Life: Life Finds a Way (To Kill You)

Originality is overrated. While many bemoan Hollywood’s lack of originality while awash in a sea of reboots, remakes, sequels and franchise building, they forget that everyone has to get their ideas from somewhere. Everything is a remix, nothing is original anymore, and every new idea is just the culmination of ideas from the past. Or as Pablo Picasso once put it, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The thing that separates the inspired ideas from the uninspired ones, however, is what they do with their plunder. Life is a terrific example of this. It may not have a single original bone in its body, but it at least knows how to use its stolen ideas effectively.

Power Rangers: A Movie Stuck in Mid-Morph

When I found out that they were making a Power Rangers movie, I was a bit skeptical. I wasn’t surprised at all that it was happening, though. Since Hollywood has been mining my generation’s nostalgia for script material for years, it was only a matter of time before they got their turn. The thing that had me worried, though, was how exactly they were going to attack this subject. I was a huge Power Rangers fan back in the day, but I’ll be the first to tell you that it hasn’t aged well at all. The inconsistencies with the American footage and the Japanese Super Sentai footage are glaringly obvious in retrospect, and it’s a perfect distillation of the vapid focus testing that dominated children’s television in the 90’s. There were two ways this could’ve gone about: they could keep the goofy, cheesy aesthetic and make the experience a groan inducing nightmare for anyone above the age of 10, or they could take the grim and gritty route and risk pissing off the legions of jaded fans who’ve had their hearts broken by Michael Bay and Zack Snyder too many times. In their attempt to find a happy middle ground, this movie just ended up killing both tones with one stone.

Logan - End of an Era

There’s a certain sense of finality surrounding Logan, a sense of inevitability. That should come as no surprise as this is supposedly the last hurrah for Hugh Jackman’s incarnation of X-Men’s Wolverine. Since the timeline has been tampered with in X-Men: Days of Future’s Past, rendering parts of the early 2000’s X-Men series null and void, Hugh Jackman is starting to get too old to play what is essentially the character that made him a star, and Deadpool has made 20^th Century Fox a little less gun-shy about making R-rated superhero movies, everyone agrees that if this is going to be the end of this character, he might as well go out with a bang. I was a bit wary about the hype surrounding this movie since Wolverine’s previous solo outings have been less than stellar, (The Wolverine was okay, and the less said about X-Men Origins: Wolverine the better.) but I figured I’d see how this chapter in the X-Men saga goes if for no other reason than closure.

Get Out - When Racial Fears Get Real

Comedy and horror have an awful lot in common. Both are about defying expectations (or at least they should be), both require more skill than one would expect to pull off properly, both have a singular goal that will result in failure if not met, and the best ones give the audience something to think about between bouts of fear and/or laughter. Combining the two seems like a feat that only the maddest of mad scientists are willing to pull off, but there have been a few successful attempts like Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, Shaun of the Dead, Scream, Cabin in the Woods, just to name a few. Get Out strikes that balance while also tackling the heavy subject of racism in a refreshing way. The directorial debut of Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, Get Out will make you laugh your ass off, shit your pants in terror, and think about whose lives really matter, sometimes all within a few minutes of each other.

A Cure for Wellness - This Is What Disappointment Looks Like

Some movies are good, some are bad, others are just disappointing. A forgettable movie is more unforgivable than an outright terrible one because if it leaves no impact and is discarded from your memory a few hours after seeing it, then that's two hours of your life that you'll never get back. But the most frustrating kind of disappointing movie to me is the kind that has so much going for it, has the seed of a good or even great movie buried deep within it just dying to break through the soil and blossom, but is bogged down by one or two fatal flaws that hamstring the entire experience. A Cure for Wellness, unfortunately, falls strictly into that category.

The Lego Batman Movie - Everything is Still Awesome

Batman has become one of the most overexposed characters in recent memory. Whether it be in comics, movies or television, the Dark Knight has no shortage of stories written about him, but ever since Frank Miller gave him the ultra gritty makeover in 1988, and The Dark Knight permanently reshaped the cinematic landscape for better or worse in 2008, the popular consensus seems to be that Batman should only be this dark, brooding, overly serious character despite the fact that he's a billionaire who fights crime while dressed as a flying rodent and whose arch nemesis is a clown. While some of the grim elements of Batman have always kind of been there, a lot of people tend to forget that the franchise wasn't always so stuck up its own ass and had an element of self-awareness. Comparing the silver age comics and the 60's Adam West show to Batman: The Animated Series and the Nolan trilogy is almost a night and day difference. That self-conscious lampooning is what made Batman one of the best parts of The Lego Movie, a movie whose entire modus operandi was pure, unadulterated joy with meta humor coming out the wazoo. But is this incarnation of the Caped Crusader enough to carry his own movie?

The Trouble With Adaptations, or Why I'm Sick of Hearing That The Book Was Better

We've all been in this kind of situation before. You've picked up a book, you read it, you loved it, you've read it front to back, fell in love with the characters, scoured its pages for little nuances, references, or clever details you may not have picked up on the first, second, or seventeenth time. Then you get the news: that book that you love so very very much is getting its own movie. You're super excited to see this story brought to life on the big screen. You count down the days til the premiere, you show up first in line for the very first screening, you're in a room with dozens or hundreds of people who adore this work just as much as you do. The lights dim, the film begins, and two hours later... you find yourself underwhelmed. Or disappointed. Or even angry. Something didn't go right. Maybe they left something out. Or several things. Or  they changed things. Maybe the director's vision didn't exactly match yours. Maybe the adaptation was in name only. It's a conundrum that cinephile and bibliophile alike have suffered through. Either way, there's no more disappointing feeling than walking out of the theater and thinking to yourself, “The book was so much better.” And there's no more infuriating feeling than discussing it with someone else and hearing them flippantly say “Of course the book was better. The book is always better.”