Spongebob Sponge out of Water: Movie Review

As a fan of both the Spongebob Squarepants Series and the 2004 Spongebob Movie, I was really looking forward to see this new movie that came out. After watching it, I do have to say that I wasn't as thrilled with it as I thought I would be. But then again,how could you possibly follow the last movie that was made. That movie was fricken awesome!

Having written all that, I'm giving Sponge Out of Water a moderate recommendation. It's got some golden moments of weird, surreal glee, but there are also parts that are a huge mess. I know, it's weird to criticize something like SpongeBob for being too unorganized or wacky, but when it prevents the story from telling the way it should you wind up with a movie that sort of feels like a bunch of separate SpongeBob episodes all tacked together in a row.

The first movie was meant to be a bit of a primer for viewers who may not have been all that familiar with the series. It focused mostly on SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and his thickheaded starfish friend Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) as they went on a quest to retrieve King Neptune's crown (and adventure that also took them up out of the sea and onto land). The rest of the SpongeBob regulars took a backseat to a more streamlined tale and (filled with guest stars like Jeffrey Tambor, Scarlett Johansson, and more) and it worked out really well. Despite sort of being "SpongeBob for Beginners," it turned out awesome.

Sponge Out of Water instantly sheds all notions of exposition at the door and dives into an insane story that contains magical tomes that can alter reality, singing seagulls, time travel, and inter-dimensional omniscient rapping dolphins. It's meant to just be a big madhouse with ever-so-slight signs of a story.

Sponge Out of Water brings all the series characters together for a movie that feels like a true ensemble, complete with a handful of truly golden moments of goofy hilarity. But it's also dragged down by an "everythingand the kitchen sink" approach that makes it feel like a bunch of good separate ideas thrown together in haste.

The Flash: TV Show Review

Most of you readers know, that my blog has mostly consisted of music and movie reviews. But I would like to live up to the name/blog change that I have made and go further into it with a review on my thoughts of the new Flash TV show.

The pilot episode was released on Tuesday October 7th (ironically my birthday, how nice of them). While watching it, I couldn't help but feel like this show was very heavily influenced by Sam Raimi's spider-man films. It sets up the whole origin story very similarly, as well as the action scenes, and the special effects are quite reminiscent. This is hardly a bad thing however, many superheros (such as the Flash) are very hard to translate to film, it is hard for them to not try to come across as trying to be serious and have that flop. The other option is to embrace the cheesiness, and boy they did. They cheesed it up just like a mouse in Wisconsin. They poured a whole bottle of Reddi-cheese on this show and doused it with an extra layer of queso!

Now, you're probably wondering if it was really that cheesey, and the answer is no. If it tells you anything , it is very similar to something you would see in the comics. I am being honest when I say they were definitely not holding any of it back. Now for many people this will be a turn off for. For the people the show is really targeting though, it won't be a problem at all! For me, it wasn't too big of a problem, but if I continue to watch it I could see it getting old real fast. I mean, the acting was pretty mediocre and the writing, don't even get me started on that.

Going into this, I did not expect much out of the action scenes. How could you really? You don't see too much examples of well executed super-speed, with the only exceptions being Quicksilver's "Time in a Bottle Scene" from X-Men Days of Future Past and Dash running on water in The Incredibles. Now nothing in this show did justice to either of those examples, but for the budget of a television show I thought they did fine. It made use of a lot of slow motion and styling effects of that sort to make it seem more realistic. In addition to that whenever Flash would be running we would either see it very up close or from a very wide angle. The wide angle actually added an interesting perspective that enhanced these scenes.

One of my biggest complaints is of the character development, it seemed like the writers tried to force a lot on you that could have fit into a three episode long area, but I'd rather have this than stretching out of material that ends up falling short. Over all I thought "The Flash" was alright, not too good or bad. I can see it sliding into the path of bad some point soon though, but I guess I will just have to wait and see!

One Song, Many Artists

The song I am going to talk about today is one that has touched the lives of many and relates to a very large group of people. This song is called "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. There are several covers of this song, one of the most known covers of it is by Jeff Buckley, the song itself actually found greater popular acclaim through a cover by John Cale. But my personal favorite cover is by Rufus Wainwright. He puts so much emotion into the way he sings this song and even if you don't even understand the meaning the first or second time you hear it, it still might make you emotional and feel the why Rufus feels while singing it.





Many other cover versions of "Hallelujah have been performed by many various singers, both in concerts live and recorded for different events which have added up to 300 total versions. The song has been widely used in films and television soundtracks, the most popular was my favorite cover of the song by Rufus Wainwright in the movie "Shrek", which was actually the first time I had ever heard the song before.




What most people don't pay attention to, is the true meaning of the song. Even when people listen to it, I can't believe no one fully understands this song. The song is about both love and heartbreak, but there are also strong religious undertones, not exactly "anti-religious" but just showing the theory that people only turn to God to complete the holes left by the imperfections in life. The first verse combines these two meanings, beginning with a biblical reference to David being Gods favored man on earth, before a lyric with two meanings, "it goes like this, the fourth the fifth... the minor fall and the major lift" the first part cleverly refers to the musical structure of the song, but it also refers to the rollercoaster of love, peaks of emotions from the best to the worst.




The second verse is a reference to Sampson and Delilah from the holy bible, although when it says "you saw her bathing on the roof" is another reference to David and Bathsheeba. It finished by telling how a failed relationship can break your life apart, and again how people in relationships and mid_life crisis's "find god".

Big Hero 6: Movie Review

Disney has finally used the first of their Marvel properties they plan on using, and it is Big Hero 6. It takes place in a fictional hybrid city of San Francisco and Tokyo, cleverly named San Fransokyo. When complications arise, Hiro (our protagonist) must gather a robot and his collective friends to get together to fight someone who betrayed his family.

The animation in this film was very good. It looked very classic Disney at times but had the overtone of a new age animation style which I found to be really sleek. The city design was also quite amazing. The combination of the two cities oddly works perfectly, and makes for some great landscapes in the film.

This film had me laughing a lot. Which is probably the best thing I can say about it. There were several characters who just worked so perfectly and had great chemistry together especially since they were animated characters. The show was often stole by the widely advertised Baymax character, who was often funny not by the dialogue he had, but by his actions.

Although I really enjoyed this film, there were still a few problems I had with it. One being that it felt as though the characters did not receive enough development. One scene characters are introduced and in the next one they are being referred to as the main characters best friends, it just seemed as though it happened incredibly quick, and it just didn't seem right. Also, many of the happenings towards the end have become very cliche as of late. Especially the final battle scene, it seemed like it was an exact copy, but kiddie-d down, version of the final battle in The Avengers.

With that said, I really did like this movie. Disney seems to be on a real hot streak lately, and I am very glad for that. I encourage anyone, especially people with kids, or people into kids movies (I guess) to go see it!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer Review

The new trailer for the much anticipated return to the Star Wars universe has been released! Being a huge fan of the series, this excited me, and I thought there was no better way to return to my blog than to share my thoughts about it! In order to read this post though you are probably going to want to watch the trailer below.

Was that not fantastic? So anyway I'm going to start discussing it from the beginning, in which we hear Andy Serkis speaking lines. What he is saying can lead us to believe there has been an "awakening", as the title states, in the force, more specifically, the dark side. After that, we see someone dressed as a storm trooper in a mad panic, sweating heavily. Now this has led to some heavy criticism from fans. Many are saying that he can't be a storm trooper since they are all clones, however I think it is way to early to tell if that is even what they are trying to do, and that he is maybe in a disguise like Luke and Han were in A New Hope.

We then see a few other things, a soccer ball looking droid, which is an interesting looking take on the classic R2 unit look, then some footage of a bunch of storm troopers ready to go into battle. This shows us that conflicts are arising again, and that something is really about to go down.

The next clip was something really interesting... we see a girl, who non-coincidentally looks a lot like Princess Leia, get onto a pod and shoot off. Obviously this leads us to believe that this is the dream off-spring of Han Solo and Leia. This will be something interesting to see, and the film is rumored to be centered on the later generations of the Skywalker family.

After that there is a few scenes of some classic Star Wars ship battles, which gives me hope since they look a lot like the classic trilogy, but after that is when the real fun starts. A darkened figure, I'm presuming to be an offspring of Luke, is walking through a forest, and as he stops he pulls out something no one expected... a triple-bladed lightsaber. Now another criticism of this trailer was the practicality of the lightsaber, how will he be able to do tricks? Won't it cut off his hand if he messes up? Well those questions could be said about Darth Maul's double blade, but that was probably the best thing about the prequel trilogy! I think it will be practical since it is very reminiscent of old swords used in the middle-ages and it will be able to protect someone better while in battle.


After that we get to see the final, and by far the most satisfying shot of the entire trailer: the soon to be famous Millennium Falcon barrel roll. Seeing this shot made me giggle and smile and jump around like a child the first five times I watched this trailer (yes, I did watch it more than five times). Now my prediction is that at some point during the film, most likely this scene, Han Solo is going to be back in the pilot seat of the falcon. It just makes sense having him and Chewy back where they started.

Overall I loved this trailer, and it makes me even more excited for this upcoming film. What my main concern was if it was really going to be a Star Wars film, and what I mean by that is will it do justice, and actually restore the greatness that was the originals, or fall under the unfortunate curse of the prequels. I am very excited to say it looks like, and I say this with caution, it can be as good as the originals. I just cannot wait to find out if it will be.

Tove Lo: Habits/Stay High Song Review

Okay, let's talk about this Tove Lo song everyone around the world has been raving about. First of all, this song has probably had the most remixes and covers than any other song I've seen in the last 17 years of my life. It's pretty much ridiculous how many are out there! There's one's on itunes, one's on spotify, one's on iheart radio, pandora, and my personal favorite one's are on soundlcloud. Don't get me wrong, I love this song and everything about it. And heck yeah I have ALL the different remixes downloaded in my music. All I'm saying is people are crazy about this tune.

Even so, the world loves this song for many different reasons. The sound of the song, the singer of it, and even just because everyone else likes it and listens to it. But only a fraction of the listeners really pay attention to what the song's lyrics are saying. First she says, "... I eat my dinner in my bathtub... Then I go to sex clubs... Watching freaky people getting it on... It doesn't make me nervous... If anything I'm restless... Yeah I've been around and I've seen it all...". She is basically summing up her life at this point in time, saying that she's not nervous about the freaky things these people are doing in all the clubs she goes to and that she's "been around" which means she's slept with a lot of people.

From the tone of the song, I feel like it's more and just about a break up like most people think it is. I think it's about the death of a loved one. Everything in her life has gone down the drain because of her loss. She says that she "spends her days locked in a haze, tryin' to forget you babe. I fall back down. Got to stay high all my life to forget I'm missing you." She is basically spending all her money on alcohol, drugs, and she is just throwing her body around to any stranger that will take her for the night.

She also says that she "picks up daddies at the playground, how I spend my day time". She is pretty much saying that she hooks up with dads she meets at parks. It kind of makes me feel that she likes being a homewrecker, because once she is through with these guys, she won't be the only one who is miserable, because she has messed up the marriage.

Obviously this song is very depressing when you really listen to it. I don' know if this was really based off of what has happened in her past or to a friend or something, but whatever it is, the song has captured the world's attention and maybe makes us feel a little relaxed or on a "high" as she says.