After seeing Wonder Woman last Friday and having a chat on Facebook Live to share our immediate impressions, Anita and I exchanged emails this weekend to discuss the film in more detail once we’d had a little time to process their thoughts. Be aware that we talk about the ending in some detail, so… Anita: There’s […]
Category: Reviews
The onslaught of headlines indicating some dark times – regarding immigration, education, and healthcare, to name just a few areas of concern and crisis – have left a lot of us looking for escapist entertainment in our downtime. Even just an hour offline and away from the news can provide a much-needed respite. Ironically enough, though, for many […]
May 25th, 2017
Let’s state the obvious right up front: Beauty and the Beast is a Disney film. What this means is that it follows a long history of formulaic narratives involving young women in a bit of a pickle (as the result of, say, selling their voice to get out of that darn sea, see the world, and […]
It’s telling that Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final outing as Wolverine after playing the character for 17 years, heavily references a moment in Shane, the legendary 1953 Western. Specifically, it references the moment when gunfighter Shane tells Joey, the young son of some local ranchers, “Joey, there’s no living with, with a killing. There’s no going back […]
I saw Get Out among a predominantly white audience this weekend. The decision was spontaneous and swift — there was a showing near me (in the white-ass suburb in which I live) at the perfect time, so I went. If I had had more than 10 seconds to think about it and plan, I would have […]
There’s a line of dialogue about halfway through Split, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest blockbuster, that masterfully illustrates precisely how this film careens smugly off the rails. Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), sympathetic psychiatrist to the movie’s hero (more on this later), sits across from her patient and asks him which of the personae inhabiting his body currently “has […]
February 9th, 2017
Tagged: Split
Shortly before Rogue One was released, a clip of the late, great Carl Sagan discussing the original Star Wars made the rounds on social media. In it, Sagan noted the fact that the people who populated the fictional sci-fi setting of the film were almost entirely white. It is wonderful that, 39 years after the release […]
December 23rd, 2016
Tagged: Reviews
For all of its immensely enjoyable stealth and combat mechanics and its terrific assortment of powers and abilities, the original Dishonored failed its female characters in a big way. With Dishonored 2, it’s clear that the developers heard these criticisms, crafting a game in which women populate all walks of life, while also improving on the […]
November 21st, 2016
Tagged: Reviews
In our hyperconnected world, where most of us carry around handheld devices that keep us linked to the internet at all times and tech companies monitor our behavior and purchasing habits constantly, a game in which you harness that technological web to disrupt the schemes of powerful corporations makes perfect sense. But with 2014’s Watch Dogs, […]
November 16th, 2016
It’s been ten years since Marcus, Dom, and the other members of Delta Squad first shot and chainsawed their way across the planet Sera in a desperate attempt to defeat the Locust, and in some ways, both those characters and the gameplay we so strongly associate with them now feel like relics from another era. Gears […]
October 11th, 2016
Tagged: Reviews
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This episode explores how female villains in games very often function to demonize femaleness itself, drawing on patterns of female representation that have roots in creatures from myth […]
September 28th, 2016
Links & Resources “Our Star Wars Holiday Special” by Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry “”Star Wars” Female Fighter Pilots Cut From Final Films” by Donna Dickens, Buzzfeed Back […]
December 31st, 2015
