Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Delivers a Good Time, Despite the Rabbids
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,…
YouTube's Slow-Mo Guys Break Down Their Quick Thinking
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…
Sorry, Han Solo, Star Wars Don't Need No Stinking Directors
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…
Rian Johnson Is Getting a Star Wars Trilogy—The Last Jedi Must Be Amazing
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…
Harvey Weinstein Is Hollywood’s Silicon Valley Moment
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…
Hulu’s Handmaid's Tale Win Heralds Television’s New 'Big Three'
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…
MTV's Next Big Idea? Reviving TRL for the Smartphone Generation
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…
Even Ewan McGregor Doesn't Know If He's Coming Back to Star Wars
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…
Cantina Talk: What Really Happened When BB-8 Met Rey
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…
Bong Joon-ho Returns With Okja, a Film About a Hippo-Pig
Six features into his career, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho has made what he calls his “very first love story.” And for Netflix, no less. But Bong being Bong—Snowpiercer was a batshit postapocalyptic thriller set aboard a globe-spanning train—his new film, Okja, is no boy-meets-girl tale. Rather, it’s the story of a friendship between a…