If any character stands at the heart of Westworld’s narrative over its now three-season run on HBO, it’s Maeve (Thandie Newton). Over the past three years, the bordello-madame-turned-sentient-android, a creation of a faceless entertainment corporation, has awakened to greater ambitions than the simple genre tropes she came into being with, only to realize that there isn’t anything for her outside […]
Author: Will Drickey
‘Legion’ wants to talk superhumans, not superheroes By Will Drickey
If you could make everyone believe you were a good person, would you ever bother to actually be one? That’s the central question of the third season of creator Noah Hawley and FX’s “Legion,” a run-off of the “X-Men” series. What’s odd is that the question isn’t asked by the show’s protagonist, David Haller, who discovers his diagnosis around schizophrenia […]
Building a Statue Is Killing a Person: Norm Paris and Mark Shetabi’s joint exhibit for Ortega y Gasset Projects explores the monumental cost of mythmaking
In 1978, on the 25th anniversary of the CIA coup that re-installed the Shah of Iran, four men doused the Cinema Rex theater in the city of Abadan with jet fuel, and burned the building down. As many as 800 people died. Prior to 9/11, it was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the planet. Even 40 […]
Bird Box Wants to Kill You
Netflix says that at least 45 million people saw Bird Box in its first week. If they’re not lying, they’re criminals–they just confessed to wasting the equivalent of 146 human lifetimes. In a just world, I wouldn’t even review this movie–it’s just a A Quiet Place knock-off, like those Transmorphers straight-to-DVD movies that only get made to grift gift-shopping grandmas. […]
Review: ‘Bitches Talkin’
To get into Bitches Talkin, the collaborative exhibition at Black Ball Projects by Eileen Quinlan and Tamar Halper (ET, collectively), you have to call Joe, who’s glad to answer any questions you have, he’ll just be behind the wall over there. It seems fitting that one has to contend with this strange combination of absence and presence just to enter […]