Movie Review – Avengers: Age of Ultron

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, directed by Joss Whedon, is the latest entry on the big screen for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This is the second Avengers film, following the team of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Wanting to create a world where their team is no longer necessary, Iron Man aka Tony Stark creates Ultron (James Spader), an artificial intelligence with the capacity to protect the world from another alien invasion (as seen in the first Avengers film). Ultron becomes too advanced too quickly, however, and only sees destruction as a viable option for “peace in our time.”Read More »

TV Series Review – Daredevil Season One

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This past week I finished watching through season one of Daredevil, the Netflix series produced by Marvel Television. The series expands upon the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), following Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), an attorney in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. Blinded as a child, Murdock developed extrasensory abilities that allow him to perform extraordinary feats despite his lack of sight. Fed up with how corrupt and dangerous his city can be, he became a masked vigilante to fight for justice when the system isn’t enough.Read More »

Comic Book Review – Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley

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Seconds is a 2014 graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, well known as the author of the Scott Pilgrim series. The story follows Katie, a young woman in a transitional stage in her life. She is a talented chef who has worked at a successful restaurant —Seconds — for the past four years. Wanting to take her talents to greater heights, she currently works toward opening and co-owning her own restaurant. One night she is visited by a strange girl who gifts her the opportunity, in the form of a magic mushroom, to right her mistakes. As things start to fall apart on a particularly bad day Katie takes advantage of this gift, starting her down a path to not only make her life better, but perfect — disregarding the rules in the process.Read More »

Reading Epics: The Odyssey by Homer

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Very recently I finished reading Homer’s The Odyssey in its entirety for the first time. This is particularly significant for me because while minored in classical studies in university and learned a lot about the story of The Odyssey, I never actually read the entire text. I’ve made it a personal mission to read epics like these, having started with The Iliad, which I finished reading at the end of 2013.Read More »

The Depth of Wind Waker

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 Contains some spoilers for the ending of Wind Waker.

I have recently crossed a milestone with this blog, having successfully kept it going for over a year, and would like to start publishing a lot more review-focused content. However, I will still be writing more reflective posts, such as the following.

This week’s post feels a bit lighter to me, but I have just started a new job that has had me working full-time graveyard shifts, so I hope you can bear with me while I simply share some experience I’ve had in gaming lately.Read More »

Movie Review – The Babadook

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Recently I watched The Babadook, an Australian psychological horror film released in 2014 and directed by Jennifer Kent. The film follows Amelia Vannick, a single mother who works as an orderly and is struggling to raise her six year old son Samuel. Her husband died in a car accident on the day Sam was born, an event that continues to haunt their small household.Read More »

Book Review – Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt

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This past week I finished reading Ablutions, the first novel by Patrick DeWitt — published in 2009 — who is better known now for his award-winning novel The Sisters Brothers. Structurally, the novel is a collection of notes, anecdotes, and recollections of the nameless protagonist’s experience working as a bartender in a seedy Hollywood bar. The story explores many of the bar’s vagrant, down-and-out regulars and employees, as well as the protagonist’s own spiraling life centred on an excess of Irish whiskey and popping pills.Read More »