Essays, Not Rants! 224: Regarding Movies About Two Superheroes Fighting Each Other If you were to put 2016’s blockbusters in a museum, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War ought to be displayed next to each other. They’re the sort of movies that, when looked at together, take on a whole new dimension. Because one is far more successful than the other. To understand why Civil War succeeds, you don’t have to look much better than at how BvS fails. Both movies have
Essays, Not Rants! 335: Watch This Web Series Back in February I got hired to direct a web series. Which is a pretty cool sentence to get to type. The web series, The Invincible Osiris Jackson, is quite easily described as a nerdy, gay romance. The showrunner and I both used Scott Pilgrim vs The World as a big touchstone for the series, both in its integration of video game tropes into film, and also its tone of both comedy and earnestness. After spending a couple months casting, finding a c
Essays, Not Rants! 142: Of Belchers I hadn’t seen an episode of I Love Lucy until last year when I had to binge-watch it for a Writing for TV class. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect and at the end my overall feeling is one of ‘meh.’ I mean, it’s notable for what it pioneered, but I guess it’s not so much up my alley. One of the things that I noticed about I Love Lucy, especially in comparison to The Honeymooners, a contemporary show I also had to watch, was how the conflict among the coupl
Essays, Not Rants! 274: Andromeda After The Fact I finally finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda and dutifully started my second (this time as Sara instead of Scott). Ramping up the difficulty to Insanity makes combat much more frantic (and thereby makes the brilliant combat systems that much more fun), but we’ll see how far I get through it before I decide to finally replay Uncharted 4 because a) it’s a better game, 2) I haven’t replayed it, and iii) my god I want to play a
Hey, checking in with you folks because I like you guys and this blog is a nice place to ramble. Life's been busy. Did the BrickFair thing this year, which was a lotta fun. I edited Episode 4 of The Invincible Osiris Jackson, which you should totally
, especially if you're a fan of Kingdom Hearts. I'm officially a proper Supervisor at The LEGO Store. Which means I'm responsible and stuff. I get a nice amount of latitude with what I do so I've room to figure out new ways to do stuff and a
Essays, Not Rants! 336: Yellow (流星) I have A Lot of thoughts about the movie adaption of Crazy Rich Asians. Far more thoughts that I’ve had time to write down. Much of that is wrapped up in the fact that it’s set in Singapore and I have a very complicated relationship with that country, owing to it, well, being where I was born and the odd circumstances with which I’ve found myself returning there for the past decade or so. So this blog post is not about that. Rather, it’s about a song tha
Essays, Not Rants! 309: Reframing a Narrative So it’s been some time (a week-ish) since Black Panther came out and the mental nerding out has sufficiently subsided that I can have some actual Rational Thoughts about the movie beyond "wow it’s so cool and Okoye is everything." And, go figure, it’s coming down to a lotta thoughts about representation. And how representation is happening. But first, a detour to Star Wars. My favorite movie series seems to have enacted a moratorium on white gu
Essays, Not Rants! 075: 35mm Originally posted August 24th 2013 Two things were announced yesterday: Ben Affleck will be the new Batman and Dan Mindel will be the Director of Photographer for Star Wars VII. This one is about the second one. The announcement of Dan Mindel was accompanied with the information that the movie would be shot on 35mm. That is: film. Alright: history lesson. Attack of the Clones was known for being one of the first films shot entirely on digital. It was different, a
Essays, Not Rants! 076: A Close Reading of Pentecost's Speech Originally posted August 31st 2013 Time to do something different. In literary criticism a close reading is, according to wikipedia “the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text.”[1] Usually this is reserved for works of literary consequence (think The Odyssey or Heart of Darkness). But because this is Essays, Not Rants! and I can do whatever the heck what I want so I’m doing a close reading of Marshall Stacker P
Essays, Not Rants! 077: Commercial and Literary Originally posted September 7th 2013 There’s an interesting divide that tends to come up when discussing literature of any sort in an academic setting. That is, the divide between the commercial and the literary. What’s this mean exactly? Apparently when it comes to fiction and stuff there’s the stuff for ‘the masses’ and then the stuff that’s more for only people who would really understand it. It’s the difference between Beasts of the Souther
Essays, Not Rants! 078: Formulaic Formulas Originally posted September 14th 2013 There are a lot of people who, when it comes to movies, say there’s a distinct formula to how everything works. Some people blanch at the thought, others say it’s blame for the derivative nature of, y’know, everything. Well, there is a formula. Sort of: there are these certain moments you can use to plot the course of a movie’s story. Just about every good story will hit these beats. They may not always be as
Essays, Not Rants! 263: This Is You In This Story There’s this thing with good stories where you have this gut response of "I wanna do that!" Video games thrive on immersion, by letting you enact what these characters do; meanwhile movies, tv, books, comics, etc let you vicariously experience events. But what if you do get to be that character? Metal Gears Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Star Wars: The Force Awakens both explore that, by making the protagonist of each story very much a surrogat
Essays, Not Rants! 079: Of Board Games Originally posted September 21st 2013 Board games are still a thing. And card games and other such games that don’t require a TV, computer, or phone. Fascinating, isn’t it? Now, I love video games. The Last of Us is a work of art and there are feel things in life that can compete with mixing alcohol and Super Smash Brothers. That’s just how things are and it’d be blind to ignore it. Video games are excellent, and are here to stay. So how long is it till
Essays, Not Rants! 051: Instant Tension: Just Add Guns Say three guys are discussing the proper pronunciation of the word milk. Then the argument heats up and they start yelling. Things are starting to get a little intense Now one of them pulls a gun on the others. Things just got real, man! Then the other guys pull out their guns! Just like that the tension in the story jumps through the roof and the argument about elocution is forgotten in favor of will these friends kill themselves over it.
Essays, Not Rants! 080: Let's Talk About Agents of SHIELD Originally posted September 28th 2013 Did you watch it this week? Because you really should have. See, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (henceforth referred to without the periods), is a spin-off of a movie. A movie series, mind you. And it doesn’t focus any of the protagonists from said movie series. The deck is kinda stacked against it. With all that it’d be easy for the show to wallow as just something to sorta tide us over while we wait for
Essays, Not Rants! 254: Xenophobia, Science Fiction, and, eventually, Hope I didn’t learn the term ‘xenophobia’ from the news, the radio, or a textbook. Didn’t come up in class or any place you’d expect. Rather, I learnt the word ‘xenophobia’ from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe books. Was in the context of various political factions being distinctly anti-alien. Now, the xenophobia usually stemmed from the Empire and their staunch humans-first attitude and view of anyone who wasn’t as b
Essays, Not Rants! 081: Genre as Literature Originally published October 4th 2013 I love science fiction. I’ve said that before on this blog, and I’ll say it again. I like spaceships. I like a world that’s a little more than ours. But when it comes to literary value science fiction almost always gets written off as being science fiction. Fantasy gets the same treatment. Why? Because it’s genre. Here’s the thing, though: science fiction can be as literary as it can be pulpy. Just like any other
Essays, Not Rants! 087: Good Female Protagonists Revisited This blog's inception came about a year-and-a-half ago due to an essay (not a rant) about Katniss of The Hunger Games and other strong female characters. In light of the fact that we're once again a week away from the release of a movie about Katniss Everdeen, I figure, hey, let's look at this subject yet again. And again. Strong female characters are strong characters. Period. There's no special checklist that needs to be applied to
Essays, Not Rants! 082: Science Fiction, Parables, and Gravity Originally published October 11th 2013 Yes, I’m still on my science fiction apologetics kick. As I’ve established over and over again, as a genre, science fiction can say a lot that normal fiction can’t, or say it in ways it can’t. Gravity is a fine example of this. Because like it or not, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece is science fiction. If Super 8 and Moon are science fiction, then so is Gravity. Super 8, like E.T. before it, is
Essays, Not Rants! 206: Differently Normal I’m currently in the middle of my second game of Subterfuge, a wonderful mobile strategy game rife with cunning, manipulation, and, er, subterfuge. Within the game our Specialists, special hires which essentially let you bend the rules of the game. While most everything in the game is depicted abstractly, the Specialists are all given little portraits. And here’s where the game’s art design shines: LOOK AT THAT DIVERSITY! For a wonderful change, ‘whit
Essays, Not Rants! 083: Awesome Non-Combatants Originally published October 18th 2013 During my idle perusal of the vast wastes of internet I came across a review of this past week’s episode of Agents of SHIELD. What caught my interest was one of the reviewer’s criticisms: there were still too many techie-type characters who couldn’t fight. And that that was lame and frustrating. Now, besides wrong, I find this criticism fascinating. Because yes, it is interesting to see an action-orientated
Essays, Not Rants! 111: A Narrative Is A Train So I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Though the final act is excellent, the film as a whole tends to stumble where the prior movie succeeded. Why? It lacked a central through line to follow. See, the first Amazing Spider-Man had a core theme: Who is Peter Parker/Spider-Man? Every thread in the story’s web (ba-dum tish) comes out from that; his tension with Uncle Ben is a question of identity, the conflict with Curt Conners is Peter looking for his f
With THE CONDUITS accepted into a festival, I realize that I really need a feature version of the movie written. So I've been working on planning it out and all. I finished the [hecka rough] Beat Sheet on Saturday, which came in at a solid 5,000+ words and around 16 pages (and 171 bullet points [not including sub-bullets] if you're wondering). Since then I've been making headway through my Outline (basically, a list of every single scene and what happens in it). I'm nearing up on the end of Act
