Coming soon, 10 Mai 2026 (and The Sheep Detectives)

Seen before a showing of The Sheep Detectives.

Having read the book, I was really looking forward to this one. For me the trailer left open the question of whether The Sheep Detectives was going to be aimed at children or not. Seeing the trailers below left no doubt that it was a kids flick. A bit disappointing but I still anticipated a lot of fun.

Regardless of the intended audience, the talking sheep were well rendered and a blast.

The filmmakers changed a lot in pursuit of a PG rating. For example, the shepherd, George wasn't impaled with a spade as in the book. Drug running? Gone! Etc. Again, one must accept that it's a movie for children whereas the book was for adults.

In the book, George's home - his trailer or caravan - is locked and we are introduced to the townsfolk through the sheeps' eyes when they come and try to enter the it in pursuit of what we don't know and for their own, obsure motivations, neither of which we come to understand until the end. The movie elides this method of telling us about the humans and instead introduces a new character, a reporter named Elliot Matthews, who has come to town for a cultural fair. We get all kinds of scenes involving no sheep at all, something which I believe the book eschewed completely.

The movie's primary goal is to entertain the audience with cute anthropomorphic sheep that make you laugh; the book was more interested in humanity and used the sheep to constantly comment on the townspeople, their foibles, their failings, and the mixed bag of motivations that they and we all are. Humans become more complex and contradictory when the sheep listen in on their conversations.

A little of this ovine commentary on humanity survives in the movie and I am thinking of the scene when the sheep are walking along and one of them talks about God, the name they have bestowed upon the local priest, and their incredulity at his behavior. But I missed how the sheep used their senses of smell to glean information as this is greatly downplayed in the movie. The sheep are basically humans with wool and on four legs here whereas in the book they are no doubt anthropomorphic but they have different attitudes and priorities and are constantly commenting on the contrasts between our two species. The sheep aren't non-human enough here.

While I preferred the ovine commentary of the book to the movie's more stripped-down cutesy murder mystery approach, the movie was still great fun. The sheep were cute and my heart went out to the winter lamb who was shunned by the rest of the flock, one of the very few ways the movie attempted to bring some intersheepal dynamics to the flock. I laughed, pondered the mystery, and enjoyed every second of talking sheep.

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The first thing we saw that wasn't a Coke commercial was a trailer for Studio Ghibli Fest 2026 which starts in the summer. 

 

Now, a nice looking rendition of the Necronomicon and baby Cthulhu I did not expect.

This looks to be something like a live action The Simpsons movie.

 

Coming soon, 7 Mai 2026 & Up the Irons!

Last night I went to see the Iron Maiden documentary, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, and saw this on the way in.

I am excited to see this flick. Anthropomorphic sheep are cool. Plus it'll be interesting to see how it differs from its source material.

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition was a fun trip back into Maiden's history despite its Behind the Music-like melodrama and wallowing in hagiography.

The concert footage was a blast to watch on the big screen and hear on the cinema's sound system. I am not the world's foremost Iron Maiden expert but I thought I recognized all of the concert footage from the time Bruce Dickinson joined through 1988. The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I was mildly disappointed that no live performances from this period were dragged from the vaults or found in someone's attic and dusted off.

My two main gripes are:

1) No song was ever played from beginning to end. At least I cannot recall one. This is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not asking for an entire performance of "Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" but how about something shorter like "Sanctuary" or "Aces High" or "Can I Play With Madness"?

2) The movie elided the bands adoption of keyboards in the mid-80s and their move into progressive metal wholeheartedly. I got aboard the Maiden train in 1988/89 with Seventh Son of a Seventh Son so I was disappointed that the doc basically ignored this album and its predecessor, Somewhere in Time. And this despite a scene where Dickinson tells a fan that heavy metal cannot be done with synthesizers. It was like the '86-'89 era was being setup for us and then nothing.

I feel badly for any fans who got into the band's music via any album after Brave New World because the movie had no interest in this music as it was irrelevant to the story's rise-fall-rebirth arc.

Honestly, the music generally played second fiddle to tales of band dynamics which is a shame.

On the plus side I felt the departure of Paul Di'Anno and the Blaze Bayley era were treated respectfully, if, perhaps, all too briefly. I wish that more was made of the music that Bayley made with the band. At least two songs from that era were kept in the live sets after Dickinson and Adrian Smith returned - "Sign Of the Cross" & "The Clansman" - so the band didn't write off that era as completely unworthy.

My preference is for documentaries that give pride of place to the music and the creative process that produces it and not the rise-fall-rebirth melodrama. Having said this, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition was still a very fun watch and I learned more than a few things about the band, including the fact that Janick Gers is English. I thought he was from the Continent originally. Oops.

The Sheep Detectives

This looks to be a hoot! Out next spring.