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Why You Should Watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The most cardinal sin that an extension to a popular media franchise can make is to be different. Formula, aesthetics, tone, canon -these mean everything and fresh ideas mean little. A lot of the homogeneity in our current mainstream media landscape has a lot to do with the fact that such brands refuse to take risks, adopt more provocative themes, or challenge existing norms within that brand. We've seen the intensity of the backlash when Star Wars does it, and we've seen it also when Star Trek has done it. 'Boldly going' apparently only means so much. And yet, going a different route and taking new chances has often resulted in better art, art that has elevated the brand it is created within. Case in point: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Granted, when the third live-action Star Trek show first debuted in January 1993, it was not greeted with immediate positivity for these same reasons. The internet was not ubiquitous at the time but there were certainly voices objecti...
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Burying the Hatchet, D’You Know What I Mean?

There are bands who break up, and there are bands who really break up. Post-break-ups, the individual members of Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, even the Beatles, have interacted with each other occasionally -even reuniting on stage once in a while. Not so with Oasis -since disbanding abruptly in 2009, its duelling creative forces, the Gallagher brothers, spent fifteen years completely estranged. They had always been uniquely volatile and antagonistic towards each other, and that apparently hadn't diminished with age. A reunion of Oasis was just about the least likely thing to ever happen. And then it did. In 2025, Oasis reformed for a global reunion tour -Liam and Noel Gallagher came back into each other's lives and went back on stage together, and remarkably it lasted the length of the tour -no bitter fights, no reports of friction behind the scenes that would have derailed the enterprise halfway through. Such little chaos really isn't like Oasis, and in a way that was...
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Shreds of Hope

The most immediately enduring image from Na Hong-jin’s Hope is that of a man on horseback riding through the woods while firing a machine gun behind him at a large alien creature descending on him. Obviously it is meant to stick with you, Na slows it down and holds on it for quite some time, a technique he employs in other areas of action through his extremely ambitious genre blockbuster that is by some accounts the most expensive movie in Korean cinematic history. He certainly tries as best he can to make sure as much of that money is on screen as possible, but he also directs it with his own aesthetic flare to keep the momentum up and the stakes always extremely tangible. He knows innately where and how to make a shot look cool. And those moments really accentuate and elevate Hope against material that doesn’t always rise to a similar standard. The movie was one of the more contentious out of Cannes this year, a lot of praise going to some of its attributes while fierce criticism w...
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