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.
The Godfather Part II (4K UHD)
If you want to tell a good story about a man, show him fail. He can recover but there needs to be a journey into darkness. Part II of the Godfather trilogy is Michael Corleone’s journey into darkness. By the end of the movie he’s lost his wife, his mother, the trust of his adopted brother and his last brother by blood. His enemies are dead by their own hand or by his.
Secret Level: Episodes 1 to 8.
While lacking a 6’ tall sword wielding heroine in boob armour riding on a flying reptile, Secret Level still gives off Heavy Metal movie vibes. This is a character driven show that has to hook you fast. Some episodes are less than 15 minutes long. Stories with famous actors get a bit more time, but you’ll know if you’re in or out in the first three minutes. The quality of the anthology stories in the first 8 episodes ranges from “this is a series pitch” to “this is a cut scene” to “could you give us another 90 minutes of this story, please?
Like a Dragon: Yakuza. Episodes 1 to 3
Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions. Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists here walk themselves into a nightmare of a heist gone awry. Gangsters who come looking for stolen money don’t shut up. The assassins who will kill them at their leader’s whim don’t talk.
Megalopolis
I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the intended audience. It may not matter to him if no one else watches it.
Joker: Folie à Deux
This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical. The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) life is. A grinding misery that gets more miserable in increments. Every day the sun rises life takes a razor blade to Arthur's soul and shaves off another thin slice.
The Substance
The Substance About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation. Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium.
Terminator Zero
Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series. The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet.