I think I've mentioned Film Crit Hulk and his interesting essays a couple of times recently. Here's a video essay that's especially interesting: Why Star Wars Works: A Scene-by-Scene Breakdown. (The closed captions on the video seem reasonably decent, but you can also read the scriptIt doesn't focus on the themes or meaning or lore, but on the ( Read more... )

I stumbled upon a blog by a military historian who analyzes pop culture, and his series on the Battle of Helm's Deep and the Siege of Gondor are fascinating. He analyzes both the book and movie versions of the battles (which have some crucial differences). And is fair enough to note that while the movie versions usually make far less sense and have ( Read more... )

Because there is more to say about Kingsman.

On Wednesday, Will at Something Short and Snappy posted a dissection of the many, many problems this movie ported over from the Bond films and their ilk while apparently trying to distance itself from those problems. The white cast versus the PoC villains, the princess offering sexual favors for saving ( Read more... )

Approximately fifty billion years after the rest of the internet, I have finally seen Guardians of the Galaxy. While it was indeed a great popcorn movie with a script that seemed tighter and a bit cleverer than average and many scenes of Zoe Saldana being awesome, I had a persistent feeling of being off-kilter throughout which couldn’t entirely be ( Read more... )

I have approximately three million backlogged, half-finished thoughts on Stuff I Have Read/Watched Lately. Here's a few to clear out the queue.

( A Stranger in Olondria / Sofia Samatar )

I watched these movies at different times over the last year, and they seemed like a good pairing. Trio-ing? Um. How about, "If you liked x, you might also like y."

Today’s SpecialThis movie is fluffy and adorable. Samir quits his sous chef job in a huff when his boss promotes someone else, claiming Samir’s cooking lacks passion. Then Samir’s ( Read more... )

It's so much more fun to go to the movies with a person as prone to making up wild stories about the previews as yourself. (You know the previews deserve it. Your version is much more interesting ( Read more... )

Inevitably, whenever someone expresses discontent about how a movie/book/TV show had plot holes you could drive a semi truck through, or characters so shallow they evaporated before your eyes, or big ugly smears of sexism/racism/homophobia/the rest of the vile package, someone will pop up and say, “But it’s just a fluffy movie/book/TV show and isn’ ( Read more... )

I finally saw the new movie version of Les Miserables. I have many thoughts about it! For instance, at the beginning when they show Valjean dragging the gigantic flagpole all Jesus-like, my immediate thought was, "Nationalism: the downtrodden's cross to bear? The burden of the prison-industrial complex?" Surely someone has already written an essay ( Read more... )

One of the things I like about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is its end: rather than gaining valuable experience from this adventure which Makes Him A ManTM, Jim Hawkins tells us that he still has nightmares about his ordeal. Shipping off with pirates might be fun for the reader, but it isn’t character-building or fun for anyone involved ( Read more... )