Review: "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" is bold, beautiful, and brilliant

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is only half a movie, and it still makes damn near every other superhero film ever made look like Morbius. 

Let’s start there: Nine times out of ten, when a movie splits itself into Part 1 and Part 2, it’s either because someone in the C-suite with a spreadsheet decreed it as a way to boost and spread out the earnings, or because a filmmaker’s head grew too big and they’ve inflated the run-time with copious amounts of ego. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or The Hunger Games: Mockingjay didn’t need to be two parts, but the math on the spreadsheet made sense. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune didn’t need to be two parts, but we’ve decided any book worth adapting can’t be done within 2 to 3 hours anymore, so it got (awkwardly) split in half. Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac didn’t have one movie’s worth of ideas in it, let alone two, but that ego got awful big, and so five-and-a-half hours of that crap were unleashed upon the world. 

 

Across the Spider-Verse is different. This is the exceptionally rare case where once you’ve seen it, you believe the filmmakers 100% when they say they intended to make one movie and eventually found themselves telling too much story, tackling too many themes, to fit within the confines of a single feature film. And by the time the end credits roll, you know they’ve made the right call, because the film is using that space and that breathing room to make something profoundly beautiful: To deepen character, establish setting, and artistically experiment in ways and to profound degrees Hollywood movies, let alone superhero films, very rarely do. It moves us, it dazzles us, it enlightens us – and by the time it tells us “To be continued,” we trust it implicitly. It’s earned the faith and then some. 

 

Of course, Across the Spider-Verse already had an awful lot of faith going in. Its immediate predecessor, 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse, is the single most aesthetically bold and visually inventive film produced and released by a Hollywood studio in my lifetime, and it isn’t a particularly close competition. In an era where both animated and live-action productions have been largely drained of imagination, ambition, and technical skill, Spider-Verse felt like it dropped out of an alternate dimension, a kaleidoscopic explosion of color and texture and motion that broke every rule of the industry’s overly-homogenized 3D animation market. Saying it’s one of the 2 or 3 best superhero films ever made feels like damning its mammoth accomplishment with faint praise. The prospect of a sequel has obviously been extremely exciting, but still, in the back of my head, at least a small part of me worried: Would they be allowed to be that adventurous again? The first film’s influence on the industry has already been vast (see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film for evidence), but it ‘only’ made $384 million worldwide. Maybe Sony – whose last live-action Spider-Man, the reprehensibly awful stand-in for all the terrible things Spider-Verse wasn’t, No Way Home, grossed close to $2 billion – would tighten the reins, demand something simpler, something more familiar, something closer to what the spreadsheet would ask for. Do we really live in the world where we could get two of these things? 

 

Well, let me put it this way: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now the single most aesthetically bold and visually inventive film produced and released by a Hollywood studio in my lifetime, and it’s only competition isSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Review: "Fast X" is fun, and that might just be enough

You know what? Maybe there’s some gas left in this tank after all. 

I wasn’t sure after the last two entries in the Fast & Furious saga, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious and 2021’s F9, the two worst films in the franchise. The former had its moments, but with a dark and miserabilist story that split Vin Diesel from the rest of the ‘family’ right at the moment the franchise first had to craft a film from the ground-up without his on-screen best buddy Paul Walker, it miscalibrated how grim the series could go before it became dull and off-putting. F9 inherited many of these problems, once again sending Dominic Toretto off on his own in a too-dour plot, but it floundered even harder because it felt like a movie being made by someone who was fundamentally unhappy to be making it. Justin Lin made the series the singularly silly (but deeply lovable) international success it is today with his run of entries from Tokyo Drift through Fast & Furious 6, but with F9, any joy he once had smashing these characters and cars together felt like it was long gone, and it wasn’t particularly surprising when he walked off the set of Fast X a week into production. Whether Diesel had simply become too demanding to work with, or Lin just didn’t have another one of these movies in him (both perfectly understandable, and both probably true to varying degrees), a change had to be made. 

 

Fast X (eventually helmed by Louis Leterrier, of Transporter fame) is not the series in its prime – even as it makes copious references to the most beloved entry, Fast Five – but it is a surprisingly solid return to form. While Lin’s fingerprints are still all over the film – he co-wrote the screenplay, and surely had most of the set-pieces thoroughly mapped out – Leterrier does seem happy to be here, and there’s a general energy to the finished film that was sorely lacking in the last two installments, an energy that can only be described as ‘fun.’ Diesel glowers less, and has some real human interactions (with Dom’s son ‘Little B,’ with Michelle Rodriguez’ Lettie, and a few others over the course of the adventure) while the supporting cast has a greater pep in their step, and the action feels invigorated by its physics-defying stupidity, rather than weighed down by the labor of it all, as I felt watching F9. The film successfully recaptures at least some of the scale and insanity of the series’ best entries (Fast Five and Furious 7, if you’re asking me), and while it has its fair share of issues, by the time we make it to the bonkers, go-for-broke cliffhanger ending, I was on board again. This is, at least in part, the series I fell in love with; the spark, which I feared completely extinguished this time two years ago, is still flickering.

Review: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" hits the right notes

Depending on how you look at it – and how the next few years of superhero movies turn out – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is either a strong return to form for a Marvel that’s been mostly creatively wayward since Avengers: Endgame, or a stirring eulogy for the kind of movie the studio simply has no interest in making anymore. Either way, James Gunn’s return to this corner of the MCU brings with it all the things Marvel’s post-2019 films (and Disney+ shows) have been missing: Color (literally and figuratively, in that it’s a film filled with both many rainbow hues and a lot of personality); texture (real sets, real costumes, amazing make-up and prosthetics, and CGI that is used smartly and judiciously and displays real artistry); humor (not machine-generated ‘quips’, but actual character-driven gags that are authentically funny); craftsmanship (there’s actual blocking and choreography and cinematography and honest-to-god production design here, not just confused actors standing in front of blurry video walls); and most of all, heart and humanity. This is a movie made because somebody had a story to tell and a passion for realizing it, not because somebody in Disney’s C-suite picked an IP out of a bucket and put it up on the calendar years ago. It is arguably overlong and definitely shaggy in places, but what it isn’t is a soulless sequence of loosely connected events filling in boxes on a checklist or setting up future stories for the content mill. It’s a real movie, warts and all, and Marvel hasn’t made one of those in a while. 

Review: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 is an absolute action masterpiece

God. Damn. 

Calling John Wick: Chapter 4 one of the great action films in the history of the cinema feels like underselling it, somehow. It’s bigger than that. It’a a tour-de-force of kineticism on par with the silent film greats that inspired Germaine Dulac to declare ‘movement’ the essence of cinema, the definition of cinégraphie, or Jean Epstein to declare animism the soul of cinema. It is a testament to light and color and shapes in constant motion, in a breathtakingly synchronized dance, the possibilities of the art form itself made manifest in the incredible images captured here and the relentless momentum with which they are strung together, pushing the viewer into a powerful out of body experience. 

Put less prosaically: It’s possible no movie has ever kicked more ass than this one. 

Jonathan Lack's Top 10 Films of 2022

Let’s try something different this year. 

This is, as it says on the tin, a Top 10 list. It includes 10 numbered items counting down from 10 to 1, and it is indeed about my favorite films of 2022. It’s not quite a Top 10 films list, since it includes 21 movies, some listed on their own, others grouped together thematically. As I surveyed everything I saw this year, I realized that while this was in many ways a great year for movies, it was also a deeply (and enjoyably!) weird one, and my experiences with cinema these past 12 months didn’t feel like they would fit neatly into the traditional Top 10 format. 

 

So I’ve blown things up a little this time out, as you shall see, arranging 21 films into 10.5 slots that combine to tell a story about which movies – and, perhaps even more importantly, which kinds of movies – meant most to me this year. I wrote my first year-end Top 10 list in 2006, a full 16 years ago now, and I’ve never really messed with the format much. After letting myself play with it here, I don’t know if I can go back the old, rigid format – this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had putting a list like this together. 

 

One way this year was odd is that many of the best movies to hit American shores in 2022 were international or festival holdovers from 2021, the date you’ll see attached to many of the films here if you look them up on IMDB or Letterboxd. My rules for Top 10 lists have always been simple: if it was commercially released for the first time in the United States in 2022, it’s eligible. Thus, if a film premiered in its home country in 2021, but didn't become commercially available in the US until 2022, then for my purposes, it's a 2022 film. Same for films that had festival debuts in 2021 (or earlier!) but didn't become commercially available in the US until 2022. So even if, in the history books, quite a few of these films will be listed as 2021, these are films that opened in theaters or debuted on streaming in the US this year. 

 

Without further ado, let’s get right down to it – we have a lot to get through, and I’m very excited about all of it. 

Review: Holy cow, "Avatar: The Way of Water" is actually really good

It’s hard to describe what, exactly, I was feeling walking into Avatar: The Way of Water. When we revisited the original film on The Weekly Stuff Podcast in September, I described my main takeaway as ‘a bad script brilliantly directed,’ putting a bit more emphasis on the ‘brilliantly directed’ part given how aesthetically bankrupt Hollywood blockbusters have for the most part become in the years since its release. The ‘bad script’ part absolutely shouldn’t be overlooked, of course; it’s a film with ludicrously thin characterizations, often laughably terrible dialogue, and a ‘white savior’ narrative so extreme and overbearing it makes past Hollywood ventures into this territory, like Dances With Wolves, look positively sober and progressive. But it’s a film that imagines and executes on a greater creative scale than virtually anything else the industry is capable of these days, and even though I’m sometimes on the less enthusiastic side when it comes to James Cameron – I think the original Terminator and Titanic are genuine masterpieces, but I’m less high on Aliens and Terminator 2 than most – I’m never going to deny that he’s one of the most formidably capable cinematic craftsman in the media’s history. There’s plenty of good raw material in that first Avatar to mine for a sequel, and especially with this second film heading to Pandora’s oceans – underwater-aficionado Cameron’s home turf – I was cautiously optimistic The Way of Water might be something special. 

In short: It absolutely is.

Review: "The Fabelmans" finds Spielberg the master and Spielberg the sentimentalist in a war for autobiographical supremacy

If they live long enough, many if not most great filmmakers wind up making a reflexive piece about their life and/or art: Fellini’s 8 ½ , Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Kurosawa’s Dreams, Malick’s The Tree of Life, Cuarón’s Roma, or (in a slightly more oblique way), Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. That Steven Spielberg would eventually join these ranks was probably inevitable, but some directors are better equipped to do this than others. How the ‘creative autobio’ piece would work for this particular filmmaker was a genuinely open question for me going into The Fabelmans. 

Spielberg is unquestionably one of the greatest to ever sit in the director’s chair, and clearly one of the most preternaturally talented. The man speaks in film more fluently than most of us speak our native tongue. His skill for visual storytelling, across a wide array of genres, is second to none, and has not waned one iota with time. To see him reflect on a life in the pictures and where those talents and impulses come from, how he learned his craft and what role it played in his foundational memories of adolescence, would of course be welcome.  

 

But Spielberg is also a director who, over time, has developed a parallel streak as a cloying sentimentalist. I say this with love, as many who have made the same observation do. While his talents behind the camera have never wavered, they have sometimes been unfortunately tempered by an inability to land the punch, to go for the gut and push towards the deepest possible truth, instead of pulling at the heartstrings for a more surface-level catharsis. Where he could once end a movie with savage honesty – most obviously in Close Encounters of the First Kind – he gradually turned into the guy who’d ease up before making the follow-through, like in War of the Worlds when the son inexplicably survives, or let an otherwise note-perfect film like Lincoln continue five minutes past a hauntingly perfect, suggestive conclusion to rub our nose in the tragedy. For all the films he’s made that can comfortably be considered masterpieces, up to and including last year’s West Side Story, there’s also dreck like Hook or War Horse that are drowning in unearned sentimentality, cloying at the heart without a center of substance, Thomas Kincade paintings springing into motion and leaving a unpleasant aftertaste of false sweetener in the mouth. Would a lightly-veiled memoir film about his childhood bring out the best in Spielberg, or invite his worst impulses to run rampant? 

If I Had a Sight and Sound Ballot – My Picks for the 10 (And 100) Greatest Films of All Time

 

Every ten years, the British film magazine Sight and Sound conducts a poll of prominent critics and academics to determine what are the ‘Greatest Films of All Time.’ It is the most notable and prestigious version of this list, the place where Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane cemented its reputation over the decades as the most commonly cited ‘greatest film,’ and where its dethroning by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the 2012 edition became big news (that was a ridiculous result – Citizen Kane is emphatically the better movie). With ten years having passed since the last edition, we’re on the cusp of getting the 2022 version of the list, with results expected in late November. 

 

I haven’t been asked to participate this time – maybe in 2032, with this whole doctorate thing wrapped up, I’ll be in the running! – but I’ve always wanted to take a stab at the intellectual exercise of naming what I think are the ‘greatest films of all time.’ It’s a tough task – very different, I think, from saying what one’s ‘favorite’ films are. That’s relatively easy; everybody has favorite movies, and you only need to justify them by saying how they’ve spoken to you, personally. Identifying the greatest movies ever, in a critical and historical sense, is a different exercise altogether. I don’t think I would have felt remotely qualified to even attempt an answer until relatively recently; but having crossed into my 30s and nearing completion on my PhD in film studies, I think I can provide an answer with a reasonable degree of experience and authority, using the knowledge gathered from a decade as a film academic and two decades as a film critic to try putting my finger on what I would call the ‘best’ movies ever made.

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #450 – The HALLOWEEN Episode: Revisiting the Original John Carpenter Classic

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a very special Halloween episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast, as we’re here on this very spooky day for a deep-dive retrospective review of one of the greatest films ever made: HALLOWEEN, the original John Carpenter classic from 1978 that introduced the world to The Shape, to Jamie Lee Curtis, to one of the most iconic film music themes of all time, and to a hilariously unwieldy franchise that has only gotten stranger over time. But this original film stands very tall on its own as one of the greatest triumphs of American independent filmmaking, a note-perfect exercise in pacing, cinematography, editing, and every other fundamental that makes film great. It’s an absolute joy to talk about, but that’s not all we have on this episode! We also review the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again! in depth and talk a little about the multiplayer, before discussing some Doctor Who news and puzzling over what’s going on with Henry Cavill and The Witcher. 

 

Enjoy!

 

Time Chart:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:02:37

Modern Warfare II: 0:02:37 – 0:32:42

News: 0:32:42 – 1:03:43

Halloween: 1:03:43 – 3:09:39

 

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

Japanimation Station #10 – Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Round-up! The Sacred Star of Milos & Live-Action Trilogy

Welcome to Japanimation Station, an anime podcast brought to you by the folks at The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are here to dive into the wide and wacky world of anime, and you can subscribe on all platforms at JapanimationStation.Com.

In our 1^st-season finale, we conclude our series of Fullmetal Alchemist reviews by rounding up the remaining theatrical feature films. First, there’s 2011’s The Sacred Star of Milos, an animated spin-off of Brotherhood made by the same crew, but with entirely different creative leadership, leading to a radically different aesthetic and the best animation Fullmetal Alchemist has ever seen. It’s a bit narratively messy in integrating Hiromu Arakawa’s characters into an otherwise original and unrelated story, but it’s also an entertaining and memorably weird experience that’s an essential watch. The live-action Fullmetal Alchemist trilogy is entertaining in its own way, but far less essential. With three films – 2017’s Fullmetal Alchemist and this year’s The Revenge of Scar and The Final Alchemy, all streaming worldwide on Netflix – this series, directed by Fumihiko Sori and starring Ryosuke Yamada as Ed, is a surprisingly faithful recreation of the manga (maybe too much so at times). Bouncing between hilarious B-movie oddity, boring recitation of the original story, and a few genuinely affecting performances and scenes, these movies are uneven but extremely interesting, and more than worth taking the time to discuss here. 

 

Enjoy, and come back next year for Season 2 of Japanimation Station, where we will be reviewing Ufotable’s Type-Moon adaptations, including their Garden of Sinners and Fate/stay Night series! 

 

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The Weekly Stuff Podcast #449 – Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Round-up! Plus Modern Warfare II Campaign & Doctor Who Reaction

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

After giving initial impressions of the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again! and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, we give a live reaction to the latest regeneration on Doctor Who and discuss the series’ exciting future now that Chris Chibnall has returned to the chasm from whence he came. Then it’s time to finish our series of Fullmetal Alchemist reviews by rounding up the remaining theatrical feature films. First, there’s 2011’s The Sacred Star of Milos, an animated spin-off of Brotherhood made by the same crew, but with entirely different creative leadership, leading to a radically different aesthetic and the best animation Fullmetal Alchemist has ever seen. The live-action Fullmetal Alchemist trilogy consists of three films – 2017’s Fullmetal Alchemist and this year’s The Revenge of Scar and The Final Alchemy, all streaming worldwide on Netflix – that are a surprisingly faithful recreation of the manga (maybe too much so at times). Bouncing between hilarious B-movie oddity, boring recitation of the original story, and a few genuinely affecting performances and scenes, these movies are uneven but extremely interesting, and more than worth taking the time to discuss here. 

 

Enjoy!

 

Time Chart: 

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:01:32

Modern Warfare II & Other Games: 0:01:32 – 0:24:18 

Doctor Who: 0:24:18 – 0:34:46 

Fullmetal Alchemist: 0:34:46 – 3:04:04 

 

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Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

 

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

 

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #448 – The Teaching Episode

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a Very Special Episode this week as Sean & Jonathan answer a series of questions all about our day job: Teaching! Sean is a high-school English teacher and Jonathan teaches at the college level as PhD student, and while we’ve touched upon all this before, we haven’t yet done a deep dive on the profession, our thoughts – positive and negative – about it, how our two teaching roles differ, and so on. It’s a fun, informative discussion fueled by some great listener questions, and while we’ve never done an episode like this before, we hope it will be useful for those interested!

 

Enjoy!

 

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

The Real Michael Myers was the Friends We Made Along the Way: An Analysis of the New Halloween Trilogy

I used to write movie reviews a lot.  

Like, a lot a lot. It was kind of my thing. I don’t do it anymore, and I haven’t for a while, and while there are a lot of reasons for that – including it just not being a viable career path anyone, no matter their talent, can actually pursue today – the main one is that I just stopped enjoying the exercise. The older I get, the less ‘good/bad’ as a metric matters to me, and the less I enjoy explaining why something falls into one of those broad categories. What I care about more than anything in a piece of media is if it’s interesting – if it’s going for something, if it has something to say, if it tries something I’ve never seen before. I want something worth chewing on. There’s an argument to be made, for instance, that Marvel’s overall output has had a notable qualitative drop since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 – but when I look at how many of their recent films and shows I genuinely like and would call ‘good,’ I don’t know if that’s really true. What is true is that they’re safe, they’re simple, and they don’t really have anything to say. Certainly nothing new. We’ve seen everything in that bag of tricks. There’s nothing left of substance to chew on. And as a result I’ve felt increasingly alienated from anything they’re putting out. 

 

David Gordon Green’s new Halloween trilogy is really, really interesting to me. 

 

These three films – 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and this weekend’s new Halloween Ends – would all, in different ways, be impossible for me to review. Are they good? In some ways, yeah. Are they bad? In many ways, yes. Do they give you something to chew on? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding and overwhelming yes, and it’s a ‘yes’ that outweighs anything I could say about their relative ‘quality.’ These are fascinating movies to me. They are weirdly shaped, they play with a bunch of themes that don’t quite connect, they mostly fail as ‘horror’ movies, and they run back and forth from polar opposite ends of the tonal map – but I also think they’re chock full of interesting ideas and moments and emotions, that they break open and play with a well-worn genre in challenging and provocative ways, and go places (especially in this latest entry) that I never expected to see but am surprised at how engaged I was when we got there. 

 

These are interesting movies. I’m not going to review them – I don’t do that anymore – but I do want to talk about them for a little bit. 

 

Spoilers for all three new Halloween movies coming up after the jump…

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #447 – The FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Episode(s) Part 4 – Brotherhood Part 2 (Episodes 33-64)

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Our journey through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood comes to an end with the second half of the second anime, now in fully uncharted territory as it adapts the final stretch of Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga. Diving deep into the Briggs and Promised Day story arcs that conclude the series, we discuss all the many ups and occasional downs of this last run. The manga is probably at its most uneven during this portion, but Brotherhood fully comes into its own as an anime, its pacing finally relaxed enough to fully tell the story, its ludicrously stacked voice cast fully in place, and its animation and aesthetics frequently on point as it approaches the end. As we go through the good, the bad, and everything in between, we find no shortage of topics worth discussing, and Brotherhood proves extremely rewarding to talk about all the way up to its all-time great ending. 

 

Enjoy!

 

TIME CHART:

 

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:03:42

Fullmetal Alchemist: 0:03:42 – 3:38:27

 

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

 

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

 

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

 

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

 

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

Japanimation Station #09 – Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood – Part 2 (Episodes 33-64) Review & Discussion

Welcome to Japanimation Station, an anime podcast brought to you by the folks at The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are here to dive into the wide and wacky world of anime, and you can subscribe on all platforms at JapanimationStation.Com.

Our journey through Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood comes to an end with the second half of the second anime, now in fully uncharted territory as it adapts the final stretch of Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga. Diving deep into the Briggs and Promised Day story arcs that conclude the series, we discuss all the many ups and occasional downs of this last run. The manga is probably at its most uneven during this portion, but Brotherhood fully comes into its own as an anime, its pacing finally relaxed enough to fully tell the story, its ludicrously stacked voice cast fully in place, and its animation and aesthetics frequently on point as it approaches the end. As we go through the good, the bad, and everything in between, we find no shortage of topics worth discussing, and Brotherhood proves extremely rewarding to talk about all the way up to its all-time great ending. 

 

Enjoy, and come back next time for our first season finale, as we wrap up all things Fullmetal Alchemist with reviews of the 2011 animated movie The Sacred Star of Milos and the live-action film trilogy currently streaming on Netflix! 

 

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

 

Subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts!

 

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The Weekly Stuff Podcast #446 – The Top 10 Video Game Controllers of All Time

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

We were planning on a very elaborate podcast for Jonathan’s 30^th birthday this week, but some unforeseen travel problems led to us breaking glass in case of emergency on a topic we’ve been keeping in our back pocket for over a decade now: ranking the Top 10 Video Game Controllers of all time! From the NES to the PS5, we go through several generations of gaming consoles to pick out the best controllers from over the years – and make fun of the worst – to determine which are the best, most influential, and all-around most enjoyable to use. And we even rank the Top 5 D-Pads of all time, just to cover all the bases. Hot takes abound and fierce debates are had as we try to reach consensus on the best controllers in the history of console gaming. 

 

Enjoy!

 

TIME CHART:

 

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:08:40

The Inevitable Death of Google Stadia: 0:08:40 – 0:31:08

Stuff: 0:31:08 – 00:44:38

The Top 10 Video Game Controllers: 0:44:38 – 1:59:37

 

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

 

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #445 – The AVATAR Episode (The James Cameron movie, not the Nickelodeon show)

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

After a trip to Sean’s Beta Corner to review the recent betas for Team Ninja’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again!, Sean and Jonathan hop over to Pandora (the planet, not the music app) for a deep dive on Avatar (the James Cameron movie, not the Nickelodeon show). It’s been 13 years since the film took the entire world by storm, becoming the highest-grossing film in history, and the film’s reputation hasn’t aged very gracefully. We haven’t seen it since its original theatrical run, so how do we think it holds up now? We get into the special effects, the world-building, the story, the terrible dialogue, the extremely uncomfortable racial overtones, and much more in this wide-ranging, rewarding conversation.  

 

Enjoy!

 

TIME CHART:

 

Intro & Stuff: 0:00:00 – 0:10:15

Sean’s Beta Corner – Wo Long Fallen Dynasty: 0:10:15 – 0:18:00

Sean’s Beta Corner – Call of Duty Modern Warfare II: 0:18:00 – 0:41:46

Avatar: 0:41:46 – 2:58:39 

 

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Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

 

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

 

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

 

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

 

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #444 – Video Game News Galore! Nintendo Direct, State of Play, Tokyo Game Show, Assassin’s Creed & More!

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

With the Tokyo Game Show going down this week in, well, Tokyo, there was an avalanche of gaming news and gaming events, with Nintendo, Sony, and many others showing off new games for 2023 and beyond, and we break it all down on today’s episode! Starting with Ubisoft’s event last week to show off the appropriately convoluted future of Assassin’s Creed, and continuing on to this week’s Nintendo Direct – where we saw a new Fire Emblem, Octopath Traveler II, and got the title reveal for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – and Sony’s State of Play, which showed off Team Ninja’s Rise of the Ronin and gave us a peek at the future of the Yakuza franchise, now returning to its original Japanese title, Like a Dragon. And if all that wasn’t enough, Hoyoverse also gave us some huge Genshin Impact reveals, including the jaw-dropping news that Ufotable, the renowned animation studio behind Kimetsu no Yaiba, will be creating the long-awaited Genshin anime. 

 

Enjoy, and come back next week for our retrospective review of James Cameron’s Avatar, as it heads back into theaters ahead of December’s sequel.

 

TIME CHART:

 

Intro & Stuff: 0:00:00 – 0:21:34

Splatoon News: 0:21:34 – 0:29:00

Assassin’s Creed News: 0:29:00 – 1:01:10

Nintendo Direct: 1:01:10 – 1:31:30

Sony State of Play: 1:31:30 – 1:56:21

Yakuza and Tokyo Game Show News: 1:56:21 – 2:11:16 

Genshin: 2:11:16 – 2:23:07 

 

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

 

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

 

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

 

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

 

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #443 – The FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Episode(s) Part 3: BROTHERHOOD Part 1 (Episodes 1-32)

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s another packed episode as Jonathan gives first impressions of Splatoon 3 on the Nintendo Switch, reviews the Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Director’s Edition on 4K UHD Blu-ray, and we commiserate over the ever-growing avalanche of Disney/Marvel news from the weekend, before jumping into the next phase of our Fullmetal Alchemist review series! This time, we’re talking Brotherhood, the 2009 anime that starts fresh to adapt Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga in full. With a new crew, a new animation style, many new cast members, and a largely new story, Brotherhood is extremely different than the 2003 anime – and in many ways, it’s also a different beast than the manga, especially in this first half. It’s a lot to talk about, and with a whole half of the series left to go, we’re only just scratching the surface. 

 

Enjoy!

 

TIME CHART:

 

Intro & Stuff: 0:00:00 – 0:37:41

Fullmetal Alchemist: 0:37:41 – 3:29:34

 

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

 

Subscribe to Japanimation Station, our Anime Podcast!

 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

 

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

 

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

 

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

Japanimation Station #08 – Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood – Part 1 (Episodes 01-32) Review & Discussion

Welcome to Japanimation Station, an anime podcast brought to you by the folks at The Weekly Stuff Podcast. We are here to dive into the wide and wacky world of anime, and you can subscribe on all platforms at JapanimationStation.Com. 

Our Fullmetal Alchemist series enters its ultimate phase as we review Brotherhood, the 2009 anime that starts fresh to adapt Hiromu Arakawa’s original manga in full. With a new crew, a new animation style, many new cast members, and a largely new story, Brotherhood is extremely different than the 2003 anime – and in many ways, it’s also a different beast than the manga, especially in this first half. While the show has come to be canonized as one of the very best anime ever made by Western fans, initial reception was more mixed, and this first half certainly shows some growing pains, with some poor structural and adaptational decisions and inconsistent animations. But it also has one of the best voice casts ever assembled, with A-list Seiyuu from top to bottom, and while it fumbles in some moments, it soars quite high indeed in others, and even in this first half delivers several iconic episodes that have already proven to stand the test of time. It’s a lot to talk about, and with a whole half of the series left to go, we’re only just scratching the surface. 

 

Enjoy, and come back next time for Part 2 of our Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood review, where we’ll finish the 2009 anime with episodes 33 – 64! 

 

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