Monthly Archives - September 2024

21Sep

How High Does DiddyGate Go?

"Are you kidding me? Compared to the music industry, we're Boy Scouts!" - Anonymous porn producer This isn't the usual stuff I cover but my sources won't shut up about it. According to them, people who weren't at all concerned when Epstein was arrested are looking into Brunei, Morroco, Russia, or any country that doesn't have a US extradition treaty. There is a panic going on in the entertainment industry over Sean Combs, the likes of which no one has ever seen...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
20Sep

Concord the Aftermath

Concord was so much worse than we thought.  The claims that it cost $200 million appear to have been just a rumor.   Try $400 million. Sony is starting to leak largely because people are starting to get the ax because Sony has to cut corners now.  Sony’s PlayStation CEO Herman Hulst was a relentless champion of Concord.  So far as he was concerned it was going to be Sony’s biggest franchise. He was convinced it would be a (pre-Disney) Star Wars level hit....

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
20Sep

Agatha All Along: First Impressions

This show started life as a gag.  Truthfully it wasn’t a bad gag.  WandaVision was a show that was half good and half godawful.  Wanda Maximoff having lost her mind and created a TV show world she could hide in was not itself a terrible concept.  But it was the first of the M-She-U entertainment products. Regardless, the Agatha All Along demi-Munsters theme song was genuinely funny and became something of a novelty hit on YouTube. A novelty hit is no...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
19Sep

Hammer Films Retrospective (Part IV) The Mummy  

The poster was ready before the picture was finished. When Peter Cushing saw it, he insisted on running his friend through with a spear so as to not cheat the audience.  “Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose.” - Translation of the Curse of Wadjet.  That was the actual curse placed upon those who would dare disturb the tombs...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
18Sep

HBO Is Making a Comedy About Marvel Films

I'd heard about this but I didn't believe it. Warner has too much of its own skin in the game but Zaslav actually greenlit this thing. This is the team that did The Thick of It, The Veep, and The Death of Stalin a Comedy of Terrors. In the trailer below you can see a very clear reference to Kevin Feige. They are actually going there. This is supposedly based on all the stuff that everyone in Hollywood...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
18Sep

Hammer Films Retrospective (Part II) Frankenstein Rises!

His nickname was “Props Pete” because of his preferred method of performance.  Most actors only interact with props if a director gives them specific instructions to do so.  But Props Pete was forever picking up this item or that one during a performance and used it casually with apparent long-accustomed familiarity.  It added depth to the role he was playing. He was trying to sell the audience on his character being an expert in whatever field the part was meant to be brilliant...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
18Sep

Hammer Films Retrospective (part I) Gothic Beginnings 

I’m honestly not the biggest horror movie guy out there.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate them. Exactly. I just hate what they have turned into.  There is so little artistry to it these days.  So little concern with trying to provoke the “delightful shiver.”  These days it’s all built around scenes that spend as little time as possible building tension and then clobbering the audience with a jump scare, followed by gory body horror.  Modern body horror only works if you don’t actually look at...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
17Sep

Rings of Power – S2 Ep 5: On the Nature of Evil

From Professor Tom Shippey’s: Tolkien as a Post-War Writer “(The works of these) five authors, Lewis, Orwell, Tolkien, Golding and White, seem to me to hang together in unexpected ways; they are all non-realistic works, whether one regards them as science fiction, fantasy, fable or parable (all descriptions which have been applied); and they are all books insistently marked by war, all works by writers who are “post-war” in more than an accidental or chronological sense.” … “Finally, all five authors share a...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
16Sep

The Dark Herald Recommends: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen this year.  I have to give it that.  I’m afraid I can’t give it a lot else. Beetlejuice x 2, is a sequel that feels like a sequel.  Tim Burton didn’t really want to make it. Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega didn’t really want to star in it.  But Michael Keaton delivered on it. I suspect this movie only got made in the first place because Ryder and Keaton’s stock has risen in the past...

By UncategorizedComments Off
Read more...
Arkhaven Forum Castalia Direct Bookstore