By Roy Mathur, on 2022-08-31, at 23:54:43--00:50:49 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show, Listen
This podcast is now so late that apologies are meaningless, but sorry anyway.
The reasons for the title of this section is twofold. The first is my having watched Jurassic World Dominion. The second is because my Mac Mini 2012 consistently proving itself for a decade of not being capable of running Windows, despite whatever bullshit Apple sold us all on and I believed.
Now I have a working computer, thanks to a donation from a friend ages ago. After after aggravating upgrading and maintenance chores it is now up and running and the podcast as of 454 is back.
I tried buying shorts during the second heatwave, but the shops are mostly stocking their autumn/winter collection. How bloody stupid is that? At least the third heatwave, supposedly scheduled for Monday, did not happen, and made the UK Summer Bank Holiday less miserable?
Tim Cook of Apple look-a-like, a CEO of gene splicing GMO company called Biosyn, hires our old friend, the supervillian geneticist Dr Henry Wu, to unleash enormous locusts in a fiendish plot to sabotage crops in an allegory that is obviously not in any way whatsoever related to the Monsanto debacle. Alan, Ellie, and Ian try to expose him, while and Chris Pratt does his Crocodile Dundee bit as he and on-off girlfriend Bryce Dallas Howard attempt to rescue their adopted clone daughter from Biosyn who want to "study" her.
There are dino smugglers to run amuck of, roast dino kebabs to dodge, lots of weird hench people, many dinosaurs to evade; including a very creepy long-clawed Edward Scissorhands-like dinosaur, and evil Timmy eventually gets deservedly Nedry'd right in the face. I've met guys like him in real-life and, other than the superficial similarity in appearance, I'm sure real Tim would be harder to kill.
There's a lot of stuff going on; too much plot, too many thinly fleshed out characters, but at least this movie looks like the end of the Jurassic World movies, though I'm sure even if the Jurassic Park franchise has been milked for all its worth several times over, Universal Pictures is far from done with it's monster moneyspinner.
Conclusion? Zero rewatchability. Stick to the Michael Crichton novels and the first movie, or, if you absolutely must have more, the first trilogy, and ditch the other films.
The season 3 episode 8 finale aired some time ago and I can barely remember what happened, except... Butcher's buggered from the superhero dope, and no, I've got nothing else. Maybe something will come to me in the pod, otherwise the last proper review I did of The Boys was episode 6 back in 449.
Season one has finished, and I enjoyed it as a mild potboiler piece of throwaway TV. I already talked about it and how much I like watching John Lithgow in anything. If you want to hear what I said, listen to 449.
Neil Ghaiman's The Sandman comic finally brought to the screen on Netflix. Sandman AKA Morpheus AKA Dream, AKA (unofficially) goth man-totty, etc. is trapped by incompetent magus, Charles Dance, leaving many humans comatose; trapped in a neverending dream, whilst a murderous nightmare escapes the dominion of dream and wrecks havoc in our world.
I'm a few episodes in and I not blown away I'm afraid, but then I never was a huge fan of the comic either. Ghaiman said in a interview he made it up week-to-week as he went along and it shows. While I like some of Ghaiman's work, like the Neverwhere TV show and book, and his short stories, I find much of his longer writing can meander and bloat and that's translated onto the screen. That bloat was also the reason I stopped reading and watching American Gods. The Sandman show could have done with being leaner.
Also, I did not like that Dream murdered Cain and Abel's cute dragon, Gregory. What a bastard. By the way, great pointy ears and hair on Sanjeev Bhaskar; he really nails the look of old DC comic's Cain and Abel, though he could look a little meaner.
The latest reboot of a screen adaptation of the horror video game franchise is a Netflix series.
Two girls and their single dad, a top notch scientist, move to the company town. Then while the wayward girls stage an animal lab rescue, they inadvertently release a virus that ends the world. The story flicks back and forth between present post-apocalypse and past origin story. Look, like the game, it's an action film about zombies. That's all you need to know.
I like the main characters, and especially the sister who's bullied horrendously at school. She reminds me of myself.
I don't like that premise for the outbreak is stolen directly from 28 Days Later. It is galling that unagented writers are always told to write original work, while those inside the business consistently create derivative content. Writers privileged enough to have agents, publishers, and paying work need to have an original thought in their heads and stop writing fanfiction, while hypocritical agents and publishers need to stop lying about what they really want. They don't want original, they want sellable.
On the recommendation of a fellow Reddit horror forum user, I'm two thirds of the way through Rose Red. This is a three part TV miniseries scripted by Stephen King and released in 2002.
In Rose Red, a professor of the paranormal, her tenure of shaky ground, assembles a group of psychics to prove that a mysterious mansion is haunted. Of course things start to go badly wrong once they enter the evil old house.
This Stephen King's take on the 1963 movie, The Haunting and Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House, but I was reminded too of the schlocky adaptation of Clive Barker's Book of Blood (2009).
Casting note: Jimmi Simpson (young William from Westworld) was playing nasty bastards even back then.
It isn't bad though it is very made for television, and a not terribly scary cosy horror. It feels like it would have been a better novel than TV show and I'd have probably read it too.
I had my fill of grimdark with Game of Thrones, and this prequel is too grubby. Ostensibly, this is follows the fall of dragon handling House Targaryen, a bunch of inbred twits denoted by blonde hair (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a dedicated wig wrangler on crew).
The characters are almost universally repellent. There's a king (Paddy Considine) who has his wife medically eviscerated in childbirth for the vain possibility of a male heir, his brother; a psychopathic usurper (Matt Smith), an ambitious Hand of the King (Rhys Ifans) who pimps out his own daughter, etc.
The gore is unrelenting and sickening, and weirdly played for laughs. Oh, the joy of medieval feudalism.
This is not for me. I was finished with the GoT universe and I'm still finished with it.
Here's some more information that only partly made it to the last CRRRRS podcast episode (454 Doctor Who: State of Decay), but was added to the blog post that accompanied it.
Black Park, Buckinghamshire is near Pinewood Film Studios, and also not too distant from Hammer Film Productions' Bray Film Studios.
Regarding cult Brit sci-fi, as well as filming Doctor Who scenes in Full circle and State of Decay, it was used in Blake's 7: The Web and as Retha in Space: 1999: The Full Circle.
According to a largely uncited Wikipedia entry, it was a stand-in for Transylvania in The Curse of Frankenstein, The Brides of Dracula, The Curse of the Werewolf, and Dracula: Prince of Darkness. It was also used in the Harry Potter films, Jurassic World Dominion, and as Switzerland in Goldfinger, to name but a few.
Today is Ganesh's birthday, so happy Ganesh Chaturthi.