My Own Little World

After having seen The Last Jedi three times, I finally have some concrete thoughts about the film. My overall positive impression of the film has not changed, but there are some things I have begun to notice that I’d like to share with you. Two of the three things I'm sharing here are going to seem harshly negative, and while they are more or less blemishes and might detract from the film, they don't  WARNING: spoilers for The Last Jedi follow. Please do yourself a favor and don’t spoil this movie for yourself. It is far better if you know nothing going into it for the first time. But really though: don’t spoil this movie for yourself. I knew nothing going in, and that made a lot of what happens in the film impact me that much more; if you want my spoiler-free thoughts on the film, you can find them here . Anyway, here’s my observations. Anytime after the first viewing, this film drags. I didn’t notice The Last Jedi ’s length the first time I watched it that mu

Film has the potential to be one of the most impactful forms of media because it excites the most senses: we can see, hear, and emotionally feel for everything that is happening on screen. We don’t always need big spectacles to do this for us either; sometimes, the smaller and more intimate a film is, the more impact it can have on the viewer. I recently saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , a well-written character-driven mystery that has at its core a really unique portrayal of forgiveness and reconciliation. I think for a time like we are in now, this is a film that everybody must see. It doesn’t become overly political, and it doesn’t try to force these hefty themes: it simply tells a human story. The most central element to Three Billboards is the writing, both of the story and the screenplay. Martin McDonagh, the film’s director and writer, is actually best known for his plays, and that style of writing shows up constantly in this film. The dialogue is meaty

Because of the complexity of The Last Jedi and how interwoven the film’s quality is with its major plot points, I am going to treat this a bit differently and more shortly than my normal reviews. After I watch this film a second or third time, I will publish a much longer spoiler-filled review; this is more of a first impressions post than anything, and I promise there will be ABSOLUTELY NO SPOILERS in the words that follow. I have never reacted to a film like I have The Last Jedi . I have never been so shocked by the way a film’s plot has progressed or by how one single movie can take the lore of an entire franchise as deep and rich as Star Wars and make you ask questions about its central core. I want to make one thing very clear, though: I still don’t know how I feel about this film. There’s too much for me to process after just one viewing for me to give it a specific score, and if you see it I bet you will feel the same way. So much happens in this film, and while that

One of my friends called Reputation “fun trash,” and I’m beginning to agree with him. Taylor Swift’s sequel to her 80s-laden synthpop tribute 1989 – an album I thought was incredibly solid and more substantial than her previous work – has all the components of today’s latest trashy pop music. It has celebrity feuds, horrible break-ups, dubstep hooks fused with R&B rhythms – it’s all here. And I’m feeling somewhat…disappointed. Granted, being someone who loved the music of 1989 and its trendy nature makes it pretty plain that I don’t care for just any pop music. My favorite pop album of the year was Lorde’s Melodrama , a beautiful synthpop record with some indie flair that subverted the lyrical trends of most pop music by showing what happens after the party ends. Besides the musical quality of the record, what I loved most was that Lorde retained who she was – an outsider wanting to offer a slight critique of what the industry pushes as its product. Taylor Swift,

It takes a lot to make me cry. It’s not that I don’t have emotions; I just don’t show them through crying. I’ve seriously cried in public only a handful of times in my memory, and I have never cried while watching a movie. Well. Frick you Pixar. You finally did it. You made me cry while I was watching Coco . In all seriousness, Pixar has done a very good job with making me feel emotion at the movies, but  Coco went to a whole other level. It does have some of the best computer animation I have ever seen (more on that later), but it’s the emotional component that makes Coco the great film it is.  A big part of this is due to the story’s depiction of Mexican culture. Coco gives the celebration of the Day of the Dead and the culture’s value of family so much justice that it made me think often about what my own family, both living and deceased, would think of the decisions I have made in my life. By the movie’s climax – one of the many examples of the power of Coco ’s

There are some films that just look like they won’t be artistic. One of the usual culprits for this is the inspirational family drama: movies like The Blind Side , as good as they are in their acting and ability to wave their emotional wands to cast a spell over their audience, they lack any unique flair when it comes to their direction and perspective. I was expecting the same out of Wonder , which follows a child with Treacher Collins syndrome struggling to fit into a normal school environment. Treacher Collins involves a lot of physical disabilities and hardships, including significantly altered facial features, that would undoubtedly make entrance into middle school (the period addressed by Wonder ) so much harder than it would be otherwise…and it’s not like it was easy to begin with. Basically, I thought this movie would bank on sympathy for Augie, the central character. Instead, Wonder tells Augie’s story from countless perspectives, and it really works in its favor.

One of the hardest things for any film to do is to be human. True humanity is extremely hard to capture in the pre-planned conversations of a script or in the often-visionary lens of a director’s camera. Even going to such lengths as filming the same cast over twelve years (looking at you, Boyhood ) does not guarantee that a movie can be a true slice of life. Somehow, some way, Greta Gerwig, in her first film in the director’s chair no less, has made one of the most genuinely human films I have ever seen. Lady Bird is an organic piece of cinematic art that doesn’t try to be terribly artistically original or innovative; it simply tells a human coming-of-age story, and it does it better than nearly any other film I have seen. As much as I’d love to claim that there is no one aspect of the film that helps this, ultimately the film rests on the shoulders of its cast. Without the amazing performances from Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Lucas Hedges, and everyone else involved, t

While watching Justice League , I couldn’t help comparing it to The Avengers . The two films are trying to do very similar things with their respective teams, and they both have very similar story beats (not unreasonable to expect given Joss Whedon’s heavy involvement in both). Honestly, that comparison does Justice League a lot more favors than you might otherwise expect: they both are fun, entertaining, bombastic blockbusters with characters the audience can get behind. Of course, Justice League is not in a vacuum, and neither is The Avengers . And that is where the problems start to show. The biggest problem I have with Justice League is its lack of character development. Now, this actually doesn’t come from this film itself, as all of the new characters (Cyborg, The Flash, and Aquaman) are enticing as presented here. The problem is that we haven’t had the prior experiences with these characters that we had in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before The Avengers came to

There are times when I will be watching a film, really enjoying it, and suddenly feeling like something is off. I often cannot put my finger on what exactly the flaw is, but because I can’t put my finger on it I dismiss it and still say the movie is good. There are other times, however, when after talking with other people about the film, I understand exactly what the flaw is. Watching Murder on the Orient Express was one of those experiences. I love myself a good old-school mystery in the vein of Hitchcock films like To Catch a Thief , and my prior experiences with star and director Kenneth Branagh (in particular his four-hour unabridged adaptation of Hamlet ) as well as the rest of this star-studded cast made me very excited to see this film. I didn’t expect a fantastic film, but I was secretly hoping that it would revitalize this largely dead genre. Unfortunately, Murder has one really big flaw that makes it largely forgettable: it doesn’t know how to balance knowledge

By this point, there has been an established formula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s a reason they are so successful at the box office: people see them as a reliable option for being entertained at the movies. That’s not a bad thing by any means – I thoroughly enjoy every single one of these movies and plan to for the foreseeable future – but it does mean that each successive film in the franchise needs to stand out at least a little bit from the rest to keep interest high. This year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 partially failed at that with its convoluted plot and somewhat rehashed humor; on the contrary, Spider-Man: Homecoming successfully rebooted a character that has had problems in past in film, giving me a film that I really enjoyed. Thor: Ragnarok does something I didn’t expect in trying to change up the formula from the previous two films focusing on the character: it cranks the humor up to 11. OK, there’s more to it than that, like the way the film

One of the things I hate most in the film industry is blatant cash grabs. Adam Sandler does it, reboots do it, and superhero movies do it all the time (*cough* Fant4stic *cough*). It might not surprise you, then, that one of my least favorite sections of Hollywood is the Christian film industry. The fact that Pureflix (the most prominent Christian independent studio of recent years) is making a sequel to God’s Not Dead makes me sick because I know that it will be just as bad as (but most likely worse than) the original and pander to its target audience in the same way. I try to give them a chance with most of their new releases, but it’s getting really hard to do so, especially after the last film of theirs I saw. I’m Not Ashamed is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It’s very poorly acted, overly sterilized to where it cannot land its emotional punches, and is made in a way that makes it a complete waste of time. Films like this that talk about my Christian faith in such

I'm going to start a new series for things I care about outside of the topics I already discuss on my blog, simply titled "Why I Care." In this first post, I want to take a look at announcement made yesterday that has the potential to change the entire way digital movie purchases work. A couple years ago, Disney launched a service called Disney Movies Anywhere. It worked like Ultraviolet, the digital copy service, in a way: you entered codes online and it put it into your libraries in various retailers. Here was the difference, though: Disney partnered with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Vudu, making it far more cross-platform than Ultraviolet (it only had Vudu), as well as putting your movies in ALL of your connected libraries instead of just one. It was a nice little thing that I grew to love and wish others copied. Well, yesterday something really big happened: Sony, Universal, Fox, and Warner Bros. all joined Disney's service and rebranded it as Movies Anywhe

There are very few things that are as much of a sure thing in film as a thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Movies like Psycho , Vertigo , Rear Window , and To Catch a Thief remain some of the most tautly crafted films I have seen, and 99% of this is due to the man himself. Hitch has this unusual ability to take an otherwise ordinary moment and make it more suspenseful than anything else you've ever seen. Nowhere is this more evident than The Birds . Coming off one of his many masterpieces in Psycho, Hitchcock had pretty much free reign when it came to making thrillers and horror films. For some reason, he decided that birds out of all things were the best villain for this. Unsurprisingly, he makes it work incredibly well. Simply a bird landing on a playground outside of a schoolhouse goes from a normal occurrence to something terrifying and suspenseful because of how this man helms this film. The Birds is a good old-school thriller, showcasing some of the genre’s b

When I first heard about The Good Place , it sounded like a neat little idea: one of the brains behind Parks and Recreation and The Office, the afterlife, Ted Danson, and Kristen Bell. It appeared to be a slightly quirky but still conventional take on the single-camera sitcom, and I knew at some point I would need to watch it. Oh, how wrong I was. The Good Place in its first season has become one of the best sitcoms currently on television. With its clever, witty writing and excellent performances, The Good Place is poised to become one of the best places to turn your attention to on Thursday nights. Part of this is because of its premise. Kristen Bell plays Eleanor, a recently-deceased woman who sees herself put in “the Good Place” in the afterlife. What’s off about this, you ask? It’s simple: there’s no way she belongs there. By any stretch of the imagination, Eleanor is at best an average person who compares extremely unfavorably to the philanthropists, environmentalist

I loved the first Kingsman  movie. It was such a breath of fresh air with its ridiculousness and on-the-nose parody of its genre (not too far off from what I felt Deadpool  did with its genre). Matthew Vaughn's direction made it quite a briskly-paced film as well while also having enough substance and good character writing to make it good in the slower, smaller moments. Naturally, I was looking forward to seeing this sequel after such a refreshing initial installment. Unfortunately, Kingsman: The Golden Circle  suffers dearly from a rampant disease in Hollywood: sequelitis. It's that condition that so many second and third installments have where they try to make everything bigger in scope by stuffing every second of the film with subplots upon subplots and new characters upon new characters. This typically results in very poorly paced movies where the audience is seldom given a moment to breathe. And...that's exactly what happened here. Now, I will say that if you l

In 2004, a little band from Las Vegas called The Killers released their first album, Hot Fuss . It rocked the landscape of alternative music, with singles like "Mr. Brightside," "Somebody Told Me," and "All These Things That I've Done" still being played on alt rock stations to this day. That album very much feels like a complete collection of songs and not just like a few tracks slapped together into a record. The same can be said of that album's slightly lesser successor Sam's Town . As The Killers have continued their career, they have never really been able to replicate the coherence of their first two albums. For me, that's a really big deal: album flow is one of the things I look for the most in my music. Without a good flow, albums become haphazard and feel less polished to my ears and severely degrade in quality. Thankfully, guys, Wonderful Wonderful  is an album that feels like an album. The flow here is much, much smoother t

If I was writing my review of Breaking Bad  after its fourth season, I would be telling you that this is easily one of the best things I have ever seen on television. Every season is better than the last, and the character development and pacing is more on point than any other film or TV series. However, the fifth season changes everything. In its final sixteen episodes, Breaking Bad  goes from one of the best television series of all time to one of the best things ever put to film. This is  entirely due to the show's writing. Vince Gilligan, the creator of the show, is an absolute genius when it comes to pacing and character development. In reality, despite a lot of breakneck tension and thrills through its first four seasons, Breaking Bad  is quite a slow burn of a show. The character of Walter White, brilliantly portrayed by a never-to-be-underestimated Bryan Cranston, often seems just on the cusp of turning into an absolute monster; however, somehow, someway, Gilligan and h

John Mark McMillan is the most famous guy you've never heard of in Christian music. Since penning the modern classic "How He Loves," he has largely lived in the small-but-active indie sector of Christian music, working his way from alternative rock on his debut The Song inside the Sounds of Breaking Down  all the way to folk-tinged indie on his last effort Borderland . That last one made me fall in love with the man's writing style and his ability to weave seamlessly between complexity and simplicity while never losing lyrical meaning (if you want an example, go listen to "Future/Past"). Because of Borderland , I preordered Mercury & Lightning  in January. Yes, that's over seven months ago. I have been sitting on pins and needles ever since, waiting to hear how McMillan would continue his stellar career. From where he was on his last project, Mercury & Lightning  feels like a natural progression musically. McMillan continues on his Springst

Kings Kaleidoscope is literally (in Chris Traeger's voice) the best thing that ever happened to my taste in music. They partially restored my faith in Christian music's ability to be good (not an easy thing to do for me). Their only two full-length albums have gotten perfect scores from me, and one of them is even in my top 5 albums of all time. Some people would argue I have a massive bias towards them and their music. To a point, I agree: I am biased towards Kings Kaleidoscope's material. Here's the thing, though: it's actually that good.  More so than almost any other artist in Christian music, they blend musical ingenuity with superb songwriting and lyricism. Their debut flipped the switch on a new generation of worship music, while their sophomore effort progressed their sound into a relatively sparser palette while also shifting their aim from worship music to music for the Christian life. Continuing their near-perfect catalog is their latest release, Th

Warning: I will minorly spoil this movie in this post.  I have this thing with romance movies, that thing being that most of them are really, really not good. There is a definite formula to the genre that I think is becoming so overused that any film eschewing it for something different (*cough* Silver Linings Playbook *cough*) becomes one of the best of the genre in my mind. I kind of wish this wasn't the case, especially now that I am in a very committed relationship with someone who happens to love these movies. However, a couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend somehow got me to actually sit down and watch The Notebook  with her, and I realized something about this formula: there's a reason it's there, and I'd like to bet that that reason is The Notebook . It was successful among audiences, bringing in over five times its budget at the box office, as well as garnering a bit of a cult following in the years since its release. People love the unabashed sentimentality

I won't talk for too long about how much I love Christopher Nolan's directing, but the long and short of it is that the man is my inspiration for even examining the technical aspects of film and seeing how they impact the emotions I feel while watching a movie. I have rated five of his films before this one, and four of them are tens (the odd one out is The Dark Knight Rises  at a nine, for what it's worth). I kind of like him a lot. That being said, I never expected him to release a film like Dunkirk . One of the hallmarks of Nolan's films is how they wear their emotions and philosophy on their sleeve. I really like this because it helps me see the connection between the filmmaking and the other stuff. The Dark Knight  does this a lot thanks to Heath Ledger's Joker, as does Interstellar  with all of its talk of the link between love and time. Now, when I heard Dunkirk  was actually a thing, I figured it would be similar in this aspect to Nolan's other fil

I was going to write this review a few days earlier than I did. I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming  last Tuesday, and afterwards I left the theater feeling slightly underwhelmed. I knew what I had just seen was good, but I was most definitely not wowed by what I saw. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of Spider-Man in the first place, and I have never thoroughly enjoyed a film starring the character. It has nothing to do with cinematic quality but entirely with tone. The Raimi trilogy often felt too campy, while the Andrew Garfield films felt like they veered too much into conventional comic book film territory. Homecoming  definitely felt more in my wheelhouse than any prior Spider-Man film, but I still didn't love it. Two days later, I was watching the trailers prior to Dunkirk , Christopher Nolan's latest film (which I'll have a review of very soon), and suddenly something clicked. Spider-Man: Homecoming  is actually really, really, really good.  This might be the be