By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox.

First off, if you haven’t seen the movie but intend to, I recommend you don’t read this until you’ve seen it or you’ll ruin it for yourself. So go watch it, right now.

Have you seen it now? Good.

I’m not exactly what you’d call an appreciator of grown-up films. Mostly that’s because hardly anybody uses the word “appreciator,” but it’s also because anybody who knows me is well aware that my appreciation of film only extends as far as musicals, animated films, and adaptations of my favorite books.

So when I say that I was extremely appreciative of Fight Club, I want you to understand exactly what I mean.

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By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Studios (and Pixar Studios, because that’s what you’ll always be to me).

I’ve liked video games since I first played Duck Hunt on my grandparents’ Nintendo, but I don’t consider myself a gamer. Once in a very long while, I might play the odd Halo match with my sister and get pelted with grenades. When I can find batteries for the controller, I might jam out a few riffs in Guitar Hero. Sometimes I play a little Mario Kart on Sunday nights when my brother and sister-in-law come over for dinner, and I get absolutely schooled. I played Sims 2 pretty frequently until I lost the disc and never bothered to replace it. And yeah, I was basically addicted to World of Warcraft my entire first year of university, and my grades may have tanked as a result of traipsing around Azeroth with my level 85 human warrior, but I was a dirty, filthy keyboard turner, so it doesn’t count.

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by Thom Yee

The Raid images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Throughout most of 2012, I kept hearing about this great Indonesian action movie.  It won the Midnight Madness Award at its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 and proceeded to earn further accolades at the James Dublin International Film Festival in Ireland and the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam.  Most of the early reviews referred to it as The Raid (which is what I’ll be calling it), though it’s known as The Deadly Raid in its homeland and was released locally as The Raid:  Redemption.

For various reasons, mostly having to do with becoming unhinged in the land of wind and ghosts, back taxes, lost passports, and Malaysian judicial canings, it took me a long time to catch up to it, but I finally watched The Raid a few days ago.

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