Nick R

I liked Anomalisa, but I'd put Adaptation on there ahead of both Anomalisa and Synecdoche New York. There's a different Rllmuk film ranking poll I've been vaguely intending to organise for a while, which I hoped to get set up and finished before it's time for the main end of year/end of decade lists. But I'm probably not going to get round to doing that now. So I say do it! But should it be 2010-2019, or 2000-2019?

They have the correct two Radiohead albums on there, but in the wrong order.

Batman Returns was one of the games I got with my Master System 2 for Xmas 1993. The console package was labelled "Saturday night at the movies pack" and came with film and TV tie-ins: Batman Returns, Bart Vs the Space Mutants, Alien 3 (plus Sonic 1 built-in). I loved Batman Returns! Swinging was not as advanced as the long pendulum swings of Spider-Man Vs the Kingpin, but still satisfying. You're right, it's not that challenging a game, mainly because the game essentially treats lives as hit points, and you immediately start right back where you died instead of having to replay from a checkpoint. On the Route 1 versions of the stages, I know I got to the final boss, but I don't think I ever completed it. However I remember the Route 2 versions of the levels being much more challenging: not just because of the hazards, but because the game doesn't throw as many lives at you as it does in Route 1. So you can't just tank your way through things like the fire in the department store.

With both Gain Ground and Shadow Dancer, I only ever played the Master System versions, never the MD ones. Gain Ground was fun, but with Shadow Dancer, neither I nor my friend whose copy it was were able to get past the first boss. Still, we had hours of fun trying to work out what was being said in the speech sample that plays when you activate the magic attack! Quite a difference in length between these two longplay videos: One of the comments on that SMS Shadow Dancer video says it's more faithful to the arcade than the MD version is.

Cowboy Bebop

I've no problem with fictional films, and movies based on true stories, being combined together into one list, no matter the differences in medium (animated or live-action?), tone, target audience, or genre. For me the problem comes when you try and judge documentaries alongside fictional narratives and adaptations of true stories. Whenever I make best-of- year lists on Letterboxd, the thing I tend to struggle with the most is where to put the documentaries. Sometimes the lines between documentary and fictionalised narrative are blurred: you can have a documentary where all the audio is actors recording transcribed interviews and all the video is re-enactments; or you could have something like American Splendor that is mostly performed by actors but also features interviews with the real person; or you could have a thing that's presented like a documentary but is really a fictional story (like people speculated about Exit Through the Gift Shop).

VFX reel. Lots and lots of digital glass! Those videos are from Todd Vaziri's JW3 Twitter Moment: Lots of behind the scenes stuff in that compilation of tweets, including these from June, taking to the film's editor:

Er, me? I missed all the hype at the time it came out; I think the first time I heard it was borrowing it from the library about a decade ago, and then I bought a charity shop copy a few years later. I think it's a good album, but not a great one, let alone second greatest of the last 20 years. And you're right about not listening to it all through: despite it being less than 40 minutes long, I can't remember the last time I listened to anything from it beyond Last Nite and New York City Cops. If they wanted an early-2000s spiky guitar-based indie album to put high on the list, they could've picked Franz Ferdinand's first album.

Because @Skull Commander mentioned it in the movies thread: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/13/100-best-albums-of-the-21st-century

Spoiler: Ted is on there but Mad Max: Fury Road is not. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/13/100-best-films-movies-of-the-21st-century

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Megadepth - thrash metal songs about the deepest parts of the ocean. Negadeth - a group consisting of Rllmuk members, performing protest songs against the forum reputation system.