Tag: film

 Than actually develop a technological and artistic counterculture:

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

The publishing world is not exempt from this state of affairs. When conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left appeared at Number seven on The New York Times bestseller list, despite actually having outsold all fourteen of its competitors on the list, D’Souza called out the Times on Twitter: “In what alternative universe do Jeff Flake’s 7,383 book sales for this week (BookScan data) top mine at 11,651? Thanks @nytimes fake list!”

This was far from the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings on the Times’ all-important bestseller list. Cortney O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er) side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The New York Times did have the book at Number 13 on its “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved Number four slot among bestselling nonfiction titles.

“It’s not only an insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said “but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”

Ludicrous? The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Notice how there is not a single mention of any writer, musician, artist, or publishing company that doesn’t subsist on parasitizing the Left in this conservative call for conservatives to “create great art, and secondly, create alternative distribution channels to disseminate it”. No mention of Chuck Dixon. No mention of Owen Stanley. No mention of Castalia, Arkhaven, or UATV. Conservative culture consists of nothing but talking about how bad the Left is; it is a literally negative culture.

Now, perhaps the author just hasn’t heard of any of those people and organizations who are already doing what he is calling for. But from what I’ve seen over the last five years, conservatives would rather cry about being prevented from editing Wikipedia than edit Infogalactic. They’d rather complain about Neil Gaiman than read John C. Wright. And they’d rather criticize the Devil Mouse’s demolition of Star Wars than invest in making alternatives.

So, we’ll just keep working, and building, and publishing great stories about the Good, the Beautiful, and the True until the day that conservatives start complaining about how we aren’t listening to their very helpful advice.

Forget seeing these movies. I’ve never even heard of them. Literally no one has ever even mentioned on of them. The Dark Herald explains why the Oscars are dying with an increasingly converged Hollywood, tracing it all back to THE ENGLISH PATIENT at Arkhaven:

The Oscars have been heading in this same direction for a while and this year they finally arrived.  I didn’t see a single one of the nominees this year and I don’t know anyone who did.

Here is the list of nominees for Best Picture for the 2021 Academy Awards:

THE FATHER

David Parfitt, Jean-Louis Livi and Philippe Carcassonne, Producers

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

Shaka King, Charles D. King and Ryan Coogler, Producers

MANK

Ceán Chaffin, Eric Roth and Douglas Urbanski, Producers

MINARI

Christina Oh, Producer

NOMADLAND

Frances McDormand, Peter Spears, Mollye Asher, Dan Janvey and Chloé Zhao, Producers

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

Ben Browning, Ashley Fox, Emerald Fennell and Josey McNamara, Producers

SOUND OF METAL

Bert Hamelinck and Sacha Ben Harroche, Producers

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Marc Platt and Stuart Besser, Producers

NO NOMINEE

NO NOMINEE

No impact. No idea.  And no desire to see any of these art house flicks. 

And in case you are wondering about the last two entries.  The Oscars couldn’t come up with enough nominations to fill their ballot this year, that’s why the last two slots are blank.  So why couldn’t the Oscars come up with enough bodies to fill the seats?  Covid gets blamed but the fact of the matter is that there were enough theatrical releases during the nominating period to fill the slate. 

However, there weren’t enough qualified films to do so. The standards for being nominated this year became a lot more stringent. Which is to say, Woke.

Of course, it’s also because there isn’t a single homogeneous market anymore. Hollywood is learning what happens when a host becomes too weak to support its parasites.

The Dark Herald, Arkhaven’s excellent lead blogger, has pronounced his judgment of Wanda Vision: acceptably mediocre, in a spoiler-filled review of the nine-episode Marvel series:

And that is all that Wanda Vision is.  Acceptably mediocre.  The fans came up with much more interesting theories than the show eventually delivered to its audience. Still better than DC, is about as high a bar as Marvel can manage at this point.  And they can only achieve that level of excellence because DC keeps lowering the bar.

I think it’s easier to start with what wasn’t Marvel’s fault.  

In 2020 Disney had discovered the rather disturbing viewer practice of “streamer branch swinging.”  Since most people can’t afford all of the streaming services, they only subscribe to one long enough to watch the “halo properties” and then cancel once they’ve seen them.  Consequently, Disney decided to take what was a six-episode mini-series and drag it out for nine episodes.  The first three episodes were clearly originally meant to be one episode.  It would have still been a bowl of “meh” but at least it would have been a well-paced one.  As it was, we got to see three episodes inside of Wanda’s TV world without any real plot progression over the course of three weeks.  Basically, the first act went on way too long, and it wasn’t planned that way. The end result was that the audience became disengaged and left.

This was a disastrous mistake made by Bob Chapek’s bean-counters.  Anyone from the creative side of things would have immediately recognized that this would ruin the pacing and it did.  However, Chapek is an accountant with the soul of an accountant and now the clerks from budgeting are making terrible decisions based on “data-driven audience insights.”  Except, by the time you have the data, the audience has already canceled Disney Plus and is giving HBOmax another shot because they want to watch the Snyder Cut.

The second problem was also delivered courtesy of Disney.  

When the higher-ups at Disney got pissed off because Gina Carrano compared the persecution of pro-Trumpers to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, they fired her in a rage.  How dare she compare our righteous pogrom against redneck-terrorists with the holocaust?!  And the blowback from the fans killed all social media engagement with Wanda Vision.  Everyone stopped talking about the show.  Great call Bob!

As for the show itself, the whole thing was a nothing burger.  All of the reveals that were hinted at ended up being duller than the actual plot.  If you googled Twins of the Scarlett Witch, then you already know how it ended….

It was all about female empowerment.  

That was what the show was really about.  It was a replay of Captain Marvel’s basic message of a woman needing to break through the emotional baggage that was restraining her in order to reach her full potential.

So far as the show’s creators were concerned, what Wanda did, in the end, was sad but of course quite necessary.  Because domestic happiness was always just an illusion created by decades of TV sitcoms to keep women down.  She had to discard these illusions so that the Scarlett Witch could rise unencumbered by the ties of family life. 

A normal feminine desire to have a home, a husband, and children were the chains that bound her.  At the end of the show, she chose to abandon all these things and become the Scarlett Witch. Even though that would mean she would be alone.  But that was the price she was going to have to pay in order to reach her fullest potential.

Wanda’s family had to be destroyed in order for her to be empowered.

While I always hesitate to share an opinion that is massively less-informed than a genuine expert’s perspective, what I think we have here is a distinction between an informed Marvel fan’s perspective and an uninformed non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective on the series. Unlike Dark Herald, I didn’t watch Wanda Vision from the perspective of someone who knew considerably more about the subject than having seen less than half of the MCU movies, most of which had only been viewed in order to learn how to write superhero movie scripts.

And at least from the ignorant, non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective, Wanda Vision was a surprisingly good, surprisingly powerful story about a woman wrestling with horrific grief. The alternative interpretations and possibilities that were not pursued are meaningless to me, because I didn’t know anything about the various historical storylines from the original comics, and therefore the production pyrotechnics with the evolving TV sitcom styles were presented were sufficiently intriguing to hold my interest in that regard.

There was, of course, an amount of the usual Marvel SJW nonsense, but it was minimal by today’s standards and did not conflict with the storytelling. As for the feminism, while that may have been how the core storyteller managed to get the whole thing greenlighted by Marvel’s congerged management, I don’t think that was what the show was really about. 

The key factor, to me, is that Wanda’s family didn’t exist. None of what she sacrificed was real. She was stubbornly dwelling inside a false reality of her own creation because she could not bear to accept the pain of her loss. And that story, or at least that element of the story, was a genuinely powerful one. The Wanda Maximoff portrayed in Wanda Vision was easily the most sympathetic character I’ve ever seen in a comic derivative.(1) To me, Wanda Vision wasn’t about the rejection of home, husband, and children, but to the contrary, about the supreme importance and desirability of those things, because the viewer could not grasp the depth of Wanda’s grief and sense of loss if that were not the case.

Which is why I thought it was considerably better than acceptably mediocre. If everything Marvel produced was similarly “mediocre”, it wouldn’t be in freefall. Of course, I still cannot recommend that anyone watch it, if doing so were to require supporting the Devil Mouse in any way, shape, or form.

(1) Pepper Potts from the original Iron Man movie remains my favorite, of course.

Now Amazon is murdering The Lord of the Rings. Whatever this is looks like a low-budget, converged version of Eragon. And given the way the corporacy is now targeting actual books for cancelling, eventually there won’t be any real epic fantasy left except Arts of Dark and Light.

Having rendered the conservatives who feared to fight them irrelevant, SJWs are now increasingly focused on devouring the liberals who paved the way for them.

The BBC will edit out racist remarks made by Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers when the show is re-aired next week. The broadcaster will remove comments by the retired old soldier in the iconic comedy series, which ran for 12 episodes during the 1970s, when the episodes are aired in its Festival of Funny from Monday.

The move comes less than a year after actor John Cleese, who played Basil Fawlty in the British sitcom, slammed the BBC-owned UKTV for removing an episode of Fawlty Towers which featured racist language made by the Major.

Cleese branded the channel ‘stupid’ for not realising the show was mocking the Major’s use of the ‘n-word’ and added: ‘We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them.’

It’s cute that Cleese believes he was ever anything more than a useful idiot laying the roadway for the traffic that is now driving over him. It’s rather like the free speech advocates who are bewildered that they are being cast aside now that their successful campaign to overturn the laws against blasphemy and treason have allowed the treasonous blasphemers to take power and begin instituting their own version of blasphemy and treason laws. 

Christopher Tolkien, the longtime guardian of his father’s literary works, is dead, alas:

We are now calling for papers for the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar, which will be held online on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th July 2021. The theme is Tolkien and Diversity.

Call for Papers

The Tolkien Society Seminar is a short academic conference of both researcher-led and non-academic presentations on a specific theme pertaining to Tolkien scholarship. The online setting of the 2020 seminar saw an increased interest with over 400 attendees from 37 countries. We are delighted to be running another online seminar that will be free for all.

While interest in the topic of diversity has steadily grown within Tolkien research, it is now receiving more critical attention than ever before. Spurred by recent interpretations of Tolkien’s creations and the cast list of the upcoming Amazon show The Lord of the Rings, it is crucial we discuss the theme of diversity in relation to Tolkien. How do adaptations of Tolkien’s works (from film and art to music) open a discourse on diversity within Tolkien’s works and his place within modern society? Beyond his secondary-world, diversity further encompasses Tolkien’s readership and how his texts exist within the primary world. Who is reading Tolkien? How is he understood around the globe? How may these new readings enrich current perspectives on Tolkien?

Representation is now more important than ever and Tolkien’s efforts to represent (or ignore) particular characteristics requires further examination. Additionally, how a character’s identity shapes and influences its place within Tolkien’s secondary-world still requires greater attention. This seminar aims to explore the many possible applications of “diversity” within Tolkien’s works, his adaptations, and his readership.

Papers may consider, but are not limited to:

• Representation in Tolkien’s works (race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, religion, age etc.)
• Tolkien’s approach to colonialism and post-colonialism
• Adaptations of Tolkien’s works
• Diversity and representation in Tolkien academia and readership
• Identity within Tolkien’s works
• Alterity in Tolkien’s works

Meanwhile, Amazon is methodically going about destroying the popular image of The Lord of the Rings:

“This is going to be very different from The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, which are on the road stories. Stories of companionship, stories that take place on journey, but this one is going to be set up like Game of Thrones. We are going to be following different characters in different locations who are going to converge on each other in the end.”

Buechler continues, “They aren’t going to have any Hobbits. There aren’t going to be any wizards. They are going to have, like they said, new characters and new lands. And that is where the big problem is. This is a giant blank canvas. This takes place over thousands of years and that giant blank canvas is going to be filled in with a couple of young, inexperienced showrunners. Does that sound a little bit familiar to you?”

“And those untested showrunners, who have admittedly an experienced writers room with writers from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, are going to have to fill a lot of time with drama and relationship stuff. Modern relationship stuff. And let’s not even get into the dialogue, which you won’t be able to adapt because there really isn’t any like there is in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.” Buechler states.

He then makes comparisons to Game of Thrones, “As you all know things were going great for Game of Thrones through Season 4 until Dan and Dave passed up the books and they couldn’t adapt George’s dialogue anymore. And they tried to interpret what George might have wanted. And George is alive. They could have asked him anything at any time and they still produced the biggest disaster in television history.”

Buechler then questions, “How do you think it’s going to go for [JD Payne] and [Patrick McKay] over there? Obviously, they don’t have J.R.R. Tolkien to talk to. They no longer have the greatest guardian of his father’s work and one of the greatest sons whose ever lived, Christopher Tolkien to talk to either.”

The YouTuber then points to a rumor, covered here on Bounding Into Comics, that there was a shift in the direction of the show following Christopher Tolkien’s death.

Buechler states, “Then, of course, there was the rumored big shift behind the scenes right after Christopher Tolkien’s death. He died in January 2020 and in March 2020 it was rumored from TheOneRing.net that a lot of the writers were fired and they rewrote Season 1 and they removed Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar.”

Next, Buechler warns, “And that brings us to the politicking. Are we going to get the nihilist, post-modern, intersectional Lord of the Rings. I think this is a good possibility considering everything we’ve seen from modern Hollywood. Then there’s the fact that we already have a nihilist, post-modern, Lord of the Rings, it was called Game of Thrones.”

Buechler then recaps many of his concerns about the show pointing to rumors of nudity, the hiring of an intimacy coordinator, the change in story structure, and the show being run by two former Bad Robot employees.

He then adds a report that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mandated Amazon create their own version of Game of Thrones. That report came from Variety and they claimed, “The mandate from Jeff Bezos is clear: Bring me “Game of Thrones.” That’s the word that has the creative community buzzing this week about a major strategy shift underway for Amazon Studios’ original series efforts.” 

I should probably wrap up the extended second volume of Arts of Dark and Light, shouldn’t I…. 

And the fans lost. The Dark Herald explains at Arkhaven:

Now, I understand there is going to be a certain number of people who can’t understand it.  

Why are the goblins at Lucasfilm are so determined to cut their own throats? I mean, it has to be obvious at this point isn’t it? The Reylo trilogy was an utter disaster and by any reasonable standard, the high Republic is an abject failure.  If they are going to keep their jobs, they need to assure that their company is healthy, and to do that they need to have products people will pay money for.  Making Star Wars fans happy and engaged is in their own self-interest. LucasFilm needs to be profitable right?  Right?

Oh, that is so adorable.

At this point, LucasFilm has settled comfortably into the model of corporate parasitism. And the uber-Woke senior executives at Disney are delighted to be fed upon by the incompetent.  

You have to remember an SJW infestation is a convergence of grasshopper-people.  

They create nothing, preserve nothing and leave nothing behind.  

When grasshoppers have finished devastating and devouring a once-productive ant colony, do they sit around trying to rebuild it?  After all, that would be in their self-interest wouldn’t it?  To have a healthy ant colony that they could regularly harvest makes more sense than destroying it.  But no, grasshoppers are grasshoppers, they destroy and move on to the next target.   

The Woke are no different.  When LucasFilm collapses under its own weight due to their undermining they will move on to another property and begin the process all over again.  Unconcerned by lessons of failure because they are fundamentally unable to face the lessons of their own mistakes.

So what is the future of Star Wars?  Well, it doesn’t have one.

And this is why Arkhaven properties will never be for sale. To anyone. Ever. That way lies inevitable devouring by the grasshoppers.

Chickenhawk Studios isn’t just making movies, it’s making movies with some very bad people. From an individual in the industry about the people behind Gina Carano’s new film project:

“Details are being kept under wraps but it will be produced as part of Daily Wire’s partnership with Bone Tomahawk producer Dallas Sonnier and his Bonfire Legend banner.”

One of their films Satanic Panic is essentially a satanic snuff film. From the trailer: “Are ready to fully commit yourself to Satan? YES! Hail Satan!” Dallas has a funny way about always being around these sorts of people.

A Satanic, Virgin-Sacrificing Sex Cult For the 1 Percent—With Plenty of Laughs

But wait there’s more! Let’s look closely at his Wikipedia page.

“In 2020, following the arrest of Adam Donaghey, Sonnier was criticized for downplaying abusive behavior and endangering employees.” Hmmm… interesting to note this Wikipedia at the very bottom. Time to Google!

Producer Adam Donaghey Charged with the Sexual Assault of a Child

Wowzer! And this is where it really gets good, I do highly recommend you read all of this.

How a Right-Wing Movie Studio Enabled the ‘Harvey Weinstein’ of Indie Film

And check this!

“When I asked him to expand on his “partisan” comments, he said, “I think there’s a perception of politics at Cinestate, and the truth is, we are a truly diverse company… I am a complicated guy who identifies as conservative because of certain fiscal responsibilities, limited federal government, things like that. But I’m no fan of the president [Trump].”  -Daily Beast

Wow, fancy them apples, so he is a conservative who hates Trump, teaming up with Benny Boy who’s a conservative who hates Trump. Now it’s coming into focus my dear reader… check out the whole article and find out what kind a person he truly is…

“And the problems with Cinestate extended far beyond Donaghey.” -Daily Beast

Far, far, far beyond diddling minors?

“On top of the sexual-harassment charges, six crew members on VFW and Satanic Panic accuse Cinestate of making them work oppressively long hours—sometimes 18-hour days—with no overtime pay, and that Donaghey, a producer on both films, consistently pressured crew members into being drastically underpaid either by inputting less hours on their time cards or asking them to turn down overtime. “At that point, it’s a safety issue,” one crewmember on Satanic Panic says. “When you hire someone who has been accused of sexually assaulting someone, and you put them in charge of writing checks for everyone in your entire company, are you not giving that person power to abuse further—whether sexually or through forced labor?”

So let’s go back to Wikipedia for one last look.

“Caliber segued into other independent projects before raising funds for two years in order to shoot Bone Tomahawk; the script had been written by one of the pair’s clients, S. Craig Zahler, whom they had been managing for two years. Following production on Bone Tomahawk, Sonnier departed Caliber to found Cinestate, a production company based in Dallas, with the intention of bringing film production to Texas. Sonnier would go on to collaborate with Zahler for two more films, Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete.”