Essays, Not Rants! 025: A Series of Arcs I decided to sit down and watch some old How I Met Your Mother episodes once, and by old I mean Season One. It was weird to watch since everyone was well, so different from where they are in the more recent seasons. It’s jarring in light of where they end up. This, of course, is one of the great things about TV shows: character development. When you have a couple dozen episodes per season you can spend a lot more time with the protagonists and working
Essays, Not Rants! 113: A Real Swell Guy Let’s talk about Chuck, because it’s a fantastic show that you should watch if you haven’t. And not just ‘cuz Chuck and I are basically the same person, but because it’s a well put together show with a lot of fun stories and great characters. But those characters are a big reason. You’ve got Chuck and his two spy handlers and their dynamic and interactions, but they’re not who this is post is about. This post it about one of the supporting character
Well, after a brief Invision Board-based hiatus, we're back!
Did you like that video review of Tahu and Takua? I haven't done one in a while and it was fun to dive back in, especially since, over the past year, I've moved to doing video post-production full time. I was freelancing for around a year at a couple of documentary houses until last month when I started as a staff Assistant Editor a trailer house. If you saw the trailer for Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, that was us. I had
Essays, Not Rants! 346: A Normal Teenager Name Lara Jean To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before really feels like a classic 80s teen romcom, except it was made much more recently. It’s delightfully sweet, and has that uncynical honesty that readily calls back to fare like Sixteen Candles or Can’t Buy Me Love. Honestly, this movie is almost an anachronism, but a delightfully refreshing one at that. Now here’s the thing, unlike all those 80s teen romcoms, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before’s protago
Perks of being an NYU student? $5 tickets to see the opera Aida at the Met. Yeah. It was really cool. And in Italian. But cool. Reeaaal cool. +12 Culture! And yeah, of course we suited up. (this photo was taken while we were lining up for a proper one, figured it deserved to be spiffed up)
Essays, Not Rants! 345: A New Origin Captain Marvel’s new series, The Life of Captain Marvel, sees Carol taking some time to reassess. In the aftermath of infighting with Tony Stark and some other less than great events, she goes to her family’s summer home in Maine to spend some time with her mom and injured brother. There’s a lot of self-reflection, some reveals of family secrets... and a Kree hunter after, presumably, Carol. Because who else? The Kree hunter closes in on the Danvers house
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
Essays, Not Rants! 160: A Manic Pixie Dream Problem You know the story. Boy’s stuck in the doldrums of life. Girl shows up. Is quirky. Her quirkiness brings boy out of the normal world. They fall in love. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl has done her job. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a term to describe a female character archetype whose purpose is to bring a male character into a more interesting existence. Also they usually fall in love. But this is a little broad. Is Wyldstyle from The LEGO Mo
Essays, Not Rants! 065: A Grownup Video Game Something big came out on Friday. It was produced by a legendary team known for their amazing work. No, not Man of Steel: The Last of Us, the latest game by Naughty Dog, a team most recently known for the Uncharted series. It’s also a video game that will have you in tears after the first half hour. Understand, The Last of Us is a grownup’s video game. No, not because of the gore or language, but adult because it’s not childish. The game does aw
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! 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! 314: A Celebration I’m a nerd. That kinda really goes without saying. Spend five minutes on my blog and you’ll see me talking about Firefly, giant robots, The Lord of The Rings, comic books, Jacques the Fatalist, and looking at video games through a surprisingly feminist lens. I really enjoy this stuff. And over the years nerd culture has gotten more mainstream. Superhero shirts are in these days and Star Wars is cool again. It’s pretty neat to these things that used be ki
Essays, Not Rants! 216: A (Civil) War of Flaws. Civil War came out. This post it about that. Yes, that’s all the intro I’m giving. Marvel’s done a fantastic job of giving their characters major flaws. Look at the original (cinematic) Avengers: Iron Man’s selfish, Captain America’s noble to a fault, Thor’s proud, The Hulk’s, er, angry, Black Widow doesn’t trust anyone, and Hawkeye’s just the archer (okay, so he’s more the cynic). It’s these clearly defined character defects that make them cla
So this is my late post-Spring Break entry. For the first time in my college career(?) I left the City during Spring Break, this time to visit my girlfriend in Paris, where she's studying abroad (because she's super smart and writes essays in French when she's not sciencing in English). Now, despite the whole growing-up-on-a-ship thing, I'd never actually been to mainland France (Martinique, yes, but that's practically a different country sorta), so going to France made country 55 for me, a
Here we are. Again. Finally. I've been busy. Welcome To The 4th Annual TMD Music Awards! Once again I find myself ranking ten albums from 2012 in order of bestness. As such there is not much need for an interlude, just that all ten of these albums are great albums you should check out. Special EP Mention: Freaks EP, The Hawk In Paris These guys are amazing. And Birds on a Wire is one of my favorite songs of the year. Give the EP a listen, a full album will be out in 2013. Top 10 Albums
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! 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! 352: 2018 In Review 2018 came and, as years are wont to do, went. Stuff happened, I wrote blog posts; you know the drill. It’s time to look back on the year and stop writing this silly excuse for a preamble. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: On Crazy Rich Asians As someone who’s spent a good deal of his life in Singapore, it stands to reason that seeing a big movie about Singapore would be a bit of a deal. Crazy Rich Asians is that movie and it’s one that I have a lot
Essays, Not Rants! 301: 2017 In Review 2017 has been a year. And it ends in a couple days, so that means it’s time for me to phone it in and post about posts! Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Hanging Out You know that thing where you talk about fictional characters as if they were your actual real life friends? This post is about how really well crafted characters make you happy just to watch them interact. #4: Trusting The Story It’s nice to be able to shut off your brain when y
Essays, Not Rants! 250: 2016 In Review Year’s over, so this means I’m looking at the rants essays from this past year. Here we go! Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: *general internet frustrations* Mockingbird became my favorite comic this year for a variety of reasons (feminist, funny, fantastic). But when the final issue was published people got mad. This is about that and why we can’t have nice things, and why Mockingbird and the fallout remain important in the larger dialogue of fict
Essays, Not Rants! 199: 2015 In Review Well. It’s 2016. Since it’s tradition, let’s take a look at my rants essays from this past year. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Let’s Talk About That Whole Black Widow Thing Hoo boy, yeah, that’s one way to start off this year-in-review. I stand by this post (that there’s nothing inherently problematic with Black Widow’s characterization in Age of Ultron, rather the real issue is that we have one female character to tell every female narrative)
Essays, Not Rants 145: 2014 in Review 2014 is a few days from being over. So once again it’s time to go through my rants essays from this year and pick out the special ones. All statistics are based on essaysnotrants.net, since, y'know, I don't wanna count through the views on BZP. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Relationship Advice from Scott Pilgrim The thing about Edgar Wright movies is that they work on so many levels. I was… off put the first time I watched Scott Pilgrim vs The Wor
Essays, Not Rants 041: 2012 in Review That’s right people, I’m doing it again. Once again instead of a usual post I’m going to look through some of the posts from this year and link ‘em. Because it’s something appropriate to do at year’s end and not because a buddy of mine and I watched two movies in two separate cinemas and last night and I’m working today. Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts #5: Two More Hours On occasion my blog posts are, there I say it, topical. This usually happens duri
