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! 237: The Give And Take of Books When I was 13 I visited a slave castle in Takoradi, Ghana. Which is a weird sentence to type, but kinda standard given the whole grew-up-on-a-ship-thing. It was sobering, seeing something you’d read about in history in person. But at the same time, for me, something firmly in the past. What had happened there was firmly in the was. Now, I recently finished Yaa Gyasi’s exceptional Homegoing. Early on, a slave castle on Africa’s coast plays a
Essays, Not Rants! 285: The First Seventeen I was recently on a plane back to New York from Montréal (if you wondering: poutine’s really good, the Canadians are onto something). It’s a short flight in a relatively small plane, but apparently, still one that lets you have those screens in the seatbacks. Which is nice because, y’know, you can watch a movie or something. Good time to catch up on movies you've missed or watch different because you wanna. Thing is, the flight from Montréal to New
Essays, Not Rants! 298: The Ephemeral and The Sublime Over the years, Hideo Kojima has, because of his Metal Gear Solid games, become one of my favorite video game designers. He's also certifiably bonkers, mixing in discussions of American militarism-as-neo-colonialism in a game where you fight giant mechs alongside a mostly naked sniper who can't speak because of a parasite that uses language to spread (and thus serves as a vehicle for Kojima to discuss how English becoming the global lingua
Essays, Not Rants! 315: End of (Star) War(s) After the original Star Wars trilogy wrapped up, Lucasfilm started letting other people play in the sandbox they’d created. And so the Expanded Universe came about: more stories set in the Star Wars universe continuing the adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy really kicked the EU into high gear, and an impressive series of novels, comics, and games were born, each crossing over and referencing each other. It’s a lotta fun
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.
Essays, Not Rants! 217: The Elusiveness of Fun What is fun? No, not what’s fun to do, what does “fun” mean? Johan Huizinga, a Dutch guy that wrote a lot about play and what play means, said in his Homo Ludens that “this last-named element, the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation.” He goes on to lament that there’s, to his knowledge, no direct translation in a Western language that really captures what “fun” is (and if you check Wiktionary, you’ll find the transla
Essays, Not Rants! 296: The Economy (Again!) Star Wars Battlefront II is a really fun game. It course-corrects a lot of the problems of the first one and throws in some fun turns. Dogfighting in an A-Wing and charging through Hoth feel plain fun. But Battlefront II also has a seriously screwed up economy, one that's intrinsically tied to how the game plays. A lot of contemporary multiplayer games have progression systems, the more you play, the more experience points you get which in turn ca
Essays, Not Rants! 284: The Economy In this day and age, I think it’s time we talked about The Economy. In video games. A lot of games have an economy of some sort, where you earn something and spend that something on a something beneficial. In Super Mario Bros. and Crash Bandicoot you collect coins and wumpa fruit (respectively) and when you get a hundred of them it’s an extra life. It’s a simple enough exchange, one that, like provides impetus and rewards for doing stuff. You’ve got th
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
Essays, Not Rants! 030: The Consistency of Continuity The way reality (and by proxy, stories) works is that if one thing happens then something else does. Because of this, we have a natural sequence of events that happens. It’s a consistent sequence of events that have bearing on each other. Man, describing continuity is difficult. Basically, if something happened, it happened. Events that happen influence the next one. Yet how much this affects the story depends on, well, the story. Let
So remember that movie I was making last year? We mixed on Wednesday and I've uploaded it now. Time to submit to festivals and stuff. It's DONE. DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE. I feel like a new mother except I don't want to see my newborn right now because the thing's been gestating for the last eighteen months and geez.
Essays, Not Rants! 227: The Beauty of Pokémon Go A recent issue of TIME Magazine (a magazine I usually like) ran a small article about Pokémon Go. In an article describing how the game “shows the unnerving future of augmenting reality,” writer Matt Vella describes players in Prospect Park as “a dozen people shuffling about haphazardly, their zombie eyes fixed on glowing phone screens.” Okay. Fine. Honestly, I shouldn’t be too surprised. This is the same publication that ran a cover articl
Essays, Not Rants! 020: The Avengers > The Dark Knight Rises You read that title right: The Avengers was better than The Dark Knight Rises. Man. Always fun to stir up some controversy. Why do I think this? So glad you asked. But let me preface all this with something: I’ve loved Batman for as far back as I can remember. I loved The Dark Knight, heck, it was one of the first movies I added to my BluRay collection. I’m not some Batman hater championing The Avengers because it’s not Batm
Essays, Not Rants! 008: The Artificial Family I grew up on a ship. Well, not really grew up exactly, more spent four very key years of my youth onboard a ship. It’s a long story. The thing about living on a ship, though, was that with only two hundred people on board it was a small community. Smaller still were the number of kids on board. I’m not kidding when I say there were a handful. Out of necessity we became more of a family than a group of friends. Life’s changed and gone on, but even t
Through a series of snafus we ended up looking at a place we had no intention of renting. For a variety reasons, one of which is size. See, in New York, a lot of the time you end up with matchboxes if you don't look hard enough. Matchboxes.
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! 101: The (Lego) Hero’s Journey, Part Two It’s been a few weeks since The LEGO Movie came out and proved that everything was indeed awesome. As I said I would before it came out, I’m going to break down The LEGO Movie with The Hero’s Journey. But wait. Two things you gotta do before you read on. First; read that blog post. I’m not gonna bother explaining The Hero’s Journey again. Second: watch the movie. Seriously. It’s a great movie in the first place and, equally import
Essays, Not Rants! 098: The (Lego) Hero’s Journey, Part One I had the pleasure of attending an advance screening of The LEGO Movie on Thursday at my university. Now, you have to realize, I’ve been into Legos as long as I can remember, have a couple models on my desk, and have been making Lego movies in one form or another since I was ten. In a nutshell: The LEGO Movie is fantastic. It’s beautifully animated, superbly cast, downright hilarious, and has a great plot. Now, the plot’s not anythi
Y'know that thing where you're offered everything you wanted? Something you've wanted for a long long time that embodies just about all you hoped for? Know what I mean? But you know you can't take it? That as much as you wish you could you can't? That you have to do the right thing and say no? And step back out alone, without what you could have had? And even though you did the right thing you feel like #### and it haunts you? So you talk it out, you pray it out, you write it out, you get
Essays, Not Rants! 141: That Teaser I saw The Phantom Menace for my eighth birthday. It wasn’t the first Star Wars film I saw, nor was it the first I saw in theaters (I have the vague recollection of seeing A New Hope when it was rereleased in Singapore). But it was a new Star Wars movie and I loved it unaware of its flaws. A teaser for the new new Star Wars dropped yesterday and I am so freaking excited. First off, it’s a new Star Wars, which, has had me pumped for quite some time. But se
....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.
Three rejections in three days by three different groups for three different projects. Woo. EDIT: Four hours after this was posted, I got another rejection letter!
Essays, Not Rants! 330: Tasty Words If you’ve ever played the Pokémon Trading Card Game or Magic: The Gathering or really any trading card game, you’ll have read the little bit of text on the bottom. Not the copyright information, but rather the flavor text that tells you a little about what the card is and how it fits into the bigger world. Stuff about where that character might come from or what the geopolitical situation in the world’s like. These are usually really small blurbs, probably n
