Analysis - On Cycles

Adam Dietrich

In my living room stand three largish bookcases, all of which are positioned around yours truly in the picture above. Each contains one or more forms of media: one holds books, another one comic collections, and a third a mixture of movies, video games and CDs. While I’m attempting to introduce new hobbies into my routine, my first and foremost pastime will remain the collection and cataloguing of media. I really do love it, whether it involves organizing, maintaining or, of course, enjoying my collected works.

Review - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Summer is winding down once more, thank God, and there’s no better way to celebrate this hot, dismal season’s slow passing than with the Xbox’s Summer of Arcade promotion. Starbreeze Studios’ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is the first of four games to see release this month. Set in a vaguely Norse, medieval land (assuming the former based on Starbreeze’s Swedish origins), Brothers follows a pair of male siblings as they venture across country to find a cure for their widowed father’s ailment. Though simple in concept, it’s now one of my favourite puzzle-oriented adventure games as well as one of the few in any gaming genre to affect me emotionally.

Analysis - Constructive Therapy

I want to buy a Lego set.

No joke. A Lego set. Or Meccano, or K’Nex, provided they still make those. And not some highly specialized Star Wars ship or Lord of the Rings set piece kit, but one of those huge buckets most of you reading had as a kid, with God knows how many pieces, all of which presented choking hazards.

Review - "Want to fight?"

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive was my surprise favourite film of 2011, a vaguely ’80s crime drama that contrasted a smooth, stylish aesthetic with blunt brutality. It was also the first movie to really sell me on Ryan Gosling as an actor, the former London, Ontario resident immersing himself in the quiet and increasingly frightening role of the film’s nameless driver. It also had an amazing soundtrack courtesy of most-underrated-film-composer-ever Cliff Martinez and electronic artists like Kavinsky, College and Desire. So I was as psyched as possible to watch Only God Forgives, the second collaboration between Refn and Gosling, again featuring the music of Martinez.

But as Drive was as unconventional a crime thriller as they come—in spite of its premise, less The Fast and the Furious and more Manhunter with cars—Only God Forgives is as unexpected a follow up to Drive as I could have imagined. I went in expecting Drive, but in Thailand, and ultimately watched what felt like something Stanley Kubrick might have directed… but in Thailand. And that isn’t a bad thing.

Tangent - A Midsummer Night's Delirium

Pictured: the atmosphere inside my house.

Things I would prefer to this week's heat wave:

• Having my toenails yanked off one at a time.
• Running face first into a tree.
• Stubbing any and all of my toes.
• Being forced to replay the final episode of The Walking Dead game on repeat.
• Being shot non-vitally.