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...

It takes a lot to make me cry. It’s not that I don’t have emotions; I just don’t show them through crying. I’ve seriously cried in public only a handful of times in my memory, and I have never cried while watching a movie. Well. Frick you Pixar. You finally did it. You made me cry while I was watching Coco . In all seriousness, Pixar has done a very good job with making me feel emotion at the movies, but  Coco went to a whole other level. It does have some of the best computer animation I have ever seen (more on that later), but it’s the emotional component that makes Coco the great film it is.  A big part of this is due to the story’s depiction of Mexican culture. Coco gives the celebration of the Day of the Dead and the culture’s value of family so much justice that it made me think often about what my own family, both living and deceased, would think of the decisions I have made in my life. By the movie’s climax – one of the many examples of the power of...