Yes, I'm pretty mystified by the backlash against TFA, and it is backlash — people generally really liked it when it came out. It has a clear grasp of what kind of tone a Star Wars film should have. And this clearly is a more difficult task than people assume — the prequels didn't get the tone right, and Rogue One…

Sorry, but comics are a visual medium, so the aesthetic and character designs are completely valid points of criticism, alongside the writing.

I usually see the lack of industrialization in Ireland as the reason why the Labour Party has never really become a political juggernaut like it has in Britain, and now that it's in the midst of an identity crisis it's even more frustrating.

I read an Irish Times write-up about those Nazi films a few years ago, Fenian rebels wearing German jackboots and such. They sound profoundly strange.

And yes, a German people asking me about the election situation was mystified why a centre-right grand coalition wasn't just going to be a given, and that's probably coming from a long German tradition of just such an arrangement

Personally I think Irish politics requires so much explanation and context that it's probably the reason why there's far more of a tradition of political theatre than political film in Ireland (apart from the odd film like Irish Destiny, etc), all of these nuances would require so much dialogue to deliver that it's…

Yeah that last part was just an aside, but you're right in that the particular window of time he chose didn't best suit his thesis, it gets to the idea that Fine Gael were the theocracy party for a long time,

Ken Loach's whole thesis for that film seems to be that the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War were a giant missed opportunity to realize Connolly's vision of Ireland as a socialist society, as opposed to rather repressed society that actually resulted.

My favorite counter-factual possibility was what if the 1798 Wolfe Tone rebellion had succeeded in spite of some of the dodgy logistics and terrible luck. This was before the Industrial Revolution had hit its full stride, the populations of Ireland and Britain were closer than they've ever been since (this is before…

The short answer is ticking all the boxes. You get a real sense watching this of RTÉ taking out a long checklist of all the groups that needed to be given their dose of screen time, and while I'm not against that in principle, they did not find an intelligent or organic way to do it.

Wow, first time on KG, I'm really pleased with this since I've loved the site since its original incarnation, that it was also a post I wrote in a hurry because I had to share in the collective emotional catharsis before heading off for work tasks, maybe that meant I wrote with a little more personal exposure than I…

I played FFVIII when I was 13 years old and like a lot of people I was in the perfect state to respond to it — I had moved to a new country a year earlier and didn't have any friends at school yet, being foreign (though still in an English-speaking country…) was fairly alienating at that age and forced me into an…

Ghibli's "Whisper of the Heart" was extremely arresting for me in how strongly it evoked a sense of being in secondary school and just beginning to explore new people, places, ways to express yourself. It has a perfect sense of pacing for evoking long afternoons after school, and is utterly sincere in its approach.

Fair enough, and while I don't really have an enormous problem with the high score element (they incorporate some fun things into the scoring which reward specific ways that you interact with the environment or the inhabitants) I agree that the timer makes those first runs tough if you're trying for score.

My favorite is probably always going to be the hotel level in Hitman: Agent 47, and to a lesser extent the Contracts remake.

Yes that's an amazingly fucked up level. I also liked how it demonstrated how the specific values of the Hitman world conflicted with more straightforward morality — it becomes abundantly clear that it's the Meat King's brother who's the psychopath who killed the girl that prompted the assassination contract — but the…

I also disabled the mini map and instinct too, though, along with everything else. To me, part of the fun / immersion of the giant crowded level is losing track of where the target is and then trying to play catch-up looking for him.

They even come THIS close to making the entire level an explicit Zoolander reference (the conversation the supermodel has with one of the targets, or with you disguised as the supermodel, makes it pretty clear that they're using male models as assassins)

Yes, to me this underlines one of the great design decisions in this game — when you're wearing a uniform of someone with an official position in this game — a guard, a mechanic, etc, — the people most likely to see through the disguise are those in the same position, who would likely know other members of their team…

I thought the Washington images were pretty cool, since they descend from twilight into the dead of night. What's REALLY nice about them is they've photoshopped every frame of the time lapse photography to remove any human being on the streets — Washington DC is rendered barren in the credits sequence