by Brandon Perkins

In the last installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’d just X’ed his GF Katya, had ridden the #720 Brown BTWN bus route to the Low bar, where the saga of their breakup continued via text. As Katya finds oblivion in the bottom of a bottle at home, Mikhail contemplates the relationship that is no more…

The first time Mikhail broke up with Katya was only a few weeks after they had begun to see each other, barely enough time to be considered an official couple in the first place. It was before he’d go back to her for a much longer and intense session, a second time around. Before he was backed into any sort of corner, when things still felt free or, at the very least, without dire consequences. It was before she began demanding changes in his life. Before he realized how deep in it he actually was. At that early stage of their first dance-less dosey-doh, Katya seemed good for him.

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by Nicole Powers

“I think it’s a question of vengeance.”
– Leonard Nimoy

The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn’t thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that come along with the relatively recent science of string theory.

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by A.J. Focht

Today’s media is overrun with rehashed tales of old myths. It is nearly impossible to come across a fantasy story that doesn’t re-use mythical beings. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies all come from traditional myths and plague our airwaves and book stores; every author is looking for a way to put their own spin on this time tested material.

Some authors are very good at taking traditional myths and adapting them, whereas others should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for their crimes against them. Most myths have grey areas that can be adapted, but they all have their canon – lists of facts and pieces of the myth that cannot be changed without altering that which is intrinsic to it. When an author starts altering these facts they upset the status quo. They weaken not only the fabric of the mythological being – but our ability to suspend our disbelief. This leaves their final product looking like a cheap bastardization of the original.

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by Nicole Powers

“You’ve got to keep ducking and weaving.”
– Billy Duffy

Interviews are not exactly something The Cult’s Billy Duffy enjoys doing. This is something the iconic guitarist reiterates several times in different ways during the course of our 40-minute conversation. However, after remaining mostly silent during his band’s recent Love Live Tour – celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Love album which carried the seminal single “She Sells Sanctuary” – Duffy is biting the proverbial bullet to promote new material.

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by Brett Warner

This Friday, auteur filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s latest psychological and emotional rollercoaster Black Swan will be dancing across a handful of movie theater screens for a limited release. The film stars Natalie Portman as a hard working young ingénue who lands the lead in a new production of Swan Lake only to find herself haunted by her more sensual competition (played by Mila Kunis) and — in true Aronofsky fashion — lots of other creepy shit. The two stars were coached and choreographed by Mary Helen Bowers and New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied respectively and underwent months of rigorous training necessary to replicate an art form that — for professionals — requires years of intense, borderline obsessive dedication. (I’ve dated two former ballerinas – trust me, they don’t fuck around.) Black Swan should have Aronofsky fans geeking out to the nth degree, though it’s not exactly the first film about a ballet company to deal with themes of obsession, jealousy, sexuality, and, well… other creepy shit.

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by Damon Martin

Imagine the terror of hearing the news that your baby has been kidnapped by an Irish Republican Army operative, and you’re left to deal with the emotional implosion while trying to grasp how exactly you’ll fight, scratch, claw or kill to get your son back.

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by Ryan Stewart

“Movies don’t matter anymore.”
-Steven Soderbergh

“If I’m such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D’Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.

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