Messages

Can't stand Milla in anything, so didn't get to the end of the trailer.

In announcing the ethnicity and gender they're deliberately excluding from the casting process ahead of any actual actor being confirmed*, I suspect they're hoping for some negative backlash they can weaponise for PR the way Ghostbusters did.  Cynical, but not necessarily indicative of the show being bobbins.


* and keeping mum at this stage of things makes me think they've got someone in mind but are waiting to see if they're available, so likely someone in a currently-airing series whose renewal is in doubt.

"It's not for us" seems like an after-the-fact justification for not getting it right, a notion supported by the multiple reboots to try something else - it might not be for us, but it doesn't seem to be for the American market, either.  Which is a bit barmy when you remember that (even now) so much of Dredd is derived from successful American movies, even the fascistic elements used a shield against criticism of Dredd's failure to crack the US market.

Aliens was ruined for me when Ripley incorrectly brandished a marine-issue Armat M41A Pulse Rifle in a tropical M-class atmospheric environment.  Destroyed my illusion of realism, that did.

There's a knuckle-bitingly bad deleted scene from the 2009 Star Trek that is notable for two reasons:
1 - it was fully shot, soundmixed, edited, and SFX were added, so at no point did anyone think there was a problem with it until after post production, and
2 - it is notably hard to find online compared to other deleted scenes, almost as if Paramount made a point of deleting videos of it from the web, but not other scenes from the same film.
It was available on the first blu-ray of the movie, though: in the scene, the green lady Kirk was sexing earlier in the movie was killed along with everyone else on the Saratoga, and afterwards he sees a green lady in the corridor of the Enterprise and starts talking to her as if she was the green lady that's dead.  So basically, the writers and director of Trek saw no problems with a scene where Kirk can't tell people apart if they're a different colour, but when you start thinking about what this says about how Kirk as a character views women, it just becomes more and more disturbing.

Am I failing to remember the relevant bits of the film, or was this also the first NuTrek to rein in the objectification of women that stood out so badly in the previous flicks?

I do kind of wonder how many people decided to try Dredd/2000ad since 1995 but then chucked it when it wasn't like the Stallone movie.

I might go see this, because whatever the word on this was, it was never going to be reliable.
With superhero movies, the fandom can't ever let a movie be "meh", it always has to be utterly amazing or completely terrible, with no middle ground.  Critics and cinema hipsters also seem to be of a consensus that superhero movies are a bubble and have a vested interest in being proved right with a palpable bomb, so I'll trust no judgment but my own on this one and would advise others to do the same.

A lot of Trek episodes were written to make use of existing sets and props, to keep the budget down.  I'm currently in the middle of season 3 and though some episodes are completely new to me, it's still tough going sometimes, especially when they beam down to planets that are just black backgrounds.

It's kind of irrelevant what 2000AD did in the '70s, '80s or '90s, because it was acquired by Rebellion in 2000. Someone needs to tell Moore that so he can write Halo Jones books IV to IX. Maybe his daughter can explain it to him.

Not sure I'd want to read anything that Moore had to be talked into writing work-for-hire as if he was being offered a great deal...

Personally, I'd like Moore to take a stab at some work-for-hire stuff, as his takes on owned properties usually end up injecting a bit of life and creativity into stagnant works, or at the very least try something different for reasons other than desperation.

I am cleverly maneuvering the conversation around to getting the board to question its TERRIBLE OBSESSION WITH AGING AND DEATH.

["Final Days" - Death of 2000 AD Characters]

Was this the theme once before?

Sort of. We did "Final Days" - Death of 2000 AD Characters in September 2012 and although Dredd featured heavily I think this is meant to dovetail with discussions had about it recently.

The one I'm thinking of had an entry where Nicolai Dante's doctor tells him he has AIDS - begging the question if was this a theme more than once?

Was this the theme once before?

[April and the Extraordinary World]

April and the Extraordinary World - a European attempt to do a Studio Ghibli film, which suffers from overexplaining its alternate history and nicking its plot wholesale from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Some nice visuals, but the animation lets the side down, as it's not just that television animation like Avatar or Skyland have surpassed the kind of thing on show here, but so has the kind of home-made animation that shows up on Youtube, making this look really cheap despite the involvement of Susan Sarandon and Paul Giamatti in the English-language dub.
Worth a look if you like alternate history fiction and/or steampunk, but only if you can be indulgent for the better part of two hours.

I still hold out hope that Trump will kill us all before things take a turn for the worse.

[centre ground]

I am in two minds about the Tories' chances in a general election: right now they have a very good chance of winning, but the further away it happens from right now, the more chance for something to go seriously tits-up for which they can't pass the buck.  Brexit currently looks pretty harmless, its after-effects easy to brush off as a temporary blip, but once Austerity MK2 starts kicking in there's going to be a lot of pissed-off people out there blaming the Tories alone for their misfortunes.

he's determined to take it away from the centre ground and those are the voters that he needs.

It's easy to claim that the electorate is right-leaning

Do you see what you did there, Pro?

I do.  I should have made it clear I was continuing IP's point about the right being rebranded as center ground by mainstream politicians and the media - New Labour are neither centrist nor moderate.

The only people who can't see the Labour party will never win a majority again are currently running the Labour party, but the Tories are headed down the same road.

Clive Lewis' recent comments made it clear that Labour are aware they need to form some sort of coalition with other progressive parties, though he didn't mention the recent voting boundary changes making it a necessity, he seemed to focus more on the fact that the party held more common ground with Caroline Lucas than with Hillary Benn.