ARQ (2016) - Movie Review

In the annals of speculative fiction, the very idea of time travel is one that seems to fascinate people the most. Like, to the point where even filmmakers and audiences that want nothing to do with the deeper implications of sci-fi are willing to go along with it; on paper, Groundhog Day shouldn’t have gotten as widely popular as it did. However, in spite of that, it is also one of the most problematic and fiddly sub-genres in the entirety of fiction, let alone speculative fiction. The reason for this is one of basic logic, and how most storytellers fail to take into account the extremely complex logic behind time travel, paradoxes, timelines, parallel timelines among many, many others. As such, even with the better time twisting tales that have come out recently like Looper, Edge Of Tomorrow and even (by some accounts) Predestination, plot holes make themselves quite prominent and end up tearing away at the work’s structural integrity. Will this film fall into that same trap?

The DUFF (2015) - Movie Review

I’m going to guess that this is because I didn’t go to high school in the U.S., but labels were never really a thing when I was growing up. Sure, there were certain cliques but we only really had three of them in my year: The geeks, the smokers and everyone else. Yeah, I was a definite geek and I had great friends within that circle but I was never completely driven away from everyone else though; I would frequently talk with the others and while I made a few frenemies along the way, I was relatively comfortable with everyone in the year. If I did have a label that I wasn’t aware of, aside from the nickname “Vol-Cain-O” that I earned due to my short temper, it would have probably been "entertainer", "show-off", or maybe "sideshow attraction"; I loved being the center of attention and trying to make people around me laugh. It didn’t always work out that way, and I would occasionally get laughed at but in retrospect I’m at least glad I got some kind of reaction. With this in mind, movies about high school life never really clicked with me aside from the rare outlier like Ben X. Well, we’re already on the subject of hipster-ish choices for movies, so let’s get started.