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Showing posts from July, 2020

Out of the Cast: Chinatown

Hello, and welcome back to Out of the Cast; the film noir podcast! This week, Tom (myself) is joined by Frankie from Jimdustries to chat about  Chinatown  (1974)! Give us a look, and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more content. We've got some exciting projects coming up in the future, so stay tuned...

Curmudgeon Media Podcast ep.4

Hello friends, we're back again with another podcast. This time around, Living Prose and The Curmudgeon talk about a whole bunch of stuff, from Top Gear (sort of) to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure...again. This was a super fun one to record and the conversation was wild. Enjoy! For more, here's Living Prose's review of Generation X.

Ghost of Tsushima: A Cinematic Clunk | Green Ornstein

Ah, Akira Kurosawa. As the director of Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and of course, Seven Samurai (1954), he stands proud as a filmmaker that non-film students such as myself pretend to know. I wonder what he’d think about his influence today. I mean after he’d finish weeping at the shoddy state of contemporary cinema, but at some point he would catch wind of Sucker Punch, and their new game Ghost of Tsushima (2020). This game was always in the background for me. I knew of it but it likely got pushed behind the warring factions arguing over The Last Of Us 2 (2020). However I was hyped as Sucker Punch are known for the Infamous (2009-) franchise, with Infamous 2 (2011) being one of my favourite games. So it’s fair to say expectations were high. There was a part of me that wanted to blow up Mongols with lightning powers, but a more realistic side of me wanted something innovative. I got neither. But damn did it look nice. Ghost of Tsushima takes place ...

Review: Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture by Douglas Coupland

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland is that strange kind of book that quickly becomes iconic, epitomising an era in the minds of everyone who reads it, before drifting into relative obscurity as the time it depicts slides away into memory. And Generation X was iconic.  It lent its name to the age group it writes about, the oft-overlooked Gen-Xers who were born between 1965 and 1980. The book skewers American culture, politics and commercialism of the time with extreme enthusiasm, and coins terms such as: McJob - “A low-pay, low-prestige, low dignity, low benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one”, Boomer Envy - “Envy of the material wealth and long-range material security accrued by members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate birth”, and Historical overdosing/underdosing - “To live in a period of time when too m...

Out of the Cast - Blade Runner

WE'RE BACK and this time, join The Curmudgeon (myself) and Accounting For Games in our podcast discussion on the classic 1982 tech-noir Blade Runner !

Persona 5 Review | Green Ornstein's Bucket List of Games

Special thanks to  Curmudgeon Film Talk   for providing the drawing 87 hours and 36 minutes. That’s how long it took me to get to the end of Persona 5 (2016). Oh, I mean get to the end of the plot, it’s not like Skyrim (2011) where you can complete the main quests in a day but fill out the time with endless side missions. It’s nearly double the play time of NieR: Automata (2017) and you had to play that game 3 times to get the true ending. Persona 5 is one of the longest games I’ve ever played. And one of the best.  Anyway, let’s start with the hard part: summarizing the plot. Within the Persona universe, there is a dimension running parallel to it - referred to as the Metaverse - which reflects the strongest and darkest desires of humanity. These evil impulses manifest themselves as “Palaces”: labyrinthine structures that embody how an individual views the world and themselves. Palaces, and the many monsters dwelling within, pro...