Category: Columns
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Destroy All Monsters: My Team’s Better Than Your Team, So There
Kind of proud of this one, mostly because it started as an all-out rant about internet argument culture and somehow metastasized into an appreciation of how the DC Expanded Universe, through its Infinite Earths model, might actually be a better gambit for consumer choice than my beloved MCU.
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Destroy All Monsters: In DAREDEVIL’s Battle Of Fanboy Wet Dreams, Elektra Wins
There are problems with Marvel’s Daredevil. I am an unabashed fan of the show – I have called its first season the best thing Marvel Entertainment has ever done, and its newly-released second season easily lives up to the benchmark – but I won’t deny any of the series’ more problematic aspects. Some of these…
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Destroy All Monsters: INDIANA JONES 5 Should Be About Short Round
Shorty was played by Ke Huy Quan (now Jonathan Ke Quan) in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. An orphan from the streets of Shanghai, caught trying to pick Indy’s pocket, Shorty quickly becomes the Indiana Jones equivalent of a gentleman’s gentleman: sidekick extraordinaire, minder of Indy’s kit, and keeper of Dr. Jones’ conscience.
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Destroy All Monsters: HOUSE OF CARDS In American Upside-Down Land
Like many of you, I spent the weekend turning down the volume on the real-life political soap opera that has overtaken the United States and watched Netflix’s House of Cards instead. You have to feel sorry for House of Cards this year, a little bit: in the 3 years since the series debuted, its TV-as-novel…
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Destroy All Monsters: “Our Lot In Life” – Droid Personhood In STAR WARS
The question of gender as it relates to droids is interesting, if only in how it connects to the other, less-discussed aspect of these characters from the Star Wars saga: the status of their personhood. Gender is one of the great convocations of personhood; or at least, one of the most significant rubrics by which…
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Destroy All Monsters: Winter In The Captain’s America
Institutional paranoia may be the low-hanging fruit of the American blockbuster, but Captain America 2 exploits it well – even ingeniously, when the movie does reality one better by claiming that all of our online presence is being cobbled together, not into a giant database by which to drive ad sales, but rather into a…