ThaOGDreamWeaver

Cherry Poppin' Daddies - Zoot Suit Riot

The Cooltrane Quartet - Should I Stay Or Should I Go

Industry news: while Flash is still stuck on a $70m opening weekend prediction - not great, not terrible, especially when there's been zero press tour or late-night appearances for any of the cast, and big-name corporate partners stayed well away from secondary promo (y'know: Happy Meals, Walmart merch, those cringey tie-in car ads - yeah, all trite stuff, but surprisingly effective at putting a flick into public awareness and butts on stalls)... ...it seems Gunn and Safran like Muschietti's work. So they've greenlit Batman: Brave And The Bold, based on Grant Morrison's run. This will be the official DCU Bat-starter, and Matt Reeves' work will be off in the Elseworlds.

Cavill's been getting the rough end of the stick lately. Leaves Witcher to do Supes again, but Black Adam doesn't do the business, and WB-D implode and reboot the universe without him... and Netflix recast with a spare Hemsworth for next season. Then the SOE film with Guy Ritchie ran into some issues, his disturbingly luxuriant facial hair surprisingly not one of them. And to add insult to injury, the buggers at 'Flix cut Season 3 in half. He maybe gets to play at being a Space Marine if Amazon and GW can pull off the WH40k series. Nevertheless. If you need a bit of smouldering, grunting, scowling and gratuitous muscle shots in your life, Geralt is back for a five-episode run, split into two volumes across the summer. Whether or not this is a handover arc where Geralt gets knocked off or retires to make little monsters with Yennifer, we won't know, but expect a mid-series cliffhanger or two.

Babylon 5, aka The Only Cool Thing Amigas Ever Did, is one of the very few richly woven sci-fi series where every character has their time and their meaning. And gets development, classy lines, ups and downs, moments of weakness and badassery, even jokes. (Well, except Kosh, but Vorlon humour's a little odd and has been known to kill the unwary). B5: The Road Home is a tie-in animated movie that lets John Sheridan (and writer Mike Straczynski) revisit every era of B5's existence, as well as quite a few alternate ones. A large chunk of the cast have returned - with the late lamented Mira Furlan, Andreas Katsulas, Tim Choate and Richard Biggs replaced by new voice actors.

Well, it'll be clipped all over YouTube in a couple of months as "reaction" or "Best Bit" videos, so I think I can wait for when it shows up on a streaming service. (Not sure who'll get that in the UK, though.) Industry-ish side notes for folks following the Little Mermaid thread... Flash has an RT Verified Audience score of 95%, and All Audience of 80%... with MetaCritic not yet user-rated. Flash's opening weekend is expected to top out at $85m. That's... average for a wide-release movie, only two thirds of Little Mermaid's numbers, and way behind the likes of GOTG3. Some estimates put it as low as $70m, which is only a little more than Black Adam. Yet somehow not the massive failure the Disney flick was imputed to be by a number of sites, YouTubers and beard-oil salesmen. Ya gotta wonder why...

I don't know how much of the improv that Williams (or Woods) did still exists, but with that much material you can pick and choose your takes. They pretty much are a walking writer's room. Similar deal/problem with Billy Crystal. His Princess Bride role as Miracle Max was supposed to be five minutes on-screen, give or take. But teamed with the wonderful Carol Kane (who's coming to Strange New Worlds for Season 2), that one scene took three days' worth of 13th-century standup gags to film. Cary Elwes had to be swapped out for a prop dummy because he couldn't control himself - which gives a whole new meaning to corpsing - and Patinkin had to take a day out from filming because he bruised a rib laughing. A lot of that B-roll still exists.

"What... are... THOSE?"

Lillias White, Cheryl Freeman, LaChanze, Roz Ryan and Vaneese Thomas - Zero To Hero

Herc is one where the writing team were clearly on point. And the animators did the same thing from Aladdin where they watched his performance and then pretty much Rotoscoped him in, plus world events to match. Woods may have changed a little in the last 25-odd years. People do. This thread ain't about that. But there and then, he's charmingly channelling Billy Crystal's Evil Twin. And it works. It's also worth the watch for Danny DeVito as Herc's PT, Broadway and Cartoon Network regular Susan Egan as Hades' foil Meg, and full-on hot gospel showtunes. (No idea why on that last one, but it literally had people dancing in the aisles at the time. Whatever works.) If you'd prefer just to skip to Hades' bits...

It's an early alpha, but quite a lot of polish on it for that. I like that you can tell Obvious Dodgy Plot Arc Lady to go e'chu-ta herself right from the get-go (because AIAB). Though the WANTED full screen flash is a) annoying compared to the discreet Alert Status in the top bar, and b) an obvious GTA lift. Speaking of which, I would play the hell out of GTA: Mos Eisley.

The Grimms certainly lived up to their name - including one about a child so naughty that she made herself ill and died... ...but then wouldn't stay in her grave without the occasional smack. Come to think of it, that's one complaint I do have about both versions of Little Mermaid. Real heroes need proper villains, and Uncle Walt knew kids love having seven shades of sriracha scared out of them. Ursula's stylish, evil and manipulative but not genuinely frightening, where quite a few others have been. Maleficient, Hades, Mei's pandazilla mom... even Syndrome has his moments (and he's quite prepared to casually murder ranks of supers, whole families and risk civilian casualties.)

It certainly looks the business. Dialogue needs a little polish. Suspect the small McGuffin the monkey/cat thing is playing with is a lot more deadly than just a toy. Also - lovely tiny Easter Egg: they visual-checked both Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the gameplay intro, as it pulls down from the stars, then into a diamond that looks suspiciously like the Paramount logo.

John Williams & Boston Pops Orchestra - March From 1941 (...and farewell to Treat Williams) Treat Williams & Cast - I Got Life

Per Screen Rant and a few other sources, Sabine is a distant descendant of Tarre Vizsla, Mando Jedi, and inventor of everyone's favourite McGuffin, the Darksabre. There are also events that make some folk think she might have some very light Force sensitivity scattered throughout Rebels, such as her strong connection to Ezra and character shifts after Kanan's exit. YMMV. But that's no reason Filoni might not have read these theories, and gone hmmm... plus, plot-wise, you've noticed Sabine seems to be at a loose end. A battle-trained, slightly overzealous, force-sensitive kid hanging around when someone might be in need of a sidekick (whether they want one or not?) Wonder how that one's gonna go...

There's also the Ghost of Cap'n Neckbeard over in Port Oakes, and his fearsome Pedants Of The Caribbean. Men quake across the Seven Seas, at their battlecry of "...actually..." Thanks, I'd tried to scab over that particular bit in my memory. Not Lin's best work, I'm afraid, and should have ended up on the cutting room floor... ...dear goddess, I hope the kidlet doesn't start playing that one over and over in the car. I mean, I love a showtune, me, but some days I just wish they'd let it go, let it go... Yes, it's a bit on the nose, whether she trades her voice/soul/identity/self-esteem (delete as applicable) for a disturbingly average guy... or for acceptance into another world. I'll be teaching the kidlet not to do that, literally or metaphorically. That kinda thing rarely results in Happily Ever After. But do keep your True Friends around to bail you out when needed. True enough - or at least on its own. 1) When there's a movie I've never heard of that I decide to go see because of great word-of-mouth: and one way of getting that to my notice is an absurdly high RT score. Like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which was Mel McCarthy's crack at an Oscar-bait flick - but absolutely worth the watch. 2) When there's a flick that I'm not sure if it's gonna be good, like the D&D movie. That wasn't just a critical hit (pun intended, if not good), real humans liked it too. I have a very limited amount of time for leisure these days that doesn't involve herding kidlets, so the Audience score punted me from "wait for streaming" to "popcorn time". ...which leads me on to... That's an odd one, and another reason not to believe some of the more negative reviewers. It ain't struggling, no way, nohow. US domestic open exceeded predictions by nearly 20% at $117.5m. Pretty darn good post-COVID, and the fifth largest Memorial Weekend open of all time. If it's been weak anywhere, it's the overseas $68m take - but had more competition around that time. (For comparison, the "movie that saved the movies" post-plague - Top Gun 2 - clocked $160m in the same time period. And on a side note, check out the top list: it's remarkable how many Memorial Weekend hits also suck quite badly.) So regardless of what narrative people wanted to spin, the money don't lie. Butts are on seats. Neither the 'vid nor the politics stopped the movie. The question is whether this movie has legs (EDIT: pun not intended, but better than the last one). The production budget was $250m - not eyewatering by modern standards, but the usual rule of thumb is they'd need 3x that to breakeven. $750m seems like a stretch. They might cheat like WB did and assign a massive fee for the D+ streaming rights, but investors notice stuff like that these days...

RT changed to a new system in May 2019, following some organised review bombing. Captain Marvel being a main target of The Neckbeard Menace, but there'd been a few others up to that point. So there are now two Audience Scores... All Audience Score - as reviewed by any registered user Verified Audience Score - you have to be able to prove you at least bought a ticket (if not saw the damn movie) before you talk about it. The default one you see on RT is the Verified score. If you click on the popcorn bucket it'll bring up a popup, where you can switch to the All Audience score. The difference is kinda striking. For Little Mermaid... All Audience: 57% / 3.1 out of 5🌟 Verified Audience: 94% / 4.7 out of 5🌟 Metacritic (for comparison): 21% / 2.2 out of 10 Mild Aquatic Spoilerage And Sidetracking Commentary: Is this system perfect? Probably not. From the point of view of someone who used to run messageboards, and now works in an industry that takes negative comments very seriously: PROS: You'd be amazed how fast people moderate their opinions when they realise the Internet is the least anonymous place you can be, especially when faced with an angry site Admin/BOFH (cue demonic laughter). But it takes that nudge to connect your online personality to your real one. It does limit the conversation to people who've seen the movie, rather than reposting prefab opinions based on YouTube vids, talking heads on cable news, the peer consensus from dank Subreddits (which tends towards negativity for Fake Internet Cool Points) or scripts they got from a political/religious/special interest group/death cult mailing lists. Yes, people do that last one, and my work has been on the receiving end of it lately. It ain't fun. It helps RT manage the volume of spam comments and flame wars. It stops RT becoming a "problem" for Whollyodd execs, which... well, doesn't end well in some cases. CONS: It's US-only, and limited to large ticket providers like Fandango. There's a certain bias in that - unless you absolutely loathe the movie - you don't wanna admit you paid money for a dud. It does limit protest on certain subjects, especially when you don't wanna put money into the hands of the folks you're protesting about. All that considered, I'd give that... a solid B / 3.5 out of 5. It's an improvement on what they had before. Needs some work. What do you lot think?

For those of you playing Sea Of Thieves and not enjoying the PvP cont- ...wait, is that a three-headed monkey?

Yes. Neil and PTerry had been good friends since straying onto each others' book tours some time back, and had a habit on that book of trying to mimic or mock each other's styles. (So the dark gothy and horrible stuff in the book is frequently Terry, and the ineffable wisdom, dad gags and snarky footnotes are often Neil.) After the genuine breakthrough success of the first book, Neil and Terry were frequently bothered by their fans, publishers and bank managers about a sequel, a movie or both. And so they had multiple drinking sessions discussions about where they could run with it. Some of the ideas found their way into Series 1 along with some wholly new stuff, and some for Series 2. (And some, particularly any that were mooted by helpful Whollyodd executives who wanted to "make it relevant to wider audiences", have been vitrified and buried under the South Downs, guarded by trained ninjas, ancient runes and a small but enthusiastic dragon, never to see the light of day). Bearing in mind that this is from very old interviews and Neil's website comments...

Small update: Ahsoka has an official release date of August 23rd, for those of you that need to bother your phone provider/supermarket/airline loyalty app/mom to add time to your D+ sub. (Seriously: I'm not sure how many people really do fork out eight quid/eleven bucks a month to the Mouse, given how many corporate offers there are.) There's also a tiny, tiny extra thing in the new mini-teaser/TV spot: Microspoiler:

Grand Funk Railroad - I'm Your Captain (Live At Shea Stadium)

Following on from TheOtherTed on the other thread: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (aka WAR, pronounced WAAAAARRRGGHHH. Obviously.) Games Workshop has never been a thing for me, other than the single most consistently successful share in my very small portfolio. But the WAR beta looked so much fun I signed up and stuck around for a while. And happily, you didn't have to be a Henry Cavill-level 'Hammernerd to get on with it. It looked great and ran smoothly, was easy to pick up and play, had interesting mechanics once you got into it, and plenty to do even pre-launch. I very much enjoyed running around blasting people with Chaos magick and working out what to do with all the Dhar I was racking up. I also enjoyed hunting the odd chicken for lunch. WAR was very, very PvP-centric, including a central Realm Vs Realm mechanic that encouraged you to join mass battles. But. That also came with a very strict anti-ganking policy. Stray into lower-level RvR areas, or attack players who were much weaker than you, and you'd be thoroughly "clucked" - at least until you returned to your right zone: sometimes for the rest of the day, and occasionally permanently. Unfortunately for Mythic, like a lot of people in 2008-2009, I suddenly had to tighten my belts. And MMOs were a luxury, even moreso when the trusty Vaio that work let me take home after being fired finally died in flames. A game of that quality was expensive to develop and run - and even with 300,000 subs per month, wasn't anywhere near breakeven. According to rumour they lost over a billion bucks on it - then again, these were EA's numbers, so... hmm. AFAIK the game was maintained well while it lasted. But further development tailed off, as did the number of servers, until finally sunsetting late 2013 when the GW licence expired. As with many other MMOs, there are legacy servers still out there.

Broadsword Online are the artists formerly known as Mythic, and then BioWare Mythic, caretakers of Ultima Online and Dark Age Of Camelot. Haven't heard much out of them for a while so it's quite a big move. They did used to be part of EA, but were spun off under Rob Denton (who also worked on on SWTOR) when faced with closure in 2014. Broadsword also developed the ill-fated Warhammer MMO Age Of Reckoning...which I'm about to add to the Good Games That Died Horribly thread. Great game, in fact, but just didn't do the numbers. I think it's a pretty good retirement home for SWTOR and should see it kept around stably, maybe even growing a bit.

Kind of the point of an MMO - from my PoV - is that I can PL if I want to, or take my time, or do something else entirely. I mean, WoW allows you to do a lot of different stuff, but then the forum nerds scream at you for not doing it the right/perfect/minmaxed way. DCUO had some flexibility which got stripped. ST:O allows for some customisation, within the limits of Federation / Klingon dress codes, though the ship builder wound up being more satisfying. CoH has quite a lot of linear elements, but the sheer flexibility in being who you want to be has - I think - never been equalled. I've been on teams with sentient walls, affable demons, assassins, sorority girls, and the Nuclear Pudding King.

I think it's in general as it's free on GitHub, and seems to use Wine kit as a baseplate.