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New Escapist Column! On M. Night Shyamalan’s Fascination with Faith…

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, with the release of Knock at the Cabin, it seemed wothing taking a look at the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan is a filmmaker with a unique perspective, and many of his films circle around the same sets of themes concerned with family and horror. However, Shyamalan is also a director fascinated by faith and belief. He’s often horrified by characters who hold firmly to seemingly irrational beliefs. More than that, though, Shyamalan’s films often mine a sense of dread and horror from something even more fundamental: the fear that, against all odds, these irrational understandings of the universe might be correct.

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

New Escapist Column! On The “Ant-Man” Movies as the Most Marvel of the Marvel Movies…

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the upcoming release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, and the way in which these films – for better and worse – feel like the statistical mean of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Part of what in interesting about the Ant-Man movies is how little they actually adapt from the source comics, largely marginalising characters like Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne in favour of porting over out-of-continuity characters like Hope van Dyne. They deliberately structure themselves to avoid key character and plot beats from the comic book franchise, and so offer the purest distillation of the adaptation storytelling of the comic book film franchise. The Ant-Man franchise is the Marvel Studios franchise that feels most generic, most cribbed together using the studio’s narrative shorthand.

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

New Escapist Column! On How “The Last of Us” Uses an Underground Metaphor…

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 fifth episode.

The fifth episode of The Last of Us, Endure and Survive, is a wonderful illustration of what the show does so well. Structurally, this is the kind of episode that every post-apocalyptic show inevitably does; it’s the story of a colony of survivors overwhelmed by a hostile horde. What is so effective about Endure and Survive is that it tells this conventional story in a way that plays into the larger themes of the show around it. The Last of Us has a very literary quality to it, and the episode is built around a clever central metaphor: it’s a story about rising up from underneath.

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

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as Fan Service Methadone…

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. To start with, though, a look at the season as a whole.

The end of the second season of Picard effectively wrote out the bulk of the show’s new cast members, explicitly to make room for a nostalgic revival of Star Trek: The Next Generation, featuring cast members thirty years removed from that series. The result is as pandering and condescending as one might expect, suffering from many of the same fundamental issues of the first two seasons, stripping out anything distinctive or unique and replacing it with a shallow petina of nostalgia. It’s cynical, it’s hollow and it speaks to a fundamental emptiness with so much modern pop culture.

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

New Escapist Column! On How “Wakanda Forever” Picked the Wrong Black Panther…

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever on Disney+, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about the movie with spoilers, given that now everybody who might want to see the movie has had the chance to see it.

Even though it was a foregone conclusion, the identity of the new Black Panther was treated as something of a spoiler in certain fandom circles. Still, four months after the movie’s release, it seems fair to concede that the film made the worst possible choice. Shuri was the logical choice to assume the role based on comic book continuity, but she has the least compelling arc of any of the major characters in the superhero sequel. Wakanda Forever would be a much stronger movie if it made a bolder choice.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.