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Music as a time machine

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By Isaac Handelman A few months ago, near the beginning of my time in college, in a fit of what might have been homesickness coupled with my unshakable sentimentality, I set to work compiling a Spotify playlist encapsulating my senior year in high school. I happened upon this idea because I’d been thinking a lot about the ability of certain songs, when played, to transport me back to the times in my life that I associate them with. My plan was to compile every song that had meant something to me over the course of my senior year (a collection that turned out to consist of about 120 distinct tracks) and order them chronologically by the specific time or event in my life for which they held meaning and/or significance. I soon found the task daunting -- after all, certain songs were associated with foggier feelings or memories than others, and were difficult to place in order -- and I gave up. But my reason for setting out on this endeavor still holds truth: music has a certai...
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You might agree that 'It's Such a Beautiful Day,' or this film might depress the hell out of you

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By Isaac Handelman You may have seen World of Tomorrow , Don Hertzfeldt’s fifteen-minute animated short that was nominated for an Oscar this year. If you haven’t, go ahead and do so -- it’s a wonderful little sci-fi jaunt with a feel-good message -- but I’d like to talk about another of Hertzfeldt’s efforts, an hour-long film entitled It’s Such a Beautiful Day , which resides on Netflix and shares some, though not all, of the generic elements of Hertzfeldt’s shorter effort, such as its black comedy. Composed of three of the animator’s short films strung together with a bit of extra material included, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is kind of an indescribable viewing experience. It’s about a man named Bill, whose life is narrated in non-linear fashion by the soothing voice of Hertzfeldt himself. Bill, despite his visual simplicity, manages to be more expressive and relatable than many more physically substantial cinematic protagonists. The film is visually eclectic, drawing from...
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Frozen Review

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Thawed. Full review by Isaac Handelman Many parallels can be drawn between Disney's latest entry in their animated canon, Frozen , and the studio's 2010 offering, Tangled : both center on quirky female protagonists, both are fresh takes on classic fairy tales, both feature some sort of large four-legged mammal as comic relief; heck, the two films even both posses bi-syllabic, single-word adjectives for titles. Perhaps these similarities are by sheer coincidence, but they nonetheless caused me to hold Frozen up to the high standard of its predecessor -- a standard that the film ultimately fails to live up to. It's not a bad film per se, but Frozen too often feels as if it's missing that spark of ingenuity that made Tangled such an entertaining ride. In Frozen, Princess Anna takes center stage, voiced well by Kristen Bell. Anna sets out on a quest to find her runaway sister, Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel), whose mystical ice powers have covered the kingdom in an eternal...
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