"Getting your clicks" is a time-honored tradition, at least if T.S. Eliot is to have a say about it. Hilariously enough, saying VU & Nico isn't as glorious as most people think is as transgressive as the VU & Nico subject matter was fifty years ago.

Teddy's the best in making up vengeance scenarios. "Replace all the shoes in his house with shoes one size smaller - we Amélie the guy." Can't wait for him to see Oldboy.

This was somewhere between A and an A- for me. I have never listened to the Mountain Goats or read The Wolf in the White Van, and I usually please myself with highbrow fiction interspersed with King. In King's more sublime moments (The Body, The Reach, Hearts in Atlantis) he uses the metaphysical tools of horror to…

Hilariously, I had this exact debate before, only with the topic at hand being marketing. A poet acquaintance of mine was really trying to prove to his friend, a marketing professional, why marketing is evil as-is. (Because it overwhelmingly serves capitalism, in case you were wondering). For him, especially after…

I, Daniel Blake spoilers

Wow, this is only the second unfavorable review of the film I've seen yet. I'd disagree with a lot of things in it, but the only one truly relevant is: "[the film] has as its keystone gag an actual large, loose, baggy monster". I think interpreting that scene as a gag (furthermore, it's not a "keystone" gag) is…

Firewatch is great! It's also 40% off right now, which I assume you're familiar with. I rarely play things other than indie narrative or puzzle games (both due to time constraints and personal preference - this year, only XCOM 2, Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3), and I thought Firewatch was among the smartest…

I haven't played smartphone games in years, but Cut the Rope series is endlessly dumb and completely adorable. It is somewhat of a logic puzzle game… though not very difficult at all, as it aimed for mass appeal.
Also, Thomas Was Alone is fantastic in every respect, though it is available for PC as well.

Oxenfree: yes! I also thought of Life is Strange while playing it, but also two other games: Gone Home, also depicting legitimate teen strife, and Year Walk, for reasons I couldn't describe in words. You might be inclined to like either of those.
Mass Effect, Ashley: hahaha, you're keeping up with the times of dealing…

Oxenfree's delighful. Despite being branded as a teen horror game, I found it to be much more adept at sketching a fact of adolescence: everyone hates everyone else, yo. As in most great horrors, the terror is generated elsewhere, and the various supernatural oddities just bring it to light. Were I to play it again,…

I was very reluctant on seeing this as someone who wrote the blurb for it when it aired at an film festival near me made it sound like an Adam Sandler movie. And it ended up being the best movie I've seen in years. It's also really not a comedy. For most of the film I felt a strong anxious disgust, laughing a lot…

As a computer scientist, I respectfully disagree about the scope. It is simultaneously a critique of bureaucracy and a statement about unnaturalness.

I've been terrified of this film's alleged didacticism since my left-leaning friends started raving about it a few months ago (and, full disclaimer, I'm left-leaning as well; just not "he's going to nationalize the railways. a hero!" left-leaning), and those fears turned out to be quite unfounded. This is a very…

If there is an overarching statement of Rectify, a thesis to it, it would be: heaven is other people. Both the philosophical subversion and the emotional undercurrent would be, without a doubt, known to Daniel. He himself stated that more people helped him than have harmed him, and in Rectify, there's no-one left to…

Regarding the 'wise old storyteller' ending: the implication was that the universe is regularly wiped in the Reaper cycle, but that it was the final cycle; Liara, bless her blue brains, created holograms expounding on… something… which led to the Reapers being destroyed in the following cycle (if the Shepard cycle was…

Some Steven King stuff (The Mist, Carrie). I actually don't think Stand By Me is superior to The Body (original novella).
Also No Country For Old Men, though it's close, and mostly managed by Javier Bardem's relentlessness.
The most striking example I'm aware of is Requiem For A Dream. While Aronofsky's movie wasn't…

Tin soldiers and Doris coming/we're finally on our own.

Regarding the suggestion, of which I wholeheartedly approve: they know now what they didn't know then, but they didn't know then what they know now.

'The Pearl Button' by Patricio Guzman, won Silver Bear in Berlin. It is not always working durings its short 82 minute runtime, but, when it does, it tackles the themes of colonialism, Pinochet, human cruelty in general, the beauty of nature and cosmological angst though a proficient symbol set. Its vast ambition,…