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How RESCENE’s Memes Made Their Way to Suwon City Hall
If RESCENE is still a new name to you, one of the more interesting ways to discover the group right now may be through the memes growing around its members. RESCENE is…
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Woni and Charmander: A 26-Second Dance Comparison That Just Works
Sometimes a short video does not need a story, an explanation, or even a spoken punchline. It just needs two images placed next to each other at the right moment. That is…
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The 5th Wave (2016): From Hit-Girl to the End of the World
One of the most striking things about The 5th Wave is simply seeing Chloë Grace Moretz at the center of it. For many viewers, Moretz first became unforgettable as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass.…
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Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015): When Manners Become a Weapon
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015): When Manners Become a Weapon By the time Kingsman: The Secret Service arrived, the modern spy movie had already spent decades trying to decide what to do…
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Jupiter Ascending (2015): What If the Gods Came to Harvest Us?
What if the beings we mistook for gods were not morally superior to us at all, but simply older, richer, and vastly more powerful? That question lurks beneath the extravagant costumes, genetic…
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Ex Machina (2015): If a Machine Wants to Be Free, Does It Have a Soul?
What would convince us that an artificial intelligence is truly alive? Intelligence alone would probably not be enough. A machine can calculate, answer questions, recognize patterns, and imitate speech without necessarily possessing…
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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014): A Revolution Needs a Face, but the Face Has to Be Real
A revolution may need soldiers, weapons, plans, and numbers. It may also need an image. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 understands that Katniss Everdeen’s greatest value to the rebellion is…
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As the Gods Will (2014): Why Death Games Keep Choosing the Young
Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will throws high school student Shun Takahata and his classmates into a succession of deadly games modeled on familiar children’s play. The games keep coming while their…
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Interstellar (2014): Science Can Cross the Universe, but Can Humanity Cross Itself?
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a film of enormous distances. It crosses planets, gravitational fields, dimensions, and decades, yet one of its most interesting suggestions may be that technological progress does not necessarily…
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Before I Go to Sleep (2014): Rebuilding a Life from What Remains
Before I Go to Sleep is unsettling not simply because its protagonist has lost her memory, but because that loss has taken away something even more fundamental: her ability to know whether…