Glass Onion commentary

Glass Onion now has a commentary track with writer and director Rian Johnson on Netflix.

The Bad Batch 2.10

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.10: Retrieval

“Attempting to recover a stolen asset, the Batch must learn to trust a thief.”

26 minutes plus credits.

So, when last we left our heroes, a masked thief had stolen their ship...

Shrove Tuesday

Pancake Day here, Mardi Gras elsewhere. (See Free Tours By Foot - New Orleans on the city’s Mardi Gras Krewes.)

BAFTAs

All Quiet On the Western Front did well. A reminder that I’ve never really done the Great War as a setting, due in part to how grim it was as this depicts.

V5 Last Dance 1.06

Tonight in Vampire: The Masquerade, the band went to a gig. The duo playing (based on Witch Of The Vale) were so Goth that a lot of vampires were there, and felt momentarily understood.

Kieron Gillen at Into The Rookery

The Wicked + The Design

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania is an example of taking characters out of their milieu, which can end up not feeling like their kind of story. In this case it feels like a Guardians Of The Galaxy. Better than Volume 2 at least.

(It doesn’t help that I don’t have much interest in Kang or that Jonathan Majors always looks sad to me.)

And that title is an argument in favour of a clean reboot.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On is a story about childhood, more or less a children’s story but not only that, with some universal emotional notes. It expands on online shorts starting here in a very meta way. It also presents a world where tiny beings live mostly out of sight but nobody seems particularly surprised by them.

The Phantom

The Phantom by Lee Falk debuted on this day in 1936.

How To Remake Your Dragon

A live-action version of How To Train Your Dragon seems like a silly idea, as the animated trilogy is well liked and the dragons would still have to animated anyway. But here we are, with the animated trilogy drector returning, so what the Hell do I know?

Oh dear.

Politics here are about to go into Interesting Times.

The Bad Batch 2.09

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2.09 The Crossing

“The team tackles a risky mission on a hostile world.”

27 minutes plus credits.

Animation showoff bit: lots of moving light and shadow.

Well, that episode description is certainly an episode description for The Bad Batch.

A change of pace, a little action but more emotional reaction to the end of Truth & Consequences.

Rest in peace, Chris Baylis.

Aid for Turkiye RPG bundle

Via DriveThryRPG:

Organized by AAW Games, the Aid for Türkiye bundle offers more than $570 in RPG PDFs for only $33 with the proceeds benefiting Médecins Sans Frontières / MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and their ongoing relief efforts.

Super Bowl trailers, ads and Halftime Show

Trailers including Indiana Jones, Guardians Of The Galaxy and Dungeons & Dragons (which just got a new trailer recently) at Empire.

Advertising highlights at A.V. Club.

Rihanna with the Halftime Show at Stereogum.

Valentines

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, but if you need plans this is already too late. Though compared to Halloween and Christmas its not much of a time for our kind of stories. See my few posts mentioning it, at least two of which are actually mentioning Eddie Valentine in The Rocketeer.

My ultimate gamers-not-caring-much note is that the prototype for Propulsion, 24 hours of gaming for charity, was that weekend that year. One of the TWH group there (Derek) had to go early as he actually had something couple-y to do.

The Super Bowl 2023

Sadly my current Vampire: The Masquerade game isn’t set in Philadelphia. And I’ve never set a game in Kansas City. Hmm.

Expect trailer and advert roundups in due course.

Infinite (2021)

Channel 4 premiered Infinite tonight, and, well, it’s certainly my second favourite genre action film about fighting immortals from the early 20202s starring Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Serial immortals aren’t as easy to keep in a group as regular immortals as they sometimes die and become unavailable for a couple of decades, if as here they can’t jump into available adult bodies, and melee weapons aren’t that good against guns in this case, so Infinite gives some of them The Force as well.

Far Beyond The Stars

The classic Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond The Stars premiered twenty-five years ago today. A uniquely sad and angry take on the idea of characters discovering they’re fictional, something most people (including me) run for fun.

Spider-Man Noir: not a live-action series I was expecting

But these days, you never know.