Is King Kong Racist?

Posted on by Colin McMahon

Whenever people ask me to name my top ten films, I can’t do it. How do you narrow down hundreds of exceptional motion pictures to a measly top ten? I’m sure if I thought long and hard enough about it, I could make it work – but I just don’t have that kind of time.

I am, however, always able to answer the question: “What’s you favorite movie?”

King Kong – the original 1933 stop-motion special effects film starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot; directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. I don’t know  how young I was when I first saw it but I have watched it countless times since. It, more than any film, impacted my sense of creativity and my desire to tell stories.

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Godzilla vs. J.K. Rowling

Posted on by Colin McMahon

Recently, you (like me) may have been surprised and saddened by how much once-beloved rags-to-riches Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been attacking trans people through uninformed and often hateful rhetoric on the internet. Now I don’t know if it’s a case of she can’t communicate well online (not like Twitter is a platform of incredible social discourse) or if she’s just a bigot and frankly I don’t care. Her actions are emboldening hateful people and she’s causing damage to an already oppressed group of human beings – that’s what matters.

But to counter that, I was even more surprised (but delighted) by this:

This charming stop-motion short was tweeted by the official Godzilla Twitter page, along with the message along with the message “Happy Pride.” So, whereas J.K. Rowling surprises with bigotry, the LGBTQ community and its allies can count Godzilla as a friend.

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The Devolution of Journal Writing

Posted on by Colin McMahon

If you’re like me, you’ve been doing a bit of reading during this pandemic. Not that I needed a global virus to force me to read (I read pretty much every night, thank you very much) but I won’t say it hasn’t affected what I want to read. Escapism is in right now, very in. With that in mind, I turned to the latest from author Max Brooks (World War Z) to see what supernatural awesomeness he had for me this time.

Devolution follows a group of people trapped in what I think was very rural Seattle. Our protagonist, Kate Holland, recently moved to a designed community called Greenloop to try and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged husband. The initial problem: A volcano erupts, cutting Greenloop off from the world and forcing them into survival mode. The additional problem: The volcanic eruption is causing all sorts of animals to move through the area, including the mythical Sasquatch.

So was it good? Yes but I want to actually focus on the one area where it fails. I found Devolution to be very entertaining and engaging, but I also found its least believable aspect to not be the humanoid cryptids, but the journal that our main character keeps.

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