Medium Mashup

Author: Ross Miller

  • You’re the Worst Season 2 Review

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    (In case you missed it, my fiancee Reba and covered the entirety of You’re the Worst’s first season in our Podcast, Firsties! You can find that on the website, on Sound Cloud, on iTunes and other podcast apps under “Medium Mashup Podcasts,” and coming soon on Google Play Music’s podcast channel!)

    One of the few complaints I had about You’re the Worst’s hilarious and assured debut season was its tendency to stall regarding Jimmy and Gretchen’s relationship. By its midpoint, we had already seen several episodes that hammered home the same point: Jimmy and Gretchen made sense in a relationship and improved each other’s lives, but were consciously afraid of such things. Both characters had reasons to keep their distance, with Jimmy’s denial of love as a concept and Gretchen’s fear of commitment and maturity, but there was only so much there to sustain a full season of television.

    Fortunately, the start of the show’s second season largely does away with this particular conflict. Jimmy and Gretchen find themselves on solid ground from the start, and much of the conflict shifts to Lindsay’s divorce and Edgar’s interest in her. This period of the season does an excellent job of expanding on both characters, defining Edgar in ways completely independent from his PTSD, and showing just how far Lindsay can fall when desperate. Just like its first season, this section of season two succeeds by balancing very funny (and often crude) jokes with an actual care and interest in its characters.

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  • The Witch Review

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    The key to appreciating The Witch is right there in the full title: “A New England Folktale.” The film is essentially a cautionary tale centered around a way of life and a set of standards that are extraordinarily outdated, and as such, is quite fascinating. It takes its lessons and its presupposition of the supernatural very seriously, and one could imagine the first generation of American Puritans creating such a film had the medium been available to them.

    The Witch makes its point abundantly clear from the start. The first thing we see is the central family voluntarily leaving their community to go off on their own. This single moment is framed as an irreversible error, as community is all that’s keeping the dangerous and ungodly nature of the American continent from harming them. We see the daughter Thomasin recognizes this, and from the moment the town closes its gates, we know our family is doomed.

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  • Oxenfree Review

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    Oxenfree borrows from a number of other recent narrative-driven games. The way it introduces its characters is reminiscent of Until Dawn, its exploration and coms towers call back to Firewatch, and its horror elements crib from any number of recent indie horror titles. However, despite its influences, Oxenfree is very much its own experience, perhaps because of its stripped down approach to gameplay and stylization.

    Of the four face buttons on Oxenfree’s interface, three of them are devoted to selecting dialogue options. That leaves only one button for physically interacting with the environment, along with a shoulder button to bring up a radio (which is crucial for many of the game’s puzzles and events), and another shoulder button for the map. Given the limited and seemingly wasteful control scheme, it would be understandable to assume that Oxenfree is poorly designed or, at the very least, under-engaging.. However, because half of the game’s buttons refer specifically to dialogue and character interactions, they end up emphasizing that portion of the game and re-orienting the player away from traditional game elements and toward narrative and conversation.

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  • Frank Review

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    I’m not quite sure that the movie “Frank” is about any one thing, in particular. It engages with a lot of ideas that struggling and aspiring musicians deal with, such as inherent genius, hard work, tragic beginnings, and what it takes to be creatively successful, but it doesn’t have anything specific to say about any of them. Unlike most films, though, Frank doesn’t suffer from its shotgun approach to the complexities of the creative process. Instead it feels like an artist venting about said frustrations through a quirky, compelling yarn centered around a man in a paper mache mask.

    Despite the marketing focus on Frank (the masked man) himself, the protagonist of the film is actually Domhnall Gleason’s Jon Burroughs, a struggling keyboardist who lives with his parents and spends much of his free time “writing music,” or more accurately, people-watching on the beaches of Ireland. The film’s first act is strangely similar to another Domhnall Gleason movie, actually; like in Ex Machina, his every-man character is swept away to a remote location with a genius figure who hand-picked him as a collaborator. From there, though, Frank takes a much different path.

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  • Uncharted 4 Review

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    For three entries now, the Uncharted series has established itself as the best in the video game industry at spectacle and set-pieces. What Naughty Dog achieved over the last console generation was largely unmatched, and their blend of explosive action, great dialogue, and tight mechanics is carried forward in their latest, and supposedly final, Uncharted title. But despite its similarities in form, Uncharted 4 is operating on a different level than its predecessors. After their landmark title The Last of Us, Naughty Dog was no longer content to simply do action movie tropes very, very well. For the final entry in the series, they really want to say something about Nathan Drake, his relationships, and his addiction to adventure. What they accomplished is not only more spectacular than most of Hollywood’s biggest summer films, but far more substantive and meaningful as well.

    This approach does come with a price. Uncharted 2 is perhaps one of the greatest games of all time, largely because of how brilliantly paced and constructed it is. No sequence feels like it outstays its welcome, and the transitions between the various types of gameplay are perfectly orchestrated. But because story is so important to Uncharted 4, and because Naughty Dog really wants to nail every element of the series one last time, the game’s segments can run longer than in previous games. This has led to complaints from a number of game critics, particularly due to the game’s first and final acts.

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