I Am Writing Again!

A New Blog For My New Writing

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Music as a time machine

Image
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
Read more

The Conjuring Review

Image
Over-hyped or truly malevolent? Full review by Isaac Handelman Few horror films in recent memory have inspired the sort of hype and attention that The Conjuring has. And who could blame the public for this? The film’s R-rating has been publicly declared to be due to the fact that the film was “too scary” for a PG-13. Some theatres have gone so far as to display signs outside of Conjuring showings warning that some may find it “too scary”. Stories abound of viewers who had to vacate the theater shortly into the proceedings because they were “too scared”. In the end, perhaps the hype has led viewers to expect the film to be too scary for its own good. The Conjuring contains no shortage of slick scares, but it’s hardly the revolution in mainstream horror that some have made it out to be. Conjuring claims to be based on the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of paranormal investigators (or “demonologists”) who agree to assist the Parrens in cleansing their new house of
Read more

Frozen Review

Image
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
Read more