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Fight or Flight
Watching this movie was another case of having to choose something for the entire family to watch. I was pretty excited though because I heard Fight or Flight is like the airplane version of Bullet Train, which is basically the pinnacle of action-comedy for me. However, after watching, I’m not sure if this movie will be nearly as memorable. The first thing I wanted to talk about was the lead actor, Josh Hartnett. The first thing I thought of when I saw his face in the movie was that he’s a psychopath. Or serial killer. Or probably both. Then, I realized he was the serial killer from Shyamalan’s Trap. Considering…
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Brave New World
I have heard of this book by Aldous Huxley for a long time, but I decided to pick it up now to see what it’s about. Honestly, it feels like a more toned down and goofy version of 1984. Most of the time while reading I had no idea what the plot of Brave New World was. It just felt like the characters doing things, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about methods of government control that 1984 didn’t already teach me. Also everything having to do with kids in Brave New World was really freaky, and I have no idea what point Huxley was trying to make…
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Heads of State
Choosing a movie as a family inevitably leads to sacrifices; obviously, I never would have chosen to watch this movie out of my own volition. I do have some things to say about it though, so let’s begin. First of all, I was surprised by Priyanka Chopra being good in this movie. She was as believable an actor could be in fight scenes and dialogue in a movie like this. My mom told me how her previous forays in acting were subpar, so I wasn’t expecting much, but she was actually the highlight. Now, let’s talk about everything that was a bit goofy. I kept getting a sense of déjà…
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The Old Guard
Two days ago, I went to the bookstore at our local mall. I headed right past the Tik-Tok books section right to the clearance. Usually, there’s nothing that I’m interested in: just printed webtoons, weirdly translated Epics, and random beach reads. But what I found that day was absolute gold. The first volume of the Old Guard comic just for five bucks. The amazon price is listed at $14. Needless to say, I bought it. I mean, the comics section of my shelf is seriously lagging behind the history, science, fiction, and classics sections. The comics, both volumes, for the Old Guard are really good. Also, there’s just something so…
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Trust
I randomly decided to pick this book by Hernan Diaz up after seeing on the display of bookstores multiple times. I had no idea what it was about before reading other than the fact that that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And honestly? I don’t think I really get the book. I followed the book when it was talking about the lives of the characters; reading about their personalities, interests, and romances was actually pretty interesting. But then the book would start yapping about economics, or have the strange unrelated but actually related lines, and I would lose track of what I was reading. I’m sure it won…
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The Wild Robot
I am not really the type of person to cry during movies and books. Sure I sometimes get sad, but I never usually react visibly. However, when it came to the Wild Robot, not only was I crying at the end of the movie, but also at the halfway point. I didn’t know a movie had the capability to affect me this much until the Wild Robot. The music was one of the most memorable parts. The notes have been engrained in my head like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, which surprised me so much, because this is a kids movie. Like who spent this much time perfecting the theme to…
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The Sorcerer of the North
Comics are a new form of books I have been to really get into. And because of that, I have tried my hand at cartooning. This is a full comic I drew for an English assignment. The idea for the project eluded me for a couple weeks, but once I got it, I had the script for dialogue done in two hours. I would attribute my ENTIRE view of storytelling to two books: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. The idea of stories about stories is something I am absolutely fascinated by because these books have infiltrated the fundamental way I think, so while…
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Mr. Robot
This was such a goofy show. Computer science is not an area of interest for me, so I never expected I would be this entertained by a show about cybersecurity and hacking. I just finished watching the first season of Mr. Robot on Netflix, and even though it was really technical and computer science heavy, I found it so entertaining. I feel like the show makes really good use of an unreliable narrator; that’s a really good technique to keep the viewer guessing at all times. I don’t even want to reveal some of the plot twists at the end, because it’s something you have to watch for your self. The…
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Uzumaki
Horror is not a genre that I usually read, but Junji Ito’s graphic novels never disappoint. This time, I randomly picked up Uzumaki from the library, and it was certainly a peculiar read. Each chapter is set in the same town with the same characters, but with a different horrific twist on the same motif: a spiral. The town and its residents undergo a slow descent into madness over the course of the volume. The part I personally found scary was the very beginning. Something about the ceramics dude becoming obsessed with spirals and then becoming one was so unsettling, especially because this was the first strange thing to happen…
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Divine Order and Devotion: Egyptian Maat and Roman Pietas in Ovid’s Byblis and Iphis
This is a paper that I wrote for my class, Ancient World Religions and Philosophy. I chose the option to choose my own topic, and having read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there was a question I had that I really wanted to answer. Why did Ovid, a religious Roman poet, write a story about devotion towards the Egyptian gods? Here is my answer.