Essays, Not Rants! 273: Mixed Results I really liked the movie Balto as a kid. And for a kid, it makes sense. It’s about a talking dog, and there’s a goose and a couple polar bears in it too. Plus it’s a story about the outsider getting a chance to prove they belong by doing an Epic Heroic Thing and earning their place.’ Also, it’s a story about being mixed. Like me. I’m mixed, biracial, half-Asian; whatever the term du jour is. Which is something I mention every now and then on this blo
NYU's campus is spread around Greenwich Village in NYC. So while going from lunch to another building today, I walked past where Person Of Interest was filming. I don't watch this show, but I know that Michael Emerson (Ben Linus!) is in it. So I stayed around. And this happened: Yep.
Essays, Not Rants! 133: Metanarrative, Cervantes, and The Princess Bride The Princess Bride is (probably) my favorite movie. It also happens to be based on a book, which I first read in my mid-teens. Now, the book caught me off-guard. It was far more cynical than the film and there was this whole mess about William Goldman’s personal life. I read it again a few years later and finally understood it. See, the novel The Princess Bride is a postmodern exploration of metanarrative wrapped in with a
Essays, Not Rants! 115: Merited Futility I like playing video games, I really do. I write about them a lot too. Gaming is great: it’s a great form of catharsis, sometimes carries unique stories, and it’s just plain fun. Which then makes it odd when I say I have trouble justifying gaming. See, it sometimes feels like a waste of time. After all, outside of the magic circle in which gaming takes place, it has no effect on, well, anything. That’s what a game is, isn’t it? This applies more so
Essays, Not Rants! 378: Menu-Assisted Narrative Mega Man Zero ends with Zero facing down a hoard of Pantheons, his saber ready and his will resolved to fight every last enemy that crosses his path. The music swells and he charges off into battle. The sequel picks up a year later and the opening stage is you, as Zero, still fighting the fight. The implication is clear: Zero’s been at it for the entire year since the first installment. It offers a neat sense of continuity between the two games
So Amazon has this thing where groups can crowdsource menial tasks to folks for menial pay. As a broke college kid (who desperately wants to be able to buy books, movie tickets, and Iron Man 3 Legos), it is my duty to perform these tasks. ...while watching TV in another window, of course.
Essays, Not Rants! 229: Meaning Upon Meaning Every movie monster in the book has some sort of sociocultural commentary associated with it. Zombies are the embodiment of a fear of conformist consumer culture, vampires are the elite rich who drain the life of the poor, werewolves are your neighbor’s double life, Godzilla is nuclear terror made real. A lot of fun can be found in figuring out what these all mean. Is Zombieland about the isolation that comes as a result of being the only people spe
Essays, Not Rants! 163: Masculinity in Age of Ultron I saw Age of Ultron Thursday night and I have thoughts. There’s the obvious nerd-out factor of the film, and it’s really cool and does a lot of things right (and, arguably, does indeed go smaller than the first Avengers), but those are essays rants for another day. So let’s talk about how the movie portrays the idea of masculinity. Because it’s actually really interesting. Age of Ultron, like The Avengers before it and probably every Mar
Essays, Not Rants! 347: Mary Jane Watson One thing I love so much about Spider-Man is how so much of the narrative can be stripped down to its archetypes. Peter Parker is an unlucky kid who’s suddenly had this great power thrust upon him. Otto Octavius is a genius scientist doomed for tragedy. And Mary Jane Watson is the girl next door. A lot of the fun of the various incarnations of Spidey, be it different adaptations or reimaginings across the multiverse (see: Spider-Punk or Spider-Ham), i
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
This week's Essay, Not Rant isn't being mirrored on BZP 'cuz it discusses some of the more adult aspects of Jessica Jones. So instead I'll leave you with the following sentiment regarding the show which I'm pretty sure we can all agree on: Hot dang, Luke Cage is HOT.
Essays, Not Rants! 313: Lost The Heart Sometimes it’s hard to explain why something good is so good; why does this one movie work. Other times, you have an example of the same thing executed less well and you’re all “ah, that’s why that one was so good.” So let’s talk Pacific Rim Uprising, and by extension, the original too. Ostensibly, both Pacific Rim and its sequel are about giant robots fighting giant monsters. What made the first one great, though, was that it was about so much more, ab
Only one I can afford in good conscious at the moment. Doing Mechanical Turk work and signing up for psych studies here at university so I can buy more. LEGO®: So Addictive You'll Let People Science On You To Buy More
Essays, Not Rants! 299: Long Live The Resistance It's really easy to see the original Star Wars as an anti-establishment film. Han, Luke, and Leia are a trio of rebels vying to undermine and overthrow the Man. And given that the movie is a product of the 70s, it just might be intentional. Empire has the Man crackdown on our plucky heroes, and Return of The Jedi culminates in the final usurpation. Of course, within this framework, any story about plucky rebels can be interpreted as anti-esta
Loglines are the frickin' worst. "Hey, let's distill your concept down into one sentence!" But then, on the other hand, they do force you to distill your concept into one sentence.
Essays, Not Rants! 207: Living in Science Fiction Is the movie Gravity science fiction? This was the discussion a friend of mine and I were having while talking about science fiction and fantasy winning Oscars — Gravity got Best Director, but is it really science fiction? Wikipedia, IMDb, and such call it science fiction, given that it’s, well, in space. That’s usually the threshold for science fiction. But something in space is hardly imaginative anymore. An astronaut who just returned fr
Friggin' love this band. Talked to Brian (the lead singer) after for a bit. He thanked me for helping fund their new album on Kickstarter (the shirt tipped him off). New York, man.
Essays, Not Rants! 088: Little Things The biggest difference between fiction and reality is that the former is not real. Duh. Ergo, one of the greatest challenges of fiction is making it seem real. Doesn’t matter if it’s Star Wars, Pacific Rim, or Chuck; it’s gotta feel realistic. Lived in, real. The crew behind Star Wars, Pacific Rim, and the film adaption of The Lord of the Rings achieved this through set design. There are tiny, almost unnoticeable details all over the movie. The ships in
Essays, Not Rants! 170: Linear Versus Open World E3 was this week, which means most major video game companies were showing off the upcoming games they have lined up. There's a lot to be excited for: Star Wars Battlefront looks great, Dishonored 2 is getting Emily Kaldwin as a protagonist, Kingdom Hearts 3 is finally in development. But me being me, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the glorious gameplay demo they showed off is what I cared about most. The game looks great, showing again why N
I live over a pizza joint. A semi-famous one that's more expensive than dollar pizza and too milky for my blood, but you get the idea. Also one usually hopping at 2am on a Saturday night for obvious reasons. Anyway, this pizza joint is also now a Pokéstop. Which is preeeetty great 'cuz I can get a steady stream of Pokéballs. But. And this is the magical part. Everyday, at some time at night, someone decides to put a Lure there. Now, Manhattan is full of Lures at night (must be when the P
Essays, Not Rants! 317: Letting Lara Down I was pretty excited for the Tomb Raider movie that came out a couple weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of the game it was based on, the Tomb Raider reboot that came out in 2013. The game was an origin story for Lara Croft, one that gameplay-wise took cues from the Uncharted series it had partially inspired but then been eclipsed by. One thing I really liked about the game was how it made Lara less of a sex object. Gone were the catsuits, short shorts, and cro
Essays, Not Rants! 236: Letting People Be Different One of the many (many, many) things I love about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is that the hunky guy Rebecca is pining for is an Asian guy (named Josh, but that parts not important right now). It’s incredibly refreshing — when was the last time you saw an Asian male as a romantic lead, let alone an object of sexual desire by a white woman in fiction? But that leads me to another one of the things I love about the show: it’s not a big deal. No one cares
Essays, Not Rants! 164: Let’s Talk About That Whole Black Widow Thing People are mad on the internet. As usual. The hubbub recently, though, is about choices made regarding Black Widow in Age of Ultron. Now, I’m a big fan of Black Widow. I’d really like her to get her own movie and Nathan Edmonson’s run on the comics has been fantastic (issue #13 is framed on my wall). And I’ll be the first to admit that a character beat in Age of Ultron did throw me off for a bit. But I didn’t realize the fur
