algroth

I was personally not too big on The Martian. Though entertaining I can't really call it any more than enjoyable fluff, and by all means what it absolutely failed to generate in me was any form of tension. If anything the safeness in his approach to all his films of late, Prometheus included, is what worries me the most about Covenant. Horror has a way of working best when it's labouring on the fringes of formal convention and genre expectations, and it's in the cues it can take from the more avant-garde currents where it can find the most effective means to disorient and unsettle its audience. Giger's art was strange at the time, but it has since become the staple for the franchise's aesthetic. I'm not sure there was anything in Prometheus that deviated from this, and I doubt there'll be in Covenant either, and in turn I can't imagine it'll be more than just another workmanlike sequel to a popular and established franchise, no different than the recent MCU films are for their own. With all that said, if the narrative is coherent it'll at least very likely turn out just fine. On the upside, Damon Lindelof is also stepping down from the screenwriter's seat for it. On the downside, the original draft was by Jack Paglen, whose previous film was possibly even dumber than Prometheus as well, that being Transcendence.

Pretty much. You'll have to excuse some broken English in the following, but here is also a review I wrote back when I saw the film in theatres (spoilers ahoy, too):

Mind putting things such as the existence of a twist in spoilers next time? I'm really looking forward to it myself but unfortunately it's not out where I live till february.

Again?

Holter's one of those artists I feel I ought to like more than I actually do, but this is a great track.

I can't help it, it forcibly reminds me of girls in black dresses with too much make-up pretending they're a witches coven or grown men and women sleeping in coffins because they truly believe they're vampires. I tried to get over it but every time I read it I dreaded the rest of the game being just as goth-bedtime-story edgy (which is why I'm asking if it is). Graven Ashe. It's about as subtle as Voldemort and it gets spammed at you over and over. Maybe I'm going about this wrong. I'll try again and make a character named Mortiferous Chaos or Killaman Slaughtermaster and just try to be as edgy as possible. EDIT: Seriously though, serious question, is there a lot of tryhard edgelord nonsense? It's not just the name, really. It's just demonstrative, but then there's the whole bleeding eyeball statue as the opening shot and the heads on pikes everywhere. Am I in for something that's trying way too hard to be dark? I went into this knowing literally nothing about the game, so I assume I just had the wrong expectations. I went into PoE with mostly a roleplayer mindset but that seems to be fairly difficult for me with Tyranny so far. I haven't played it yet but I agree with your remarks about the names and you are likewise voicing my same fear about the game, and reasons to why I dislike the "dark fantasy" genre as a whole. The very concept suggests a genre that is thought from appearance down than from the themes and narrative upwards. It is as I wrote elsewhere in the "survey for the future" thread, the best way to go about achieving a particular tone is by letting it emerge naturally from the ideas, and to just forcefully put a bunch of murder and ominous names and heads of pikes you are only overcooking something to the point the underlying themes and narrative no longer matter. Take the latest film adaptation of Macbeth for example: it is a grim storyline and told in a 'suitably' grim fashion, only that the atmosphere and style is pervasive throughout, regardless of which situation one finds themselves in at the story; you could pick up all the elements that conform the face of that film, from the atonal, cluster-heavy avant-folk music to the desolate landscapes and intensely colour-graded shots, and apply it to just about any story, all to the same effect. I fear Tyranny may play like this for me when I get around to it (which shouldn't be far from now). Regardless I am all the same looking forward to it.

PoE is $45 for the base game right now. Actually, I just ordered last week a DVD version of it from Amazon for U$S 25. Might be part of a sale, though, but still, a heads up!

I didn't know Julio Iglesias was so hardcore. Nor the B-52s so punk for that matter.

Voice performances are part of an art in and of themselves, and they can help further enhance good writing, or even make bad or mediocre writing somewhat palatable. But a bad performance can also ruin the text it's interpreting. I enjoy it as yet another means of portraying and experiencing the text so long as the voicework is decent or better, but I would rather have fewer voiced lines and characters in favour of maintaining a consistently high calibre through them all, than performing as many characters as one can at the expense of overall quality.

Incidentally, Alain Resnais was at one point in talks with Stan Lee to make an X-Men adaptation. One could only wonder... Personally, I enjoy superhero films and I don't think any topic is inherently incapable of quality. I think Nolan's done a great job with the Batman films, as has Guillermo del Toro with Hellboy and Bryan Singer with his better X-Men films. Are they The Mirror? Not really, but still very solid pieces of work that also encapsulate a collective state of mind and period with commendable precision.

Same here, really (I'm from Argentina). Political correctness is mostly an American issue and, by consequence, an internet issue. The rest of the world seems unencumbered by it, really.

The issue I see with that distinction is that it is very easy for the former to fall into the latter. If there is any aspect to which I'd think political correctness is positive is in helping to advance a neutral and equitative vision of the law and government to all minorities regardless of race, gender, ideology, beliefs, nationality, class and so on. But when it applies to society and interpersonal relationship/contact, that's when things go awry. To my mind, part of why this happens is not least because the system acts as a terrible barometre to what is and is not a form of discrimination. Calling a man "black" instead of "African American" regardless of context is not being racist, and yet in the eyes of many advocators of political correctness, it is so: by ignoring the context however you cannot take into account the tone in which it was spoken, who it was spoken to, to what purpose... You are chastised for using the word "black". And yet again, going to the Zizek videos, how do we know there are not people who feel offended by the term "Native American"? If they do, should we disallow it, and change it for something further out there and likely just as arbitrary? Maybe some "Native Americans" prefer to be called Indians, as with the example in that video. You can't establish a system with which to police every use of one such term or another, to do so is to further feed a barrier of "respect" that is at once illogical and alienating. Edit: Was responding to Ben here.

wait, what? You lost me there... Are you seriously saying that Marx and Mussolini both followed the same ideology only in different times? No. As the etymology of the word describes, it is the voicing of an opinion that goes against the current political dogma. In the 80's and 90's it was fit to call it a form of fascism because of the conservatives in the US enforcing moral purity everywhere. Today it is political incorrect to go against equality. Isn't going against equality against the very foundation of the US? "That all men are created equal, that they have been endowed by their creator with with certain unalienable rights" and so on.... Going against equality is a much more serious issue than the overuse of political correctness What you think qualifies for equality has nothing to do with what political correctness is. I think "equality" in this context means that all humans regardless of gender, race, social class, religion, personal beliefs, past, sexual orientation and identity and whatever other differences there might be should be considered equal, but please do explain to me what your definition is I'll bite the bullet. So... Equality is an ideal the US constitution stands for, which has unfortunately not yet been reached because still to this day Western society is tipped to the favour of some minorities over others, largely for standing prejudices, discrimination and so on. Political correctness is an attempt to forcefully correct this on a social and systemic level, but it is rather more like throwing a mantle over the tensions that still exist between minorities. Political correctness is not equality so much as it is a means to reach to it, and thus you can certainly address and attack this approach without standing against the notion of equality.

Indeed. I actually did not know Neil Gaiman at the time, however, so that's what it was to me.

Absolutely. Really liked that one even as I originally dismissed it as just a romantic fairy tale starring Claire Danes.

Pretty much. It's very much a "pot calling kettle black" situation.