Oh ok, I didn'r remember it was that "new". Yes I am talking about the awful Stallone movie. It certainly had that tacky 80s vibe to it.

edit: double post finally appeared

Bruckheimer has the Midas touch.* Also / therefore, it has a terrific cast (Eccleston, Olyphant, Lindo, et alia) original music from The Cure and Foosed cars! We bought the two films together but have only watched the original once, whereas the remake is worth a bucket of popcorn every now and again. :)

I see he also started a games company (2009) but closed the studio four years later without a released. (No wonder I hadn't heard about it.)

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* A lot of his films haven't aged that well, though (Armaggedon springs to mind —— who thought Ben Affleck screaming his lines for the last half hour was a good idea? —— perhaps that was Michael Bay's fault), but they were certainly good at release (like, say, The Rock).

What you write here is my experience with the last movie in the previous trilogy, the name I forgot long ago. I found Phantom Menace and the one after so bad, that I had no hope for the 3rd movie. I really enjoyed the lightsaber battle in the arena. (I don't discuss the "i have the higher ground anakin" battle without mocking it however.) And tying it to A New Hope at the end gave me chills when infant Luke and Leia were separated and sent to their respective homes.
I have not seen Rise of Skywalker yet and don't think I will. My enthusiasm for SW died a long time ago in a galaxy that I live in. The two prior movies were really bad that I can't stomach another bad SW movie.

See, here's the thing - what killed a lot of people's enthusiasm is what gave me the ability to approach new Star Wars movies in a much more relaxed way, and enjoy them even if they're not very good. My capacity to be shocked or dismayed or offended by SW being utter crap was exhausted with the prequels. SW can't "hurt" me anymore. If they manage to make something really good, like Rogue One, I'm super happy, but when they make shit like Last Jedi I just sort of shrug. And when we get something like Solo and Rise, kinda stupid and not to be compared with the originals, but still fun in they're own right then I'm willing to be forgiving of a lot of issues and enjoy the ride.

One game that's better than you'd expect is Quest RPG: Brian's Journey. It's not perfect, but it's better than you'd expect a Game Boy Color version of Quest 64 to be.

While not all the music made it in, and some tracks have been shortened, what's there is surprisingly well done.

It even adds some extra story, and it also avoids some of the original game's issues. In particular, getting turned around in dungeons isn't a thing in this game, at least not to any more extent than it would be in a typical 2D JRPG.

The one issue is that, if you don't use your staff as a weapon, you likely won't gain any HP, and you will therefore have some trouble surviving the endgame. There's also the lottery which feels rather pointless, to be honest; it should have just been a store instead.

If you liked Knives Out you should also watch Crooked House.

When I started watching Crooked House I had a deja vu to the beginning of Knives Out, to the point that I wondered if they were an adaptation of the same story. Thankfully they ended up being different. Both were good, but I did liked Crooked House a lot better.

Games:

- Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. I didn’t really know what to expect going into this game. I wanted a third person action type game that could satisfy a similar itch to the Dark Souls series while being different, and I came across a recommendation for this game. It was on sale here at the time, so I picked it up. It turned out to be one of the best video game purchases I’ve ever made. It was fun, challenging, and though many people say the plot is meh, I found it quite intriguing, especially when things transition to the endgame. I unfortunately did not get far into the endgame content or even touch the expansion due to a crash causing me to lose a discouraging amount of progress in the endgame, but I have incredibly fond memories of the game and will definitely revisit it when I get the chance.

- Arcanum: Of Steamworka and Magick Obscura. As many times as I’ve tried to get into the pre-Bethesda Fallout titles, I just never could get the same enjoyment out of them that so many others have. I’ve started Fallout so many times since I first bought it, but I just don’t enjoy it. I find it a dull experience through and through. I heard many comparisons to the early Fallout titles when I bought Arcanum, so I was incredibly apprehensive. Turns out I didn’t need to be. I found Arcanum to be so much more enjoyable in every way that I endured the game’s rough edges and spent more time than I’d like to admit just waiting for my stamina (or whatever it was called) to refill between battles.

Films:

- Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night. I’ve never seen the original silent film, but I stumbled across Werner Herzog’s remake (reimagining?) on Amazon Prime video. Intrigued and expecting a cheesy-but-charming-in-a-70’s-movie-way. I was so wrong. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the movie was scary, it was definitely creepy, and beautiful in the most eerie way. It was strange and sometimes distressing and there were moments I stared in open-mouthed horror-confusion at what was going on, partly because it was occasionally bizarre in a weirdly realistic way and partly because I wasn’t always sure what exactly was happening. Something about the cinematography has stuck with me ever since, too. Several wide or slightly distant shots of characters walking through beautifully creepy scenery with nothing but footsteps or ambient noise to accompany them—little to no music—were far more effective in creating atmosphere than anything I’ve seen before or since. Great movie.

- The Book of Eli. I heard a lot of mixed things about this movie, and I’ll admit that I really only watched the movie because I’d seen one of the fight scenes on YouTube and thought it would be a cool post-apocalyptic action movie. I went in with low expectations, but I was quite surprised. The opening music, some of the shots of Eli’s travels, the fight scenes, the incredible foreshadowing of his blindness, the central plot point of the titular book, the scene where Eli gets shot and Denzel’s acting in that scene—look, there’s a lot I like about this movie, and while I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a masterpiece, I enjoyed it far more than I expected to.

- The Man from UNCLE. This one has already been mentioned, but I feel like it deserves another. I’ve never seen the TV show on which it is based, but I expected the movie to be little more than an average James Bond-esque spy thriller. I didn’t expect it to have interesting characters, a decent amount of humor that was never too in your face, and some beautifully shot moments.

I just saw knives out last week and loved it. I've now got a request in for crooked house with my local library. Thanks for the suggestion.

Utlima 5 DOS version.

This was far better than I expected mainly because my only prior exposure to Ultima 5 was via the NES version, which is an objectively bad game (kuso-level bad, if you know what that means, or in a league with games like ET and Superman 64 (and Arabian Nights PC, if you want a comparison to a game available here)). On the other hand, the DOS version (and probably every other version of the game) is actually pretty good, being more like Ultima 4 than the NES Ultima 5.

Of course, the game still has its issues; the Shadowlords' random appearances in towns, the fact that leveling up requires a random event (Lord British appearing when you sleep), and the fact that you still need reagents for even the most basic of spells, only now each reagent shop only sells a proper subset of the buyable reagents (so even if you're wealthy, you still need to visit multiple towns to get all the reagents you need). (It also doesn't help that the Gate spell now requires that you be 8th level to cast, making a once handy convenience spell now likely unusuable for most players.)

No Ultima game is perfect, but at least computer versions of Ultima 5 are at least decent, unlike the NES version.

(On the other hand, Ultima 4 got an excellent NES version, even if it's not exactly faithful to the original.)