Due to my summer-heavy work cycle drastically opening up, I’ll have a lot more free time during September than I have in many months. One way I plan to take advantage of this (along with quite a bit of doing nothing, reading, and catching up on TV shows) is to write a bit more for…
I’ve been on a Bruce Springsteen kick recently (I think I could write a two-thousand word analysis on Rosalita alone), but occasionallyI need something more mindless and disposable. My recent pop album of choice has been Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, which has risen considerably in my esteem the past few weeks. It has a lot…
In the past I have praised the Annie Awards for providing a lens into the most important animated features from each year of the past couple decades. The largest mark against the awards came in 2008, when Kung-Fu Panda won Film of the Year against Wall-E, which was by far the most recognized and important…
Over in that house is a kid who thinks you’re the greatest, and it’s not because you’re a space ranger, pal. It’s because you’re a toy. You are his toy! – Woody Rating: 4 stars (out of 4) The success of Toy Story was almost unprecedented: Critics made it the fourth best-reviewed film of all time.…
On February 3, 1986, Pixar became an independent company by LucasArts selling the organization to Steve Jobs. (Little known fact: Jobs’ first billion actually came from Pixar, not from Apple.) Pixar spent its first decade exclusively releasing shorts before it partnered with Disney to bring you Toy Story in 1995. The rest, as they say,…
For the past few months, I’ve been meaning to do a sweeping revision of everything I’ve written for Earn This. I finally waded through the archives, polishing and trimming and clarifying to make my writing stronger. I’m notoriously bad at picking up every grammar or wording error before I publish an article, but my archive…
The U.S. version of The Office is my favorite show of all time (for a variety of reasons, all of which will be detailed in a post published probably some time around when this season’s finale airs). Yet, until this past week, I had never seen the British original. In the past five days, I’ve…
Rating: two stars (out of 4) The Invention of Lying just doesn’t know what it wants to be. It spends its first third belaboring its premise — a world where people are incapable of lying — with the same joke over and over. Then it shifts to a Yes Man-type attempt at an inspiring tale.…
Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) There was a point about halfway into It’s Kind of a Funny Story when I was confident the film was headed into four-star territory. The set-up in this movie is phenomenal in three ways: the way it establishes its conflict, the way it introduces its colorful cast of characters,…
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4) Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers. The show’s opening sequence explains that…