Yearly Archives - 2024

Vampire Rules (Part II)

REPOST: It's Halloween season so a few things are getting bumped for the next few days.********************In 1931 Universal Film Studios was faced with a fairly serious problem.  They had a decision to make and no matter what that decision was, they were going to lose money on it.  They had to do it now, they couldn't put it off any longer. Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer (1927) had completely rewritten the rule book. It was a rulebook that was only about 15...

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First Impressions: The Penguin

This show is both a success and a failure.It succeeds in being a truly excellent gangster drama.  The series takes place in The Batman movie setting, at the end of which, the seawall surrounding Gotham City was broken (just accept it) and the city had been flooded.  That’s just background setting and continuity. More important so far as this show is concerned, Gotham’s Godfather, Carmine Falcone is dead.  Shot down in the street.The new head of the Falone family is...

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Another One Bites the Dust: GoDot

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1840479811376201880 For those that don't know, Godot is a an open source game engine. Which means that the vast majority of its employees volunteers. If there's one thing the Bug People love, it's volunteer organizations. There is rarely someone who's job it is to keep useless people out.Discuss on Social Galactic

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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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