Monthly Archives - September 2024

Rings of Power: Make the Pain Stop!!!

It will be decades before we discover how The Rings of Power was really made.  Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. MacKay and Payne are nothing but lightening rods at this point, everyone who’s leaking says that is their only function, they have no power at all over the production, they are there to take the blame.  Which makes it very difficult to tell who is in charge, assuming it’s anyone at all.  A couple of years...

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RIP Dame Maggie

She could make you laugh and cry in the space of five minutes.   She could portray intimacy while projecting emotional distance.  Laurence Olivier admired her so much he slapped her across the face during Othello, and could hold her in physical comedy against Carol Burnett. Dame Maggie Smith has left the building at age 89.Margaret Smith Natile Smith was born in 1934 to Scottish Secretary and an English Pathologist who worked in Oxford.  When she was seventeen she took to...

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The Top 5 Films of the Greatest Horror Star You Never Heard of

UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1921: Conrad Veidt as "Cesare" in the film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". Photograph. 1921 (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)Sure, you’ve heard of Lon Chaney Sr. You would know Boris Kharloff’s voice anywhere. Dracula wouldn’t have been a thing without Bela Lugosi. Price, Lee, and Cushing carried the horror genre on their shoulders during its darkest decades.But one of the greatest horror actors of all time, you’ve probably never heard of.Okay, you probably do know of...

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Hammer Films Retrospective (Part VI) The Golden Age 

Okay, it is Hammer Films so gold-plated is probably a little more accurate.You could always tell a Hammer Film just by the look of it, even if you had surfed in, just flipping channels on a Saturday night.  There was something about its aesthetic. Something about its style. Hammer in the Mid-Sixties was at its height. Their gorgeous look was and still is unmistakable. On a minuscule budget, Hammer delivered films that seemed pretty close to C. B. DeMille’s epic.For a...

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How Does Ubisoft Keep Screwing Up This Bad?

Ubisoft really needs a Japan coach. Just some normal Japanese person who can tell them when they are stepping on yet another cultural landmine. Not the Clown World consultant and Sweet Baby alum Kazuma Hashimoto. Just a nomal person who would have steered you away from another PR disaster like the one above.The ninja chick is sitting on top of a Torri gate. A Torri gate is kind of a symbolic structure that marks the boundary between the mundane...

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Modern Role-Playing Games In One Picture

This is absurdist fantasy dressed up as inclusivity. This picture has been all over my feed for a couple of days. Mostly because it perfectly encapsulates Modern Audiences Dungeons and Dragons.I could forgive this if it was made by an AI, but it clearly isn't. Someone drew this. It's all the thought that didn't go into this is what makes it impressive. You are presented with a Red Sonja type of heroine. While her face...

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Hammer Films Retrospective (Part V) Quatermass and the Pitt 

Doctor Bernard Quatrermass is frequently credited with being the father of Doctor Who.  Which used to mean something good.  Regardless, this makes the one-time BBC staff writer Nigel Kneale, the grandfather of Doctor Who, and honestly, it kind of fits.  A preachy, judgmental, and hypocritical Leftie who is constantly exasperated by the human race’s refusal to “just grow up.” Nigel Kneale was the creator of the Quatermass serials.  His voice was easily and unquestionably the most influential in the shaping of the...

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Hammer Films Retrospective (Part III) Dracula

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was first and foremost a gentleman.  If not necessarily a gentle man.  His father was a Colonel in the King’s 60th Rifles and his mother was an Italian Contessa.  His parents separated at a young age and he and his sister lived with their mother when she moved to Switzerland.  He took an early interest in acting at school when his mother remarried, he returned to Britain.   He was Stepcousins with Ian Fleming and was introduced to Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Pavlovich,...

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