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Work and the Zero
[Some spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero] Through an unfortunate series of events, Kentucky Route Zero’s Conway finds himself in debt to a mysterious distillery in the Zero, staffed entirely by strange glowing skeletons. With no way to pay, the distillery hounds him into working for them. His traveling partner Shannon Marquez suggests that he could…
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Jojo Rabbit’s Cardinal Sin (and why it’s a good thing)
[Spoilers for Jojo Rabbit] Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit does the one thing you shouldn’t do when depicting Nazis: make them sympathetic. On the surface this might seem like a deplorable artistic choice – the idea that a Nazi, the universal villain, is somehow worthy of understanding and sympathy. What Jojo Rabbit does though, is the…
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Mr Robot: The Machine that Whiterose built
Mr Robot’s episodes are peppered with Chekov’s guns. An insert shot of a Signal message. A spoken line cut off mid-word. You can practically hear the metaphorical rounds loaded into the metaphorical rifle. It means something right? It has to. Sam Esmail is no J.J. Abrams right? The secret box isn’t empty. And the guns…
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Disco Elysium
“There is a specter haunting Europe: the specter of communism.” Disco Elysium embodies these words, but probably for the opposite reasons Marx and Engels wrote them. They ushered in the rise of communism with these words, but Disco Elysium speaks of its fall. In Revachol, communism is a *thing* that happened, but in the fog…