Scarefish

More so than any other episode, this one feels completely skippable and predictable, and almost seems to be deliberately wasting time stalling for the finale. Charlie literally won't shut up about how Vaggie betrayed her, and lied to her, and was dishonest, and didn't tell the truth, and didn't tell her who she really was, and, literally says to another that this makes her feel angry. This is disasterous for a show that has already shown it can delve into substantive, dark subject matter, but chooses now to string the viewers along with contrived melodrama. Not to mention, this episode features that awful discount-Shakira song that goes "For LooooOOOOooooOOOOoooove." Just a very lazy episode that does little to push the ball forward. I don't come to Hazbin Hotel to get My Little Pony with occasional F-bombs thrown in.

Well, they've finally managed it.

The first Ant-Man nearly had good character moments, it crippled itself with the ever-so-apparent "funny problem" that has been plaguing Marvel's films for many years now. The sequel had much better spectacle - it was genuinely stunning at times; it's nearly enough to let me ignore the heavy Flanderization of all of our established characters. Now we have the third movie, and somehow we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.

The characters have lost all sense of individuality and urgency that they had in the first film, or what little of it they had back then. The ensemble plays off as that of a mid-day American sitcom, and not one of the ones that anybody really emjoys sitting down and watching actively. Full scenes dedicated to Scott's asides are not even the least bit funny as every joke is incredibly obvious and surface-level, oddly sandwiching the film with an incredibly cringe-worthy opening and ending that feel entirely useless. I don't think I have been so disengaged with any piece of media since I saw The Emoji Movie, though there are some sequences where this film at least creeps up to just being plain bad rather than abusively lazy. Scott has pics taken with peoples' dogs, he gets mistaken for Spider-Man, and he has a Hollywood-style panic attack that ends in an anti-climax that thinks it's much funnier than it is. These are the most memorable bits of the story due to their placement at the most crucial sections of the film, and that plays a huge role in sinking this movie's rating for me. It's like they wanted to numb viewers going into the film's first act, and then Sucker Punch them right at the end. This film is creative anaesthesia.

Somehow, with so much special effects and so much money dumped into it, this film manages to be the ugliest film in all of the MCU. I'm sure the special effects actually made the film worse. They spent countless resources ruining their sub-par film to turn it into one of the worst films I've seen in years. M. O. D. O. K. Is shocking; there was a time when Marvel was churning out visually stunning films back-to-back. Even if the other elements of the films were lacking, you could at least rely on popcorn entertainment, but not here. For the first time in the MCU I'm replused by the special effects more often than not - this was trending with some underbaked effects in Black Panther and Black Widow, but I didn't expect it to get to this point so quickly. This feels more like a low-budget TV film managing to seem bigger than it should be through clever effects, but it's a huge big-budget Hollywood film that's crippled by sloppy effects and messy environments through the vast majority of the film. I can only imagine this is due to a lack of cohesive, or decent, artistic direction; the incredibly poor money management on display here is insulting. I've never seen a better example of how bloated film budgets are on the verge of destroying the film industry as a whole, and by this point I'm almost hoping for it to happen already. After the pandemic we just got out of, the last thing we need are thousands of unincredible films that think they're worth our time. At a certain point I just have to say enough is enough and file for a divorce from corporate films.

Quantumania turns the infinitesimal quantum realm into a busy mess nearly as sloppy as its slapdash script.

I guess the team behind Quantumania just didn't quite understand what "less is more" really means.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a show that I struggled through for a month plowing through the painfully childish episodes of the first season, but after I overcame that initial slump the rest of the episodes flew by like nothing. The switch between seasons one and two is night and day and I was pleasantly surprised that a crowd of rabid fans turned out to be right about something for once. I'm usually not a fan of prequel or midquel content, and I especially didn't expect much potential out of a series making sense of Star Wars characters that we seemed to have exhausted a long time ago, but I found myself incredibly attached to Ahsoka and her journey throughout; she is easily one of the most interesting and complex characters that this franchise has ever produced, and the finale left me wanting more, leaving at its peak, which I think was the right move, artistically.

One thing I found strange with the series, however, was its treatment of the battle droids. They simultaneously cutesy up their designs and humanize their personalities here while also upping the physical gags involving them which has an incredibly paradoxical effect of making me feel bad for what should be emotionless evil droids. At times it feels like the heroes are relentlessly bullying harmless, cute, funny robots and I wish they had not gone so hard with their irreverent slapstick humor. These bits would probably be more appropriate as skits in Robot Chicken or something parodying the show. Frustratingly, they tease development some way through the series by repurposing droids to fight for the good guys, and they still don't treat them with any more dignity than the bad droids even though the show had gotten very mature by this point. This show clearly had a big effect in popularizing the battle droids in fanart communities, so it succeeded on that front, but then to also crank up the cruelty towards them just genuinely made me feel bad. It's probably a minor thing for most people, but if you binge the show it really is relentless with such gags.