Kell 'n' Tell

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A movie poster for Rian Johnson's Knives Out. From Lionsgate via IMDB: 'When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead at his estate just after his 85th birthday, the inquisitive and debonair Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is mysteriously enlisted to investigate. From Harlan's dysfunctional family to his devoted staff, Blanc sifts through a web of red herrings and self-serving lies to uncover the truth behind Harlan's untimely death.'

Movie Review: Knives Out (2019)

Kellen Aguilar December 1, 2019 Reviews Leave a Comment

Cast: Ana de Armas (Marta), Daniel Craig (Detective Benoit Blanc), Chris Evans (Hugh Robinson), Jamie Lee Curtis (Linda Robinson), Toni Collette (Joni), Christopher Plummer (Harlan Thrombrey), Don Johnson (Morris Bristow), …

Movie Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Kellen Aguilar November 27, 2019 Reviews Leave a Comment

Cast: Tom Hanks (Fred Rogers), Matthew Rhys (Lloyd Vogel), Chris Cooper (Jerry Vogel), Susan Kelechi Watson (Andrea Vogel), Enrico Colantoni (Bill Isler), Maryann Plunkett (Joanne Rogers), Tammy Blanchard (Lorraine) Director: …

A movie poster for Alma Har'el's Honey Boy. From IMDB: 'From a screenplay by Shia LaBeouf, based on his own experiences, award-winning filmmaker Alma Har'el brings to life a young actor's stormy childhood and early adult years as he struggles to reconcile with his father through cinema and dreams. Fictionalizing his childhood's ascent to stardom, and subsequent adult crash-landing into rehab and recovery, Har'el casts Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges as Otis Lort, navigating different stages in a frenetic career. LaBeouf takes on the daring and therapeutic challenge of playing a version of his own father, an ex-rodeo clown and a felon. Artist and musician FKA twigs makes her feature-film debut, playing neighbor and kindred spirit to the younger Otis in their garden-court motel home. Har'el's feature narrative debut is a one-of-a-kind collaboration between filmmaker and subject, exploring art as medicine and imagination as hope.'

Movie Review: Honey Boy (2019)

Kellen Aguilar November 21, 2019 Reviews Leave a Comment

Cast: Shia LaBeouf (James Lort), Lucas Hedges (Otis Lort, 22 years old), Noah Jupe (Otis Lort, 12 years old), Byron Bowers (Percy), Laura San Giacomo (Dr. Moreno), FKA twigs (Shy …

A movie poster for James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari. From IMDB: 'American car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles battle corporate interference, the laws of physics and their own personal demons to build a revolutionary race car for Ford and challenge Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966.'

Movie Review: Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Kellen Aguilar November 18, 2019 Reviews Leave a Comment

Cast: Matt Damon (Caroll Shelby), Christian Bale (Ken Miles), Jon Bernthal (Lee Iacocca), Tracy Letts (Henry Ford II), Caitriona Balfe (Mollie Miles), Noah Jupe (Peter Miles), Josh Lucas (Leo Beebe), …

A movie poster for Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep. From IMDB: 'Years following the events of 'The Shining,' a now-adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers to remain immortal.'

Movie Review: Doctor Sleep (2019)

Kellen Aguilar November 13, 2019 Reviews Leave a Comment

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Danny Torrance), Kyliegh Curran (Abra Stone), Rebecca Ferguson (Rose the Hat), Zahn McClarnon (Crow Daddy), Bruce Greenwood (Dr. John), Carel Struycken (Grampa Flick), Emily Alyn Lind (Snakebite Andi), Jacob Tremblay (Bradley Trevor) Director: …

From Wikipedia: "'The Slave Ship,' originally titled 'Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on,' is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake." Turner's painting demonstrates many of the themes represented in this project -- black (il)legibility, black (non)being as permanent sinking, a total climate of anti-blackness.

Blackness, Breath, and (Non)Being: Scenes of Illegibility

Kellen Aguilar July 12, 2019 Academia, Essay Leave a Comment

This project turns away from a positivistic discourse of black enfranchisement in order to attend to expressions of blackness as a condition of ontological death — that is, as an …

“Marking the manners of the times:” A Creative Simulation of Metagames in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Kellen Aguilar May 15, 2019 Essay, Humor, Video Games Leave a Comment

This simulation gamifies some of the thematic elements in Frances Burney’s Evelina, such as female delicacy and satire, women’s vulnerability to violence in the public sphere, and 18th century British …

Mountain is a simulation video game developed by David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions. It was released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android in July 2014. The game is an idle game in which the only influence the player can have on the game is at the start of the game where the player is tasked to draw objects. The game is designed to be played in the background while the player uses other applications. From Sean Wejebe's website: 'The Longest Couch is a game where two players have to complete a series of commands on a gampead to navigate their respective boy to the center of the couch. Once the gamepad commands are completed, the players move to a shared keyboard - as the boys on the screen get closer, so do the players. It is very romantic.'

Failing at Gaming: Queer Gameplay in Mountain and The Longest Couch

Kellen Aguilar March 27, 2019 Essay, Video Games Leave a Comment

How are video games queer? This question is central to recent game studies scholarship that attempts to bridge the rigor of queer theory with the playful possibilities of digital games. …

Excellent fanart by Mitch Alexander for Mattie Brice’s game, Mainichi. Brice describes Mainichi on her website as follows: This is an experiment in sharing a personal experience through a game system. It helps communicate daily occurances that happen in my life, exploring the difficulty in expressing these feelings in words. As well, it stands as a commentary of how we currently use game design for broad strokes of universal experiences instead of the hyper-personal, and often exclude minority voices. Mainichi was made in RPG Maker VX, an under-served program in terms of accessibility. My goal was to make a game on my own that didn’t require programming and used community resources. I want to make games that feasibly anyone can do on their own. The only special skill I needed for this project was simple graphic editing.

Queer Failure in Mattie Brice’s Mainichi

Kellen Aguilar March 25, 2019 Video Games Leave a Comment

Queerness in digital games can mean a few different things. In one sense, a queer game may challenge the dichotomies that traditionally structure digital games: narrative and gameplay, player control …

This essay draws on a gameplay glitch in merrit kopas's queer digital game Lim to argue that cross-cultural friendship in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is a form of glitch or failure that permits relations beyond the logics (the “code” or “script”) of the colonial system. The friendships in Passage -- namely, between Aziz, Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested -- develop as the product of accidental or unscripted encounters within the rigid stratifications of colonial Indian society: a chance meeting at a mosque between Aziz and Mrs. Moore or an intimate tea party hosted by Mr. Fielding. These encounters contrast with normative, scripted events such as the Turton’s “Bridge Party,” which reify the cultural, spatial, and temporal boundaries between colonizer and colonized.

Glitched Out Fiction Part II: Hacking the Colonial Script in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Kellen Aguilar March 19, 2019 Academia, Essay, Graduate School, Video Games Leave a Comment

In the first part of this series, “Glitched-Out Fiction Part I: Hermaphroditic Hackers in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature, I drew on Jack Halberstam’s theorization of “queer failure” …

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