movies

Chat-your-own-Adventure #18: Skink Theater

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience bidding tokens (earned while watching) to determine the path of the story.  The underlined phrases in the choice of three were the winning pathways.  Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d ever like to participate in our interactive fiction.

Skink on Mirror                            Finch in Popcorn                            Bat in Lights

He thought only geckos could stick to surfaces like that so successfully, but the skink was intent on proving Darren wrong. It scurried across the surface of the long bathroom mirror, avoiding his attempts to snatch it with a brown paper towel. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Props Department

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Donut fired his weapon. Well, it wasn’t his weapon. None of this belonged to him, though it certainly felt like it did in the moment. It felt like it was his revolver, his badass vest and cowboy hat, and his actual wiry mustache. It took significant focus to remind himself that he couldn’t even grow a mustache reliably. It was more like trying to grow chia seeds in a sink drain.

Still, he felt masculine. The bullet, garlic-infused, left the gun and struck Strusse in the chest. He was a vampire at the moment, so he was forced to recoil in agony. Steam, rather pleasant-smelling steam, shot from his wound as he tripped over one of the giant noodles and sank into the spaghetti that Donut was also entangled in. Continue reading →

Jungle Book and the Digital Divide

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

I saw the new Jungle Book.  It is a solid film, but one issue really sticks with me.

Several flaws are obvious: the musical numbers are forced-in and tonally jarring, its remake premise sucks out much of the excitement, and the animals would simply look ten times better if their voices were essentially telepathy instead of having mouths meant for crushing throats or unhinging their jaws flap all over the place.   Continue reading →

Age of Ultron and Serial Storytelling

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

I’ll preface this piece by summarizing my overall reaction to the Marvel cinematic universe: It’s a series of mediocre-to-average films falsely elevated in popular culture because of the connective tissue between them and it has started an unstoppable corporate snowball that will dominate theaters with its bloated sets of background information for at least the next five years.  That being said, this piece is about an older, subtler, more sinister phenomenon that stunts artistic, cultural, and emotional growth that happens to be present in Hollywood’s latest cape-wearers reunion. Continue reading →