Early memories of Minecraft sound like a mixture of "Can’t Hold Us" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, "Blurred Lines" (you know exactly the one), and "Harlem Shake". In 2013, at the height of Minecraft’s popularity, the word “selfie” became part of common vernacular for the first time and was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionary. For many of us college students, those were our middle school days, and it’s probably best to leave those in the past. That’s exactly what happened, according Google Trends. Following Minecraft’s meteoric rise in 2013, it dipped and has been steadily decreasing in web search popularity on Google and YouTube. But seemingly out of nowhere, it’s trending again?

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games trilogy, recently announced the release of a new prequel to her hit series. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is expected to reach bookshelves in May 2020. The film series has briefly resurged in popularity following Freeform’s Hunger Games Weekend – a marathon of all four movies which aired April 25^th and 26^th. Lionsgate also streamed the series for their "Lionsgate Live! A Night at the Movies" fundraising event on April 17^th. It’s no secret that The Hunger Games is no longer the buzz-worthy, popular series it was around 2012. In my own experience, bringing it up in casual conversation is a little awkward for everyone involved, but it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of amazing feats that this franchise and its respective books have accomplished. Even if it’s been a few years since it peaked in popularity, there are still reasons to support this series.

Netflix added a forgotten gem to its collection this past May. Audiences vaguely remember The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the movie where Brad Pitt is born old and dies young. I remember the buzz that this movie generated when it first came out in 2008. Television networks aired it so often that I was able to watch it a few times, though I never quite understood why adults grew so silent and contemplative at the end. I was old enough to understand that many of the characters had passed away, which could explain the silence. But other movies with similar death tolls did not have the same, sullen effect that Benjamin Button had on adults. Upon watching the movie for the first time in my 20s, I finally began to understand why the story leaves audiences in a melancholy, catatonic state, and it has nothing to do with death. On the contrary, it had everything to do with life.

It is no surprise at this point in the Coronavirus pandemic that movie theaters across the country have shut down in response to the crisis. Even at times like these there are silver linings and thankfully, movies will not go unwatched. Instead of screening and – in the case of Trolls World Tour – premiering in movie theaters, many new releases will be available on streaming platforms much earlier than expected. Such is the case with Onward, Frozen II, Emma, The Invisible Man, Bloodshot, and more. Although living rooms are nothing like movie theaters, there are several ways to sit back, relax, and enjoy these early releases from home. If you wish to take this at-home experience a step further, here are a few ways to simulate a classic movie theater while social distancing and flattening the curve.

At a time where everyone is stuck indoors and the prospect of a sunny, beachy summer feels further and further away, a lot of people have found solace in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. There are screenshots all over social media of villagers standing around a paradisiacal island with fruits in the trees and butterflies in the air. Unfortunately, buying the game and its corresponding console is becoming a bigger challenge. Due in part to the smashing success of New Horizons and to coronavirus restrictions in China, the Nintendo Switch is out of stock.

Hulu is promoting Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May with a site featuring all of the Asian titles that are available for streaming on their platform. One such title is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, a Japanese film widely renowned for its delicate, gripping narrative that exposes the human definition of the word “family.” The drama follows a seemingly conventional family made up of a grandmother, two parents, an aunt, and a son. The tension slowly rises when the father figure, Osamu (Lily Franky) encounters a little girl who was left outside her house in the winter. He takes the girl home with him and trouble ensues when she is reported missing. The family decides not to return her since they found scars on the child’s arms and other signs of abuse. In the second half of the drama, many secrets concerning the real origin of each family member are revealed and their lives are drastically changed. If that premise is not a sufficient hook, here are four reasons to go watch (or re-watch) Shoplifters.

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), was the recipient of the award for Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time this was written, the film boasted a 98% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes with an Audience Score of 92%. Portrait was released in the U.S. in 2020 and is available for streaming on Hulu. Since its release, it has produced a lot of commentary, both about its breathtaking cinematography and its scandalous love scenes.

Shakespeare’s plays have endured centuries in the public mind. Theatre and film adaptations alike have retold Shakespearean tales to the point where they are sometimes unrecognizable to the untrained eye. Some people still gasp when they are told that The Lion King was based on Hamlet, that 10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew, that She’s the Man was a retelling of Twelfth Night, so on and so forth. Contrastingly, there are critics who recognize the Bard’s influence and hold movie adaptations up to the standard of West Side Story, or even higher. Finally, there’s me, a hopeless romantic in quarantine who just wants an enjoyable retelling of Romeo and Juliet. The following three movies are adaptations that either flew under the radar, are laughable until you give them a chance, or hid their similarities to the original so well that the reveal might surprise a viewer.

As college students across the country find themselves back in their poster-ridden childhood bedrooms, that familiar feeling of teenage angst seems to be crawling back into everyone’s minds. A lot of us moved away from our hometowns to discover the freedoms that college had to offer just to be back under mom’s roof, and subsequently, mom’s rules. It’s perfectly normal to fall back into your teenage tendencies when it just feels like no one understands you and everything is the end of the world... especially during a global pandemic.

I was drawn into playing Smash Ultimate for the first time in 2019. I had no experience with a Game Cube controller and no idea what I was doing in general, so I flailed and screeched a lot – much to the amusement of my boyfriend. Since then, we have played many more hours and I have learned at least enough to write this rookie review.