Call of Duty: Burning Stuff

I have a confession to make. Call of Duty: World at War is my very first World War 2 based shooter. In fact, my first foray into the world of testosterone fueled, realistically portrayed war games didn’t occur until I picked up Call of Duty 4 last year at the behest of a couple of friends who were addicted to its crack-laced multiplayer mode. To be honest, I had planned on allowing Call of Duty 4 to serve as both the beginning and the end to this chapter in my life.

Then, everything changed when Nazi Zombie mode was announced.

Read More »

Thanks to Eye Weekly, I had the chance to see an advance screening of the latest Kevin Smith flick, the concisely titled Zack and Miri Make a Porno. In case the marketing push / picture above didn’t tell you, The movie is a collaboration between slacker icons Smith and Seth Rogen, two comedians who deal with the same subject matter of pop culture-spouting low-ambition adults in markedly different ways, Smith favoring the long, drawn-out discourse and Rogen the rapid-fire throwaway reference. (Both love the dick jokes, though.) This clash of styles adversely affects the resulting ninetysomething minutes, but ultimately, the movie manages to entertain enough to be worth a watch.

Read More »

Photo Credits: Flickr user uber-tuber

“How can I say this as nicely as possible?”

This is my job as a designer. To take shit and turn it into gold. Shit, you understand, it’s not even like I’m taking scrap metals and transmuting them into a precious metal. Nope, I just gallop right on by alchemy atop my twenty-foot-tall horse and bitch slap it with the Hand-of-Midas.

Have you read this before? Are you sure? Then you’re probably not one of us. This is what we read. This is what we write. Articulate, sophisticated, observant, and inspired. Verbose, obscure, referential, and patronizing. Whether we love ourselves or hate ourselves, we know we’re better than the Luddite masses incapable of what we do. We wouldn’t even be in this field otherwise.

Read More »

O My ♥, the latest full-length release by Vancouver’s Mother Mother, is a record I’ve been eagerly anticipating since 2007’s Touch Up, which is unabashedly one of my favorite albums of all time. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I could listen to every song on that album at least three times in a row, and that, however plebeian it may be, is the highest praise I can give to a record.

So, how does O My ♥ compare?

Read More »

Whether it’s the casual, interspersed slaughter of Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer or the unsettling buildup to the painful climax of Audition, Takashi Miike’s most seminal films can be broken down into bizarre cycles of exposition and violence. In the aforementioned movies, he cultivates tension and unnerves the viewer for just long enough that when the killing does begin, it’s almost cathartic in its brutality — after all, violence is one of the easiest things to understand.

Miike’s Izo, released in 2004, is this cycle both turned on its head and taken to its extreme conclusion, and as a result, the symbolism is heavyhanded, the exposition is lengthy, the killing is numbingly frequent, and there’s about thirty minutes in total of a guy screaming and playing acoustic guitar.

Read More »