Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes you seem
to get what you want, but the price is not what you have expected; karma just
might be real, and if you try to play it…it will be played, but so will you. There
is a reason as to why Gandalf tended to downplay his magical skills, and he was
a Maiar, i.e. – not a human at all, more like a demigod that inhabited a human
shell – but more on that later.
As we suffer from family problems and other issues, we turn
to the magical world of make-believe to make us feel better, and what do we
discover there? Disney is owning a large part of National Geographic franchise,
which is why the latter is advertising TLK-2019, a movie so…unsatisfying, that
there’s a man on YouTube, who made a video about 30 minutes long if not
slightly more so, just ranting about how bad TLK-2019 is.
…TLK-2019 is not the best movie of 2019 so far, but neither
is it the worst; it certainly does not deserve a 30+ minute rant either. If you
do not like it, that is fine; the fact that the bloody Disney owns a large part
of NatGeo franchise – not so much. Seriously, what does the House of Mouse want?
To become real life’s analogue of the SW empire? Yeah, not cool, not cool at
all.
Looking away from TLK-2019, which is an inferior remake of
the 1994 film with some variant dialogue that doesn’t do anything, we see… the
trailer for the upcoming ‘Cats’ movie… and what in seven Hells did we see?
Well, from a literal P.O.V. we have seen a number of famous
actors and actresses singing around in digitalized anthropomorphic cat suits,
singing and dancing. And why were they singing and dancing in digitalized
anthropomorphic cat suits? Only the Lord knows. Well, maybe Nick Fury – the original
Nick Fury – also does, but we’ve been already subjected to the above-described
spectacle, even if in the previous incarnations of ‘Cats’ the cast wore
real-life, regular cat suits and make-up, and it was just fine. ‘Cats’ is a
musical, after all, so who the Hell cares about the suits, beyond their basic function
of them?
…As for the main plot of ‘Cats’… listen. It’s a bunch of
cats – literally speaking – who come together as a single tribe and debate via
song and dance as to who will ascend to Heaven (for that is what it is, even it’s
called differently here), and be reborn into someone new. Guess all of them are
out of their nine lives or something, because otherwise? It makes even less
sense than it does in the canon – but that is okay. It is a musical. It does
not supposed to make sense! There already was an attempt to adapt it into a
movie format, and it was not very successful – it was a direct-to-video format,
and that never really works. Why should Cats-2019 be better? As TLK-2019 shows,
a movie cannot get ahead on CGI alone; TLK-1994 is still the better version out
of the two, (so far; maybe in another 25 years we will get TLK-2044 or
something).
In addition, you must remember that ‘Cats’ is a musical, and
they don’t transform into movies too well from the start. Does anyone remember
the latest one, not a biopic of Barnum Brown or someone like that? Judging by
the crickets chirping – no. There is no indication that Cats-2019 will endure
any better, ‘Cats’ or no ‘Cats’.
I remember when Cirque du Soleil made a film, about human
life from birth to death. The first dance was depicting the – fertilization of
an egg by sperm; then the protagonist’s childhood; his first love, depicting by
two statues dancing, (we’re talking a heterosexual couple here, BTW); then his
maturity; then the scene where a bunch of proletarian types (the turn of 20th
century, here), confront the protagonist in his mansion; and the final scene,
our protagonist, now an old man, leaving with a crowd of children for Heaven or
someplace similar. All of the above was executed by nothing but dance and
music. After going through it, I promptly went to the radio and listened to
contemporary pop songs (J-Lo – at that time she was more of a singer than an
actress unlike these days) until I returned to normal. There’s only so much
edgy progressive culture that I can take – and movie musicals like that Barnum
Brown piece, ‘Rocketman’ (sort of), and the upcoming Cats-2019 (we’re talking
December of this year), have all that plus singing. What joy. Not. It’s really
almost enough to make a blogger return to real life… just in time to see and hear
POTUS the Donald open his maw and emit a series of racist insults that have no
business being emitted by a POTUS; you motherfucking Yankees, impeach him now!
Try to escape back into mass media? To AoS, to be more
precise? Oh wait, AoS is being cancelled at last – the upcoming 7th
season will be its’ end. So far, AoS is trying to give all that it has…more
recycling, this time of the Ghost Rider plot arc. Further compounding the
situation is the fact that Gabriel Luna does not appear to be returning to AoS,
especially for the finale of S6 – he is busy preparing for his own ‘Ghost Rider’
TV series… Gregg is doing the best he can, playing a Coulson clone that has
Ghost Rider powers… AoS has officially jumped the shark. It made sense for Luna
and his character – Robbie Reyes – to return to AoS back when a fear dimension
that is not a fear dimension after
all, but he never did. Rather, Deathlok made his obligatory appearance – one per
AoS season or even less – and that was the end of that. Only it is not, and
Izel is about to take over the world via her alien space bats…sorry, shrikes.
In real life, shrikes are carnivorous songbirds with some rather gruesome and
disturbing feeding habits: when they catch a small animal, they impale it on a
thorn, and strip flesh from the impaled corpse at their leisure. Real life can
be stranger than any science fiction, and for North America, there are two main
species of shrike, the loggerhead and the northern shrikes – but we have
digressed.
No, not really. Not unlike S5 and especially S4, AoS is
trying to combine several plot lines into one, just in time for the explosive
mid-season finale. Yes, it is supposed to be the season finale, but this is just AoS being cute, among other things.
They are losing cast members again – agent Davis has apparently died for good –
and the numbers still are not so high, and the enthusiasm is on the decrease,
now that the cast and the crew know that the gravy train has almost ended. Will
AoS end up in an equally big mess as the last two seasons of GoT did? Since
this week’s episode – ‘Leap’ – forgot/ignored about Snowflake’s existence
completely, odds are that yeah, they will be, forgotten coffee cups and water
bottles aside.
…So, for now, this is it. See you all soon, people!
PS: Do not try to play the karma, please, unless you are that sort of a wizard/cleric/theurge. If
you are – go ahead; if you are not – eventually you will lose control and then it will
be really bad for everyone.
Now – see you all
soon!
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