Words by  Curmudgeon Film Talk There’s this scene in Porco Rosso (1992) wherein the protagonist, Marco, dines in solitude with his childhood friend, Gina. She relays a recently-acquired anecdote: a boisterous yet conceited seaplane pilot named Curtis - whom she’d just met - asked to marry her. “I’ve married three pilots,” she tells him, “one died in the war, one in the Atlantic, and the third in Asia.” I recall, upon watching Porco Rosso for the first time, this line irked me. “Here are two people who’ve been friends for many years. Why would she tell him this? Surely, he would already know,” I thought to myself. An excuse for exposition, I imagined. My criticism came too soon, though. As Marco hesitates, his face gone blank, it becomes clear – in the most indirect manner possible, Gina discloses her husband’s death. The solemn words follow: “they found him?” Their subdued manner keeps them composed. And yet, something in director Hayao Miyazaki’s detailed ey...

  Picture this: You go about your daily business as usual, doing the things you always like to do, and going to the places that you have always gone. Suddenly the whole world stops with a shudder as your muscles begin to fail you, and a searing headache accompanies the encroaching darkness as you black out. A stroke. Waking up, twenty days later, you find yourself unable to move at all. The doctors tell you that you have ‘locked-in syndrome’; you are effectively paralysed across your whole body. Your world has ended, you might think. On 8 December 1995, this is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby , the then-editor-in-chief of French magazine Elle . Waking up in hospital in the northern French coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer, he found himself “paralysed from head to toe, his mind intact yet imprisoned inside his own body, unable to move or speak.” The only way he could communicate, or even move, is through the blinking of his left eyelid. Devastated, he discovered that he was,...

Hype is a deadly mistress.  The greater the anticipation, the higher your hopes become. Rarely can anything live up to your lofty expectations, and Id Software’s DOOM Eternal (2020) is one such release that got hyped to hell and back, ironically.  DOOM (2016) was one of my favourite games of the last decade. It harkened back to the shooters of the 90s and early 2000s that I grew up on, and it succeeded marvellously. DOOM Eternal has the challenge that every sequel must overcome; not only must it do what the previous game did, it has to do it bigger and better.  Its premise alone shows the game is going bigger. After the events of DOOM , hellspawn demons have vacated Mars and taken over the whole Earth, pushing the human race to extinction. You are the almighty, ultraviolent Doom Slayer/Marine/Guy, and you’re here to do 2 things: Kick Ass. … actually that’s it. DOOM Eternal ( DE ) ’ s globetrotting campaign boasts 13 levels. Each of the...

Image courtesy of Green Ornstein Words by  Curmudgeon Film Talk . SETTLE DOWN CLASS. …ehem… Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say that. In either case, welcome to Detective Writing 101 . Today, we’re going to be taking a peruse through a few trademarks of a great detective story . I’ll be your professor, Dr. Curmudgeon . Except I don’t have a Master’s Degree yet, so I’m not a professor. Nor do I have a doctorate, so the proper title would be Mr. Curmudgeon. But I have a blog, and I complain about movies on the internet. That’s basically the same as having a PhD, right? If you’re familiar with my writing – which might be unlikely , since Curmudgeon Media’s collective following consists of an old man who lives in my crawl space, my dog, and a boiled egg – you may have noticed that I’m big on film noir . When I say “big on film noir,” I of course mean that I will shoehorn it into any conversation, and if I could materialise its essence and inject it directly int...