Monthly Archives: August 2022

Series Review: Light & Magic

Disney+ unveiled a new documentary recently Light & Magic a series exploring the history of the groundbreaking special effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM.)

Founded because no studio effects department was capable of meeting Lucas’s vision for his upcoming space opera Star Wars, ILM quickly became the industry’s premier special effects

Disney Studios

company, producing the special and visual effects not only for Lucasfilm’s productions, Star Wars, Indian Jones, but also the company others turned to when they needed outstanding effects for their films.

While it is important to remember that this documentary series is produced by a studio closely tied to ILM and its products and therefore cannot be considered unbiased there is at least some dirty laundry and less that admirable moments shared in the show. The episode steps us through ILM’s life chronologically from its founding as a rag tag group of artists who dared not dream of real cinematic heights to the creation of the defining effects of our time, CGI.

Light & Magic streams on Disney+.

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Is The Dawn Beginning to Break in the East?

Yesterday, in Kansas a state that the former idiot won in 2020, after all the scandal, sadism, and incompetence of his presidency, by 14 points the voters went to the polls with an option of stripping abortion rights from the state’s constitution.

The evil Republicans had done everything in their power to advantage themselves in their quest to strip people of their rights. They had placed the ballot imitative on a primary schedule when turnout among Democrats would be low but high among their own base. They wrote the proposal in twisted, contorted language to obfuscate its meaning and effect. They even ran ads blatantly lying that the proposal would protect rights and choice.

And it availed them not.

By about 17 points, a spread greater than the Orange Man-baby’s victory in 2020, the citizens of Kansas rejected the lies, the deceit, and the cruelty of the Modern Republican Party defeating the proposal.

We are still in the clutches of the dreadful night of the insanity of the GOP. And that night is long and full of terrors but perhaps the very first, faint, glimmers of dawn’s light are breaking in the East with this victory. Perhaps the first stirrings of a great giant are rumbling from Kansas. Perhaps to paraphrase Gandalf ‘The Democrats are to going to wake up and realize that they are strong.’

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