The Panther Prints

    Overall, the Grammy’s were actually pretty entertaining. The performance with A Tribe Called Quest and Anderson .Paak were great and very relevant because of the themes of resistance in their music. Anderson .Paak was definitely a good choice to pair with the old-school sound of A Tribe Called Quest. One of my few problems was how many awards Adele won. “Hello” was good, great even, but 23 as an album was definitely not better than Views or Formation. Everybody and their mom listened to Views and Formation which empowered women everywhere to stand up for themselves. Even Adele wanted Beyonce to win the award for best album of the year. I was also very disappointed that Frank Ocean didn’t submit his album Blonde, because, for me that was the best album of the year and definitely in my top 5 of all time.     Some of my favorite moments in the Grammy’s were when James Corden started rapping and got a bit political, Schoolboy Q was shown wearing a bright pink hoodie...

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service: Hype or Hot By Cal     The long-awaited album by A Tribe Called Quest, We Got it From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, came 18 years after their last release: The Love Movement. It was released on November 11, 2016 by Epic Records; 8 months after one member, Phife Dawg, passed away. The album features appearances from an eclectic mix of artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, Elton John, and Kanye West. The reason for the delay is relationship issues between the group. It’s their second record ever to reach the Billboard 200 and received wide critical acclaim. The title was created by Phife Dawg before he died and even though Tribe doesn't understand the meaning they kept it in place to honor Phife.     My favorite track off We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is “Dis Generation” which features Busta Rhymes. My favorite line is “Talk to Joey, Earl, Kendrick, and Cole, gatekeepers of flow. They are e...

4 Your Eyez Only: Hype or Hot By Cal On December 9, the long-awaited 4 Your Eyez Only by rapper J. Cole dropped. It was dropped exactly two years after Forest Hills Drive, his most recent album. It is J. Cole’s 3rd ever studio-produced album and the hype surrounding it was crazy. I’m here to compare it to his other albums Born Sinner and 2014 Forest Hills Drive and to give my thoughts on whether the hype was deserved. 4 Your Eyez Only touches on many relevant topics such as mass incarceration and drug abuse. He also talks about his daughter, Nina, and what he hopes she will do. My two favorite songs off of Eyez are “Immortal” and “Neighbors”. Immortal is about how legends live on far after they've died and sometimes even surpass legends that are alive. He references real legends such as Tupac and also fictional ones such as Tony Montana. “Neighbors” is a song about current signifigant issues such as stereotypes and racism. If I had to put J. Cole’s three studio albums in order ...

The Review Corner By Ella ✍✍📚🎥📺📝📝 Hello! I’m Ella, and this is the review corner of the school newspaper, where I review both a movie or a book. Since it’s October and Halloween is a few days away, I chose a very popular book I've heard good things about… Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs! My Review: 5 OUT OF 5 PANTHER PAWS! 😻 I liked this book a lot! It was really cool and creepy, and one of the things I admired was the use of the vintage photography, which really helped the book get its creepy Victorian vibe. Another thing I liked was the variety of the characters. There was a lot of adventure and fantasy. It was a very cool book, and I recommend it to both 7th and 8th graders.

One of this month's reviews is the Little Prince, which was put on by the Marin Theatre Company. They were kind enough to invite the sixth grade to come and see the play. For those who do not yet know it is about a prince who came down to earth from another planet and tells a stranded Aviator about his adventure through space and his home that he had left.The story was originally a book by Antoine de saint-Exupery, who like the aviator in the production was also a pilot. The little prince was  acted by Elissa Beth Stebbins, the pilot was played by Geno Monteiro, the Snake and rose were by Isabelle Ellingson and the fox and the men on the other planets were by Lizzie Calogero. I personally enjoyed watching the performance but the ending might bring tears to your eyes. I thought that it was very well acted and that it was cleverly written. Even though it only played in the theatre from december twelfth to the twentieth. I think that anyone who would watch it would love the produc...

 Rating: 1/5 Panther Paws   When a movie like this comes out, you don’t really know what to expect, do you? It could be a hilarious, silly shark and tornado movie, or, it could just be really, really bad. Sometimes it depends how you look at it. The story is about a guy who owns a bar on a beach in LA, divorced, and everything is going alright until, somehow, wait, is that right? A giant herd of sharks get picked up in a tornado?! There are so many things wrong with that statement.  The guy decides to leave his bar, and drive away with one of his employees and a customer to go find his wife, daughter, and son to save them from the most unrealistic event in the history of existence. It seems as if this movie takes itself too seriously, when there’s a whole cliche emotional scene about whether or not he still cares about his family, or something like that. It really gets boring during those scenes because we came to watch sharks jumping out of tornados...

5/5 Panther Paws Today we live in the age of bad animated kids’ movies, but one stands out from all of the talking cars and food falling from the sky (yes, that actually happened). The one I am talking about is The Lego Movie . When I was younger, I spent hours each day putting little colorful plastic bricks together to make deformed houses and flightless space ships. The Lego Movie really clicked with me (no pun intended) for this reason. The story revolves around a normal minifigure named Emmet who lives among a bunch of other people like him, in a big lego city surrounded by giant walls. The opening scene suggests that the people living there think that “everything is awesome!” As the story progresses, though, it becomes evident that something worse is going on. I’m not going to spoil it any more. The animation is all made on a computer, but it is supposed to look like stop motion, with real legos. It was really cool to watch it  because of the realistic feel to the...

Rating: 5/5 Panther Paws When you enter Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social networking site, you are immediately given the ability to share anything with anyone, for better or worse. I recently read a book titled lol...OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know about Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying , by Matt Ivester, about social lives and how the internet and its numerous social networks can be dangerous. The book reflects on tragic and true stories of people just like us whose lives were ruined because they didn't think before posting things that anyone could see. There are also cases in which people were cyberbullied unintentionally by their friends, who didn't understand how their actions would be viewed, and there were times when people posted comments and texts saying things they would never say in real life, because they couldn't see the recipient's reaction. At first  this was just going to be a book revie...