Another December, another massive opening for a Star Wars movie—this time to the tune of $450 million worldwide. That alone isn't really surprising; Star Wars fans tend to be the See It Opening Weekend type. What is surprising, though, is how divisive the film turned out to be. (Star Wars fans also tend to be […]
Living in New York, one grows accustomed to building safeguards. Commuting via the subway, for instance, requires specific defensive measures. The MTA suffers from chronic delays, regular breakdowns, the occasional track fire, and serious overcrowding. One conventional escape for most passengers is the application of headphones. Listening to music or a podcast (the city is […]
First released last year for a bevy of other platforms, Furi is all boss fights. With pounding synth-heavy music and a visual style riffing off of anime and cyberpunk, it's an unending stream of big-bad showdowns, the sort of challenging, mano a mano fights usually served up as level or quest climaxes in other games. […]
Click:Plastic bag manufacturing machine Atlanta is the smartest show on television. I’m unoriginal in that sentiment—for the entirety of its first season, which emerged in 2016 with the marvel and depth of an art-house indie film, it was regarded as such—but that doesn’t make it any less genuine, or true. Depending on how you color […]
More than 40 years ago this month, MAD Magazine founder William M. Gaines managed to outrage hundreds of his loyal readers, all by barely lifting a finger. For the April 1974 issue of his happily juvenile comedy rag—a mix of pop-culture parodies, political humor, and sound-effect-saturated comic strips—Gaines’ staff went with a cover illustration guaranteed […]
Though no one realized it at the time, the summer of 2003 was an apex moment for Z-grade cinema. That June, Tommy Wiseau released his crackpot rom-dram-com The Room in Los Angeles, giving viewers their first taste of the writer-director-star’s penchant for hammy performances and nonsensical non sequitors (“I did not hit her! Oh, hai, […]
Meeting a Monster is incredibly painful. It’s supposed to be. Created using audio recordings and re-enactments, the virtual reality experience recounts the story of Angela King, a woman who spent eight years in the white power movement and is now trying to confront the person she was—and is. It would be hard to watch at […]
After the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, I downloaded the audiobook version of No Time to Spare, one of the final tomes from the celebrated fantasy writer. It’s a clear-headed dialectic on getting old and getting on with it and I hoped, in choosing the audiobook, to hear Le Guin on the other side, […]
Click:fugitive emission gate valve I had a view, and my view was this: Serial sexual abusers should submit to castration. Castration, I believed, would sideline the abuser’s compulsions and thus keep the world safe from him (or her lol). While castration hasn’t been tested on abusers in the Harvey Weinstein style, it’s been used with […]
The premise of Westworld rests on an uneasy relationship between a town’s residents and the “newcomers”: wealthy, oblivious visitors, convinced that a new cowboy hat gives them permission to do whatever they like. In other words, there’s no better allegory for what happens to Austin during South By Southwest. Presumably to placate their Austinite hosts, […]