I saw it this afternoon. I thought it was enjoyable, but for a film meant to celebrate Disney’s 100th anniversary, I was expecting more.
They were supposed to play the “Once Upon a Studio” short in front of Wish, but for whatever reason there was no short.
Chris Pine was excellent as King Magnifico, I was disappointed that he didn’t get much screentime. I was frustrated that Valentino (the goat) didn’t have much to do in the film, and you could remove him from the plot and it would make very little difference. Asha seemed like a nice, funny, dorky kid, but the plot made her seem selfish, and made Magnifico seem completely justified in his decision.
I thought the animation looked…okay. It’s cel-shaded CGI, but it feels like it doesn’t really commit to the style. It mostly feels like any recent Disney animated film but with an added filter. I heard rumors that the film would also be animated in 2D, but that seemed to be reserved for the special effects such as Magnifico’s green magic (or whatever it was called).
I enjoyed the musical numbers, especially “Welcome to Rosas”, “This is The Thanks I Get?!”, and “Knowing What I Know Now”. However, some songs like “This Wish” and “You’re a Star” feel like the songwriters were cramming in too many words (for example “So I make this wish/to have something more for us than this” could have been shortened to “to have something more than this”).
I also heard rumors that every Disney animated character would appear, but unfortunately that’s not the case. There are a few references to other films here and there (and Peter Pan himself has a cameo at the end). I expected the end credits to go all-out on the crossover element (because early screening reactions on social media said to sit through the credits) but it was just a series of constellations in the shape of Disney characters (they even referenced Home on the Range, Chicken Little and Strange World, considered to be some of Disney’s worst animated films!) The whole movie just felt like a wasted opportunity.
In conclusion: if you want to watch a movie with stylized 3D animation about a wishing star, go see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
It is possible from a technical standpoint (look up libdvd or MakeMKV) but it might not be worth it for some titles. Here are some considerations:
➖ Pressed DVDs, as opposed to DVD±R(W)s, last very long and do not take up too much physical space on spindles, in paper sleeves or organizers (depends on your apartment size of course). Drives do fail but can be acquired cheaply (or for free if you salvage them from old PCs and have a USB adapter).
➕ DVDs will always have worse compatibility with modern equipment than MP4. Good luck getting a smart TV to play one from a drive over USB.
➕ For content that only ever existed as SD video, your non-reencoded rip will be pretty much the highest quality available.
➖ That rip will almost certainly be in SD MPEG-2, interlaced (unless it’s a movie), and gigabytes in size, usually a little over 4 or 7 GiB (most discs are single-layer or double-layer and the video bitrate is set to fill the capacity).
You can reduce file size to 10-25% by reencoding to H.264 or H.265, using a lot of computing power and losing a little quality. H.265 does not support interlacing and takes way longer to encode, but you can fit a good-looking 100-minute HD movie on a CD with it! Many pirates overestimate the bitrate they need with H.265, leading to unnecessarily giant release files.
➖ Likely not a concern for you but ripping copy-protected DVDs could be illegal even for personal use while downloading others’ HD rips might not be, like in my country.
DVD subtitles are 1bit bitmaps, ugly and relatively big in terms of storage. Their positioning is tied to video resolution so they will be at the center left if muxed with HD video. The MKV container is the only modern one that handles them at all. Converting to SRT or other text-based formats requires OCR (which does not always fully work). If they aren’t on OpenSubtitles.org, I would rip them, skim the OCR and upload them there.
➖ You will lose interactivity but that was usually more of a nuisance than a feature. I don’t think Bandersnatch or another similarly suitable title ever released on DVD. (Yes, I am confident that DVD Video is just barely capable of holding the entirety of that movie’s footage with full interactivity and everything but I doubt Netflix bothered, it would have cost a fortune.)
I would definitely back up niche DVDs but not mainstream ones – depends on how much you trust the scene to have your back. Up to you, really.
Many years ago I ripped a large number of DVDs, several hundred if not into the thousands, and the vast majority were dual-layer. Very few commercial movie releases were on single-layer disks, at least in the US. It sounds like you may be in another country so your experience may be different but where I am dual-layer disks were far more common.
From what little I understand UK law lets us have personal copies but nothing else. Certainly no distributing (and I wouldnt myself). This is just to make my life easier so I can find a film (or even TV show) easier and have it all in one place.
5-8 years ago this would have been fantastic news.
But Filoni has spiraled into Great Value George Lucas.
“Act as much like a plank of wood as humanly possible.” direction.
Write as boring and inconsistent a plot as possible.
Honestly, everytime I go back and watch ATLA, the first 2-3 episodes are really not that great. And after Filoni left the quality just improved from then on.
Maybe Filoni + Lucas was some sort of magical fusion greater than the sum of its parts, or maybe it was just luck. Either way, Filoni on his own has become this boring stale potato chip writer and has the direction capability of a carpenter.
On Linux, you need the libdvdcss library in order to rip protected DVD’s with vlc.
For legal reasons, it can’t be included by the distros directly but there’s usually a documented way to install it.
Here are two Reddit links I found recently when I wanted to rip some DVDs. I haven’t ripped them yet, so don’t know the best advice, and it’s been a while since I last did it.
I think they want to avoid legal trouble so they won’t distribute DRM-breaking software. Maybe there’s a fork but I would first try libdvd on Linux or MakeMKV on Windows.
I use a two-step process of MakeMKV to do the initial rip and then Handbrake to convert to a more reasonably sized video file. Maybe there are more efficient options, but this one works for me.
MakeMKV is the way to go. If you have enough space, just rip the streams as direct copy without re-encoding. This way you can encode later if needed with the best codec available at that time.
I’ve been doing exactly this the past couple of weeks.
Also I’ve set up a JellyFin server to be able to access my backups. It takes so e tinkering with the folder structure and file names, but once I figured it out it does a pretty good job of scraping metadata. And it saves on the wear-and-tear on my optical drives only having to read each disc once.
Yes, it works with all protected discs I tried. It’s freeware and you only have to pay for Blu-ray support. A small issue is that it will never allow audio-only or subtitle-only MKVs, which would speed up the process of acquiring rare dubs & subs where HD video is available from elsewhere.
It rips the disks 1:1 into MKV format. Honestly, you could probably leave it there and skip the long Handbrake conversion. DVDs are only around 5GB of files.
Also when installing MakeMKV be sure to Google for the free product key from the developers.
Eh, it’s part politics, but also part the way he treats people, including his children. Not a good person outside of his public persona, if all reports are true.
We’re not talking some kind of rapist here, just being an asshole to people that he had no need to be an asshole to, mostly employees.
The political shit is absolutely true, btw, he’s made the statements supporting the ccp and against Hong Kong independence publicly, but I don’t really count that against someone that lives in and/or is from the areas, just not my business (regardless of disagreeing).
The other stuff is fairly well known, but it’s mostly “alleged” because there’s no proof for every bit of it. But you can find the parts about him and his son easy enough, and make your own judgement there.
other people in the thread are more detailed but as hong kong protested being swallowed up he licked the boots of the ccp with his public statements. Hes a shill at this point pure and simple. There is some personal stuff about him but for me I have friends in hong kong. Can you imagine being swallowed up by russia and one of your own saying how its only right and natural and really you are russian. I won't watch a film by him at this point. I think karate kid was actually the last one I saw and I did not really think of it as a jackie chan movie or I might have skipped it. Wish I had as it was pants. Pretty much should do that if I hear a smith child is in the movie at this point.
“I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not. I'm really confused now. If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic,"
“I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want.”
Basically he sold his people out for state benefits and has hoped into bed with the party.
There’s also the parental stuff, basically telling his son to rot in jail after getting arrested with a bit of weed and disowning his lesbian daughter.
I feel iffy on this. I loved the original Karate Kid growing up, but absolutely hated the 2010 remake. Partly because I feel like it is following the trend of just lumping every Asian character into a generic “Kung Fu Guy” stereotype with no room for nuance.
Like, in the original, Mr. Miyagi’s backstory as a Japanese war veteran was pretty significant to his character, and karate being a specifically Japanese fighting style made sense for him to teach.
Not to say you have to be Japanese to learn karate, but that wasn’t even the premise in the 2010 movie, where Mr. Miyagi was swapped out for the Chinese Mr. Han, and the discipline being learned is kung fu, not karate. But that doesn’t matter, does it? Because as far as the white people in the audience are concerned, there’s basically no difference. Asian is Asian, right?
(And being a movie made in cooperation with China Film Group, which is a propaganda arm of the Chinese government, they definitely couldn’t have Mr. Han also be a war veteran who regretted his years of service, because who could ever regret fighting for glorious communism?)
I never saw the Jaden smith film, but that’s a bad joke right? That it’s kung fu, not karate? How did they even think it appropriate to still call it karate??
Yeah, it was fine but as an Asian American, the name bothered me. I dunno why they didn’t just call it “The Kung Fu Kid” and market it as a spiritual successor.
I love that we’re getting all this Asian cinema nowadays, but there’s still more to do. Like you said, lumping all Asians together still. And even still, a lot is all about being Asian. Say what you will about the Fast and Furious movies, but the character of Han is what we need more of. A character that just happens to be Asian, and his whole personality isn’t just “Asian dude”. He’s just a guy, and that’s awesome.
it could be interesting in that the grown 'karate' kid befriends a chinese kung fu artist and theres all kinds of nuance learned between the japanese artform he knows and this new, foreign form, artist and its history.
Aww heck, I think Jaden and Willow are both pretty cool (their parents, not so much). Everybody has an akward teenage phase, his just couldn't be hidden because he's will smith's son.
movies
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.