At the end of season 1 of AMC’s hit series Preacher, the sign outside the Annville, Texas church read “Today: Meet God, Tomorrow: TBD.” Well, the “to be determined” part was incredibly accurate… Annville blew up… ALL OF IT! Luckily, that was behind the dust of the car carrying the trio of Preacher Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), Tulip (Oscar nominee Ruth Negga), and drunk Irish vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun). They are on the search for God… no literally, God is missing. Jesse is possessed by Genesis, a half demon half angel force that allows him to control anyone. Oh and yeah, there’s a cowboy from Hell chasing him. Ok, I think we’re caught up.
Book Expo descended on NYC Thursday and Friday, and it was a reader’s dream. The prelude to Book Con (Saturday and Sunday), Book Expo was like having a Jacob Javitz Center sized library organized by publisher, where free books are literally thrown at you. And not only that, many of the books have not been released yet, and the authors are just hanging out ready to talk.
One of the many many publishers was Scholastic which handed out books like candy in “read-topia.” There are many lovely tomes headed our way from this kid-centric press (young adult too!) this fall.
Golden Earring‘s “Radar Love”; The Button Down Brass‘ “Tequila”; Martha and the Vandellas‘ “Nowhere To Run”; and Incredible Bongo Band‘s “Bongolia”: these are just a few of the songs that can be heard in the trailers for Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver. Since the film made its festival debut earlier this year at SXSW, critics have been feeding the hype machine, going as far as saying it is one of the best movies of the year.
Judging by the looks of the trailers and featurettes, it’s easy to see why. The action in Baby Driver practically syncs up to the music. And I say practically because I haven’t seen it yet. But if you are a fan of amazing soundtracks, then the newly released tracklist for the film’s soundtrack should have your attention. Check out which songs made the cut, below.
Last year, a new all-female reboot of Ghostbusters hit theaters. Though it grossed $229 million worldwide at the box office, that was off of a $144 million production budget. So adding the millions that was put into the marketing campaign, the film was barely a mild success. Thus, there will probably be no sequel. The film was fine, and with the way it ended, there was plenty of stories left to tell. But it all comes down to money, and if there isn’t any, then it isn’t worth it for the studio to take such a risk.
Now one of the Ghostbusters alum believes he knows why the reboot didn’t work. According to Dan Aykroyd, it was director Paul Feig. More on the story, below.
Doctor Who
Season 10, Episode 8 “The Lie Of The Land”
Directed by Wayne Yip
Written by Toby Whithouse
Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas, Michelle Gomez BBC America
Air date: June 3, 2017
Ever since the dawn of modern mass media, there has been this concern that media has a meta-textual element designed to mislead the public. Call it subliminal advertising or even the Discordian fnord, but there is always this notion that the newspapers, the TV, the Internet that people so willingly and gleefully consume is actually putting us to sleep somehow. Though it informs us, that very act also allows it to control us. It creates a method for the direct manipulation of the human psyche, and since mass media systems make the replication of controlling information so easy, the many can be controlled by the very few.
This dystopian idea of control through mass media is what Doctor Who examines with Episode 10.8 “The Lie Of The Land.” Having established last week that a new alien species (the Monks) has arrived on Earth that behave something like a shadowy, Illuminati-like group, the gimmick of “The Pyramid At The End Of The World” was the setup for a choice. Bill (Pearl Mackie) must pick the uncertain future of life on Earth with the Monks, or let the Doctor die. She chooses the former, and now we see what life with the Monks looks like.
Topical political satire is the trendy thing. Even Netflix’s House of Cards felt cut and pasted out of the newspaper headlines. So with climate change on everyone’s mind, and the same week President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Accords, we now get the brand new title for SyFy’s newest entry in the “in”famous Sharknado series… Sharknado 5: Global Swarming! The fifth film will debut on SyFy channel on August 6th, carrying the tagline, “Make America Bait Again.”
The Dominant Paradigm is a weekly podcast where Geeks of Doom Podcast hosts Dwayne D, Andrew Sorcini, and Tosin Onafowokan discuss STARZ’s TV series American Gods, the works that inspired it, and the larger questions about the lenses in which we see our world, AKA, the paradigms.
In this episode of The Dominant Paradigm podcast covering American Gods Episode 1.6 “A Murder of Gods,” we see the birth of the Three Stooges in Laura (Emily Browning), Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber), and Salim (Omid Abtahi), along with other interesting twists.
On this week’s The Drill Down podcast, a virus is going around Chipotle (and this time it’s not in the food), new gadgets from Intel, Nest and others, Google’s gender pay gap, the undead comment on Net Neutrality, plus much, much more.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the seminal and legendary album by The Beatles, which not only seemed to crystallize the band, but also the entire sensibilities of the youth of the globe during the mid to late 1960s, celebrates its 50th anniversary today.
Released in America on June 2nd, 1967, and a week or so earlier in the band’s native UK, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has become such a recognizable force in pop cultural history, it’s almost like a brand, a headquarters where so many musical and cultural influences spawned. From its rich and vibrantly complex yet totally welcoming cover to the same adjectives applied to the wide range and scope of music, which almost acts as a primer for every single style of music up to that point in musical history (pop, cabaret, vaudeville, psychedelia, straightforward rock) and even acting as a blueprint to just the around the corner genres that followed (like progressive and even acid rock), Sgt. Pepper is a true artifact of a time long gone and yet still acts as a straight arrow pulse right in contemporary society, whether it’s for novelty’s sake or reality’s sake.
Syfy has released a new trailer for Blood Drive, their upcoming ultra-violent grindhouse series.
The series is set in a not-too-distant future Los Angeles, where the days are hot and water and gasoline are not at all easy things to come by. And so, naturally, humans now fuel their vehicles with human blood!
You can read more about Blood Drive and watch the new trailer below.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press
