Category: TV and Movies

What Is Game Of Thrones For?

Warning: This post contains spoilers through the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire and the second season of Game of Thrones. Also, if you choose to follow the links, you are...

perspective in illustration

How The Avengers Succeeds

“They’re a mash-up; they’re insane,” Whedon says. “But the beauty of that is as exciting as the problem of that is daunting.” Marvel’s The Avengers is an impressive monster. A juggernaut at the box...

The Tragedy of Prometheus

by Sam Wilkinson I have never seen the movie Alien from beginning to end. I have seen the entire movie, but only ever in pieces. I can’t bring myself to watch it in one go, if...

Classic TV is Bad TV

TV isn’t better, just different. And someone in the future less swayed by the fads of today will see today’s TV as just different, but not better.

The People Problem

I am about 8 years old. My parents are out for the evening, and I am home with my younger sister, and Beverly, a baby-sitter we both like. Beverly introduced my sister and me...

“An Incompatible Combination”

I’ve watched every presidential debate thus far in the Republican primary.  And I’ve done more than my fair share of laughing, weeping, and sometimes just staring blankly at the television screen.  In a way,...

The Culture is Fine, Thanks

Forgive me for a little anti-curmudgeon curmudgeoning, but the numbers cited in this Mary Sue post by Jamie Frevele (and the post itself, to some extent) set off all my neurons. We see these dire...

Nostalgia and film

As a brief follow up to my post on upper-middle-class families in modern television and film, I’d like to respond to this comment by Sam MacDonald: Yes. If we could only go back to...

Tits! Swords! Edginess!

(Editor’s note: Erik’s praise for “Game of Thrones” drew me out of semi-retirement. Bear with me) One of the problems with easing constraints on a creative medium is that creators are inevitably tempted to...

TV Review: A Game of Thrones (HBO)

I have television in my house once again – for a little while. This is because it was cheaper to hook up television service when we were hooking up cable internet than to pay...

The Hunger Games (and other books and such)

I just finished the second book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy – Catching Fire. Both books have been really great reads – fast paced, suspenseful, extremely and surprisingly violent given their intended audience....

“Nuclear chivalry.”

As many have said before, it’s no coincidence that in the world of Hollywood blockbusters the last decade has been the decade of the superhero film. In the nineties our blockbusters brought us fantasy...