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Were we to ever name something after a celebrity (as opposed to someone more obvious and deserving, like ourselves), it would probably be a star (as in “Xeron 12 13 Philip Seymour Hoffman”) or color (like “Cameron Diaz Yellow”) or something less grandiose (maybe “Ol’ Dirty Bastard Lane”). One thing’s for sure, we would never [...]

Not too long ago we read an excellent graphic novel by Hannah Berry entitled Britten and Brülightly that’s like a traditional detective novel except the private investigator Britten’s partner, Brülightly, is a talking tea bag. Awesome, right? (It is.) Well until that work is adapted for the big screen, our quirkiest police pairs in film [...]

Maybe it’s because buildings tall and short seem to be slapped together over a few weeks or a couple months these days, or maybe people just realize that watching long construction processes reduced to a 20-second video is really cool, but we’ve become addicted to time-lapse clips of epic skyscrapers rising from their foundations [...]

Fan-dom, as virtually all of us know but few will admit, involves about as much copycat art and homage as the Internet can handle. Some of these artifacts are more valuable and laudable than others; like, for instance, Michael Jackson art is a hot commodity right now. In the hierarchy of fan art, experimental videos [...]

These days we mostly know Pixar animation studios for their adorable and relatively deep and thoughtful computer-animated films (WALL-E, Up!, etc.) and the funny short films that generally precede said features then go on to win all the short film Oscars, but, like most big names in the movies, they go their start in advertising. [...]

The whole idea of a president needing a vacation sounds, to be honest, more than a little wimpy. After all, you’re the leader of the free world, and the free world never takes a break. If “vacation” was code for “diplomatic trip abroad,” we might understand, but every president seems to make a point of [...]

Hey, so, it’s basically Moon Week this week, with the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing coming up on Monday and tomorrow marking the date that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off in Apollo 11. Accordingly, every media outlet is knee-deep in nostalgic moon-gazing coverage, but we’re more interested in the ways that [...]

What’s a good sci-fi or fantasy series without a fascinating, deeply rich urban locale to serve as its backdrop? Batman’s got Gotham, Superman has Metropolis, and any comparable franchise that plans to stick around would do good to create comparable settings from which subplots and supporting characters can emerge to provide new narratives and continuing [...]

Although YouTube abounds with heaps of evidence to support the argument that cheap video equipment is dumbing down the world, wasting energy and killing creativity, there are plenty of works that suggest the opposite. The advances in fan films, for instance, are proof that new, cheaper technology levels the playing field in a productive way. [...]

One of the most iconic images of modern history is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary: on June 5th, 1989 an unknown man faced down a row of tanks on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where months of protest had finally ceased when the military removed protesters from the public plaza by force. Nobody ever discovered who [...]