The only major quibble that I have with the film is a design decision. When it came to the costumes, sets, and even ships the film takes a minimalistic approach - probably to highlight how far in the future the story takes place. The books describe the noble houses living in much more opulence.

I actually preferred some of the production design of the Lynch film for this reason. Overall of course, the Villeneuve version is superior.

I wonder what the value proposition is for actors taking on these movies anymore.

A decent pay cheque I imagine. Also, if you’ve ever dreamed of being able to fly or punch a bad guy through a wall or what have you, you’ll be able to live our those fantasies (and getting paid for it). In other words, it might just be a fun experience. Not everything has to be a calculated career move.

Surely she has the pull to land something better right now?

I dunno. House of the Dragon was her big break, no doubt, but she was only in a handful of episodes. She didn’t break out in the way that, say, Emilia Clarke did on Game of Thrones.

The mainstream posters for tentpoles are almost floating headshots these days, but there are more interesting variations around. I quite like the IMAX poster for Dune Part 2, just as I liked the IMAX poster for Part 1.

Lots of negativity in this thread, but that seems to be par for the course for any fandom. Personally I’m cautiously optimistic.

Skydance produced/co-produced (often partnering with Paramount) on a number of franchise movies, including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, GI Joe, Terminator, The Old Guard and Spy Kids. Some of their productions have been well-received (eg Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick) and others less so (Terminator Genysis and Dark Fate, although personally I quite liked Dark Fate). They’ve also produced smaller, critically acclaimed movies like True Grit, Annihilation and Air; as well as their share of dreck of course, like Geostorm.

What I think is clear though is that Skydance is primarily interested in big franchises, so if they were to acquire Paramount, I think more Star Trek movies would very likely be in the works which, as a fan, I’d be happy about. I know there’s an argument that Trek is best suited to TV, but some of the best Star Trek has been big screen Star Trek. And studios are more willing these days to have franchises run across both TV and film concurrently (MCU, DC, Star Wars), granted with mixed success.

Re Larry Ellison’s involvement - my guess is that he’d be a silent partner, putting some of his personal fortune - rather than Oracle’s funds - to help out his son. I believe he did the same thing for his daughter, Megan Ellison, whose company Annapurna Pictures he helped fun and which went on to produce films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread and Books Smart (and the stage musical A Strange Loop). I doubt Larry Ellison will take a hands-on role in the management of Skydance/Paramount.

You’re not the only one who’s picked up on this:
https://www.primetimer.com/quickhits/the-west-wings-hartsfields-landing-has-never-made-any-damn-sense

If you watch the show (and I’ve watched it a lot) you can tell that Aaron Sorkin wasn’t writing to a detailed plan. I think a lot of his ongoing storylines grew organically (and were often turned in very late, which ultimately led to him being sacked from the show), which meant he sometimes repeated, or retconned, beats, or made other mistakes.

Hartsfield’s Landing was probably named after Hart’s Location, another New Hampshire town that has often votes at midnight. I recall reading a story that, because of the weather, of the three towns that usually do vote at midnight only Dixville did so this year.

edit: Hrrm. Turns out that’s what the linked CNN story actually says. Serves me right for not RTFA.

I think the fact that Anson Mount nailed it as Pike helped. (He followed in the footsteps of Jeffrey Hunter and Bruce Greenwood - all three Pikes have been really good.) Personally, I suspect that the more SNW edges towards being TOS the less I’ll enjoy - or, more accurately, the less I’ll respect - it.

Franchises have always struggled to reconcile the need to reinvent themselves on the one hand, and the need to retain those elements that attract fans to the franchise on the other. As a long-time Star Trek fan I also want the franchise to push forward and try new things (and in some ways recent shows have done so - eg Lower Decks being Trek’s first sitcom), but at the same time many fans just want to see the characters that they know and love, hence the obsession with bringing back - or tying new characters to - legacy characters (ala Strange New Worlds or Picard’s third season). I wish they’d kept Kirk to the very last episode of Strange New World, and was even a bit disappointed to see the TOS Enterprise appear at the end of the first season of Discovery.

I thought it was a well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s. Give it a go and see if you like it.

Even though musicals are my life, I don’t see every movie or TV musical in the same obsessive way that I see every stage musical that I can. To me musicals usually work so much better as live theatre. Also, I have a bias against jukebox show - I prefer original songs written specifically for the story. So it’s taken me almost 12 years to catch up with Pitch Perfect. But I have to say I really enjoyed it. In some ways it’s a standard, very predictable underdog story. (I think I was surprised by only one small thing - that the girl everyone thought was a lesbian actually did turn out to be a lesbian - I thought the twist would be that she was straight). But that predictability didn’t spoil my enjoyment. Definitely a case of “it’s not where you end up, but how you got there”. I was most impressed by Anna Camp as the primary antagonist. She could have played the role in a very straight-forward, bitchy. even over-the-top way (much like Adam Devine played the secondary antagonist), but she gave her line readings an earnestness and undercurrent of insecurity that made her interesting and not unlikeable.

Also watched the fourth season finale of For All Mankind. Overall a better season than season 3 (because of less family soap opera) but not as good as the first two seasons. Still one of my favourite shows currently in production and I hope it gets a fifth season.

It means you weren’t the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - [email protected] then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

Unused idea for the title sequence to Westworld.

If you enjoyed On the Basis of Sex you should check out RBG, the 2018 documentary about Ginsburg. Ginsburg also appears as a character in a couple of episodes of the fifth season of The Good Fight, played wonderfully by Elaine May.

I think I preferred the early Wes Anderson, before he went full Anderson. Check out Rushmore and (what I think is his best movie) The Royal Tenenbaums.

Movies:

• Rebel Moon. If you gave an AI the prompt: “A Star Wars movie written and directed by Zack Snyder but with all Star Wars copyrighted material disguised” this is what you’d get. I know that’s exactly what the movie was, minus the written by AI bit (though I wonder), but it felt almost like a parody of itself.
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Mediocre, except for Patrick Wilson who elevated every soggy line he was given to read. They desperately wanted to recreate the Thor/Loki dynamic to the point where I thought in one scene I actually heard Aquaman call his brother “Loki”.
• One Life. Schindler’s List if Schindler’s List focused more on the red tape needed to rescue people from the Nazis, and Oskar’s twilight years. Kidding aside, a decent movie, but more on the “worthy” end of the spectrum than the entertaining.
• Poor Things. The best movie I’ve seen this year. May still be true 51 weeks from now.

TV:

• For All Mankind. I enjoyed the “retro” early seasons more, but it’s still a very watchable show, and one I still consider to be a Star Trek prequel if I squint and look at it slightly sideways. They certainly seem to be heading towards a Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies scenario this season. One of the few shows I’m watching week-by-week instead of saving up and bingeing.
• A Murder at the End of the World. Well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s.
• Bodies. Decent crime mini series set across four time periods. I thought the more modern settings and characters were more interesting than the oldey timey (wimey) ones, but the show managed to bring all four storylines together in a pretty satisfying way.
• Silo. Halfway through. Pretty good, but maybe not as good as I heard it was.

As others have pointed out, Foundation isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov’s stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were… not. Haven’t watched the second season yet, but apparently it’s more consistent.

For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven’t tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don’t know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.

I can’t imagine US audiences taking kindly to a movie with “Messiah” in the title, so imagine that it’ll be called Dune: Part 3.

I don’t understand why there wasn’t a spinoff.

There were actually two spin-off shows: The Lone Gunmen and Millennium. Granted, I think Millennium was retconned into being an X-Files spinoff show after it was cancelled so that the storyline could be wrapped up in an X-Files episode.

• For All Mankind season 4 - along with House of the Dragon my favourite show currently in production
• Downton Abbey New York season 2 - comfort food of sorts, populated with amazing theatre and musical theatre talent
• New Frasier about the old Frasier Crane - still finding its feet, but it took the old Frasier about the younger Frasier Crane a year or so to do the same
• Gen V - decent spin off
• Loki season 2 - satisfying finale
• The Creator - not as good as I was hoping it would be