Because I’m Bored, Let’s Figure Out Every Dexter Character’s Signature “DISCO Elysium” Skill
Something I’ve always enjoyed in my time writing critically on media are weird comparisons — taking two pieces of media that otherwise would never be placed alongside each other and seeing how hard I have to smash them together to generate something interesting. In that vein, I recently finished binging Dexter, and made a joke with a friend who also loves Disco Elysium about whether Dexter Morgan had access to Shivers. Then I thought about it a little too long… and this happened.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once vs. the Decade of Cynical Art
As we all slowly drift away from the media landscape of the 2010s, I’ve found myself obsessed with what might be its most unwavering aesthetic pillar. From the Marvel Universe’s cinematic sprawl, to our final great shared cultural object in the form of Game of Thrones, to the explosion of reality TV, to a set…
A Tribute, to the Redemptive Science-Fiction of Person of Interest
There’s a lot of advice floating around for would-be writers, ranging from the omnipresent (read always, write always) to the niche (write at this time of day, always write this many words per day, etc.), but the two best pieces I’ve ever received both dealt with what is probably the hardest of all moments to…
Rogue One: A (Star) War(s) Story
Rogue One is many things. It is an action movie, an abbreviated hero narrative, a heist film (for about twenty minutes), and, yes, undeniably, a Star Wars story. However, more than anything else, Rogue One is a war movie, and it inhabits that intersection between escapist action and a horrors-of-war narrative better than any other…
You Might Have Missed: The Handmaiden
There is no such thing as a perfect film. But, at least in my view, there are films that are in and of themselves and as pieces of their respective genres the best they could possibly be. And as you can probably imagine, I could count all of them on one hand. That’s not necessarily…
The Refreshing Horror and Heart of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has, at its core, two very different movies fighting for dominance. One is the modern mediocre action movie, with its clichéd, easy-to-predict one-liners and bland, slightly-stubbled leading man and elaborately choreographed yet snore-inducing hand-to-hand combat sequences. The other is a genuinely deep and compelling iteration on the series it carries on—a…
Your Name: A Film on Reality, Seen through Fantasy
Your Name (Japanese title: Kimi no Na wa) is one of those rare pieces of art that defies genre classification—that breaks every assumption and expectation of science-fiction, fantasy, and coming-of-age narratives, and that takes our reductionist approach to film and fiction and shows that nice, convenient labels are never necessary in creating powerful works. It simultaneously melds body-swapping and time…
Mustang: Beautiful Filmmaking in Its Rawest Form
It’s not often that a film will leave me at a loss for words. Mustang, a foreign film co-produced by France, Germany, and Turkey (in which it’s set), defied every expectation I’d had for how I’d feel when it ended. I knew it had been well-received, that it had won awards, that it had been nominated for a…
A Tribute, to the Wild, Wonderful Weirdness of Gravity Falls
I’m not a fan of binge-watching. In my mind, television, like every serialized medium, is best when experienced week-by-week—the anticipation building with every cliffhanger and every inexorable countdown to the next episode, all that tension to be released in one euphoric rush before the cycle begins again. In comparison, blasting through a season in one dazed weekend…
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Sunset Over Ithaca 