Essays, Not Rants! 265: Book Listening I’ve been a huge Trevor Noah fan since he showed up on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and started ragging on misconceptions of contemporary Africa by comparing it to the rural US. I found his stand-up special, African American, on Netflix and was delighted to hear him cracking jokes about growing up mixed. Though mine was in no way identical, there was enough familiarity there to really connect. Also, he’s funny. So I was one of the five people who was really k
Essays, Not Rants! 320: Between a Wookie and a Hard Place A recent trailer for Solo, that new Star Wars movie about, uh, Han Solo, ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. A (space) train hurtles along its tracks around a mountain as a battle rages atop it. It comes close to the cliff side and hanging out the train is none other then Chewbacca, and he is heading straight for an outcropping. The Wookie appears destined to certain doom as the trailer ends. The question of whether Chewie survives bec
Essays, Not Rants! 219: Being There It’s a stormy night in 1995 and you’re a college student just returned from a year abroad. During that time your family moved to a large house on the outskirts of town. A house, you discover, without anyone home that looks like it’s been stolen. That’s how Gone Home opens, a game where you assume the role of Kaitlin and explore your new house, trying to figure out what happened during the year you were away. Now, Gone Home toes the line of being a video
Essays, Not Rants! 129: Becoming Legend On Thursday a new trailer dropped for Bungie’s Destiny. In the vein of trailers for Bungie’s prior games (like Halo 3: ODST’s
which remains one of my favorite pieces of marketing ever), it doesn’t really tell you much about what the game is like. It’s live action, for crying out loud, not a cutscene, or let alone actual gameplay. Which almost begs the question, how does the game even play? Only, no, the trailer actually does an impressive job of summ
Essays, Not Rants! 060: Becoming Iron Man I hate spoilers. I really do; I swore off social media for the two days in between the Lost finale and when I could watch it. That said, this post deals with an aspect of the ending of Iron Man 3. It’s not one of the huge twists, but it’s a little surprise. It’s been a week since it came out so I feel alright writing about it. S’yeah. Spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Well, first spoiler, Tony survives. But the main one I’ll be addressing is
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
tl;dr: I no longer have a bar in my chest. Longer version: Got into Singapore on the 10th. Spent the intervening time playing video games and eating, Monday morning local time went into surgery to have my bar removed. Since, y'know, it's time. Everything went well; the bar's sitting on a shelf here in the hospital room (along with some chips of bone [my bones]); I can walk and move and stuff. Useful abilities, those. Current signs point to heart being alright. So yes. I did just pull an Iron
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! 376: Bad Taste I really like Iron Man 2. This is not a popular opinion; the movie is usually listed near the bottom of MCU movie rankings, especially when held up against its predecessor. But I really like it all the same. I suppose there’s no accounting for bad taste. Perhaps there’s some explanation for my deep affection for this much-maligned movie when the context with which I first saw the film is taken into account. The summer of 2010 saw my heart acting up with
Y'know how when you're younger you figure when you're an adult you can buy all the LEGO you want? And then when you're an adult you realize you gotta budget for it? And then you do budget for it (by rearranging some priorities [movies and alcohol took a hit])? And then you get an employee discount? And then you save your money until double VIP points roll around and then you buy a bunch? And then you get a backlog? Yeah.
Essays, Not Rants! 130: Background Details There’s a building I can see outside my window that’s under construction. I’m not sure what it’s going to be or where exactly it is, but it looks to be somewhere in TriBeCa. The basic structure of it is there, there’s a crane going up the side, and it looks like the skeleton of a monolith as there aren’t any external walls up yet. There are tiny lights on each floor that glint in the daylight. To my sci-fi-addled mind it looks like something you’d s
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
C'mon ya'll! PM me your questions for the powercast! About anything! New York, South Carolina, Singapore, the ship, heart disease, the Singapore military, BZP, Lego, Bionicle! C'mon people!
Essays, Not Rants! 304: Artistry in Disaster The Room is an awful movie and I adore it. It's terribly made, replete with an incoherent plot and some truly questionable acting decisions, but it also manages to cross that elusive line of terribleness into wonder. It's a movie that makes you ask how on earth could something like this have been made as you delight in the fact that it was. It is also a movie best enjoyed at a midnight screening with a multitude of plastic forks and having imbibed a
Essays, Not Rants! 333: Artistic Stratification So the Oscars announced a new category. Is it something like Best Stunt, to acknowledge some of the crazy cool things stuntpeople and Tom Cruise do? Could it be Best Choreography for beautiful fights or films where the blocking of camera and actors plays like a dance? Maybe it’s for Best Color Scheme, which sounds totally arbitrary but you’ve movies like (500) Days of Summer and Pacific Rim that use colors masterfully. The correct answer is none
Essays, Not Rants! 050: Art or Not Here at NYU I hear a lot of things about movies and art and stuff. With the Oscars being last week and half of my classes being primarily film related, I heard plenty (like how Beasts of the Southern Wild was everything an indie film needed to be [...so?]). But one thing that really stuck out to me was the opinion that Argo shouldn’t have won since Argo was more Summer blockbuster fare as opposed to Best Picture fare. Yeah, I know, I touched on this last week
Essays, Not Rants! 062: Arrested Protagonists Pain and Gain is a movie with villain protagonists. Not like Dr. Horrible, more if a couple of the thugs from Taken had a movie about them. This creates a whole host of problems for the film. We shouldn’t like the three main characters, they’re based on real life people guilty of torture, theft, and murder who wind up in jail. The paradox is that we shouldn’t like them but we still need to be invested in the show. For better or worse (mostly worse)
Essays, Not Rants! 364: Apex Teamwork Ever since my brother got himself a PS4 I’ve been paying a bit more attention to online games. Sure, I play my share of online, games like Battlefront and Destiny are a great way to relax while watching The Daily Show, but an online multiplayer component has never been a big draw. Now that my brother and I can play online together, I’m ever on the lookout for a game where we can throw down together. Over the past couple of years, Battle Royale games have
My lease ends at the end of May and I'm moving. It's part price, part the mouse hunt of the past couple months, part the six floor walkup, part the uneven floors, part the lack of a sick in the kitchen, part the price, part the fact that my bedroom door doesn't really close properly anymore, and part the price. I'm gonna miss the fire escape and the roof and the location and the apartment, though. But Mata freaking Nui apartment hunting in New York is rough. I mean, probably not if you have a
Brother and I signed a lease on an apartment today, as neither of us wanna live in dorms next year. It's very much a dinky New York apartment (sixth floor walkup, no sink in the bathroom), but we figure it's got character (also: actual two bedroom, a living room [!]) and it's near our usual haunts (few minutes from some decent bars, not far from my favorite dollar pizza place, near Trader Joe's, near campus), so, yeah, it's a win. Holy [censored] this is what growing up is. My name's on an a
