It's 1:30am and I have my day job in the morning, but I'm writing right now (and just finished another round of bourbon with bitters) and feel like rambling. This weekend we wrapped production on THE INVINCIBLE OSIRIS JACKSON, a webseries about a gay, black nerd looking for love in all the wrong places. A webseries that I was hired to direct. As in direct a production for money. I got paid to direct. I emphasize these words because this is something I've wanted for years, heck, it's ba
Essays, Not Rants! 248: Prequels Can Work Prequels, by their nature, face an uphill battle in that we know how they are going to end. We know that Logan is gonna lose his memories in X-Men: Origins, we know that Sully and Mike are gonna be best friends (but only one of them a scarer) in Monsters University, and we know that Anakin is gonna become Darth Vader. By explicitly being movies of the stories that came before, we enter into them knowing where they end up, and, well, already being spoil
Is so much work, man. Got forms on forms on forms to fill out, crew members to assemble, roles to cast, and locations to find. D'you have any idea how friggin' difficult it is to find an apartment to shoot in in New York (when you don't have one)? The apartment itself isn't so much the issue as is the "hey friend, I need to film a movie, can I take over your home for a weekend wherein I redecorate it, bring in 12-15 cast and crew people, and I shoot for 12 hours a day?" Surprisingly, it's a ha
As a massive fan of Hot Rod, when I heard NYU had a free/early screening of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping I knew I had to go. It is exactly what it needed to be. And it's a satire/parody that manages to keep its schtick up throughout, which is downright impressive. Not as good as Hot Rod, but then, Hot Rod's phenomenal.
Essays, Not Rants! 346: Poking Around Games have rules and expectations. If you’re playing a first-person shooter, violence is the expected solution to most problems. A puzzle encountered in an RPG is going to have a solution, though it may be one you need to progress a little further in another direction to be able to solve. The rule of thumb in point-and-click adventures is that everything you can click on and inspect is gonna hold something of interest. Say you’re playing Monkey Island a
Essays, Not Rants! 096: Playing with Expectations In celebration of the wonder of Netflix, I decided to watch Drinking Buddies the other night. The premise is nothing new, Luke and Kate are coworkers with incredible chemistry who are, unfortunately, in relationships with other people. What makes the movie such a joy is how the film plays with this idea. All the building blocks are in place, but the plot dances around them and subverts them. The scene where the Luke and Kate would/should kiss
Essays, Not Rants! 349: Playing Together Easily the highlight of my time playing Destiny was Vault of Glass. It’s a raid, that is a really difficult mission that requires serious teamwork and a pretty major time investment. It took work to even find a group to play with: I play on the PS4 and didn’t know anyone else who played Destiny. So I had to the internet to find a group who wanted to run Vault of Glass and were okay with bringing someone along who hadn’t done it before (me). It took us
Essays, Not Rants! 172: Pixel Problems I remember seeing Patrick Jean’s short film “Pixels” when it first hit the internet a few years ago. It’s a cool short film with a fun concept. It does what it does and is great for it. Then there was Freddie Wong’s “
” which took a similar idea and, though not quite as visually spectacular or narratively sound, was a great ode to nerd culture (Lara Croft from Tomb Raider gets in the lander from Lunar Lander!). Then along comes this new movie Pixels, b
After a busy summer doing almost anything but (and a madly busy second-half of a spring semester), I've picture locked on The Conduits. Now it's off to music and sound and color correction and vfx for all that fun stuff. Can't wait until it's done.
Essays, Not Rants! 303: Personal History Exposition is, by nature, a weird thing. In fiction, it is effectively the author, whether through prose, dialogue, or (in video games) incidental environmental encounters telling you stuff about The World you’re visiting. It could be something as mundane as Ted and Jack used to be dating but now Jack’s into Sheila and that’s when Ted decided to quit his job or something as subtly major as "Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. [need better ex
Essays, Not Rants! 007: Perilous Tension Tension tends to drive a story forward. Well, tension and characters. But this is about tension (which relates to characters). Anyway, one source of tension, especially in movies that can be classified as action and adventure, is peril. Everybody loves peril. We see our characters and we ask ourselves “dude, what happens next?” And that, dear reader, is an excellent question. See, depending on your personal literary philosophy it’s wondering either
Essays, Not Rants! 200: Performing Truth Twelve years ago I went to the Grand Canyon. While in a town nearby, a couple of guys dressed as cowboys did a shootout. Blank firing guns and all; twelve year old me thought it was real cool. This past Thursday, part of my school trip here in South Africa had us watch a group doing a collection of traditional dances. Also cool. Were they authentic? A cowboy shootout isn’t particularly typical of modern Arizona and Tribal dances celebrating a good hunt
This happened a couple days ago, but didn't post about it 'til now. The Conduits got into a festival, the Urban Action Showcase Expo. Meant I got to go to the launch gala. Also meant it got screened at the AMC in Times Square. Pretty sure this means I've peaked.
Part Two of TMD's Fourth Annual Movie Awards Yesterday I posted the big movie list. Today's the Awards. As usual we have my rather unusual categories. Now, due to the tardiness of my writing and posting this, I've kinda forgotten a lot of the movies I shortlisted in my head so sometimes I'll just have the winner rather than a bunch of nominees too. —————————— Worst Movie Basically, what sucks. These movies are not so-bad-they're-good, but are so-bad-they're-worse. Nominees: I Am Number Fou
I'm gonna be upfront with all of you: my mom is way cooler than yours. I'm not going to detail history (years in India, on a ship, etc) or the fact that she's someone I can have long Skype calls with. Nah, instead I'm gonna do a quote compilation. I'm fully aware this puts me in a fairly dorkish category. But honestly, I don't mind. =P
Alright, I did have a group of quotes and anecdotes about my dad for this (like how he perks up if you play the theme to Battle City, or how he kicks all kinds of butt at Pac-Man) but I figured the following information was proof enough that my dad is cooler than yours (and I'm not even gonna get into the whole 30+ years of traveling the world thing): My Dad will casually quote Abed (off of Community) in the middle of conversations. Dang straight.
Essays, Not Rants! 264: Page Feel I read a lot. This is partly a byproduct of having grown up a bookworm and partly having taken a course of studied that meant a lot of reading. Like a lot a lot. Since graduating, I’ve kept it up best I can and I’m sitting at fifteen-odd books in the past eleven months. Like I said, reading a lot. A side effect of this is that I have a wonderful bookshelf. You’ve got Ulysses there and the first volume of Saga there with CS Lewis’ Of Other Worlds. I like it
Essays, Not Rants! 215: Order, and Narrative Thereof I’m one of those people who will respect you less if you pick an album to play, and then play it on shuffle. See, there’s a deliberate rhyme and reason for the order of songs on an album. U2’s War needs “Surrender” to be its penultimate song. After an album about war, violence, and fighting for hope, we have a song about giving up which leads into “40,” an adaption of the Bible’s Psalm 40. It’s crucial that the album ends there, in that s
Essays, Not Rants! 052: One Year Holy ow. This is my fifty-second post. That means I’ve been keeping up this blog for one year. One post a week for a whole year. Dang. I’m actually quite impressed I’ve managed to keep this up. My last attempt at a weekly blog wound up becoming bi-weekly, then monthly, then wheneverly. The fact that I’ve been keeping Essays, Not Rants! going for the past year with weekly posts of at 600-800ish words makes me want to give myself a self-five. Which I’ve done.
Essays, Not Rants! 022: One Kind of Folks in the 'Verse. Folks. A quintessential part of an American High School education is reading Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Well, most educations. It’s presented as a classic coming of age tale set amongst racial tensions in the south as seen through the eyes of a young girl. Cool. Except that’s not what it’s about. To Kill A Mocking Bird is about people. It’s about how people are just people. Most chapters highlight one person, be it Calpurn
Essays, Not Rants! 086: Once Again On SHIELD Yep. I’m talking about this show again. Because it’s great and I don’t have much time to watch new movies (besides The Dark World) or read or play much video games. So we’re talking about Agents of SHIELD again. The show started strong and since then has steadily improved in itself. Characters have been fleshed out, dynamics enhanced, and it's proved itself capable with taking on different sorts of plots. What's even better is that all of this is
