One can’t say that this arrest comes as a huge surprise. Although I had Jared Leto and Neil Gaiman higher on my Arrest Bingo card than Russell Brand. It’s not a great time to be a skeezy celebrity known for preying upon one’s fans, however “consensually” one wishes to insist it all was.
British police on Friday charged Russell Brand with rape and sexual assault following an 18-month investigation sparked when four women alleged they had been assaulted by the controversial comedian.
London’s Metropolitan Police force said Brand, 50, faces one count of rape, one of indecent assault, one of oral rape and two of sexual assault. The alleged offenses involve four women and took place between 1999 and 2005 in central London and the English seaside town of Bournemouth.
Police said the investigation remains open and urged anyone with relevant information to contact the force.
In September 2023, British media outlets Channel 4 and the Sunday Times published claims by four women of being sexually assaulted or raped by Brand. The accusers have not been identified.
The comedian, author and “Get Him To The Greek” actor has denied the allegations, saying his relationships were “always consensual.”
Brand is due to appear in a London court on May 2.
The obvious question this raises is if it’s only celebrities currently out of favor with the media who will be held accountable before the law or if it will go after its skeezy darlings too.
And, you know, what about those Pakistani rape gangs whose victims number in the thousands?
Fandom Pulse reviews the film based on Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel.
A Working Man with Jason Statham is out in theatres this week and is beating Snow White for the top of the box office. The movie is a lot of fun with Jason Statham’s action delivering with a great character in Levon Cade and a cool supporting cast. There are some problems with the film, however, which stem from caricature villains as well as a couple of moments where the kidnapped young girl Jenny Garcia gets a little too “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as a strong female lead in moments. These elements were not in the book Levon’s Trade, which was a much darker, more serious action thriller, and it’s a shame they didn’t follow the tone of that book more closely.
There are always going to be changes and compromises when translating a story from one medium into another. What works in a novel, or in a comic book, simply doesn’t work on film. And, of course, different media have different tropes and cliches toward which those who are operating in that medium tend to gravitate; given that David Ayers directed both THE BEEKEEPER and A WORKING MAN, the chances that the villains weren’t going to be colorful cartoons was zero.
However, the rising profile of The Legend suggests the possibility that the next movie in the Levon Cade series will be more true to the books, especially considering that nearly all of the criticism of what has thus far been a very successful film has been focused on various elements that were never in the novel. Chuck was not involved in writing the script, but we can hope that he will be in the next one.
And there will be no Hollywood influence at all in the films on which we are presently working; I’m very pleased to be able to say that not only has The Legend’s BLACK WARRANT already been optioned by a film production company, but there is a significant level of interest in what we’re tentatively calling the Silververse, a century-long shared Arkhaven comics universe that includes traditional heroes created by The Legend, Razorfist, JDA, and myself.
RED HORNET is a 1980s superhero.
The Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equality initiatives imposed by Marvel and DC Comics has utterly destroyed traditional superheroes such as The Punisher, Spiderman, Batman, and The Phantom, but when the old heroes fall, new heroes rise.
On a side note, those who have been around for a long time will recall the eerie coincidence when, two days after I published a short story called THE DEPORTED here on this site, the small Italian town in which it was set was completely destroyed by a landslide and had to be evacuated. So, you can probably imagine the thought that crossed my mind when two days after completing a climactic scene set in an abandoned skyscraper in certain city in Asia, I was greeted with headlines that read “Massive Earthquake in Bangkok; Tower Collapses”.
Fortunately, it turned out to be a different tower. And honestly, I don’t think I can be held responsible for the fates of all the towers in Bangkok. Although if a natural disaster takes place in Stockholm this week, I will have to give serious consideration to laying down my creative pen.
Just in case you didn’t fully comprehend the complete extent of Disney’s inversion and devotion to pure Satanic wickedness, note that they not only race-mixed the bird, but they even got rid of the bluebird, the innocent symbol of spring and hope, and replaced it with a carrion-eating black vulture, an ugly symbol of evil and death.
Fortunately, most Americans are onto them now. The live-action inversion of the animated Snow White appears to be bombing harder than even the most negative projections had anticipated. If the reports of a $16 million Friday box office are correct, and assuming past patterns hold, the film’s opening three-day weekend should be around $34 million, which is way below the disastrous $50 million industry projections of a bomb and even worse than the $37.5 million worst-case estimate by Box Office Theory.
This would point to a domestic total of $85 million, which would be an absolutely brutal catastrophe for the Devil Mouse, particularly in light of the fact that the flow of government funds to it are being actively disrupted.
I would go so far as to say that the Devil Mouse may not survive four years of a second Trump administration.
Bill Burr is not dead. But his comedy career is. Not his career; no doubt that will continue to ascend with his appearances in Disney Wars television shows and very serious dramatic movies. But he’s not a comedian anymore.
What happened?! That guy was funny. He didn’t give a shit. He certainly didn’t virtue-signal, as you can see from that last clip.
But now? My God. He’s just awful. Spewing lies about Elon Musk. Just … lies. Like, I can’t believe he’s still on the Hitler thing. Seriously, I can’t believe it. Nobody with half a brain actually believed any of that crap the left tried to pull with Elon earlier this year, yet the Dems just keep going back to the well.
It’s amazing, really, how dumb they are. They think that resonates with people. Does Bill Bull actually think Elon Musk is a Nazi? I mean, come on. What are we doing here? Really, Bill? That’s the hill you’re gonna die on? The hill you’re gonna tank your career on? The Elon-Nazi hill?
Insane. They’re all just insane.
We’ve lost Bill Burr.
What happened? He got converged. And convergence eliminates an individual’s ability to fulfill his purpose just as certainly as it eliminates an organizations ability to fulfill its primary purpose.
Apparently even the massive health benefits of losing weight may not be worth the adverse side effects from Ozempic and its kindred weight-loss drugs:
I work with MDs and PhDs across every specialty — psychiatrists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists, nutrition scientists. Not one of them has failed to mention, in hushed tones, the ‘observational adverse events’ they see with GLP-1 drugs.
Why whisper? Because questioning the safety of this medical ‘miracle’ is career suicide in today’s climate.
The pharma-industrial complex, backed by regulatory bodies and media puppets, has turned medicine into a religion where blind faith replaces scientific debate. Some of these ‘whispered’ potential side-effects you may have heard about: Ozempic Face, of course, but also hair loss and diminished libido. Others, you likely haven’t: gastric bezoars (hard indigestible masses that can form in the gut), or suicidal ideation, accelerated aging and more.
But to return to ‘Ozempic Face’: many have assumed that it’s simply the result of reduced facial volume due to weight loss that leaves many people looking older than before. However, based on my extensive professional experience of helping people lose weight over the years, I’ve never seen them look older — only younger.
To be honest, I hadn’t given this issue much thought, as I’ve been more focused on the potentially life-threatening side effects of the drugs.
That changed the day my surgeon told me his patients on GLP-1 medications were ‘aging in fast-forward’, with some looking a decade older in less than a year. He said, their skin didn’t just appear older — it was behaving older, losing elasticity, with more wrinkles and crepiness, and healing more slowly. Even the connective tissue or SMAS (Superficial Musculoaponeurotic System), which structurally supports the face, was becoming thinner and weaker.
It seems that GLP-1 drugs may be accelerating the breakdown of structural proteins like collagen, elastin and hyaluronic acid at an alarming rate.
Looks like the Hellmouth is devouring its own even faster than usual. We must all endeavor to put on brave faces and staunch our tears.
“After years of speculation, and polite urging from observers like me, Kathleen Kennedy has informed Disney, as well as friends and associates, that she will exit as Lucasfilm president by the end of the year, per three sources.”
No doubt Amazon will want to hire her to make sure that THE LORD OF THE RINGS is demolished as utterly as her previous franchise. I think she’d be wasted on James Bond, as simply casting Ncuti Gatwa as gay black James Bond would almost certainly suffice to lay waste to Ian Fleming’s fading legacy.
ITEM:Rumours abound that Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa is set to walk away from the sci-fi drama leaving the future of the show in doubt.
ITEM:The James Bond film franchise will no longer be controlled by the Broccoli dynasty, after long-serving masterminds Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson announced they are stepping down. The pair will now give creative control to Amazon MGM Studios, which was formed when Amazon bought Bond’s parent studio in 2022.
I think we not only know that the next James Bond will be black and gay, we also have a very good idea of who it is going to be.
It’s fascinating to observe how TV people – and remember, George RR Martin was a TV writer – simply don’t understand some of the technical basics of storytelling. The Dark Herald explains why Black Captain America was always doomed to failure from a technical perspective, even if the Disney degenerati were not actively attempting to subvert the characters and the storylines, at the Arkhaven substack.
Feige was determined to follow his plan of a Marvelverse that had one continuous storyline for both TV and movies. He clearly viewed himself as a grand master storyteller who could rival Tolkien. Except it was a truly terrible idea. First of all, he didn’t invent any of the characters so they are now nothing like they should be, consequently, the audience has wandered away. Second, if he had read the comic books then he would have known just how utterly hopeless a task a single grand storyline has always been. It’s been tried repeatedly, and it’s always failed because you can’t tell any kind of coherent story with one hundred POV characters. The closest thing to a success was DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths because most of the cast was dead by the end of it.
The attraction for executives like Fiege is that it feels like you are making people show up for everything you do because if they don’t, they will miss part of the story. This creates two major problems, one, there is no entry point for new viewers. They are expected to go all the way back to Iron Man (2008) and work their way through what is now about 100 hours of content and you have to include the TV shows because Kevin wanted it that way. Even if you are rigidly trying to keep the narrative cohesive you have the problem of people just not being interested in ALL of the characters. This confuses the hell out of casual viewers because a story like Captain America: Brave New World is built on major events they didn’t know about because they didn’t watch them.
Just for a baseline understanding of the setting you had to have watched the 2008 Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Captain America Civil War, Avengers Infinity War, Avengers Endgame, Falcon and the Winter Solider, and The Eternals.
It’s really not a very difficult concept. The average individual has trouble keeping more than three simultaneous thoughts in his mind. So, the optimal limit on perspective characters in any one creative work is nine, which works out to an average of three characters per act. One can certainly go below this, but one goes above it at one’s peril of cause the reader – or the viewer – to lose interest.
There are just so many ways this is almost certain to go very, very wrong:
Little House on the Prairie fans are voicing their concern after Netflix revealed plans to release a new take on the beloved Western series, which aired from 1974 to 1982. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced they were working on a ‘fresh adaptation’ of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of American children’s novels.
It has been more than 40 years since the original, long-running series wrapped its final episode after nine seasons in 1984.
In a statement, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Jinny Howe, vp drama series for Netflix, revealed that the reboot will be a ‘fresh take on this iconic story.’
Fresh take = Pa is going to be an escaped slave, Ma is going to be a strong, independent Jewish feminist, Mary will be crippled by polio because she didn’t get vaccinated, and Laura and Nellie will have an ambiguously lesbian relationship.
There is some real Rings of Power potential for disaster here.
Those Hollywood millions may be flowing out of Wales even more quickly than they flowed in after Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the team. Lady C, who usually knows what’s going on behind the scenes, explains why Reynolds and Lively appear to be heading for defeat in court, as well as, she suspects, a divorce.
Here’s the story. Reynolds has form in hijacking movies from their originators and not only taking credit for them, but taking the profitability as well. When he and Lively realised that “It Ends With Us” was going to become a huge hit – and Baldoni, who was not only the male lead but also the brains behind the film, the producer, director, script writer and held the option to a sequel, had control of the project – they set about wresting control of the movie frmom him.
However, to achieve their objective of supplanting Baldoni, they had to obtain the rushes and edit the movie themselves. And that’s where things derailed… Ryan Reynolds became increasingly unsettled (to be polite) when he witnessed the unbridled attraction his wife was displaying towards Baldoni… So what does Lively do? Ever the pastmistress of deflection, she denies behing attracted to Baldoni, spins her overt acts of attraction into victimhod, and blames her co-star for taking advantage of her. Remember, at this point, neither Lively nor Reynolds appreciated that Baldoni had footage with sound which could disprove her accusations.
Now, it all made sense to me except one thing. How could publicly destroying the man guarantee them the control over the sequel that they were allegedly pursuing? Did they think he would grant it to them in a settlement, when the movie did $350 million globally? That seemed… improbable.
Well, it’s been reported that there was a clause in his original purchase of the IP that would strip him of the right to use them for the sequel if he was accused of sexual harassment. Which, to me, tends to tie the whole thing together.
It’s entirely possible that this scenario isn’t exactly correct, and even if it is, it’s at least theoretically possible that everyone involved takes a deep breath, steps back, and realizes that letting bygones by bygones and making nice in public would be a win-win-win for everyone. But where sex, pride, and lawyers are involved, people are seldom rational about their interests.
Anyhow, I hope for the sake of the town and team of Wrexham that the vagaries of celebrity ownership don’t wreck what has been a very good thing for everyone, including our community and our FC.
