A retrospective on my family’s endless obsession with movies, as well as The Fast and the Furious’ place within it.
Tenet: Nolan's Most Interesting Misfire
Bojack Horseman: The View from Halfway Down
The final scene with Diane and Bojack on the roof, recalling their first roof talk in season 1, doesn’t recontextualize the show so much as restate its core – the loving, strained, and sometimes outright broken relationship between the two. In Diane’s relationship with Bojack, we reach the show’s core questions. “How do we best treat those we love in our life who continue to hurt themselves and others?” “What boundary do we draw between ourselves and others?” And, to Bojack, who has asked this question of Diane since season 1 and always been disappointed: “Am I a good person?”
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World vs. Neo-Platonic Romance
When I first saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I absolutely adored it. I hadn’t actually dated any human being at this point, like any self-respecting antisocial misanthropic middle/high school mankin, but I fell in and fell in hard with the ethos and romantic message of the film, especially the anti-hero characterization of the titular Scott Pilgrim. Years later, and in the context of the graphic novels and culture as a whole, the film does not appear in such a rosy light.
Bumblebee and the Romantic '80s
So, I saw Bumblebee recently, and if you want my tl;dr thoughts, I thought it was rather good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was fantastic, and it ended up being one of my favorite popcorn films of the year (in a crowded year, too). However, having seen it a couple times, I’ve started having some mixed feelings on its relationship to nostalgia, the ‘80s aesthetic, and how this relates to how we consume media in general. So weirdly enough, to truly communicate what I thought about Bumblebee, we first need to discuss…
Socrates. Huh?
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
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
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
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, 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.
Call of Duty: Finite Warfare
The Last Jedi: Concept vs. Execution
Star Wars and Higher Innocence
In the seemingly endless waking nightmare that is our existence with the Star Wars and Marvel “Cinematic Universes,” we have been treated to a lot, a lot of talking about Star Wars, but it’s not exactly a critical discourse. It’s more akin to a nonstop ejaculation from—what I can only assume Disney’s horde of marketing people would condescendingly refer to as—the “enthusiast” demographic.
Saints Row and Deviant Optimism
Saints Row: The Third should be, by all accounts, an unremarkable game. Most everything about it is “competent” and nothing more. The gameplay, running around and shooting with no cover, is fine. The missions are fine. The open world is mostly lifeless and small. Yet it was easily one of my favorite games of 2011, one that I plugged around 100 hours into over multiple playthroughs, and the entry of the Saints Row franchise that put the series on the map as more than a Grand Theft Auto clone. Why? What is so damn special about this also-ran open world crime game?
That New Terminator and the End of Originality
So, in case you haven’t heard, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Linda Hamilton are working together again on a new Terminator film. They’re saying all the right things: they’re returning to the roots of the original two films; they’re resetting the franchise, essentially; they’re pretending the films Terminator 3 onward do not exist. And I was on board. Until they said, “…and we want to make it three movies.”
…and then I was very much off board.
Death Note and Removing Easy Outs for the Audience
Trying to process Netflix’s new adaptation of Death Note is an exercise in schizophrenia. Adaptation is already one of the most delicate tasks that can be bemoaned from both sides—i.e. being too faithful or not faithful enough—but on top of that, it appears to take influence from several other random sources. Heathers, Final Destination, a slick aesthetic and synth-laden soundtrack all come together on top of an already complicated story. And the sad truth is, the sum of all these pieces (that I love on their own) come together to make something that is merely “eh” and seriously dramatically muddled.
Movies, Innocence, and Identity
There’s this cute little moment in The Office. It’s pretty simple; Michael has just moved back into his office as manager and Erin lists all the random comfort items he has—a humidifier, a dehumidifier, a foot fan (?), most importantly, a Casio keyboard. Erin turns on the keyboard and a dinky little tune comes out. Before they start wiggling to the music, Michael says, “It’s good to be home.” It’s silly; it’s small. It’s also one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.
And I can't stop thinking about it.
Dunkirk and the Death of Certainty
The last proper “war film” I saw was Letters from Iwo Jima (or the rightly praised Band of Brothers if we’re counting television). These stories, and most war films, depend on creating attachments to characters and then throwing them through escalating, harrowing conflicts, leading to a cathartic or bittersweet ending with a message of the author’s choosing. Many of you must realize I’m not just describing war movies—I’m talking about the classic three-act structure of the majority of film. To discuss our mainstream portrayals of war in cinema is to analyze some of the very foundations of the medium. Many of our earliest films deal with war—propaganda, historical re-enactments. When the (short-lived) Yugoslavian filmmaking industry began after the end of World War 2, the majority of their films were Partisan war films. The purpose has both cynical pragmatism and genuine artistic intention. Creating characters we care about in the service of a greater cause or country lets the audience conflate their sympathy with said greater cause. The structure of most war film is rote and uninteresting for a reason—it intrudes on the audience’s viewing in no way whatsoever, stepping aside and letting the message or conflict have center stage. Pauline Kael once wrote that many “classic” films are from the studio era precisely because of their bland, utilitarian technique—anything more forced and they wouldn’t stand the test of time. War films and their story structures are the same way. Most of us don’t want uncertainty in our darkest times—we desire to see heroes of simply, wholly good character face adversity or evil and overcome it. Whatever may happen to the hero’s cause, we are certain at least that their cause will prevail.
Oh, what I would do for such reassuring feelings right now.
Resident Evil 7 Part 2: The Impotence of the Reset Button
Upon finishing Resident Evil 7 on my third sitting in a scant seven and a half hours, my first thought was, "What now?" Well, fine, it wasn’t quite that philosophical—I laughed about Chris Redfield’s new boy-band-Ryan-Gosling-in-The-Notebook-ass-face and wondered aloud why the hell he was working for Umbrella now (the series’ stock Evil Corporation.) Still, despite the ending’s seeming dogged determination to wrap every story thread up with as pretty a bow as possible, I left feeling rather unresolved on the future of the series.
Resident Evil 7 Part 1: The Catharsis of Horror
For the next few days, I’m going to be playing Resident Evil 7 every day and writing my impressions and thoughts as I go. Obviously, what I write will be affected by the gameplay of the day, but I’ll also expand the scope of my writing from time to time as needed. For this introduction and first piece, it is clearly such a time.
I have a weird relationship with the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 on the Wii in middle school, at a time when I was definitely unprepared for the ceaseless tension and difficulty in the gameplay. Yet, despite leaving every play session as an emotionally exhausted husk, despite having to pause the game and organize the inventory every few seconds to give myself time to breathe, there was something perversely compelling about the experience.