ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Those looking for an evening of good music and fun will soon have that with the High Plains Music Fest.

This year’s High Plains Music Festival will be Saturday, Sept. 12 at Dirtona Raceway just outside Hugoton, with the gates opening at 5 p.m. and the music starting at 6:30 p.m. This year's music lineup will include Cole Barnhill as one of the co-headlining bands, and as he tells it, music has been part of his life for a long time.

“I grew up in Lubbock, Texas my entire life, and Lubbock's a really big music town out here just because we're kind of separated from a lot of stuff,” Barnhill said. “If you play music out in West Texas, you come to Lubbock. I was born and raised there and had a lot of uh opportunities coming up in Lubbock. I started probably seven or eight years ago, or maybe even longer than that, doing open mic nights at local bars and places like that. We really started to get into the touring aspect of everything and traveling around the country about three or four years ago and we’ve been developing our sound ever since while seeing where the road takes us.”

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Ten years ago, the moviegoing public was officially introduced to Tom Holland as the newest iteration of Peter Parker/Spider-Man for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and last weekend, Holland’s most recent outing in the role was released with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

The movie follows Peter as he anonymously protects New York City as the hero Spider-Man and investigates a powerful new threat while his powers undergo an unexpected and potentially dangerous evolution. I’ve yet to see a truly bad piece of Spider-Man media, and I ended up being VERY pleased with this latest outing.

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

A few winters ago, there was a weekend when I came down with a particularly nasty cold, which meant I was homebound and basically welded to my recliner because I was in no mood to do anything. That weekend, I was surfing through Netflix for something to watch while working on getting better, and I came across the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” cartoon. I blew through the series in less than a week and ended up absolutely falling in love with it – the animation is fantastic, the voicework from the entire cast is amazing, and the writing is some of the best animated series writing I’ve come across ever. I could probably write an entire series of essays about why I love the original series, but I know I’ve got limited space, so I’ll just encourage you to either watch the show or do some research online.

When I heard earlier this year the show’s immediate story would be continuing with a new movie, “Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender,” I got EXTREMELY excited and couldn’t wait to see where the story took our heroes after all this time. The movie follows Avatar Aang (Eric Nam) and his allies as they discover Tagah (Dave Bautista), a surviving airbender, and join him in searching for a staff that could bring back the Air Nomads before it gets in the hands of the Denied, an aggressive group of non-benders.

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

When it comes to modern filmmaking and storytelling, one of my favorite directors is Christopher Nolan, whose work I was technically introduced to back when I was in high school with “The Dark Knight,” which remains one of my favorite movies to this day. 

Since then, I’ve followed his films off and on, and when I heard a couple years ago he would be taking on adapting Homer’s “The Odyssey,” I became VERY excited, especially when the teaser trailer was finally released with “Jurassic World Rebirth.” For those who might not know, the story takes place shortly after the end of the Trojan War and follows Greek general Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of Ithaca, as he undergoes a long and perilous journey home and encounters mythical beings as he attempts to reunite with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland).