Wartank

Inventory

Seven magazine pieces in R4NT between August 2001 and March 2004 — four film reviews, one culture-war broadside, one bachelor's cookbook, and one closing thought piece on table manners. No blog companion pieces. A short, deliberate run from a pseudonymous contributor whose voice was fully formed on arrival: intellectually ferocious, willingly provocative, anchored in technical precision and a refusal to settle for easy sentiment.

Voice

Wartank writes like a visual theorist with a grudge against middlebrow comfort. The hallmark is granular technical objection wrapped in philosophical urgency — not "this film bored me," but "this directorial marriage betrayed eight years of Kubrick's architectural thinking." He deploys extended metaphor (quicksand in Star Wars, the slow-revealed egg in Alien) and invokes adjacent works to expose failures of imagination. The tone oscillates between professorial precision and conversational contempt; he'll dissect the physics of Yoda's movement, then crack a crude joke, then quote Adorno. A running tic: finger-wagging at audiences who mistake technical proficiency for vision, who applaud digital rendering without demanding why it exists.

Topic mix

Cinema dominates — five of seven pieces are reviews, and four of those five are unhappy. Sexthis is the lone polemic, a 2001 culture-war broadside defending male aesthetic appreciation against accusations of objectification. The 2004 closers, Bachelor Chow and Thought Piece: Eating, drop cinema entirely and look at appetite — one as instructional comedy ("Make rice! Follow your Chinese heritage and get busy"), one as an essay on table manners as embodied class. The throughline across all of it is the same: he wants to know whether the thing in front of him was made — or done — with intention.

Evolution

• 2001 — debuts with the Spielberg-diluting-Kubrick excavation in Artificial Intelligence, then pivots immediately to Sexthis, the broadside. Two modes already in play: structural film criticism, unapologetic cultural argument.
• 2002 — peak irritation. Attack of the Clones is the long surgical dismantling; Powerpuff Girls is the surprise affirmation, an unembarrassed defense of "high carnage, high octane, high fidelity" cartoon spectacle.
• 2003 — the celebratory exception: Alien: Director's Cut, where restraint, tangible props, and Giger's craft get the kind of attention he usually reserves for indictment.
• 2004 — leaves cinema behind. The bachelor cookbook is mock-instructional and self-aware; Thought Piece: Eating is genuinely searching. The censor becomes a philosopher.

Standout pieces

1. Star Wars — Attack of the Clones — The longest review, the sand rant ("I don't like sand") weaponized into a thesis about Christensen's atmospheric failure. Peak irritation, clearest purpose.
2. Artificial Intelligence — Interviews a visual concept designer to excavate Kubrick's nine-year vision beneath Spielberg's softening. His most structurally elegant piece, and the one that best explains his underlying value: fidelity to authorial intention matters.
3. Alien — Director's Cut — The only uniformly positive film review, and therefore the most revealing. The opening — the slow descent into the egg chamber, written as patient screen-direction — is its own argument for restraint over spectacle.
4. Powerpuff Girls — The Movie — The unexpected one. He defends a 70-minute cartoon as "a bombardment of the senses that requires you to refrain from thinking" and means it admiringly. Proof he wasn't actually a snob, only an enemy of fakery.
5. Thought Piece: Eating — His final piece and most personal. A woman's table manners trigger an essay on whether behavioral elegance can be transmitted or corrected. Reflective, almost tender — wondering aloud about subjectivity and acceptance.
6. Sexthis — The most confrontational. A defense of "Ed the Sock" that turns into a credo: personal experience is more real than mediated image, and aesthetic appreciation is not a moral failing.

Throughlines

The throughline is integrity under pressure. How do artists hold their vision when faced with genre expectation, studio notes, or the machinery of spectacle? Wartank judges harshly when they capitulate, celebrates when they resist. He measures success by fidelity to intent, not by box office or critical acclaim — which is why he can love both Ridley Scott's restraint and the Powerpuff Girls' "non-stop bubble-gum action extraordinare" without contradiction. Both were made on purpose.

Fun details

• Bachelor Chow reads like a parody of his own film-criticism voice applied to a frying pan: "Got Rice? Good, cause you're going to need that shizzle later." The technical precision survives; the stakes are now stir-fry.
• The Alien review opens with two and a half pages of pure scene-direction — no commentary — before he ever names the director. He's showing what he wants from cinema before he tells you.
• Sexthis contains an actual three-line manifesto in all-caps ("One's personal experiences are far more REAL…") which is as close as he gets to a pull quote. He believes in personal possession of judgment.

The arc

Three years, seven pieces, and a clean trajectory: from indicting Spielberg in 2001 to wondering whether table manners can be taught in 2004. The early Wartank was a censor; the late Wartank was a philosopher. Same standards, softer light.