Everyone knew this was coming but the forms of vendetta must be obeyed. Nelson Peltz has finally thrown down his gauntlet at Bob Iger’s feet. The Trian Group has sent its 130-page white paper (more of a white novel if you ask me) to Disney’s institutional investors. This is basically a list of everything that Disney is doing wrong and what Peltz says needs to be done to fix them. The letter to PepsiCo was rather searing about PepsiCo’s own stance...
I had pretty much given up on playing AAA games when this came along.. They have mostly been a series of rolling disasters for the past couple of years. Redfall, Gollum, Starfield, Skull Island, Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League and of course The Last of Us 2. You’ve probably got a list of your own. It’s not just technical incompetence, although if you buy anything from Bethesda, damn kid what were you thinking?No, politics have pushed...
“Unadaptable” is the word that was most frequently used to describe Frank Herbert’s Dune and not without good reason. People who have had no trouble at all with Tolkien’s Silmarillion have struggled mightily to plow their way through Dune. Herbert stood the convention of “show don’t tell” on its head and mostly just told. He took a 900-page exposition dump on his readers and somehow made it all work. Making a movie version of this is all but impossible but there...
BUMPED 3/02/24. I'll be posting my review of Dune II on Monday, so I decided to bump this review of Villeneuve's first Dune movie. Obviously, the stuff about there possibly not being a sequel no longer applies but I decided not to edit it out. Frank Herbert’s Dune always makes the list of greatest science fiction books of all time. And unlike Foundation and 2001, it actually has business being there. It was a book that was genuinely for the thinking man. Dumb...
None of these are in this articleREPOST 3/1/24. In honor of Farscape's Silver Anniversary and because my review of Helldivers 2 needs an editing pass when my brain isn't fried, I repost this Dark Herald classic.TV tends to lag behind film trends. The 1980s is arguably the best decade ever for science fiction and fantasy movies. In the 1990s the small screen followed suit.This is a list of 1990s sci-fi series that I decided weren’t obscure enough to qualify as forgotten. I’ll do...
The court is assembling from all across the land for a king is dying. Various factions are now presenting pretenders to the throne while the old king insists that he's still good for years. But it is becoming clear that Iger has lost the support that matters. The last earnings call was a nothing but smoke and mirrors. Too much of it was obviously staged. When it was clear that no one who mattered would be allowed to ask awkward questions. Too much went wrong...
In 1942 James Clavell became a prisoner of war of the Japanese Empire. He was eventually transferred to the infamous Changi prisoner-of-war camp where he would remain until his liberation.“Changi became my university instead of my prison. Among the inmates, there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.”-James...
Sean Baily is out as the president of Disney Live Action. I knew someone was going to have to answer for last year's carpet bombing of the theaters. I’m honestly surprised it was Sean Bailey. He really wasn’t responsible for the disasters that Disney has produced. Although, it’s true that he didn’t stop them either. Alan Bergman bears a great deal of the blame although Dana Walden bears much more. David Greenbaum at Fox Searchlight has been promoted to the newly created...
So much wrong in one posterThere is a time in your life when children’s television programming reenters your life. Or at least it did if you were Generation X. I have no memories at all of my parents sitting down with me in front of Saturday morning TV. When the subject comes up I’ve rarely run into someone in my age group that has. Admittedly there wasn’t too much available when I was a kid that needed monitoring. Although, there...
Question: What is the most influential movie you've never seen?Answer: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune.This film's art designs have inspired just about every movie that isn't trying to imitate Star Wars or Star Trek, it clearly inspired ship, set, and costume projects as diverse as Alien, The Black Hole, Babylon 5, and Farscape. Arguably the revived version of Battlestar Galactica as well. Its influence is strongly felt in Warhammer 40K and Starcraft. Yet, not a single person has ever seen this film.Because it...
