How hard is it to make a spiritual successor to one for one the most iconic stories in cinema history? One thing is certain, once the image is formed of what that franchise is about, it is difficult to divert from it. Rodan tries the difficult task of both appeasing the general audience, who want a movie about giant monsters wrecking the city and not to retell the same exact story, while keeping it in line with viewer expectations. The truth is told in this tad bit ambitious review of RODAN.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is another David F. Sandberg film that has an issue with it's opening. I just reviewed his film Until Dawn and if you can survive the not so good dialogue of the first couple of scenes, you are in for a very good movie. This film has a similar issue.
An exploitation film is a film that exploits some talked about fear or trend in culture in order to sell tickets to a movie that is probably not very good. Exploitation films are usually low budget, badly made B-movies, with a certain charm to them, if you like Tommy Wiseau's work. 2010's Robert Rodriguez film Machete is, somewhat of an intentional attempt at recreating the exploitation film phenomenon. Which exploits US politics of 2025, somehow. ( Rodriguez must have a time machine somewhere in his studio ).
It was nice to take a short break from the grind of trying to make CGI stuff all day long and watch a movie. And who could be a better film-maker to casually enjoy, but Luc Besson, who after all these reviews I did of his films, I start to feel like I understand, similarly to how a therapist might understand his client? His 2025 low budget film June and John is undeniably Luc Besson, even if the fact that the film was largely shot on a smartphone makes it look kind of weird and slightly amateurish.
BTFree stands for Big Tech Free. Talking to @Ozoned we came up with a few ideas that might be interesting to pursue. For example the B could be drawn as a Bee. A nasty, kind of, insect character. Then if you add to it an English Top Hat and a cup of T. Well you get yourself an Oligarch. A nasty Oligarch. Representing the Big Tech ( BT ). But how do you want to get Free from it?
Imagine being locked up in prison for something that's legal. And not even merely legal. For something that is a human right. There is this very small human right, I don't know if you know about it, it's called the Freedom Of Speech. An ability to express your opinion without being persecuted for it. And it's more than essential. It's the cornerstone of things like Freedom in general. Sometimes though bad people that are trying to persecute you for this anyway - are smart. And they will look for any other way of shutting you up if this one is not available for them. Good example is Julian Assange. Not so good example could potentially be Josiah Mizukami.
There is a person on the inter-webs, who dedicated himself to reviews on security devices. His name is Lock Picking Lawyer and he showcases how secure real life locks are. In his video 1543 he reviewed a rather peculiar security feature on a lock from ABUS. Which is strengthening itself not by building some clever mechanism that is hard to bypass, but rather, uses law, to make bypassing it more illegal than it already is. They made the key-way ( and by extension the key ) to be shaped as the trademarked logo of the company. Therefor producing or distributing blanks for this lock would be a violation of the trademark law. Using proprietary software for security is doing the same mistake as trusting this lock by ABUS.
Sheiny was in Mendel's house that day. She was looking at some random things on her computer. You know... Getting into a yet another rabbit-hole on Wikipedia. She clicked on a link to an article about Paternalism. And on the right side, beside the text of the article, there was a picture with a caption "Child on a leash". The picture is depicting a child with a rope tied to her torso, which is held by an elderly woman. This image infuriated Sheiny to such an extend that for the next few minutes she could not even talk. How dare they?
It is estimated that by 2030 the child-surveillance industry will grow to $500 billion. An industry that capitalizes on bogus fears and causes anxiety in parents and children ( for different reasons ). And an industry that is both directly and indirectly causing the privacy nightmare that we are experiencing. On many levels the industry itself is causing much more damage than good. Here is a short summary of the damages it is causing and how to deal with them.
In 2019 on the Cannes film festival director Nicolas Winding Refn ( the director of the 2013 film Only God Forgives ) released episodes 4 and 5 of his ( then ) new multi-episode picture Too Old To Die Young. Episode 5 titled "The Fool" contains a car chase scene. Some argue it is one of the most romantic car chases in cinematic history. The joke is, that the car chase is set to a romantic Barry Manilow's 1974 hit "Mandy", making the juxtaposition rather hilarious in nature. But given the ass-born theory specialist that I am, I must suggest an interesting twist to this whole ordeal. During the principal photography of the first episode of Too Old To Die Young another film-maker Panos Cosmatos released a film, strangely similar in style to whatever Refn is doing. And his film was called Mandy. We can theorize that maybe Refn responded, in his strange way, recognizing the stylistic similarities, so to speak.
In movies and books one dimensional, boring sort of characters, are those that never change throughout the story. Good stories contain character growth. A change in the character's world view. Think of Jake Sully in Avatar: He starts as a marine, ready to shoot and kill every living thing on Pandora. And end up being the leader of Pandoran resistance.
On the internet people tend to think that other people are set in stone when it comes to their believes. That other people are one dimensional characters without character growth what so ever. If one is born with a flaw, or has a recorded history of a flaw, therefore, using the logic of the citizens of the internet, this flaw is unremovable, untouchable, and unchangeable truth representing this person's every second of existence. That is so silly. The world is full of character growth. The world is full of people learning new things. The world is full of people that change their mind.
When I reviewed Havoc I wrote about this strange feeling that I dubbed "short orgasmic blackout" when I see a stupidly serious, angry face of a female character that is really cute. And one of the most cutest actors living these days is fucking Ana de Armas. Let me illustrate. We see young Victoria Comte playing Eve ( the main character ) while being 11 ( Comte was born in 2013, do the math ), and then the film says "12 years later" so now she is 23. Yet de Armas playing her is 36 ( at the time of filming ). She plays somebody almost half her age and it works. Why? She is fucking cute! That's why. And because of that I knew I was probably getting the "short orgasmic blackout" the movie.
Chloe just entered the room where Sheiny was sitting all alone and typing away at her laptop. Sheiny was too occupied with her movie-script to notice the presence of Chloe in the room. Chloe was scratching her head. She just didn't know how to explain why certain programs are bad for Ivan even if they are not strictly malware. He understood why being careful is important. After that day when the vigilante almost murdered him, he never ever questioned the importance of being safe. Privacy was at most important for him. But Free Software? That is far beyond what's needed for just privacy.
Sir Kenneth Branagh! That's the end of the review. Just kidding. A Haunting In Venice is the new picture directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Kenneth Branagh which is a kind of a sub-genre of films of it's own. Branagh started his directorial career by directing a movie where he played the main role. And continued directing movies where he played the main roles ever since. Of course sometimes he might make a movie where he plays not the main character, like the 1992's Peter's Friends where Peter is played by Stephen Fry. And Branagh just has a very big role in it. And sometimes he plays in movies where he is not the director. Like in Dunkirk, Tenet and Oppenheimer all directed by Christopher Nolan. Of course lately he got himself directing jobs where he didn't cast himself what so ever. Like in Marvel's Thor ( where the actor was cast by Marvel ) or Disney's Cinderella where for obvious reasons a middle aged man cannot play the main character. But most of the time he plays the main character in the films he directs. It kind of became a meme at this point that if Branagh directs a film, most likely he plays the main character.
The following text is a story I wrote, after listening to a DEFCON Conference talk about HALO 3C devices that are designed to catch smoking and vaping children in schools. The hackers Reynaldo and nyx got access to one such device, took it apart, looked into its hardware and software. And found out that at best it is poorly designed. And at worst it is a literal Mossad bug to listen to kids talk.