The Snarky Cats of Ulthar

(QUENTA SILMARILLION: OF THE RUIN OF DORIATH, OF TUOR AND THE FALL OF GONDOLIN, OF THE VOYAGE OF EÄRENDIL AND THE WAR OF WRATH) With Part 5 of our ongoing review of The Silmarillion , we finally finish the Quenta Silmarillion! This one took the longest to write and frankly, we blame Túrin Turambar. We weren't eager to go back to Middle Earth after that . Another problem was that we've been trying to keep this snarky and there's little to snark about here. (You can read the previous reviews here: Part I , Part II , Part III , and Part IV ) We knew these next three chapters were going to be sad just by reading the titles, but we weren't prepared for just how bad it was going to get. Naturally, much of it was caused by Fëanor’s sons, whose sole function in this whole book is to ruin everything for everyone. At least, this time, they were considerate enough to finally die, which is something they really should've done a long time ago. Chapter 22: Of the Ruin of Doriath

Cruel Peter (2019) sees a psychotic brat who has fun torturing animals and cutting people up in 1908 Sicily get his comeuppance when a local boy, Alfredo, whose dog he buried alive, does the same thing to him. Alfredo even made a wooden tombstone with a little creepy nursery rhyme-style epitaph. Aww, that will surely break the heart of Peter's enabling, veiled mother. Skip to present day London (I think), where a widowed archaeologist, Prof Norman Nash, is given a light assignment by his boss to get him back in the game after we lost it following his wife’s death. This light assignment? To lead the excavation of a historical Sicilian cemetery, which so happens to be in the vicinity of Peter's now abandoned house. That can't be good. What's even worse is that Nash's daughter Liz has been trying to contact her dead mother with what the movie calls a Bishop's Ball. I googled this but it's not a real thing. It's basically a crystal ball with cuts on its sur

The basic plot of Suspiria – an American dancer named Susie Bannion joins a dance company that’s really a front for a coven that’s willing to kill whoever gets in their way – remains the same in its 2018 remake. However, Dario Argento’s original was a waking nightmare powered by OTT bloody deaths and an epic soundtrack by Goblin, whereas Lucas Guadagnino’s version is the complete opposite: colourless and very much grounded in its 70s Germany setting, almost obsessively so. Argento kept the focus on the dance school, but Guadagnino splits it three ways: the Markos Dance Company; a widowed therapist, Josef Klemperer, who has one of the dancers, Patricia, as a patient; and the wounds of WWII Germany that are still very much open and fuel present day events (though oddly, the fact that the Markos Dance Company was around during the Third Reich only leads to praise for Madame Blanc’s feminism in a time when women were seen as nothing but broodmares). There’s always a TV or radio on, inform

I’ve got a confession to make, not only did I find Season One of  Iron Fist  better than Season Two, I watched it twice. Embarrassing, I know. First, I must say I was pretty impressed with how the writers adapted the source material. I never read the comics, so I’m basing that on what I read in Wikipedia. Smart move not including the connection between Danny’s father and K’un-Lun. We wouldn’t want one more white person traipsing around a mystical Asian city, especially will all those enlightened folks that immediately yelled “Whitewashing!” because a white character was cast with a white actor. Anyway, I really was glad they changed it because that backstory is way too convoluted, like comic book characters’ backstories are wont to be. It was also better to have the people of K’un-Lun train Danny and let him become the new Immortal Iron Fist because they expected him to stay and guard the city. I also liked how they linked the Hand to K’un-Lun – it actually makes a lot more sense for a