November | 2023 | unshavedmouse

Well. That was anti-climactic.

I feel like a knight who’s been on a quest to slay a terrible dragon for a decade only to arrive at the top of the mountain and find the dragon’s around the size of a chicken and died several years ago from old age.

In the early days of this blog I built up Planes as a personal bete noir, a movie I would never, ever review because it represented the worst of crass, merchandise driven movie-making for both Disney in particular and animation in general.

Oh my. How innocent I was. How innocent we all were.

But after years of the absolute garbage I have had to sit through for you people (love you all) it is with a heavy heart that I must report that Planes is…fine?

I mean, it is aggressively mediocre, don’t get me wrong. But, given the state of Disney’s output at present, there’s something refreshing about a movie that manages to hit a solid C.

In fact, I would say it was one of the most safely boring movies I’ve seen all year were it not for the fact that it’s set in the Cars universe and therefore is, as all movies in that benighted franchise are, weird as fuck.

WHAT KIND OF LIFE DOES THIS POOR CREATURE HAVE?!

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This map is wrong:

That’s not to say it’s bad.

It’s very useful.

It’s informative.

It is even, when you take a step back and consider it, quite beautiful. But it’s wrong.

The continents aren’t that size relative to each other. Not even close. Of course, you could use a different projection that shows them the correct relative size, something like this:

But now all the continents’ shapes are distorted nearly to the point of being unrecognisable.

Every 2 dimensional map of the world is wrong because, obviously, the world is not flat (I swear to God if anyone starts shit in the comments…). Ultimately, any attempt to render a three dimensional sphere as a 2 dimensional rectangle is, well, a lie. It’s an attempt to simplify that will always lead to distortion one way or another.

I love historical films. I hate historical films.

This was going to be a review of Inherit the Wind.

It became something else.

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