My Own Little World

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...