Last week's ** announcement of Far Cry 5 wasn't itself a surprise. Over the past 13 years, the series has evolved from a playground of first-person shooter mayhem to something far more distinctive: A collection of deep, difficult, often political games that served as meditations on violence as much as enactments of violence itself. They've…
When Rabbids, the hyperactive cartoon rabbits introduced in Rayman Raving Rabbids, get excited, they shout "Bwah!" They do so repeatedly and volubly. This is a fact I didn't know yesterday; I hope I forget it by tomorrow. The Rabbids, which gained attention for their mascot potential and have since been spun off by their creators,…
Click:Crushing & Grinding Equipment High-speed cameras, commonly known as slow motion cameras, imbue milliseconds with the weight they’re so rarely granted. A balloon pops, with the water inside it still holding its shape; a bullet shot underwater leaves an attenuated cone of air in its wake. Daniel Gruchy and Gavin Free, known on YouTube as…
Of all the Star Wars tropes fans love—the scoundrels, the weird foods, the planets dominated by a single biome—the best one might just be the face-off. Not the battle itself, but the fermata beforehand: Two combatants, gazes locked on each other, knowing that it's about to go down. Most of the time, the ensuing struggle…
Congratulations, Rian Johnson—you survived the Star Wars obstacle course! In a world where not every director even gets to finish the movie they start producing, you, exalted amongst your peers, have not only wrapped one—you’ve been given more. Lucasfilm announced yesterday that you're getting your own trilogy (three films!) with which you can do whatever…
A few days ago, Chelsea Handler took to Twitter and blew the horn of war. “This is the year of the woman,” she wrote. “From Fox, to Silicon Valley, to Hollywood. We may have lost the election, but it raised sleeping lions.” It was October 8—more than a year after Fox News head Roger Ailes…
Last year, when Jill Soloway accepted her Emmy Award for directing Transparent, she hoisted it in the air and hollered "topple the patriarchy!" At the time, she was talking about trans rights, civil rights, and the feminist movement, mostly on TV but globally, too. Twelve months later, The Handmaid’s Tale, a show where the patriarchy…
TRL, the MTV show formerly known as Total Request Live, went off the air in 2008. On November 16 of that year, to be exact; Beyoncé performed its swan song. In the nine years since, YouTube became the primary vehicle by which people watched music videos, the activity for which people tuned in to the…
If one thing's for certain, it's that Disney productions are tight-lipped affairs. Lucasfilm movies, Marvel flicks—these things are made under lock and key. So if you happen to ask people affiliated with those franchises, don’t be surprised if the answers they give are less than definitive. Take, for example, Ewan McGregor, the man who played…
With Disney's D23 Expo less than a week away, fans are about to get all the Star Wars news they can handle. And considering most of the Lucasfilm updates recently have been about the directors of the Han Solo standalone movie getting replaced by Ron Howard, the (presumably) good tidings from D23 won't be coming…