by Michael Lesiuk | Jul 21, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies
Boy, Total Recall (1990) is actually a lot weirder than I remember it. This is probably because, as a kid, I often caught bits and pieces of it on TV, so I rarely (if ever) watched it straight through, and whatever I did watch was an edited-for-TV version. The mixture...
by Michael Lesiuk | Jul 18, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies
The Grey (2012) is far better than I would have thought. The quote on the DVD box — “Terrifically exciting! Hold on tight! It’s a true call of the wild!” — really doesn’t do justice to the film. You know how when you finally get...
by Michael Lesiuk | Apr 29, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies
I’ve been binging through Stargate SG-1 recently, and my theory is that the show is secretly a sitcom. The sci-fi ideas in the show are not that innovative; some of the plot lines are quite bad; the effects are definitely not anything to write home about; the...
by Michael Lesiuk | Apr 24, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies
Simon Prebble’s reading of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is quite good. I’ve been listening to it on my runs and while I’m doing mindless tasks like making dinner or cleaning. The Literary Theory course by Paul Fry from...
by Michael Lesiuk | Feb 20, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies
I liked this movie. (Maybe from now on I’ll just post “hey, here’s a thing I liked.” Huzzah for low-content posts.) This was my favourite exchange: The Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Benicio (Kaden Leos) are watching cartoons while Irene (Carey...
by Michael Lesiuk | Feb 14, 2012 | Fiction/Lit/Movies, Language Semiotics and Rhetoric
In Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jakobson describes six functions of language. The phatic function of language is language whose function is essentially contact, language for the sake of language, regardless of signification. Anyone who owns a cat understands the...
