Pandemic 2020
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Coming of Age in the End of the World: Big Mouth Season 4
Coming of age stories are some of the most popular, enduring, and accessible fictions in pop culture. They can comprise gorgeous films like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood or Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird to gross-out fare like Superbad or Sex Drive or Blockers to more supernatural stuff like It or Stranger Things or Super Dark Times to the fact that half of all YA novels starting with Twilight could be classified as ‘coming of age’ in some way or another; and that’s only stuff that started in the last 15 years or so. I’m sure I missed other important examples. Coming of age stories are everywhere and have been so for decades…
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As if They Never Left. Animaniacs 2020 and What We Want from Television Reboots
The famous 1959 film, Ben-Hur, won 11 Oscars the year it was released and grossed the second highest box office total for any film ever made at the time. It was a cultural phenomenon the likes of which very few movies, then or now, could ever hope to achieve. It is still remembered today, though opinions on it after sixty years are of course mixed. It is something of a time-capsule of a film, a view to a very different Hollywood that made movies in very different ways with very different means of profit-making and different audiences in mind. Ben-Hur was also a remake of a 1925 film titled: Ben-Hur:…
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Daredevil Season 3 is Amazing and Already from a Different Era
The fourth episode of the third season of Netflix’s Daredevil contains what is perhaps the most technically impressive one-take shot in television history. An eleven minute ‘oner’ that begins with a multi-party fight in an infirmary, moves to an intense and emotional and plot-relevant conversation in a storage closet, and then climaxes in an escape/fight sequence through an honest-to-God prison riot. Even if the rest of the season had been an utter disappointment (it wasn’t), watching Daredevil Season 3 would be worth it just to experience the sheer action-filmmaking triumph that is the prison fight one-take. The shot is the cinematic centerpiece of an overall fantastic season, and just reading…
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The United States of Waiting and Worry: Election Week 2020
Deep down, we knew it was going to be like this. We’d been told over and over before the election that with mail-in balloting and the surge in voter turnout this year that definitive results in the most consequential presidential election in generations would most likely not come in on election night. I believe most of us even accepted this warning, on an intellectual level at least if not an emotional one. Because that was the problem, wasn’t it? We just didn’t get how four years of the most destabilizing and destructive President in at least a century; a President who was impeached already for attempted election interference, the most…
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The Pandemic Special and What South Park Means in 2020
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The Pandemic Special and What South Park Means in 2020
My friends and I have been asking ourselves different versions of the same question since March of this year: “How will [INSERT SHOW TITLE HERE] adapt to Covid-19 next season?” There have, of course, been quite a few bigger fish to fry in terms of anxiety this year than wondering if It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia can stick the landing in this new television landscape; but as a media-obsessed person living in lockdown, it was a relieving form of idle speculation. Scripted television shows we had loved for years were going to have to figure out new ways of being, new topics to consider, new styles of presentation, much like…
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The United States of Waiting and Worry: Election Week 2020
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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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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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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.…
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The Infinite Fantasy of The Dragon Prince
Happy quarantine, everyone. I hope we’re all staying safe and healthy and managing to keep our sanity. It’s a strange and scary time but at least we still have comforts and escapes to get us through. I, for one, have been re-watching a bunch of shows on my various streaming services these last couple weeks. Shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth, and Better Call Saul; all great ways to find a laugh or at least get your mind off everything that’s been going on (or you just finished watching all the shows that start with ‘A’). And I know for a fact, that I am not the…
