My Own Little World

I'm going to put two of my cards out on the table before starting this review. The first: Into the Woods  is one of my favorite shows from a musical standpoint. The second: I have never seen it performed in its entirety on stage. Now that those two things are out there, let's talk about this film. I knew from the second that Disney picked up this project that it had enormous potential. They, more so than any other studio, have done musical fairy tales right almost every time they make one. When the cast list started rolling out, I became even more excited for Into the Woods . Bringing in heavyweight talents like Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt instantly brought some credibility, while the musical talents of Anna Kendrick and others would bolster the film in that perspective. Then, my school's drama department announced that this would be our spring musical, I knew I had to go see it. From the very first line, I knew that the music would be done justice. The score was wri...

Sometimes, movies can surprise you. Other times, they don't. Strangely, the latest creation of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, The Interview , does both. On one hand, it definitely had a B-movie feel and was supposed to be campy, overdone, and exaggerated all around. On the other hand, I was surprised at how deftly it delivered blows through its satire. I'll confess that I'm generally not a fan of comedies these days. Most films placed in the genre just seem to be unfunny and stale (I'm looking at you, Adam Sandler). However, The Interview was one of the first films in a long time that I can say was genuinely funny. Granted, there are your lion's share of crude jokes that somewhat repeat throughout the film, but the delivery and timing of James Franco and Seth Rogen is impeccable. From the opening scene, every single viewer can tell that this is going to be a ridiculous movie, and that's exactly what it is. It's exaggerated, improbable, outlandish,...

In all my years of watching movies, I have never waited so long and with such great anticipation for a conclusion to such a mediocre series as I have for The Battle of the Five Armies . To be honest, I didn't love the first two films of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy all that much. They were overly long and quite poorly paced, making the short length of its source material obvious. However, they were good entertainment and definitely deserving of being seen in a theater, and because I loved Tolkien's novel so much I decided to give this final installment a chance. Similar to both An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug , The Battle of the Five Armies is well-written and almost replicates Tolkien's novel on screen. However, Peter Jackson has added a lot of material and back story to the original to fill in the two hour running time; but this does not distract from the story as much as the previous films. This is mostly because this inst...

My first reaction to Mockingjay Part 1 : wow, this is going to be long. My second: wow, this is good. Those two thoughts pretty much sum up my experience viewing Mockingjay Part 1 . I really didn't care for Mockingjay  the book as much as the first two parts of The Hunger Games trilogy, so when I heard it was being split into two parts, I knew this was a good possibility. Taking the same cast and crew as Catching Fire  plus a few additions was a good idea, but making Mockingjay  into two movies made me think of other young adult series that have suffered the same fate and not turned out as well as they could have if it was one film. That being said, Mockingjay Part 1  gets off to a good start for this two-part epic, mostly because of the script. The pace is a little deliberate, and there's not much action; however, the film turns into a war film shortly after it opens and begins poking fun (in a completely legitimate satire kind of way) at propaganda films. T...

Before watching the third film in the Hunger Games franchise, released last Friday, I thought I would share my thoughts on the first two films in the series: partially to remind myself of the universe, and partially to have an excuse to watch these movies again. This is a review of the second of the two films.  After seeing The Hunger Games , I wanted desperately to see the sequel, Catching Fire . There was so much potential for the franchise after the first film, and as I liked Catching Fire  better than the first novel, I had high hopes. When I heard Lionsgate had replaced Gary Ross with a new director, Francis Lawrence, I was even more excited for this film. In my mind, a new director was just what this franchise needed. I'll start with the script and story, as their quality was largely unaltered from the first film. Even though the series's author Suzanne Collins would not stay on to write the script for Catching Fire , it largely stayed true to the novel. The larges...

Before watching the third film in the Hunger Games franchise, released today, I thought I would share my thoughts on the first two films in the series: partially to remind myself of the universe, and partially to have an excuse to watch these movies again. This is a review of the first of the two films. 

I have a confession to make. Nick Jonas was definitely my favorite Jonas Brother. He was always the one who seemed the most musically inclined and wanted to do his own thing. Kevin and Joe wanted to be rock stars: Nick wanted to be more alternative and old-school. Well, two years after the band's breakup, he's finally getting his shot. With his self-titled debut album, Nick Jonas finally gets his chance to prove why he's still relevant to music today and not just a relic of the Disney pop star era. Musically, Jonas's album reminds me of Ariana Grande's debut album Yours Truly  in the fact that it is a former teen star taking on '90s R&B and pop (and the killer range/head voice they both show off). It works well here, though not quite as well as Grande's album, mostly because it still feels very rooted in today's music; however, its swagger and bouncing beats cannot be denied. Almost every song is appealing in some way, with standouts being ...

Over the course of their career, Foo Fighters has been known for bringing a classic rock twist to the post-grunge genre. They are also very celebrated in the world of music, having won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album over their past several consecutive albums. However, after their masterpiece of Wasting Light , released in 2011, I was wondering where they could go from there. Would they be more experimental or return to their roots? Sadly, the answer is neither. For the Foo Fighters, Sonic Highways  is definitely a journey to nowhere. Sonically, it loses a lot of the depth that Wasting Light  while not charting any new ground. It feels less intriguing, as if we've heard it all before. The guitar riffs tonally feel the same as before, which is definitely not a bad thing; however, they somehow are not nearly as enticing and demanding of our attention. Honestly, it feels as if Foo Fighters decided to move into a more conservative genre, as Wasting Light  was viscera...

You know, I was going to begin this review with some little quip about Interstellar 's similarities with 2001: A Space Odyssey  or some note about why I love Christopher Nolan's film-making. And, to be fair, those would have been perfectly sufficient ways to capture your interest in this film. However, both of these methods don't seem very fitting after seeing it, so I'll start by saying this:  Interstellar  is, quite honestly, the best movie-going experience I have ever had. There are so many things about it that make it great, but it all comes down to this: it melds its impressive visuals perfectly with its emotional impact. This is so important for many films today, as they repeatedly entice us with their stellar visuals while sometimes falling a hair short on the emotional front (or vice versa). Let's start with the story. Interstellar 's plot largely operates around a 2001 -type setup: multiple movements in the same grand symphony. However, the move...

From my first listen of "Shake It Off," I could tell that Taylor Swift's newest album 1989 was going to be a must listen. This was a huge turn musically for her, going from a country-pop vibe to a slightly more experimental mainstream pop sound. As I heard more new tracks, I realized that this was a bigger turn than I thought it would be, intriguing me even more into Swift's new album. It was going to be either great or very bad, with not much room in between. Thankfully, 1989 's musical turn is a fantastic genre change for Swift. Diving into the deep end instead of wading into new territory was a little bit of a gamble, but it pays off. The overall vibe is very 1980's synthpop, which I personally loved. Not many artists could pull off this style and keep it relevant and listenable all at the same time, so Swift doing this is quite an accomplishment. Songs like "Style," "Out of the Woods," and "All You Had to Do Was Stay" exe...

First of all, before I start this review, I want to commend Chris and his team for continuing to make great Sunday morning worship music for the masses. Truly, I do. It is hard to write this many songs and keep them worshipful without being entirely flippant in a church service. So, Mr. Tomlin, I thank you, as a fellow worship leader, for giving all this music to be at the church's disposal. However, I'm not reviewing a collection of songs for a worship service. I'm reviewing an album. That is the unfortunate consequence of being an avid music fan: as much as you want to like something, you sometimes just can't. Chris has a tendency to write music that doesn't always work in a studio recording, and that trend sadly continues on Love Ran Red . As a whole, the album fails to ever truly capture my full attention for very long. There are many good moments, but they fail to make a good album on the whole. Thankfully, these good moments aren't hard to come by ...

Lecrae is the undisputed pioneer of Christian rap. His albums have sold more units and garnered more acclaim than any other modern Christian rapper. His Church Clothes mixtapes are some of the best albums I've ever listened to. However, recently Lecrae has received some accusations of selling out to the mainstream, losing the punch in his lyrics and being a carbon-copy of mainstream rappers in his beats, even bringing some of them in for guest features. Does his new release  Anomaly  support these accusations? In a word, no. Lyrically, Anomaly  returns to some of the themes present in his most challenging work, Church Clothes . In particular, "Welcome to America" speaks to the approval we seek as Christians in United States. It's as humbling as "Church Clothes" in its exposure of the American church. "Nuthin" is pointing out that talking about the same-old, same-old is just as good as talking about nothing. It is a clever jab at the prosperity ...

Sometimes, I see a movie that is not like anything else I have ever seen. A list of these films for me would include Gravity , Inception , (believe it or not) Les Miserables , and Flight . I guess I'll be adding Boyhood  to that list as well. However, unlike the other films on this list, what makes Boyhood  unique is not its story, its characters, or its themes: it's the production.  As some of you may know, Boyhood was shot in less than fifty days over twelve years with the same cast and crew. Talk about a gamble. There was no telling what would happen if one of the principal actors just suddenly died or if the director's own daughter, playing Mason's sister, decided not to be in her dad's movie anymore. Thankfully, the entire cast and crew stayed together for all twelve years of production, making one of the most unique films of all time. Without this method of production, we wouldn't have the unique story, deep characters, or the rich themes present i...

I'm so elated to finally be writing this review. U2 is one of my favorite bands in the history of music. They are perhaps one of the most spiritual non-Christian bands in the industry and a very prolific live act as well. However, they've been very inactive with releasing new material since 2009's masterpiece (in this reviewer's opinion) No Line on the Horizon . It was last year that we heard "Ordinary Love," the first new material from the band in almost four and a half years. That song was for a film about the life of Nelson Mandela and won a Golden Globe. Their second single came as a promotion on the Super Bowl this year. "Invisible" was a free download on iTunes for two days during which Bank of America would donate $1 for every download. It was well-received as a promotional single; however, I really didn't want a whole album of that sound. It was a little too "radio-friendly," shall we say, for my tastes. And then today, ...

I recently fell in love with House of Heroes after listening to their 2010 album Suburba  (which is the most fun I've had listening to music all summer). Their alternative rock sensibilities absolutely refreshed me, while their musical complexity reminded me of the Beatles in its simplistic nature. Their new EP Smoke  doesn't come out until August 19, but because I supported their IndieGoGo project I got it a little early, so I felt it was only right to share my thoughts on it with you. Lyrically, Smoke  carries a theme of overcoming intrusion into our lives from good and bad influences by the knowledge of our salvation in Christ. This begins with "Bottle Rocket," as it conveys the invasion of a catastophe intending to consume our souls. "Wake Up Screaming" is about searching for a lost purpose in our lives, while "The Worst Kind of gods" discusses false belief and hypocrisy and adds some spoken word about not seeking our own devices to hamme...

Some of you may not believe me, but I actually have a schedule for reviewing music. I look at upcoming releases and preorder what I can on iTunes so I can stay on track. However, this time I deviated from the norm. I had no intentions of reviewing Swoope's new album Sinema , but several sites had it rated so consistently high I just had to take a look. I can tell you right now that I am extremely glad I did so. What Swoope has done with Sinema  is create an incredibly appetizing concept album that only gets better with more listens. The central story deals with themes of temptation, consequences, and the struggle between our flesh and our Godly nature. I find this notable and quite risky, as most Christian rappers deal with rejecting the status quo of Christianity instead of more relevant topics such as this. It revolves around Swoope and his relationship with a fictional character, Mya Desirae. The story is kept running by phone calls between the various tracks...

This review has taken me a long time to be able to write. Looking back I can find only one reason for this. This is the only time I have ever guessed about an album and been dead wrong. I'm glad I was wrong, too. As you can see from my past two posts, I don't have the most welcoming view of Hillsong Live (now Hillsong Worship). To me, it felt like they made re-recordings of the same album every year, slightly changing the instrumentation in the process. Lyrically, this album does not differ greatly from previous Hillsong albums. For the most part, the album's lyrics focus on Christ and His sacrifice and how His Name is the Name above all other names. This is essential for a worship album, as the focus needs to be on God and not those worshiping Him. "Broken Vessels (Amazing Grace)" is a prime example of this. Besides the fact that it uses the lyrics to the hymn's first verse in an extremely clever way, it references the fact that we are broken people t...

In my last post, I covered all the reasons why I did not like Hillsong for the longest time. Those of you that are Hillsong fans may be wanting to ask me a lot of questions, but I am confident that many of them will be answered in the following words. Leading worship over the past few years has shown me one of the coolest things about Hillsong: it is an incredible resource for churches around the world. No other worship band that I know of could write at least ten new songs each year and not have them all be awful. If a church were to use Hillsong exclusively as their song catalog for worship, they would have an extremely robust selection of songs to sing. My perception of United has begun to change over the past couple years. Specifically, their 2013 studio album Zion is what changed my view of Hillsong in general. On Zion was a collection of songs that were God-focused and wildly original in their music. It was almost unrecognizable as a Hillsong album due to their house...

As my few regular readers will note, I have started to preface my music reviews with a little background on my thoughts going into my listening of an album. In preparation for my review of Hillsong Worship's (formerly Hillsong Live) upcoming album No Other Name , I felt that I needed to elaborate on my thoughts surrounding the Hillsong brand due to some past comments I have made about their music. This is the first part of a two-part series on this topic. Hillsong is probably one of the most famous names in Christian music, but most casual listeners will not realize that Hillsong is actually the name of a megachurch in Sydney, Australia, that identifies with the Pentecostal tradition. Within the church, there are several different bands that all serve different purposes. For this first writing, I will limit them to Live (the main worship team) and United (the youth band). There are and were many more, but these are the only two that have stood the test of time and stayed releva...

Have you ever expected something totally different than what you got when seeing a movie? I have on several occasions, the most recent being Godzilla . The first trailer I saw for it was very involving and well-done and made me want to see the film until I saw the title. I know next to nothing about the legendary monster and was not very eager to learn anything about him either. However, after noting the goals for the tone and feel of the film, I decided to give it a go. I could not have been more surprised with what I got. I expected the military to be hunting Godzilla, trying to destroy him before he destroyed the entire eastern seaboard. Instead the plot almost acknowledges Godzilla with the reverence of a god. Ken Watanabe's character, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, has been searching for him for quite some time and constantly urges the military to let Godzilla be the hero (spoiler: they do) and kill the two MUTOs, or massive unidentified terrestrial organisms, that have been terr...

When I saw the music video for "Midnight," the first song released from Coldplay's new album Ghost Stories , I was more than a little perplexed. This song was like nothing I had ever heard before in its eerie vocals and sweeping synths, but I just did not like it. Then the first official single, "Magic," was announced along with the album. Seeing the track listing and the running time made me even more curious. Well, Ghost Stories  has been released, and I could not be more convinced that you'll love it. The beginning of the album is surprisingly down-tempo and melancholy. With previous openers such as "Hurts Like Heaven" from Mylo Xyloto  and "Life in Technicolor" from Viva La Vida , I expected something much happier than "Always In My Head." That is when I started listening to the lyrics to see why this might be, and I found out exactly why: this is a breakup album. As some of you may know, Chris Martin, Coldplay's fro...

The Marvel movie machine is an unstoppable force that will earn its money whether or not they produce good films. Thankfully, they have a high standard for their films that makes them critically successful as well as commercially. However, that standard has been slipping as of late, with Iron Man 3  and Thor: The Dark World  drawing in some of the poorest reviews of the series. Does the second installment of the Captain's story bring Marvel back to its former heights? In short, yes. The Winter Soldier  succeeds where the recent Marvel films have not: the story. Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely make The Winter Soldier 's story suspenseful yet thematically rich at the same time. Like The Dark Knight trilogy, it mixes political undertones and themes prevalent in our world today with incredible action sequences and tense, chaotic moments, propelling the movie through its 150-minute running time quite quickly. It never lets up on its relentless pace, mak...