My Own Little World

Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them. That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado : while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the fi...

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian household in a suburb-like small city. Currently, I am pursuing a degree at a moderate Christian university for the purpose of pursuing a career in full-time church work and have worked in churches for this summer and the previous two. In the past couple years since going to school, I have experienced several crises of juxtaposition in my faith, pitting beliefs I have had since I was a child against a more “liberal” or “secular” understanding and being surprised when realizing that the two were not contrary but could be complementary. The juxtaposition at the crux of this wrestling has been that between faith and doubt, how the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty (or, more damningly, self-sufficiency). I say this to show why a film like First Reformed resonated with every fiber of my being. It is a treatise on the difference between facades of authenticity and the real thing, and it uses the supposed tension between...

Lean on Pete is somehow bleak yet beautiful. I was taken aback by how brutal this film is to its protagonist. Charley’s life as shown in the film does not start too great, and when life begins to hit him with blow after blow, taking one thing he loves after another away from him, it begins to become almost depressing. By the end of the film, Charley has almost nothing to continue living for – and the fact that he is just fifteen years old and has seen more life than most middle-aged adults I know makes that all the more heartbreaking. He finds a companion in the titular Pete for a while, becoming attached to this aging racehorse; and when he takes Pete’s future into his own hands and runs away with him, it is done with such poeticism and such little dialogue that makes it resonate incredibly well. As good as the film continues to be after that moment, Lean on Pete begins to show its flaws not long after. As events transpire on Charley and Pete’s journey, everything starts...

Manchester by the Sea makes me grieve. This is a powerful tale of emotion, a tale of life being so relentlessly brutal in the blows it deals – and in how often a single man can be reminded of those blows. It is a real film – real in the way it portrays the process of grief, the desensitization it causes to the outside world, real in the motivations and reactions its characters have. It all starts with Kenneth Lonergan. The writer-director shows here his uncanny intuition for sculpting characters in respectful, complex, and subtle ways. Manchester does not have one scene out of place: every moment has purpose and builds something into the story. Sometimes films like this one can become bloated due to their complicated character building and the many necessary subplots for doing so, but that is not the case here. In fact, as the film went on and introduced more elements I longed for all of them to be explored more – which does happen – just because these characters became s...

If I’m being honest, I really want the Christian film industry to succeed. I want it to be good art that families can feel comfortable seeing in a theater. I want it to have good messages for Christians in the world today, and I want these films to do well and gain respect outside of the American evangelical sphere. There haven’t been many films of this genre, though, that have risen above one of two categories – borderline sermon or borderline propaganda – and the typical lack of production quality behind these films means that I cannot in good conscience say they are good movies either. If I’m being honest, though, I also must admit that I Can Only Imagine is one of the better Christian films of the last several years. It does a surprisingly good job proving that its story – the life of Bart Millard and how his journey led him to write the titular song – can make an emotionally compelling film, which considering how unnecessary the film seems at its outset is quite a feat. ...

As soon as I saw who was involved in The Post , I was hooked – you give me Steven Spielberg directing people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and it’s kind of like the most surefire Oscar contender you can get. And I got exactly the film I expected with The Post : a high-quality, entertaining, and even slightly informative movie with some great performances and few if any flaws behind the camera. It’s probably irrational for me to assume that The Post could be any greater than the sum of its parts, but that sum – as good as it was – is something I have seen before. Spielberg has gotten into a groove of these kinds of movies, these politically-charged dramas that tend to show a correlation between the world of the past and the world of today. The Post does everything that films like Lincoln and Munich have already done and done well; as lazy as that may sound for someone with Spielberg’s profile, this film does make some very pointed connections between the Nixon and Trump ad...

I have loved Aaron Sorkin for a long time. I first encountered his writing with The Social Network and fell in love with it watching The West Wing , The Newsroom , and Moneyball . He has a very unique style with fast, witty dialogue that says a lot in very little time; when combined with the walk-and-talk technique of The West Wing , it becomes an incredibly effective tool. I have never disliked his writing, even though it does get a little soapboxy from time to time. When I heard Sorkin was going to sit in the director’s chair for the first time, I got incredibly excited. I didn’t know what kind of visual style to expect from him, but I did know that the same writing that I fell in love with would be back in full effect. With Molly’s Game , Sorkin proves himself to be a competent but not (yet) adventurous director. There are parts of this film that definitely prove there is a lot of potential, but it’s not fulfilled here. Most of this I see through the film’s length: at two ...

This is a rare occasion for me. I don’t think The Greatest Showman is a good movie, but I did enjoy watching it most of the time. It’s not a guilty pleasure; it’s more like a sugary, rich dessert that doesn’t strike me as inventive or unique but also doesn’t make me sick of its richness. What does this, no doubt, are the musical numbers. They took me out of The Greatest Showman in the best way possible. Let’s be real: this movie doesn’t know what character development is. It doesn’t know how to craft a compelling story. What it does know how to do is tell a story through music, and for that reason it’s actually quite tolerable to a fan of musicals like myself. It’s not just that the music itself is good; the numbers are filmed well in their own right. They are choreographed and shot quite competently, and the vocal performances are excellent as well. My personal favorites were “Rewrite the Stars,” “The Other Side,” and the likely Oscar contender “This Is Me.” There’s o...

I have to admit that I am not as familiar with Ridley Scott’s filmography as much as I should. I have seen only a handful of his movies, but there has always been an element of risk involved with them. Blade Runner and Alien changed science fiction films forever, while some of his more recent works have seen the revitalization of dead genres like what Gladiator did for Rome-era epics. In his most recent film, the now 80-year-old Scott took a risk of a different kind. All the Money in the World originally starred Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty, but after his sexual assault allegations Scott opted to reshoot all of Spacey’s scenes with only a month left until release with his supposed original first choice for the role, Christopher Plummer. They re-edited as they reshot, getting all of Plummer’s scenes filmed in a little over a week. Why am I telling you all of this? It’s for one reason, and only one: there’s little to no evidence of the film’s hectic reshoots in the final ...

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...

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...

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,...

There's something to be said for the art of the twist ending. A really good plot twist towards the end of a film, no matter the genre, can make repeat viewings incredibly insightful and very rewarding which in my mind makes a film more valuable. I personally love plot twists in the course of watching a film for the first time and how they often make me look for the trail of breadcrumbs filmmakers leave throughout their work. One of the films most renowned for its twist in modern times is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense . When this came out in 1999, everybody ate it up (at least from what the box office numbers show). It catapulted Shyamalan to the front page of filmmaking, and for good reason. This is a really well-constructed supernaturally-driven drama with some horror elements. Here's the secret to this film, though, and why the twist works so well: The Sixth Sense  has a really keen understanding of what it is as a film. It realizes that its content does ...

Let's wind the clock back just a few weeks to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony. My girlfriend and I were watching them, having seen the front runner for Best Picture,   La La Land , and desperately wanting it to win. For two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it did. Then, chaos ensued. In an unprecedented gaff, the wrong card was handed to Warren Beatty and he announced the wrong film as the winner. In its place was Moonlight , a low-budget indie film based on an unpublished play that chronicles the life of a gay black man in the projects of Miami. Nobody saw this coming, including us. I'm not going to lie: I was a little devastated that one of my favorite films of all time, let alone last year, did not win Best Picture. That being said, the fact that Moonlight  won Best Picture made me want to see it more than I already did, so I made a point of seeing it over spring break. And it was brutal. I usually don't struggle with giving films scores and ranking them, but Moonl...

Generally, I go into some elaborate introduction about how I go into a film and what I expect from the people in front and behind the camera. However, I don't really have a whole lot of thoughts of that variety, so I'm just going to give you my thoughts in a nutshell. Hidden Figures is a perfectly fine film. It's not perfect, it's not incredibly artistic, and it's not an instant classic. But if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that you will enjoy Hidden Figures  more likely than not. Most of this is due to the film's tone. Hidden Figures  has a very positive, uplifting, inspirational tone that instantly attracts and allows the viewer to very easily buy into the story the film is trying to tell. This is a rarity among good films these days, with the majority of audiences seeing darker tone as emotional complexity and depth. I actually completely disagree with this, despite my preference for darker films, so I greatly appreciate Hidden Fi...

In closing the door on 2016, I realize that there are a lot of films that I have seen that unfortunately I was unable to review for one reason or another. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want you guys to know what I think of most of these films, so just like the last couple of years I will be doing a few posts over the next month or so wrapping up all of the films I got a chance to see from this past year. This time, I've got an animated Disney film that packs a punch, Woody Allen's latest film, and a Western featuring Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges... Zootopia  - Buy it.  This is one of the most insightful and timely animated movies ever made. Zootopia is a little too on-the-nose about its contemporary themes at times (and there might be too many moral lessons to keep track of), but otherwise their execution is perfect. The voice acting is top notch, and the animation of the animals is incredibly detailed and lush. The story is different for a Disney film ...

I'm just going to come right out and say it: Creed  is one of my favorite movies to come out this year. It's not because the Rocky franchise is one of my favorites in cinema history, as I feel that a couple movies really tainted the entire series. It's not because I like any of the specific actors or crew members involved, as I'm not very familiar with any of them. No, it's because this is a movie that I would gladly spend my money on time and time again. I left the theater pumped up and wanting another installment in a way that almost no other movie has done. Looking back at my viewing of Creed , the reasons why surprise me. Usually when I like a film this much, there has to be some kind of great story to get me hooked. With Creed , however, this isn't the case. Not to say that the story is bad, but it definitely is not the film's best quality. It loosely follows the storyline of the original Rocky  at times and deviates from it to become a more sta...

I wanted to see The Walk  ever since it was announced. I love the story of Philippe Petit's high wire crossing of the span between the Twin Towers, and I love Robert Zemeckis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's respective talents. Yet, I never expected the film that I got. I expected a somewhat standard biopic with a slightly more serious tone. Instead, I got what felt like a fast-paced heist film. That is why The Walk  is one of the best films I've seen so far this year: it can deftly balance between the more expository narrative of Petit's life and the intense high wire sequences that drive the film's heart. Zemeckis as a filmmaker excels at this. He has proven in two of his previous films, Forrest Gump  and Flight , that he can bounce back and forth between two distinct tones and make an amazing film out of them. In Forrest Gump , it was between romance, drama, and war; in Flight , between dark comedy, thriller, and courtroom drama. In The Walk , we get some ver...