Author: Ren Hsieh

Conventions, Video Games

A Washed Up Gamer Goes to E3

Ren Hsieh

There were more than 68,000 total attendees at E3 this week, and I’m almost certain all of them have been gaming more than I have in the past five years. I’m retired. Too many consecutive days of realizing I’d played through the night until dawn had me putting the sticks down. Not to mention, I just can’t keep up with these kids. I’m washed.

Yet here I got the fortunate opportunity to cover E3 for NOC in the conference’s first year open to the public. I had to do this, for the culture, for the kid inside who never finished Mario 2, and for the same kid that reached the end of Streets of Rage and chose to kill my brother to take over the gang.

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Movies, Reviews, Sci Fi1 Comment

The Happy Hour Review: Colossal is Basically White Feminism

Ren Hsieh

I watch, I drink, I spit hot fire. Yup, you guessed it, spoilers ahead.

Colossal checked off a lot of boxes for what I would theoretically enjoy in a movie. Directed by Nacho Vigalondo, it is often funny, surprisingly dark, and an inventive new take on kaiju movies. I like all those things. The lead, Gloria, is easy to root for as played by star Anne Hathaway. And Jason Sudeikis impresses as Gloria’s friend and eventual foil, Oscar. For about half of the movie, I found this all very enjoyable.

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Comics, Marvel3 Comments

The Happy Hour Review: Totally Awesome Hulk

Ren Hsieh

When I was a kid, I had to dig real deep for a comic book with an Asian face in it. There were no superheroes in my image from the big publishers, Marvel and DC. Instead I bought every copy I could find of this kung fu book Oriental Heroes. And when that wasn’t enough, I bought every copy of Usagi Yojimbo I could get my hands on. A samurai bunny was close enough.

Marvel’s The Totally Awesome Hulk isn’t just close enough, it’s perfect.

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Comics1 Comment

The Happy Hour Review: Image Comics’ Paper Girls

Ren Hsieh

Paper Girls #1 is a finely crafted, unpredictable marvel. I haven’t been this hooked this instantaneously on a comic since maybe all the way back to Dark Knight Returns, or the first Eastman and Laird TMNT books, stuff I loved as a kid. Paper Girls gives me that kind of nostalgic sensation, like I’m in middle school again. But I was never as cool as these night-riding, shit-talking 12-year-olds.

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Television4 Comments

Hell on Wheels: Chinamen, The Final Frontier

Ren Hsieh

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched through Episode 6 this season, there are some character revelations and minor plot twists revealed, but ostensibly nothing that would alter anyone’s viewing of the show.

AMC’s Hell on Wheels entered its fifth and final season this summer with seven episodes scheduled to finish in 2015 and seven more in 2016 to close it out. The show follows a former Confederate solider, Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), as he reconciles his dark past while becoming a key player in the race to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

Admittedly, I have never been a regular viewer of the show. I only tuned in for this season after hearing that Hell would finally include Chinese railroad workers as part of its story; and not without some healthy skepticism. Chinese workers have been mostly glossed over in mainstream media depictions of the western frontier and they got the same treatment through Hell‘s first four seasons. While the show’s creators Joe and Tony Gayton gave practical reasons as to why this happened, the chances of whether the Chinese would ever be included on the show seemed less promising with each passing season.

Season Five, however, has been worth the wait.

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Comics2 Comments

A King Among Men, Dinosaurs, and Robot Karate Bears

Ren Hsieh

It’s the distant future, it’s Los Angeles. So the desolate wasteland in King — a new creator-owned comic by Joshua Hale Fialkov, Bernard Chang, and Marcelo Maiolo — is no stretch. The titular man is the last of his kind, left on an Earth we recognize only in its rubble, surrounded somehow by talking dinosaurs, humanoid animals they call CrossFreaks, and of course, giant karate robot bears.

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Movies, Reviews, Sci Fi10 Comments

NOC Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road

Ren Hsieh

As humankind ventures deeper into a digital being, Mad Max: Fury Road reminds us that we still live in an analog world. Life after the apocalypse will have no synthesized dings or chimes for audio cues, we will have only the roar of revving engines, bursting flamethrowers, war drums, and a gas-powered electric guitar to warn us that danger is in the distance.

It took 30 years for George Miller to return to the wasteland, but the timing couldn’t have been any better. Miller has taken the uncompromising arthouse nature of the original Mad Max movies, and combined it with 30 years of experience and the technology to create the fully realized, seemingly impossible world of Fury Road.

The result is an action movie that will be the benchmark to which every one to follow will be judged.

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Marvel, Movies3 Comments

Five Takeaways From the New Ant-Man Teaser

Ren Hsieh

After years toiling in development hell — along with Iron Man and Captain America, Ant-Man was one of the studio’s first announced self-financed properties — two directors and several insect-sized teases, Marvel Studios’ latest attempt to dominate the moviegoing world with more C- and D-list superheroes was finally revealed during ABC’s debut of Agent Carter and it’s possible the House of Ideas has done it again. After the break, we run down a few of the things that caught our eye as we wait for Ant-Man to become the latest Marvel hero to emerge from the summer blockbuster season as a household name.

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Anime, Movies, Sci Fi31 Comments

Lost in Translation: Scarlett Johansson and ‘Ghost in the Shell’

Ren Hsieh

As our friend Angry Asian Man pointed out earlier this week, Scarlett Johansson has been offered the role of Major Motoko Kusanagi in Dreamworks’ live-action remake of Mamoru Oshii’s ground-breaking anime Ghost in the Shell. And well, she’s white. Which to many of us here certainly feels like more Hollywood whitewashing at first glance. Particularly to anyone following the on-again off-again plans for a live-action remake of Akira with an all white cast or M. Night Shymayalan’s tragic The Last Airbender.

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Conventions, Fashion

Epic Props Dispatch From NYCC: Evolution of a Vendor Booth

Ren Hsieh

Want to see how a vendor booth goes from being a bunch of cardboard boxes to an elaborate thing of t-shirt selling beauty?

Today is the first day of New York Comic-Con, and Epic Proportions is once again taking up some prime real estate in the Jacob Javits Center. If you are going to be at the show, come by and say hi at Booth #2010. We even have DC Comics superstar Bernard Chang at the booth for the whole show!

Click through to see the evolution of the Epic Props Booth.

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Comics, Crowdfunding, Toys

Kickstart The Green Turtle and Other Amazing Heroes Action Figures

Ren Hsieh

There is a Kickstarter ending in three days that will produce retro-style super hero action figures. Among them is The Green Turtle, the first Asian American comic book superhero. The character was recently rebooted in the graphic novel, The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew earlier this year.

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Comics, Movies4 Comments

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Proves Michael Bay Does Not Care About You

Ren Hsieh

Very rarely do the things we cherish as youth hold up over time. By the 1980s, the cartoons my generation watched were mostly extended commercials to sell toys. Nevertheless, the lasting ones all seemed to have a good spirit. There were lessons to be learned about teamwork, camaraderie, and leadership. And, then we would go buy some toys.

The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action reboot is a hollow Makerbot rendering of a movie. It is a garbled pastiche of disconnected pop culture references crudely assembled, as if by not-yet-ready-for-Skynet A.I. trying to calculate the best ratio of human enjoyment vs product placement.

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Marvel, Movies, Reviews4 Comments

NOC Reviews Guardians of the Galaxy: Hooked on a Feeling

Ren Hsieh

If you haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy yet, you will. Director James Gunn and his cast — starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and Bradley Cooper — have found that cross section of great action and effects, genuine mirth, and likability, that makes for a movie that kids will fondly remember into adulthood. What was once widely thought of as a long shot in Phase Two of Marvel Studios’ cinematic universe, Guardians could very well be the new Star Wars to this generation’s adolescent filmgoers. Halloween is going to see a lot of trees and raccoons running through the front yard for years to come. Toys will be flying off the shelves. And Marvel has $94 million reasons to celebrate its box office dominance.

Which is not to say that Guardians is the new sci-fi G.O.A.T., but rarely does a film so effectively appeal to both youth and adults. And, unlike Marvel’s previous films, young fans of Guardians get an all-new set of characters to love that don’t belong to their parents. Like Harry Potter before it, Guardians will belong uniquely to this generation of toy-buying, cosplaying kids.

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