I feel like I have said this many times, but I still feel the need to reiterate this point every time a Marvel movie comes out: I think the MCU is starting to have a negative impact on the superhero genre and on the greater landscape of how studios are choosing to make summer blockbusters. Sure, movies like Deadpool and Logan continue to break the mold and innovate, but that is one studio (FOX) deciding to do something fresh with the genre. Overall, it still feels to me as though Marvel is breeding complacency among audiences to accept the same film over and over again, sighting only an extended universe as a means of distracting you from the fact that you just watched a re-packaged version of the last MCU film. 
​
And what’s frustrating as a film critic is that it really isn’t my job to analyze what this phenomenon might mean in the greater scope of the film industry. My job is to tell you whether or not a movie is good. And because the Marvel films keep cranking out movies that range from good (B+) to decent (B-), it looks like I am constantly recommending that people fly to the theatre to see what I just said is probably damaging the industry. So I leave this introduction as a warning to those who follow the superhero genre as closely as I do. While the review you are about to read is positive, and Spiderman: Homecoming is a decent film, I fear that movies like it (I’m looking at you Doctor Strange and Wonder Woman) are breeding a more complacent audience and, thus, a more complacent Hollywood.

That being said, I can’t deny the charm of Spiderman: Homecoming. After the mediocre The Amazing Spiderman and abysmal The Amazing Spiderman 2, Homecoming feels much more true to the Spiderman character I want out of a movie. Tom Holland plays a younger, more charming yet believably socially isolated Peter Parker, who is trying to balance a normal high-school life with super-heroism. After assisting Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in Captain America: Civil War, Parker is disappointed in his lack of meaningful superhero work, constantly hoping Tony will call him in for more official Avengers work. But when Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a mechanic who was screwed over by Stark, starts building and selling weapons using alien technology, Parker faces the challenge of dealing with a devastating threat on his own.
​
Spiderman: Homecoming immediately defines itself through its lead. Holland is the best to play the character so far, a charismatic and likeable lead that might be one of the most charming members of the MCU right now. He plays both Peter Parker and Spiderman flawlessly, and it’s certainly a step up from the duller protagonists of MCU outings like Doctor Strange and the Thor series. He is the anchor that keep the rest of the film in check, because the majority of the film's other elements are far more standard Marvel-fare than our main hero.

Name an MCU stereotype. This movie has it. Predictable story, dull villain, forgettable score, good but not overly noteworthy action sequences. Without Holland, this film would have been on the lower end of the “acceptable Marvel” scale. But his charm is enough to carry us through the conventions of an otherwise average movie.

At times, the movie also manages to set itself apart from the other Marvel films tonally, something that is rare in the standard MCU fold. Spiderman: Homecoming is not exactly the John Hughes movie I wanted it to be, but it does manage to escape into that vibe every once in a while. It certainly helps that Peter’s high school friends, Ned and Michelle (Jacob Batalon and Zendaya), are two of the more likeable characters in the supporting cast. Ned, Michelle and Peter work off each other very well, and it definitely seems to imply at the end of the film that we will see more of them in future Spiderman films. It’s the times where the movie scales back to a personal level and looks at Peter’s “normal” life that I found myself having the most fun.

So I find myself at the same point I always do with MCU movies. I can’t deny that I liked the film, and that I would love to see Holland on screen as Spiderman again. But I also can’t deny that I feel like the MCU is leeching into the summer blockbuster in a way I don’t want to support. The conclusion that I have come to is this. This movie is going to make a ton of money: that much is inevitable. So we aren’t going to make any difference if we don’t see it ourselves. What matters is that the movie was good, another piece of light Marvel fare to distract us from whatever we’ve got going on for a short two hours. So go nuts.

Grade: B

​In times like this, I have to remind myself that I have done this to myself. Honestly, at this point, how am I supposed to blame anyone but myself for having seen this thing? No one made me go see this, no one made me be a film critic and I’m sure as fuck that there isn’t a single person whose mind will be changed about this movie after reading this review. Any person with enough forethought to read a review before going to see Transformers: The Last Knight wouldn’t, because anyone capable of thinking that much knows that this is one of the worst series of film ever created. And this movie certainly doesn’t break the mold. Buckle in, folks. Before the end, I might be apologizing to Baywatch.
 
Fun fact: Transformers: The Last Knight has more subplots than there are grains of sand on every beach on the planet Earth. Okay, maybe that’s not true. But that’s sure as shit what it feels like. I’ll try to explain what the fuck happened in this movie, but seeing as I’m sure it didn’t look cohesive in the script, I doubt it’ll look cohesive here.
 
The world is in a state of turmoil. Transformers continually fall from the sky and terrorize humans. Thus, human-kind has decided to either imprison or kill any Transformers they see, including the Autobots who have helped save their planet at least 4 times. Optimus Prime has left Earth to find what remains of Cybertron, his home planet, and finds a desolate wasteland that can only be saved by an ancient Transformer staff hidden on Earth. The staff was entrusted to Merlin (yes, really) to help King Arthur defeat the Saxon hordes. King Arthur and his round table joined forces with 12 Transformer Knights, forming a secret society meant to protect Transformers hidden on Earth. Now, Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) is the only remaining member of that society.
 
A fugitive from the law, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) protects the Autobots from the task-force meant to take them down, repairing them in a junkyard. When trying to save another Transformer, he is gifted a talisman that signals the destruction of Earth by Cybertron. Thus, he and an Oxford University professor named Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), whose father was a member of the secret society, are called upon to save the world from total annihilation.
 
On top of that, it feels like there are about 1,000 more characters and subplots that help turn the film into the sodding, bloated mess that it is. And mess is the best way to describe nearly every aspect of this heaping pile of inane fecal waste. The plot is, as you can see, all over the place, the characters never shut up (there are an obscene number of moments where a character will say something and other character will repeat it almost word for fucking word) and the editing is a nightmare. 
 
This is up there with Taken 3 among the worst edited and shot action films I’ve ever seen. And maybe I’m spoiled by movies like The Raid: Redemption, John Wick and Kingsman: The Secret Service. But masses of CGI garbage flinging each other across the screen while insanely tight camera angles mask the fact that no choreography work was done on this film, whatsoever, is an unacceptable way of creating action sequences. Even a fairly standard car chase scene fails to overcome the camera’s obsession with flying all over the place.
 
And then there’s the most depressing part of the film. The cast. And I’m not talking about the film’s lead, Mark Wahlberg, an actor so incapable of feeling natural in a role that the closest he’s ever gotten to a good performance is playing a parody of himself in The Departed. I’m not even talking about the racist stereotype characters that have peppered Michael Bay movies since the beginning (in these films, specific Transformers seem to hit stereotypes that would have been insensitive in 1920’s vaudeville acts). I’m talking about the number of talented actors whose appearances/voices in this movie will make you question reality. See how long you can look at this list without gagging at the thought that these talented people took part in this detritus-ridden trash.
 
John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Jim Carter, Steve Buscemi, Tony Hale, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Jerrod Carmichael, Frank Welker (the man who has been the voice of Fred in every Scooby Doo product since the original show), and Anthony Hopkins.
 
Imagine hearing that all of them were going to be in a movie together. Then imagine the smack in the fucking face when you realize it’s Transformers: The Last Knight. I don't know what dirt the studio has on all of these people, but it must be pretty damn good. But watching performers of this caliber deliver the absurd exposition and juvenile jokes that this movie excretes made me physically pained. 
 
And there’s so much more shit I could go into. Like how Optimus Prime’s loyalty changes at the drop of a hat. How about the fact that the movie claims George Washington, Frederick Roosevelt and William Shakespeare all knew Transformers were real? Or the scene where we find out Bumblebee fought Nazis with the Allied troops in World War II? Or when Yeager finds a watch in Sir Burton’s house which Burton claimed KILLED HITLER?!? 
 
Transformers: The Last Knight is a relentless assault on the senses, a war against rationality, quality, intelligence and coherence. I don’t understand why people keep throwing money at Michael Bay and allowing him to do projects like this one. I cannot comprehend how anyone in their right mind could have enjoyed even a single aspect of this film. It’s a loud waste of time. 
 
I’m sorry Baywatch. I thought it couldn’t get worse. It did.
 
Grade: F

​I get a huge kick out of movies like this. It’s one of my favorite parts of being a film critic/enthusiast and one of the main reasons why I am trying to ween myself off of reading reviews or seeing trailers before I set foot in a theater. I knew absolutely nothing about The Book of Henry before I saw it, literally not even having the faintest idea what the film was about. Sometimes, this can be a disastrous move that ends with seeing something not worthwhile. And with The Book of Henry, it kind of is that. But in what I found to be an extremely entertaining way. 
 
The trouble is, I want people to have the same experience I did seeing this movie. But I also want people to read this review. So I am going to try writing about the film without going into much detail about what happens. Let’s just say that the film involves the life of an extremely intelligent and mature 11-year old named Henry (Jaeden Lieberher), his waitress single-mother Susan (Naomi Watts) and younger brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay). And I know that’s not a lot of information to go on. But you're just going to have to believe me that seeing this movie is not only hilariously worth it, but likely better if you know very little about what happens. 
 
What I can tell you is that the ridiculous events of this movie are built around really good performances by the three lead actors, all of whom do an incredible job given the film’s turbulent and almost insane plot. Good child actors are hard to come by, so it’s a nice surprise when both Lieberher and Tremblay make decent work of their dialogue. Lieberher’s Henry is especially interesting to watch on screen, a young genius who is significantly more in control and adult than his mother and most of the grown-ups around him. His scenes are easily the best in the film. A scene where Henry bursts into the principal’s office and picks a fight akin to the kind you’d expect between a cop and their chief is especially fun to watch. 
 
But about halfway through the film, The Book of Henry pretty much completely changes genres. Again, I am not going to go into any detail as to why the movie changes so radically, but I can say that it does this more like a trainwreck than I possibly could have possibly imagined. The movie shifts from a drama to a thriller like a car crash you can’t look away from. And it’s honestly hilarious. Again, I kind of feel like it is better to see this unfold in front of you on screen, but let’s just say the movie’s third act is the kind of insanity I was not expecting out of a movie like this.
 
The Book of Henry dips so deeply into the ‘So Bad It’s Good’ category that I thought it might drown. The first half has some legitimately good dramatic sequences, but the film falls faster than gravity tells us should be physically possible once the movie starts trying to do a bunch of crazy shit at once. As I write this, I am starting to see reviews pour in that are bashing the fuck out of this film. And yeah, I can see where people would think this is an unwatchable mess. But I think it is an extremely watchable mess. Sure, I laughed when I wasn’t supposed to. And sure, things that happen in the middle of the movie seem engineered to manipulating you into caring about the third act, trying to distract you from its lunacy. But the fact that I got some value out of it makes me feel like this movie is being punished a bit more it deserves. Is it good? No. But is it entertaining? Hell yes.
 
Grade: C+ 

​I am now convinced that Marvel and Disney have done massive, irreversible damage to the modern blockbuster. The MCU is a landmark method of creating a string of separate, yet somewhat related, films which culminate in seeing individual characters from their own films come together in an epic adventure on-screen. However, the success of the MCU seems to have other studios thinking that emulating that formula is the key to creating box-office giants, forgetting that the main reason the MCU work was that its foundation (in this case we will ignore the fact that The Incredible Hulk came first and say that Iron Man was the film that kicked things off) was a solid movie with interesting characters.
 
Enter The Mummy, Universal’s attempt to kickstart their own “Dark Universe” (DU), made up of all the classic Universal monsters. Yes, you read that right. Universal wants to place characters like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and The Mummy in the same shared universe. So how does this first film do at laying down the foundation for the rest of the cinematic universe? Not particularly well.
 
Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a member of the U.S. army who finds and sells ancient artifacts on the black market. Morton stumbles upon what appears to be an Egyptian tomb in the middle of Iraq, using a map he stole from scientist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). Halsey is working for Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), a scientist and genius determined to find and destroy sources of evil in the world. However, evil becomes a more challenging foe than any of them could have expected when the tomb releases Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a mummified princess with the power to imbue someone with the powers of an ancient and evil god.  
 
The Mummy feels eerily similar to watching someone play a mediocre Tomb Raider or Uncharted video game. The characters aren’t particularly interesting, expository dialogue comes at you in huge and clunky waves and action set-pieces happen so rapidly and back-to-back that it's hard to keep track of what is actually happening in them. And non-stop action wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem if these scenes had been shot with any clarity. But the camerawork and choreography in the action set pieces are shoddily put together, resulting in a product more confusing than it is thrilling. 
 
The dullness of the characters certainly doesn’t help either. Even Tom Cruise, whose charm usually bursts through otherwise sluggish scripts, flounders under the film’s overall dreary nature. The only solace comes when the film occasionally embracing the horror roots of the original 1932 Mummy film, creating some genuinely interesting and horrific horror imagery. There is a sequence involving Tom Cruise being attacked by rats that actually made me squirm. Add to that a couple of actually really nice shots (a flashback sequence involving Ahmanet training in the Egyptian desert comes to mind), and the film shifts from being extremely boring to fairly boring with occasional relief.
 
I’m not going to lie, The Mummy was less bad than I expected. It was more of an innocuous bad than an offensive bad, the kind of movie that leaves little impact on both the positive and negative spectrum. It exists. Maybe other movies in the DU will have more of an impact and create a fun cinematic universe, but this isn’t a great start.
 
Grade: C

The World War II-era drama has long been a popular topic for film. One of the greatest wars of all time, in which the sides seemed to be physically embodying good and evil, has the grandiose nature that is almost inherently filmic. Great films like Saving Private Ryan and Grave of the Fireflies show both the grand and horrifically human sides of the epic conflict. It is one of the most interesting and captivating pieces of modern history, and films that display its nature on-screen are almost always captivating, to some degree. Unfortunately, in the case of Churchill, the grand nature of the historic war is made a bit too small and detached to be listed among the great films of the time.

Churchill follows one of the most recognizable prime ministers in the history of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill (Brain Cox), in the few days before the Allied forces invade the western front of the war. With D-Day fast approaching, Churchill begins to question the validity of the invasion, claiming that it is too risky and may very well cause the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers and French civilians. Churchill airs these concerns to the generals of the Allied forces, including U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower (John Slattery), to no avail. Thus, Churchill must struggle to deal with his own mental and physical ailments while the overbearing stress of an invasion that could change the course of the war looms overhead.

Churchill represents a type of low-budget biopic that has to focus very specifically on its script and characters in order to achieve greatness. The scale is lowered because of the tightness of the film’s budget, so attention to detail in terms of the quality of the script and acting is paramount. Unfortunately for the film, the story flounders as it tries to grasp the breadth of the story with some type of intimacy. While the performances are not bad and the script occasionally achieves a moment of capturing the horrors of Winston Churchill’s stress and strain, it feels overdramatic and cheap for the majority of the film. I feel less so like I am watching a movie meant for the theaters and more like a historic reenactment on the History channel with some over-zealous actors trying to add their own flair.

Brian Cox’s performance as the titular character is perplexing in how often it waivers from good to over-the-top and campy. I can tell that he is trying to bring a grand nature to the troubled leader, but his performance mostly comes off as overwhelmingly goofy. This is no more apparent than in a scene where he kneels at his bedside, praying that a storm will come to further delay the invasion plan. This scene should feel like an intimate dive into the mind of the character, but is written and performed more like a war speech that a thoughtful, private moment. 

And that’s how the whole film feels, cheaply grand. It lacks the production value to be a grand war epic, and also lacks the subtle and creative writing to make it an intimate film about a war hero. What we ended up getting here is a film that doesn’t understand what it is, and that works to the films detriment throughout its run-time. While the movie isn’t necessarily bad in a lot of aspects, it is quite unremarkable in almost every way.

Grade: C-

Up until this point, the DC Extended Universe (or DCEU, I guess) has not had a particularly good track record. Standing at 0/3, I was pretty much losing hope that they would ever make an even passably good film. Man of Steel had its moments of quality, thanks mostly to an excellent Hans Zimmer score, but fell due to its boring characters and cringey story. Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad were both absolute messes, with little to nothing in the way of redeeming qualities. Thus, the bar for Wonder Woman was set quite low. All the movie had to do was be passable and it would be the best film of the DCEU. And passable it is, if still not pretty flawed.
 
Wonder Woman, the first stand-alone superhero film to feature a female lead, follows the titular character, an Amazonian woman named Diana (Gal Gadot). Diana was born and raised on Themyscira, an island of only Amazonian women, who have isolated themselves from the world of men and constantly train to fight Ares, God of War. They believe that one day, Ares will rise from the ashes of his defeat at the hands of Zeus and try to destroy the world, and must be ready for the fight to come. But when American pilot and spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash lands in Themyscira and tells them about the Great War that is raging all across the world, Diana becomes convinced this is the return of Ares, corrupting men into destroying each other. Thus, Diana and Steve must travel to the front lines of the First World War to stop the Germans from unleashing a devastating gas-based weapon that could end mankind.
 
A comparison I began making when the first trailer for Wonder Woman came out was that it looked similar to Captain America: The First Avenger. Perhaps that was just because both movies take place during wars of the early 20th century, and the leads are both idealistic symbols who bear the colors of the United States flag. But the movies feel eerily similar, as Wonder Woman bears all of the positive and negative qualities of the average Marvel film. It has interesting and likable characters and a good sense of humor, but suffers from a less-than-captivating story and underwhelming villain. 
 
On the positive end, it is nice to finally have a movie in the DCEU with characters that aren’t soulless. Gadot and Pine play their characters with an energy and charisma that has been completely absent from the previous films in the franchise, playing off each other wonderfully. And once Diana finally dons her classic costume and starts kicking ass, it’s hard to resist being invested. Though the camera work in the action segments suffers from some of the issues that many action films have (such as too many close-ups to mask the lack of creative choreography and an over-reliance on slow-motion) these scenes have an infectious energy. This energy likely comes from Gadot’s performance, which is the film’s crowning achievement. She is Wonder Woman and she owns the role wonderfully. 
 
But the problem arises with the rest of the film built around these compelling characters. The story seems to drag along at times as the same basic pattern emerges. Diana thinks she is fighting Ares, Steve uses this to his advantage to get her to help fight the war, Diana does something amazing that shocks people/gives them hope. The entire film feels like going through the standard motions that have been set for a superhero origin movie in the modern superhero era. There are no strokes of originality here, just standard superhero fare. Top it off with a villain which neatly fits the Marvel formula of dullery and you’ve got an underwhelming experience that will likely not stand the test of time.
 
I wanted to love this movie. I wanted DC to give me something to compete with Marvel and Fox’s superhero line-up that could potentially shake up the superhero slog. While Fox is willing to push the envelope and take risks with movies like Deadpool and Logan, it seems like DC’s new strategy is to emulate Marvel movies to a tee. And that’s not a great idea when you consider that the Marvel formula is starting to feel stale and repetitive. Wonder Woman may scratch an itch you have to see a beloved character on-screen, or to at least see a watchable movie in the DCEU, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of other superhero fare.
 
Grade: B- 

I hate this film. This is the worst shit I have seen in a long goddamn time. Holy fuck. I don’t even know where to start with this so I’m just going to dive right in. Baywatch is an unfunny mess of a film, a dump-heap of near epic proportion that seems to be so far up its own ass that it can’t figure out how simultaneous banal and heinous it is. It takes all the tropes I would have expected out of a terrible comedy from the early 2000’s and compounds them into a trashy cluster-fuck of borderline insulting and offensive badness. 
 
The movie follows veteran lifeguard Mitch Buchanan (Dwayne Johnson), who is forced to take in new recruit Matt Brody (Zac Efron) into the Baywatch team. Brody is a cocky, disgraced Olympic swimmer, forced to work as a lifeguard as both a PR move for the beach and to serve community service for a previous crime. But Brody quickly realizes that the job involves more than he thought when drug-dealer/business tycoon Victoria Leeds (Priyanka Chopra) threatens to buy off all the beachfront property and use it for her own nefarious purposes.
 
Everything about this movie is unlikeable, but I think the most egregious aspect are the characters themselves. None of them are even remotely interesting, relying heavily on stereotypes and tropes that we are so used to by now that we could map out their actions after having taken five pounds of heavy narcotics. And sometimes these stereotypes go from dull to actually offensive, especially in the case of the realtionship between characters Ronnie Greenbaum (Jon Bass) and CJ Parker (Kelly Rohrbach). They are the generic “overweight nerdy guy falls for sexy woman” pair, going all in on both of the terrible tropes that come with both ends. The nerd is insanely awkward and eventually falls to the role of being the team's “tech guy”, the woman is just a sexy body and given no character whatsoever. It’s the perpetuation of stereotypes like this that makes the film unbearable.
 
And even the characters who are not offensively tropey are oddly hypocritical. Take the lead, Mitch. Mitch is the perfect lifeguard, a physical specimen who simultaneously saves lives and make the people on the beach feel comfortable. He reiterates multiple times that the only thing the Baywatch team should care about is saving lives, that you can only be on the team if you are going to give your all into saving the lives of people who need help. But then, he spends something like five fucking minutes of screentime having what is essentially a dick measuring contest with Brody. It’s a cheap chance to show off Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron’s ripped bodies, and it is so out of character for Mitch that it is extremely obvious how little of a shit the screenwriters give about making their characters any more than vessels for jokes.
 
And, in theory, all of that might be OK if the jokes were any good. But they are not. The film’s brand of humor reminds me of Masterminds, my least favorite film of 2016. The jokes are childish, the kind of humor that you’d expect twelve-year-old boys would laugh about while carving penises into the stalls of their middle school’s bathroom. Actual jokes that happen are as follows:
 
1. A guy gets a boner and tries to hide it by laying on a lawn chair, but his dick gets stuck. He can’t get it out, but his boner won’t go away because he keeps looking at an attractive woman in a swimsuit.

2. Brody has to look at a dead man’s taint. This is the extent of a joke that goes on for about 30 seconds.
Also, the dead man’s dick is out. Laugh.

3. Buchanan and Brody have to sneak into a building in disguise. Brody crossdresses. There is no discernible punchline, as the film expects seeing Zac Efron in drag will be so side-splittingly funny that it would be unnecessary to actually add a joke in.
 
And I could go on from there. The movie has a slew of other problems, like the awful editing and action sequencing, which make it so reprehensible. It’s a comedy that completely lacks any sense of humor, any characters that we can even slightly enjoy, any attempt at being interesting. Baywatch relies on hackneyed stereotyping and uninspired dick/shit jokes so heavily that I find it hard to believe six grown-ass adults wrote it and not 30 sixth-graders who huff glue. Please, don’t see this movie.
 
It’s not worth the Bay-watch (sorry). 
 
Grade: F

​I don’t know if you are able to tell by my writing style, or by the fact that I am writing for a university blog, but I am neither a tween nor a “young adult”. Well, I guess technically I am a young adult, but 20 year olds are never what people mean when they say young adults. “Young adults” aren't young adults; they are older children, usually between the ages of 13 and 17. And that demographic is one that advertisers, filmmakers and novelists have been targeting for years. This is a group of young people going through a transitional time in their lives, and they seem to  eat up media that have characters who share the types of emotional experiences they are going through. Some films and novels, like the Harry Potter series and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl do this extremely well. Everything, Everything does not.

Everything, Everything, based on the novel by Nicola Yoon, is a soulless film that lacks both interesting characters and any kind of backbone. The film follows 18 year-old Maddy Whittier (Amandla Stenberg), a teen who suffers from a rare disease that causes her to have extreme allergic reactions to almost everything that exists in the outdoors. Because of these allergies, she is forced to live an isolated life in her home, only coming into contact with her mother (Anika Noni Rose), Nurse Carla (Ana de la Reguera) and friend Rosa (Danube Hermosillo). Everything changes, however, when Maddy begins forming a relationship with Olly Bright (Nick Robinson), her new neighbor. This budding romance causes Maddy to call into question everything about her condition and life trapped inside the same four walls.

Maybe it’s simply because I am not a middle-school aged person anymore, but nothing that happened in this movie interested or spoke to me on any level. This is because none of the characters do anything to stand out or make you care about them. They are all quite boring, and that goes especially for the two leads. We are essentially made to believe that Olly and Maddy are so charming that they both fall for each other instantly, without knowing anything about the other. Except nothing these characters do is remotely quirky or interesting. They are the most normal and dull people I could imagine a movie being made about. I feel like the film thinks that the main character having a rare disease makes her inherently interesting. It doesn’t. She is boring.

And the lack of depth that the characters have only accentuates the predictable and lifeless story. I won’t expressly say what happens at the end of the film, but it is so fairy-talish and safe that I feel like a room of executives sat down and wondered how best to pander to a young audience. The movie feels like it has about thirty safety nets to ensure that nothing even vaguely upsetting happens throughout the movie. This makes it feel as though the film has literally no stakes, which only adds to the nothingness and boredom created by the blank-slate characters.

Everything, Everything is a drag. It’s a film that completely lacks anything intriguing. It’s a dull and predictable mess of a film, the kind of movie that thoroughly misses the mark of being original in any facet. Maybe I’m just out of touch, because the pre-teen females in the audeince really seemed to dig what was going on. I’m glad they found value in it. I didn’t.

Grade: D

​I absolutely love the Rocky movies. Of the seven films within the Rocky canon, I only don’t like Rocky V, the one Sylvester Stallone himself says was a cash-grab mistake. But I love the other six films, from the excellent Rocky and Creed to the insane but hilarious Rocky III and Rocky IV. There is something about the charm of Rocky himself that make the movies so fun to watch, and Stallone seems to have been born to play the endearing character. But the character of Rocky, like many characters in fiction, did not come from nowhere. Stallone, who also wrote the original Rocky film, was inspired by the real life boxer Chuck Wepner, who nearly lasted 15 rounds in the ring with one of the greatest boxers of all time, Muhammad Ali.

Chuck is a biopic that tells the story of Wepner’s career and the impact that both the Ali fight and the success of the film Rocky had on him. Wepner, played by Liev Schreiber, is a small-time boxer who barely keeps his marriage together through his problems with drugs, alcohol and women. When he is given a shot at Muhammad Ali and manages to do far better than anyone assumed, causing newbie writer Sylvester Stallone to write a film based on him, his arrogance shoots through the roof, pushing his loved ones further away from him and spiraling him into a drug-fueled and lonely life. 

While the premise of Chuck was at least somewhat interesting to a huge Rocky fan such as myself, I quickly found myself bored by the film as a whole. And I feel like this is the hardest type of movie for me to describe. No aspect of the film is abrasively bad, but in no way is anything that happens even remotely interesting. Take the performances. Schreiber, Elizabeth Moss, Naomi Watts, Ron Pearlman, Jim Gaffigan and more all do a fine job in their roles. But I can’t think of a single moment in the film that didn’t stop my eyes from glossing over. At no moment in the movie did anything capture my attention.

And that makes it not only extremely difficult for me to talk about the film, but also very difficult to score. I can’t really bash the film for the way its story is structured, seeing as the movie is based on true events. But I also can’t say I found it interesting, because I definitely didn’t. The dialogue is super forgettable (I don’t think I remember a single thing any of the characters said), cinematography standard and music unremarkable. 

Every aspect of the film is like the color beige. It’s fine, and I can't really complain about it, but I wouldn’t want a wardrobe that was all beige. This film lacks the cinematic color to make it stand out in any facet. All I could think the entire movie was that I’d rather be watching Rocky. And, in a couple of months, I’ll bet you anything that I won’t even remember I saw this movie.

Grade: C-

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with director/writer/editor Ben Wheatley, whose newest film Free Fire opens nationwide on April 21st. We had a lovely discussion about the filmmaking process and how Free Fire came to be. Enjoy!

Q: I saw that you recently tweeted out some screenshots of sets from Free Fire that you had built in Minecraft, and have read that you like to do set design in game. Where did that idea come from and when in the process do you do it?

Ben: It’s quite early on, usually. It’s not a new thing to make visualizations stuff in CG, but usually you need a team of people and it costs a fucking fortune. Minecraft is the only 3-D package that I can operate on my own. It’s easy, like working with LEGO. So you just build the sets in that and then you can walk ‘round it and share it with other people so they can see it as well. It’s just an easier way of doing things. It’s weird; I mentioned it once and everyone has gone fucking crazy about it, I don’t know why. 

Q: And were these Minecraft sets used for story-boarding, or was it there to help you initially visualize the sets?

Ben: No, it’s really just an initial thing. It helps that you can change the field-of-view of the camera, which can help replicate how different lenses will look in the space. That’s really useful and hard to do with drawings. But it’s not the only thing we do, we also storyboard. Paki Smith, who was the production designer on the film, did loads of paintings and sketches before we got there to get a real feel of the full situation. So the Minecraft stuff was just the beginning of the process.

Q: In terms of the genre mixing that you did for the film, combining crime, action and comedy, what was your goal with combining these genres and how does it differentiate Free Fire from other shoot-em-ups?

Ben: I guess the film initially comes from wanting to make something that was on a smaller scale, something that you felt like you could understand on a human level. I see these bigger action movies and feel like they are becoming too abstract. You know, you are seeing these incredible images but you don’t feel attached to what is going on. I remember seeing the DVD extras for Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the crew was really excited that they blew up a building in the film. And I remember watching it at the time and going “Oh fuck, they blew up a building!” You see a movie now and they'll blow up a city or planet and you just kind of shrug it off. I just started wondering why I so loved the movies in the 70’s and 80’s that were far more modest in comparison to today’s action. I think it’s because films are starting to lack action on a human scale. I felt like this was the right kind of story to drop into and really feel the more human element.

Now the comedy side of it comes from me wondering how enjoyable it is to be dropped into that environment and for can long can they stand it. In every film I have made, I try to give characters a sense of humor because the world of cross characters that never have a sense of humor doesn't feel right to me. But seems like a badge of honor for a lot of movies to be a punishing emotional fucking misery ride. And most people’s lives, even when they are at the harshest, still have an element of levity. I just tried to infuse that into the film.

Q: Was the idea of going after a more human action movie where you became motivated to use mostly practical effects?

Ben: I like that you can’t argue with the practical stuff. Actors naturally react to practical effects because guns are firing real blanks and things are actually exploding. The idea is to get rid of as much phoniness as possible, because the less phony material for the audience to sift through the better. You want to get the audience as close to the movie as possible.

Q: Did you have to use any CGI?

Ben: Yeah, bits and bobs, but hopefully you never notice. The muzzle flashes of the guns sometimes don’t show up and you have to edit those in. Which is really quite annoying when you spent all the time getting real guns and using practical effects.

Q: Every character brings something really special to the film and played an essential role in the story. How did you achieve that and was it hard to make every character important to the audience?

Ben: A lot of action movies seem to be about one white-hatted character who guns down a bunch of bad guys. The “good guy” will gun down 60 people and I’ll be sitting there going “shit, man, that would be one of the worst shootings ever.” and then that happens three or four times throughout the movie. If you changed the music, this guy would look like a horrible murdering psychopath.

So the idea of making all the small characters likable and knowable gives them humanity and gives the whole film a kind of empathy that you kind of feel sad for these people. We shouldn’t be in the position of wanting characters in a movie to be dead, so I tried to make every character able to be rooted for.

Q: You’ve worked as an editor on most of your feature length films. What part of the editing process is the most fulfilling and keeps you editing your own movies?

Ben: I think that editing is the final control of a movie, the engine room of a film, and I am not keen on giving away the reins on that. There are very few frames between a good cut and a bad cut, so I want to be sure that the movie is exactly what I want it to be. I think like an editor when I am writing and shooting as well, so I can be confident when I am shooting that I have whatever material I need because I am the one who edits the final product.

Q: Why did you choose not to have any explicit details about the setting of Boston, though the movie is set there?

Ben: It was a kind of respect for Boston and a knowing that (chuckling) I’d eventually have to face people who were actually from Boston. I thought it wasn’t important to be overly reliant on details about Boston. There is a bit of historical detail about the guns being moved to Ireland, but I didn’t want the film to end up being diluted by the actual history of Boston in the 70’s. The film doesn’t even have a date or location stamp, so it really doesn’t matter to the film. It can become a sideshow, and I didn’t want that. 

And also, we know that there are plenty of films that have taken place within Boston with Bostonian actor and the fucking accents are still wrong. We didn’t want to get into that whole issue, so we avoided it all together.

Q: Why did you pick the time period of the 70’s? Was it specifically for the subplot of the guns being for the Irish?

Ben: Yeah, it was pretty much specifically for that. On the practical level, it is also about getting rid of the issue of mobile phones. The mobile phone has kind of screwed over the thriller genre. If the movie took place in modern times, they’d all just phone for ambulances and it’d be over before it really started. 

I also wanted to make sure the movie didn’t get to tied up in the characters being part of the mafia or Whitey Bulger's gang or whatever. These things have kind of become used too much, so having the two sets of criminals turn up to buy these guns with the context of the IRA behind it, they seem less off-the-peg. It also makes the film seem more refreshed with more characters from abroad. 

Q: Who was your favorite character and why?

Ben: This is a difficult one to answer because the actors are all very active on social media, so they’ll find out and give me hell. The more I think about it, the more I realize my favorite is Steve-O, the Sam Riley character. Whether or not you believe the heinous things that are said about him throughout the film, he seems to just like the chaos of dragging everyone down. Even though it's absolutely unhealthy, to him it a hell of a lot of fun.

You can read Eric Tatar's full review of Free Fire here.