Complaining about the price of video games is an American pastime. It gives people great joy to grumble incessantly about a luxury product that requires the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars and the blood, sweat, and tears of technicians, artists—and yes, even…businesspeople—only for those same complainers to purchase said item and wind up having the time of their lives.
Read MoreFor those of you that have already purchased and read the first three issues, you may be wondering why I’m telling you to buy them again. You might even scoff at the idea. To you I say, please do not scoff, sir/madam. Because these new issues of Cities of Magick are not the same as the ones that came out of the Kickstarter campaigns.
Read MoreOstensibly, The Matrix Resurrections is about the toxicity of nostalgia, IP-farm-to-franchise filmmaking, and the way we reckon with our own creations many years after they have wormed their way into the collective imagination. But in truth it is about a guy in a coffee shop who simply cannot get his shit together. I empathize with this guy, mostly because he is played by Keanu Reeves. But that empathy will only carry one so far. There needs to be something worthwhile to carry one through.
Read MoreHow ironic is it then, that in a franchise defined partially by style (the women, the cars, the suits, the casinos, etc.) that the director who lacks an overt style of his own directed one of the best James Bond movies ever made? I’d argue that not only did he make one of the best Bond movies, but he also set a standard for blockbuster action movies in the 21st century.
Read MoreWhen you are dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all those likes and hearts and shares and retweets from your first day on the internet to your last, for just one chance to come back here as young men and women and live the life you pretended to have in other people’s pockets?
Read MoreMy view is that Rogue Nation doesn't just solidify Hunt's status amidst the pantheon of fictional do-gooders, I think it actually situates Ethan Hunt as the premier superhero across the entire history of cinema.
Read More…that’s one of the things that’s so infuriating about Zack Snyder’s Joss Whedon’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League (ZSJWZSJL). The entire enterprise is an exercise in cinematic gaslighting. The movie is constantly telling us that Superman was a great hero who can be trusted to protect planet Earth and its inhabitants. Bruce Wayne, who might as well be Superman’s publicist in this movie, is the one usually doing all the telling. But why should we believe Bruce? Why should we trust him? When have we ever seen either of these men act in a heroic fashion at all?
Read MoreGod, in this instance, is essentially putting out a hit on a child. In a court of law, the hitman—in this case, Abraham—is not solely responsible for the murder he commits. It is also the person who orchestrates the hit that bears some responsibility.
Read MoreThe following paragraphs are taken from an email I’ve been sending my gentile friends more or less every year on the day of Passover, or as you folks might refer to it: “that holiday based on the Disney film Prince of Egypt.” Since I originally wrote this document nine (!) years ago, I could not help but make some slight alterations to the text.
Read MoreLike it says on the tin.
Read MoreI have a new comic out on Kickstarter. I won’t go into too many of the details here, but you can check out the campaign page and decide for yourself if you want to back it (or at the very least spread the word). To whet your appetite however, here are some pages from Cities of Magick #1, a future-fantasy western by Will Tempest and yours truly.
Read MoreNo man who accepts himself as a weapon to be used by powers he cannot fully comprehend can stand his own reflection for long.
Read MoreBig news! George Kambadais and I are remastering our all-ages superhero action-comedy webcomic Suburban & Chickenhawk for print! Support on Kickstarter today!
It’s a lot of stuff.
Read More“Sometimes I’ll just start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”
- Michael Scott
Read MoreOver the course of the two hour and fifteen minute run time of Solo, viewers will get explained at so aggressively that their eyeballs may roll one full turn, or more, in their sockets. What I mean by that is that their eyeballs, at the start of the film, will be aimed forward--in their customary orientation--and then their eyeballs will rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees during the film, to then return back to their original forward-facing orientation, almost as if nothing had even transpired. But trust me, something has transpired.
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How will I ever be able to look my film school friends in the eye and say that I didn't love Federico Fellini's 8 1/2?
I did however love the idea behind it. The concept of a semi-autobiographical film about a film that interweaves plot with the inner workings of the main character's mind is an appealing one. Fellini & co. exteriorize protagonist Guido Anselmi's (Marcello Mastroianni) private thoughts, hopes, and dreams in a seamless and oftentimes beautiful way.
Oddly enough, this is also something video games can do very well. One of the best example in recent memory are the myriad flashback/hallucination sequences in Batman: Arkham Knight.
After I finished the film I found myself wondering if this kind of thing has been done in comics before. I'm sure there are more than a few ways to inject memory/thoughts/dreams directly into the visual fabric of an individual comic panel or a series of them. It's something I'll chew on going forward.
(You can see what else I've been watching lately over at my Letterboxd page.)
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New York City is crumbling. In many different ways. When I was young and would visit Manhattan with my parents, I thought I had arrived in Metropolis: City of Tomorrow. Now that I'm older and have sampled a variety of its locales and living situations I can say with confidence that New York City is a great big rotting organism shot through with shiny luxury condos. People run around the shell on its back, attempting to fix its disintegrating infrastructure and build skyward, but the skeleton that supports it all will one day turn to dust.
"....an examination by The New York Times has found that Mr. Lhota’s reach as a power broker has grown with new board appointments in Manhattan and on Long Island, giving him extraordinary sway over some of the most important aspects of New York life. But while Mr. Lhota remains a respected official, his growing web of jobs has led to potential conflicts of interest and competition for his time, complicating the still-flailing effort to resuscitate a transit system used by millions of people every day." -- NYT
"These apartments — seen as the scourge of landlords and the salvation of struggling New Yorkers — are at the center of a housing crisis that has swelled the ranks of the homeless and threatens to squeeze all but the affluent from ever-wider swaths of the city. But even as Mayor Bill de Blasio has made adding more affordable housing a signature pledge of his administration, the system that protects the city’s roughly one million regulated apartments is profoundly broken, a New York Times investigation has found." -- NYT
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That's all for now, folks. Stay sharp--that is definitely not me standing outside your window.
Peter Weir makes it seem super easy in Witness. Everything, from communicating just what kind of detective Harrison Ford’s John Book is to establishing the (admittedly simple) good cop vs. bad cop plot, is done with such economy that it can easily be taken for granted. Weir also knows when to rachet the tempo up. Book and Kelly McGillis’s Rachel fall in love slowly, gracefully, their feelings accumulating over time, so that when they finally embrace it causes an explosion of passion on screen (it helps that Ford is one of the best looking leading men in cinematic history). The final showdown works much in the same way, only with shotguns instead.
But it’s John Seale’s camera work that sets this film apart. His compositions, like Weir’s direction, are the result of a light touch. Door frames, windshields, exposed beams in a simple Amish kitchen—Seale uses the shapes created by these unassuming items to frame his figures in a way that makes it seem like that’s what the items were designed for in the first place. He opts for intense close ups whenever he can, as Ford and McGillis’s performances verge into nonverbal territory often. Seale excels at capturing the nearly imperceptible gestures and stolen glances that seem small onscreen but in fact do a great deal of heavy lifting for plot and performance alike.
“Capturing” is the operative word. In many scenes, especially those that examine the day to day life of the Pennsylvania Amish, Seale exhibits the skills of a documentarian, his eye focused on his subjects without bias nor judgment.
Wow, The Weekend in Review is back? That's crazy!
I, like all 7 billion people on planet Earth, saw Avengers: Infinity War. Here are my thoughts:
My (very minor) notes concerning the music, video games, and things I wrote in 2017.
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