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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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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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