Essays, Not Rants! 127: The Gutsy Ending I feel like Edge of Tomorrow has been out long enough that it’s safe to talk about the ending. And honestly, I feel like I could have discussed the ending much closer to when it came out because, well, it kinda just was. There wasn’t a big shocker at the ending, no moment that left you going “woah.” Edge of Tomorrow ends with breaking the loop, as one would expect from a movie that’s essentially Groundhog Day with aliens and guns. But unlike Groundhog
Essays, Not Rants! 328: Global Vessel I’m not really a sports person. But once every four years I get really hardcore into a sport. I am, of course, talking about the World Cup. Which should really come as no surprise. For starters, it’s got my mostest favoritest trope; the ragtag multinational team. They may be in competition, but there remains the fun of watching countries as disparate as Belgium and Japan share a stage. Then of course there’s the fact that soccer/football is the sp
So last week I got a location (friend of mine's apartment) and we're gonna shoot there. So that's settled and that's awesome because now I have a place to make my movie. Great. Most of my preproduction paperwork is squared away, so that means I just have to wait for approval from NYU so I can shoot on the 18th/19th (holy frappe that's in two weeks). I also got to fill out my pick sheet - I'm renting a DOLLY. This is exciting. Crew is also coming together. I've got a meeting with the art depa
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! 118: The Dynamics of the Buddy Movie Im on vacation. As such, heres an essay I wrote for class during my Spring semester. We were assigned seven movies and had to compare the lot of them. Hence writing about The Parent Trap. Enjoy. The buddy movie is one of the most prolific genres in cinema. With movies as diverse as the classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, recent blockbusters like The Avengers, and animated films such as Toy Story; chances are everyones seen some
One of the (many) things I like about Gallatin is that since I get to design my curriculum much of my classes are seminars. This means, when I play my schedule right, I've got a lot less lecturing and a lot more discussion...ing. Which makes literature a lot more fun. Now, for pulpier stuff like Ender's Game, BioShock, or When Harry Met Sally (all stuff I've read/played/watched for a class), it means we get to look closely at what's, frankly, entertainment. But what surprises me is how much
Essays, Not Rants! 373: They Changed It But That’s Okay The band Barcelona enthralled me with their first album, Absolutes, with its soaring melancholic piano-driven sound paired with some soulful songwriting. It was a shock to the system when their sophomore album, Not Quite Yours, instead featured a more rhythm-focused sound and the piano relegated to support in many songs. Their third, Basic Man, sounds even less alt-rock; it’s an album full of mellow synthy grooves. Each of their albums so
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! 182: Same Story But Different Pacific Rim is predictable; you’re not gonna win any prizes for pointing that out. It’s not like The Last of Us or District 9, which subvert the expectations of the audience. When you watch Pacific Rim you know what’s gonna happen; Raleigh and Mako will team up, something will happen that lets them prove themselves, and there has to be some last minute complication. Yet it’s an absolutely fantastic movie, and one of my own favorites. No, it’s
Essays, Not Rants! 375: Obsolescence I have a floppy disk lying around somewhere with stuff on it I must have written when I was around eight or ten years old. I don’t know exactly what’s on it and I’m not sure where it is at any given moment; it’s one of those things that I’ll happen on occasion and think to myself “hey, I should get the files off of this some time.” Of course, there is the whole issue of finding a floppy disk reader. My laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive anymore and what
Essays, Not Rants! 045: Broken Pieces I saw Silver Linings Playbook the other day and loved it (it is currently my favorite of this year’s Oscar nominations). For many reasons, really. Like the brilliantly intelligent script that doesn’t talk down to its audience, some great cinematography, stellar acting and so on. But what really got me was how the protagonists were just so broken. No, not their lives; they were broken. There’s a difference. Let’s take Uncharted. Nathan Drake is not a brok
Saw it at the IMAX midnight, as I tend to do with these sort of things, but the girlfriend's been bugging about watching it again (which, y'know, I wanted to too). Finally found time to do so today. And hot dang. There's so much done in there that makes me jealous. Like, not budget or having a baddonkey fight choreographer, smaller choices that are genius. Like putting the camera here instead of over there, or not going straight to the reveal but panning over it to build tension (see the shot
Essays, Not Rants! 260: On Deconstruction, Reconstruction, and Also Batman A deconstruction takes something apart. Shrek shows how weird fairy tales are by pitting the story from the point of view of an ogre. Suddenly the princess promising herself to whoever rescues her is especially bizarre, as is the idea of there always being a noble prince. The point of a deconstruction is usually to display how tropes and conventions in some narratives don’t work so well when held up to some more stringe
....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! 305: But For Adults Dennis Villeneuve is currently attached to the latest adaption of Dune. It's an exciting prospect: Dune is a rich novel and Villeneuve has shown himself to be both a skilled director and excellent at adaptations. Arrival was an excellent adaption of a terrific short story, one that managed to make the feeling of the ephemeral come as much to life on the screen as the page. Blade Runner 2049 somehow captured the moodiness of the original while injecting i
I mentioned in my last entry that I've been running a Star Wars: Edge of The Empire RPG with some friends over the summer. Which is great, 'cuz I love tabletop and I've got a good group. So I'm gonna be rambling about those games on here. Let's start with the players; the crew of the Flying Flask. Character creation was a lot of fun back in June. First up, we have Tengen'benwen'henfen, a Chiss Pilot/Commando who, uh, pilots the Flying Flask. Ten's ex-Imperial too and, as such, has an anti-es
Essays, Not Rants! 244: An Asian-American Superhero I wasn't sure how I felt about Silk when she first showed up in the Spider-Man comics, but it was when she got her own series – and a narrative no longer intrinsically tied to Peter Parker – that she really came into her own. But on the on the one hand, yeah, another webslinging spider-themed hero? We've already got a lot with Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and Miguel O'Hara in books of their own; do we need one more? The thing i
Essays, Not Rants! 138: Where No One Has Gone Before Let’s talk about space, because of Interstellar. Now, it’s hard to discuss the film because so much of what makes it Interstellar is because its based so fundamentally on the curves and turns of the plot. So for the sake of avoiding spoilers and ruining everything, we’re not talking about Interstellar’s story. Instead let’s talk about the set up; about the initial question asked by the film, the question of space travel. Many of the early
Essays, Not Rants! 379: Delicious Stakes There’s a common maxim in storytelling stating something to the effect of how you should always raise the stakes. Don’t make it just a friend at risk, make it a sibling. Instead of it just being the neighborhood affected, have it be the town. If you’re gonna have to save a city, it oughta be a major metropolis like New York. And why stop at saving the city when you can save the world? High stakes usually mean high thrills. The Battle of New York at th
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! 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
