MOVIE: Limelight (1952)

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Limelight Year: 1952 Rating: Approved Length: 137 minutes / 2.28 hours While it is rare to find a film by/starring Charlie Chaplin that isn't uproariously funny, the depth of the drama of this piece certainly shows the range everyone's favorite silent actor could perform. Chaplin will always have the little idiosyncracies in the way he moves, but when they're applied to a washed-up drunk, suddenly they take a much more serious turn. Films like The Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) certainly have their amusing moments, but work better as social commentaries, or at least are more direct about their message than the earlier films like The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936). What's really interesting about Limelight is it feels almost as autobiographical as it does groundbreaking. I mean, if we were to name one famous actor who excelled at playing a "tramp", Chaplin is the only one who would come to mind (although Buster Keaton, who also appears in the...
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MUSIC: CSPhil – Symphonic Dances

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Colorado Springs Philharmonic Conductor: Josep Caballé Domenech Date: September 17, 2016 This year, my wife and I decided to go to the symphony more. With this year being the 90th anniversary of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, they pulled out all the stops and have a great lineup. As a result, we ended up essentially getting season tickets. While it's difficult for me to really "review" pieces of music like these, since they've been around for a long time, I'll merely give my impressions on the following set from the first event of the 90th season of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic. Some of these impressions come in the form of stories, so if you get a chance to listen to these pieces, read along and hopefully you'll get what I'm trying to convey through the piece. For Spacious Skies Anthony DiLorenzo Having never been to a "World Premiere" of a song before, this was quite a treat. The Philharmonic commissioned a number of pieces based on "America the...
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MOVIE: The Martian (2015)

by benmweilert1 Comment
The Martian Year: 2015 Rating: PG-13 Length: 144 minutes / 2.4 hours I, for one, am excited that space travel is now a topic regularly covered on the big screen. If the general public becomes even a little bit more interested in interplanetary travel, perhaps I can see man stand on the surface of Mars in my lifetime. The Martian (2015) is merely the latest in a string of space-themed sci-fi movies that brings the excitement of outer space to theaters. While not nearly as continually intense as Gravity (2013), or as epic as Interstellar (2014), what The Martian does right is give a sense of scale to the challenge of returning to Earth from being abandoned on Mars. Gripping and just humorous enough to keep it from being dour, director Ridely Scott uses many cinematic techniques, including several montages, to tell the story many have already read from Andy Weir's novel of the same name. While many sequences and scientific explanations were obviously cut for...
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BOOK: The Martian (2014)

by benmweilert2 Comments
The Martian Year: 2014 Author: Andy Weir Length: 387 pages What a world we live in! It's exciting to see a self-published book receive such attention, eventually becoming a New York Times bestseller! Truly, if a writer is talented enough with a good enough story, they can make it in this over-saturated market. And while some of my love for this book comes from my hopes of eventually being "discovered" as a self-published author, most of it comes from my love of scientific realism in fiction. Truly, this is more of a challenge than world-building in a fantasy genre, because in order for it to be believable, it must obey the laws of physics. But let's get down to brass tacks here. There is no doubt that Andy Weir did his homework on this book. In fact, some sections almost read like the output section of a very complicated spreadsheet (which I certainly appreciate, on a personal level). Even with the technical detail to keep...
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MOVIE: Dirty Harry (1971)

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Dirty Harry Year: 1971 Rating: R Length: 103 minutes / 1.72 hours What makes an iconic film? Is it something that has memorable moments and catch phrases? Is it something that stands up against the test of time? Is it something that resonates with us on a deeper level? Whatever it is, I feel Dirty Harry (1971) is certainly an iconic film. Let's take a look at why this is the case. First off, there's the famous monologue about counting. "Do you feel lucky?" completes a tense moment that merely started with a detective's intuition that something was about to go down. But what make this early scene that much greater is the bookend it creates with the film's antagonist, Scorpio (Andy Robinson). This isn't even the only bookend this film has to offer, as the two deaths at either end of the movie end up being submerged in water. Secondly, while the 1970's seem quite different to our modern styles, something about the culture...
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