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New Escapist Column! On How “The Last of Us” Finds a Fresh Angle on Familiar Clichés…

Posted on March 10, 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 penultimate episode.

The Last of Us belongs to a genre that has been well-explored over the past few years, the post-apocalyptic horror. It’s a narrative template that has been thorough excavated and interrogated across a wealth of media. Audiences are familiar with the language and the logic of these kinds of stories, and there are perhaps only so many variations upon the archetypal theme. This what makes the season’s penultimate episode so compelling. The Last of Us wades into a familiar post-apocalyptic set-up, but finds a way to explore it that plays uniquely to the show’s strengths.

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

Filed under: Television | Tagged: belief, cannibalism, ellie, Food, joel, post-apocalyptic, religion, review, Television, the escapist, the last of us | Leave a comment »

200. Goodfellas – Summer of Scorsese (#17)

Posted on September 19, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Jay Coyle and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guest Jenn Gannon, with Andy Melhuish, Jack Hodges and others, 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 Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, continuing our Summer of Scorsese season, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Martin Scorsese is one of the defining directors in American cinema, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that have shaped and defined cinema across generations: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Colour of Money, The Aviator, The Departed, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street. The Summer of Scorsese season offers a trip through his filmography via the IMDb‘s 250.

As far back as he could remember, Henry Hill always wanted to be a gangster. However, the life that Henry leads doesn’t turn out exactly as the young hoodlum might have expected, as he finds himself navigating a web of betrayal and violence involving his closest friends.

At time of recording, it was ranked 17th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: america, capitalism, Food, gangsters, goodfellas, greed, henry hill, Joe Pesci, karen hill, lorraine bracco, martin scorsese, masculinity, podcast, ray liotta, robert deniro, scorsese, The 250, violence, wealth | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Hungry (Review)

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Darren

This November, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the seventh season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Harsh Realm.

Hungry is an underrated episode of The X-Files.

Although it was the third episode of the season to air, it was actually the first episode produced, allowing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to ease themselves back into the demanding shooting schedule. As with Vince Gilligan’s script for Unusual Suspects, the idea was to write an episode that required as little of Mulder and Scully as possible. However, rather than building Hungry around an established member (or members) of the supporting cast, Gilligan decides to introduce a new character and make them the focus of the episode.

“I am sharkboy, hear me roar…”

Hungry is not quite as experimental as X-Cops, but there is something deliciously subversive about telling a “monster of the week” story from the perspective of the monster. Gilligan is arguably building upon the work done by David Amann in Terms of Endearment, but Hungry is very much its own story. It pushes Mulder and Scully to the very edge of the narrative in a way that distorts many of the underlying assumptions about what The X-Files is and how it is supposed to work.

Hungry is proof that The X-Files still has legitimately great stories in it, even if the seventh season has a decidedly funereal atmosphere.

Brains…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: allegory, Food, hungry, kim manners, meat, metaphor, monster, monster of the week, monsters, passing, postmodern, rob roberts, shark person, vince gilligan, x-files, zombie | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Our Town (Review)

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

A rare “monster of the week” script from Frank Spotnitz, Our Town could be seen as a mirror to Humbug. Humbug seemed to mourn the way that eccentric little communities seemed to be fading into history in the nineties – the loss of unique and distinct little hamlets. Our Town seems to offer a counterpoint, suggesting that perhaps the intrusion of the outside world into these tightly-knit communities is not a bad thing.

Inspired by the classic Spencer Tracy film Bad Day at Black Rock, Our Town sees Mulder and Scully investigating a small-town disappearance that eventually leads the duo to uncover a horrifying secret at the heart of the local community.

Fresh bones…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: america, bad day at black rock, cannibalism, capitalism, cgd, chicken, consumerist, d avid duchovny, Food, food processing, frank spotnitz, gillian anderson, health scare, mad cow disease, meat, nostalgia, papau new guinea, ritual cannibalism, romance, small town with a dark secret, small-town america, the x-files, x-files | 3 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Oranges

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Darren

There’s an interesting film in here, somewhere. The Oranges teases the possibility of brutally exposing the seedy underside of suburban life, as we follow an affair between a married man and his best friend’s daughter, but The Oranges is far too shallow to land anything resembling a killing stroke. The adult cast is composed of talented veterans, but the script doesn’t give them much to do – instead The Oranges treats their children as the focal point, misjudging the talent of young actresses Leighton Meester and Alia Shawkat. It all feels too light, too cosy, and too willing to pick the low-hanging fruit to really create an interesting study of life in the ‘burbs.