I love horror movies. Unfortunately, it seems like I’m increasingly alone in this statement — not that I can blame people for a lack of interest in a genre that self-cannibalizes and generally trades character identification and suspense for cardboard cut-outs and shock value. That being said, the number of horror films, including “Psycho,” “Jaws” and of course, “Halloween,” that are affectionately deemed cinema classics is larger than you may think. Are these, however, really the only films worthy of coming back to when looking for a scare?
I scoured the Internet for fresh games in preparation to write a game review for this week’s issue of The Student. Even with my computer’s dated hardware I figured I would find a new(ish) title that would pique my interest and be worth sharing with the Amherst community. Several titles caught my eye, yet before I reached for my wallet, I took a look at games I had played and reviewed so far. Few of them place significant emphasis on narrative in a fulfilling way. Instead, the story often serves as an exposition to justify gameplay.
“Argo” is the second of the handful of year-end films carrying with them heavy loads of Oscar buzz and attempting to bring home the hearts of film-goers and, more specifically, the Academy Awards come February. Following “The Master,” the result of a five-year toil of the director whose previous film was perhaps the most critically acclaimed of the last decade, hype for “Argo” was comparatively restrained.
Watching Meredith Monk was a dream come true for me. Indeed, her concert had the rare magic of teleporting me from the Buckley Recital Hall to imaginary landscapes: when she performed parts of “Songs from the Hill” (1977), I was watching her at the top of a mountain in New Mexico under the scorching summer sun, where the music was born. And when her voice bounced with the piano keys in “Traveling,” I felt like a kid hopping along a grassy path in a vast open land, bounded only by the snowy range from afar.
When your aesthetic appetite has exhausted the 18,000 works available in Amherst’s own Mead Art Museum or when you’re just looking to get off campus for an afternoon, hop in a car and head to Smith or Mount Holyoke, or both.
There’s a lot to be said about “Looper,” but perhaps the most important speaks less to the successes of the film than to the dreary state of the pseudo-genre “time travel” movie and the larger science fiction genre as a whole.
After fighting my way through a horde of armored war-beasts, greedily snatching fallen gold and weapons and narrowly avoiding death, I looked to my clock and realized with surprise that two hours had passed. That sums up my experience with Torchlight 2, an action role-playing game and the sequel to Runic Games’ Torchlight. While you don’t need to have played the original to enjoy this sequel, Torchlight 2 dramatically improves just about every aspect of its predecessor.
