REVIEW: Get Duked! [2020]

How can you get lost in a place without corners? Teamwork. Orienteering. Foraging. Three tasks that shouldn’t be too difficult to complete when bolstered by your best friends on a hiking trip en route to earning the Duke of Edinburgh Award. It’s going to be a challenge, but most who seek it do so with open eyes because of what the accolade means on their university applications. They want to be their best, will follow the map to the letter, and meet their chaperone at the midway campsite and coastal…

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REVIEW: Vivarium [2020]

Raise the child and be released We all like to believe that we have some semblance of control over our lives. Do we, though? How much of our identity is dictated by social conditioning? Maybe it’s explicit indoctrination like that taught by religion, politics, and culture as “superior” than others. Or maybe it’s implicit like the subliminal messaging possibilities of art appropriated by marketing. You might say to yourself that you’re too smart for advertising, but what do you do when confronted by four of the same product consisting of…

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REVIEW: Sightseers [2012]

It was an accident, Mum. It’s always the quiet ones—those introverted, socially inept (when not talking about their preferred topic of choice), and downtrodden souls rejecting their unjust position within a hierarchy outside of their control. They’re the ones who trade a lack of entitlement to do whatever they want for the festering entitlement of believing they’re more righteous than those who do exactly that. These are the civil servants who snap after being stepped on too many times; the selfless adult children of aging parents who are trapped by…

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