Arts & Lifestyles

Everyone knows that children are inherently terrifying. They’re small and quiet, so they can sneak up on you and steal your chicken nuggets when you bend down to tie your shoe. They’ve got those tiny, dead eyes that betray the fact their brains haven’t developed adult concepts like “empathy” or “consequences.” And nothing is more devastating to one’s sense of […]

For most of human existence, we’ve accepted that there’s only one reality. What you see is what you get, all the way up into space and out across the cosmos. There’s only one set of stars in the sky, there’s only one earth and there’s only one you or me. But lately, there’s been plenty of scifi media churned out […]

Things were a bit different in the tenth century. For one, you only needed a computer that displayed three digits for the year. Also, there were no computers. As you may know (since I never shut up about it) I was a history minor in college, and the only thing that stopped me from turning that minor into a major […]

There are two kinds of audiences when it comes to movies that center on public safety careers. One kind, which constitutes the vast majority of viewers, watches a movie about police, or firefighters or EMTs, and thinks “wow, how interesting — this is an adequate story to capture my interest for 90-150 minutes and I am therefore entertained.” The other […]

Is the warm wind bellowing across the arid, southeastern plains of Wyoming, stirring up an envelope of dust at the peak of summer, a sirocco? No. But it’s close. Not geographically, of course. Everyone knows a sirocco is bound to North Africa and Southern Europe, in other words the crust of the aquatic pizza that is the Mediterranean Sea. But […]

There was a moment there, in late winter, where it seemed that doom was foretold. But just as in a snap of the fingers, the billionaires stopped squabbling with millionaires and baseball is back on the menu. You may be wondering why I’m opening a movie column about a really fast blue rat with a reference to baseball returning, and […]

Would you give someone you loved $250,000 if they told you they were being chased by their enemies? I think for most of us the answer is “no” and it’s not just because getting your hands on a quarter of a million dollars cash is no easy task. We all like to think that if someone we loved came up […]

By the time you’re able to get this edition of Nick’s Flix in your hands, I’ll be enjoying the sunny, 75-degree weather of Las Vegas. I’ll be checking out that big wet wall they call the Hoover Dam, and I’ll be peeking over the edge of the abyss that is the Grand Canyon. I’m not telling you all this to […]

Hostage situations in movies tend to be tense affairs, but in Windfall, it’s a little less Argo and a little more Scooby Doo. Windfall is a new movie on Netflix starring Jason Segel, Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins revolving around a robbery-turned-hostage-situation. Segel, referred henceforth as “Segel” since none of the characters in the movie are explicitly named, is not […]

Full disclosure: I have a strong distaste for time travel. Now, you may be thinking – but Nick, that seems like an incredibly specific thing to not only spend time thinking about, but have a negative enough opinion that you feel it necessary start a movie column with. Well, you’re right. Time travel, as a trope in popular media, is […]