In defense of Kylo Ren
The Emo Kylo Ren Twitter account (@KyloR3n) has had me ugly laughing since The Force Awakens came out. It’s true, Kylo Ren is in so many ways like an angsty teenager who probably listens to the...
Category: Arts & Literature
Deadpool Walks A Careful Artistic Line
As a piece of film, Deadpool represents a fascinating dichotomy. One entirely legitimate reading is that of a film by fifteen-year-olds, for fifteen-year-olds — filled with sex jokes, explosions,...
No Mas Bebes: How White Feminists Still Fail Latinas On Reproductive Rights
Renee Tajima-Peña’s No Mas Bebés, on the widespread use of coerced sterilisation at LA County Hospital in the 1960s and 1970s, aired last week on PBS in what was perhaps extremely fortuitous...
Never Grow Up: HBO’s Animals, Adult Coloring Books and the Birth of the Kidult
With the rise of adult colouring books — colouring books designed for adults, not the other kind of ‘adult’ — has come the rise of animated comedies also targeted at the adult market (think...
Play Like A Girl: Star Wars’ Gender Problem
Star Wars, like most science fiction and fantasy epics, has had a bit of a gender problem. Like Lord of the Rings, it offers a deluge of multi-dimensional and varying male characters while only...
Two Poems
Half-Life here on planet earth we watch sad movies, cry, and eat popped corn with salt when we want to feel things cheaply. I wonder what the aliens make of us tucked up on the mothership the surface...
The X Files Returns: Is The Truth Still Out There?
The X-Files is back, complete with spooky opening titles and snappy Mulder-Scully action. On Sunday night, the Internet went absolutely wild for it, even with American football and Downton Abbey to...
Review: Mercy Street
On Sunday night, the first original PBS drama for broadcast in 10 years, Mercy Street, hit the airwaves, hoping to coast off Downton Abbey as a lead-in. 3.3 million people tuned in for the programme,...
Dark Energy: Why HBO’s “The Leftovers” is the Best Show You’re Not Watching
Death is peculiar. It marks us all as guests and travelers on this planet, as guests of being – or what we know of being, anyway. Even if one believes in the permutation and transcendence of the...
Director Sydney Freeland on Trans-centric Web Series “Her Story”
A web series about a couple of Los Angelenas discovering love when they least expect it sounds less “groundbreaking” than stereotypical indie pitch. Yet “Her Story,” which debuts its first...