Far and Away
I remember very well when I saw this movie for the first time. I had just graduated high school, and was down in Texas visiting my dad and grandmother for a few weeks in the summer. I had a bit of a crush on the next door neighbors’ grandson, and I think they pressured him to do a nice thing and take me out, so we went to see this movie. I still remember being blown away, both by the fact that this cute boy had taken me out to the movies and also about…
Romancing the Stone
Joan Wilder is an introverted romance novelist who lives alone, endlessly waiting for her hero “Jesse” to arrive at her door and sweep her off her feet. Who appears at her door instead is the man (Zolo) who murdered her brother in law, searching for a treasure map he sent to Joan before his death. Joan finds out her..
The Matrix
I’m pretty sure everyone has at least heard of this movie. It hit movie screens back in 1999 like a nuclear blast, and has been cloned and troped a zillion times since then. From its groundbreaking special effects to its fascinating storyline, The Matrix has cemented its place in pop culture the way…
Joyeux Noel
My brother, a big history buff, turned me on to this movie when he told me about the actual Christmas truce of 1914, during World War I, where over 100,000 British and German troops held a ceasefire on Christmas and exchanged alcohol, tobacco, pictures, and food. They played football, lit Christmas trees and candles, and sang carols together. Dead were buried, Christmas services were held, and for a day, war and strife were…
The Girl on the Mountain
I honestly can’t remember how I first heard about this film. I know I stumbled across the trailer somewhere online, watched it, and thought, “Huh. This reminds me a LOT of the characters in my big fantasy epic I’ve been working on for sixteen years!” So I had it on my watchlist forever, and finally watched it the other night on Amazon and was very…
Legends of the Fall
About a year and a half ago I re-watched it when I ended up in a conversation with a bunch of guys about whether Tristan was really the “hero” of the film. One guy had been reading Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge, and was confused by Eldredge’s praise of Tristan. The guy saw Tristan as…
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The movie is set in the 1930s, in the small hamlet of Green Town, Illinois where two boys, Jim and Will, are best friends. One week before Halloween, they find a flier advertising a…
The Goonies
The ultimate in kid’s adventure movies! Between this movie and Back to the Future, the summer of 1985 was one I have extremely fond memories of. After seeing this movie, my brother and I immediately came home and started looking for…
Abandoned
I stumbled across this short film (6 minutes) on Youtube, on a channel called Messenger Studios. I had no idea what it was about, but ended up in tears half way through. A very powerful punch packed into 6 short minutes, dealing with those times when we feel abandoned by God.
The Last Starfighter
Like most other kids in the 80s, my brother and I were big gamers, rocking out our original Atari and NES gaming systems, and going to the arcade every chance we got. (He was much better than me, I can remember one trip to the arcade where we’d each gone in with two dollars and I blew mine in the first fifteen minutes and after wandering around for an hour I checked on him and he was still on his first fifty cents.)