From what I understand, Jack Reacher was mainly a vehicle for Lee Child to earn money, and he became more popular than Child ever expected. He’s said he doesn’t even like the character that much, and had been looking for a believable end for the hero (because of his resourcefulness) before handing the franchise over to his brother.
ETA: My mom was into the Reacher novels, and even she thinks the handover was a stupid move.
Reacher looks like he’s so bulked up he can’t reach his gun.
For years Lee was swearing that Reacher would end in book 21, called Die Lonely. Many of us were disappointed when that didn’t happen. When I mentioned that I found the handoff to be a purely monetary move-Andrew writes an ok thriller, but his sales are a fraction of Lee’s- I was soundly excoriated by the members of the FB group. I had been part of that group since before FB was a thing. Also, they made it an offense to mention that you didn’t like Tom Cruise as the character.
Guardian
No paywall:
The Lord of the Rings appendices are more of a “show bible” – the kind of notes you’d give to teleplay writers – than a narrative of their own. So producers have woven their own stories of romance and palace intrigue into the book’s timelines, fairy stories and genealogical footnotes.
That has allowed them to cast people of color as some of the series’ elves and dwarves, pleasing some of the books’ fans and angering others. Recently, Vanity Fair ran a spread of promotional photos for the show, including images of Sophia Nomvete as Dwarven princess Disa and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Elvish warrior Arondir.
On YouTube, the trailer for The Rings of Power has 67,000 comments as of this writing, and thousands of them are the same quote from Tolkien about the corrupting and uncreative nature of evil. “Evil cannot create anything new, it can only spoil and destroy what good forces have invented and created,” it reads in multiple languages. Others were more blunt. “Imagine spending millions of dollars to promote your woke social justice warrior garbage of a film. Way to tarnish a good franchise,” read one. “Amazon decided to destroy Tolkien’s work. Because why do a good job when you can just be corrupt and force your political beliefs,” stated another.
Was just about to post this!!!
I have to say, I’m really over the loud bigots being considered the “real” fans and the rest of us being some kind of woke upstarts who just want to “ruin” pop culture by demanding inclusivity and diversity… because at the heart of it, that’s the argument being made here.
The professor quoted sounds interesting, though! Here’s her book…
Also, unsurprisingly, Neil Gaiman pops up in the article…
Some devotees are refusing to cede that ground, arguing that such symbols – and fantasy more broadly – should be for everyone. “White Supremacists don’t own Norse Mythology, even if some of them think they do, any more than they own the Bible, or the US Constitution, even though they might think they do,” wrote fantasist Neil Gaiman on Twitter.
Also… Michael Moorcock… “Epic Pooh”!!! 
“I don’t think these books are ‘fascist’,” wrote the great British fantasist Michael Moorcock in 1978, “but they certainly don’t exactly argue with the 18th-century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times.” Moorcock thought Tolkien owed a lot to AA Milne; he called the Rings books “Epic Pooh”.
But here is what I"m talking about with the author of the article…
So is it fundamentally disrespectful to do what Amazon has done by making a modern adaptation of such a traditionalist work with a non-traditional cast?
Is he really trying to say that an “all white” world is “traditional”? That people of color were never in Europe before recently? Plenty of historians of the past have pushed back against them.
I can’t with that show; despite its popularity, the idea of two grown ass men still funking over some BS teen drama they had 30 years ago doesn’t resonate with me at all.
It’s almost forty years ago—Ralph Macchio is 60
Thanks for harshing my delusion with reality; I did the math after posting and then intentionally decided not to correct it because:
A: Focusing so much on pedantry all the time is not exactly useful, healthy or endearing to others.
B: It’s rather disconcerting how slippery the passage of time gets as one ages - it’s all Timey-Whimey.
I haven’t seen the show but I read the first few books in the series; I don’t think it takes someone with a background in literature or psychology to note that Reacher has always been an alpha male escapist fantasy.
He’s the biggest and strongest SOB around, he goes where he wants and does what he wants on his own schedule and has no responsibilities to anyone. He never even learned to use a washing machine because he buys a new outfit at a local thrift shop every couple of days rather than be encumbered with luggage.
I watched this last night.
It’s disposable fun, no surprises in the story whatsoever but the Eddie/Venom relationship is really, really funny.
I watched both Venom movies over the last holiday; they were much better than I expected, even despite the complete lack of relationship to the Spiderman and the Spiderverse.
I agree completely about Eddie’s relationship with Venom.
Those actors have definitely aged well—I can imagine it might be a problem for the writers because they look too young
I don’t know about Zabka so much, but I truly believe that Ralph Macchio, (much like Dick Clark) must have sold his soul to the devil at some point; dude still only looks 40 at the most…
Sold it for that? What a waste.
Marred a bit by the fact that most of the lead actors aren’t Jewish. I don’t usually mind this, but when they’re acting caricatures it makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
The best analysis of this I’ve seen is this one, by a media consultant who is also trans so has an extra perspective on marginalization:
I recently got sick. Could not do much, so I binged something I skipped a long time ago, because I probably was an idiot at the time.
Im just talking about his apparent lack of aging physically; nothing else.
Sheryl Lee Ralph is someone else who looks like she lives in a time machine:
Dirk Gently; I enjoyed both seasons.
Yeah, I can totally see how that could be a grating aspect of the show… like, get over being in HS, dudes, you’re grown ass adults! But I’m still enjoying it. We’ve sort of made jokes about that aspect of the show, as we’re watching it. We found that especially true of Kreese, the cobra kai sensei from the original films, who showed back up just as soon as Cobra kai gets reformed and wins the all valley at the end of season 1, and then sets about trying to take back over the dojo (or that’s where it seems to be headed part way through season 2. Kreese is even more pathetic than Johnny or Daniel trying to relive their glory days, because at least they are learning something by training a new generation of kids and evolving in their own right, while Kreese is just a pathetic bully through and through. And apparently, his high point in life was being a dick to a bunch of teenagers!!!
I do appreciating the storyline with teenaged characters and their struggles. And it does sort of try to recast the story from the original movie, and retell is from Johnny’s point of view… I do like how well he’s carrying the emotional weight of the story and how he’s trying to struggle up from being a sort of loser who peaked in high school.
Good call! I love that show even though it is definitely not Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency! I am not precious about that though. Kill your darlings. Murder them all
ETA: I want his jacket so bad
EATA: It was also very jarring for me because I watched this show immediately before I started watching Schitt’s Creek. Dustin Milligan has some range!
The show was that different from the novels?
