Leaving High school...

With my high school career ending in six short days, I am reflecting on the way Christian Brothers Academy has shaped me as a person.  Four long years at the academy can do a lot for a naive fourteen year old coming out of middle school. Coming into high school, there was a long list of stuff I didn’t know, and more stuff I thought I knew.

    Since I came from one of the smaller towns (Monmouth Beach)  in the area, I was fortunate enough to “breeze through middle school”. Literally not having to lift a finger as far as school work came, I was kind of attacked by CBA classes when I arrived. I remember the first weeks of CBA, there was the freshman run and a whole lot of orientation introducing our class to the academy. Looking back on it, I can remember myself thinking “I’m so bored of sitting around and listening to people talk, I wish classes would just start” and boy was I wrong. The most difficult part of freshman year, for me, was the biology midterm. Not only was it my first real science class, and my first exam, it was the first mid term on the schedule. I thought “Okay, I can study for this the night before.” and I cannot write in words how wrong I was.

    After freshman year, CBA didn’t seem as bad. I made friends with people who I probably would never had met, I got to go to places where I probably never would have been, and I got to do it all with a good education and athletic leadership. 

dodgeball

Dodgeball is one of Vince Vauhn's funniest movies. He stars as a gym owner who is having money trouble, so him and his buddies start a dodgeball team to compete in a tournament. They go to Las Vegas for the competition and a Cinderella story occurs.

 

 Labeled as "A True Underdog Story"  Dodgeabll includes every element of a great movie. From comedy to drama, it is a story best told on the movie screen with popcorn.

Trailer Park Boys

Trailer Park Boys is what happens whens a sit-com meets with a reality TV show. Three convicted felons make a fake documentary on their life living in a trailer park. Making several attempts at illegal schemes and operations, they try to make large quantities of money for their "retirement", meanwhile they just keep getting arrested.

 

 The three main characters Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles are Canadian raised and proud of it. Constantly fighting with the law and the trailer park supervisor, Jim Lahey, these three musketeers are  always getting into trouble. Trailer park boys is on their tenth season, this one including Snoop Dogg.

Scarface

When Castro let thousands of Cuban prisoners into America, it created a chaotic scene (espicially in Miami). It began drug lords known as Cocaine Cowboys and a Cuban and Colombian cartel rose from it. A positive outcome from this decade was the movie Scarface.

 Al Pacino was courageous in playing this role of Tony Montana and using a strong, fake Cuban accent. It paid off for him, as we all know, it was one of his best movie roles ever. He played a poor Cuban who came over to America with nothing, claiming to be a political prisoner, and worked up the cocaine cartels. Loosely based off real events, Scarface is a fictional story of the drug trade in Miami.
A good reference documentary is a doc. called Cocaine Cowboys, which tells stories of and interviews the real kingpins of Miami from the 80's.
The reason this time in Miami was so interesting was because it was raw and insane. As you see in the first scenes of Scarface, Tony Montana goes into the street after almost being chainsawed, and shoots a drug lord right in the head. In front of many citizens.
Scarface is going down as one of the best movies due to its out-of-this-world violence.

2016 Academy Awards

In the past year some of my favorite films have been released and last night on February 28, the Academy nominated who the best was.

The obvious award everyone wanted to see was Leonardo Dicaprio winning best actor for the Revenant. And not only did he win best actor, but Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won best director as well. The Revenant had to be filmed over a prolonged period of time due to the climate. Being filmed in northern Canada/Alaska there was very little daylight, so the cast would spend the non-film time rehearsing for perfection. Leonardo Dicaprio preformed amazingly by portraying the role of Hugh Glass, a 19th century fur hunter and navigator. Inarritu also did an extraordinary job filming and choreographing the cast in the movie.

Brie Larson won best actress for the movie The Room, which was a fictional portrayal of non-fictional accounts of woman being kidnapped and locked away in someones house. The story being very dramatic, Brie Larson did a very sentimental performance with Jacob Tremblay, the son she had while locked away.

The Departed

The Departed is my favorite Martin Scorsese movie. It is an amazing script and directed perfectly, but the cast of the movie carried the film to its Oscar.
It was funny seeing Scorsese going up to accept his award, when he got the microphone he asked, "can you reread the envelop? are you sure this is right?" It was about time he won an academy award for his work. Although he deserves most of the credit, like I said, the cast of the movie was the heart and brain of the movie. Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Alec Baldwin all can be in a movie without each other and still thrive. The fact that this was a cast is amazing, because if you compare them from back then to now, they have all reached great success in their careers. It's almost like Freaks and Geeks or Parks and Recreation, where the cast is 100% talented and each member goes on to achieve success.
I don't want to spoil the movie, so all I can say is The Departed is a great sequence of realistic crime twists in a south Boston police department and this movie will leave you at the last scene with your jaw on the ground.

Entourage

Probably the only good movie that originated from a television series,  Entourage cannot be compared to any other movie that started out as a TV show. Entourage, in my opinion, is perceived as a good show because it is a realistic fantasy of what people want to live. I doubt the Hollywood lifestyle is really like that, but with all the cameos and real life situations, it is seen as realistic.

Cameos are kind of what makes the show. Having actors and celebrities play themselves so often has never been done. But besides the cameos, Vinny Chase's "entourage" is the second likeable factor about the show. All of them came from nothing together, and they are enjoying the fame together. No matter what happens they stick by each other. Which is something that is a lot easier said than done. People love seeing good morals and bad habits mix, and Entourage is the epitome of that. For example, if Johnny Chase, Vinny's brother is having a bad week, the entourage will take him out partying. Cheering up your family members by going to a mansion in Malibu, Entourage offers a mix of good and bad priorities.