[EXPRESSO] Caught Stealing (2025) | Idles Hands

There some irony in a title like that for a filmmaker that already borrowed heavily from other, better directors, but i can’t deny i do like Arofonosky movies (The Whale was great), and i was surprised to see this new one, Caught Stealing, kinda sneak by into theathers.

So instead of taking “cues” from Satoshi Kon this time it goes for a more popular type of cinema, a crime caper set in New York, a 90s NY of people that can barely make rent but will proclaim their love for the San Francisco Giants, as it’s all framed with the titular baseball slang term i had to look up, as the protagonist, Hank, is a generally decent normal guy that could have been a baseball star if a car crash didn’t nip that in the bud.

Hanks calls his mother daily, has a semi-relationship with a nurse, and wants nothing to do with crime, but after accepting to take care of his punk neighbor’s cat while he’s away, he ends up unadvertly dragged into the seedy criminal underbelly due to some very bad luck and a series of absurd circumstances.

This time it feels like Arofonosky wanted to do a Cohen Brothers style crime caper (thought it’s based on a novel of the same name by Charlie Huston) while also retaining his usual style…. and it doesn’t really work until the last act, trying to be unpredictable and marrying very gritty violence with almost slapstick style comedy, coming off as kind of confused than anything, with its various ideas and tones having spent most of the movie fighting each other they do click the end, a little too late.

Terrific performances (especially by the supporting cast) help one wanting to see it through, and it’s not bad…. just kinda baffling.

Pinocchi-O-Rama #2: Pinocchio: A True Story (2021)

Let’s get the “meme boy” one over so we can kill any mystique it could possible accrue in time, by tackling one of the more recent adaptations, the Russian 2021 one that pretty much nobody would have cared about if the english dub had Paulie Shore delivery such a stock effeminate – and most importantly out of place – performance as the titular Pinocchio, especially notable in the clip you’ve seen of him talking to Gepetto of how he wants to see the world on its own, as he ready for it.

Tybald being Pinocchio’s horse, which he never had in the original story, but then again, it bound to be expected from your movie when it can’t even have the gall to call itself “THE true story”.

Just one of the many. Whatever.

I guess someone finally saw Tangled and wanted to have a funny horse character, so much it presents the movie as a story he’s telling you about, giving the basic gist of Pinocchio being carved by Geppetto, dissing the “growing nose” thing and then actually… preseting more than actually narrating the whole thing. Liar. And odd as a Jiminy Cricket replacement. Sort of. Not really.

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Vampire Holmes (2015) [REVIEW] | Everlasting Love

YES, i’ve heard of this by doing a research on the worst voted/rated shows on AnimeList.

I could have talked about NAMI (no, not that one, not that Nami either, most likely not even your thrid guess), so you decide if you lucked out or not in this occasion.

I’ve held off on covering it because it’s so goddamn obscure and has such infamous reputation… that even finding english fansubs for it was a notable task.

And it figures the only english subbed version i could find around it’s from a group labelling themselves as “BetterThanNothing”, i’m sure even they eventually did so moved by piety, as nobody even wanted to bother making it more available. It’s a rare case of people finding an anime so shit that they don’t even spread awareness by shit-talking it, they figured it was more deserving of wallowing in the dark, unspoken and unheard of, still more valuable than trying to actively focusing a spotlight on it, even if just to trash it for easy views on Youtube and socials.

Can’t say that it was a bad stance to take, in hindsight, this is no Chargeman Ken.

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[EXPRESSO] Gato Roboto NSWDDL | Domo Domo

Gato Robot NSWDDL cover.jpg

I didn’t know what exactly to make out of Gato Roboto, but since it was on sale and Devolver Digital published it, why not, for 2 bucks?

And it’s not like the game hides or even tries to hide its ispiration, as the main image used for marketing is a cat exiting a black and white version of Samus Aran’s Power Suit. The actual robot suit doesn’t look like that (as one might reasonably guess), but it tells you exactly what this is: is Super Metroid with a cat.

That’s it. I was expecting to see an actual gimmick, but the “gimmick” is that it’s a really good Metroid style title, actually finding the good balance between contained world and Metroidvania style progression that Xeodrifter failed to capture, so you don’t get lost at all since the design pushes you in a certain direction, but you also need to find out how to progress with the obstacles each enviroment introduces, such as heat, lava, water, etc.

And the whole idea of “Metroid but you’re a cat” is actually used well, as you can leave the suit to swim (begrudingly so), jump-scale walls or navigate narrow passages, but you have no offensive capability… because you’re just a normal cat, as normal as a cat using a robotic suit can be. Some good, challenging boss battles too, for a ¾ hour (more if you want to complete it 100 %) experience that’s fun all the way through, and doesn’t overstay its welcome for the sake of pleasing insane logic such as “hour=price”.

And while the aesthetic choice of “black and white graphics with retrò pixel aesthetic” is as “indie game” as it can be, it’s actually pleasing to look at (which isn’t always the case), and the story isn’t half bad, too. Fun one, recommended!

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