Right away, the cinematography of The Gift implies something is not right with the film’s central couple, Simon and Robyn (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall). As Jim Hemphill writes in his review of the film for Paste: [Director Joel] Edgerton’s eerily still and angular compositions, in which Simon and Robyn are repeatedly framed through glass, … Continue reading Stranger Danger
Imagine yourself wearing a pair of latex gloves, scraping some dust off the surface of your favourite book or movie with a scalpel and tapping it into a glass vial of clear fluid. Now seal the vial and shake it, stare into its contents. When little Venus symbols to start floating in the solution you can declare to all … Continue reading On Evaluative Criticism
I can’t remember how many turn-based strategy games I’ve played in a row but these days it seems like the games that excite me the most involve commanding sprites along a grid in small, squad-sized skirmishes. Case in point, the most recent I played was The Banner Saga. In The Banner Saga, the player guides two separate caravans … Continue reading Resource Based Humanity
Director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy is one of the most respected works of fiction in the past decade, uniting popular and critical audiences in rarely agreed celebration of its value and importance to contemporary fiction. Its exclusion from the 2009 Academy Award “Best Picture” category sparked considerable controversy and even prompted the Academy … Continue reading The Fascist We Deserve: The Authoritarian Ideology of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy
Violence is paramount to maintaining fantasy fiction and disembodied violence is a pillar of the fantasy genre. Disembodied violence is the celebration of violent power, or the expression of violent power against unthinking but vaguely human-shaped antagonists; it’s the kind of violence that isn’t really violent because it doesn’t take place against another person. Take Iron Man 2: in … Continue reading Imagine the Power: Disembodied Violence in Fantasy Traditions
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