In his video essay (also available in text form), Matthias Stork details the elements of what he calls, “Chaos Cinema” and their effects on film and viewer experience: “The film doesn’t seduce you into suspending your disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.”
From Ultima Online to Eve Online, Cracked covers “The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in Online Gaming.”
“The only reason that we cannot make genre movies is the barrier that censorship sets.” Jia Zhangke says more here. Meanwhile a leaked diplomatic document gives some insight as to whose taste is being served in recent Chinese historical epics. Xi Jinping admires American World War II dramas: “Some […]
Ryan Holmberg reads Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s Black Blizzard closely with Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, and discovers Black Blizzard is an adaptation of pulp mystery writer Shimada Kazuo’s story, “Black Rainbow,” then puts Tatsumi’s work in the context of other mass entertainment of its time. The piece itself is […]
The Japan Society had a program featuring Japanese animation from the 1910s-1940s. Even if you missed it, you can still see some shorts —a beautiful 1929 silent featuring Tengu; sing along with a 1930 papercut animation village festival; an unfortunate butterfly from 1931; tricks between a fox spirit […]
Capt. Robert M. Chamberlain uses Leeroy Jenkins, World of Warcraft icon and internet meme, to analyze the “American way of advising” in Iraq: “The video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times, is analogous to the disparity between the deliberation with which American forces approach counterinsurgency […]