Great Characters in Television: Walter White

AMC’s series Breaking Bad has been buried under heaps of awards and praise in its three seasons so far. Among the accolades, the show has garnered 3 consecutive Emmy awards for Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Bryan Cranston’s turn in role of Walter White, and for good reason. Breaking Bad is a showcase of great television in almost all aspects, from editing to cinematography, but it’s the development of White that makes the show so fascinating. Cranston embodies a character unlike any I’ve ever seen before on TV, and acts the part with such conviction it’s hypnotizing to watch.

Occasional Movie Review: Super 8

In a small town in 1979, a group of kids shooting an amateur film accidentally document a suspicious train crash that nearly gets them killed. As they recover from the experience and naively try to put their movie back together, they find the event has not only affected their film project, but their own friendships and, to a larger extent, the entire town as well. Caught up in the mysterious occurrences and the responding military presence, tensions rise and the children find themselves at the heart of the conflict. 

Occasional Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

 

In the Second World War a young Erik Lehnsherr is separated from his mother in a German work camp when a Dr. Klaus Schmidt takes interest in his remarkable ability to bend metal to his will. Isolating him to work on his powers, Schmidt kills Lehnsherr’s mother right in front of the boy when he realizes he is unable to control his powers on command. Meanwhile in America, a similarly young Charles Xavier finds a blue-skinned runaway named Raven stealing food from his kitchen and takes her in to live with him. These events mark the first step in the development and eventual founding of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and The X-Men, but not before setting in motion a winding story that weaves itself into the events of the Cold War in the 1960’s.

Final Thoughts: LA Noire

In my previous post I gave my immediate reactions to the first hours of LA Noire, a 1940's detective story that follows the career of WWII vet Cole Phelps as he rises through the ranks of the LAPD. I was hesitant to write about the game at such an early stage, knowing that any declaration I made would be premature and vulnerable to change, but I wanted to get my impressions down early, since I knew it was a particularly long story.

First Impressions: LA Noire

LA Noire, the newest game by Rockstar, has built itself a lot of expectation with its revolutionary motion scan technique and its sheer size, supposedly taking up a full 25GB layer of a Blu-Ray disc (3 DVDs on the Xbox 360). Promises of new graphical fidelity and a huge new narrative built around the already successful Rockstar open-world model captured the attention of many video game players and even drew some from the cinema crowd, and the all-around hype has placed the game near the top of the list of most anticipated games of the year. At the time of this article, I’m not even halfway through the game’s story and still making my way up the ranks of the police force, so I don’t have a full game to reflect on. However here is my take on the game so far.

Occasional Movie Review: Thor

 

In the realm of Asgard, Odin (Anthony Hopkins) is nearing the end of his reign as king. His decision to pass the title to his eldest son Thor (Chris Hemsworth) causes envy in the younger Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who, in the hopes of removing him from the throne, manipulates his brother into recklessly starting a war with an old and powerful enemy. Blind to Loki’s betrayal, Odin banishes Thor to Midgard for his heedless arrogance, casting all of his Asgardian power into the hammer Mjolnir and sending them both to Earth. His apparition takes scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) by surprise and, unbeknownst to her, his proximity puts Earth and everything she knows at risk. Thor struggles to deal with his banishment and dual existence, striving to defend Earth and Asgard from what he has wrought and to reclaim his power as the God of Thunder.

The Importance of Portal 2

I already talked at length in a previous post about what makes the first Portal such an important landmark in the video game industry so I’m going to try not to backtrack too much into the same arguments here. Portal was a fantastic game and a huge surprise to players everywhere, but it was a small treasure, far from a full game experience and its praise and acclaim quickly turned into a clamouring for more. Four years later, Portal 2 is the fully realized sequel to the original adventure into Aperture Science, and it attempts to expand both on Chell’s journey and on the success of its predecessor.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

In the frozen waters of the South Pole, Sokka and Katara of the Southern Water Tribe are bickering on a fishing trip when they stumble onto a strange, glowing iceberg housing the figure of a young boy inside. Breaking it open they discover Aang, a rambunctious and bafflingly conscious kid with strange arrow tattoos all over his body. They take the child back to their village where the tribe elder is shocked to discover that Aang is, in fact, a young monk from the Northern Air Temple, the last survivor of a civilization believed to be extinct. More puzzling still, Aang is surprised to hear about his people’s fate when the villagers ask about his mysterious appearance, and is completely unaware that the Fire Nation has been systematically taking control of the other territories across the world, beginning with their eradication of the air nomads nearly a hundred years ago. The Water Tribe is struggling to grasp the gravity of this child’s discovery when Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation attacks the village and abducts him, claiming Aang to be the lost Avatar, sole connection to the spirit world and centre of balance and harmony in the world. Sokka and Katara give chase, setting in motion an ambitious journey to restore the Avatar and bring peace back to the four nations.

Great Characters in Television: The Entire Cast of Firefly (and an Appeal to Browncoats)

In the year 2517, humankind has expanded outward throughout the galaxy after depleting all of Earth’s resources. As more and more planets were terraformed and colonized, the Alliance, a sort of interplanetary government, sought to unify all the worlds under one rule. Naturally resistance broke out, pitting the freedom-seeking Independents (affectionately titled “Browncoats”) against the Alliance, invoking a brutal civil war which decimated the Independents’ numbers and violently set straight any and all opposing the Alliance’s power. The Alliance swept in and took control of the more civilized inner-planets to create prosperous, flourishing worlds but doing so left a large number of abandoned isolated colonies in the outer reaches of the universe to govern themselves, often eroding into crime and decay, many times falling to mob-rule. 

The Importance of Portal

It doesn’t take much to put together that I’m a video game addict. My copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has logged a total playtime long enough that I’m too embarrassed to post it on this blog. I’ve likely completed as many games as I’ve read books, and for as long as I can remember my bank account has been regularly suffering at the hand of new Playstation releases. So it’s safe to say I have a sizeable investment in the industry, which I am truly proud of. I really think the video game is culminating into its own true medium, comparable to film or literature, and capable of real emotional response.

Occasional Movie Review: Rango

Rango tells the story of a domesticated chameleon with an identity crisis who has his terrarium (and his life) abruptly shattered when he is ejected from the backseat of his owner’s car. Left dehydrated and abandoned on a desert highway, the lizard stumbles upon an Old West-style town called Dirt, inhabited by a collection of rustic creatures who rely on a steady economy of water for business and survival. As the lizard infuses himself into Dirt’s society and becomes the town Sheriff, the water runs dry and it’s up to him to find out where the water has gone, and discover who he really is beneath his camouflage.

Great Characters in Television: Dexter Morgan

A character in a television series presents a unique challenge in storytelling because, differently from literature or film, a TV show presents the audience with a continually progressing story on a weekly basis and therefore the characters involved in the story are required to do the same. The strength of a great television character is complexity and consistency; strong motivation, a multi-faceted personality, challenges and faults, and a deliberate evolution – all building and conflicting with each other over the course of a show’s run, a culmination that often, if successful, stretches over multiple years. This hopefully will be the first of a series of articles celebrating the best of these characters that television has to offer.

The Problem With Perez Hilton (and Gossip Media)

I want to talk briefly about gossip, or more specifically about the responsibility of gossip-mongering television shows and websites. I’m well aware that, as a deeply invested consumer of the entertainment industry, I’m willingly jumping into a shark tank. If I run a search on my favourite actors and musicians, I have no doubt that the first dozen results will be more rumour and hearsay than relevant news on their film or music careers. I have no issue with this (I’m also entirely conscious that many of my favourite actors and musicians are as responsible as ET and TMZ for the perpetration of this trend).However gossip writers have become proper journalists, landing columns in newspapers and reports on CNN, and as such, take up the accountability of their other news counterparts. I’m not talking about rumours about a celebrity’s personal life – that’s a topic for another article, and something I’m not informed enough to speak about. What I take issue with is the inaccuracy and dismissal of relevant information in their articles.

Occasional Movie Review: Michael Bay and Transformers

At this point, discussing Michael Bay's blatant love affair for anything big and on fire is beyond redundant; he's turned himself into a walking punchline:

That being said Bay has become the brunt of a lot of criticism for his unwavering movie-making formula. Although I can't say I disagree - the extent to which he continuously relies on the same tools makes his movies both predictable and ridiculous - I have to say with a franchise like Transformers you couldn't ask for anything more. A two-hour action sequence is the perfect job for Michael bay and I would go so far as to say he is probably the only person in Hollywood who could have made it work. And that's exactly what he did. Seeing Transformers was one of the best experiences I've had in a theatre in the past few years. Here is a list of the reasons why it's so entertaining:

My Experience From Book to Film: Shutter Island

In 1954 U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) travels to a remote, storm-beaten island, site of Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, in order to investigate the disappearance of patient Rachel Solando. However, what appears at first to be a missing persons case quickly becomes far more suspicious and the further Daniels’ investigation goes the more disturbing his discoveries become.

My Experience From Book to Film: Watching The Watchmen

Watchmen has always been the gospel of sorts in my comic book side of things. Recommendations and comparisons were sent my way lots of times, to which I always felt a genuine interest and curiosity but nonetheless moved along blissfully ignorant of what exactly I was passing up. When announcements of the Watchmen movie reached me a year or two ago I knew I had only a limited time to experience the comic book on a clean slate and picked up my own copy.

It goes without saying Watchmen is unlike anything I've read. Its plot structure is genially built on intertwining themes and concepts of morality, politics and psychology that delve extremely deeply into society even today, all the while taking place in an alternate universe of the1980’s where Nixon remains president and the cold war has spiraled toward nuclear holocaust. Expanding and building on all of these themes are the characters, all of which are extremely complex and conflicted in their own rights. Moore delivers a wide spectrum of psychoses, vulnerabilities and perspectives relevant to the superhero archetype as well as the human condition as a whole. The story is rich and fulfilling and at times poetic and tragic.