Netflix’s dark comedy promises to rock the mood ​● Are you still getting the Dracula movie? ● The new Star Wars series was inspired by LOTR ● Andrzej Sapkowski is writing a new book The Witcher ● The hottest video game right now ● Which country is the most rectangular in the world

Black comedy from Netflix promises to shake the mood

There are some genres of film that are really hard to come up with after they’ve been explored, re-explored, and then trodden over n times until, even as a fan of the genre, you get sick of it at some point. But I dare to say that the Chilean director Pablo Larraín managed to do it El Conde (“The Count”), his latest film, which will be released on Netflix on September 15.

As in the case There is none, his directorial debut, which was awarded at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2012, inspired Larrain’s new feature film with a page in his country’s modern history: the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. But unlike his first film, the one that will be released on Netflix is ​​not a drama, but a comedy, and a plot that will upset some.

El Conde appears with an alternate “historical” theme in which Pinochet is a vampire who doesn’t want to live “another 250 years” because he’s sick of people calling him a thief. “You can call a soldier a criminal, but not a thief,” the general himself declares in the film’s trailer. There is a not-so-subtle irony in the fact that Pinochet spent the last part of his life defending that he was not a criminal.

If Larraine’s vampire movie idea is as novel as it gets, the story itself isn’t exactly original, falling into the category of comedies about family rifts. I won’t go into details because the trailer you see just below is as suggestive as possible and I think it’s absolutely hilarious. But why am I saying this? El Conde will it upset someone and promise to shake the mood?

Because this is exactly the kind of movie that a section of the political right will eviscerate for being “woke” and “leftist”, while even a section of the left will tear it apart on the grounds that it “humanises” a fascist dictator through such a presentation. I can’t wait to see the video for Ben Shapiro Destroys El Conde” and a Mother Jones article to explain to us that these things are no joke.

Do you have another Dracula movie?

To see what I said without exaggeration, the vampire movie genre is one of the most popular, this very Thursday another Dracula feature film was released. Demeter’s last journeythe film in question is basically an adaptation of a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Captain’s Log, which tells the story of a vampire’s secret journey from Transylvania to London.

I mean the part where the “count” kills all the people on board one by one. Someone probably remembers that “Demeter” is the name of a ship, that this part of the book was shown in movies for obvious reasons. Please, the new film was directed by Andre Ovredal, a Norwegian director known for such horror films as Troll hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary stories to tell in the dark.

Interestingly, the reviews immediately after the release of the film are mostly negative (it only has 45% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.6 on IMDb), but two undisputed masters of the horror genre, Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, gave it a thumbs up after seeing it, reports The Independent.

“Loved it so much: gorgeous, extravagant and brutal!!!,” del Toro tweeted, while King described it as a “dizzying time.” The problem would be that, as far as I can tell, it has not been released in cinemas here. But Digital Trends points out that it’s likely to air on the Peacock on Halloween, so here’s to Skyshowtime if it does.

The new Star Wars series was inspired by LOTR

American actress Rosario Dawson, or Ahsoka Tano for fans star Warsrevealed in an interview published by Entertainment Weekly this week that the character was partly inspired by a strange source for the new series she’ll star in, set to premiere on Disney+ this month, August 23: the wizard Gandalf FROM lord of the rings.

“In the animated series, you see her turn white, but I really liked the idea that she had another dimension,” said Dawson, referring to the fact that Ahsoka’s character first appeared in two animated series of the galactic franchise. very, very far away Clone Wars (2008-2014) and Rebels (2014-2018), to be presented to the general public in Mandalorian

“[Producătorul] dave [Filoni] and I’ve talked a lot about Gandalf the Gray and Gandalf the White and that transition and how she (not Ahsoka) is very capable and great and considered a leader, but she still has a level of development to reach,” he said. – explained the actress. Speaking about another source of inspiration for the new series, the samurai films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, she said:

“Ahsoka seems like a lone wolf and I could sense a bit of that coming from her as well Rebels, where she’s working with all these different people, but in a lot of ways she’s on her own. What I really liked about this new series is that we get to explore that a bit more. We get to see what it’s like for her to be in that position and the path she chooses as a kind of ronin, a lone warrior.”

Andrzej Sapkowski writes a new book “The Witcher”

Although he’s been dropping nasty hints about it for years, the Polish author has now officially confirmed that he is indeed working on a new book of the saga the witcherHe stated this in an interview with the Ukrainian YouTube channel Fantastic Talk. “I never say things like that because with me you never know. Maybe I’ll do something, maybe not,” he said again, annoyed.

But Sapkowski explained that “until now, when I said I was going to write something and then didn’t write, people complained that I was misleading them or lying to them. So I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing until it’s done. Because until I’m done, I don’t think it exists.” And then confirmation came, the Polish author stated that “I always make exceptions for my Ukrainian friends.”

“Yes, I am working on a new book about the Witcher, and very hard. It may take a year, but not more than that,” he said. Season of stormsbook the witcher published in 2013 and the last to appear, it featured a self-contained Geralt story set years before the main saga of the franchise, which concluded back in 1999 with the publication of Vol. Mistress of the lake.

Although Sapkowski didn’t provide any more details about the new title, IGN speculates that it will most likely be set in the past rather than the future, given that Geralt’s story ends pretty conclusively in the main book saga. In addition, the future of Geralt is already told by CD Projekt Red video games, which take place a few years after the book.

Sapkowski is very reserved in public appearances, although he is a national star in Poland (PHOTO: © Irontrybex | Dreamstime.com)

The most popular video game at the moment

… by no means is it a famous name. But the specialist site Kotaku describes it as “one of the best games of the year”, PC Gamer as the “definitely the best game” of 2023, and Metacritic, which also aggregates reviews of video games, not only movies and series ( I had no idea either, to be honest ), it has a score of 89 out of 100 from critics.

It is about Diver Dave, an indie game developed by Mintrocket, a South Korean game studio that no one has heard of before, but it’s also their debut game. In just 10 days since its release on Steam on June 28th, the game has sold over a million copies, which may not seem like much, but consider that this is a pixelated 2D game with zero marketing budget.

Diver Dave revolves around him, oddly enough, Dave, an overweight diver who must have enough catch during the day for his sushi restaurant, which he keeps open at night. In other words, it will be a simulator of resource accumulation and management. Numerous games have proven that if you find the right ingredients, such titles can be extremely successful.

But in the case of the name Mintrocket, the simulation part is by no means the one that captivated many gamers, the corresponding advantage lies in the adventure elements of the game, the unexpected events of which the titular diver becomes a victim, and the humor with which the story is told sprinkled. I don’t find the trailer necessarily instructive in that regard, but seriously Diver Dave it deserves a try.

What is the most rectangular country in the world?

Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso – the latest upheaval in Africa has put the spotlight back on a number of countries that, let’s be honest, would be hard to find if someone handed you a blank map, even if you excelled in geography at school. I’d say it’s also largely due to the fact that much of Africa looks like a giant patchwork with countries that share borders without much distinction.

This is connected with the “battle for Africa” ​​of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when large European colonial powers used roulette to divide unoccupied territories among themselves. This situation reminded me of an article published last month by IFL Science, they quoted an Australian statistician named David Barry, who set out to rank the most rectangular countries in the world.

Barry said he came up with the idea after a friend noted on Facebook that Turkey was an “extremely rectangular” country and then realized there was no reliable source online about countries with “very straight borders.” So, what is the most rectangular country on the world map?

By Barry’s calculations, that distinction belongs to Egypt, a country whose territory overlaps the rectangle shape by 95.5%. Next in the ranking are ordered and surprising to me the fact that there are not as many African countries as I expected: Vatican City, Sint Maarten (a country that is part of the Netherlands in the Caribbean), Lesotho, Yemen, Ghana, North Macedonia and Poland .

Nauru completes the top ten ranking, and Turkey, where the idea started, is in 15th place. Although they are also quite rectangular, the United States ranks only 169th according to Barry’s methodology, this is due to the fact that the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska break the symmetry of the main “body” of the country. You can view the full rating on the statisticians’ blog.

Libya is only in 23rd place, although it also looks quite rectangular (PHOTO: Ignacio Ruiz Casanellas / Alamy / Profimedia Images)

On the head new trailers this week was unfortunately completely unremarkable, so if you’re interested, you should also read last weekend’s Nerd Alert column, a series-related special the witcher inspired by the writings of Andrzej Sapkowski, what it’s all about, you can find it here:

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