smokinjoeevil's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Shape of Love]

I know I'm in the minority...

.... but something just doesn't sit right with me about this Flash. I understand what the point of it is, the moral of the story, etc. But the fact is (and yes, I know I am being overly analytical when I point this out) the main driving impetus behind his transformations as pertains to self-image just doesn't stand up past the first transformation. It makes sense that he would want to become the muscle man - because the advertisement and, seemingly, general consensus is that those kinds of guys attract the ladies. So there is a REASON for him to take on the muscular look. However, then he goes on to adopt the mantis appendages of the toy, and even airplane details - even though his girlfriend (originally the only reason he was making a transformation - to impress her) indicates to him that this is not what she wants. So, where I originally identified with the desires of the character to look better for his mate, all that identification with the character was squashed into non-existence when he decided to start making himself look like an idiot by taking on the attributes of everything in sight. It doesn't make any sense. Let's say I saw a rapper, and he was getting the chicks. So, to impress my girlfriend, I buy a hoodie. She let's that slide. Then I get a couple gold chains. And then, when I express my intent to upgrade my teeth to golden replacements my girlfriend straight-up tells me that she thinks gold teeth are for jack-asses... in your Flash, the character still gets the gold teeth. I liked the animation style, and the intent of the Flash with respect to moral lesson or point, but part of me just can't get past this glaring error in the story's build-up.

ScaredyDave responds:

I can respect that. Basically what happened in my mind was that at first yeah, he is trying to impress the girl, but after a bit of it he thinks that just adding onto himself is fun, so he lets the fun of it blind him from what he was originally intending to do. Kind of like someone who has a hobby that their mate disagrees with. Its like, yeah ok, its a little cute that you have a few collectible trains, but when it gets to the point that you're making entire replica cities with working trains and subway systems in your basement then its a problem. Thats the way I viewed it, and I'm glad you shared your opinion. You didnt really "point anything out", its more like you described the plot lol, the way you viewed it was just differently, and thats important to me because chances are you aren't the only one who viewed it like this.

[Waiting for redesign]

Slow

The animation and drawing style were mediocre bordering on slightly-good. it was slow at points for no good reason. Slow is good for building tension at specific moments, or trying to play out some joke where the punchline is how long something took, but when your entire ACTION sequence is marred by enough slow-downs to choke a giraffe, there's something wrong. Story (or is it supposed to be joke/punchline??) needed a lot of work - It started off being about the redesign, and some guy waiting for it. Then it moved on to Tom Fulp going nuts because he lost at Castle Crashers. Some people are claiming "randomness", I would tend to claim more that it is just poor adherence to coherence - I mean, come on... 3/4 of the animation had nothing to do with the redesign.

[The Pigpen]

Really good.

As others have said, had a really poignant message... it's sad that social realities can be summed up in such dark material. And the animation was of top-notch quality and style.

It made me think of something my wife and I were noticing driving through some of the shadier neighborhoods in our area. There are these guys carrying signs calling people to turn in their gold and jewelery for cash. Of course, given the neighborhoods these guys are walking around in, the people paying those guys to wear the signs:

A. know that this target audience will be highly interested in cash
B. it's not entirely likely those people have a lot of gold and jewels just lying around

So, it sorta stands to reason that the guys who are ultimately after the gold to turn a profit really don't care all that much where the gold and jewels actually come from... that is to say... if the people they are advertising to don't have them, and yet they use these ad tactics in those neighborhoods specifically, then there is possibly even an expectation that stolen goods will be turned in to them... and that may be perfectly acceptable from their standpoint.

Sorta like the human in your story, who shows the pig what it is that will get him money by cutting a part of his flesh away... basically teaching the pig how to get the money, and get him rooted in the dirty-deed-doing, so that the human can ultimately get what he wants without having to get his own hands dirty.

Once again, totally awesome in quality, style and message.

[the Last of the Dashkin]

I agree with the minority of others...

... in that I think the narration sort of cheapened it all. My favorite part about the previous episodes/stories was the fact that it all seemed like a world completely and entirely apart from humanity, with it's own set of rules and it's own general mystery to unravel - because it seemed nothing about it could be known by a human. But now you're making it seem as if humans/people/whatever WERE a part of it at some point? in my view it ruins the "freshness" of it... the feeling that it is an undiscovered world. And the narration just helps to steal that mystical aspect and mystery away. A human voice is now telling you the story... honestly, it's a bit like coming across what you thought was a deserted island, only to find out as you excitedly explore it that there is a docking port for touring cruise ships on the far shore.

Also, if I remember correctly, Bitey wasn't the only intelligent/sentient/emotional being among the other animals you've introduced. There was a witch at one point, the guy peeing in the stream, and the one gathering the Waterlollies... who all seemed as intelligent/sentient/emotional as Bitey. Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but the narrated story made it sound as if he were the only one with those near-human attributes... and it just led to my mind finding a discontinuity in the story-telling on that score.

[MM Jesus Rangers]

Just a few words...

"Moyea demo".
SAM-type voices.
Not really Flash.
Non-sensical character design.

Fix those things and it may have been pretty amusing. Otherwise it just looks like you used stock demo-figures and a voice-generator to skirt around actually having to do much work.

bmcoyne2007 responds:

The Moyea Demo thing can be fixed, other than that, I used XTRANORMAL. I don't really have a program on my computer that allows me to make flash animations like the ones seen on this site, I use Windows Vista if you happen to know of any programs/software. Oh, 1.5 is NOT the fixed version, that will have to wait til about midnite.

[The Newgrounds Experience]

Without having to make an account?

Why does it start off with "The NG Experience WITHOUT HAVING TO MAKE AN ACCOUNT" and then proceed to show a poorly rendered couple of screens of someone registering for an account? It makes no sense... and has this animation come off as... well... to put it bluntly, if animations could have Down Syndrome then this one does.

The animation was too fast at parts. In one particular part the fake cursor was in the way of some of the (supposedly) comedic entries this fake user was making into the sign-up forms. The quality of the grap[hics used to represent the sites involved was really poor - which may have been on purpose, but with the bad quality of the animation itself I couldn't tell.

BADFX responds:

It meant witout the person watching it having to make an account, The gaygle and homail pages were meant to be crappy, the newgrounds page was meant to be good. and thanks for telling me about the extra cursor

[SUPER 8 Database Cinema]

Open source?

What do you mean by "open source" as it refers to your Flash submission here? Are you implying that if some one asks you'll give them the original FLA or something? I'm not sure you're applying the term correctly, which would mean you don't know what it means.

On another note, the separate "scenes" or clips you can shuffle and what-not were just too abstracted from one another for it to really be worth trying to compile them into a new order. In my opinion, at least, the "movie" is basically meaningless no matter what order you put the shots in. Which means probably not a lot of people are going to bother with creating their own video "code". It's a neat idea, but you would have really needed to put some time and thought into the clips you included in order to make it interesting for people to go about forming their own, cohesive, video sequences. As it stands, all you have is a bunch of poorly drawn/animated random shots of garbage (again - my opinion)... which does not lend to cohesion of a movie-experience whatsoever.

Lastly... what the hell was with the animation of the guy reaching down his throat and then (apparently) out of his own ass? Not only do I not see the correlation in that to your theme of "guilt", but it was really, really poorly done. He reached into his mouth with his HAND, directly... there is absolutely no way his ELBOW is going to come out first on the other side of anything. Just strange, and like I said, not worth the time to examine and re-shuffle the clip order.

I like the idea, but not as it is executed here.

[Dont touch the smoke]

Only stopped in here...

'Cause I saw a review of yours on some other Flash and saw that your personal icon was your own brand of the the NG Level Maker 2 icon. So I went to your user-page and saw that you had submit this Flash... and that, oddly enough, your Flash's preview icon is the same icon.

Anyway... the actual fight-scene wasn't too bad. The stick-figures were maybe a tad simplistic, and their heads seemed to shrink and grow at random in some spots. The only thing I didn't quite get was the jumping/flipping in the beginning between each word. Seemed like it was just an excuse to lengthen the clip with a re-used section of the animation... .but didn't really add anything (except a bit of confusion).

Besides this I agree with "Nemakachec"... the story coming down to being about "smokes" kinda detracts from the punchline, rather than adding to it.

[Gravitaxis ++]

I know this is over-analyzing...

... but over-analyzing things is in my nature, so anyone who doesn't like it can go find somone else to hound...

Anyway... to me this seemed like a slow-motion display of reverse time following someone for whom gravity is reversed (at least for a time). Which leads me to my point... when he first "fell" (which actually happens at the end of this video, since it is in reverse), and was therefore heading into the sky... presumably at a good clip since, again, other points of reference in people's actions and movement, the fireworks, etc. surrounding him appeared in slow motion... and then the woman in the suit (for whom gravity is still oriented toward the planet surface) jumps off her craft and heads toward him. Now let's say the guy had reached even just 60 MPH in his "fall upward", and the woman had only just reached 60 MPH in her fall downward... then the two bodies would have collided at 120 MPH. I don't have to mention what happens after that... but suffice it to say they wouldn't have had a chance to exchange anything more than a deluge of breaking bones with one another.

Other than that... very cool Flash. The backward nature of it was really fun to watch unfold. It would be a great way to end a Flash with a revelation, such as where the character had come from after having just run backward through a mess of incomprehensible story.

[Circle n' Square]

I could be wrong...

... but this seems like it might be a sort of parody on all the Flash submissions where, while the art and animation might be of good quality, it's really nothing more than two well-drawn and fairly-well animated characters standing around talking... so that all the animator had to do was draw the characters once or twice and then synch mouth movements to the audio. The humor in this being the fact that you blatantly made the two "character's" in this Flash very poorly drawn and animated... and the point that this is really no different than any other "stand-around-and-talk" type Flash movie would be dually noted.

If that was the intent... then I like it. If not... then I guess I don't.