by Thom Yee

Sound City images courtesy of Variance Films, Roswell Films, and Gravitas Ventures

Nostalgia is a hell of a thing.  It circles our minds, advises us on the seemingly wisest course of action, and occupies our thoughts as we pretend to transcend into the future.  It even drives large parts of our economy.

Nostalgia is all around us, everywhere.  We can deny its presence as we produce our important works in a vain attempt to do something new, but it’s always there for one simple reason:  we all want a do-over.  It’s the reason why we ask ourselves what we would do if we could go back — to a simpler time, to a happier time, to a more hopeful time where anything was possible.  And for a lot of us, the main thing we would do if we could go back is our damndest to stay there and not have to move forward.

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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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by Thom Yee

A Good Day to Die Hard images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

The first thing I asked when somebody told me there was a fifth Die Hard movie coming out was, “Is it set at Christmas?”  It’s not a necessary element.  It’s not central to the plot, nor is it something you contemplate in the overall context of the films.  But it’s important.  To me, the first Die Hard, the one, true Die Hard, is fundamentally three things:

1) a superlative action movie;

2) an all-around perfect movie; and

3) a quintessential Christmas movie.

It’s an atmospheric element that lends so much to the feel of the original that it’s inextricably, inexorably, and never-endlingly linked to what the Die Hard experience is.

A Good Day to Die Hard is not set at Christmas.

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