Author: Ryan

    Movies

    Carnage: The joys of watching people being horrible

    If you're the sort of person who insists on likeable characters in entertainment, Carnage might be the most unpleasant film you've ever seen. The characters are dishonest, hypocritical, condescending, arrogant, snide, antagonistic, and insulting. They begin the film with a mask of pleasantries covering their inner ugliness, but by the time the credits roll everyone has been exposed as a tremendous asshole.
    Movies

    Meek’s Cutoff’s: The wild, stoic, wandering west

    It's hard to say exactly when Meek's Cutoff grips you, but before you know it a group of 19th-century settlers carefully easing their wagons down a steep hill is one of the most riveting scenes you can imagine. Everyone in the film feels real, and the stakes are impossibly high: If things go any more wrong, or don't start to go right, people are going to die.
    Movies

    The Debt: Heroes, lies, guilt, and Nazis

    The Debt begins by revealing one of its climactic scenes: A Nazi war criminal escapes from his Israeli captors, brutally assaulting one of them in the process. She recovers just in time to shoot him dead before he escapes into hiding forever. The event makes everyone a hero, as long as none of them talk about what really happened.
    TV

    How I Learned to Hate How I Met Your Mother

    How I Met Your Mother is unique among TV shows for its approach to narrative and storytelling. Events are described by multiple characters, often tainted by perspective or memory, there are flashbacks within flashbacks, and more than one narrator has been revealed to be entirely unreliable. That was all well and good, until now.
    TV

    What is The Office about?

    The Office always had storylines and themes that gave the series some forward momentum. Most of those have disappeared or been resolved, leaving the show with a glaring flaw: Everyone is pretty much content.
    TV

    Battlestar Galactica 1-10: Hand of God

    Hand of God is an old-fashioned caper. The fleet finally finds a source of fuel, but it's guarded by Cylons. They're outnumbered and outgunned by the Cylon force, so they need to devise a cunning plan to win the day. It's basically Oceans 11 in outer space.
    Cycling

    Making Safe Cycling Laws Meaningful

    With a provincial election in the fall, Ontario politicians are starting to line up their platforms. Yesterday, NDP leader Andrea Horwath unveiled her party's environmental policies, and most of the attention seems to have gone to a proposal that would require drivers to give cyclists at least one meter when passing.
    Cycling

    Making Up Facts: Not just for mayors any more

    Making Shit Up is the new standard for getting things done in Toronto. If you've got an issue, there's no need for things like research or facts. You can just make up claims, and apparently many media outlets will print them, regardless of any actual connections to reality.