I’m about to come clean here. I am an Empire Strikes Back guy. You should know us by now. We are the pretentious idiots who swear up and down that ESB is one of the most important films out of the original Star Wars trilogy. I was seven when I first saw that film, and as the credits rolled, I …
Listiography: Egg Hunting in Ready Player One
This weekend, audiences are lining up to watch the Steven Spielberg directed adaptation of Ernest Cline’s nostalgia-fest Ready Player One. There’s a lot to love here. With Spielberg at the helm and Cline co-writing, the film might be one of the few film adaptations to stick the landing. While I’m busy writing up the film and chopping it up into …
Where Homage Meets Understanding: What Pacific Rim: Uprising Gets Wrong
There’s a moment in the third act of Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018, dir. Stevens DeKnight), right in the middle of its thunderous final battle, where a character runs by a giant mecha statue right in the heart of a Tokyo. This moment single-handedly ruined the whole movie for me. Yes, I had already been engaged by its metal munching, monster-crunching …
Just A Wrinkle: Why Disney’s Newest Adaptation Shows the Flaws of Bringing Classics to Theaters
When it was announced that Disney was finally bringing a film adaptation of bring the beloved classic “A Wrinkle in Time” to the big screen, fans rejoiced. Adding Ava DuVernay (director of the 2015 film Selma) to the fold as the director seemed liked icing on the cake. With DuVernay’s eye and a Disney budget, it was safe to bank …
The Beauty of Culture and Conflict in Marvel’s Black Panther
There were a few moments while watching Black Panther (2018, dir. Ryan Coogler) in which I found myself laughing out loud in the theater, and it wasn’t because there was anything particularly humorous happening on screen. I mostly laughed because I wondered how director Ryan Coogler was able to accomplish something so simple and yet still unheard of during my …
Film Poetics: Spotlight on Guillermo del Toro
“Film poetics” is a term which runs parallel to the David Bordwell theory of the “historical poetics of cinema” in that it looks at the specifics of film production. Film poetics takes this a step further in stating that everything that goes into a film (set design, writing, lighting, wardrobe) harmonizes with the vision of its director to create one …