Ran

No kidding. Sounds quite cool. Found this brief article sharing some of the aspects of it.

I recall that particular scene, since it leads into one of the coolest bits of cinematography in the whole film (after Gawain is left bound and stripped of his equipment, the camera pans slowly around, through the seasons, to his bleached bones, and then around again to him alive), but it's a small part of the film.

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Some amazing landscapes, but this feels mighty unfocused, unlike Dances with Wolves or Open Range. Getting Wyatt Earp vibes...

"Oh, there goes that dream" is one of the best line deliveries of, I don't know, the last twenty years of film. I've watched a fair lot. Some was rewatching things I've seen before -- The Revenant is just on another level of film-making, All The President's Men made investigative reporting seem incredibly exciting (the serial phone calls, chasing a lead, was really well done), The Pianist was heartbreaking (and Brody's hands just look like a pianists), The Quick and the Dead (trashy, but I forgot how explicitly Leone-esque the opening was; also, Di Caprio, Keith David, and Russell Crowe all getting to work with the legendary Gene Hackman in the film was pretty cool), Cast Away (a very fine Zemeckis-Hanks film, which I hadn't seen in decades). A couple of new (to me) films, though: The African Queen, which I'd genuinely never seen before, and which was... well, maybe the least of John Huston's films. I can't say I particularly enjoyed it, even in a nostalgic sense. It just comes off as very staid and old fashioned, with very little zip to it. I think, obviously, that back in 1955 it would have come off very differently -- it was filmed on location in Africa, and offered sights and images in full color that would have been really something for audiences of the day -- but I just couldn't hang with it. Finally got to see Glazer's The Zone of Interest. A bone-chilling film. The infrared sections were a completely surprise to me, and provided a response to the banality of evil made manifest in the Höss family through a very simple but incredibly brave act of humanity.

Based on Astrid Lindgren's beloved Ronja rövardotter, this is a new Swedish adaptation that had a bit of a troubled production history, with the production company and backers basically running out of money to complete it. Netflix appears to have swooped in and bought it out to finish it, with the first six episodes releasing in March 28 and the back half later in the year. Linda and I kept an eye on it in part because some of the filming took place at Bohus fortress, which is a local historic site. (We do not have waterfalls like that in our area, though. Probably someplace more inland or further north.) It's been adapted a few times before, in particular a 1984 Swedish film that's quite beloved (and was the top-grossing film of the year in Sweden, while also winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), and the 2014 Japanese anime adaptation directed by Goro Miyazaki (son of Hayao Miyazaki). ETA: Here's a work-in-progress stamped trailer that Viaplay (network and streamer that was providing the funding that had to pull out due to financial issues) released last year with some additional clips that give more of a sense of what's going on in the film:

More than that, in the end: he's no longer showrunner, either, after Skydance tried to rein in the budget even more I guess. He'll still "contribute scripts", but is no longer involved in production and will not be on set.

Nope. May be a setting you have for YouTube itself, vaguely recall there's something about it. What device are you using, and browser?

The presence of the Noldor in Middle-earth was predetermined by Eru Ilúvatar, anyways.

Agreed. It's as inappropriate as the ballot stuffing attempt at Noreascon 3, and the Puppies, and is in some ways worse because it seems it involved the collusion of several professional organizations/publishers to manipulate the results. If the claim from the Chinese fan has any truth to it, it goes well beyond just there being a slate, and there being an active effort for organizations to take charge of and submit ballots. "Oh, it's not against the rules", well, maybe not in China, but I think most of the Western world with a standard of democratic practice can immediately see the problem when that attitude meets a thoroughly-Western democratic process (largely designed by Anglo-American fandom with a smattering of like-minded western and northern European cohorts) which relies on these sort of shenanigans just not being something people would even countenance, and so rules did not have to be written for them. But if the Worldcon is going to leave the sphere of the democratic states and democratic cultures of the world, then yeah, it looks like we're going to have to put in more rules for those who need fair play spelled out to them.

Fair enough. The publishers were the ones out of bounds, the Chinese voters did not know better. True. I suppose the fact that nothing like this has happened before, though, is why people are bothered by the implications -- it really would be absurd if the biggest SF publishers in the US/UK colluded together to propose which of their works should be nominated and which works should win awards, and people would be annoyed (rightly, I think) by this sort of naked attempt to influence the results. Recommendation lists are one thing, coordinating to try and decide who'll be getting awards is quite another. The Western side of the debacle has much more transparency thanks to Lacey's e-mail dump, but we're basically shut out entirely on the Chinese side of it other than the very few details the Chinese local government and McCarty's remarks have informed us of to date, and what sleuths have figured out from Chinese social media and anonymous comments. It's interesting that back in mid-2023, the existence of this slate was known, and people were glad that EPH seemed to have limited the impact. And now we know that, no, EPH was not to thank for it, it took the administrators making the call that this mass of identical ballots were not organic. ETA: Jeebus. Someone pointed me to tweets from ErsatzCulture, who had been digging through Weibo (Chinese social media), and a few days ago he shared a tweet he had founded that translated as an encouragement for everyone to vote, to read actively and choose their favorites... and doing so on their own behalf "(rather than the organisations collecting votes to manipulate)" A symptom of just paranoia with this one Chinese fan... or an indication of just how fucked things were? A slate is problematic enough, the idea that some organization(s) were convincing fans to hand their ballots to them so they could submit them for them to manipulate the results...

I don't know how deep you are into Lovecraft scholarship, but Providence includes S.T. Joshi as a character in the final issue. Joshi seemed bemused but not unpleased, as Moore had clearly inserted him because he had read some of his scholarly work on Lovecraft. I would also point to this site run by dedicated Lovecraft/Moore fans/scholars which have extensive annotations for Moore's various Lovecraftian works. I don't know if they might give you a different perspective on the issues you had with it. There's a lot of depth, I think, in what Moore is doing with the Lovecraft mythos. ETA: Oh, also, Issa López signed on to a multi-year development deal, including showrunning season 5 of True Detective. Oh dear. Well, popular is popular.

Commenting early, but the Visual Effects Society Awards have been announced, and The Creator did very well -- leading the pack with five wins out of seven categories. Apparently, the news is that Gareth Edwards is pretty much locked to direct the next film in the Jurassic World franchise, after having had meetings with Spielberg and Frank Marshall in which they were impressed with his vision for the film. Screenplay by David Koepp, who did the original Jurassic Park screenplay, as well as Carlito's Way, the first Mission: Impossible, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, and lots more.

Normally, no, but when it's said several publications all put forward the same bulleted item, they appear to be colluding together to clearly influence the voters about what to vote for as a finalist, not just a nominee. It's really strange. I do not blame Chinese fans at all in all this. I am sure they acted in a way that seemed entirely right and within bounds. The antipathy towards slating that exists at the Hugos, and efforts to defeat it, are something that most would have had no idea about.

Alas, the rest of the show doesn't really live up to it, but it's totally watchable.

I've heard the gunplay in Borderlands is pretty good.

Which Western magazines bullets recommendations (e.g. offers up only one candidate in a category despite having published multiple eligible stories in a category) and which Western magazines that are publishers of nominatable fiction decide to include nominees from other publishers? A quick Google shows that sites like Tor.com and Clarkesworld will publish lists of all their Hugo-eligible works in a given year, and Locus provides its very lengthy recommendation list yearly, but Locus is not a publisher of fiction but rather a trade magazine.

First off, my ritual fuck you to DC, HBO, and that scab Lindelof for participating in pillaging Watchmen when they all know that they have abused Moore's rights. That's from the 1990s, not 1980s, though.The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Lost Girls, Top Ten... IMO, he's written a lot of great stuff in the 21st century as well. LoEG is a ridiculous masterclass in Victorian literature and popular culture while also interrogating all the ugly, nasty sides of it. As it progresses he pushes into post-War Britain (featuring his unvarnishedly brutal take on "Jimmy" Bond), and eventually contemporary Britain as well. Neonomicon doesn't strike me as at all stupider than the Lovecraft mythos, but to each their own. He followed it up with Providence, which eventually ties together the ending of Neonomicon.

Which one? I've heard Penelope Cruz is really good in it, so I hope it's not her.

Interview at IGN with Miyazaki, answering some questions, including explaining the setting (which is in the same universe, but sort of another dimension, from the Lands Between)

She worked with Roth (and Jack Black) before in The House With a Clock In Its Walls, which was a hit. So maybe she liked the experience, plus, you know, money. Roth is coming off his best directorial streak in years, with that film, a well-received shark documentary he documented called Fin, and last year's horror film Thanksgiving. But there's a lot of garbage in his past, too. My understanding is that Borderlands has a very crass, vulgar, toilet humor sensibility, very "meme" focused, and that seems to be what the film intends to deliver (plus over-the-top action and bright, colorful character designs).

Since they couldn't make any changes to the scripts during most of the filming due to the writer's strike, I'm guessing that they wanted to improve some sequences that they normally would have fixed while filming.

Naked Hatted Avatar Week.

I think the argument I've seen is not that it was just a slate, but that two or more big publications/publishing house in China colluded together to form a fairly unified slate, including some categories featuring only one recommended work, which goes well beyond your typical slate. EPH exists to deal with slates from a minority of voters having outsized power, but when multiple influential entities collude together to form a super-slate, it overwhelms the ability of EPH and basically means that the result is determined by these influential entities. As far as I know, only custom says publications can't do this -- if Random House, Tor, and Del Ray put out a super-slate where they divvied up the awards between them, and then 50% of the electorate voted the slate, I'm not sure if people would have felt that was kosher, but there's nothing in the rules explicitly against it. And yet, if it happened, I think people would be pretty pissed off, and there would be action taken to codify that this sort of collusion isn't allowed. And the stance of McCarty, at least, seems to be that the WSFS rules give the Hugo Administrators discretion to toss ballots if they believe they are outside the bounds of what WSFS envisions. And the fact that EPH even exists suggests that WSFS has previously shown a strong aversion to slates, and so the Hugo Administrator using their discretion to throw out ballots that were clearly part of this slate seems in line with a reading of the previously indicated will of the WSFS. Above and beyond, we are told that the Chinese Hugo Administrators reviewed the nominated Chinese works because the Western administrators did not read Chinese and could not vet them, we know at least one Chinese work (Hai Ya's "Fogong Temple Pagoda") declared ineligible for no obvious reason that anyone can determine but given the previous that was likely a determination of the Chinese Hugo admin, and we know that the Sichuan propaganda committee took credit for having a hand in censoring the awards. I don't need to look at a single thing that McCarty has said to believe that we don't know the half of the role of Chinese administrators, local political or business interests, publishers, etc. had in this debacle.

Yeah. @Mr. Chatywin et al. Try Malwarebytes to find and remove it.