Menitta's Daily Yapping

This has been on my mind for several months now and it's especially present now that I am playing the recently released Onimusha: Way of the Sword. We are in a particularly interesting time when it comes to paying homage to performers that have passed away. Technology has gotten to a point, with video games in particular, where companies can take the likeness of one who passed away and put them in a modern story. As the title mentions, I wanna talk about Onimusha and Stranger than Heaven.  Onimusha Way of the Sword is a samurai action game featuring the likeness of Toshiro Mifune (passed away in 1997) as Miyamoto Musashi. I'm a few hours in and I am absolutely loving the game. It's a ton of fun. What particularly impressed me was the performance on display and just how much respect is put on representing Toshiro Mifune as Miyamoto Musashi.  In the mid 50s, Toshiro Mifune played Musashi in the Samurai trilogy, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki. Mifune also started in m...

I'm 29 now. My birthday was last week, August 30th. I was in NYC for the week but I had that Sunday off to do whatever. I made the most of it! Originally I thought about seeing a Broadway show but the options available weren't really interesting to me, and also the ticket prices were approaching triple digits so I passed. I still had some fun stuff planned though. The Saturday before, I went to the Barnes and Noble on 5th Avenue. They had a sale going on for Arrow Video where all their movies were 50% off, just like they do with Criterion. I ended up grabbing a few movies.  Blackhat and A Simple Plan were blind buys but I trust both directors (Michael Mann and Sam Raimi respectively). I love Kill Bill and Untouchables, and those were both on sale. The next day on my actual birthday, I did a few fun things. First, I went to the M&M store in Times Square. This was fun but I could tell it's mostly for families and kids rather than single 29 year old...

Recently I've been wondering if I have what it takes to make movies. Obviously it's a LOT of work and I do not want to go from "movie watcher" to "movie maker" overnight, but I would like to try. I love movies and I've been thinking about the filmmaking process and what goes into the general craft a lot lately.  Last week during my stay at Elmira, New York, I found myself watching a ton of movies in the hotel. I finished all the Transformers movies (I almost did a post on that but I didn't have the energy. TLDR; only the first and Bumblebee are actually watchable movies) and many movies by M Night Shyamalan.  M Night Shyamalan has such a fascinating filmography. Prior to last week, I never saw any of his movies. My curiosity was sparked from Marcus Cosmonaut's video on all 16 of his movies. What I found fascinating is just how varied are his films, from indie movie starring himself, friends, and family, to one of the greatest psycholo...

This is a follow up to my last post on Persona 5. I feel like documenting my thoughts on this game. Like I said before, I played this hundred plus hour RPG three total times. That is not something I do often. Clearly I love this game. So why don't I look back fondly at it? I want to fix that. I believe it's important to be able to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of a work of art. Over the past near-decade, it feels like the internet and persona fanbase chose to focus on the negatives with P5, and opted to put it down rather than acknowledge the things it does well and understand why it became as popular as it did. I'd like to remind myself why I came to love this game so much and also have a fresh understanding of the game. This will be a rolling blog post. I started writing it on Wednesday, June 24th, 2026.  Off the bat, it is impossible to talk about Persona 5 without mentioning it's immaculate presentation. Opening up with a thrilling casino heis...