Tag: movies

The True Anti-Tolkien

George RR Martin isn’t the anti-Tolkien. It’s the denizens of the Hellmouth who are desecrating JRR Tolkien’s intellectual legacy, as Fandom Pulse points out that The War of the Rohirrim is much worse, and much more intentionally subversive, than its box office failure would indicate.

Hera is kidnapped by Wulf and rescued by a strong female shield maiden-to-. The maiden goes toe to toe in combat with Wulf and his forces and rescues Hera singlehandedly. No men are required.

Later, when Helm dies, his one regret (even though both of his sons died horribly in this conflict) is that he didn’t listen to Hera. He affirms, despite her having done no deeds to deserve it, that she should be the one to lead her people, calling her both “cunning” and “strong” to unsubtly reiterate the point of the strong female lead.

However, the institution of marriage is struck again as the film progresses. During the final siege of the keep, rewritten as Wulf not being present but in battle with Frealaf in the original Lord of the Rings lore, Hera puts on a wedding dress to confront Wulf.

While it’s yet another cringy moment in which she goes toe-to-toe with a warrior man, fighting and having no problem being stronger than him in combat, the most subversive element is again an attack on the sacrament of marriage.

While it could be construed at first that Hera is willing to sacrifice herself for her people, she doesn’t. She simply kills Wulf with the help of the shield maiden woman, showing again that women can be stronger than men.

Wulf mocks Hera asking why he would marry her now. She once again reiterates that she will marry no man. This is where it gets creepy as Hera says she is wed “to death.”

Everything is sacrificed on their subversive altar. Literally everything. Heirs and families really should think twice before accepting riches to destroy the legacy their predecessors have left them. While it’s good to see that there is no audience for these absurd abominations, they never should have been made in the first place. And the opportunity cost is severe; there is plenty of room in Middle Earth lore for a dozen movies and series that will never be made because the Hellmouth is totally incapable of respecting the source material.

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When a Pet Thinks He’s a Player

The Hellmouth is always quick to put him in his place:

 In the Heights just launched this weekend.  During what was supposed to be a routine promotional interview the Director, Jon Chu was suddenly being roasted by some sow for not having enough Black Latinos in this movie.  Vox (the crap one), NY Times, The Independent, the WaPo, and the rest of the Woketard media were on the attack over this horrifying issue of “Colorism” that no one had cared about before last week.  Lin-Manuel Miranda finally apologized for this hideous malfeasance on his part.

That is the official story.

The Dark Herald proceeds to explain the actual reason Lin-Manuel Miranda suddenly fell out of favor with the paparazzi.

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The Shadow Cannot Maintain

The Dark Herald explains why the IP holders of the D&D property are destroying the appeal of the Drow, and even more so, the character of the Drow renegade, Drizzt Do’Urden

The problem is that Drizzt was intriguing to D&D players because he was the only good member of a race that was well-known for being unspeakably evil. You hated running into even a single Drow if you were in a low-level campaign.

It was the fundamental dichotomy of his character that drew people to him. A child of the spider goddess who followed a path of light was somebody you wanted to find out more about.

What made him choose the life of a complete outcast? A traitor to be tortured and murdered by his own people but hated and feared by all else because he was a member of that race. His character archetype is that of the Renegade Hero* and it is their rebellion that fascinates an audience.

The problem is that retards like the people who write for Screenrant are so wrapped up in their Delulu Land paradigm that they can’t be made to understand that turning the Drow into just a bunch of subterranean indigenous people with BLACK skin and cultural differences that white colonizers from Greyhawk or the Wherever Realms can’t acknowledge as being valid utterly destroys the character of Drizzt.

It’s his rebellion against the fundamental evil of his own race that drew his audience to him. His evil race is the very foundation of his character. Take that away from him and he’s just some loner.

We all know that the shadow cannot create. But we’re learning that it cannot even successfully maintain what it holds. It inevitably destroys everything it touches over time.

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The Pain Remains

It’s not over until Jeff Bezos says it’s over. The Dark Herald manfully continues to suffer through the relentless water torture that can’t even rise to the level of a generic and mediocre High Fantasy pastiche:

The series is unsalvageable, everyone involved knows it. You don’t have an exodus of on-camera talent unless they are trying to avoid the taint of association. The Tolkien fans are long gone. Even Hollywood has been forced swallow the bitter pill that the Woke audience they want doesn’t exist. By no possible measure is The Rings of Power a success yet they have to keep doing this. The makers are now going with the minimum risk of remaking Jackson’s Lord of the Rings without knowing how to do that. Whatever financial sleight of hand that was used to finance this has clearly locked Amazon into a multi-season commitment.

Every episode of this show is bad, no getting around that, but one of them had to be the worst. This one was it. They will have to build a high mountain indeed to top this heap of shit. This is the stupidest, most incompetent episode of the entire series so far.

The Legendarium. The Cinematography. The Spacial Awareness. The Basic Physics. The Narrative comprehension. The Avoiding gross demi-incest stuff. This one got every single thing wrong.

Except the title. That was picture perfect.

“Doomed to Die.”

I have to admit, I wasn’t even remotely tempted to watch Dem Rangz last season. And now, well, I just feel bad for Dark Herald and all of the poor actors and actresses are involved. And, of course, for Tolkien’s heirs, who are receiving an object lesson in why Christopher Tolkien was always such a stickler for respecting his father’s legendary work.

“What could possibly go wrong?” You know someone, probably a lawyer, said somewhere along the path that led to Amazon acquiring the rights to ruthlessly and relentlessly rape the literature.

And now we know.

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He Jumped on the Grenade

Greater love for his fellows hath no man than the Dark Herald, who is suffering through the second season of The Rings of Power on our behalf:

It’s been two years since the first season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was unleashed on a helpless and unsuspecting world. Seven hundred and thirty days has not been enough to dull the pain of the horrors it inflicted on the genre of high fantasy.

J.R.R. Tolkien was without question the greatest and most influential fantasy writer of the 20th century. Every writer that followed him had to consciously either embrace or reject Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was the story of a struggle of good against absolute evil. A story where the protagonist succeeds in his quest to take the One Ring to Mount Doom but ultimately fails in his mission to destroy it. He is saved by Providence and the self-destructive nature of evil.

In the 21st century, there has been a race on to turn as much of the fantasy genre as possible into a pastiche and palimpsest of Professor Tolkien’s life’s work, or perhaps a better term would be a mockery. This production is certainly the pinnacle of that school of thought. There is no ultimate good or absolute evil there are simply shades of grey and at the end of the day everyone is the same and we are all equal. No one has the right to judge anyone for anything unless they are a white male, in which case they bear the sins of all the world and must constantly perform acts of contrition from morning to sunset.

Nowhere is this school of fiction more pervasive than in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

throws back a quick shot of Four Roses

Let’s get after it.

The show starts with a recap of the first season. This is probably a sad necessity for its audience. I know that I personally had to (pauses to shudder) rewatch the entire first season because the brain cells that had been assigned to remember it had died of embarrassment. I’m not the only one, everyone who has to review this has been groaning about having to wallow through the acre of rotting of pig dump that is 2022’s Rings of Power.

Within minutes of starting this new season, you know that Amazon has outdone the last one in terms of sheer incompetence.

It’s impressive that Amazon actually managed to lower the bar. But, as we know, the real purpose of these abominations is to destroy the affection for the source material. Fortunately, the joke’s on them, because we can read old books!

Which is vastly more entertaining than thinly-disguised lectures on girl power and how orcs are people too and they just want a better life for their children, and anyone who doesn’t open the gates of Gondor to them are racists for whom there is no place in Gondorian society.

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Oppenheimer and the Manhatten PsyOp

Who would ever have imagined that Barbie may have been the more historically accurate of the two big movies this summer? Miles Mathis watches the Oppenheimer movie and concludes that it’s an inept attempt to cover for the fact that the Manhattan Project was a fraud from the very start.

At minute 47, we finally get to the Manhattan Project, and the strangest missed clue in the whole mystery is put right on the chalkboard. Oppenheimer suggests to Groves they create a secret base for the project? Where? Well, on Oppenheimer’s private ranch in New Mexico. . . Pause on that. Swish it around in your mouth for a while and taste it as if you are just swallowing for the first time. This is as strange as having the codebreaking project at Bletchley Park, or actually much stranger. In the 1940s the US military already had bases all over the country, with many in the west being out in the middle of nowhere and almost unknown. They didn’t need a new secret base, and if they did you would expect the brass to pick the location, not the 38-year-old Oppenheimer. Opie was allegedly a physicist, not an expert on US geography. So having Opie draw this up on the chalkboard as an X, and the X turn out to be his private ranch, is a magnificent and visual clue to the fake. We are supposed to believe this all happened on the private ranch of some rich guy out in the middle of nowhere? But as you see, it was perfect: it was the perfect place to hide a huge bomb project, but was also the perfect place to hide the LACK of a huge bomb project. All the secrecy would hide a project, but it would also hide the LACK of a project. What if there was nothing out there at all but some cacti and tumbleweeds? Would we know the difference to this day? No.

Here’s something else most people don’t know. Most of the uranium for the Manhattan Project supposedly came from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, Africa. But it was derelict, being flooded and then closed in 1936. The US allegedly reopened it in 1944, which seems a little late, doesn’t it, especially since they first had to pump out all the water. To answer this little problem, we are told this Belgian mining company had stockpiled 1,200 tonnes of uranium in a warehouse in Staten Island. That’s convenient isn’t it? Sometime after 1936, after being closed, this company decided to stockpile all that uranium in New York? And why would they do that? In 1936 there was no call for uranium since no one was building bombs back then. But they just put 1,200 tonnes of it in Staten Island for a rainy day, because, you know why not?

And how is this for suspicious? After the war, ore containing 1% of U3O8 was considered fantastic, but this uranium in the warehouse in Staten Island just happened to be 65%, over 65 times higher in the needed yellowcake. What luck, right? Never before or since had uranium of that mix been found, but we happened to have it sitting in a warehouse in Staten Island. Right next to the Ark of the Covenant.

Oppenheimer was a Fraud, 5 August 2023

The more one reviews the details of 20th Century history, the more obvious it becomes that literally everything has been fake and gay for a lot longer than the last twenty years of open Clown World rule. There isn’t a single item of the mainstream history narrative that can be assumed to be generally true. At this point, it is more likely that space, nukes, and dinosaurs are all more or less fraudulent than they are actually as was taught to us in our schools and universities.

Be skeptical, be very, very skeptical, that anything is as you were told it was, if you haven’t personally gone over at least a substantial percentage of the details of the sort that Miles Mathis points out in his recent paper on the Manhatten Project. Because the closer one looks at these things, the more obviously manufactured they appear to be, and the devil’s hand is revealed in the ridiculous details.

What is astonishing is the ease with which these false historical events can be debunked with a level of knowledge that goes no deeper than Wikipedia. And it would certainly be nice if somewhere, someone is keeping an account of human history that is actually more or less an accurate record of real things that actually happened.

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7 Signs of Controlled Opposition

Postcards from the Edge of Reason lists seven signs that your saviour du jour is just another gatekeeper:

  1. Inexplicable popularity with conservatives.

The first time you heard about Big Conservative Thing was probably someone in media telling you how popular it has already become. No one can explain how, and most likely nobody you know could say they knew anything about it when it was small. Their rise is described as miraculous, or a movement, but the growth was very sudden.

  1. Fleecing massive amounts of money off of conservatives.

Gee. With all those resources in one pool, we’ll surely see some positive change, right? Right? Don’t hold your breath, mate. But do expect someone to extol the virtues of “taking stands” and “making statements” and other ways of paying them to tweet things about other famous people.

  1. Alleviates the pressure of the current situation by saying, “Something is being done.”

Somewhere, out there. You may have had a bee in your bonnet about some issue, and Controlled Opposition may have even gotten you riled up about it, ready to kick names and all that. Even just listening to someone talk about it was cathartic.

  1. Offers their entertainment value as part of some vague solution.

This is closely tied in with the last two. One way or another, it always comes back to them leading the way forward. They assure you that you’re all part of something big together.

  1. Leaves the true power of action entirely within the System.

The closest they ever come to offering a solution is to reinforce processes inside the System, or to leave solutions entirely in the hands of System officials.

  1. Portrays the managers of the system as incompetent, weak, cowardly, clumsy, or even greedy, but never evil and complicit.

This deflects true responsibility from those in power. Worse, it appeals to our natural inclination to say this about leaders we disagree with. But this is all part of the show that starts with politicians saying one thing and doing something else with entirely different results.

  1. Irregular ties to suspicious folk.

How many CIA agents do you know? How many criminals? How many billionaires? You may know zero, or a handful. But you probably don’t know many, and you probably haven’t received large sums of money from them, or acted as godfather to their kids.

The most reliable sign is the first one, the way that they suddenly pop up out of nowhere and their “incredible rise” is celebrated by the media and accepted unquestioningly by the average conservative. And here are a few additional signs:

  • This isn’t their first rodeo. Look into the background of all these manufactured characters and you’ll inevitably discover a previous attempt at becoming a star, from Ben Shapiro’s playing violin on TV as a “child prodigy” to the “modeling” of various female gatekeepers.
  • They publish books even though they’re obviously not writers. I’ve written and published more books than most of these “bestselling authors” combined, and I’m not even particularly prolific. The one “popular book” is there to justify their marketing as a relevant intellectual figure.
  • They’re poorly read and are usually known to have one major influence, who is the only intellectual figure they ever reference because it’s the only one they can reference. How much Jung do you think Jordan Peterson actually read when he didn’t even bother reading the Bible once?
  • They’re connected to other manufactured creatures. See: Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
  • They travel a lot. Most genuinely successful people don’t travel that much because their success permits them to live comfortable lives in the manner they prefer. If you’re in LA on Saturday, DC on Sunday, and Budapest on Monday, you’re not successful, you’re an actor working a PR job.

It’s not an accident that these signs tend to point to The Sound of Freedom being a gatekeeper operation. That doesn’t make it a bad thing, per se, especially given the comparisons and context. But it does point to the improbability that enthusiastically anointing those involved with the film as conservative leaders will end well.

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Snow White and the Seven Diversities

Do you think losing tens of billions of dollars is going to slow Disney’s doubling down? Think again, because they’re going to double down even harder. Not only is the new Snow White movie going to feature a Latinx actress, in the place of the seven vertically-challenged people, it’s going to feature the Seven Diversities.

That’s not a joke. That’s really them. It should be good fun naming them all.

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We Have a Deal

Some guy of whom I’ve never heard before, who apparently appeared in some television shows I’ve never watched, is forbidding everyone who doesn’t celebrate child abuse from watching him do whatever it is he does.

Michael Imperioli is among many actors in Hollywood speaking out against the Supreme Court, with the “Sopranos” star making a statement against the group’s ruling in favor of a Christian web designer who sought legal protection to discriminate against same-sex marriages due to her religious beliefs.

Imperioli shared a screenshot of a news story about the ruling on Instagram, with the headline “Supreme Court protects web designer who won’t do gay wedding websites,” along with a caption railing against the decision.

“I’ve decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Goodfellas’ or any movie or TV show I’ve been in,” Imperioli wrote Saturday morning. “Thank you Supreme Court for allowing me to discriminate and exclude those who I don’t agree with and am opposed to. USA! USA!”

Sounds great! I love the smell of Freedom of Association in the afternoon. And I can’t help but wonder, in the aftermath of the Bud Light, Target, and Disney debacles, how many producers and directors are going to be eager to hire actors and actresses who have antagonized the greater part of the entertainment market?

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Did AI Write Dem Ringz of Power?

The Dark Herald is suspicious. Not deeply suspicious. But a little.

I had suspected that an AI generator came up with some of Rings of Power’s more cringe-worthy dialog.

Finrod: Why does a stone sink? Because it cannot look up.

That line is exactly the kind of thing an AI generator comes up with. The words can be made to sound like wisdom by an actor trying his damndest but give it any kind of sapient thought and it falls into the uncanny valley.

But I didn’t think the whole thing was written that way.

But those AI guys I chatted with are convinced that a new Amazon AI wrote the entire thing. That any human involvement at all was only there to sand off edges that were just too rough.

The big tell for them is the number of things that are produced by a mind that simply doesn’t know any better. Like Galadriel going for a swim in the middle of the ocean or the townspeople giving up their easily defendable castle to move back to their completely indefensible town. It was something that happened and it had dramatic impact, of a sort, but again taken as a whole the concept falls into the uncanny valley. Every episode had something like this in it. Adar’s rousing “brothers and sisters in our own land” speech was weird and out of place when applied to orcs. And of course “Feed me the meat and give it to me raw.” Every single episode was full of things like this.

Then there were all of these incongrous and conflicting events, that frequently had me yelling, “didn’t you read your own damn script?” Individual events sound plausible in isolation but can’t be turned into a coherent structure when taken as a whole. Mostly because the AI isn’t looking for that problem. And the Bad Reboot guys may not have been allowed to correct it. I could understand a couple of frustrated Hollywood nobodies being willing to sign a suicide before reading NDA if it got them something made and they could take credit for it. A high-level failure is still high level, people will be returning their calls.

Was that the real point of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just a big experiment by Amazon to see if an entire mega hit could be created by AI?

I couldn’t possibly say, because I didn’t watch one single second of it despite being an inveterate Tolkien fan who had read The Silmarillion before finishing high school. As well as, of course, the trilogy and the Hobbit enough times to wear out the white books that came in the gold boxed set in the early ’80s.

But it does make one wonder. Because if Amazon hasn’t tried it yet, someone is going to do so soon.

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