Alan Rapp

Everest

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Everest
  • IMDb: link

Everest

Based on a true story, Everest recounts the events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. There have been plenty of mountain climbing movies over the years and Everest does little to break from the pack. Working against the movie is the extended opening which plays like a Travel Channel infomercial attempting to sell the audience on traveling to Nepal to climb the world’s biggest mountain with the help of experts like Rob Hall‘s (Jason Clarke) Adventure Consultants.

The climbers themselves are the typical hodgepodge of one-note characters you always expect to see in movies like this with a couple of stand-outs (Clarke, John Hawkes, and Josh Brolin) while the rest (Martin Henderson, Tom Goodman-Hill, Naoko Mori, Michael Kelly, among others) quickly fade into the background. The movie picks up a bit once the climbers begin their ascent of the mountain in earnest and the disaster porn part of the plot kicks in.

The film, and the scale of the undertaking, is certainly helped in IMAX 3D. As a theatrical experience Everest does have something to offer (even if the story feels more straight-to-DVD). It’s certainly not a must-see, but it works as escapist entertainment.

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Black Mass

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Black Mass
  • IMDb: link

Black MassBlack Mass is a semi-successful film highlighting the amazing story of Irish-American mobster Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp) and his rise to prominence in South Boston in the 70s and 80s as the head of the Winter Hill Gang in large part thanks to his role as an FBI informant for Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). What should be a thoroughly engrossing character study becomes a by-the-book gangster movie that entertains but doesn’t due justice to the source material.

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth adapt the non-fictional account of events from Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s book that is highlighted by Depp’s performance under heavy make-up as the charismatic violent sociopath. There’s certainly more to the story than we get here, and I do have to wonder how much director Scott Cooper left on the cutting room floor. I expected far more about Bulger’s rise to power, which we hear the FBI talk about constantly but we don’t see evidence of over the course of the film. The filmmakers’ focus on the lives of Whitey Bulger and his closest associates leaves the larger canvas left half finished.

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The Scorch Trials

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
  • IMDb: link

Maze Runner: The Scorch TrialsThe sequel to The Maze Runner swaps out a complicated maze for an equally ill-defined desert landscape full of zombies for our surviving heroes to navigate. During a brief rest in a military complex obviously run by the same organization which experimented on them in the maze, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his friends meet a group of kids from other mazes and begin to uncover the truth about why they are so important to WICKED.

While the others are content to be kept prisoner in a safe place with three square meals a day and their own cot, Thomas befriends a boy from another group (Jacob Lofland), and, after discovering the truth about the continued experimentation, helps his friends escape into the barren wastleand outside the facility known as “the Scorch.”

In the same way that The Maze Runner declined to explain how putting kids in a death maze helped make them more valuable to WICKED, screenwriter T.S. Nowlin glosses over how a zombie virus is responsible for turning a major American city into the middle of the Sahara desert.

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South Park – Stunning and Brave

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: South Park – Stunning and Brave
  • wiki: link

South Park - Stunning and Brave

South Park begins its 19th season by tackling Caitlyn Jenner, political correctness, fraternity culture, and Deflategate. The episode, and new troubles for both the school and the town, begins with a new principal being hired for the elementary school. An extreme mashup of frat boy and political correctness, PC Principal immediately enforces a no tolerance policy that even leaves Cartman considering following the herd (especially after the new principal literally attempts to beat his beliefs into the helpless 4th grader with his fists). With even Stan’s father won over by the group, and everyone else scared into silence, it falls on Kyle to stand-up to the new bully in town.

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