Monthly Archives - May 2024

Roger Corman RIP

In 1947 after getting his degree in Industrial Engineering at Stanford Roger Corman got his first job at US Electrical Motors.  He started on Monday and quit on Thursday telling his boss he had made a terrible mistake.  The next week he got a job in mailroom at 20th Century Fox making $32 a week.  He eventually worked his way up to script reader and did a lot of rewrites on a Greggory Peck film called The Gunfighter. He received absolutely...

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Anime is Great… It’s the Fans That Suck: Urusei Yatsura 2022

A few years ago, Emilia Clarke was making a backdoor pitch for a superheroine movie by means of a comic book that she claimed she had written.  She hadn’t and the project was still born.  However, she or rather her publicist put out some statistics that I thought were hilarious at the time.  Queen Dani: “In doing my research, I found that 16% of comic book creators are female, according to a 2019 study, and only 30% of comic book characters...

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Doctor Whoke

I know, I said I wasn’t going to watch this again but it's kind of like having a quart of milk in the refrigerator that you know has to be bad.   I mean it was stuck behind something for two months and you forgot that it was there. Gallons of milk have come and gone since that one quart was forgotten about. There is no possibility whatsoever that it is fit for human consumption.   And you still have to smell...

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The Dark Herald Recommends: Midway

I thought I should do something for Pearl Harbor Day. In 1976 WWII was about as far away for audiences as the Gulf War is for us. Midway was that fresh of a memory when the Charleton Heston film with that title hit the theaters. I was seriously considering a Does Not Recommend rating for this film. It’s borderline. Roland Emmerich loves him some epic spectacle. The kind of films he loves making are the BIG ones. The sort of screen grandeur you...

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It Just Keeps Getting Worse for Middle Earth

Warner Brothers has decided to feed off of the massive success of the Gollum game. Apparently.  With Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum Oh, it came and went so fast you don't remember it? It was this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0acyYZAfio They are making a movie about Smeagal. The most pathetic creature on all of Middle Earth. “For over two decades, moviegoers have embraced the ‘Lord of the Rings’ film trilogy because of the undeniable devotion Peter, Fran and Philippa have shown towards protecting the legacy of...

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Disney to Pay $100 Billion for Hulu?!?!

Of course, that title is clickbait but it's not entirely inaccurate. All of the studios have been so badly burned by the streaming wars that it was just announced that Disney+ and Warner Brothers' Max would be bundled together on Hulu. I have a feeling Zaslav is getting the better end of that deal. He won't be paying for Hulu for a start. Quick reminder, Disney was originally an equal partner with Fox and Universal for Hulu. When they bought up Fox they got the...

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Disney’s Stock Craters After Earnings Call

Inspiring performance Bob. Disney's Q2 earnings call was today and I think it spoke for itself. I suspect some of this was put options being exercised. Everybody knew that the price of Disney stock had been artificially inflated because of Nelson Peltz's bid to get on the Disney BOD. Which means there were a lot of sell orders with a hair-trigger. Now that Iger's job is safe for another year, the investors have finally started badgering him about Marvel's disastrous performance. And he really didn't...

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RE:View – Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

It’s better than it has any right to be.  Which is not to say that it’s good. One of the joys of a total knee replacement is the insomnia.  I had been watching Wicked City on Tubi, drifted off before the end and Spacehunter had come on because, for some inexplicable reason, Tubi thought I would like it.   I kind of did. Back in the eighties anyway.  One thing that always strikes people who watch this thing is that it feels like it...

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