Zombieland: Double Tap Is Way Too Familiar For Its Own Good

Comedy sequels have got to be one of the most treacherous subgenres out there, the track record for these films is just not great at all. Exceptions like 22 Jump Street do exist, but more often than not, comedy sequels are just reheated leftovers of jokes that just aren't as funny the second go-around. Even getting the entire Anchorman crew back together resulted in a middling Anchorman 2 rather than a laugh riot. Zombieland: Double Tap is the newest entry into the world of comedy sequels, and as far as these types of movies go, it's actually one of the better comedy sequels out there. However, that's not exactly the highest bar to clear and when considering it as just a movie on its own terms, Zombieland: Double Tap can't help but feel more than a touch underwhelming.

Richard Linklater Delivers An Intriguing Trip With A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater's primary focus as a filmmaker has been making quiet meditations on how mundane moments of life shape us as people in the long-term. This wistful kind of storytelling has served him extremely well in delivering such outstanding features as Boyhood or any of the three Before movies. But over the course of his career Linklater has stepped out of that comfort zone to deliver delightful family comedies (School of Rock), remarkable Coen Brothers-esque dark comedies (Bernie) and even acclaimed period piece romantic dramas (Me and Orson Welles). But perhaps his biggest stretch outside of Boyhood-type projects is A Scanner Darkly, an animated adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel of the same name.

The Highwaymen Is One of The Most Tedious Movies I've Seen In A Good Long While

The other day, I was going through the twenty-two 2019 movies I'd seen up to that point and trying to rank them all from best to worst (for the record, the best so far was Us). While going through this list, I discovered something I hadn't realized before: The Highwaymen is my least favorite movie of 2019 so far. Considering we've only just now reached April 2019, that statement doesn't really have much weight to it, goodness knows that The Highwaymen isn't anywhere near as bad as all-time worst films like God's Not Dead. But of the small crop of movies I've seen from 2019, The Highwaymen is easily the most disposable and tedious film of the bunch.

Surviving The Undead Inhabiting Zombieland Proves To Be A Recipe For Great Comedy

The two writers behind Zombieland are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, a pair of individuals who are most well-known today for writing both of the Deadpool movies. Watching Zombieland through the lens of it being a precursor to the pair's work on Deadpool, one begins to notice some similarities between the two projects. Most notably, both are extremely violent works containing a large amount of dark humor that inhabit well-trodden grounds of genre fiction (superhero movies and zombie movies) with lead characters who have varying degrees of self-awareness of the circumstances they're stuck in and provide narration to the audience on circumstances that are playing out on-screen. Like the two Deadpool movies, Zombieland is also funny, even moreso, in fact, than the pair of Deadpool movies Reese and Wernick would pen in the years to come.

Solo: A Star Wars Story Is Better Than You'd Expect A Han Solo Origin Movie To Be But Still Suffers From A Derivative Nature

Ever since Harrison Ford shot his blaster through a mosquito alien in a seedy extra-terrestrial tavern in 1977, people have loved Han Solo. Why wouldn't we? He's got bad boy charm, he's got Harrison Ford's immense charm and he gets to serve as a grounded point-of-view in the original Star Wars as a guy who just doesn't care about all of this alien mumbo-jumbo in this universe. Even as a guy who thinks Han Solo is cooler than a morning on Hoth, do we really need a whole movie detailing the man's background? The fact that he carried an aura of mystery was always a big part of Han Solo's charm after all. Well, Disney marketers, er, master storytellers have seen fit to give us a Han Solo movie in the form of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second stand-alone Star Wars Story following 2016's Rogue One.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri Pokes And Prodes The Audience With Realistic But Occasionally Shallow Vulgarity

Expectations are a funny thing. I walked into Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri certain I knew just what kind of film I was about to watch and walked out of my screening having just witnessed a feature that played against my expectations in many respects. The premise of this new Martin McDonagh motion picture had me expecting a film that was rife with relevant social commentary and instead the final project itself starts out by positioning itself as something akin to that before transitioning into a story that's more about dealing with general themes of loss and grappling with said loss.

The Glass Castle Is Admirable For Its Thematic Aspirations And Is Less So In Its Execution Of Said Aspirations

At the dawn of this decade, the general populace mostly knew Brie Larson as Envy Adams in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and as a recurring heavy presence on the Showtime drama United States Of Tara. In the years since though, she's starred in a number of acclaimed motion pictures hailing from all sorts of genres, won an Oscar and been cast as a Marvel superhero. Perhaps the movie that really helped her start her ascension to movie star was the 2013 drama Short Term 12, an outstanding feature full of lovable characters and an emphatic spirit that made human beings out of its troubled characters. She reunites with that films director, Destin Daniel Cretton, for the new drama The Glass Castle, which, sadly, is a major step down from the quality of Short Term 12.

War For The Planet Of The Apes Is A Captivating & Grim Work Of Art

Third movies in big franchises or trilogies have a tendency to be regarded as frequently lackluster compared to their predecessors. I don't think that's entirely fair since we've had a number of great third entries in big series of movies in recent years (Lord of The Rings, Captain America, Iron Man and Toy Story all delivered strong third entries in their respective franchises), yet such a thought process in pop culture. Want some further concrete evidence that third movies can be something special? Check out War For The Planet Of The Apes, the newest entry in the film series that, when first announced, sound like the ultimate cash-grab and now has morphed into something that feels groundbreaking for the very medium of summer blockbuster fare.

True Detective Season One Review

Early on in the first season of True Detective, Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) tells his homicide detective partner Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) to be way of applying too much of a story to a crime scene early on in the investigation since you could begin to warp the crime scene to fit your narrative. Turns out, though, Rust's early intuition was a solid indicator for what kind of narrative was behind a vile murder that left a naked women tied up with antlers surrounded by various tiny wooden objects said to ward off the devil. Of course, it takes Rust a while to figure out that he's onto something, with the narrative that unfolds from the investigation he and Martin undergo managing to impact both men's lives in profound ways.

A Sense Of Authenticity Courses Through The Veins Of The Edge Of Seventeen

When Hailee Steinfeld came onto the scene in December 2010 with a fantastic leading (not supporting as the Academy Awards erroneously thought) performance in True Grit, you'd think such a turn would have made her a major commodity in the world of American cinema. Alas, any woman in Hollywood is going to find challenges in advancing their career and for Steinfeld she was boxed into co-starring as generic daughter roles to leading male characters in the likes of 3 Days To Kill and Begin Again. Granted, she was in Pitch Perfect 2 (a film I freely admit to not yet seeing) last year, but that's been the only major role of note Steinfeld seems to have garnered in the past six years.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One Review

Mock (Yeah)...Ing (Yeah)....Jay (Yeah)

Cliffhangers are a tricky business. Do it one way, and it can become an entertaining way to simultaneously push the characters forward while giving a glimpse at the future (see: The Empire Strikes Back and The Hobbit films). But others really just do it in an abrupt fashion that manages to decrease the overall quality of the film. Thankfully, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One manages to avoid being a calamity. In fact, it's an entertaining movie filled with tension packed sequences.

Gotham (Series Premiere) Review

The mythology of Batman is so large at this point that to come at it with a new idea is almost impossible. Gotham isn't entirely original, but it does at least give us a perspective on the madcap world of The Caped Crusader that isn't usually given a lot of thought in comics, films or other storytelling mediums. It tells of a time before Batman, what was Gotham? What was the city and the people that lived in it like?

The Hunger Games Mockingjay: Part One Just Got A Freaking Awesome New Trailer

I really did not care for the first Hunger Games movie, with it's poorly written characters and terrible camerawork, but oh my God, I adored the second movie. Catching Fire was easily The Dark Knight of these Hunger Games films, going much deeper into the struggles of the cast of characters to excellent results. Considering the director of Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence) is in charge of both Mockingjay movies, I'm super pumped for the next Katniss adventure, and that excitement has only gone up with this newest trailer that you can watch below.

So, I Was On Netflix: Free Birds

Not since Beverly Hills Chiahuahua has a movies
poster had such a true claim

Each Tuesday I review a film that can be found on Netflix Instant Streaming. This week, what happens when time travel and turkeys get mixed together. Spoiler Alert: an awful movie happens.