A Celestial Farewell to 2025: The Moon Meets the Seven Sisters

 

 A Celestial Farewell to 2025: The Moon Meets the Seven Sisters  

As the clock ticks down on the final hours of 2025, nature is putting on a display far more ancient and beautiful than any fireworks show. On New Year’s Eve, look up into the winter sky to witness a stunning cosmic dance.

Our bright, glowing Moon will be gliding incredibly close to the Pleiades star cluster—also known as the "Seven Sisters." In mythology, these sisters were transformed into stars to save them from pursuit, shimmering eternally in the night sky. To see them reunited with the Moon on the very last night of the year feels like a special omen of peace and wonder for the year ahead.

 When: The night of December 31, 2025

 Where: Look for the bright Moon; the tiny, dipper-shaped cluster of blue stars will be right nearby.

 Tip: If you have binoculars, grab them! The glare of the moon can make the sisters shy; binoculars will help them sparkle against the lunar glow.

READ MORE : https://astronomynews.site/?p=848

ART SAVES US FROM LIFE... 

Never Gonna Snow Again: Consumerism, Communism, And The Weather

 

 

"There definitely needs to be a balance struck between the financial sector and scientists. Because the way it's affecting certainly climate change and just generally, I think people's lives - everything is becoming, I feel with the consumerist culture, people are losing control, and losing connection." ~ Alec Utgoff

Actor Alec Utgoff masterfully weaves his way through the lives inhabiting a humorless Polish community, as an inadvertently seductive masseur - the ethnic Russian Ukrainian immigrant Zhenia on an elusive psychological or even political mission.

Perhaps cynically equating all longings for a better world with magical thinking, whether political, emotional, obsessive consumerism or the fleeting frustration of a massage, the film teases then seems to settle on a fateful dystopia in store for the human race. But in any case, a combo playful and sobering prophetic perspective on the way things are, or progressively will be.

 As for Zhenia, his rare revelation in the evasive narrative proceedings regarding his favored sports players back home as the Donetsk team - that ethnically Russian breakaway self-declared communist republic currently at war with Ukraine - may indicate a surprising clue to the entire preceding mystery at work. Or considering everything else that has transpired, maybe not.
Written and directed with subversive nihilistic glee by Małgorzata Szumowska.

 Here's Alec Utgoff, phoning in from London in a decidedly enigmatic conversation about the film.

ALEC UTGOFF CONVERSATION 

Prairie Miller

Painkiller: Not Simply Another Vigilante Thriller, Though That Too

 

 "The main premise is that there's a conspiracy by the big pharmaceutical companies. And that's what motivates the character, is that it's not just one person - so he goes after the whole idea - the whole concept of government sanctioned drug dealing." ~ Michael Pare

Michael Pare, best known for his starring role in Eddie And The Cruisers and its sequel, is on a very different dramatic detour these days, as he delves into his current film targeting those legal drug peddlers profiting off the other pandemic, that has unleashed deaths from prescription drug overdoses across the country. That is, those pharmaceutical corporations and doctors reaping the profits off popular misery precipitated by late stage capitalism. And not simply another vigilante revenge thriller, though that too.

Starring horror vet Bill Oberst Jr. as a combo podcaster prophet of doom and the masked medication avenger in question, Painkiller has much more on its mind beneath the sensationalistic surface. Namely, that lawyer turned screenwriter and co-star Tom Parnell has dedicated this film and its narrative emotionally and politically to his own young son in real life - a victim of prescription drug addiction. And that brewing tension as Parnell's character confronts Pare's evil doctor, is an undercurrent simmering under the surface of this reality fueled film.

A Cinedigm Release May 4th.

Six Minutes To Midnight: Nazi Intrigue - Intentional And Otherwise

 

                                The Duke and Duchess of Windsor visit Hitler in 1937

 A British spy thriller based on the actual pre-WW II existence of a Nazi Germany finishing school located, in of all places, on the British coast, Six Minutes To Midnight may be said to harbor as much mystery as what the vintage noir setting does and doesn't explore. 

Starring and co-written by Eddie Izzard who has cast himself as the targeted undercover espionage agent Miller at the actual Bexhill-on-Sea Augusta-Victoria-College finishing school for female children of Nazi Germany's military and economic elite back then, the narrative is fueled by a second covert German operation to airlift the students out of Britain as WII looms - to prevent their arrest and detention.

The plot - in multiple senses of the word - is fueled by robust performances all around. From Izzard impersonating an instructor at the school to Judi Dench as the fiercely dedicated and progressively bewildered headmistress, and Jim Broadbent and James D'Arcy as enigmatic figures whose respective motives for the sake of mystery, are best left unsaid. On the other hand, the girls themselves tend to more generic representations, perhaps owing to a less defined pursuit of cultural distinctions or awareness.

But what mystery Six Minutes To Midnight does summon to the clouded surface, though perhaps more by unintentional inference than otherwise, is historical intrigue. And not just the unanswered question -  what was a Nazi college doing in Britain in the first place. In other words, a WW II ideological confrontation that was indeed not as clear-cut as the historical record has formalized by the victors. 

 

That is, European countries including Britain, who had their own far from isolated fascist elements within - and existing into the present time. And that includes the following research explored in the SBS documentary, Spying On The Royals:

'...The British Royal Family have never been able to escape the spectre of their unsavoury historical Nazi connections – the Nazi sympathisers the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, alleged WWII plots to install a pro-Nazi government and that controversial footage of Queen Elizabeth apparently making the Nazi salute as a child.

 

Now the question remains: just how far reaching were their Nazi connections? With the Royal Family refusing to release historical documents that would bring greater clarity to the issue, alternate evidence has come to light and theories abate.

The Windsors – former monarch Edward VIII and his American love, Wallis Simpson, for whom he abdicated the throne – were a pesky thorn in the Royals’ side, not least because they were thought to be Nazi sympathisers. Intelligence given to the FBI claimed the Nazis were using the Duke and Duchess to glean information that would scuttle the war effort of the allies - Edward at the centre of an alleged plot to overthrow the Winston Churchill government in favour of a pro-Nazi one.'

Prairie Miller

 

Willy's Wonderland: Battling The Demons Beneath US Consumer Paradise

 

Turning up just in time as anarchistic antidote to the artificially soothing sappy Oscar bait like Nomadland and Minari, Willy's Wonderland brashly sabotages American Dream consumer paradise tall tale antics while let's just say, irreverently subverting its own intentions as well. Not to mention seemingly hitching a ride on the current wave of red state versus blue state pandemonium in progress finding its way from this crisis ridden country to the screen.

That never disappointing perpetually in perfected character surreal maniac Nicolas Cage takes charge of the narrative and this movie without uttering a single word. Literally. Billed as The Janitor, Cage is hoodwinked by a depraved rural community in the Deep South while passing through, and set up as that Wonderland sacrifice to local serial killers, seemingly cousins of Cookie Monster animal robots within. Don't ask.

Goaded by the local mayor into scrubbing clean the dilapidated funland premises overnight behind locked doors in exchange for fixing up his car they've just trashed, The Janitor wordlessly obliges hyped up on endless cans of energy juice, while fending off the homicidal cuddly robots by murdering them instead - in large part resolved with smashing their internal batteries one by one to bits.While an annoying sidebar gang of rowdy teens infiltrating the depraved establishment to hopefully burn it down, could have well been left on the cutting room floor.

And eerily a reflection of the growing divisive showdown in this country between the red states and blue states, outsiders to this pathological southern tribal culture must be sacrificed to maintain their threatened stability and disappearing way of life. What that metaphorical threat may be - intimated most recently in Buck Run and Let Him Go - a majority tidal wave threatening rural values, religious fundamentalism, and black people as the sacrificial lambs to deflect from economic instability since Jim Crow - or even increasingly capitalist feeding frenzy, unattainable rabid consumerism. In any case, the Capitol Hill decked out fantasy fashion statements siege may be just the symptom of what's in store.

 

Prairie Miller