As you may all know, I am somewhat obsessed with Pride and Prejudice. It is my favorite book. Okay, that's not really true. It's more... this is the book by which I measure my own work. It has so much wit, and character! It has nuance and layers, and it's timelessly...
Let's have another movie swordfight breakdown! One of my faves is from, I kid you not, the Bond movie Die Another Day. Really! Swordfights show up in odd places sometimes. Now, all things considered, Die Another Day was a pretty terrible movie in most other respects -...
Everyone's talking about the Strong Female Character(TM). The actual pushback isn't a mystery, you know? Lots of women said the same thing long before it was even A Thing - that maybe, just maybe, the way anyone with a uterus tended to be written as a sex-dispensing...
Okay, time to talk about another all-time great movie swordfight, again from The Princess Bride. I've talked already about Inigo Montoya versus the Man in Black, and yes, I love that fight like whoah, but this one... oh man, this one. Inigo's Crowning Moment of...
There must be some kind of law about fantasy swords in video games. There's a recipe to them, if you know what I mean. It's not enough for a sword to be a long piece of sharp metal. It's got to have... extra stuff, extra colors, extra everything! Presumably this is...
So... I'd like to talk about lightsabers. First of all - look, they're basically magical sword-like objects wielded by space-mages. They have only one real purpose in the Star Wars canon, and that's to be a marker of otherworld-ness associated with Force-users. They...
So I've talked a little about what makes movie swordplay boring... Now it's time to talk about the good stuff. The best stuff. And where better to start? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC6dgtBU6Gs Yes, it's Inigo Montoya vs. the Man in Black. Believe me when I say...
So, let's talk about Anna. Once again, major spoilers ahead, so click away now if you haven't seen Frozen yet. Alrighty then, still here? Let's move on. Has Anna seen Elsa? Here's what we know about Anna. She's six when Elsa accidentally whacks her in the head with...
I've been trying to articulate for a while just why Frozen irritates me, in spite of all the hype over this being a Disney movie focused on the relationship between two sisters etc etc. After seeing it a few weeks ago, I decided to mull it over a while and then...
Oh, it's a long list, believe me, but I thought I'd give a shout out to the stuff that I have made a conscious decision not to buy, as opposed to the stuff that I'm not buying because I can't afford it or I don't know about it or I have no interest in it. Grand Theft...
The Heat is still my favorite movie of 2013, just FYI. It was a buddy cop film with two women as the leads, one of which was Melissa McCarthy being her usual awesome self. It had a minimum level of romantic bullshit, and the more overt displays of sexuality were NOT...
Much as I like big flashy action movies, I have to accept that they don't like me. It's the same problem I have with comic books - the lack of any kind of meaningful female representation that doesn't actively insult my intelligence or body shape is exhausting. So I...