VIDEO GAME: The Legend of Zelda – Echoes of Wisdom (2024)

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The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of WisdomYear: 2024Rating: E10+Time Played: ~20 hours With the recent successes of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I started to wonder if the top-down Zelda titles were now a thing of the past. Sure, the remake of Link’s Awakening looked awesome, but it wasn’t really an original idea. Enter Echoes of Wisdom, the first Zelda game to feature the titular princess as the main character (CD-i games notwithstanding). I was glad that Nintendo took a risk here to develop something new, even if the execution sometimes left more to be desired. While Echoes of Wisdom holds the player’s hand perhaps a little more than the recent 3D games, it still feels like the map has the open-world freedom of these larger games in the franchise. There are problems, and as Zelda progresses through the game, she finds “echoes” of enemies and objects to solve those problems. Of course, with so many different things...
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MOVIE: Monsters, Inc. (2001)

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Monsters, Inc.Year: 2001Rating: GLength: 92 minutes / 1.53 hours Early Pixar films always had a way of being grounded in our reality. The toys in Toy Story (1995) had to make sense as toys. The insects in A Bug's Life (1998) were all known insects. It wasn't until Monsters, Inc. (2001) when an entire world had to be created to explain the "monster in the closet" fear most children grow up with. And while this film is definitely another tech demo to show how good Pixar had gotten at simulating cloth and fur, the plot itself is one of the most original pieces Pixar has ever created. Coming up with dozens of different monster designs was only the first step. That Pixar created a world designed for these monsters to live and work in was the basic follow-up, but creating a whole system of door portals that could access any room in the human world was genius. And having screams power the...
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MOVIE: The Shape of Water (2017)

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The Shape of Water Year: 2017 Rating: R Length: 123 minutes / 2.05 hours The modern master of the monster movie, Guillermo del Toro is at it again with The Shape of Water (2017). Much like the Universal Studios monster classics, del Toro has created a career around directing films about how humans interact with these monsters. From building giant robots to fight giant monsters in Pacific Rim (2013) to hiring monsters to kill other monsters in Hellboy (2004), del Toro has also occasionally shown the more human side of monsters. Or, more accurately, he has shown how monster-like humans can become. Previous films by Guillermo del Toro, like Cronos (1993) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006) have highlighted the negative qualities of man while infusing these films with a sense of fantasy that can often border on straight-up fairy tales. The Shape of Water certainly falls into the "man is the real monster" category of del Toro's movies, but it kind of beats you over the head...
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