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BREAKING THE WAVES

Well, this was upsetting. I like how the poster makes this look like a cute rom-com, because it’s not at all. I hadn’t seen a Lars Von Trier movie before, but I knew he was widely known as a controversial/shocking director.
I guess I would describe the plot as a mentally-ill woman with religious psychosis (involving a religion centered around men) can’t exist without her husband and all the men in the movie just kind of take advantage of that. It made me sad to see her keep hurting herself, because she thinks it’s what God and her husband want, and then you see everyone around her judging her for it.
The movie is filmed very realistically, and it feels like you’re just in the room watching everything happen over the characters’ shoulders. People walk awkwardly close and awkwardly far from the camera and it doesn’t cut away from much.
Emily Watson was really good in the lead. She Gollums a lot and she has a pretty wild performance with a wide variety of emotions going on.

I’m going to spoil it, so click this text if you want spoilers.

As much as she suffered for her husband, I’m not sure if she actually loved him as a person. I think she was raised to commit herself to her husband and didn’t know how to live without him. She seems like she would gladly keep him on hospice for years while he’s miserable to even exist.
I said it didn’t cut away from much, but I’m really glad it cut away from the last boat scene. I was about ready to skip a few minutes when I saw her going *back* to the violent rapists on the boat because she believed it would save her husband’s life.
Anyways, they kill her pretty brutally. Interestingly, her husband does recover at the end, and there are moments where it breaks the realism to show the bells of heaven accepting her when she dies (even though the church, which had no bells, had tried to condemn her to hell). It ultimately shows her as being the righteous loving person and not the judgmental townspeople.

I appreciated this a lot more than I enjoyed watching it. It’s not a fun movie at all, and I wouldn’t recommend it for a movie night with the besties, but it conveyed really well what it attempts to convey and made me feel strongly (strongly bad). I remember once when someone told me “War Horse is good, but I wouldn’t want to ever watch it again”, and I never understood what they meant, but I think this is what they meant. Am I losing my edge?
I tagged this as a chick-flick for the lols.
Oh, also shoutout to all the awesome glam rock on the soundtrack. Any movie that kicks off with Hoople and ends with Bowie gets my respect.

THE MARKIPLIER MOVIE

So I watched this in lieu of the Superbowl, and I thought it was interesting.
I’ll get my negatives out of the way first. Some of the dialog I found pretty weak. It’s very obvious that it’s based on a video game, because it introduces information in a way that feels like it’s introducing game mechanics. Like “go over and try the camera”. *Presses button* “wow, this camera will be useful”. There’s also just some cheesy lines that feel like “hey convict, you’re finally awake”, and then the quirky intercom proceeds to give exposition.

Also was not a fan of the way the flashbacks were done. Did not gain any information from the flashbacks that I didn’t already get from the dialog, so I don’t see any need for them to be there.
There were places where the script really could have been better.

I did like the direction on this. The tone is extremely strong, and it feels slow, mysterious, and somber in a good way.
You really don’t know anything except what you’re told and what you see within the ship, and you can’t exactly trust anyone within the story, which lends to it being psychologically creepy.
In some ways, the lower budget works well in restricting the locations and effects that can be shown. You only really see the creatures through glimpses of grainy camera images.

I’m going to spoil things now, so click this text if you want to see it.

As it goes along, it gets super intense. Markiplier rips his arm off. Gallons of blood are dumped into the set. Hardcore to the mega. It’s kind of like if they put Markiplier in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and shook it up for 15 minutes. I like that you’re left never really knowing if he made the right choice in sacrificing himself to give the other humans the data or not. I left feeling simultaneously hopeful and hopeless, so I guess that’s good.

So yeah, rock on, dude.

Not a perfect movie, but I feel more positive about it than negative. I definitely think it’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it.

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1989)

So I watched the bad Phantom of the Opera from the video rental store. And I have thoughts.
This Phantom is super edgy. He sells his soul to the devil and makes his mask out of strips of skin from people he murders. He must smell awful from all that rotten flesh. Seems like sepsis waiting to happen. He somehow makes it look pretty decent with foundation and eyeliners though. Drop the makeup tutorial, king.
I like how the Phantom hangs out at the bar and gets into fights. I don’t know. Just didn’t picture him being the type to leave his lair and go out for a drink.
The horror was kind of hilarious. I don’t think it was supposed to be funny when Christine got hit by the support sandbag, but the ridiculous montage had me laughing. Also some guys try to rob the Phantom in the alley and he just straight up beheads one of them. And the other guy’s like “…nevermind, keep your wallet.”
I’m not sure how he killed someone with a towel either, but that happened.
It’s interesting to hear the Phantom is called Erik “Destler” in this. This seems to be the first use of that last name. I always assumed it came from fanon, because it seems like for whatever reason people really latched onto it within fan works (despite him having different last names within more popular POTO adaptations). He doesn’t have a last name in the original book. That's not super important, but I wanted to go on a tangent.
The ending is awful. The Phantom burns Raoul alive, then Christine shoots him, and then… she wakes up. It was all a dream she had after getting hit by the support bag! And the Phantom is just a regular producer. But then! He’s like “actually I am the Phantom!” And she kills him again. And that’s the movie. (As a sidenote, I love that when she's trying to destroy the sheet music to kill him, she runs straight past a burning barrel and decides to put the sheet music down the storm drain to destroy it instead. Brilliant, Christine.)
Pros… uh… the Don Juan song is pretty? It’s funny-bad to watch?
Robert Englund is a better actor than everyone else, but the character given to him really doesn’t feel like the Phantom of the Opera as much as it does a generic sadistic killer.
(Funny enough, the disc had a fullscreen side and a widescreen side. Was unsurprised to see it’s from 2004, because I just made a post last week in the CD tab about how DualDiscs were popular around that time.)

February 7, 2026

I went to a local video rental store. It's far away from me and has bizarre hours (and I work bizarre hours), which is why I hadn't been in the past. But I figured it's not bad to support them with a membership even if I'm not always able to get a movie.
Anyways, it was a lot of fun. They prioritize rare, out-of-print and imported content that's difficult to find elsewhere, so I feel like I have a whole wealth of knowledge at my fingertips.

Naturally, I got weird Phantom of the Opera movies.

Excited to go back when I have more time and dig through the collection.

BARRY LYNDON

Rewatched this, because I like it.

Kubrick is well-known to be a perfectionist, and every shot of this looks like a moving Victorian painting. I was thinking recently which movies I would buy if I upgraded to 4K, and this was one of the first to come to mind. It’s so uniquely beautiful and there’s no other movie that captures the same feeling.



The movie feels so grandiose, going across decades and several countries, following Barry Lyndon’s rise and fall. He’s not honorable at all. He fights everyone he encounters, gains all of his wealth through ill-gotten means and immediately squanders it. The movie is way too epic for how much of a loser he is. It’s rare for me to side with new characters over already established ones, but I was immediately rooting for Lady Lyndon and Lord Bullington to get revenge in the second half. I felt bad for them.

Anyways, you get to watch Barry Lyndon fail at life in the midst of beautiful desktop backgrounds of 18th century Europe, so what’s not to like?

THIRST

This is so good.
Priest does an experimental treatment and becomes… vampire priest. He is now thirsty for blood (and his friend’s wife).
I too understand the pull of sinful desires, because I like Coca-Cola. Mmm. Delicious guilt in a cup.
There’s such a blend of tones. It can go from hilarious to romantic to scary to dramatic within minutes.
The beginning is kind of depressing. There’s definitely some recurring themes of suicide and it’s not entirely clear whether the main character is joining the experiment to help people or because it has a 1 in 500 chance of survival.
Then in another scene it has the priest and the friend’s wife, Tae-ju, on the rooftop testing his vampire powers and it literally feels like the scene that’s in every superhero origin story. They start jumping around on strings and a lot in the plot is just Twilight-except-good.

The husband and the mom were really irritating. Imagine living with some guy (and his mom) who keeps whining for you to change his hot water bottle while his mom smells his farts to see if he’s healthy. Ew. I see why Tae-ju ran off with the priest in their forbidden sinful vampire romance.
Speaking of which, this couple is really into feet. Like there’s extended toe-sucking scenes between them in a hospital bed next to a coma patient.
Anyways, things happen. He broods around with religious guilt, while she gleefully murders everyone in sight. She’s very crazy and fun. I want to get the gif of her with the scissors, but Tumblr isn’t letting me save it right now, so have a picture of her with a knife sticking out of her chest instead.

Jealousy occurs. Drama occurs. I’m sure the mom was absolutely traumatized seeing everything that went down.
I wasn’t quite sure where the ending is going, but I do love the way it wraps up. The last scene was a good combination of darkly comedic and beautiful.
Anyways, the plot gets crazy and I won’t spoil too much. I had a blast with it. I want to recommend this to people, but it’s probably best to sus out if they’re ok with a certain level of weird first.

PRETTY IN PINK

You need to understand how great the outfits are in this.

Look at these outfits. I mean, the plot is okay. It’s a regular 80s coming-of-age movie. They go to the prom or whatever. All the guys in the love triangle kinda sucked. But these OUTFITS.


Immaculate! I wish I looked as cool as Iona. The final dress was too hyped up though.

MERCY

I was looking for things to watch with my AMC A-List, and this awful poster popped up. I thought, “Hmm… I could see something critically acclaimed that's supposed to be good, or I could see that hideous-looking thing.”

Disappointingly, I bought my ticket three minutes before showtime, and it said the theater would be empty, but then six people showed up in the theater at the last minute. Go away. It was really hard to stifle my laughter at this and I wanted to Mystery Science Theater it.

The plot is just Minority Report if Minority Report wasn’t good. I’m very confused on what the message was, because what was presented clearly seemed bad and there was a sarcastic trailer at the beginning presenting the AI justice world as a dystopia, but then the AI suddenly acts very human and helpful and he uses it to save the day? It also kind of portrays the surveillance state as a helpful tool? And at the end they say "yeah, y'know, it's flawed but it works i guess". What message are they trying to get across? Nothing in this dystopia looks appealing, but the writing seems to support it? I was unsurprised to see the Amazon Studios production credit.

I love how it says “the AI has convicted 18 people, reducing the Los Angeles crime rate by 68%”. How much crime were those 18 people responsible for??

So Chris Pratt sits in a chair on trial and his acting is hilariously bad. He’s not this bad in other movies, so I’m not sure what he’s even going for here, but he’s screaming every line even if it’s not that serious. The basic plot is he has to prove that he didn’t kill his wife to the AI judge in 90 minutes or he gets executed. But we’re also told that he was one of the main people responsible for this corrupt justice system in the first place, and then we see a bunch of footage of him drunkenly abusing his wife, so you really don’t feel bad for him at all and just sit there rooting for him to die. You get to the end of the movie and it's like, "oh no the man whose homeless brother was wrongfully killed by the system is trying to blow up the AI. i hope chris pratt can save the robot in time.". Maybe Amazon could buy Star Wars and make a movie that tells me to root for the Empire.

There’s action scenes in this that are just police body cam footage watched through a screen and I was trying so hard not to laugh at every one. There’s a scene where Chris Pratt freaks out in a bar and throws a bunch of peanuts and gets arrested. Then there’s two car chases that both look exactly like when you wreck the car in GTA5 and the car flies off a ramp and flips a thousand times and the people just flop out onto the road.

The police footage was clearly intended to look “cool”, but it had the opposite effect. They also say “easy grab” and “release the drone” which kept taking me out of the movie and making me think of Charles Stiles Mystery Diners.

There were so many twists and turns and “no, he was his brother all along” and “no, the brother was innocent the whole time” and “no, actually the partner cop was corrupt and not the AI”. Has enough pointless twists to rival The Sniper 2.

Of course, there are some positives… The movie is in real time, so there’s a ticking timer in the corner of the screen. This was great, because it saved me having to check how much time was left on my phone throughout the boring movie. All bad movies should just automatically have this feature to let you know how much suffering is left.
Also… hmm... yeah, that’s all the positives I can think of. Might be the worst thing I’ve seen since the Flash. If any movie deserves a 1-star rating, it’s this.

DEATH NOTE LIVE ACTION MOVIE BINGE

I decided to binge-watch all of the movie adaptations of Death Note (except for Light Up The New World, because it wasn’t available for rent, stream or purchase).
For anyone wanting to get into Death Note, please watch the anime or read the manga and don’t start with any of these. They are best viewed as supplemental material if you already like the series.
I'm also not bothering with spoiler tags, so if you're unfamiliar with Death Note, read at your own risk.


Death Note (2006 Live Action)


Kicking it off, this movie looks great. Really captures the beautiful gothic art style of Death Note, and the special effects held up really well with age. The budget looked a lot higher than the 300 yen reported by the producers, and I’ve never seen a movie that looked just as good in 240p. An outstanding artistic achievement.
The non-stop whip-pans and zooms accompanied by “dun dun” sounds were absolutely genius. I wouldn’t have felt the full emotional impact of the deaths without this editing choice. The extras did an amazing job falling over and clutching their hearts. At one point, I audibly gasped because I genuinely believed the acting was real.
I loved the use of visual storytelling when Light threw the law book with exaggerated anger into the trash. They could have just told us he was upset about the legal system, but instead they showed it with classy subtlety. Everything about this movie was subdued and mature.
Light’s girlfriend, Shiori, was very important and I can’t imagine Death Note without her.
My only con is that I think they forgot to export the background music, but at least someone had the rights to the lyrically and sonically appropriate Red Hot Chili Peppers song about California to blast over the final scene. Rock music makes everything cooler.
I recommend watching this as your first entry to the Death Note franchise. Just jump right in there. I can’t wait to watch the 15 sequels to this so I can feel like a real man.


Death Note 2: The Last Name


Despite the laughably bad title, this one wasn’t as bad as the first. It has many of the same problems, but a lot of the exaggerated nonsense felt toned down, and it focused more on the dialogue between the main three, who all gave good performances.
Probably the worst opening credits scene I’ve ever seen. I had to pause for a minute to process what had just occurred.
This is my favorite live-action Death Note movie, but that’s really not saying much.


Death Note (2017, Netflix)


I feel like I was too harsh on the 2006 movies.
When you change everything about the characters, are they still even the characters?
Light “Turner” is a white American introduced wearing frumpy clothes in a scene where he exchanges test answers for money. What happened to the whole “justice, moral code, hating corruption in society” thing?
Light Turner is not smart. His father and teachers don’t like him, because he’s a rebel. He’s socially awkward and pines after Misa (I mean Mia). Immediately after murdering a classmate, he shows the death note to his crush and confesses to the murder. Brilliant, Light.
Mia then proposes that they could use it to change the world. The new world is not Light’s idea, because no one on the writing team actually read any of the source material before adapting this.
Mia had absolutely *nothing* in common with Misa and it took me about halfway through the movie to even realize that’s who she was supposed to be.
The Ryuk effects are eh, but at least they recognized this and were smart enough to shroud him in shadows so it’s less obvious. Willem Dafoe was noticeably on another level from the other actors.
L’s character was the most intact. At least he was a detective… called L… who sits weirdly. I mean, the bar is pretty low here after seeing what they did to Light and Misa. Take a shot every time L knocks something off a table like a cat.
I like my Death Note to have generic high-school prom scenes where they play Chicago and Air Supply. Also it’s really edgy and cool when they say “fucking fuck” and add in a bunch of gore scenes. The heart attacks were kinda boring so I’m glad they exploded some heads in this one.
I am left with many questions such as “Why did Atticus Ross do the music for this?” and “Was Trent Reznor held hostage by Netflix to make Atticus Ross do the music for this?”
By far the worst live-action Death Note.


L: change the WorLd


Death Note 3: L Saves the WorLd from EboLa is exactly as stupid as it looks. I did the self-checkout at the library, because this cover is embarrassingly bad. Highly recommend if you want to watch L babysit and eat sugar for 2 hours.
I now know that L is the kind of parent who knows their kid has a severe contagious illness and still brings them coughing to the grocery store.
The virus feeding off of sugar was a hilarious twist. Just have him die of diabetes at this point.
Honestly, the guy who plays L does a good job, but this script is awful. I feel like for an L spinoff movie to work, it needs to have a really compelling mystery story and walk through his process of solving it. It’d be better if he had a partner on the case so we could hear some of his insights. He’s kinda just silent and odd and looks depressed and I have no idea what he’s thinking for half the movie.
We’ve screwed it up with alternate timelines and endings already, so we might as well have a banger Silence-of-the-Lambs type of story where he has to team up with Light to solve the final case. Maybe throw in some supernatural elements to the mystery as well, considering this is Death Note. Whatever we got was just boring. Maybe I’ll go write fanficiton.


Death Note: The Musical (2015)


Not technically a movie, but this is the best live-action one, I don’t care.
For anyone unfamiliar, the musical is adapted by Frank Wildhorn, who makes a lot of gothic-style musicals full of beautiful ballads… and more beautiful ballads… and more beautiful ballads. This makes for great soundtrack albums, but very monotonous stories when you watch them live or filmed. Everyone kind of just stops the story every two minutes to belt melodramatically, and you don’t really have enough variety of emotions to keep it interesting.
That being said, absolutely beautiful music on this soundtrack. Rem and Ryuk were definitely the standout actors. The musical adds more to the relationship between Rem and Misa, which is beautifully tragic. The female characters in general feel more fleshed out in this compared to the original Death Note, which, uh, doesn’t like women too much.
L and Light’s back and forth duets while they psychoanalyze each other are very fun. Calling the tennis song "Inside of Him" was a choice. They have more duets on the original soundtrack album, I believe, but it was probably a good decision to cut one or two. As much as I like the songs, it would have been the same information being repeated, which isn’t really necessary. They also set this version of the musical back in Japan, which I prefer to the original production’s westernization.
In conclusion, it’s a guilty pleasure. They needed to sing.


Death Note (2015 J-Drama)


Filmed like a workplace instructional video. I don’t even think they mic-ed the audio correctly, because the background noise was weirdly loud sometimes. There was one point where the same wind stock sound kept repeating over and over. There’s got to be more than one wind stock sound you can use, right?
The L logo looked like they drew the outline with the basic Procreate line brush, and colored it in with the soft round Procreate brush, but they didn’t completely fill the edges. You need to polish it a little more, guys.
The music was extremely dramatic, but never fit the scene. I’m very sure they just looked up “action movie stock music” and downloaded the first thing that popped up.
I know the budget is low, but when I’m sitting there thinking “I could edit the sound better on iMovie”, it’s less of a budget issue and more of a skill issue. There’s plenty of great low-budget content on YouTube that make the technical elements of this look lazy.
Let’s see what else…
- Hearing the Cinemasins sound during a dramatic scene was funny.
- Misa’s concert felt like a local bar act.
- L is just some hot guy with none of his original character traits.
- We don’t talk about puppet Mello.
But at the end of the day, none of this matters. Because Death Note is not a story, but a vehicle for homoerotic shower scenes. L and Light find any excuse to get shirtless and spout romantic dialogue at each other.
For anyone who wanted a final confrontation scene between them where L turns off the cameras and they punch each other out and both try to write each others’ names while tragically confessing their love to each other, then you should watch this.
Also Light has a flashback to their shower scene after killing L.
2.5 out of 10 as a Death Note adaptation
7 out of 10 as a cheaply-produced Lawlight porno


(Bonus!:) Death Note: Another Note — The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases


I know it's not a movie, but I'm going to throw in this book that I read as well. It's a very fast fluffy read if you just want something entertaining to skim over a lunch break or something (that's what I did).
It's really cool, because the more you think about it, the worse it gets. The entire case is just built on random letters flipped in different ways. Like maybe the victims names were meant to spell "BBQQBB", but the one was flipped upside-down so it's intended to read "BBQ BBQ" to foreshadow Beyond Birthday burning himself like barbeque. It wasn't, but that's the level of made-up nonsense we're dealing with here, so why not at this point? Maybe "L After B B" wasn't meant to be read as "LABB", but literally as "BBL", y'know?
I like how Naomi savagely roasts everyone upon meeting them. I don't know why she does this, but it made me laugh a couple times. She also keeps calling L on unsecured lines in public spaces in front of suspicious individuals, so it doesn't seem like she was a very good FBI agent.
The story keeps teasing you with some tragic thing that got Naomi expelled from the FBI in the past, and there's a point where it just becomes funny. Just tell me what happened, Mello.
Oh yeah, all of this is told from the perspective of Mello, who did not witness any of the events, and I have no idea why it even needs a framing device.
But my favorite part is how the villain in this is basically just described as looking "exactly like L, but with red eyes and he's a serial killer". All I can picture in my head is someone's lazy DeviantArt Death Note OC where someone traced and recolored L, and I think that's hilarious.


Final Thoughts on the Live Action Death Note Binge:
In conclusion, Death Note is an odd story to adapt. It’s split into three completely different acts, which works well as arcs of a TV show, but it’s hard to condense into one coherent movie. Most of these adapt the first third, then rush everything and jump directly to the ending, often making up their own ending to tie everything together. Adaptation-wise, it probably would work best as a trilogy of movies, unless you just want to make things up. I’m generally pretty open to changing the source material for the sake of adapting it to a new medium, as long as the changes are done with an understanding of the themes and characters (unlike the pointless Netflix changes).
Now that I’m out of bad Death Notes to watch, I’ll have to find something else to give my life meaning.