ThaOGDreamWeaver

Final trailer is up, and it just wants to liiight... a little flame in your heaaaart... (with a very large flamethrower)

Puddles Pity Party - Brain Damage / Eclipse

Still gutted that Daft Punk won’t reunite. I mean, they could have handed on the helmets to new members for generations and no-one would have known. Y’know, the Dread Pirate Robots.

Odd question: anyone got a good formula description for someone holding a Reaper type scythe? For another hobby project I'm working on (building my own Tarot deck...)

Yet another Bard, albeit with very high scores in the Destruction motivation. Which would make me some kind of Death-Folk or Country/Punk crossover Bard, I suppose...

Thanks. Have caught bits of Slow Horses, kind of gave up on Americans halfway through, and Informant has now been added to queue. Not heard of the Ipcress File remake, will take a look. On the movie front, speaking of spy movies - and making Henry Cavill look weird... ...it's a Guy Ritchie war movie. Sort of. For those of you who aren't history nerds, the title is Churchill's nickname for WW2's Special Operations Executive. SOE's ops weren't quite as colourful as the poster and movie make out, because they'd have stood out like sore thumbs. But they did come from all walks of life, and were trained to blend in, while working as assassins, thieves, spies and military advisors/trainers to Resistance groups. And their story does need to be told. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you can get the SOE's collected Training Manual on Amazon - including self-defence techniques, how to fling an exploding rat, and a field guide to burglary "compiled with the help of professional and patriotic criminal sources."

Decided to hop out to a random movie on Sunday, and that turned out to be Argylle. I think it's worth a watch (possibly on streaming), though spoilery notes ahead... On that note, I'm in the mood for a good spy caper (especially with my "Jayne Blonde" AC/AA Dominator running around Paragon). Anything good I should add to queue?

Interesting choice, is all. He's quite a versatile actor - yes, in cape world, we know him for Quicksilver (and Ralph Boehner...) and he delivered a pantheon of charismatic creeps in AHS:Cult. Haven't seen Mare of Easttown but heard that was good, and Dahmer isn't up my alley - but again, heard good things about his acting. He's got no particular schtick or associations, so you're really not going to know who or what you're dealing with. Re your spoilerbox, my thoughts:

So this project is real, and there's a first image: Confirmed cast: Jared Leto😠, Greta Lee🙂, Evan Peters🤨, Hasan Minhaj😐, Jodie Turner-Smith🤩, Arturo Castro🤓, Cameron Monaghan🤯, with Gillian Anderson🥰. Confirmed director: Joachim Rønning, a Norwegian indie darling who - like the unfortunate Brit director from a pair of threads that have wisely been consigned to history - got sucked in by the promise of big budget big name movie making, only to find out their project was cursed (PotC: Dead Men Tell No Tales, though his second Mouse outing with Maleficient:Mistress Of Evil was pretty solid.) He replaces Aussie adman Garth Davis (Foe). Execs: the producers at least knows what he's about: Jeff Silver, who cut his teeth on The Wonder Years, and then built a very varied CV ranging from Training Day and Assault On Precinct 13, to Santa Clause and three Disney live-action remakes. Confirmed plotline: TRON: Ares follows a highly sophisticated Program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings. Production notes: began filming (finally) in Vancouver in January under codename Velcro, after pandemic delays and then the strikes. Unconfirmed pointless speculation: something about ARES's right hand is screaming weapon. Not to mention the red colour scheme, the armoured-looking suit, and the odd looking warning-triangle data disc/ frisbee / next Apple jack I'll have to get a dongle for if they flip off the EU.

Disturbed - Land Of Confusion

Boy George, Ariana DeBose & Nile Rodgers - Electric Energy

Two Steps From Hell - Victory

Yes, this is pretty creepy on its own, but the noise that compressor makes...

Freyja - Seidlæti

Unfortunately I've got no idea - just lucked into that particular combo. Here's the prompt: I'll try and remember. Here's another take on the DW above, or as close as I can remember, using the Ominous Escape preset for Playground XL (because it's busy right now, and the Photorealistic ones take too much queue time for free users...) Here's the settings that were used: And now with the Masterpiece preset: Again, the thing these seem to annoy me with most are the eyes - any specific ideas for nudging the prompts not to screw those up? Tried adding blurred eyes, mismatched eyes, distorted eyes to the exclusions but doesn't seem very reliable.

If only work'd give me the budget...

Trying out PlaygroundAI's RealVis XL settings... DW, looking classy (though I can almost never get it to put the spiderweb design over the chest...) Ranger Emily, looking pensive (why do the eyes come out tinted?) ...and Captain Thunder - oddly, the hardest one to instruct on (not least "how do I remove the weird spoiler thing from the back?) But other than that... yep. We like.

Deadpool has always been a parody comic that still exists as part of the Marvel canon, sort-of. And if there's a genre that deserves to be parodied, it's cape movies. And their fandom. Where the two Deadpool movies fell down is that they have more-or-less recognisable plot arcs, with emotional beats that more or less make sense, in between all the fart gags. And Celine Dion. So they are perhaps better than their subject matter deserves.

Oddly, IMDB did a "making of" documentary series on it which is still live on their site. Perhaps one day it'll be a case study.

Studio rewrite? Out of curiosity, I've just had a look at IMDB. There are two fairly obvious pairs of writers credited: The writer/director, Brit TV journeywoman director SJ Clarkson, and a Brit writer called Claire Pearson - responsible for the brilliant and quite mindbending Life On Mars (the OG version with the Quattro, not the US remake), and also Spooks - a dark and slightly grimy Brit MI5 series (find it on Britbox if you can.) The other writers are... Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose highly esteemed credits include but are not limited to: the recent Power Rangers movie, Gods of Egypt, and a little charmer that went quite viral called Morbius. Sazama and Sharpless are also listed under Story, which would be the original pitch that got the greenlight. (Incidentally, Sazama is also on an IMDB user generated list called Hack Writers.) Which leads me to think the following. This is pure conjecture, but. 1) Sazama and Sharpless, among others, are hired to develop a batch load of Marvel properties to build out the Spideyverse before Sony has to hand back the keys. Possibly at bulk rates. 2) Morbius gets filmed and released. About which we know, and about which Matt Smith will happily tell you if you get him drunk enough. So here he is shirtless. 3) No-one in their right mind would touch this property after what happened with Morbius. So they have to hire in a fresh-faced Brit, excited to step up from TV to a big motion picture. 4) Clarkson finds out what she's got herself into slightly after accepting the gig - given filming schedules, possibly Morbius hadn't come out yet - and calls in a friend to help do a desperate attempt at a rewrite. Which... doesn't work either, or gets edited back towards the greenlit version. 5) If I'm even slightly right, I would 100% pay to see Emily Blunt and Ruth Wilson double-head a thinly-disguised movie about the making of this movie. Because it would be a whole lot funnier.

Neko Fuzz & Raizon - Catisfaction Happy Caturday to all who celebrate😻

Mick Smiley - Magic (Ghostbusters OST) (And in case you were wondering... https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-mick-smiley-made-the-best-ghostbusters-song-then-disappeared-efccd93cce8d)

Well, let's put some numbers behind that. In 2023, global box office - all the movies, in all the cinemas everywhere* - clocked around $34bn. Pretty good. But in 2019, that figure was $42bn. (And in case you were wondering... 2020 was $11.5bn.) So yes, COVID hurt, but it also brought a massive uptick in streaming. And audiences are still pickier about what they want to go see, especially with cinema-exclusive windows chopped down to months or even weeks. I'm definitely one of them: while I've gone out with friends for GOTG3, D&D and Wonka, I've happily waited for Oppenheimer, Songbirds & Snakes, Marvels and Barbie. Unless it's something I really wanna see, the movies can come to me. Averagely interesting is no longer enough. *except South Korea, where there is a lot of very weird and somewhat insular box office gaming going on, so it's been excluded from industry figures. Odd little story: worth a couple minutes of your time to read.

Oooooooooooookay. I know they’re trying for a GOTG vibe here, it actually looks the part, and they’ve got a stellar cast. But that script… …if a trailer’s supposed to be the best bits of a flick/attract mode, then we may have some serious issues…?