ThaOGDreamWeaver

Small piece of casting news: clearly we weren't the only ones impressed by Nic Hoult, as Gunn has just officially cast him in Superman: Legacy... ...as Lex? Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. Especially as Lex isn't the primary antagonist: that's The Engineer (think T3's Terminator X model.)

The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid! Yeah, being genetically Scottish, pale and interesting, I get that a lot. Even to the point of people taking the mickey on flights back from holiday. Factor 50 all day, every day...

No Doubt - OI! To The World

Love Is A Long Road - Tom Petty

Just regenerating this for a moment as the Specials have now completed...

Hey Duggee - Enid's Dream Weirdly catchy, especially if you like the Weeknd. And then there's the video...

I pretend everything other than the first one exists. The first one is worthy. Because, apart from anything else... this.

I have a few DP type toons to fit different concepts. DP/NInjitsu and DP/Devices have been great fun for my Agents type characters, plus a DP/Empath combat healZ0r. Thinking about making a two-fisted Indiana Jane type next and not sure whether to go /Martial or /Energy. Agree that Fire is your best bet all round round, but Toxic and Cold are situationally useful against enemies that don't resist them well. Cold can also put the brakes on big crowds a little... and very handy for snow displays this time of year. Tox's -DMG isn't quite as useful as if they'd made it, say, -Regen.

Kurt's not always had the best of luck with the roles, so it's nice to see him having yet another renaissance. And while I love a good movie, sometimes I'm happy with a box of popcorn and a terrible one. Now check this out, one time. Thangyallver'much.

Which seems kinda unfair. Tested well, critics were good with it if not raving, scored well with audiences... ...well, the audiences that got to see it, because pretty much everywhere was booked for Barbenheimer at the time. There's been differing reports about whether this and Aquaman are canon to the new DCU, though Gunn certainly liked it and thought Maridueña could come back as Jamie Reyes. And even I think the genre could use a break for a while. Well, not a break exactly. A pause in the rush to exploit the genre. A movie should be entertaining, sure, but it needs to tell a story. A good one. And there are many, many kinds of stories that you can meld into the superhero world. Which The Batman managed to do. It's recognisably a Bat-flick, but very much a proper underworld/serial killer flick too. And there's a whole bunch of other genres that would work and have worked. Horror. Retro pulp. Conspiracy. I mean, maybe not a Richard Curtis romantic-comedy take on Captain Britain with Colin Firth, but... ...*blink*... ...nah, that'd never work. Well maybe. Could it?

It's not that far off now. Best example technically was the recent Indy movie (talking about the recreation of the younger Jones, not necessarily the plot, though I was pretty happy with it by the end.) Question is... do you want to? Pulling that out into another thread...

KISS - God Gave Rock & Roll To You II ...and speaking of v2.0...

Technically, they are comic book heroes - and superheroes (check out the properly ridiculous Phantom Of The Park movie, as well as their actual Scooby Doo movie that sent it up...) So KISS played their last-ever show at Madison Square Garden. But as they vanished, they suddenly appeared above the audience, declaring their fans had made them "immortal." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67611691 What they're gonna do is use the ABBAtar robotic technology pioneered for London's Voyage show, projecting digital images onto physical mannequins. I'm not gonna give away exactly how they do it, because it's pretty impressive - it's a very very old bit of stage magic given a whole new lease of life with technology, and a highly controlled environment. But while the Swedish crew wanted to make the show as realistic as possible - and according to my partner who's seen it, there's still a lot of Uncanny Valley going on - KISS have been trying to do the exact opposite for the last 50 years. So they're going to... let's say... embrace all the possibilities. So, theoretically, between physical avatars and digital reconstruction, there's a lot of actors and musicians that we could bring back to life. And with the cunning Ukrainian folks at Respeecher, you can make them say what you want (singing... not yet so much.) Some people are good with that: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/james-earl-jones-signed-darth-vader-voice-rights-to-disney-for-ai-use/ Question is... do we want to? One of the only bad bits of the fantastic Rogue One was bringing Peter Cushing back from the dead. Even without the flaws in the CGI recreation, it made it much harder to suspend disbelief - for me - than if they'd used the actual actor they'd used for mo-cap and voicing, with some decent aging makeup. And as you may have heard, one of the key sticking points in the recent SAG-AFTRA strike was actors wanting to be protected from future AI use without their permission (and without royalties). So admittedly this tech is moving really, really fast, and I'm not sure where we'll be in a few years. But would you watch a movie, gig or TV show knowing its stars were either dead, retired, or didn't want to be in the show?

Giving this thread a quick Stimpak, because we have a big update. Vanity Fair has a First Look and interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/11/fallout-first-look ...and there's a THR video. If you get locked out of VF or just want a quick TL;DR, here goes. Bethesda didn't want the show to be retreading an existing game - so this is an original story by Jonathan Nolan, developed with Bethesda's writers as consultants. It's set in a relatively unexplored area of the Fallout world (Los Angeles), and is officially canon. And Bethesda are slightly jealous of some of the stuff the TV writers came up with - so there's a possibility of a TV-to-game adap. We have three intersecting lead characters: Lucy (Ella Purnell - Never Let Me Go, Arcane, Maleficient) is a Vault Dweller from Santa Monica's relatively luxurious Vault 33 (compared to some of the more horrific experimental Vaults we've seen in the games, anyway... and definitely compared to the world outside.) She's nice, naive, slightly "spoilt", and not quite ready to face the terrors she needs to. Maximus (Aaron Poten - Father Stu, Emancipation) is a squire to one of the power-armour Knights of the Brotherhood of Steel. Definitely more of a survivor, but also desperate to prove himself to his Knight and the Brotherhood. And then there's The Ghoul (the fantastic Walton Goggins - The Shield, Sons Of Anarchy, Hateful Eight, tons more). Described as "The Good, The Bad, AND the Ugly." Feels slightly similar to the role of The Man In Black in Nolan's other big show, Westworld: an antagonist, sure, but very aware of and intelligent about the world, how the world he lives in came to be, its deepest secrets, and has become both hardened and comfortable in it. Has a certain swagger and charm. Ruthless, but with a certain code of honour. Whatever their initial motivations - Lucy trying to fix a Vault problem, Maximus's quest to be a knight, the Ghoul out bounty hunting... ...there is a McGuffin of some sort they all wind up chasing, that could radically change the balance of power in their univerzzzzzz... ...what? whassat? Okay, quest show. We get it. Not the most original plot, I suppose. But like Last Of Us, how they get there, how the key characters interact, and where they wind up is going to make or break it. Supporting cast includes the mighty Kyle McLachlan as Lucy's dad Hank, the Vault 33 Supervisor: mysterious nerd specialist Michael Emerson, pulled over from Nolan's earlier Person of Interest, as a scientist: and fine journeywoman actress Sarita Choudhoury as a warband leader. The released photos - seen in the vid above - make the production values look pretty darn sparky to me. The Ghoul gets an origin story - making him over 300 years old - as does Vault-Boy. Still no Ron on the IMDB listing. Which is disappointing. But again - it's not a difficult gig to record a V/O. Release date is now April 12 2024. So what do we think?

I have a whole stack of DVDs of those - all the freak-of-the-week smouldery-vampy-detective series. It was a whole subgenre for a while: Forever Knight, Moonlight, Blood Ties (the books are much better), and of course, Lost Girl. Any I missed that I need to check out? Plus the Nic Cage-produced Dresden Files, which made a few changes from the books, but captured the spirit of it fairly well - and told some great original stories. It had one imaginatively nasty episode - pushing the limits of what you can do on TV - about the Hand Of Glory...

The Pogues - Streams of Whiskey🥃☘️

The only woke issues I had with Quantumania was staying awoke through it. Yeesh. It's kind of puzzling how this has warped into a whole win/lose/zero sum thing with the movies, not to mention a lot of other things. Time was, there would be movies that appealed to one kind of audience but maybe not this other one, and that would be okay, both financially, and with the press and politicians not being overly bothered... ...unless it was really nasty/juicy/transgressive stuff. I'm not quite old enough to remember when Exorcist, Brazil, VideoDrome or Life Of Brian came out. But I do know those got fun, and for some slightly better reasons. Marvels is not the Messiah, it's a very... slightly half-baked popcorn movie with a bunch of adorable cats in it that needed better editing. And more cats. Nothing more insidious than that. Financially, risking a studio's rep and future on big-swing franchise tentpole movies that you haven't given time to develop properly is getting to be a risk. MGM/Sony killed Bond partly for that reason. But also creatively, that character had run its course and needed a rest and refresh. If we're looking for a less-PC, more testosteroney* example, Fast X is a franchise movie, a mess (EXPLODING HAMSTERBALLS!), and the lowest-grossing in the series. It's allegedly just scraped into profitability, though what kind of profitable depends on who you ask. I've yelled enough about rolling breaks and other quantum accounting techniques they use in Hollyweird. If you really wanna know, look it up. The death of the Franchise Movie has been long foretold by prophets of Profits Of Doom. It ain't happened yet. Like serial killers (and their franchises), it always seems to rise just when you think it's gone. But making smaller bets on smaller, story-led movies and shows - like Loki - for a range of different audiences? That might be a better time creatively, financially, and give everybody their own theatre to head into at the 'plex. Well, at least until the next Tom Cruise flick comes out. *Testosteroney: the other San Francisco treat.

Side note: if you like your beat-em-ups, Omni-Man (voiced by JKS) is now in MK1 as a DLC character. And gets some suitably choice lines. He'll also be joined by Anthony Starr as Homelander, John Cena as Peacemaker, and one Jean-Claude Van Damme.

...you had to ask, didn't you?

In before the vault lock for once. Keep up the fine work, heroes.

Kids. They grow up so fast these days.

See also: goth aunties...

Being a Mac fan, my knowledge is somewhat limited - other than the new Metal-chipped Macs are something else compared to their predecessors, and knock seven bells out of the average business or lower-end gaming laptop. (Worth getting a cooling fan pad though). If you're looking for a tablet that isn't an iPad, the Galaxy range is cute but overpriced, and Google Pixel is more reasonable but tends to age a bit more quickly. If you're planning on upgrading your phone/contract soon, though, a bunch of phone dealers will try and throw one at you at a bargain price in return for your eternal soul customer loyalty. Bargain hard. If you're a little more adventurous in your Amazon adventures - or your purchase might need to survive less-than-delicate handling (ie: kids - or outdoor use, or anyone who might be a tad too klutzy for a shiny shiny glamour model), I can happily recommend Blackview Rugged devices. Picked up a couple years ago for a friend who works in building and offshore engineering. Decent price, decent looks (if you like black), and most importantly, it's survived everything that's been thrown at it / it's been thrown at. Standard-issue Android interface - takes a little getting used to if you're switching from iPhone, but good stuff. BTW, when buying Android, especially for kids/elderly relatives: do remember that while Google have finally started doing proper security checks on stuff that goes through the Play Store, it can be bypassed by various sneaky means. Unbox it carefully, turn on all the security settings, consider getting Malwarebytes or similar paranoia reassurance apps, and teach them the drill about scam sites/apps.

Beedle The Bardcore - Yeah!