Year of Critique

The Shining Stanley Kubrick Review/Critique: "How could anybody write an entire thesis paper on one movie?" This is a question that may have crossed my mind before watching The Shining , but will never cross my mind ever again. Knowing as much as I did going into this movie I really wasn't expecting to be confused, but lo and behold come the end of it I'm wondering what the fuck just happened. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey earlier this year, so I thought that I was prepared for the worst Kubrick could throw at me. Clearly I was mistaken.           The Shining  is one of those movies that you could talk about with someone for hours and still barely scratch the surface of what you think the movie might be trying to say. Even with it being one of the most famous horror movies ever made, one that literally has another famous movie dedicated to analyzing it, there's still so much that hasn't been said. I think this is the biggest strength o

Hvis Lyset tar oss Burzum *Sorry for the Delay, I came down with the flu recently so it put a damper on most of my YoC reviews. I'll try and get through these as fast as possible for you all!* Review/Critique: When trying to get into new genres of music, there are often a decent amount of growing pains. It's inevitable as you try to expose yourself to new things that there are going to be some things you have trouble seeing the appeal of. For myself and many others, something that tends to be off putting are harsh vocals. They've certainly grown on me over the last year, but I would be lying if I said I particularly enjoy them. I was totally enamored with  Through Silver in Blood  for example, but the screaming on  Hvis Lyset tar oss just didn't do it for me. So I'm going to try and go a bit more in depth on why that may be, and give you my honest feedback on the album - which is hopefully the first of many black metal albums I will listen to in an at

Theme:  Dreams Album: Teen Dream Beach House Why I chose this album: I had quite a large number of dream pop albums to choose from going into this month, and the  seemingly quintessential listen within the genre  Teen Dream checks all the boxes. It's spacey, airy, and most importantly has Dream, in the title ! Of course I'm only joking - when listening to a few samples of the albums I was deciding between,  Teen Dream really just best set the mood I was going for, and was definitely the album I most wanted to hear more of. Film: Lucia Pawan Kumar Why I chose this Film:   To be honest with you all, my first instincts for this month had me picking Requiem for a Dream, not Lucia . Upon looking a bit more into the movie though, I realized it's just not as relevant to the theme as it seems. Lucia though, was a perfect match. It deals not just with dreams as they pertain to sleeping, but also with dreams in the aspirational sense. The second I saw the d

Majora's Mask Nintendo Review/Critique: I'm going to start off this review by saying that I've been a Zelda fan for as long as I've been able to hold a controller in my hands. Starting with Wind Waker on the Nintendo Gamecube all the way up to Breath of the Wild just a few year ago, my love of the series has not waned for a second. Because of this, it's rather awkward as a long time fan of the series to tell people that two of it's most critically acclaimed games, TLOZ Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask , are games I've hardly touched. What makes this even more embarrassing is that I've had access to physical copies of both of these games for over a decade and still never played them. I have the collector's edition for the gamecube, the 3DS port of Ocarina, and as of a short five years ago, a physical copy of  Majora's Mask for the N64. Even though I haven't played these games before however, they still feel like cornerstone piece

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.” Review/Critique: " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " is a really weird book to review properly. Like most of it's contemporaries, it's a wildly popular and influential piece of literature that has solidified its place in pop culture indefinitely. Many people (myself included) know the general ideas explored in  " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " through their frequent parody in other pieces of fiction - similar to how most people know the baseline story of Frankenstein and Dracula.  Unlike its contemporaries though,  " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " is at its core a mystery novel, and importantly one who's mystery occupies the entirety of its length. It

The Face of Another Director:  Hiroshi Teshigahara Review/Critique: Of all the pieces of media I've consumed over the year, not one has been as hard for me to comment on as The Face of Another . I've been dreading making this review, as I honestly don't know exactly how to comment on a movie as weird or different as this one is. If I had to categorize it I would say it's a drama, but even then that categorization feels wrong. It's somewhere between Horror, Drama, and Mystery. The mystery element thrown in there because trying to figure out what the fuck is going to happen or at what pace would require you to invite over a team of trained detectives. This isn't to say there's no consistency to the film at all, just that it follows its main story thread so infrequently and at such a bizarre pace that it's hard to know exactly what's going on and how each scene is relevant to the main themes or story. Overall though I'd say that the mov