From the stunning triumph of Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election in France, to the victory of Die Mannschaft in the Confederations Cup to the demise of the Netherlands Football Team to this year’s TV series, movies and books, we present our year-end wrap up:
World News
Alt-Right vs The Resistance: Paul Joseph Watson vs William Legate
As J.K Rowling said in her 6th Potter book, Half-Blood Prince, “the war against Voldemort is not going well,” in this case, we could replace the word Voldemort with US president Trump, the British PM May or the Philippine president Duterte, who ever you may want. So in this article we would go to the one of the many battles going on between The Liberals or The Resistance vs the White terrorists Alt-Right, the one we may call the “Battle of Twitter.” So in this case we pick two of the most well-known figures from both sides and compare their tweets to see who’s winning, bigly!
For our first salvo, we chose William Legate, the 22-year-old Thiel Fellow, entrepreneur and creator of Ponder, representing the Resistance. On the other (dark) side, for the Alt-Right group, is the charming and very white and privileged Paul Joseph Watson who is apparently living on a basement or a warehouse, we don’t know for sure. His favorite hobby is to read Mein Kampf. So without further ado, let the battle begin. (Please take note that some tweets were about the same subject/topic, other tweets were their replies to each other).
Macron Has Won a Historic French Election.
An untested whizkid has shot to power as President of France in his very first election campaign, crumpling older, hard-bitten veterans in his wake.
Emmanuel Macron‘s astonishing rise from provincial straight-A student to Rothschild banker, to civil servant, to Sunday’s victory as President of the sixth-biggest economy in the world seems like one of the mythic tales of success familiar to all French children, in which a gallant young hero overcomes impossible odds to achieve giant success.
Aged just 39, Macron is France’s youngest leader since the famed French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who took power at age 35.
(http://time.com/4769931/emmanuel-macron-wins-french-election/)
Sports
Football: The Twilight of the Netherlands: Oranje bows out of the 2018 World Cup
After another embarrassing failure from the national team, Dutch football has plummeted to a new low that marks a spectacular fall from its golden days of club and international glory.
The 2-0 win over Sweden in their final qualifying game on Tuesday couldn’t prevent Netherlands missing out on the 2018 World Cup, but the country had given up hope long before then.
After reaching the finals and semi-finals of the last two World Cups, Oranje find themselves the laughing stock of Europe and the latest slip leaves the country wondering once again where its national game is headed.
(http://www.goal.com/story/the-demise-of-dutch-football/index.html)
Football: Die Mannschaft with young squad wins the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup
All roads lead to Russia in 2018. The Confederations Cup is over and the final stages of the World Cup, the qualifiers, are underway. In Europe so far, only Germany is clear to be heading back to the World Cup, fittingly as the world champions should. France could be on its way too but it faltered against Sweden and Netherlands, making their path not so clear. Our favorite, the Oranje, meanwhile, has been reinvigorated by their huge win against Luxembourg, and we are really hoping that they would find their way to the Finals because as one commentator has said, the World Cup would be much, much more interesting with the Dutch and its fans. And of course, let’s face it, it would be weird without the Netherlands in the line up.
On to Russia: 32 teams triumph in qualifying matches for the 2018 FIFA World Cup
TV Series
Sense8 named as Best TV Series of 2017
So why is Sense8 so charming while so many of its peak-TV brethren feel like slogs? Probably because its serialized plot has almost nothing to do with what makes the series such a pleasure to watch. Sense8 fits in with much of the Wachowskis’ work (which also includes films like Jupiter Ascending, Cloud Atlas, and Speed Racer): It’s a celebration of human connectedness, a hippy-dippy ballad of love and understanding that grinds its teeth at repressive or orderly governments and corporations. This nakedly political show somehow manages to be free-spirited, rather than dull or polemical; its good intentions often border on goofy naiveté in a way that’s charming rather than grating.
Books
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is 2017’s Best Book
It took me one week to write this review because I can’t find the right words to say about what I felt about this book. And came Shelley Harris’ review and her words are perfect to describe what I felt about Chabon’s novel:
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ is the book of a lifetime for the uncomplicated reason that I’ve spent my whole life reading, and it’s the best book I’ve ever read. But it’s the book of my writing life, too. Writers read double, I think: once in readerly abandonment to the story, a second time with a critical distance. In that second pass I watch ‘Kavalier and Clay’ as I might, appropriately enough, watch an illusionist. I try to work out the trick, to see how those movements, which seem perfectly ordinary – a shifting around of the same words we all use – might produce that dazzling effect.”
(https://geekgodreview.com/2017/02/05/book-review-the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier-clay/)
John Green releases new book: “Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down!” Meeting Aza Holmes in John Green’s new novel
In Turtles All the Way Down we meet Aza, a teenager suffering from mental health, who, together with Daisy, will embark on a journey to solve the mystery of a missing wanted billionaire, all for the $100,000 reward money. For Aza this will mean reconnecting with the billionaire’s son Davis, her childhood friend. It is a story that will lead readers to a mansion and its accompanying wealth (rare paintings, modern tech, a private cinema) and meet a dinosaur, but also take us to the familiar world of teenagers: the cafeteria, school classes, after classes moments. All of this while being trapped to the inner world of Aza, in her repetitive, intrusive thoughts.
Movies
Dunkirk and the World War II
You can practically see it from here… ” Kenneth Branagh’s stoical naval commander is talking about “home”, the word that recurs throughout Christopher Nolan’s long-nurtured epic of wartime retreat. Yet he could equally have been referring to the Imax 70mm presentation in which I saw Dunkirk, and which was also probably visible from France – a jaw-dropping spectacle in which the picture for the most part stretched beyond my field of vision, both vertically and horizontally. “We have a big love for the big format,” says cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who works agile wonders with the bulky film cameras used to capture such stunning images. Available in a dizzying array of projection formats (digital, 35mm, 70mm etc), Dunkirk hits our screens with aspect ratios ranging from square to oblong and all points in between, depending upon which version you choose to see. But see it you must.
(https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/23/dunkirk-review-terrifyingly-immersive-christopher-nolan)
The New Star Wars Film is Out
The Last Jedi had a Christmas Eve falling on a Sunday, during a major winter storm that paralyzed several states, in a theatrical marketplace full of several other competitors for some of the same target demographics, with a longer runtime and more somber story that was a bit less family-friendly, and lacking The Force Awakens’ status as a long-waited return of the original full cast.
These are glaringly obvious points that any realistic, informed box office assessment has to consider and apply to the overall analysis. Ignoring that information — or being uninformed about it — inevitably results in flawed or disingenuous claims. Negative headlines full of outrageous hyperbole and sky-is-falling alarmism might generate more clicks and higher ad revenue, but it also generates more contempt and debunking by others who care about accuracy in journalism.
Geekgod Review 