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
I feel like I should have mentioned this earlier. For my January term I, and a group from Gallatin at NYU, are off to Spain and Morocco for a couple weeks. We just arrived in Cordoba today after spending the last few days in Madrid (and one in Toledo!). So I guess here are some quick highlights: Sometimes it seems like Spain has a vendetta against free public wifi Walking around Madrid is loads of fun Having epic group meals are fantastic; especially when your university is paying for both
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! 311: Beauty in Destruction I saw Annihilation this week, which, y’know, shouldn’t really be surprising. I like Alex Garland as a writer (Never Let Me Go is heartbreakingly beautiful, Dredd is a solid action movie) and enjoyed his directorial debut in Ex Machina. Annihilation is science fiction replete with a primarily female cast, so it checks a lot of boxes for me. And it’s a wonderful film, truly haunting with some moments of absolute horror, but one that is essentially
Essays, Not Rants! 342: Classically Petty Don Quixote is a pretty important book, to put it mildly. Often counted one of – if not the – greatest book ever written, it’s definitely something you can categorize under Serious Literature. It’s also home to some outstanding pettiness and a magnificent take that to fan-fiction. The book was hugely popular right from when it was first published. It didn’t take too long for another writer to think there was something to this delusional adventurer a
It's March. Sure, only a couple hours past midnight into the new month, but here we are. My movie's shoot date is in 22 days. Y'know, this one. The one where I'm the first non-film major to make a thesis film. I'm just about cast, which is good. Working on locations (I may be shooting in a location Jessica Jones used. Also, bars and diners are kinda hard to lock down for biggish productions). I'm still around $7,000 short of meeting my budget. Which, btw, is a friggin' fart load of money.
Well. That was awesome. The Lego booth (floor area, more like it) was pretty cool. Saw the new Batman and Spiderman sets. Got a pretty neat Hobbit poster too. They were also building a mosaic of the turtles: Went to a couple panels about stories, that was cool. Saw some Assassin's Creed III gameplay, got an inflatable tomahawk and a pretty epic exclusive shirt. Played a bunch of Play Station All Stars (as Drake, duh). Game's fun. Very different from Smash Bros, I'll probably buy it, budge
Essays, Not Rants! 312: Of Men Mega and Mighty Mega Man was the video game I cut my teeth on. Well, more accurately, Mega Man X4. It was a tough game that I worked my way through as a kid. Didn’t beat it until at least three years after I got it, but still picked up Mega Man X5 and Mega Man X6 (and Mega Man 8) in the meantime to fight the new bosses, master the new levels, and get my butt kicked time and time again. I got better, beat them, got into the harder Mega Man Z games (look, the namin
Caught a 7pm IMAX showing (for the poster!) It's, it's good. Makes a lot of really bold choices. Choices that I like for the most part. Lots of fun character beats. And dude, it feels like a comic book. There are a lot of those really cool HOLY SNAP moments, which, y'know, is fun. 'cuz that's what you want in a comic book movie. Also it's interesting to watch it as someone who now reads comics. Characterization works and there are some cool set ups too. Man. Now to see it again sometime so
Essays, Not Rants! 033: And I Feel Fine I live in New York City. Also, last week New York City and much of the US’ East Coast was hit by a hurricane. Power went out, plumbing failed in the higher floors of NYU’s dorms (that is: mine), and classes were cancelled. Of course, I find this all terribly exciting: this sort of event is what pop-culture has been training me for for years! See, we love post-apocalyptic scenarios. What could be cooler than banding together with a group of friends an
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
Essays, Not Rants! 213: Where TMD Explains Why You Should Fund His Movie There are five days left for my movie’s Kickstarter. So that means it’s time for me to go on a spiel about why you should fund The Conduits. ‘cuz I’m really proud of this story and want you to be able to see it when it’s done without all that festival hoopla (and just for $9!). So what is this whole production? The Conduits is fundamentally a student film, given that it’s being worked on primarily by students and being
Essays, Not Rants! 074: No Detail Wasted I’m reading the Harry Potter books again. What really strikes me, even more so than the last time I read them, is just how well planned the whole series is. I don’t just mean the incredibly well-developed characters here, I’m talking about how J.K. Rowling clearly had the whole story prepared before she began writing. Sirius Black gets mentioned in the first chapter of The Philosopher’s Stone, but doesn’t come into play until The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Essays, Not Rants! 154: Manners Maketh A Genre Spy movies are old hat. Well, least the slick James Bond ones are. Movies like Goldeneye have either been deconstructed by the Bourne movies (or even by more recent Bond flicks, to an extent) or lovingly lampooned by the likes of Chuck and Archer. Now, this isn’t bad (I love Chuck and Skyfall). Spies aren’t the sort to smoothly enter in a suit with a myriad of fancy gadgets, they’re gritty people in dark, realistic worlds. If you aim for a more li
Essays, Not Rants! 085: Two More Hours The book Ender's Game is near to my heart. I listed it as my favorite book on my college apps years ago (in lieu of The Lord of the Rings — too cliché). I've read it at three different stages of my life: in high school, in the army (during basic training and later as a corporal), and for class during my freshman year of university. What I'm saying is I love the book. Not just because it's about kid-soldiers saving the world, but because it explores questi
Through a series of snafus we ended up looking at a place we had no intention of renting. For a variety reasons, one of which is size. See, in New York, a lot of the time you end up with matchboxes if you don't look hard enough. Matchboxes.
Essays, Not Rants! 169: Narrative Contracts Early on in Borderlands 2 the player encounters a fence of electricity in between them and their goal. Claptrap, the voice over the radio, tells you there’s a fusebox on the other side and that if you run fast enough, you won’t take damage from the fence. Your objective changes, now saying to run into the forcefield. So you do, and it deals damage to your shield and pushes you back. Claptrap suggests you do it again, he says you weren’t running fast
Essays, Not Rants! 227: The Beauty of Pokémon Go A recent issue of TIME Magazine (a magazine I usually like) ran a small article about Pokémon Go. In an article describing how the game “shows the unnerving future of augmenting reality,” writer Matt Vella describes players in Prospect Park as “a dozen people shuffling about haphazardly, their zombie eyes fixed on glowing phone screens.” Okay. Fine. Honestly, I shouldn’t be too surprised. This is the same publication that ran a cover articl
Essays, Not Rants! 240: Bang for A Buck Movie tickets here in New York short you around $15 a pop. Which is a lot for a movie, but we go anyway because, y'know, movies. So it's worth it, price of admission and all that for those two hours. Conversely, your typical new video game costs $60 at base, ignoring deluxe editions, special editions, and inevitable DLC. Which makes it come up to around a lot; Star Wars Battlefront totals out $110 if you buy the bundle for all the expansions, which I h
Essays, Not Rants! 071: Where’s My Dang Black Widow Movie? Comic-Con was last week. As in, the, Comic-Con. And we got news, like how Avengers 2 is actually Age of Ultron and how we’re having a team up between Superman and Batman and how there’s gonna be a friggin’ Star Wars and Phineas & Ferb crossover. They also screened a new Marvel short, one that focuses on Agent Carter from Captain America, who you’ll remember as his love interest. Also, Black Widow will be having a large role in Capt
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
