Obituary - Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

Roger Ebert died this week. For close to half a century, the man’s name and image were synonymous with the very idea of film criticism, far and away the most recognizable person in his field and, in many ways, the most accessible. An active presence on social media networks for the last few years of his life, he arguably connected with his readers more than most critics half his age. And perhaps most importantly, his work showcased humility and unguarded humanity, even in the last week of his life.

2012: A Cinematical Retrospective

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m into a bottle of wine. I’d say it’s about time to wrap up the year and ring in the new one by naming my favourite movies of 2012.

Review - "Big Things Have Small Beginnings"

A lone figure stands on a dead planet, gazing solemnly at the spacecraft which brought him here, now flying away. As the mothership soars into the stratosphere, the being—a tall, hairless biped with chalk-white skin and uncannily human features—removes his cloak and drinks an oozing, shifting black liquid. In seconds, the compound brings him to his knees, painfully rending him apart at the molecular level until the humanoid tumbles down the adjacent waterfall and dissolves among the rocks below. But from this individual’s agonizing death comes a glimpse of something new. Decayed DNA strands reanimate, one cell splits into another, then another. Like seeds cast into the wind, life spreads.

So begins Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s semiprequel to his 1979 blockbuster—and my all time favourite movie—Alien. I specify “semiprequel” because Scott himself has been wishy-washy about where it sits in the Alien continuum. While it’s set in the same fictional universe, it focuses not on the series’ eponymous monsters but on a species only glimpsed in the original film. It’s a much grander movie, featuring a more cosmic and existential brand of horror than that of its darkly sexual proto-slasher progenitor. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by way of Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing, and with a touch of H.P. Lovecraft to boot; in other words, everything I could ever ask for, give or take some concerns I have with the finished product.