My Own Little World

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...