Essays, Not Rants! 205: Tarantino, Iñárritu, and The Art of Indulgence I finally saw The Revenant this week. I also saw The Hateful Eight the same day and it’s really interesting to have seen them back to back. Both are by directors who are arguably auteurs, both are classified as Westerns, and both are covered in their fingerprints. Filmmakers have their trademarks. Something by Joss Whedon will be rife with witty dialogue. J.J. Abrams’ stories will have mystery and wonder. A Michael Bay mo
There was a moment tonight, at the Lego Store Event, when the Bionicle folks said "anything you build tonight you can take home." Deevee's face lit up and all of us made a mad dash for the pieces bin. Some people built part hogs (I have never seen so many ball joints on a technic axle before), some built multi-armed multi-weaponed multi-headed beings, I... well, I did this: I even added gear functionality! I wasn't near the actual sets, hence some of the not-rightness in comparison to the
Holy snap buckets. Here we go. It's movie time. Spent most of today driving around with fake concrete barricades in a van picking up last minute equipment and props. Also: we're shooting with a skeleton crew tomorrow. When we weren't planning on. WOOHOO ADVENTURE. This is happening. Here we go. Also, because I haven't advertised it enough; Facebook page here! And Kickstarter here! I should probably get some sleep in the meantime.
It's March. Sure, only a couple hours past midnight into the new month, but here we are. My movie's shoot date is in 22 days. Y'know, this one. The one where I'm the first non-film major to make a thesis film. I'm just about cast, which is good. Working on locations (I may be shooting in a location Jessica Jones used. Also, bars and diners are kinda hard to lock down for biggish productions). I'm still around $7,000 short of meeting my budget. Which, btw, is a friggin' fart load of money.
Hey, checking in with you folks because I like you guys and this blog is a nice place to ramble. Life's been busy. Did the BrickFair thing this year, which was a lotta fun. I edited Episode 4 of The Invincible Osiris Jackson, which you should totally
, especially if you're a fan of Kingdom Hearts. I'm officially a proper Supervisor at The LEGO Store. Which means I'm responsible and stuff. I get a nice amount of latitude with what I do so I've room to figure out new ways to do stuff and a
Essays, Not Rants! 156: Superheroes Are For The Birds I’ve said too many times before that awards don’t always mean quality (especially when The Lego Movie gets ignored), but that doesn’t mean I still don’t have opinions. Especially when those opinions are about Birdman. I really enjoyed Birdman. Its shot-as-if-it’s-one-take-ness got a little obtrusive at times and bordered on being gimmicky, but its strong plotting and performances helped bring it past that. It was interesting and a great m
Essays, Not Rants! 218: Superhero Stardom (A Response) There’s a recent New York Times article I came across that laments how the rise of the superhero genre has conflated actor-stardom with character-stardom. The article itself doesn’t really chase down the points too well, but the central gist (as far as I can see) is that in the recent slate of films, characters have come to trump actors. As Wesley Morris suggests in the article, when you watch Oceans Eleven, it’s George Clooney doing all t
Essays, Not Rants! 135: Superhero Overdose If you haven’t heard, DC recently announced their cinematic plans for the next six years. We’ve got a Justice League movie, a Wonder Woman movie, one with the Flash, one with Aquaman, a Green Lantern movie, and so on. It’s DC’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers. They’re looking to emulate Marvel’s formula, releasing two a year. Not only that, it looks like most of the Justice League roster from the cartoon is getting their own movie (except Martian Manhunte
Essays, Not Rants! 257: Stuff From 2016 I Wanna Talk About Every year I do a thing on this blog where I list my top nine movies. Thing is, movies aren’t the only things that come out in a year. So here’s a list of a bunch of stuff in a bunch of different mediums that came out last year that I really liked that I wanna talk about. They may not be the best thing to come out of the year, but it’s stuff I want to talk about. Book: Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi I talked about this book when I first fin
Essays, Not Rants! 032: Storytelling and Parables Remember: This post is about storytelling, not the veracity of any religion Doesn’t matter what you think of Jesus, gotta admit the guy could tell a story. Or the people who recorded them spiffed them up. Either way, Jesus often communicated (religious and otherwise) points through stories in ways that were not heavy handed yet still managed to tell a good story. See, Jesus knew his audience. He knew that some people were inherently opposed t
Essays, Not Rants! 223: Sticking To The Obvious I put off watching Spotlight for a while. It had a lot going for it — talented cast and the subject matter — reporters investigating child abuse covered up by the Catholic Church — was charged, tragic, and topical. Way I saw it, this was gonna be a heavy, intense movie. Hence putting off watching a presumably gut-wrenching movie Which is why it’s so frustrating that Spotlight wastes so much potential in favor of being painfully obvious at best
Essays, Not Rants! 286: Stepping Away Ed Skrein – the dude who played Ajax in Deadpool — made headlines recently. Not for taking a role but rather for stepping down from one. See, he was tapped to be in the reboot adaption of Heckboy. But the character he was slated to play, Major Ben Daimio, is Japanese-American in the comics, and Ed Skrein is decidedly, er, white. Upon finding out that his casting would be whitewashing, Skrein stepped down from the role in order to not be part of that machin
Essays, Not Rants! 266: Star Wars’ Newfound Dearth Of White Guys The Star Wars video game Battlefront 2, the follow-up to 2015’s Battlefront, was revealed a couple weeks ago, and the sequel seems to be righting a lot of the mistakes of the first game. It boasts more interesting combat, the return of classes, multiple eras in which you can play, and Jedi Rey as a playable character (which, right there makes me wanna preorder it). Unlike the first, which was basically online multiplayer only, th
Essays, Not Rants! 367: Star Wars Trailer There’s a new Star Wars trailer, for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, and naturally, I am very excited. Because, y’know, Star Wars. There’s so much I dig about it (Rey’s fantastic new outfit, Poe and Finn on adventures, Leia!), and I’m fully aware that this is because it’s Star Wars and these movies will forever delight me no matter what. But here’s the thing, the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker is an essentially perfect example of how to tease a m
Essays, Not Rants! 316: Star Wars As An Anti-Capitalist Discourse Oh you thought I was kidding? Here we go. Star Wars takes a lot of cues from Westerns. Characters like Han Solo and places like Mos Eisley’s cantina make it pretty obvious. But it’s also apparent in where it takes place: the fringes of society. Be they remote planets desert or frozen, these stories take place away from economic and cultural hubs. Which, given that we follow the good guys, makes sense: implicit in the Star Wars
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Essays, Not Rants! 294: Spoilers and Reveals Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. That’s a spoiler, right? What about Luke fights Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back? How about Yoda’s the green dude Luke meets on Dagobah? Or Luke goes to Dagobah? Where does it stop being a spoiler and become plot information? Spoilers used to mean something that’d, well, spoil a surprise, ruin the story. It’d be telling someone that Lando betrays Han in Empire. Since at the point, the story seems to be pre
Essays, Not Rants! 258: Spoiled Endings I really liked Rise of The Tomb Raider up until the last thirty-odd minutes. Everything’s coming to a head, set ups are paying off, there’s a boss fight against a principal antagonist. You go to the next area and… There’s a cutscene, and in that cutscene the game ends, wrapping up most of the plot points with a tidy bow but still leaving a bunch frustratingly hanging for the inevitable sequel. You get another nice little plot button if you continue the g
Essays, Not Rants! 340: Spidey’s New York Narratives are a two way street. What you bring to them is what you get out of them. So let’s talk Spider-Man, the video game (again). Spider-Man, of course, takes place in New York. Because, well, duh. Now, I happen to live in New York and have lived here for most of the past six years. I went to college at NYU Gallatin down in the Village and lived in a semi-lousy apartment (okay, pretty lousy, it was a six floor walkup and there was no sink in t
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
I feel like I should have mentioned this earlier. For my January term I, and a group from Gallatin at NYU, are off to Spain and Morocco for a couple weeks. We just arrived in Cordoba today after spending the last few days in Madrid (and one in Toledo!). So I guess here are some quick highlights: Sometimes it seems like Spain has a vendetta against free public wifi Walking around Madrid is loads of fun Having epic group meals are fantastic; especially when your university is paying for both
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! 307: Space Car There is a car in space right now. Like an actual road-safe, driven on earth on an actual road, not-originally-intended-for-space car in space. And it was playing David Bowie until it ran out of juice. So, a while ago, Tesla/SpaceX/Boring Company founder/potential supervillain Elon Musk tweeted that the Falcon Heavy’s test payload would be his own Tesla Roadster. The Falcon Heavy is the latest rocket to come out of Musk’s SpaceX. Which sounds pretty cool b
