WarpZone's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[COME GET YOUR WILLIE!]

So-called Laissez-faire capitalism has entered a new era. One in which Disney doesn't make enough money to tell the American government what to do anymore. From this day forward, that is a privilege only afforded to (insert most recent international incident in which America backed the bad guys.)

[20 Years of Badger]

We'd expect nothing less from the grand-dad of the internet! :D

[Classic Sonic Parkour Animation]

I just got nostalgia chills. Did you recreate frames from the Sonic CD opening animation using 3D models!? That's crazy!

[Honk]

This made less and less sense until it suddenly made all the sense. Amazing non-verbal visual storytelling. Props to the music for keeping me hooked until the twist ending.

"Honk." Heh. That's good.

[ALL RICK!]

IS THIS A JOJO REFERENCE!? Just kidding. Good stuff! Especially your Rick voice. Your Morty needs more vocal fry. It might be easier if you got someone with a higher voice to do it, or maybe even pitched it up in Audacity or something. (It's free, so why not, right?) I'm disappointed in myself for not seeing the punchline coming even after reading the title.

[ZTV News Episode 9]

I KNEW IT! I knew BennetTheSage was the voice of Dave. I called that shit like, four years ago!

[What Fucks Me Off In Modern Gaming]

Wait, you made a Flash cartoon.

That means you already own a computer.

Why the fuck are you trying to play videogames on your Netflix Machine?

COAEM responds:

well the xbox one is the best in future TV....Yeah I use a laptop for my videos i probablely couldn't even run undertale on this badboy

[The 5 stages of Work Loss]

You forgot Stage 6:

Make the whole damned thing again from scratch in half the time, and wonder why it took you so long the first time. ;)

[Good Citizen]

I don't get it. Are you mocking conspiracy theorists or sincerely criticising the powers that be?

If you're criticizing the government and capitalism, why the flouride rage? Are you literally a time traveller from the year 1940? Because you would almost have to be to still be genuinely afraid of water fluoridation in the year 2013. It's just a fluorine ion. We understand how it interacts with organic and inorganic compounds. We've been doing the experiment for decades, and the result is weak-to-moderately strong evidence that it does exactly what it says on the tin: an overall reduction in caries and sometimes cosmetic white streaks on the teeth. You can have health problems if they fuck up the dosage, of course, but that's also true of oxygen, water, and carbon. You might as well try to ban hydrogen hydroxide if you're worried about water fluoridation.

If, on the other hand, you're just mocking anyone who hates the government, why the somber tone and the links in the Author's Comments? You make some legitimate points in the video, if a little hyperbolic.

You can't honestly believe that the government is organized enough and good enough at keeping a secret to cause a car crash to happen every time somebody complains. There'd be way more suspicious car crashes if that were the case. They would have single-handedly put Detroit back on the map just buying enough American-made cars just to run over all the Occupy Wall Street Guys.

And, no, you can't just use the South Park Defense of "it's parody!" In order for your parody to actually mean something, you the author must have an actual opinion. No, "everybody's stupid except me" doesn't count. You have to actually believe in SOMETHING is true, and you have to have the balls to defend that position publicly. You can't just make a cartoon with both sides of the issue stylized to the point of being barely recognizable but obviously hyperbolic, and then shrug and go "it's parody." You can't leave the author's position open to interpretation, as if to create a work that opinionated people of all stripes and creeds can scratch their heads and go "well, I GUESS this is making fun of the other guys."

Now, having said that, a truly well-executed parody could conceivably obfuscate your intent with layers of sarcasm and meta-narrative, but doing so requires way more deliberate effort and cleverness than I'm seeing here. This just looks like you googled "arguments against capitalism" and then went "how can I draw that?" Or more like "how would an extremely unoriginal newspaper political cartoonist circa 1960-1980 draw that?" I mean you even put the little signs on symbols so we would know what they stood for.

I really lost my shit when you brought out the camera fat kid though. What task is this abomination of science meant to perform, exactly, that it does so "more efficiently" than the living fat kid? And what the fuck was with the ending after that? OMG, the government-created camera cyborg stopped recording me, and shut down, and then started recording me again, only this time it was RED! And then the black hands that can kill with a single finger suddenly need like four entire hands just to stop ME from watching the camera foorage of the camera cyborg that's watching the camera that's recording all of this... oh, FUCK IT. This isn't deep. This is not depth. It's barely even symbolism. It's just the most ham-handed imagery you could come up with to depict systemic corruption, and it's clear that you put way more thought into making the hands look all nasty and badass and timing everything with the music properly than in actually having an original political thought or suggesting anything even approaching a solution.

Lack of due vigilance is not the problem here! We are EVER so fucking vigilant these days! Everybody has a camera in their phone! The NSA has all our data but we produce so GODDAMNED much of the stuff that they can't parse it! Meanwhile for every service like Google that turns over our data, a new one springs up that doesn't store any data in the first place!

For fucks sake, we marched on the banks. We elected a black president. Do you think all of this happened in a vaccuum? Do you think social and political change is EASY? That all it takes is INTENT to get results? You chastize us to "fix the cause, not just the symptom," but I notice that you are conspicuously silent about what this magical cause is.

Do you imagine that there actually IS some singular, malevolent, direct CAUSE of all evil in the world? An actual man made of inky black magic, held together with money and covered in spikes, that secretly makes all the decisions in the world while you and me stand by silently and twiddle our thumbs? What's his NAME? Where does he fucking LIVE? You might as well try to convince people to march on Hell and shoot the Devil in the face while you're at it. That was not a metaphor for some politics guy or another, by the way, I am talking about the actual THE DEVIL the devil. Like, from the bible. Shadowy Government Hand is just about as real as the Devil.

The reality is, the government AND businesses are ENTIRELY composed of ORDINARY HUMAN BEINGS just trying to get by. The People will revolt when The People HAVE ALWAYS revolted all throughout human history: When they reach their last straw, or when they have no other option. We're not there yet. I hope we never will be again.

But no, that doesn't mean we're stuck in an inevitable decline, forever under The Man's thumb until he fucks it up and we have a big violent revolution that drastically changes who the privelaged fuckers are couple of decades. Even in times of peace, there's ALWAYS somebody trying to make things BETTER, even with rich fucks running the world.

The Arab Spring happened. The Internet happened. A Black President happened. Contrary to some peoples opinions, the world did not stop spinning in the year 1970. My generation did things, and we attempted even more things than we accomplished. Fuck you for insinuating otherwise.

You wanna change the world, hotshot? Find a fucking cause. But don't bitch to me about how "nobody's doing anything about the nondescript corruption" just because we're not all out throwing rocks at riot cops. Just what exactly do you expect us to accomplish by getting arrested?

Wow, that post got away from me. Probably a lot of misdirected rage at your cartoon that was intended for an idiot professor at the local community college. I'm sorry man. Bottom line: The arc of history is long, but it trends towards justice. Progress is marked by funerals, not by births. We are doing the best we can with the tools and resources we have. If you have a better idea, I'd like to hear it. But don't just bitch about "complacency." I am not complacent. Do I fucking sound complacent? This is not what complacency looks like.

Nice use of inbetweens, and I really liked that lense flare at the end.

KiWiArts responds:

I wish you would have used the time you put into using up all the precious review space, to read any of my previous statements. Further I would recommend you to ‘bitch about‘(as you would say) your personal problems to a friend or family member than rather pulling the short into it.
You would be surprised but this short and any artistic content on this site is NOT just for YOU and only YOU created. So don’t have the ignorant nerve that I’m only addressing you personally.
I applaud you if you‘re really as big a real life activist as you are a keyboard hero.
But to put words in my mouth or making a fare fetched statement about my true intend are just plain stupid.

Let’s make it clear, you’re entitled to your opinion and only yours on how you interpret the short. So don’t think that your interpretation is definitive for everyone.
Beside you should check on your so check on your facts about Fluoride helping against caries. The only ‘proof’ they come up so fare is that it creates a 6nm layer on your teeth which is literary no protection from caries or anything. And why? Because there isn’t any ground for the statement, no matter how long you search for it.
To all your other complains, do yourself and us the favor to read my other statements first.
Sorry I won’t spend any more time with to feed your egotism. I got no respect for anyone who can’t keep his personal problems out of a discussion which has nothing to do with this.

Thanks for basing your score not only on your opinion on the subject though.

[Skin : A Pixel Nightmare]

I actually liked this one. I was a little annoyed at all the body horror at the beginning-- it was so gratuitious that I started to suspect it wasn't going anywhere. I'm glad I stuck it out though, because it ended up actually having a story behind the gore, unlike 99% of the crap that passes for horror these days.

The video game metaphor worked for me, especially the glitchyness, which was occasionally used in a clever way to give us false starts. I didn't care for the overuse of flashing, and especially the pixel moire pattern, which wasn't really creepy, just painful on the eyes.

Overall, it may not have been subtle, but it had a nice slow buildup and a psychological narrative with an internally-consistent theme. Good horror starts with WTF and ends with you feeling like you understand now. Without that hook for the curious mind, there's no real reason to subject yourself to it. So many modern horror series forget or willfully ignore that principle. This pixelly Indie effort at least made the effort, and mostly delivered on it. I'll take that over another disappointing sequel that misses the point any day.

ClockworkPixel responds:

Thank you very much. Body horror i.e. boils, pus and all that really disgust me which is why I used it.