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New Escapist Column! “The Last of Us” is Solid, Sturdy Worldbuilding…

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s fourth episode.

The third episode of The Last of Us was a highlight of contemporary television, one of the best episodes of television produced in recent memory. The fourth episode is nowhere near as transcendent, but suggests that the show has found something resembling a groove. The fourth episode is a lot of what might be described as “shoe leather.” It’s largely dedicated to set-up and world-building. However, it also feels much more assured and comfortable in its own skin.

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

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New Escapist Column! On Netflix’s Password-Sharing Clampdown…

Posted on February 8, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this week. This week saw some controversy with Netflix announcing – and then swiftly walking back – plans to cut down on password-sharing among users.

This gets at something fascinating about the challenges facing the company going forward in an attempt to maximise profitability. The urge to monetise shared accounts makes sense, but it also risks alienating users at a time when the company is trying to transition into a more traditional ad-supported model. Cutting off access to Netflix for users – especially the younger users disporportionate affected by such a clampdown – would be a very risky move for the company.

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

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New Podcast! The Sundae Presents Bonus Episode 4 – “Miami Vice”

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Darren

Look, I’m a fiend for mojitos. I was delighted to be asked to join the wonderful Dean Buckley and fantastic Ciara Moloney for an episode of their film podcast, The Sundae Presents. I was especially honoured to join them for their first episode with a guest. So, no pressure!

The premise of the podcast involves one host inviting the other to watch a movie that they have not yet seen, and getting the reaction to that. Ciara and Dean had never seen Miami Vice, so it seemed like the perfect subject for a discussion like this, Michael Mann’s fascinating study of the breakdown of boundaries and identities while inventing new ways to make movies with a digital camera, it seemed like a good fit for the premise.

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

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New Escapist Video! On Why Television is Perhaps the Perfect Mode of Adaptation for Video Games…

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Darren

We’re thrilled to be launching a fortnightly video companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch every second Monday, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel. And the video will typically be separate from the written content. 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 Last of Us continuing on television, we took a look at the show as one of the most successful video game adaptations to date. In particular, after decades of trying and failing to translate video games to the big screen, does The Last of Us suggest that the smaller screen is the perfect place for them?

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New Escapist Column! On the Thrills and Disappointments of “Knock at the Cabin”…

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist during the week. With the release of Knock at the Cabin this weekend, it seemed worth taking a look at the latest movie from M. Night Shyamalan.

Knock at the Cabin is by turns fascinating and frustrating. It is a movie that works really well as a claustrophic and ambiguous thriller, a home invasion movie that is essentially a battle of wills over belief. However, it suffers somewhat from the fact that Shyamalan can’t stay within the cabin. At various points, the narrative has to become bigger and more epic, and in doing so, it unravels the tension that makes the best scenes in the movie so compelling.

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

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322. Dragonball: Evolution (-#14)

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guest Jonathan Victory, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

So this week, James Wong’s Dragonball: Evolution.

Goku is a teenage boy who has been trained in martial arts by his Grandpa Gohan, but also sworn to never use those skills for his own benefit. As Goku navigates his difficult teenage years, he finds himself drawn into an epic struggle when the villainous King Piccolo suddenly reappears with a plot to conquer the world using the seven mysterious dragon balls. With an unlikely team of allies, and a looming solar eclipse, Goku finds himself on an unlikely journey of self-discovery with the fate of the world in his hands.

At time of recording, it was ranked 14th on the list of the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

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New Escapist Column! On Why That Episode of “The Last of Us” Wasn’t Filler…

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This week saw the broadcast of Long Long Time, a spectacular episode of The Last of Us. While the episode was almost universally praise, there was some criticism that it was “filler.”

This is an interesting argument, in what it reveals about modern pop culture and what it misses about the art of storytelling. Long Long Time is thematically essential to The Last of Us. It’s an episode that establishes the actual meaningful stakes of the story, beyond the plot mechanics that spur the narrative forward. It’s easy to miss in an era where spoilers are considered a huge issue, where media is designed to be consumed at multiples of its intended speed, and where recap culture has reduced storytelling to lists of plot points. Nevertheless, it’s important.

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

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New Escapist Column! On How M. Night Shyamalan Proves Bigger Isn’t Always Better…

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Knock at the Cabin in theatres, it seemed like a good time to consider the films of director M. Night Shyamalan, and the director’s interesting redemption arc following his descent into a laughing stock during the 2000s and 2010s.

Since the turn of the millennium, the assumption has always been that directors scale upwards, that filmmakers tend to movie from low-budget projects to big-budget blockbusters, a career arc typified by directors like Christopher Nolan or Ryan Coogler. Part of what is so fascinating about Shyamalan is that his career rejects this logic. Shyamalan had that arc, launching with a series of impressive low- and mid-budget films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but floundering with bigger projects like The Last Airbender or After Earth. He’s instead found redemption working at a smaller scale on movies like The Visitors or Old.

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

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New Escapist Column! On “Crimes of the Future” as a Movie About David Cronenberg’s Art…

Posted on February 1, 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. This week, we took a look at David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future.

This past year saw an explosion in movies by auteur directors exploring their childhood and their relationship to their art: The Fabelmans, Empire of Light, Armageddon Time, and so on. What is really interesting about Crimes of the Future is that arguably fits that template for director David Cronenberg. Cronenberg is a director known for his depictions of body horror and transformation, a unique filmmaker with a very distinctive style. Crimes of the Future feels at times like an attempt by Cronenberg to express where his art comes from: inside.

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

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New Escapist Column! On How This Week’s “The Last of Us” is a Masterpiece of Television…

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s third episode.

The first two episodes of The Last of Us were pretty good, doing a lot of worldbuilding and rule-setting for the series, while also working hard to court fans of the games with very knowing and loving recreations of key sequences and dynamics. However, the show really came into its own in its third episode, Long Long Time. Taking a break away from its central characters, The Last of Us played out a beautiful love story that effectively sets up the show’s emotional stakes.

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

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