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  • St. Vincent Review

    St. Vincent

    St. Vincent is a perfectly fine movie. It has some funny dialogue, a strong Bill Murray performance, and is centered on a particular character’s arc. The relationship between Murray’s Vincent and child protagonist Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) is fun to watch, and it feels like a “complete” story. It doesn’t outright bungle any particular aspect of its narrative and if you’re looking for something to watch, you could certainly do worse.

    But the problem with St. Vincent, like the paragraph above, is that it is unremarkable and by the books. It takes the shape of an emotional dramedy with a flawed protagonist and his young, innocent new friend, but it doesn’t seem to have a unique point of view or any flair to differentiate it from other movies. Despite the best efforts of the cast, St. Vincent lacks the soul to truly elevate it.

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  • Inside Out Review

    inside out

    Pixar has proven over the last decade that they can consistently deliver all-ages movies that are both popular and emotional. A major part of their power comes from Pixar’s mastery of the bittersweet. In their best moments, Pixar overloads its audience with powerful feelings both positive and negative, intertwined in a way that makes it difficult for the viewer to rationalize. In Up, we see the entirety of Carl and Ellie’s life together in a short montage, taking the viewer through a beautifully executed sequence of extreme highs and lows. In Toy Story 3 we watch Andy give away the toys that the series has focused on for all three films, a moment of loss, abandonment, and a new beginning rolled into one. Both moments require a herculean effort on the part of the viewer to hold back tears.

    Given Pixar’s history and proven skill with mixing joy and sadness into potent cinematic moments, it makes perfect sense that their newest film, Inside Out, takes the concept of complex emotional entanglement and makes it the subject. The film attempts to tackle the psychological drives that power us all on a day-to-day basis. In addition to characters representing fear, anger, disgust, joy, and sadness, the movie also tackles the imaginary, our core values, abstract thought, the subconscious, dreams, and long-term memory.

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  • Unknown Hosts 7/1/2015

    This week on Unknown Hosts: Apple store decisions, Arkham Knight, Destiny/Red Bull, and Playstion vs Xbox

  • Steam Refunds and the Importance of Culpability In Game Sales

    arkhamEarly this year, I wrote a piece on the state of broken game launches and the mentality of fixing a title after release. Not much has changed since that was published, especially in regards to PC games. While the PC platform was finally starting to get consistently strong ports from console-focused developers toward the end of the last console generation, now that the PS4 and Xbox One have launched, many developers are again focusing their efforts on console games and then offloading half-assed ports to PC. We saw it earlier this year with Warner Bros.’ Mortal Kombat X, which frequently crashed on users and, when a patch was released to fix the problem, ended up erasing their saved games.

    Just this month, yet another disastrous PC launch occurred with a different Warner Bros. title. Batman: Arkham Knight is abysmal on PC, requiring absolutely top-of-the-line PC components to even maintain 30 fps without major stuttering. The game forces a 30 fps framerate lock on users as well, frustrating people with high-end machines, and is missing several visual effects present in the console versions of the game. Even worse, most computers that can handle the game’s specs slow to a crawl during many of the batmobile segments. The game requires a $1000+ machine to get visuals and performance that is still inferior to the $350 Xbox One.

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  • Orange is the New Black – Season 3 Review

    orange-is-the-new-blackOrange Is the New Black was never really intended to be a smash hit. While Netflix threw lots of money into promoting House of Cards, Orange was always positioned as something of an experiment, a low-risk series meant to reach a different section of Netflix’s audience. However, right from its first season, Orange has been a major sleeper hit, continually growing an audience based almost solely on positive word of mouth. At this point it is more successful (and, frankly, better) than House of Cards, and something of a phenomenon for Netflix. It just goes to show that if you write a show driven by empathy for its characters and make it readily available to people, it will find an audience.

    But can Orange Is the New Black keep its quality up now that audiences already know what to expect? Personally, I think so, but there are some indications in the recently-released season three that it may have some obstacles to overcome in its transition from sleeper hit to popular institution.

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