Monthly Archives - April 2021

Jeff Kaplan is Out at Blizzard

Not certain what this means.Jeff Kaplan is suddenly leaving the company after nearly twenty years. And he is doing so with no real explanation. I haven't heard about him getting Canceled for a ten year old tweet or accidentally calling a Trans-woman,"dude." Kaplan started off at Blizzard doing lowly QA work for Warcraft III. From there he worked all the way up to lead developer on the super MMO Titan. Which failed and then the pieces...

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RE:View -The Last Starfighter (part 2)

Picking up where we left off.When Alex got into Centauri’s car, he shook hands with a stranger whose face was shaded out. There was a static shock and then the stranger got out just as the door closed in and Alex. That was a robot named Beta.  He had two purposes in the story.  One a touch of comic relief as he tried to imitate Alex in his daily life and two he gave Catherine Mary Stewart more screen time.  It fleshed out her...

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Shang-Chi Trailer Drop

Here you are. The long awaited trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjz6LoiQQo I still don't have an answer to the question, who the fuck is Shang Chi?Look I do know a little something about comics. I've bought a couple in my life. I had actually run into obscure characters like Defensor and Bouncing Boy. I have not the slightest idea who Shang-Chi is. I could feign knowledge by googling him but I refuse.This is one more of Disney's attempts to get their hands...

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I’ll Believe It When I See It

That said, there is more than just gossip that Kray-Kray Kay-Kay’s reign of destruction at LucasFilm has ended.Frankly, I’ve heard these rumors so many times that my reflexive reaction is dismissal as more fanboy wishful thinking.However, these rumors have come on the heels of several events in a sequence.  First, the firing and canceling of Gina Carano blew up in Disney and Lucasfilm’s face.  The second event was the stockholder call-in, where instead of getting asked if the Adventurer’s Club will ever...

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Cheap Thrills: Dead Gentlemen Productions

We are hitting an intriguing popculutre crossroads. The major studios have reached the crest of a wave. Given the size of the budgets for major releases (typically nine figures), they have to try to minimize risks, they do this by data-driven audience feedback which results in a homogenized entertainment product instead of a movie. Blandness is built in. On top of that there is the more important fact that once anything hits the internet it's free. ...

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Release the JJ Cut

I vote no. Also, don't do it. Please!There is enough chatter on the web about this subject at the moment that I thought I needed to address it.The shill media is pretending that this Astroturf campaign by Bad Reboot is an actual thing.  As far as I can tell it started with a lengthy Reddit post. And it came from the offices of Bad Reboot.J.J. Abrams is first and foremost a politician. That is his primary talent set. His secondary talent is...

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First Impressions: Joss Whedon’s The Nevers

B-O-O-O-R-R-R-E-D!!!That’s my first impression in a nutshell.  It’s incredibly boring.The Nevers is a new show on HBOmax that premiered this weekend.  And it’s Joss Whedon’s first since Dollhouse, eleven years ago.*  And this is absolutely a Joss Whedon show.  It’s got it all.Women beating up strong men?  You bet!Sassy comedic dialog? Of course!Vague sexual tension between all the women on the show? Naturally!Good looking women fighting in their underwear? What did you expect from a feminist?!Spidery, cold, creepy feeling as if you now have thin layer of oily...

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REPOST: The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Enola Holmes

For reasons that will shortly become obvious, I need to get some articles written well in advance of their publication date on this blog. Which means you get to read a review from my old blog today.REPOST:There are two rules if you’re going to be playing in some other writers’ backyard. First, you have to respect the rules of the game they invented. Second, you need to clear the bloody rights. Both of which Enola Holmes failed to do. The Arthur...

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The Wait is Over! We Now Know How Kathleen Kennedy is Going to Screw up Indiana Jones!

That’s right guys!  The feminist franchise killer herself Phobe Waller-Bridge is form of the destructor.  We weren’t sure how Kray-Kray Kay-Kay was going to fuck-up Indy but we were all knew in our hearts it was going to be something special.  In retrospect, we should have seen this one coming.  My gal Phoebe has been demolishing every franchise with a milliliter of testosterone in it for years. In her devastating wake, Han Solo was left a bumbling man-child, Lando Calrissian was fucking a toaster. And...

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The Dark Herald’s Top 5 Asteroid Movies

For no reason whatsoever……I have decided, completely out of the blue, to do an Asteroid movie listicle.  Planet Impact films are a subgenre of disaster flicks.   These stories have been around for a while.  Arguably H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds was the first novel to use it as a device.  And while it occasionally showed up as a motif here and there, the genre didn’t really find its footing until the impact theory of dinosaur extinction became popularly known.  That was when people first became...

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