Review| A Hidden Life
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden…
Review| The Lighthouse (2019)
For a while now I have been contemplating how filmmaking changed with the introduction of sound in film. The dawn of the “talkies” is an innovation that I am not at all sure we have fully come to terms with…
Review| Skin (2019)
What are the factors and events that must happen in order to shift a person away from a violent and dangerous system of thought? Most of the answers given to this question are understandably abstract, because no singular process of…
Review| Crawl (2019)
The horror genre, since its inception, has busied itself with social commentary from macro to micro. Standouts have been made across that spectrum. It is one of the many flexible components of genre-filmmaking: the ideas driving the films can be…
Review| Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury
There is a whole generation of people (myself included) that were raised on CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) artists, most of which was a mere husk in form of popular music that was created at the same time. For every Michael…
How Culture Has Killed the Zombie: The Dead Don’t Die and the Death of Meaning
“[George Romero] turns the whole concept into something completely different. You can’t control the zombies. They are out of control. Generally, monsters — vampires, Frankenstein, Godzilla, whatever — they are outside the social structure. They are a danger to it, they are…
It’s Not About You: Godzilla: King of the Monsters and the Legacy of Toho
However, Godzilla: King of the Monsters maintains the legacy of the franchise in a way that the 1998 or 2014 do not because of their overtly Western narrative frameworks. It concentrates on the kaiju, first and foremost, while obscuring the human stories in order to broaden the thematic world beyond the human perspective, and it maintains the environmental critique that has been present since the first film. Within the legacy of Toho, the film is everything one could expect.
Aladdin (2019): Phenomenal, Cosmic Powers; Identity-Giving Loving Space
The luckless Aladdin, whose luck turns around; his beloved Jasmine, a princess far above his station; and Jafar, the dark vizier consumed with a dark purpose. The story would hardly be complete without identities concealed and then discovered; what else…
Review| 13 Minutes to the Moon and an Echo of a Greater Mission
Most episodes of 13 Minutes to the Moon begin with the tell-tale staticky buzz-whine of Apollo’s radio background noise and the iconic high-pitched beep of a Quindar tone. Like the Apollo 11 mission itself, the podcast is deliberate, well-planned, and…
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