Month: January 2025

The Passion continues, apparently…

It’s almost two years since I posted something about the putative sequel to The Passion of the Christ finally being about to happen… and, well, two years later it’s apparently still about to happen:

Mel Gibson says that he is going to cast a de-aged Jim Caviezel in his long-planned sequel to The Passion of the Christ, and that the film will be an “acid trip”.
Gibson was speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, and when asked who “the next Jesus” was going be, Gibson replied that he was aiming to use Caviezel, who had played the lead role in the first film in 2004, in a story about Jesus’ resurrection. Asked how he would handle the 20-year time gap for a story that is supposed to take place three days after the events depicted in Passion of the Christ, Gibson said he would use de-ageing techniques that are “so good now”.
Asked when the film would start shooting, Gibson said he hoped to begin “next year sometime”, adding: “There’s a lot required because it’s an acid trip. I’ve never read anything like it.”

So it might finally be happening in 2026? At which end of the year? I don’t know, I feel like 2 Passion 2 Christ is Mel’s white whale, kind of like his version of the Avatar sequels in that James Cameron also insists will happen but the second one took thirteen years to finally come out (number three will supposedly be out by the end of this year) and only Cameron really still cared about it. Times have moved on and I doubt that a second Passion will do anything like the business the first one did, if and when it ever becomes a thing. And as far as it being an “acid trip” goes, well, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse already exists. Mel’s Hell had better be at least as lunatic/ludicrous as that if it’s going to be worth doing at all…

Nothing of value, etc, again

And Anita Bryant has also left us…

Born on 25 March 1940 in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, Bryant quickly rose to fame through her musical career with hit songs including Till There Was You, In My Little Corner of the World and Paper Roses. At the age of 18, Bryant was crowned Miss Oklahoma.
In addition to singing at the White House during Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, Bryant sang at Republican and Democratic national conventions. She was also the spokesperson of Florida Citrus, at one point coining the phrase, “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”
In the 1970s, Bryant became politically involved by leading the anti-LGBTQ+ “Save Our Children” campaign, which sought to repeal an ordinance in Dade county, Florida, that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Speaking to Playboy in 1978, Bryant said: “I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law.”

This led to the infamous but kind of glorious incident illustrated above where she got pied in the face on TV by Thom Higgins; it evidently remains his best known piece of activism (apart from apparently coining the term “gay pride”), and probably the defining image of herself… I must say, if you were going to detonate what had been a pretty nice career up to that point, Anita found a brilliant way to do so; she’d never really hid her religiosity but this wasn’t the ideal way of underlining it, and even for the 70s it was considered unnecessarily egregious. The real crunch came, though, when she divorced her husband a few years later and all her Christian friends turned on her cos she violated “God’s law” with that; she fucked her secular entertainment career AND her religious one. The damage that she did to others, of course, was already done, even though she did apparently soften her views later, and her being gone from the world will hardly make the US a magical wonderland of queer acceptance… Still, I imagine there’s a lot of queer people out there who are not exactly sorry to see the back of her right now; wonder what “tributes” pride month will feature when that comes round…

The final slice

Remember Pizzagate? The conspiracy theory about a child sex trafficking ring operating out of the basement of a pizza shop in Washington that didn’t actually have a basement, but right-wing idiots got so worked up about it that one guy actually stormed the place with weaponry to investigate it? Remember him? Yeah. He’s dead now.

The conspiracy theorist who entered Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington D.C. with two guns in late 2016 as part of the Pizzagate hysteria was shot by police on Jan. 4 and died this past Monday, according to a press release from the Kannapolis Police Department in North Carolina. Edgar Maddison Welch was a passenger in a vehicle that was pulled over by police on the night of Saturday Jan. 4 while driving a gray 2001 GMC Yukon, according to the Kannapolis Police Department.
“The officer recognized the vehicle as one normally driven by an individual who he had previously arrested, and knew had an outstanding warrant for arrest. A vehicle stop was made by the officer and during his interaction with the driver, the officer recognized the front seat passenger as the person with the outstanding warrant for arrest,” the Kannapolis Police said in a statement.
The police department’s statement says the officer was speaking with the driver when two more officers arrived on the scene, and the first officer proceeded to open the front passenger side door.
“When [the officer] opened the door, the front seat passenger pulled a handgun from his jacket and pointed it in the direction of the officer,” the police statement reads. “That officer and a second officer who was standing at the rear passenger side of the Yukon gave commands for the passenger to drop the gun. After the passenger failed to comply with their repeated requests, both officers fired their duty weapon at the passenger, striking him.”

I must say, this was a development in the story I wasn’t exactly expecting. Now, though, I find myself wondering how long it’ll take the Q believers to declare him a martyr to the cause and that this incident was a targeted Deep State assassination of a guy who Knew The Truth or something like that… actually, what am I saying, I’m sure they already are…

Rien de valeur n’a été perdu

Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen finally shuffled off his mortal coil the other day, after decades of hatemonger activism in the National Front and other organisations. As you can see from the above photo, the good people of Paris are clearly not sorry to see le sale raciste go at last, and the Le Pen family are apparently struggling to stay on the same page with regards to his dubious legacy… his daughter Marine, of course, famously expelled the old cunt from the NF because she wanted to get mainstream respectability and Daddy was a bit too appalling for that to happen, but apparently her niece Marion is more like her grandad and she’s had spats with Marine about the party not being racist enough. Needless to say, I’m in favour of anything that serves to divide the far right and gets in the way of them doing things, so I have no problems with this situation continuing and getting worse, obviously…

Moving on from Meta?

So Mark Zuckerberg’s going back to his roots, rating girls’ attractiveness… er, “free expression”, apparently. Who knew Facebook as ever meant to be a hub of free speech? Certainly not Facebook themselves, who have enough of a history of censorship that Wikipedia has a whole page devoted just to that…


Community notes instead of actual fact checkers. Just like Twitter. Almost feels like there was no point leaving.

As for removing restrictions on those not even remotely hot button issues, well…

In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation.

Fantastic. The article also notes these other changes:

Removing language prohibiting content targeting people based on the basis of their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when they are combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within bounds to accuse, for example, Chinese people of bearing responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new addition appears to carve out room for people who want to post about how, for example, women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn’t be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now permits content that argues for “gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.” […]
Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech may “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta admitted that its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update does preserve language toward the bottom of the policy prohibiting content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”

On the plus side, you still won’t be able to deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of controlling the media and you can’t do blackface and you can’t be overtly racist… and does any of that matter when you see the stuff that Facebook lets slide? The overtly racist hate groups it keeps saying don’t violate their community standards? When Zuck talks about working with Mushroom Cock, I feel like he’s being at least a little disingenuous about what that means…

(via)

Anyway, people are wondering whether or not the time has come or is coming to get the hell away from Meta’s services, or at least from Threads and Fessebouc (I don’t know why but Instagram feels less corrupt for some reason, and I am probably wrong about that), if not social media altogether. I don’t know. Saw someone on Threads saying “hey, don’t forget Reddit’s still a thing”, which… yeah, that‘s an appetising thought, isn’t it? I don’t suppose Meta’s really going to go down or anything, I mean, Twitter’s still there and me leaving that made no real difference except I could feel smug about myself for not using one billionaire’s social media while using three of another billionaire’s.

And Bluesky, of course. No idea how long that’ll take to get enshittified, but I’ve no doubt it’ll happen eventually. Still seems like it might be the best option for that sort of Twitter-esque short form thing. But maybe proper blogs really are the way ahead? This is where most of my activity takes place these days, if I have anything to say it tends to be here… I have a feeling this sort of thing will yet see a resurgence as long as our social media providers insist on “working with” the Right…

Also, Zuckerberg was the Zodiac Killer, not Ted Cruz.

The FUCKIN’ songs!

If all else fails this year, and it probably will, we at least got a cracking new episode of “What Makes This Song Stink” from Mr Finnerty… Pat may never quite top the “Kravitz Bowl” video, but this is beautiful in so many ways too. I’d never heard of “Lonely Road” until now, and Jesus fuck it is RANK, a hideous interpolation of a certain John Denver song. It’s the sort of thing that makes me glad I’m mostly out of touch with what constitutes pop music these days. But—and this is truly impressive—it’s actually NOT the worst song featured in the video. There’s actually at least one song in here (that “Chevrolet” nonsense) that sounds even worse. Also, Pat has threatened us with a video about Disturbed’s version of “Sound of Silence”, so THAT’s something for us all to live in terror of if there weren’t enough such things…

Orders from above

Author Chuck Wendig posted this recently:

Obviously I see the point he’s making—the ease of generative AI without the need for actual skill or to do anything but come up with the right words is what it’s all about—but I think his analogy is a bit off. The work is everything, sure, but the work is still being done in the situation Wendig describes… which was basically the situation in which Val Lewton produced his famous horror films for RKO’s B unit in the 1940s; the studio came up with the film’s title and left him to get on with the job of actually making the film. So Lewton had to organise the cast and crew and all of that. Actual work still had to be done. I know there’s other comparable cases in the film industry (though admittedly the specific instances aren’t leaping to mind as I write this) (EDIT: fucking American International, of COURSE. How could I have forgotten them?) where the production company came up with the ad campaign first and then made the movie. Similarly, if a book publisher gives an author a specific order for a book they want written, or a record company pulls its roster together to make a tribute album or something, if they’re not using generative AI then the work is being done, even if the creator of the work didn’t have the original idea. Like I said, I completely get Wendig’s point but the comparison doesn’t work for me…

What we all needed

I have been quite consciously and deliberately trying to avoid posting political stuff on here for the last week, hence why I haven’t said anything about a number of things like Oolong trying to interfere with British politics as well as American, the New Orleans bombing, other stuff… been trying to find less disheartening things to post, stuff that’s more sort of arts-related, books, films, music, etc, and leave politics out for a while. Despite which, here’s something that kind of crosses the two streams…

Melania Trump will be the subject of a new documentary directed by Brett Ratner and distributed by Amazon Prime Video. The streaming arm of the tech giant got exclusive licensing rights for a streaming and theatrical release later this year, the company said Sunday.
Filming is already under way on the documentary. The company said in a statement that the film will give viewers an “unprecedented behind-the-scenes look” at the former and incoming US first lady and also promised a “truly unique story”. […]
The film is the latest connection between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. The company in December announced plans to donate $1m to help fund the president-elect’s second inauguration – and said that it would also stream the event on its Prime Video service, a separate in-kind donation worth another $1m. […]
Bezos in October did not allow the Post to endorse a presidential candidate, a move that led to tens of thousands of people canceling their subscriptions and to protests from journalists with a deep history at the newspaper. This weekend, a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist quit her job there after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before the president-elect.

This is weirdly timely, cos I saw someone on Threads a few days ago ask whatever happened to Brett Ratner, who I have frankly never given a shit about so I had no idea, and so I went to look up his Wiki entry and… OH. Sexual harrassment, eh? Yeah, that sort of thing can put a spanner in the works of your career, even in Hollywood, and it evidently did so in Brett’s case… I see him listed as producer on precisely one film since these allegations started in 2017; I also observe that he moved to Israel using the Law of Return, and I saw something somewhere suggesting he did so because Israel doesn’t extradite to the US or something… no idea if that’s accurate or not, but I presume he’s not too worried about actually having to answer for what he allegedly did, not if he’s moving back to the US to make this thing about Trump’s missus. Maybe Trump’s protecting him or something. Anyway, that‘s what happened to Brett Ratner, evidently… somehow Jeff Bezos decided he was the right person to direct this piece of toadying for his streaming service. Trying to keep in with Mushroom Cock for when the latter finally tires of that South African character, too, no doubt. Fuck I hate all of these fucking people.

Parenthetically…

That, apparently, was another piece of work by Brett Ratner, being a music video for CANNIBAL CORPSE of all bands. I spotted this listed in his Wiki entry, where it kind of stood out to me, not least because otherwise his music video filmography is entirely made up of hip-hop, R&B and pop videos. How the hell did he end up working with THIS lot? Makes no sense at all. Either way, AV Club were unimpressed:

Like Fincher, Brett Ratner also got his start in the world of music videos, working with the likes of LL Cool J and Heavy D And The Boyz before making his first feature, Money Talks, in 1997. Also like Fincher, Ratner hasn’t left his music-video past behind now that he’s an A-list filmmaker: He frequently lends his short-form magic to club-hopping cohorts like Mariah Carey and Jamie Foxx. In 2006—the same year he gifted X-Men: The Last Stand to the world—Ratner stepped out from behind the velvet rope and crawled deep into the sewer of gory, Satan-hailing metal by directing the video for Cannibal Corpse’s “Make Them Suffer.” While the director/band combination makes for an even crrrazier couple than Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker from Ratner’s Rush Hour movies, “Make Them Suffer” itself is a thoroughly mundane metal video loaded with de rigueur strobe lights and smoke machines. Impressively, Ratner found yet another forum in which to be mediocre.

Ouch.