Seizing a Lifetime, One Day at a Time

I just saw La La Land and wanted to share my thoughts about it. The movie tells the story of how an aspiring actress and a struggling jazz musician help each other find love through the struggle of achieving your dreams. Overall, it was a decent movie with some catchy music. Here are some things that stood out to me: * I loved the raw, immature sound of the lead actors voices. At first it was distracting, but as the film progresses it pulled me in and helped me feel like these were regular people like me. * The musical number at the beginning of the movie didn't seem to fit. It seemed like it was just a way to introduce that this was a musical but didn't really add to the story. * When Mia's car got towed, how did her roommates get home? Small plot hole, but it bugged me for a while. * There were a lot of plot holes. What happened to the band? What happened in between fall and winter at the end (trying not to spoil too much)? Who's number did Sebastian's sister ...

One of our (few) Christmas traditions is to go see a movie on Christmas Eve every year and this year we went to see Moana. * Fairly predicatble plot * Weird scene with crab * Super compelling, emotional music * Great animation. The water (as water, not when it turned into the ooze ocean spirit thing) looked amazing. The grandma's manta ray was really cool. When Moana gets covered in sand I was impressed at the detail of sand on her. Overall a good movie, music that I keep listening to and a gon. (I wrote this 18 months ago and never posted it so here it is now. Since everyone waits for my reviews to figure out if they should see a movie, I apologize for making you wait so long :) )

Last night, my wife and I completed our December Date-athon (we went on 4 dates this month!) by going to dinner, getting some shopping done and (finally) seeing Rogue One. I had high expectations going into this movie based on all the reviews I've seen. Usually that's a bad sign as the movie never lives up to the expectations and, sadly, this wasn't different. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie. I just didn't enjoy it as much as it seemed everyone else did. Here are some of my thoughts (caution spoilers): For the most part, I didn't care about the characters that died. Maybe I didn't get attached to them because going in I knew that a lot of people were going to die, but whatever the reason, that spoiled the movie. Also, we didn't get a lot of background on all the characters so there was less attachment to them. Along those same lines, it felt like the movie had two identities. The first half of the movie wanted tell the story of the people...