I Made a Thing

I Made a Thing

Super quick post here. You’ve likely noticed how quiet the blog’s been in the past month or so, and it’s because I’ve been participating in not one (!) but TWO (!!) game jams (!!!) for the month of November!

https://ari-runanin-telle.itch.io/euretta

The first was a solo project in my usual wheelhouse — a text adventure written quite a bit like a screenplay called Euretta. In it, a Stranger wanders the wild northwestern forests of California as a type of underworld as he searches to bring his wife back from the dead.

As with all tragedies, not everything is as it first appears.

Twin Peaks and the Search of the Western

Twin Peaks and the Search of the Western

When I first started this blog, I had one main goal: to talk about films and games in an engaged manner without getting overly academic about it; to remove the artifice of pretension from my writing without sacrificing any observations on deeper meaning. Now, for the most part, this goal has manifested itself in writing about the sometimes profound meaning some action films hold for me. And while I think that’s a worthy pursuit, I also understand how pretentious that can appear. It’s like saying, “Look, you just don’t GET Sylvester Stallone like I do, okay?” So, in the interest of trying a different approach, and just because I can’t get this particular subject out of my damn head, we’re going to look at something far more “high-brow” and written about…

The third season of Twin Peaks. And how its haunting feeling of emotional loss is the core of the entire show.

Cliffhanger and the Sincerity of Sylvester Stallone

Cliffhanger and the Sincerity of Sylvester Stallone

While he’s received a little renaissance of sorts with the release of Creed and soon Creed II, Stallone has always seemed a little like the sloppy seconds of the ‘80s. There’s The Terminator and then Rambo, True Lies and then Demolition Man, Eraser and, well… Assassins, Stallone’s filmography always playing second fiddle in popularity. This sounds horribly harsh, but this second-hand feeling points to a crucial truth in Stallone’s emotional core as an actor… (and yes, I just said that)…

The fear of being overlooked.

Mission: Impossible as Screwball Comedy

Mission: Impossible as Screwball Comedy

The name, “popcorn flick,” and even to a degree, “Mission: Impossible” itself encourages a passive viewing experience, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get contract: the viewer agrees to only look for certain elements and ignore everything else, and the movie agrees to check those boxes. It is a blockbuster compromise—the film accepts a level of derision from the audience, and the audience accepts to like the movie a certain amount for indulging them. This phenomenon is best encapsulated in the phrase, “It was stupid, but it was fun.” We’re going to talk about everything else — specifically, how Mission Impossible is at its heart, a comedy.

Arby 'n the Chief: The Anxiety of Adulthood

Arby 'n the Chief: The Anxiety of Adulthood

Arby ‘n the Chief, more than ever, strikes me as an artifact of its time—late ‘00s Xbox Live culture—and as created by a man who is smarter than he is capable of articulating at the time as he experiences growing pains both as a director and as an early adult in his 20s. And those growing pains—that fuzzy grey area between childhood and adulthood, and all the insecurity and uncertainty that comes with that—those are what give the show its surprisingly resonant emotional core and its funniest, most endearing moments, what led to its widespread success.