Tag: movies

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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The Marvel Implosion Continues Apace

The Dark Herald reviews a new Marvel movie that apparently has something to do with Antman, and possibly, The Who, on the basis of its title which I can’t even bother to learn.

I have rarely seen a genre movie so dripping with contempt for its core audience.

Nineteen eighties Mexican sword and sandals videos had more respect for the people that would be seeing it than this flick did. There are no characters, only cut-and-paste caricatures. This is no plot, only a series of ridiculous contrivances. This entire motion picture has been built around appearance for the sake of appearance. It is a Disney Frankenstein. This film is broken. Like its namesake, there is no substance to Quantomania at all.

The Antman character was a problem for Marvel Studios. The problem was that Ari Arad cared about Marvel Comics back when the studio had to listen to him. In the comic books, Hank Pym and his second wife Janet van Dyne were the original Antman and the Wasp, and they were also the founders of the Avengers. Back when Ike Perlmutter made sure that Marvel gave a rancid fart about the canon, not having an Antman in the team that Antman founded was a problem. The thing is Hank’s first wife was murdered by the Hungarian secret police which was why he became Antman in the first place. Bob Iger and Kevin Feige were at best uncomfortable with Hank’s anti-Marxist baggage. But there was no such problem with the Scott Lang version. A hero on a redemption arc is easy to write and easy to make a movie about. Consequently, Scott Lang settled into a role of Antman as a lovable loser trying to make good.

This is the part where I try to ruin the whole movie for you by spoiling it in detail, but this thing is such an inconceivably disjointed trainwreck that my brain keeps shutting down in self-defense when I try to recall the details.

The film opens with Scott strutting down a sidewalk in an alternate universe San Francisco, where he isn’t trying to avoid stepping on broken needles and human shit. The theme from Welcome Back Kotter is playing as Hank has a montage about what a great life he is having as a superhero. The whole city loves him. Apparently, he landed a book deal and has a number-one bestseller. We are meant to believe he wrote it himself; this is the least of the contrivances that are about to pummel an unsuspecting audience.

Montage ends when Scott has to bail his new teenage daughter out of jail (she was recast). Cassie was protesting for the rights of the homeless to establish her unassailable moral superiority over her Generation-X world-saving superhero father, and it is done with such brutal impact that passersbys suffer blunt force trauma. She shrank a police car and was apparently allowed to keep it in jail so she could put it on the comically outraged cops’ desk at the county lockup. She is allowed to leave rather than be arrested again for GTA of a police car because the movie has to get to the next scene as fast as possible. Cassie is such sassy.

I do so love the smell of an imploding converged comics industry in the morning. Throw in a little Devil Mouse in decline and it’s practically a party.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Future of STAR WARS

Is bleak. It is very bleak indeed, if the Dark Herald is hearing things properly.

There was a big pow-wow at Disney on the future of Star Wars. Iger, the senior executive leadership at Disney as well as the leadership of LucasFilm. Disney has massively over-invested in Reylo Star Wars. The sunk costs are too big to reskin the rides and attractions at Disney Parks. Disney hates the idea of retconning away Rey anyway, they NEVER throw away a property, that company’s executives are as repelled by that idea as fish is of getting a suntan.

They have come up with the most designed by committee future of Star Wars imaginable. This is the result of market testing, egos tied to malinvestment and of course the malinvestments themselves.

Consequently, the new big Star Wars movie is going to star five characters.

Ready? Because Disney don’t care if you aren’t

  1. Rey
  2. R2-D2
  3. Chewbacca
  4. New character that will be introduced in the TV shows
  5. (You guessed this one already) Baby Yoda.

Bob Iger had to go with something. In fact, anything. He can’t shitcan Kathleen Kennedy, not with a big proxy fight coming up. He has to express confidence in her despite her disasterous record because he was the one that never fired her.

What they are telling themselves is that the reason Rey isn’t popular is because she has faded from public memory and needs to have her profile raised and not that she was Queen of the Mary Sues.

This is literally the complete opposite of a character-driven approach. It’s a plot-driven approach driven by the need to force the completely different characters from different mediums together. Why not throw in a character from the Alan Dean Foster novels and another from the Dark Horse comics just to increase the degree of difficulty?

It’s really too bad neither of the writers I tried out as collaborators were able to make the grade on my now-ancient not-Star Wars project called FARAWAY WARS that would have preceded Nick Cole’s GALAXY’S EDGE by more than a year. Well, perhaps once I’m finished with my next four books, I can crank one or two of them out myself. It’s more likely that I’ll initially do it as a comic script, however, as Arktoons continues to grow.

FARAWAY WARS

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Wakanda Never

The Dark Herald steels himself and reviews Wakanda Forever in substantial detail. It’s not an easy job, but someone has to do it.

I feel like such a chump.

I honestly thought Marvel was going to try for once. I have no idea what this unfounded optimism was based on.

Most of the praise for this film was written by shills before it hit the theaters. You can tell.

Although, I have seen legitimate good reviews for this movie, and they were entirely from fat Gamma Males. If you are a Fat Gamma Male or are simply a Gamma male who is fat in spirit, this is absolutely the film for you. You will cry like the bitches you were born to be throughout the whole thing.

If you are a Delta and above, you will curse the goddess of whatever fate that pronounced the doom upon your head that forced you into a theater to endure this impenetrable wall of tedium.

Fortunately, the movie theater I went to serves drastically overpriced beer. Bless you, oh Founder’s Dirty Bastard Scottish ale ABV 8.5%, I couldn’t have made it without you.

I strongly suspect this script was mostly finished before Chadwick Boseman died because he was mad as hell with Disney about something before he clocked out. It feels like it was extensively reworked. Some things just don’t fit like they should. It is possible that this script was originally supposed to take place during The Snap after T’Challa got zilched out for five years. That would make more sense than the complete lack of political adjustments being made when T’Challa was…let’s face facts…dead after Thanos’ little visit.

When T’Challa Blipped back in, he should have seen Gorilla Dude sitting on his throne being unhappy to see him. Although Gorilla Dude was undoubtedly less happy to be in this movie given that he was portrayed as being stupider than a gorilla.

Regardless, a story about his family adjusting to King T’Challa being gone would only make sense if they hadn’t already just gone through it. They are acting like they are mourning him for the first time and we all know he just spent five years being dead.

I would have to assume that you were hopelessly incompetent as a scriptwriter to have deliberately designed a story like this. This is not an assumption that I can casually dismiss with Marvel in the 2020s.

The oppressed minorities in this movie are constantly snarling about “colonizers.” WHY? Neither Wakanda nor the Sea-Mayans were ever colonized. And if the Wakandans were so morally outraged about the slave trade… Why. Didn’t. They. Do. Anything. About. It?

If Wakanda is three hundred years ahead of everyone else then I am pretty sure, my 18th-century ancestors would not have been willing to pursue the slave trade in face of 20th-century weaponry.

Read the whole thing there. In related news, the Devil Mouse is losing money. A LOT of money.

The Walt Disney Company is expected to make massive layoffs due to their poor financial outlook. As per a memo sent to top company execs last Friday and subsequently viewed by Variety, the House of Mouse will begin taking substantial measures to offset the company’s recent and abysmal Q4 financial losses.

This year, production spending for the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit an all-time high with both both Thor: Love & Thunder as well as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hitting $250 million in costs before marketing – the highest such budgets for a non-Avengers film in the entire franchise. The massive costs of the film have driven Marvel Studios’ average break-even mark for those films to be an estimated $700-800 million dollars.

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