The Hall of Fire

The Demeter subplot is among the most effectively written horror I've read. It has even more impact because the reader knows things that the characters don't, and because in this case being genre savvy wouldn't do the character any good. And then to have it end in a weather report, with the narrato...

Meanwhile, saw Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express. The cast is wonderful, but Branagh is not at all a good Poirot. Weird, because he clearly can do characters who are not hypermanly, he was a perfect Gilderoy Lockhart. Worse, the script doesn't trust the book and tries to add excitement...

Barbie . Was definitely on the fence about seeing it in theatres, given that I’m picky about what I go to the cinema for. And I’m not in the target market (as least I thought I wasn’t, now I’m not sure). But I was intrigued by the trailers and the debate it generated online, and felt I needed to en...

Oppenheimer. Very hard to know where to start writing about this movie. Given that it’s basically three hours of people talking about physics and politics broken up with (spoiler alert) one very big explosion it’s surprisingly compelling. Which is, I suppose, a testament to Nolan’s skill as a direc...

I just finished watching Tenet on TV. The advantages of watching it on the small screen are 1. Not getting overwhelmed by the excessive blasting of anything and everything that moves (more violent than James Bond movies, and more gritty), 2. The ability to stop and rewind to catch important little ...

Stumbled on this interesting video essay, which breaks down Barbenheimer in far more detail than I expected was possible. I have to say it might work for me - I'm strongly considering seeing Barbie in the cinema, which I'd be unlikely to do otherwise. And I was intrigued by the 2001: A Space Odyssey...

Sorry, I still don't get it. But I often don't. There wasn't (as far I know) any intentional plan to release and market the movies together. It just happened that their respective studios picked the same release date and the Internet found the juxtaposition funny. In all seriousness, though, this w...

Barbie is off to a strong start with 90% on RT from early reviews. Still waiting for the reviews for Oppenheimer - I've got my ticket for Sunday.

The big day is almost here. Choose your fighter.

The "great moderniser sweeping away feudalism and spreading the Enlightenment across Europe" I am far from a Napoleonic scholar so it's not a surprise that I've never encountered that take before, but it seems a bit sus. Especially since he specifically declined to make a promise to "...

The "great moderniser sweeping away feudalism and spreading the Enlightenment across Europe" versus "vain tyrant waging incessant wars to aggrandise himself and put members of his family on foreign thrones" debate on Napoleon goes back to his contemporaries, so I expect we'll see...

This popped up out of nowhere given the fame of the director and lead, but looks extremely impressive:

Frelga wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 7:34 am Well, what's the point of paying Twitter to promote your tweets if no one is going to see them?

Yep. This is the strange thing.

It is really sad that one man's hubris could destroy such an important resource. I agree. I suspect the driver for this decision has been the urge to push more members to subscribe to Twitter Blue. So far the changes haven't been enough to shift people to other platforms, but will this do it? It's ...

So, the count is crawling out of his window, presumably at night/after dark, to post Harker's letters in Harker's own clothing. I can't quite figure out how this is supposed to give people the impression it is Harker as I would imagine the post office would be closed and few people would be out &am...

As someone who was fascinated by the Titanic as a child, I was following this closely. I wasn't surprised that some sort of cowboy outfit was running tours to the wreck on an unsafe submarine. The techbro mindset of disruption and ignoring good risk management in order to innovate and stay on the cu...

AI-generated entertainment has been having rough start . AI-generated ‘Family Guy’ livestream banned after making a bomb threat An AI-generated livestream version of Family Guy has been banned after it appeared to make a bomb threat. The parody version of the animated sitcom was being hosted by a ch...

Lucy had quite a day, didn't she. I'm impressed - we've met four male characters, not counting Dracula, and all seem to be thoroughly decent guys, if a bit precipitous in proposing. No toxic masculinity for Mr. Stoker. Gender and gender roles are among the most interesting things in Dracula , and p...

Throughout the novel there seems to be some sort of affinity between vampires and their intended victims, and I took the creation of a sense of familiarity to be an aspect of it. It's possibly one of their powers. The way the Brides can make Jonathan almost want them to bite him over his natural fea...

As a language geek, I can’t help but notice around this point that Stoker seems to have forgotten that his characters speak different languages. The fact hat Harker can understand the dialogue between the vampires implies either that they considerately speak in English in front of people whose bloo...