Any amaro fans out there? I have arrived late to the game but am enjoying educating myself on the varied products available. For those of you who don’t know, amaro is an Italian herbal liqueur possessed of a bittersweet flavor and is usually sipped as an after-meal digestif. The full list of ingredients vary but range from flower to citrus to bark and, in the case of one bottle, artichoke. To date, of the ones I’ve tried, this one is my favorite…
Amara is made from Sicilian blood oranges – and is pretty damn delicious. Highly recommended.
Speaking of which – any amaro aficionados out there? Any you’d recommend?
What are some comedies everyone else found hilarious that you…uh…did not?
Austin Powers (all of them)
Shaun of the Dead
Team America: World Police
Zoolander— Joseph Mallozzi 🏴☠️ (@BaronDestructo) April 16, 2024
Interesting article here…
The Life and Death of Hollywood
“The supposed sure shot of IP is currently misfiring: in 2023, Disney’s The Marvels fell more than $64 million short of breaking even, and its Indiana Jones sequel drastically underperformed. The Flash, for Warner Bros. Discovery, lost millions, and the company’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods flopped.”
Another reason for the growing apathy to new programming is the obsessions with green lighting shows NOT based on quality or potential popularity but the prospect of what type of BUZZ or critical acclaim it will generate. For a while now, it’s all about those LOUD shows, the ones that receive a lot of press but are watched by a minuscule number of viewers.
So, what do you all think? What are your theories for why Hollywood is going the way of the dodo.
Top 6 Stephen King movies?
6. The Dead Zone
5. Stand By Me
4. The Shawshank Redemption
3. Carrie
2. The Shining
1. Misery https://t.co/qUW2zyOXOC— Joseph Mallozzi 🏴☠️ (@BaronDestructo) April 12, 2024
Misery stands alone in my books. And you?
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Re comedy films:
I was surprisingly unimpressed by BARBIE.
Why?
—Too much pre-release hype and too many reviews, both of which revealed plot points and jokes.
—Poor-quality audio when it was streamed in my apartment community’s theatre. (Normally, the audio is excellent.)
—BARBIE paled in comparison to OPPENHEIMER, which I had seen in same venue a few weeks before.
—Emphasis on 1990s (& later?) versions of the iconic doll. My Barbie years were in the 1960s.
—Bothered by the “brainwashing” sub-plot.
I’ll stop there. May give the film another chance on small screen.
I’m teetotal so have never tried Amaro. What qualities make it so good?
I grew up watching a lot of ’70s and ’80s British comedy TV shows (The Goodies, Love Thy Neighbour, ‘Allo ‘Allo) and the Austin Powers movies are very much in the same vein. So I enjoyed them. Shaun Of The Dead is a different type of humour but I’m sure Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright grew up watching the same shows as me so our brains are wired the same. I like Shaun Of The Dead but it’s not as good as Hot Fuzz (which I know is another movie we disagree on).
I smirked though Team America: World Police and marvelled at the creativity. But it’s not one I would rave about. And I haven’t seen Zoolander. The trailers put me off.
Hollywood is extremely risk averse so it keeps churning out stuff from existing IP rather than trying new ideas. But the public is getting bored. I think that’s why Everything Everywhere All At Once was such a huge success. It was so different. Barbie is the outlier here, though. Existing IP but also a smash hit. The trick there was that it was actually a smart movie that subverted everyone’s expectations. The problem with the superhero movies these days is that they’re too formulaic. There is no subversion of expectations. In fact, there is pandering to expectations.
We’re due another Tim Burton Batman, or an Iron Man. Something that breaks the existing formula and defines a new formula that everyone copies for the next decade. I’m sure that script already exists somewhere . . . the question is will Hollywood have the balls to make it?
I need to rewatch Misery. I didn’t like it much when I first saw it. I felt it wasn’t as good as the book which really creeped me out. But I think I can look at it with fresh eyes now. “It” is my favourite Stephen King book and I really liked the recent adaptation so I reckon that would be my number 1 SK movie.
My view is that, as with Television, Hollywood has long stopped listening to fans to gain a view of what those fans want. Hollywood seems obsessed with IP world building but they are fogetting that the younger generations (who a lot of the programming is aimed at) have very short attention spans and will, and do, quickly tire of a world of branded movies/TV Shows. The Marvel universe is a excellent example.
Sequels, prequels and remakes being the main course. Too many big names with low talent. Too much CGI. Too big budgets. Politics both ways. Disney is a sweatshop for films.
There is still great stuff out there. I’m sure it will recover in some way soon.
Too much talking about the death of IP but little attention to a long run of bad writing, poor executed CGIs not to speak about underskilled Directors. All this in the name of not awarding contracts to the folks who really knows the drill of the business.
True as well.
Related to this topic, Mikey Newman just released an interesting video covering the 100 year history of MGM. I found it ironic that in the 1940s MGM was struggling with poor box office results so turned to their existing IP and started releasing tons of sequels in the hope that it would revive their profits. Spoilers, it did not. Until the ’60s when they had some success remaking their earlier hits from the ’30s. So the reality is that Hollywood have been doing this stuff from the very beginning. Everything old is new again.