Blog Archives
sLost in Space, Netflix’s revamp of the classic SF TV series, is so abysmally bad that there’s no end to the possible critiques one could lodge against it. The biggest complaint—and, ultimately, the only one that matters—is that it’s boring. Tedious. Excruciatingly bland and stupefying. In fact, the only thing that broke up the boredom […]
Marvel’s been carving a vast swathe through cinema history. With 19 movies released over the last 10 years, all of them inhabiting the same shared universe, they’ve built one of the most impressive and lucrative film empires in cinema history. (Even their flops are better than, say, most of DC’s offerings.) According to the best sources […]
Far Cry 5: I Was Wrong About Why It’s Bad… But It’s Still Bad
Monday , 23, April 2018 Computer Games 13 CommentsI was wrong about Far Cry 5. When I saw the first publicity photos—featuring a panoply of villains with an American flag with crosses on it—I assumed the game would be a hatchet job on Americans, Christian Americans, and gun-owning Christian Americans. Mea bad. Mea maxima bad.
Modern movies are mostly awful. It’s rare you find even one worthy of a recommendation, and to find two? Well, that’s like winning the modern movie lottery. And to find two movies worthy of a recommend on the same day, movies that are absolutely and intrinsically opposed to each other in concept and execution, is […]
The Order of the Stick is one of those things that should never have worked. A comedic strip, illustrated entirely in stick figures, set in a literal D&D campaign world (complete with earning XP and other RPG tropes), with a dense, multi-layered plot, produced over the span of fifteen years, and still not done? Absolutely […]
Modern American culture is nothing more than a geek media Skinner Box. The vast majority of geek gunk is driven by pure nostalgia. Creativity seems to have been banished, and with all the reboots and remakes all we do is endlessly recycle the identical characters, costumes, and props, endlessly retelling slightly different stories about the […]
The Princess Bride opens with Fred Savage in bed suffering from a dire illness, the likes of which has seldom been encountered by mere mortal men. I can empathize because, indeed as I write these very words, my body is under assault from some vicious scourge more suited to a zombie horror movie (or a Cloverfield […]
Jessica Jones, an ostensible superhero, is a compulsive narcissist, a miserable bitch who spreads misery wherever she goes. The first season of this Netflix Marvel show tried to justify her miserable narcissism by blaming it on her dead family and her insanely-tragic-in-an-over-the-top-adolescent-way past history with a mind control psycho. Fair enough. The funniest thing about […]
Borderlands 2 is one of those games where it’s a damn shame the people who made it are such total creepos and jerks, because it really is quite good but the experience of playing it is ruined if you know anything about them. Pandora, the planet Borderlands is set on, is a crazy funhouse version […]
Every so often I find myself doing something completely inexplicable and retroactively justifying it to myself by saying “Well, maybe I can write about it for Castalia House.” Seriously, why CH hasn’t fired me yet, I have no idea. So how about that Red vs. Blue, huh? Red vs. Blue—RvB for short—is, or was, a […]
Modern day cinema should be a window into a world of marvels. Special effects are better than they’ve ever been, allowing us to depict anything we can imagine. Take the trio of “The Lord of the Rings” movies. Gorgeous, stirring, and while not perfect, they’re so damn good it’s astounding. Then, at the other end […]
Blame Netflix. Oh, sure, I’ve had vast numbers of people DEMAND that I review this cinematic catastrophe, but since I wasn’t ever going to spend any money on seeing it, I could plausibly wave off. “Nope, sorry. I’m too busy, it’s too expensive, and my astrologer says ‘no can do’.” Then Netflix went and put […]