My Own Little World

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...

In looking back over my posts, I realized that I've never really dived into what my favorites of everything are. Yes, it's fairly easy to see from my reviews where my tastes in film, TV, and music lie, but I wanted to talk specifically about my favorites of pretty much everything. These lists outline my favorites from different genres of music and movies, as well as some more specialized lists. First up is a tough one: my top ten favorite albums of all time. This particular list is actually quite fluid, so there's no guarantee that I'll feel the same way in a month, much less in a year. That being said, at the time of this writing, these are my ten favorite albums in my library. 10. Revolver  - The Beatles (1964) The Beatles' first inclusion on this list is definitely not their last, but it made me fall in love with the Fab Four in high school. Revolver  was a transitional period for the band as they moved from their poppy origins towards a more psychedelic ...