Homestead” is a post-apocalyptic drama that follows ex-Green Beret Jeff Eriksson and his family as they escape to a fortified prepper compound called The Homestead after a nuclear bomb detonates in Los Angeles. As society collapses and chaos reigns, the residents of The Homestead must navigate internal conflicts and external threats to survive. Homestead Review Homestead is an interesting experiment from Angel Studios. Based on Jeff Kirkham’s best-selling book series Black Autumn, the film,  serves as an hour and fifty-minute introductory episode for what will soon be a series of the same name hosted on the Angel Studios platform. Neal McDonough gives his usual quiet and confident performance, leading a cast of characters played by those with familiar faces if not names. Bailey Chase, who is best known for the Netflix series Longmire and a 12-episode stint on the early 2000s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, co-stars as the jaded and struggling family man/ex-Green Beret tasked with keeping the Homestead safe from those who would destroy them, and possibly also from dissenting voices from within. Chase, an almost 30-year veteran of the small screen, fills his role nicely, imbuing him with an interesting mix of professional excellence and personal foibles. Most of the rest of the cast seems up to the task, with only one or two occasionally struggling to connect with some of the more intense emotional scenes or, more forgivably, some rare instances of uneven or unnatural dialogue. There are some significant issues with plot and character consistency that detract from the overall quality, with important plot points depending on humans behaving like 80s movie cops. In other words, their behavior is entirely disconnected from how people actually act. Don’t get me wrong, no one is using a cutting torch to open a glass door, but, for example, there are some fundamental issues with McDonough’s character’s psychology. On the one hand, he is both the ubermensch of preppers, with a massive compound, hydroponics gardens, armed special forces security, functioning hospital, a doomsday arsenal, etc., yet isn’t emotionally prepared to protect his compound from incursions and puts the creation of rules of engagement on the backburner even after there is an incident that results in someone’s death. Dwayne T Robinson in Die Hard, played by Paul Gleason The location of the Homestead compound is another fundamental flaw that viewers will simply have to accept and put aside in order to enjoy the show. Located at the top of a hill overlooking a city with a (quickly starving) population easily in the hundreds of thousands, anybody who war-gamed the end of American civilization to the extent that someone in McDonough’s character’s position would have would quickly come to the conclusion that the Homestead needs to be moved to a less visible, more easily secured location or that embattlements would be nearly as important than food and water. That said, its placement is for plot convenience and to provide the program with its antagonists. These annoyances aside, the program has a compelling premise, high production value, and enough quality performers to warrant a watch, especially if you’re looking for your next streaming series. WOKE ELEMENTS DEI Catburglar Like a thief in the night, the existence of DEI initiatives and culture continues to rob the few black people in this show of the unassailable truth that they were cast for any reason other than talent. However, my guess is that Kearran Giovanni, who plays Tara Eriksson, and whose Homestead character’s ethnicity isn’t explicitly stated in the books, was cast thanks to a long stint on the TV series Criminal Minds, and her fictional family was then cast around her race rather than as a political statement. Giovanni gives one of the program’s most natural performances. The post Homestead (film) first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

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by J.D. Rucker, The Liberty Daily: The Deep State and the UniParty Swamp reacted as one might expect to Kash Patel being appointed as the next FBI Director by President Donald Trump. They’re panicking. The first unhinged attack they’ve launched against him is to say he’s unqualified. This is a joke. One can argue he’s […]

from Moonbattery: To the surprise of only the most clueless, DEI ideology has been found to hurt everyone, including the identity groups it ostensibly helps at the expense of the rest of us. Still less surprising, the media has attempted to suppress this information. The Blaze reports: A study published Monday by the Network Contagion Research Institute and […]

  The first two episodes of It’s In The Game covered roughly five years each of development time- the first two titles in episode 1, then Madden ’92 through Madden ’96 for episode 2. An appropriate amount of time is dedicated for each- obviously, building the first two Madden games from scratch was more difficult than the first five updates. The third episode goes through a full eight versions, though, and skips a lot of the details that made the first two episodes so engaging. The years 1996 to 2003 didn’t just see the video game industry transition to CDs, but DVDs too- but these issues are mostly only described in the context of massive jumps in picture quality.   The third episode is more about Madden’s competition than it is Madden Football itself, which is appropriate. As the cliffhanger for the end of the second episode noted, NFL Gameday was the only football game for the Playstation on release. It was a high quality title too, and it’s funny watching the Madden interviewees seethe about it being described as the best football game of all the time when that isn’t exactly wrong. There’s probably a story to be told in and of itself about how NFL Gameday collapsed as a franchise so quickly, but It’s In The Game has no interest in being a bad winner. Holliday Horton, the 3D Artist for NFL Gameday, explains why NFL Gameday was so good, and she’s a fairly logical choice for the task because yeah, the 3D art quality, that would definitely do it.   A less logical choice was Ric Neil for the Madden team. It’s In The Game doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that Ric Neil’s main contribution to Electronic Arts at the time he was tapped was for the notorious disaster Psychic Detective, which described here as a 3DO game even if it did also get released for other platforms- most notably the Playstation. If Ric Neil was selected because of his familiarity with porting CD games from the 3DO to other platforms, It’s In The Game doesn’t discuss this. Part of the problem with Madden ’96 was that Electronic Arts was working off the John Madden Football game for the 3DO as a baseline. Oddly enough, though, this isn’t treated as relevant as the fact that Ric Neil personally likes football. I did appreciate the factoid of Psychic Detective costing two million dollars though. I’m not sure whether anyone involved with development had ever said out on camera how expensive that particular failure was before.   The big move that got Madden Football ’97 to outperform it NFL Gameday equivalent is also not particularly glamorous. The game was rushed to an early October release to fit onto Costco parcels. Fortunately, Ric Neil’s team was on schedule enough that the only new feature they had to cut was animating the football, so this was totally doable. Part of the trouble with John Madden Football at this point is that there are increasingly few innovations to discuss. At one point Nathan Caswell pivots to discussing how John Madden Football influenced real-life football broadcasts in terms of visual design. That yellow line which TV broadcasts use to represent where the first down marker is? That’s from video games. It’s a suitably ironic development too, given that John Madden Football games aspired to look like real sports broadcasts.   This was the main selling point of John Madden Football’s other chief rival, the NFL2K series by Sega Sports, which survived the Dreamcast as a very credible threat to John Madden Football. How John Madden Football ultimately defeated NFL2K is…an ignominious story, frankly, and I’m quite curious how the generally positive tone of It’s In The Game is going to deal with it. Then there’s the matter of John Madden himself slowly losing influence, as he’s forced to admit that to the new generation of Madden players, they don’t even remember his identity as a coach. One of the lasting influences of NFL2K was that it got John Madden off the game’s cover and put football players on. The Madden Curse is discussed in an almost obligatory way, and only really in the increasingly commercial context that video game football has been transforming into.   It was always a business, of course. Yet some of the magic is wearing off. It doesn’t help that many of the more energetic interviewees disappear this episode with fairly minimal explanation.   The post It’s In The Game Episode 3 Review: Amazon Prime Documentary Covers the Madden Franchise to 2003 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

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