Results of Ruminations

By my count, I've consumed approximately 80 titles so far this year. Those titles include podcast series, narrative-based video games, audio books, comic books, and novels. I include the narrative-based video games because they're lengthy and textured enough to give me a lot to think about. Because video games have different ludological goals, I don't include every title (like, how would I ever "finish" a game like Overwatch ?), and there are only a couple of them, but I feel like they're an important part of the narratives that I consume in order to improve myself as a person and a writer. I don't count movies, though. Maybe I will next year, and amp up my goal from 100 titles in a year to something more like 150. Film has been pulling me in more and more lately, in part because of its compact nature (though some long-form storytelling, like Netflix's Stranger Things  is hardly compact). It takes an investment of only a couple hours to get the whole...

When a youth from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decides to volunteer for an eighteen- to twenty-four month mission, said youth agrees to abstain from a lot of things that generally comprise the majority of a kid's living experience: No dating, no popular/secular music, no contact with home save emails once a week and a couple of calls, and no watching movies, especially not in the theater. This list of Don't Commandments is designed to strip away the distractions of normal life so that the limited time as a missionary can be focused on the purpose of dedicated missionary life: Preaching the gospel. So it makes sense within the internal logic of the Church's system and it is, for the most part, an effective maneuver that does help keep missionaries honed in on their purpose. The fascinating thing about this forced fast of films is that there's an unspoken but fairly well understood cultural expectation on the other end of the service. Young women (a...

When I talked about dual identities a while ago, I focused on the Batman and a little on the Hulk. I had originally planned on incorporating an analysis of how Peter Parker and Spider-Man intersect as identities, but the essay was going too long by that point. I cut the stuff--which, for me, means highlighting the text and pressing Delete . So whatever I was thinking about apropos of Peter/Spidey, it's gone now. However, I'm at the precipice of beginning another school year  and I've been feeling incipient stirrings of what I can only assume is the (apparently) real phenomenon of a mid-life crisis. My parents were pretty steady, stay-the-course kind of parents, so I don't have a lot of up-close context for these feelings, but I've been struggling a lot with what I understand of myself, my goals, my ambitions, my dreams, and my realities. One of the things that I've always used as part of my identity, with varying degrees of severity, is my obsession with Spid...

In the first part , I set up a rewrite for Batman v. Superman  to try to salvage what happened in that film. Obviously, this is not a unique exercise, and there are a lot of others out there who have done similar things. I haven't read or watched those thought exercises, so if there are parallels between my ideas and others, it's happenstance. Part 2 Batman's unsatisfied, so he breaks into Luthor's office to see this "curiosity". He hacks (because it's this easy) the files, but doesn't have time to decrypt them as the alarm goes off (of course) and he has to do his disappearing bat-trick to keep from being caught. Now, however, he's on the trail.   Back at Lexcorp, Luthor figures out what Batman has done. "They know." He places a call, then says to the scientist fellow from earlier, "We have to move forward the Doomsday Protocol."  "To when?" asks the tinny voice on the other side of the call. "As...

Note: I'm assuming most people who care about Batman v. Superman  would have seen it by now, but I guess I should say I'm talking about that film in this essay. So...spoilers on it, Man of Steel, and  Wonder Woman , y'know? I tried " script doctoring " Jurassic World , so I thought I'd throw out some ideas about what I would have done differently with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  Because multiple different films are contingent on the BvS  as the flagship, tent pole, or whatever metaphor you want to use for the entire DC Extended Universe, there are likely parts from Zack Snyder's film that had to be in there as setup for the other films. In fact, that setup is part of what makes BvS  such a hard film to follow. (In essence, DCEU went the opposite route of Marvel: What if The Avengers  had been the third film in the franchise, with only Captain America and  Iron Man  coming before it? It wouldn't have worked the way that it did. DCEU is...

Yes, you should go see the movie. Spoiler: He doesn't wear those headphones with that jacket. ( Source ) Seeing the Spider When I was, I don't know, eight or nine, I owned a Spider-Man comic (I believe it was Amazing Spider-Man 361 or 362 ) that had exciting news in it: a Spider-Man movie would be released soon. The next bit of news I heard about Marvel was that it was going bankrupt. (For more details, this article walks you through the big parts.) I was worried that my favorite comic book superhero would never get a chance to be on the silver screen--and, even worse, that his parent company might go under. Fortunately, Marvel pulled through. Eventually, we got the Sam Raimi Spider-Man  and its two sequels, and though the third was easily the weakest entry, all of them represented a unified vision and tone for the franchise (though, yeah, the third one is atonal, but...well, moving on). When I first saw Spider-Man , I was about two months out from starting my mi...

Note: To discuss the themes of Cars 3 and look at how they affected me, I have to talk about the end of the movie. In that sense, I'm spoiling the film...or, at least, the film's plot . Don't read if you don't want to (which is always the way it works, obviously), but I feel like there's more to this movie than the story and whether or not it's "spoiled". And though I believe that, I wanted to make this paragraph a little longer to ensure that no one catches an eyeful of spoilers that they didn't intent.  Major spoilers. ( Source ) Pixar's third entry into its Cars  franchise is significantly better than Cars 2 , in large part because Mater isn't around very much at all so the story instantly improves. Okay, that's probably not fair. Cars 2  had some endearing zaniness, and the chance to expand the world of the franchise was a natural step: First film, bring the urban to the rural; second film, bring the rural to the urban. Both ...

During the summer, I get the chance to see a few more movies than I do during the school year, and I had the opportunity to do so today by going to see Wonder Woman, which released today and was, therefore, screened and shown by a bunch of people over the last week. Still, I was one of the first to see it on its opening day, and I have to admit that I enjoyed it as much--if not more--than I was hoping to. That's a huge relief. Wonder Woman (and Wonder Woman ) means a lot to a lot of people, and there is also the pressure for a flagship property to perform well that will help ensure a continued franchise. And the controversies surrounding screenings  as well as Gal Gadot's politics and history  threaten to take away from how much fun this movie is. So I'm leaving the troublesome stuff behind to focus on the film itself, which I endorse and encourage people to see. It's definitely my favorite superhero movie in a long time, and though nothing will ever surpass the gee...

I have been talking about dinosaurs here for a while . And since  some rumors  about the new Jurassic World franchise have been floating, I thought I'd revisit what I wrote about Jurassic World  and point out where I would go in completely different directions. For starters, I would skip the horrible concept of "weaponizing dinosaurs", despite it being a large theme in the film. After all, Crichton originally imagined Jurassic Park  because he felt only entertainment would front the money needed to refine the tech and allow the cloning to happen. It's a sad commentary on our world, I think, that twenty years later, we figure the only people who want dinosaurs are those who are looking to exploit them for war. Now, chucking off one of the themes is in and itself problematic. After all, it was clearly an important part to the filmmakers' vision of Jurassic World.  But if you think about it, there' s already precedence for dropping inconvenient plot poi...

A YouTuber named Nerdwriter--whose eclectic video essays span a gamut of fascinating topics, from how to read art to linguistic analyses of songs to deconstructions of film--has a great video about how Batman v. Superman  in particular, but Zack Snyder specifically suffers from eye-catching and memorable scenes, but fails to deliver on genuine moments. I rewatched Man of Steel  tonight, and I think Nerdwriter's points apply to the first foray into Snyder's take on Superman. I still like that movie. I'd never argue that it's well written (some of the dialogue is horrible, and their aversion of the word Superman  throughout almost the whole thing is weird) or not rife with problems, but I still enjoy the film. Part of it stems from my unapologetic joy at "building punching"--sequences where people throw other people through buildings. It can be monsters versus robots (like Pacific Rim , or, as I like to call it, Robot Monster Punch Punch ), or monsters vers...