Welcome back to the new and improved Input 2. On this week's episode, we will be discussing the newly adapted Slenderman movie. How did this all start and where has it gone since the beginning? How did the movie hold up to the legend behind the Slenderman? All of this and more on this week's episode of Input 2.
‘The House with A Clock in Its Walls’ is a spooktacular Spielberg throwback marred by some iffy effects and poorly-done punch-up. Jack Black and Cate Blanchett absolutely steal the show with a surprising amount of chemistry, the latter adding a necessary sense of heart that the main narrative tries to pull off (to mixed results). Darker than your average Autumn family flick, it makes for a perfect matinee and a potential staple of yearly cable Halloween movie marathons for years to come. Not as well-wound as it should have been, but even a broken clock can still get the time right if the conditions are favorable.
‘Dragalia Lost’ is everything great about JRPG’s combined with everything horrible about mobile games. The characters and art-style are both wonderful, and the gameplay itself is fun and addictive. However, the game is bogged down by a sub-optimal control scheme and horrendous progression that walls you the moment you really start getting into the game. It’s definitely worth a try, but once it starts demanding cash, tell it to get lost.
“Pilot” serves its purpose to establish the procedural nature of ‘God Friended Me.’ The episode itself, however, doesn’t give confidence that this series will have a long lifespan. Somewhere buried underneath all of the cringey dialogue, terrible acting, contrived plot points, there’s a solid core that has potential to make an interesting show discussing religion and social media. That, however, would be too complex and unique for a primetime CBS show. It may be fun to watch as something fascinatingly bad, but that doesn’t actually make it good.
Amplified: A Conversation with Women in American Film Sound, was created through Ball State’s Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry and crewed by a total of 14 Ball State students. The film celebrates the women who work in Hollywood’s sound departments. From Foley artists to sound editors, Amplified gives a platform to 30 different women working in the male dominated film industry, allowing them to tell their unique stories.
Few individuals have become so synonymous with the title "rock star" as Queen's Freddie Mercury. The group's late lead singer was famed for his intense charisma, his musicality, and his bitter fight with AIDS that ultimately claimed his life in 1991. Without a doubt, his most enduring song was Queen's hit, "Bohemian Rhapsody" which displayed a fair amount of emotional, tonal, and musical range for the group, cementing their place in the stratosphere of modern music history.
Much like the first album of their first trilogy, "iridescence" sounds like a solid blueprint that will polished with the following albums. The blemishes are visible, but the bigger picture is so wonderful that those blemishes are (mostly) excused because the possibility for improvement is pretty much guaranteed. How could a group that shows as much talent as Brockhampton not have the ability to improve? But as it is, without thinking of the follow-ups, "iridescence" still captures the magic of the original "Saturation" trilogy and stands as one of 2018’s most inventive hip hop records in a year that has brought us a lot of amazing hip hop.