My Own Little World

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'm going to put two of my cards out on the table before starting this review. The first: Into the Woods  is one of my favorite shows from a musical standpoint. The second: I have never seen it performed in its entirety on stage. Now that those two things are out there, let's talk about this film. I knew from the second that Disney picked up this project that it had enormous potential. They, more so than any other studio, have done musical fairy tales right almost every time they make one. When the cast list started rolling out, I became even more excited for Into the Woods . Bringing in heavyweight talents like Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt instantly brought some credibility, while the musical talents of Anna Kendrick and others would bolster the film in that perspective. Then, my school's drama department announced that this would be our spring musical, I knew I had to go see it. From the very first line, I knew that the music would be done justice. The score was wri...