I have low expectations for Ballerina (John Wick spinoff). But as it’s pouring rain outside, let’s take a look.
Rogue One is more enjoyable to watch right after the finale of season 2 of Andor. In 2016, who’d have thought there would be an Andorverse? Well, besides creator Tony Gilroy.
Apple’s WWDC 2025 is next week. And when it comes to major releases, to paraphrase Sean Connery:
Captain Ramius: Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess against our old adversary - macOS hardware obsolescence.
Tonight, sleep. Tomorrow, world’s best uncle.
I’m in the queue to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order. There’s over a hundred people here. Nintendo will be around forever.
I’ll say one thing about Laurene Powell Jobs, in 2020 she said she was going to donate the family fortune.
"I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she added. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."
I raised an eyebrow at that as Steve wasn’t known for philanthropy. But her fortune is now half what it was when the article was written. Apple and Disney have both done well over the past five years, so that isn’t a decline in portfolio value. It’s giving.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it. But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. Needy and damaged in the book, but dynamite on the screen. Tom Wolfe despised the characters he wrote about in his novel.
Today I finished reading the 30th anniversary edition of The Devil’s Candy, covering the torturous filming of Brian De Palma’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” While the movie is a dud with fun moments, nothing in this book screamed it was a fiasco. I’ll rewatch the movie before I review the book.
Season 2 of Andor shows you how good Star Wars should be. The World War II occupied France storyline. How ambitious people can slide towards hideous acts. The timeline compression that keeps the story moving. All the episodes work.
I took my nephew into a Warhammer store for the first time. But my mother was with us. Proving you can never be too young or too old to learn about the grim dark future.
This won’t go well.
This does raise a question: is Dark Sun coming back? One of the big reasons that WotC gave for not releasing the Mystic or the Psion was that there was no book for it to accompany.
Source: Bell of Lost Souls
Dark Sun is a post ecological collapse setting where social stigma, tyrannical rule and slavery are core themes of the setting. D&D 5.5E is about not offending people. The current writers can’t deliver the grit Dark Sun fans would like.
The Phoenician Scheme
A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative. Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him. Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes.
Moving day from Typepad has completed and it’s over now. Except for DNS propagation and SSL cert autoupdates. Both of which are like air travel; you have no control, so sit back and assume you’ll get to your destination eventually.
When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related event. The man’s social battery appears endless. The book, true to its title, recounts the magazine industry’s fall from influence and subscribers.
Until Dawn
Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.
The Monkey
This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets. Yes, the clock work driven, drum playing, malevolent looking toy monkey of the title is evil.
The Gorge
Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie. There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping.
The Last Dangerous Visions. Edited By Harlan Ellison.
By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read. In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre.
Wolf Man
Vampires one week, werewolves the next. Unlike the highly cinematic Nosferatu, Wolf Man is merely a good-looking streaming movie. It could be psychological scarring from Covid, but monstrosity because of disease has taken root in the mind of horror writers. In fiction, lycanthropy has been everything from a pact with the devil to a supernatural curse, but here we return to the idea of it as an illness. This is a movie where the werewolf is neither calculating nor 8 feet tall on two legs with a great coat of computer generated hair.
Nosferatu
There’s a silver undertone to this movie that reminds me of vintage black & white film stock. But then everything about this movie is looking to remind you of something vintage. Once again, a couple opposes a personification of evil. A misshapen, diseased creature of catastrophic power. Of the other times I’ve seen Nosferatu told on screen, this couple is the best looking. Genetic super lottery winners, who I’m sure have real people's problems, but the only problem we are concerned about here is the murderous Count Orlok.