Idiots might grin when they see a fiery-eyed, supernatural Peter Dinklage give a knowing smile while avenging his bloody death at the teeth and talons of a hell-spawned succubus near the end of Knights of Badassdom. (Whoops! Spoiler alert!) He’s a badass in Game of Thrones! And now he’s a badass in a movie about […]
Denis Theriault
Posted inCulture
A Day in the Life
Fruitvale Station tells an eerily familiar story
Fruitvale Station starts with an ending. In cell phone footage, all shrieks and shaking, we see the final moments of Oscar Grant—a 22-year-old black man from Oakland who became, long before we mourned for a boy named Trayvon Martin, a symbol of society’s profound struggles with race, police brutality, and privilege. It is a few […]
Posted inCulture
More Human than Human
With Monsters University,
Pixar goes to college
“Where’s the girl?” I’d taken my 5-year-old with me to see Monsters University—this year’s winsome prequel to Pixar’s 2001 Monsters, Inc.—and though he claimed he “liked all of it,” clearly he did not, in fact, like “all of it.” He missed the character every kid watching the first Monsters movie was supposed to identify with: […]
Posted inCulture
Prime Directive Achieved!
The Star Trek We Deserve
Every generation, it has long been said, inherits the incarnation of Star Trek it most deserves (actually, I don't think that's true; I'm pretty sure I'm making this up). The original TV series, immaculately conceived in a campy manger nearly 50 years ago, arrived dripping with American optimism and ham-fisted Cold War and racial allegory. […]