It’s about time:
It never had a real Blu Ray release, which always seemed odd to me.
And why not:
And why the hell not:
Update: it was once again brought to my attention that Amazon Text+Image links are nuked by ad blockers. So here are the text links to the 4K movies I linked to:
So YouTube recommended the new trailer for the movie “5-25-77:”
It’s a “coming of age” film about a kid who wants to make movies, set around the time of the release of the original Star Wars. Shrug, ok, another movie about movie makers. But a comment made me look this up on Wikipedia, and lo and behold, there IS something rather unique about the film:
Johnson began funding the project in 2001 and filming took place from 2004 to 2006. Additional shots and special effects were filmed in 2015, 2016, and over the next six years, making the films production span a total of 18 years.
Great googaly moogaly!
So “The Woman King” is a forthcoming “based on real events” movie about the “Dahomey Amazons.” It’s being spun as sort of a real-world Wakanda… an African nation that fought against evil European slavers. Small problem: Dahomey made its riches by selling other Africans into slavery. That’s pretty much what their economy was based on. But, whatever. The focus of the movie is on a corps of female warriors, “Amazons” who fought for their king. How’d that work out for them? Well, there is the official trailer… and there’s this lightly modified version:
So I saw #TheWomanKing trailer and thought wow… a true story awesome… doesn't end well ladies sorry 🤣 pic.twitter.com/aqKvmww1VS
— Thermo (@NotThatThermo) July 15, 2022
What do you want to bet that that’s not exactly the spin the movie will produce…
“Rings of Power” is – so far – bad television, worse politics and *terrible* Tolkein. But what it’s good at is inspiring humor.
Back in 2016 I released seven PDFs of CAD diagrams formatted for printing at 24X36 inches (those are shown after the break). This was another product line that didn’t exactly blow up the market, and no further diagrams were released. But now that I have two books of CAD diagrams released, and two more coming (and potentially more after that), I’m considering trying again. The Lockheed CL-400 Suntan, A-11, A-12, SR-71, YF-12, along with several B-47 and B-52 related designs are possible, as well as designs that aren’t from those books (X-20 Dyna Soar, several Orion vehicles, etc.). If this sounds interesting, let me know; if there is something specific you might be interested in, let me know.
As rants go, this one is both entertaining and on the mark:
Someone jacked footage from “Metropolis” up to 4k, boosted it to 60 frames per second and colorized it. It’s incomplete and imperfect; the scenes from the utterly craptacular recently discovered archival bits were not fixed up. Doing so would be a *major* chore, but with new software and AI, it might be practical soon. Convert the whole movie to this level of quality, and it looks like I’m springing for another copy. Add an alternate soundtrack where actual dialog and sound effect are added and include a fully restored and upgraded yet still B&W version, and that’s a hundred-dollar package any day.
Same folks did the same to the 1902 “A Trip to the Moon.” The colors tend to jump around a bit.
Womp womp….
The “artist” used a piece of software called “Midjourney” that used his text prompts to produce the image, which he upscaled and printed off. And then he won, and artists are cheesed off because, like the factory workers before them, they are finding that automation can do a better job than they can.
It’s definitely an interesting piece of art, and the controversy is likely to make it popular enough to make a few bucks off of.
We are rapidly approaching the day when AI *and* robotics can do anything humans can do, and do it better. This is a subject science fiction has covered over the years, and it’s something that society had damned well better figure out how to deal with before it comes along and drives *everybody* out of a job.
But for now…. *snerk.*
Lots of folks don’t like the show. They are not wrong to do so.
I’m seeing people arguing back and forth on whether or not to “hate watch” the show. Shrug. I can see both sides: give up and sigh in vague, fatigued defeatism, which is where I am with this; or rage against the dying of the light. I will never not hate on bad Star Trek; I’ve got forty years of fandom invested there. But LotR is *only* thirty or so years deep with me. And my house ain’t exactly littered with die cast and plastic toy spaceships from Middle Earth…
Anyway, this guy takes another view, and he ain’t wrong to do so: