Medium Mashup

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  • The Last of Us: One of the Best Arcs in Gaming

    The-Last-of-Us1Spoiler-Free General Review:

    Gaming as a medium is much less evolved than the other visual mediums. I’ve often likened gaming’s current state to the early days of film, when many of the most-respected pieces were simply pre-existing plays, recorded from a vantage point not far removed from the audience and presented as-is. This was before montage, close-ups, and many of the devices we now utilize as the primary tools of filmmaking.

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  • Hannibal Reborn: New Life For An Exhausted Franchise

    hannibal_b6417eSpoiler-Free General Review: 

    I’d be hard-pressed to think of a concept more preemptively played out than a Hannibal Lecter TV series. For one, the Hannibal character has been exhausted in two mediums already. While the franchise peaked tremendously in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, even Anthony Hopkins’ electric performance as Hannibal Lector could not sustain the subpar plotting of Hannibal or the pedestrian Red Dragon. Even worse, they gave the notoriously mysterious character an absurd origin story in Hannibal Rising, explaining away elements of the character that nobody wanted or needed to know in the first place.

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  • Man of Steel: A Gorgeous Film Brought To Its Knees By Poorly Structured Storytelling

    man-of-steel_82c9dcSpoiler-Free General Review:

     

    Man of Steel has so much going for it. The cast is across-the-board excellent, from Michael Shannon’s righteously-angry Zod to Kevin Costner’s loving and protective Pa Kent to Amy Adams’s intelligent and self-sufficient Lois Lane.The movie is stunningly gorgeous and absolutely nails the iconography of Superman (if there are any doubters as to the latter, just rewatch this trailer, which is more powerful than the film itself and arguably tells a better story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DJcgm3wNY). The score is incredible, evoking the loneliness and melancholy of Kal-El along with the hope for a better tomorrow represented by Superman. The sound work and visual effects are stunningly brilliant, and the action sequences demonstrate what may be the best example of a super-powered brawl in film to date.

    It’s just a shame that the narrative structure is so shoddy. Long scenes are presented before we have any context for them. Way too much time is spent on exposition. There is a poorly explained and uninteresting Macguffin device that serves as the villain’s primary motivation. Most unfortunate of all, the film has no center, and a protagonist who still feels alien to the viewers by the end of the film.

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  • The Entertainment Blog

    Welcome to the Entertainment Blog section of Medium Mashup! This section is broken up into two parts. The first section is for Reviews. This is pretty much what you’ve come to expect from a criticism site: my general opinion on a piece of entertainment, be it a movie, television series, or video game. You can choose to view only one type of media via the pull-down menu at the top of the screen.

    The Deep End is where I approach entertainment with a larger theme or idea in mind. These are written with the assumption that the reader has already consumed the media in question and wants to go deeper. Spoilers abound, and add to the conversation. These are also split into sub-categories in the pull-down menu.

    Feel free to dig around, and please enjoy!