Essays, Not Rants! 253: AMERICA! If you follow this blog you’ve probably realized that my mostest favoritest trope is the rag-tag multicultural team. It’s why I’ll always hold Disney’s Atlantis in high esteem, it’s why I have such a huge soft spot for the Magnificent Seven remake and Rogue One. Pacific Rim, Halo: Reach, X-COM, you give me a multicultural/national team, you make me happy Really happy. So you can understand my hesitance when the follow-up to Al Ewing’s very enjoyable New Ave
Essays, Not Rants! 059: Where It Needs To Go So here’s the deal you make when you tell a story. Actions have consequences. I don’t mean of the physical variety (you destroy a support, the roof caves in), no, I mean emotional consequences. Sometimes you have to deal with those. Well, sometimes you don’t. Look at romances like Star Wars or other more light hearted fare. Han gets frozen in carbonite, Leia’s planet gets destroyed, and Luke blows up the Death Star and everyone on it. But the movi
Essays, Not Rants 018: Legend’s End This weekend the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s epic Dark Knight Trilogy was released. His was a new Batman, one that took place within the confines of our world rather than some dark/campy alternate. Nolan sought to not only retell the Batman story, but to elevate it from just a story to a legend. In telling the story of how man became myth, Nolan took each aspect of Bruce Wayne’s journey and centered a movie around it: overcoming fear, resisting evil,
Essays, Not Rants! 322: Space Cowboys I’m honestly surprised I didn’t stumble upon Cowboy Bebop earlier. It’s got a lotta my favorite things (cool ships, genre blending, a ragtag crew) and it is a maddeningly good show. It also bears more than a few resemblances to another show about space cowboys that I love: Firefly. Or more Firefly resembles Cowboy Bebop, given that the former show came a few years after Bebop. Now, there’s a wealth of writing to be had about the similarities between the
Essays, Not Rants! 287: More Thoughts On An Open World I am a big fan of linear, narrative gameplay. I love the Uncharted series for its tight and moving narrative that thrusts the gameplay along and I will critique the Assassin’s Creed games for their tendency to waylay their own plot with an overabundance of pointless side missions. I yearn for games that propel me along, marrying good gameplay with an strong narrative. Including so-called ‘walking sims’ like Journey or Gone Home that may no
Essays, Not Rants 026: Everyone’s Story If you meet me in person, chances are at some point I’ll ask you what’s your story. Who you are. What brought you from wherever you’re from to where you are what now. Because whatever the reason, it’s your story and tells a good amount about you. So naturally, when I watch/play/read something, I’m looking for a character’s story. What made them who they are? Sometimes, you don’t need a particularly deep story (Dr Horrible wants to be inducted into the
I've loved Marc Webb ever since I saw (500) Days of Summer three years ago (and subconciously since I saw his video for Dare You To Move). I really liked Andrew Garfield in The Social Network and even more after Never Let Me Go. And, like most every other boy on the planet, I grew up with a knowledge of the Spider-Man mythos. Simply put, The Amazing Spider-Man was very amazing. The focus was not on Spider-Man, but rather on Peter Parker. You got to know the kid, understand who he was and w
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! 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
....the person who directed the music video for the song you're listening to is also the person whose class for which you're currently working on a script.
Essays, Not Rants! 188: The Honest Truth A lot of stories aim to be real. Or as real as you can be while being a, y’know, story. The challenge here, of course, is figuring out what real is. One interpretation of ‘real’ is realistic. No spaceships, because spaceships are far from commercial right now. No superpowers or superheroes, because those aren’t things. And no magic either. Y’know, realism. So like Lost in Translation. It’s about two people in Japan, and just about there. There’s no
Essays, Not Rants! 341: A Dearth Of Asians I was talking with a friend at work the other day about Silk. The superhero, not the fabric. I’ve mentioned her on the blog before, and I do really like her, and am bummed her book ended. My friend quipped that I should be, she’s, like, the only Asian hero in Marvel. I protested, there was also Shang-Chi, and Amadeus Cho, and, and, well. That’s about it. We decided to include Kamala Khan, after all, Pakistan is in Asia and we have a bad tendency t
Essays, Not Rants! 069: In Defense of Giant Robots I grew up on Power Rangers, giant mecha anime, and Transformers. I built giant robots with my LEGO’s (and spaceships, natch). Of course, all this was just cartoons and imagination for the most part. And now we have Pacific Rim. It’s easy, heck, it’s natural to brush aside the movie as being simple childish nonsense. After all, giant robots are the stuff of anime and Power Rangers. The stuff you enjoyed as a kid. You’re an adult now. You ha
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 321: Motivated Acceleration I am endlessly fascinated by mediums. No, not people who claim to talk to ghosts; rather the forms that stories can take. Why does this story work better as a novel? Why this a video game? Why that a play? It’s usually adaptations where you can see the cracks that are the chasms between mediums. Consider the recent comic adaptation of The Last Jedi, which is essentially a beat-for-beat retelling, it doesn’t quite capture all the visual splendor o
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! 058: With Regards To Motivation I have a research paper I should be writing. I also have a stack of books near me ranging from On Free Choice and The Will by Saint Augustine, Iron Man and Philosophy, Campbell’s The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Finding Serenity, The Existential Joss Whedon, my own annotated copy of Life of Pi, The Philosophy of Joss Whedon, and a few others too. These are what people in academia call ‘sources’. I think I know what I’ll be writing about, but I’
New York ComicCon. Anyone else going? I'm going Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Renting my ticket to the roommate so he can go to the MLP panel on Thursday. And yes, I will be dressing up.
Two years ago yesterday I was told I had a very potentially fatal heat condition. Several doctors later and here I am. I’ve got a bar in my chest and my heart seems to be fine. Yes, like Iron Man. So here's to two years of amazing grace. Your move, heart disease.
Essays, Not Rants! 351: Spiders Comics are weird. Especially superhero comics. There are people who come back to death, people with weird powers, people who lose those weird powers but then get them back when they come back to life. Also, y’know, aliens and monsters and crazy science ######. Like I said, weird. There are also multiple universes, and so multiple versions of characters. There’s a version of Captain America where she’s the biracial daughter of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones and
