Category: TV and Cinema

With Apologies to Mitchell and Webb…

Thorin and Company are trapped at the top of a bunch of burning pine trees, surrounded by Goblins and Wargs…

Thorin Oakenshield: Right! This is a bad situation, but I have a plan! On my word, everyone leap down, weapons drawn, on the nearest warg. Go for the throats first, then turn your axes on the goblins. Not all of us will make it, but we’ll make a damn good accounting for ourselves!

Gandalf: Yes… yes… Or I could just summon a flock of giant eagles to come to our rescue..?

Thorin Oakenshield: ……ok.

Gandalf: EAGLES COME FORTH!!

Gandalf and Legolas have been trapped on the highest pinnacle of Orthanc by Saruman the white wizard…

Legolas: Alright! We’ll wait until the next time Saruman comes up to gloat at us. I’ll climb up on the statuary and loose a rain of arrows upon him, while you blind him with a sorcerous flash. Then we’ll take the stairs and fight our way down, grabbing the palantir on the way out!

Gandalf: Yes… very good… Or I could just summon a flock of giant eagles to come to our rescue..?

Legolas: ……ok.

Gandalf: EAGLES COME FORTH!!

The army of Gondor stands before the Black Gate. The forces of Sauron are in disarray, the ground shakes and ash falls from the sky as the One Ring is consumed in the fires of Orodruin…

Aragorn: The Ringbearer has completed his quest! The power of Sauron is broken forever! Assemble the most skilled riders and the fastest horses – if there is any hope that Frodo and Sam yet survive, we must ride for Mount Doom with haste!

Gandalf: That would work… Or I could just summon a flock of giant eagles to fly to the mountain and rescue them..?

Aragorn: ……ok.

Gandalf: EAGLES COME FORTH!!

(Saw The Hobbit last night. I’ll post my thoughts later but in the meantime I couldn’t get this ridiculous parody out of my head :))

I Have Some Complaints

The old depression is absolutely killing me at the moment. I’m dragging myself into work, but spend a lot of the day just dully staring at the screen trying to remember what I’m meant to be doing. Not good, not good at all.

In any case, I have some complaints…

Westpac – it’s pretty impressive that you were able to find, let alone hire Bonnie Tyler for your latest ad, but seriously, what kind of maniac would play Total Eclipse of the Heart at a wedding? It’s a song about a relationship crashing and burning! You might as well play Deutschland über Alles at a Bar Mitzvah!

Treechange – I hate that word. I don’t know why I hate it, I just do. With a passion. If you ask me, Sigrid Thornton has a lot to answer for.

All over the news this morning is an artist in Queensland who’s using roadkill and maggots to make paintings. Any fool who thinks this is newsworthy has obviously never hung out with artists.

The Twelfth of the Twelfth Twenty-Twelve – Oh woop-de-do. Some numbers have lined up. Let’s all strip naked in the street and party. If we used base 8 or something this would be a day like any other.

That’s it. Maybe some caffeine will cheer me up.

Thoughts for the Day

1: People who can’t tell the difference between ‘balmy’ and ‘barmy’ should be shot.

2: Kim Deal’s vocals on Here Comes Your Man remind me of the high school sweetheart I never had.

3: The government’s new National Broadband Network ads look like the containment grid’s broken down again.

That is all

World War Dud

One of my fav0urite books of the last few years is Max Brooks’ World War Z. It’s an amazing example of both storytelling and world building, and so enjoyable that I’ve read the entire thing four or five times.

The trailer for the movie adaption was released a few days ago… Oh dear…

Running zombies? RUNNING ZOMBIES!? I don’t know what book they’ve been reading, but it ain’t World War Z.

Well, at least that’s one less movie I’ve got to make time to see…

Leia now a Disney Princess

The news broke today the George Lucas has handed over Lucasfilms – and the Star Wars frachise – to Disney, and that Disney intends to start pumping out new Star Wars films, the first to hit the screen in 2015.

Now, in an exclusive* deal with Disney, the Wyrmlog is proud to present the first look at the under development Star Wars Episode VII!

All hail the mouse!

(* By which we mean entirely fictional….)

Fracksticks!

Kusanagi on a crutch! It turns out I did lose a bunch of important data when my hard drive died a while back 🙁

Most of it I can reconstruct – with some hard work. What’s frustrating is that I’m sure there’s some of it that I can’t remember, which means I can’t reconstruct it, which means it’s lost forever. It’s also personally galling that I didn’t back it up in the first place – I was so certain that I’d backed up everything important, so to miss such a big chunk of data is just humiliating.

Well, I guess it’ll encourage me to be more careful with backups in future 🙁

At least last night’s Hamster Wheel cheered me up somewhat…

Boorman You Wacky Man

THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED!
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way...

Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…

…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…

My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.

What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.

Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.

Ramblings

You know, I was planing to write up what I did in Melbourne this weekend – including why I was there in the first place – but I ran out of time. So instead I’m going to blog about television.

Exactly when did swamp-dwelling hillbillies become a television genre? Swamp People, Swamp Men, Turtleman – what maniac decided these were good ideas for shows, and what maniacs watch them in sufficient numbers to make them viable?

American Digger – I think this show is mis-titled. It should be called American Destroying the Archeological Record for Fun and Profit.

Caught the first episode of Black Mirror last week – the one where the British PM is blackmailed into… well you know if you watched it. They describe the series as black comedy, but I didn’t find anything comedic about it. Which is not a condemnation – I found it a taut and thought provoking thriller. I’d like to watch the others in the series, but they’re on a bit late and I need to work Tuesday mornings. No doubt they’ll be available online.

Apparently that’s all I’ve got to say about television. Hmmm.

Caught Lawless last night with Rebecca. It was actually really good – I’m astonished to relate that Shia LaBeouf can actually act. The Appalachian accents were a bit tough to decipher from time to time, and Guy Pearce’s villain was a bit over the top, but overall a damn good watch. Also, Jessica Chastain – wow (and I was thinking that before she got her kit off thank you :)).

Um, yeah. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Good to See

Asylum of the Daleks premiered on Australian TV on Saturday night. Not the best season opener ever, but major props to whoever came up with that giant Dalek building on Skaro, and even more major props to whoever slipped a Special Weapons Dalek into one of the shots. Woooo Special Weapons Dalek!

That’s all I’ve got to say.

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami