Saturday movie review: Last Flag Flying

/
Saturday movie review: Last Flag Flying

When I covered the Denver Film Festival last November, one of the movies I was especially excited about seeing was the drama/comedy LAST FLAG FLYING, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Steve Carrel, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishbourne. The trailers convinced me the road trip movie featuring the oft-comic cast as vets on a mission would be laugh-out-loud funny with a few touching scenes scattered throughout and a sure highlight of my festival experience.

Unfortunately I didn't see LAST FLAG FLYING at the festival. The movie was among the most popular and sold out quickly, so my husband and I missed out.

We hit the jackpot last week, though, when LAST FLAG FLYING hit the top of my Netflix queue. It took mere minutes after starting the DVD for my assumptions about the film to be flipped as it immediately proved...

Read More

Throwback Thursday: The tunes they are a changin'

/
Throwback Thursday: The tunes they are a changin'

This #TBT piece by Lisa Carpenter originally published March 24, 2011 on Grandma's Briefs.

I'm proud to say my family is musical. We dabble in playing — a guitar and piano here, a recorder and ukulele there — but it's in the listening to music that we really excel. As a whole, our hearts, minds and ears are open to myriad genres, everything from classical to Christian, country to show tunes, hard rock to soft rock and many that aren't really rock at all. We even have our family favorites in the rap genre. (I must admit, though, jazz and easy listening rarely pass notes in our homes, our cars, our iPods, or Spotify queue.)

Music plays a prodigious and powerful role in our family, which is why...

Read More