Media Man

Chaplin is a 1992 bio-drama written by William Boyd/William Goldman/Bryan Forbes and directed by Richard Attenborough. The film stars Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin and it tells the story of the performer's life. Story The story is good, however, it suffers from the same problems that every other post- Lincoln biographical picture had: they tried to tell the story of Chaplin's entire life. Bios that try this often end up the same way: pointless. The reason Lincoln  worked so well is that it told a single story of Lincoln's life: him trying to pass the 16th Amendment. With Chaplin , you get a very broad sense of his whole life and so the movie isn't really about anything. It's just scenes cut together one after the other to show Charlie Chaplin's life. That's never worked for a movie, that's supposed to have a point, and it doesn't work here. The screenplay is alright, but much of it doesn't stand out. However, a lot of the jokes they ...

Recently, there was huge news for the upcoming superhero film Spiderman Homecoming : 19-year-old actress Zendaya has been cast as Mary Jane Watson. I need to stress that this isn't the first thing that made me worried for the new Spider-Man movie, but it is the tipping point that has started making me deathly nervous about its quality. My worries started when I heard about who was heading the project: director Jon Watts, whose only other notable directing credits are a mediocre Kevin Bacon movie called Cop Car  and a couple of episodes of the comedy series The Onion News Network. The second aspect that caught my eye was the film's writers. Firstly, there are six of them, which makes me nervous because that's one story stretched between six people, all of whom probably have their own ideas of how it should be. Secondly, more than half of them are comedy writers with credits on American Dad, Community, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Horrible Bosses . Notice anythin...

X-Men Apocalypse  is a 2016 superhero movie directed/produced/written by Bryan Singer and co-written by Simon Kinberg/Michael Dougherty/Dan Harris, all of whom have worked on the scripts for previous X-Men films. The film has earned the love of its audience, with a 7.6 on IMDb, but has so far been a critical disappointment with a 47% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 53% on Metacritic. Story The film's set-up is pretty similar to how it goes down in the comics; an ancient mutant named En Sabah Nur has awakened from his slumber and has set his sights on destroying/conquering the Earth, wiping it clean of all  humans, who he sees as the weakest beings on the planet, and leaving only the strong to survive and rule. Now, the X-Men must band together to stop his master plan. Even though the set-up is good I think it's Fox trying to play their trump card after it's already been played.  Days of Future Past  was such a perfect climax/ending to the X-Men movies because it felt so...

Looper  is a 2012 sci-fi action film written and directed by Rian Johnson. The film garnered critical praise and financial success upon its release was one of the most well regarded movies of that year. Please note that it's very hard to review this movie due to its complex plot and just cool touches I don't want to spoil. Story Joe is a looper, an assassin who kills somebody sent back through time whenever the future mob needs to get rid of a body. (This is the simplest version I could come up with.) One day, however, he's sent a very special target: his older self. Old Joe escapes and now Young Joe must find him and kill him before his employers kill him for letting his target escape. The set up is delightfully original and many of the ideas in the film are pretty inspired. They make the world feel real, getting you sucked into the environment. The screenplay is fantastic. Even though the exposition at the beginning is clearly exposition, it doesn't feel lik...

The Evil Dead  is a 1981 low-budget horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi. The film launched the careers of both Raimi and the film's main star, Bruce Campbell. Despite it being an amateur film and having a measly $375,000 budget, the movie has grown into one of the most iconic films of recent memory and is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Story High schooler Ash Williams and a group of his friends are vacationing in a cabin in the Tennessee mountains when they find a book made of human flesh and a collection of tapes from the man who found it. The group accidentally activates a spell that awakens a group of evil spirits that begin to possess them one-by-one, tuning them into zombies. Now, Ash must survive the night and defeat the evil dead. Even though the set-up is cliched, the film was released before  the "cabin in the woods" was a trope. So rather than hurting the movie, the setup comes off more as a staple, a little piece of...

Being depressed isn't fun, right? It makes you feel useless, puts you in a poor temper and generally skews your view on things to the nihilistic side for the rest of the day. I say this to disclaim that I'm not saying that you should go out and buy art to purposefully depress yourself. I'm just asking, if something we know is depressing is before us, does that necessarily mean we should avoid it at any cost, especially if it's a representation of real life events? The biggest question here is: What's the point of depressing art? Artists certainly use it to vent, that's true, but what does it mean for us, the readers? One point of depressing art could be empathy. Take, for example, the book Maus , which tells the true story of a holocaust survivor and his struggles with the author, his son. People can identify with this story for many reasons: struggling with a relative with alzheimer's, a distant parent, even having a friend or relative who's...

Deadpool  is a 2016 superhero action/comedy directed by Tim Miller and written by duo Paul Wernick/Rhett Reese. The film was, and still is, huge among audiences and critics, surpassing Passion of the Christ  as the highest grossing R-rated film ever made. Story The plot, for the most part, is a simple revenge story. Somebody kidnaps Deadpool's girlfriend and now Deadpool has to find and kill the bad guy and save the hot chick. What makes it work, though, is that the movie knows it's simple, so that's not what the focus is on. The focus is on the character of Deadpool himself and the screenplay. Deadpool is a full ant-hero through and through: he only cares about getting his revenge, not helping people or fighting bad guys for any other reason. You're able to route for him, though, because they spent time setting up Deadpool's back story and why we're supposed to care about him. This is helped by the fact that the character is consistently funny. The other c...