on: unobtanium. Fast forward hundreds of years, and a material is discovered on Pandora which possesses qualities which were previously only thought of as theoretically possible. Perhaps jokingly, perhaps sincerely, the new wonder material is called unobtanium, referencing the fact it is no longer hypothetical, but it’s still damn hard to get a hold of.

Now, I recognize that 1) none of that is explained in the movie, so it’s just head canon, and 2) as you say, calling a material you are actively mining ‘unobtanium’ is stupid. However, I don’t think it’s any more or less stupid than your suggested alternative courses of action given the context of the plot.

If unobtanium had ANY relevance to the story beyond “this is the source of conflict”, I’d wish for more juice there. But Cameron is nothing if not a functional screenwriter. No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, the sole purpose of the scene is to telegraph the third act conflict (and allegorize the Iraq War, to some extent, but he does more with that elsewhere). The screenplay spends only bare minimum amount of time covering that detail before speeding along to more relevant thematic matters.

So, I agree that it’s a dumb contrivance that is clunky. However, it’s just so irrelevant that I don’t care. Call it whatever you want to, the name, like the material itself, is completely inconsequential. Frankly, I’m actually warming to the idea of calling it MacGuffinite. Put a line in that it was named after the first marine to die on Pandora or some such bs. Have your cake and eat it too, a plausible in-universe name, and a tell to not think about it so much.