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GOO Reviews

~ An Edmonton-based movie blog

GOO Reviews

Author Archives: ghcrawford

Inside Out

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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Tags

Animation, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Emotion, Pixar

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures.

Images courtesy of Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures.

To varying degrees, we’re all creatures of emotion. When I was younger I believed I had more right than anyone else to have emotions, and, more specifically, to channel those emotions in whatever way I saw fit. After all, what did the other kids in my class know about loss? What did they know about feeling unloved or unwanted?

In my young and narrow mind, I believed they knew nothing. And as other children do, I even went so far as to believe that I was the only one in the world, that no one else had feelings, that only I could experience the world as I did. I lacked empathy, or the basic understanding of others’ emotions and the will to feel the same way.

Empathy, as with most things, came as I grew older and as I learned that others did, in fact, have the same association with loss and rejection as I did. So did the ability to understand my emotions and the reasons behind them. It was no longer enough just to feel sad or angry: I had to know why I felt the way I did, which led to understanding, which led to (hopefully) not taking those emotions out on others.

But when I was a child, with emotions so much fuller and so much more untameable, this maturity was beyond my grasp. All I knew was that I felt angry, or fearful, or happy, and I didn’t know how to keep my emotions inside where adults told me they belonged. So instead of keeping it all bottled up, I let the inside out.

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Game of Thrones: Season 5

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Television

≈ 1 Comment

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of HBO.

Images courtesy of HBO.

Life has a habit of challenging us. It’s never easy or complacent; if it is, you aren’t doing it right. It likes to throw curveballs, to wrench up the works, to lay waste to all your carefully laid plans. And every so often, those complications bring us to the edge of a precipice: a place where your plans hold no weight and you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Season 5 of Game of Thrones was one of those complications. And in true GoT fashion, it threw quite a few wrenches at its characters as well. (Goodness, I’m mixing metaphors.) So let’s dive right into my post-season review, which will gloss over a lot of the particulars in favour of some larger examination.

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Pitch Perfect 2

25 Monday May 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Gold Circle Films and Universal Pictures.

Images courtesy of Gold Circle Films and Universal Pictures.

Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d never become a writer. I like to pretend I could’ve been an artist, an actor, or a singer. (Never anything so pedestrian as a doctor or lawyer, if only because you don’t need good grades to go into the arts.) The only problem is, much like my boy Justin, I’m mediocre to middling at all of those things.

Even though — and maybe even because — I lack the kind of superstar power that could help me succeed in any of those fields, I love them like crazy. I love art, I love theatre, and I friggin’ love a well-sung piece of music. And you know what I really extra especially love? When that music is just voices and nothing else. Yes, this is me freely admitting that I like a cappella music.

Unfortunately, my radical, all-encompassing love for a cappella didn’t extend as far as Pitch Perfect 2, and I’m going to tell you in my usual exhaustive fashion exactly why that is.


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Avengers: Age of Ultron — A Review from an Allegedly Normal Person

18 Monday May 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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Tags

Action, comics, Marvel, MCU, superhero

by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios.

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Last week, the sweaty nerds — or one of them, anyway — had their say about Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. It was a review dripping with both sweat and unbridled nerdiness. It was a review jam-packed with self-referential prose about the movie-watching experience, wonderings about the Marvel cinematic universe, and well-thought-out arguments against popular critical positions.

And you should be aware that I, supposedly a normal person, agree with most of it.

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Magic in the Moonlight

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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When the heart rules the head, disaster follows.

by Grace Crawford

mitm poster

Images courtesy of Perdido Productions and Sony Pictures Classics.

 

Comparing love to magic isn’t exactly a unique idea, but it’s easy to see the truth in it. It does seem miraculous how you can be reduced to a stammering mess, how clear thinking can become muddled by the smell of another person’s cologne or the flash of a mischievous smile, how your courage disappears when it’s confronted with a face patiently waiting to hear how you feel about the person it belongs to.

But if you look at the trick for long enough, it’s easy for the wonder to vanish. You become so comfortable with the other person that the glossy, shiny pages of your story together start to look wrinkled and dog-eared. You see the person’s flaws so clearly that you wonder how you could have ignored them for so long. Probably one of you has farted in front of the other without bothering to cover it with a cough.

And when we reach that point, it’s also easy to believe that we never loved the other person in the first place. Because we love feeling the magic, and when it’s gone, we start to wonder if it was ever really there at all. And maybe we might start looking for a new source of magic, starting the whole delightful cycle all over again.

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Half a King

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Books, Recent Books

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“You may need two hands to fight someone, but only one to stab them in the back.”

book cover

by Grace Crawford

Every so often, I like to wander around Chapters until I find a book that strikes my fancy. These fancy-striking books are usually ones I’ve never heard of, because I like exploring new stories on the off-chance they’re something special.

When I started reading Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King, I was afraid I’d chosen… poorly. True, it was a rollicking fantasy yarn. True, the world was well established and extremely well thought out. True, there was a lot of detail that didn’t seem particularly important but helped add to the realism of it all. But the book wasn’t anything particularly new or special — at least until I reached page 300, at which point all the pieces snapped together.

It was at that point that I realized I’d been reading a completely different book than the one I bought. And it was glorious.

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Insurgent

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Red Wagon Entertainment, Summit Entertainment Mandeville Films, and Lionsgate.

Images courtesy of Red Wagon Entertainment, Summit Entertainment
Mandeville Films, and Lionsgate.

If you haven’t seen Divergent, you’d better check out my review or you’ll be just as confused as Fiancé was when I dragged him along. If you haven’t seen it but are in a particularly stubborn mood, go ahead and read, but don’t get mad at me when you don’t understand stuff. If you have seen it, fabulous; you have my blessing to read. If you’re getting peeved at this disclaimer, just shut up and read already.

Insurgent picks up a short time after the events of Divergent. Tris, Tobias, Caleb, and Peter have found refuge with the Amity faction, which disintegrates pretty quickly once Eric finds them and Peter betrays their presence. Tris, Tobias, and Caleb run into a group of factionless aboard a supply train, and Tris discovers that Tobias is the son of Evelyn Eaton, presumed dead but very much alive and the leader of the factionless.

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Cinderella (2015)

23 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by ghcrawford in Films

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by Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.

Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.

I have always believed that if we are good and kind and brave, we’ll be rewarded for it. That’s why (even if I’m not always successful at it) I always try to do what I can for others, and I feel bad when my good intentions don’t amount to very much.

That’s a pretty common truth. Sometimes, no matter how well-meaning our intentions are, it’s still possible to let others down because of some deep flaw in ourselves, whether it’s as innocuous as time management or as nefarious as self-sabotage because we don’t really believe we’re worthy of being rewarded.

But sometimes, perhaps more frequently than we might like to admit, we let others down because their expectations of us are too high. And yet we keep striving, keep aiming for that impossible approval, keep on trying to be good and kind and respectful in spite of the obstacles placed in front of us, whether by everyday life or by the very people we’re trying to help.

Because still we desperately hope, way down in the deepest parts of us, that no matter how hard life gets or how much it gets us down, we’ll be rewarded for our efforts.

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