Opinion
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The Boys Will Show You the Truth: Superheroes are Terrifying.
Imagine you are a criminal. I know, I know. You’re not. You’re a good person with hopes and dreams and you pay your taxes on time. You never speed in school zones. But, just for a second, imagine it. Let’s say you and your crew (cause of course you have a crew) have decided to commit a standard starter-crime in a comic book universe. You’re going to rob a bank. The reasons why you choose to rob a bank, or even why that particular bank on that particular day in that particular part of Metropolis/Gotham/Spiderman’s New York; don’t particularly matter. They matter to you of course. Maybe you are simply…
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Bill & Ted Face the Music is the Sequel America Needs Now
Sometimes a movie just turns out better than it should. The premise is tired, or it’s a sequel to a series that everyone (probably rightly) thought was long dead, or it’s made by a director or studio that you have deservedly lost all confidence in. Yet it works. Something about it, the writing, the way all the main actors commit to their roles, the fact that updated effects actually managed to make a difference. It just works. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a great example of this; a pointless cash-grab decades-late sequel that’s somehow hilarious and just plain enjoyable to watch. The first Pirates of the Caribbean; a movie…
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The Bubble is a Metaphor: the Strange Pleasure of Sports in a Pandemic.
Edit: So this article aged hilariously fast, didn’t it? Apologies for how immediately wrongheaded this article proved to be. I stand by the parts that are still both accurate and relevant. I’ve been watching a lot of hockey and basketball lately. That is not my attempt to excuse the utter lack of content I’ve been posting to this site for the last couple months. That gap occurred because all my writing time and thought were dedicated to finishing an agent-ready draft of my novel (which I have now done, so get at me agents!), and I didn’t want to waste your time and mine with some half-assed post neither of…
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The Future is a Little Lonely: Marc Rebillet’s Drive-in Concert
We’re in a strange time right now. I realize that might be the most mind-numbingly obvious thing you’ve ever read but I’m also sure it’s something you’ve said at least once to someone in your life in the last week, or it was said to you. Because it’s an all-over kind of strangeness we’re dealing with right now, it is far more than one thing. It feels as though almost everything about modern American society is in flux. There’s been the COVID-19 pandemic (duh) and the quarantine that followed, bringing nearly everyone’s life to a more noticeable halt than anything in the last fifty years. Unless you’re an essential worker…
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The Great, and Its Many Reflections on Power
So I’m going to begin this article today with a somewhat embarrassing admission. You know that famous Oscar Wilde quote: “Everything in the world is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power“? While I’d always found that quote funny and useful (acknowledging that it may be something Oscar Wilde never said), I don’t believe I ever fully understood what it was getting at until I was most of the way through binge-watching the first season of Hulu’s The Great this weekend. You see, I’d always thought it was about lust as motivation and the way in which lust can transform and curdle. Or, to put it more directly…
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Solar Opposites: Living in the Shadow of Rick and Morty
Orson Welles wrote, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane when he was 25. Despite the fact that its’ box office performance was only considered mediocre at the time (it was eventually re-released and made plenty of money, don’t worry), it was…you know, Citizen Kane. Even now, just the title is considered shorthand for ‘great fucking movie’. The myth is that Orson Welles spent the rest of his career trying to live up to the impossible-to-meet expectations set by Citizen Kane, his debut feature film. Though it is somewhat disproven by the string of successful movies he acted in, or directed throughout his career or just the famous opening sequence in…
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An Ode to Bookstores
I miss bookstores. Do you miss bookstores? Now, look, there are plenty of other admittedly more important problems arising from this quarantine; and plenty of other more visibly devastated mediums. One of the best things about a book after all, is that it can provide you with the same joy and escape and thought no matter where you bought it or where you’re reading it. A movie is objectively different when seen in a theater compared to your TV. Live music is how music is meant to be experienced. The loss of movie theaters and concerts right now is a tragedy and I desperately hope both of those industries can…
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Why Does Star Wars Matter So Much?
I’m exhausted today, as I write this post. Last Monday, on Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you), my roommates and I re-watched Empire Strikes Back to celebrate. Watching that fantastic movie for the fiftieth time (at least for myself), naturally got us talking about all manner of things related to Star Wars. And then, as seems to be the case recently whenever nerds the world over begin speaking about the storied franchise, we started talking about everything we thought had gone wrong with the sequel trilogy. That conversation just wrapped up half an hour ago. That’s why I didn’t post anything last Wednesday. Nine straight days to…
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Masterpieces in Some Other World: Mac Miller’s Circles and D.F.W.’s The Pale King
I finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. For those of you who don’t know, The Pale King is an unfinished novel. David Foster Wallace had been working on it off and on for about ten years, and while he had hundreds of thousands of polished and publish-ready words set aside in a neat stack, it remained incomplete when he succumbed to his depression and killed himself in September of 2008. His longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, was given the task of putting the book together using the stack of manuscript Wallace had set aside, other chapters and…
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Tinder Conversations in the Time of COVID
Tinder sucks. This is a fact, not an opinion. It’s something that anyone who has any experience of the app knows is true in the same way we know gravity pulls things down to Earth, water is a requirement for life, and the Eragon movie is a tragedy beyond imagining. It’s an awful, shallow app that magnifies all the worst parts of yourself while destroying any shred of self-esteem you might have had lying around. All of which might be why it’s so popular. It’s an almost perfect analog for all the ways normal IRL dating make you feel. All from the convenience of your phone, just a swipe away.…
