I’ll spoil it up front: the twist is that you’re in a Michael Haneke movie but it was written by a retard. Okay, that’s harsh. It’s not a bad movie, in that the internal logic is mostly consistent, it has the advantage of being brisk, and Dave Bautista can actually act. In fact it might…
Author: Hank Oslo
TAKEN: Who isn’t Bryan Mills?
“That thing you thought was disposable cultural grist is actually Great” is an easy pitch to make, because it melds “tfw too smart to enjoy popcorn cinema” and “I enjoy bad movies ironically” into the self-actualizing synthesis of “aktschually, Liam Neeson jumping over a fence at two cuts per second is a masterpiece of impressionist…
Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Life Instrumentalized
Cyberpunk as a genre ebbs and flows as reality itself assumes more of the conventions of the genre. It would be simplistic to merely list off the requisite elements: pseudo-noir stories of crime and betrayal set in a world of body augmentation and transhumanism, artificial intelligences, the Internet as its own domain, deterritorialization (especially with…
Poor Canada: A Review of “Ending Bigly, Eh?”
Poor Canada. By accident of geography and population, it has been doomed to be a resource extraction scheme masquerading as a country, with an essentially superfluous high IQ population under the misapprehension that they are free men possessed of traditional Anglo-Saxon liberties and not temporarily elevated chattel of a latifundium. The thing about primary production…
Hellraiser, and male and female id
The structural simplicity of the horror genre has always provided a sort of narrative budget to explore other ideas. When you have a fairly straightforward arc from establishment – spooky stuff – reveal – fight – conclusion, there is plenty of space to tell an implicit story on top of the surface level plot. The…
“The King’s Man” and the European Civil War
The “Kingsman” movies are conceptually simple. What if we lightly touched up pre- GrimDarkPseudoBourne era James Bond? A shadowy group of British secret agents stops various villains from blowing up the world (and saves some cash by not having a single titular franchise character). Sex is confusing and problematic to the target audience, so strip…
“The Cabin in the Woods” is a simple movie
In narcissistic industries like the movie business, there is nothing so beloved as a story about themselves. Movies-about-movies, movies-about-moviemakers, movies-within-movies, all have more examples than can be counted, on top of the documentaries. But Hollywood isn’t just a quaint little industry of yeoman writers and performers – their longevity, insularity, geographic concentration, and access to…
The Real Jan 6 Was The Friends We Made Along The Way
No one believes the United States Congress is “legitimate”. As a group they are universally despised. This is not a novel circumstance – there hasn’t been a day since 1800 or so when a double-digit percentage of the population didn’t prefer a double-digit percentage of Congress erected on the trees conveniently planted mere yards away…
Comptrollers, Commies, and Community Banking
One problem with journalists is that they generally don’t read much, and understand even less. So the controversy over Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, rapidly devolved into (unfortunately credible) accusations of communist sympathies, with liberals doing the obligatory wow-just-wow and mischaracterizing the substance of the smear job. In reality, her…
American Shitshow: Self Defense and Self Preservation
You are a baron, to the manor born. It’s a pretty cushy gig. Your great-grandfather did most of the heavy lifting, fighting for the guy who subsequently took over the country, and getting control of a nice slice of land for his trouble. It’s not a lot of land, but it’s enough to provide you…
The American Sun 