David Brevik, the creator of Diablo and the upcoming indie title It Lurks Below, recently went on a bit of a rant regarding the state of Blizzard.

“The people above Blizzard, who are profit happy, [are saying] ‘Oh my God, Fortnite is making a fucking shitton,'” said Brevik on a stream that featured thejunglequeen playing the Diablo-like Path of Exile. “‘Overwatch isn’t Fortnite…why have you wronged us?…We’re going to get rid of the profit sharing program. We don’t like this. We don’t like the fact that low-level employees make decent money at Blizzard. We’re going to get rid of this program because we need more profits to increase our stock price and improve our shareholders and the elite 1% of the company.'”

Brevik continued to bash Blizzard by suggesting that some of the recent corporate decisions made by the company (or for the company) may have been responsible for Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime shockingly leaving the company.

“‘You don’t like this very much, Mike Morhaime? Well too fucking bad, you’re gone,'” said Brevik. “‘Now we pass it and we get more profits…more money in my pocket, motherfucker, for your work that you’re doing.'”

Remarkably, Brevik doesn’t stop there. He also talks about how he knows about “some of the things [Blizzard] has planned” and wonders whether “Blizzard even be close to the same” if these projects don’t go well. He also laments how many people have left the company and seems to question whether or not Blizzard is really even Blizzard anymore. We can’t even begin to cover everything that he said that is worth hearing, so be sure to check out the full rant by watching the video below (skip to about 3:38:10 for the good stuff):

Let’s get a few things out of the way before we dive into this a bit. First off, Brevik admitted that he was fairly drunk during this stream. Second, he states that he is speculating a bit regarding the specifics of Morhaime’s departure and some of the other things he mentioned. You have to take all of that into account.

However, it’s 100% true that Blizzard has dropped their employee profit sharing program (which has reportedly led to decreased overall wages for Blizzard employees), and it’s also true that Mike Morhaime’s departure from the company was surprising and came around the same time that Blizzard cut the employee profit share program. Brevik notes that the structure of Activision Blizzard means that Blizzard might technically have power over Activision, but that it’s only because Vivendi has power over them all.

In case you’re out of the loop, this discussion regarding the state of Blizzard is rather timely as Blizzard recently revealed a very controversial mobile adaptation of Diablo and also announced that they plan on making mobile versions of more of their games. Those moves have thrust some of the other controversial business decisions that Blizzard has recently made into a far larger spotlight.

The Coen brothers have been making westerns their whole career. Whether dealing with the frontier landscape (No Country For Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), themes of Americana (Fargo), mythmaking (The Big Lebowski) or violent individualism (everything they’ve ever made), the genre has loomed over their work like a wide-brimmed Stetson.

When they gave us a properwestern in 2010’s True Grit, the result was brilliant, but frustratingly restrained. With key shots borrowed from the Henry Hathaway original, and much of the famous “Coen dialogue” lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, it arguably felt more like a skilful exercise in reinvention than a Coen brothers original.  

Finally, then, we have the western that we’ve always been teased with – a film as unique, dark, cerebral, witty and cinematic as anything the brothers have ever made, and a genre offering that feels like something no one else could possibly put their name to. What’s more, we get six of them. 

Originally imagined as a Netflix series, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs has since morphed into a single 133-minute anthology film, with six unrelated chapters telling six different stories about life in the weird Wild West. 

There’s no framing device (save a hand turning the pages of a hardback book, Winnie The Pooh style) and no vein of continuity running through any of the chapters, expect for the Coen’s usual air of comedy nihilism. Death is everywhere in the world of Buster Scruggs – it’s usually used as the punch line – and the tone only really varies between grimly comic and comically grim.  

Setting the tone (and raising the bar) is the film’s opening chapter, “The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs”, which casts Tim Blake Nelson as a grinning, rhinestone bedazzled, singing cowboy – who also happens to be a cold-blooded killer. It’s the funniest and the most surreal that the Coens have been for years – shooting cartoon-sized bullet holes through 1940s archetypes and giving Nelson the most memorable role of his career.   

Next up is “Near Algodones”, opening with a botched bank robbery and leaving James Franco on the end of a rope, willing his own horse to stand still. It’s a stark, high-contrast, high-concept desert fable, and the cold dealing of life and death makes for the film’s most amoral tale. Until we get to “Meal Ticket” that is… 

Easily the oddest chapter in The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, the third story follows Liam Neeson’s travelling showman from town to town as he restages famous speeches with the help of Harry Melling’s limbless torso propped up on a chair. 

Weirdly, balance is (sort of) restored by Tom Waits, who leads “All Gold Canyon” entirely on his own – a lonely prospector digging for gold in a beautifully stripped-back pastoral that says more about the American Dream in 15 minutes than most other westerns manage after two hours.  

Zoe Kazan returns to the Oregon Trail she once rode in Meek’s Cuttoff for “The Gal Who Got Rattled” – a stately, perfectly unromantic love story set on the Western plains that complements Kelly Reichardt’s film with a lot less authenticity and lot more black humour, somehow still coming off as the heart of Buster Scruggs.

Finally, “The Mortal Remains” brings us to the end credits in a gothic Stagecoach ride that plays into everything the Coens do best – dropping a group of great character actors (Brendan Gleeson, Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek) in an odd place and giving them something awful to deal with. Underworld overtones loom large, and this might be as close to horror as the Coens are ever likely to get, but the chapter works best as a dark fable about storytelling itself – a neat, nasty bit of fireside yarn-spinning that makes us remember that we’ve just heard five other tall tales. 

In fact, the immersion of Buster Scruggs is probably its best asset – with each chapter good and rich and distinctive enough that you forget it’s not an entire film in its own right. There isn’t a weak story in the bunch (“Near Algodones” is the shortest and lightest, but it’s still terrific) and Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography keeps each one feeling unique and looking strikingly beautiful.  

Watching the film is akin to reading a particularly good short story anthology, with every chapter adding another few faces to a bigger tableau of oddballs, murderers, desperate freaks and tragic characters – a postmodern, playful take on How The West Was Won that deals in detail and dialogue to lovingly flip the genre on its head.  

This, finally, is the Coen brothers western we’ve been waiting for.

Disney’s original Dumbo is one of the saddest animated films in the studio’s history, but it looks like Tim Burton is about to make things a whole lot worse. The second trailer is here for the live-action reimagining of the big-eared flying elephant tale, and it already looks pretty upsetting. 

As expected from Burton, it also looks visually amazing – with the film set in two different circuses that each give him a chance to indulge his love of Big Top weirdness. 

We only get a glimpse of Dumbo in flight (and it looks like there’s no wisecracking mouse in this version), but we do see plenty of Dumbo himself – a doe-eyed leathery looking ele-calf that retains a lot of the designs from the 1941 original.

Ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito) hires washed up performer Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) and his kids Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins) to care for a newborn elephant whose oversized ears make him a laughingstock in an already struggling circus. Dumbo inhales a feather in the trailer, which may or may not be the reason that he starts flying, but it isn’t long before Medici realises that he’s got a star attraction on his hands. Smarmy looking entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) realises this too, and comes along to try and steal Dumbo for his bigger, slicker circus – alongside Eva Green’s trapeze artsist. 

From there on out, expect the film to expand on Disney’s original story with a lot of magic – and a lot of tears…

Dumbo is due to fly into cinemas on the 29th of March, 2019.