This weekend, audiences are lining up to watch the Steven Spielberg directed adaptation of Ernest Cline’s nostalgia-fest Ready Player One. There’s a lot to love here. With Spielberg at the helm and Cline co-writing, the film might be one of the few film adaptations to stick the landing. While I’m busy writing up the film and chopping it up into …
Where Homage Meets Understanding: What Pacific Rim: Uprising Gets Wrong
There’s a moment in the third act of Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018, dir. Stevens DeKnight), right in the middle of its thunderous final battle, where a character runs by a giant mecha statue right in the heart of a Tokyo. This moment single-handedly ruined the whole movie for me. Yes, I had already been engaged by its metal munching, monster-crunching …
The Beauty of Culture and Conflict in Marvel’s Black Panther
There were a few moments while watching Black Panther (2018, dir. Ryan Coogler) in which I found myself laughing out loud in the theater, and it wasn’t because there was anything particularly humorous happening on screen. I mostly laughed because I wondered how director Ryan Coogler was able to accomplish something so simple and yet still unheard of during my …
Film Poetics: Spotlight on Guillermo del Toro
“Film poetics” is a term which runs parallel to the David Bordwell theory of the “historical poetics of cinema” in that it looks at the specifics of film production. Film poetics takes this a step further in stating that everything that goes into a film (set design, writing, lighting, wardrobe) harmonizes with the vision of its director to create one …