the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On How “Arkham City” Uses the Language of Video Games to Make the Player Feel Like Batman…

Posted on June 1, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist earleir this week. As part of a Patreon goal, I will be playing through the video game of The Last of Us for the website, but to warm up, I decided to take up playing some video games that I remember from my own childhood: the Arkham games.

Replaying Batman: Arkham City, I was taken at how well the game uses the narrative structures unique to video games to immerse the player in the world and the psychology of the Caped Crusader, beyond what is possible in comics, film or television. The game places the player in an artifical countdown, and gives them sets of competing objectives, forcing them to decide what to prioritise and how best to respond to the immediate crisis as the situation keeps escalating around them. It’s an approach that manages to make Gotham feel like a real and living place, with the Dark Knight caught in the middle of it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Comics | Tagged: arkham city, batman, batman: arkham city, comic books, level design, open world, rocksteady, sandbox, the escapist, video game design, video games | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Myths and Lies of “Barry”…

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the end of Barry this week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look the show’s final season.

Barry is a show about Hollywood, but it is also a show about America. It is a show about mythmaking and self-delusion, about the stories that people tell themselves to feel better and about the stories that are told about people to make everybody else feel better. It’s a black comedy about a hitman who becomes an actor, but over the course of its four seasons it evolved into something decidedly more complex and compelling. Like Succession, it is a show that speaks perfectly to the current moment, holding a mirror to a nation in crisis.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: america, american history, Barry, Bill Hader, delusions, fantasies, hbo, hollywood, lies, myths, out of focus, prestige television, Season finale, wow | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Recap – “Succession and Barry Are Masterclasses in Series Finales…”

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Darren

We’re thrilled to be launching a weekly multimedia podcast at The Escapist, called The Recap. I’m hoping to be a regular fixture of it, stremaing live every Tuesday evening. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.

This week, with the ending of Succession, Barry and Ted Lasso, it seemed like a good opportunity to ruminate on what it means to actually end a long-running series. What is is that makes a finale compelling and effective?

Filed under: Television | Tagged: ambiguity, Barry, conclusions, endings, finale, season finales, storytelling, Succession, ted lasso, the escapist, the recap | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Into the Spider-Verse” as a Postmodern Superhero Remix…

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse this weekend, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to take a look back at Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Into the Spider-Verse is arguably the best superhero movie of the previous decade. A large part of the film’s appeal is that it is a superhero movie built around the understanding that its audience has seen other superhero movies and understands the classic beats of the superhero origin story. As such, it can speed them up and slow them down, iterate over them and subvert them, using the audience’s familiarity to create a postmodern meditation on the very idea of Spider-Man.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Conventions, in the frame, meaning, memes, memetic, Narrative, pop culture, postmodern, rhythm, sony, spider man, spider-verse, storytelling, tropes, viral | Leave a comment »

336. Jeepers Creepers: Reborn (-#37)

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week joined by special guests Joey Keogh and Billie Jean Doheny, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, Timo Vuorensola’s Jeepers Creepers: Reborn.

Twenty-three years after its last feeding frenzy, the mysterious “Creeper” has emerged from its rest, and it hungers. Finding itself drawn to a horror convention in Louisiana, the Creeper plans to unleash a nightmare all of its own upon the unsuspecting cosplayers.

At time of recording, it was ranked 37th on the list of the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: The Bottom 100, This Just In | Tagged: #metoo, billie jean doheny, hollywood, horror, ip, jeepers creeper, jeepers creepers: reborn, joey keogh, me too, nathan winters, podcast, reboot, sequel, sexual assault, slasher, The 250, The Bottom 100, the creeper, Timo Vuorensola, victor salva | Leave a comment »

325. Child’s Play (#—)

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Charlene Lydon, this week joined by special guest Bren Murphy, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, Tom Holland’s Child’s Play.

Young Andy Barclay just wants one thing for his birthday: a Good Guy Doll. However, the coveted toy is outside his mother’s price range. Luckily, fate brings a discount doll into her hands, but things quickly become complicated. Andy finds himself at the centre of a series of mysterious deaths and is convinced that his beloved companion has taken on a life of his own, inheriting the spirit of the serial killer Charles Lee Ray, better known as “Chucky.”

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: Brad Dourif, charlene lydon, child's play, consumerism, don mancini, horror, imdb, killer dolls, mayhem, murder, podcast, slasher, The 250, Tom Holland | Leave a comment »

335. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (#135)

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week joined by special guests Graham Day and Luke Dunne, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

A shocking and unprovoked attack on the community of Knowhere leaves Rocket fighting for his life. His old friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy, embark on a mission to save his life. In doing so, they find themselves journeying back into a past that he has never discussed and heading into conflict with a mysterious figure known as the High Evolutionary.

At time of recording, it was ranked 135th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: chris pratt, disney, graham day, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, guardians of the galaxy vol. 3, high evolutionary, imdb, James Gunn, luke dunne, marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios, outrage, podcast, pop culture, rocket raccoon, superheroes | Leave a comment »

334. John Wick: Chapter 4 (#181)

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This time, Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 4.

Still exiled and alone, John Wick wanders through the global criminal underworld. As his friends fall around him and the knives of the High Table close in around him, the assassin finds himself contemplating an uncomfortable question. What does he actually want? What can he actually accomplish?

At time of recording, it was ranked 181st on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: action, commentary, donnie yen, film, franchise fatigue, hiruyuki sanada, john wick, john wick: chapter 4, just the two of us, Keanu Reeves, martial arts, morality, Movie, nobody, podcast, rules, society, The 250, This Just In | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The TARDIS Crew – “Torchwood – Children of Earth (Part 2)”

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Darren

I was thrilled to be invited to join the great Ben and Baz Greenland for an episode of their podcast, The TARDIS Crew.

This is the second half of the episode covering Torchwood: Children of Earth, and it’s fun to get to discuss the five-episode miniseries as the culmination of Russell T. Davies’ work on both Torchwood and Doctor Who. We discuss the metaphor at the heart of the show, the queer-coding of the central narrative, and the way in which it effectively completes Jack’s arc of transforming the character into an even more dysfunctional version of the Doctor.

You can listen directly to the episode below or by clicking here.

Filed under: Podcasts!, Television | Tagged: brexit, children, civil service, podcast, reproductive futurism, the tardis crew, torchwood, torchwood: children of earth, united kingdom | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Trump Era Paranoia of “Star Trek: Picard”…

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Star Trek: Picard at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Thursday morning while the show is on, looking at the third season as the show progresses. This week, the season’s fifth episode.

The third season of Picard is fascinating, in large part because it’s so narratively and thematically empty. So much of the show is given over to empty nostalgia, that there’s little sense of what this story is supposed to be about, beyond a loose assemblage of familiar clichés into a recognisable pattern. There’s none of the urgency of the immigration and xenophobia metaphors that informed the first two seasons, as clumsy as those were. Instead, Picard falls back on a set of unfortunate science-fiction clichés that speak to the worst impulses of the current moment, a paranoia that feels tied to the worst of the American zeitgeist.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.