The newspaper industry sure isn’t what it used to be.  I, however, unlike a lot of professional movie critics could not go into to much depth on this subject because I have absolutely no journalistic background outside of this blog (meaning I have absolutely no journalistic background).  That said, I do think I have an affinity for movies about newspapermen — All The President’s Men, His Girl Friday, Ace In The Hole and others that I like but aren’t coming to mind feature smart, savvy reporters that’ll stop at nothing in the name of their story and the god damn truth, and I find something inherently compelling about that.  Spotlight, the latest film from director Todd McCarthy taps in to this now nearly-extinct idea of bright newspaper reporters on this type of quest, while the story at the heart of this film digs into something deeper and more troubling than most movies of this ilk are willing to delve.

The story at the heart of the story at the heart of Spotlight pertains to the Catholic Church, and the constant allegations of child abuse that had been thrown their way in the Boston area.  It’s 2001 and the Boston Globe’s premier investigative section of the paper known as Spotlight is looking for its next story to cover.  There have already been several stories and investigations into these charges in the past, but as several sources come out of the woodwork and the Spotlight team finds themselves getting more and more wrapped up in the Catholic Church’s cover-ups, they find that this whole thing goes way deeper than they’d ever anticipated.

First off, I’ll just say the cast here is pretty phenomenal.  It’s been nice seeing this second act of Michael Keaton’s career in lieu of the Birdman movie, and there’s something weirdly satisfying about seeing him trade quips with a guy like John Slattery, just because they’re two particular kinds of actors that I never thought I’d see together in anything.  Liev Schreiber here isn’t nearly as wooden as we’ve come to expect him, and yet his innate woodenness actually feels appropriate for his role as Marty Baron, the unflappable editor of the Globe.  Then there’s Rachel McAdams, who isn’t quite having a McCoughnassaince in the wake her work on True Detective this season, but she was still about the only thing I liked about TD season 2 and I like her again here.  And though Spotlight clearly relies on this idea of the ensemble, if there’s any stand-out performance, it’s from my mancrush Mark Ruffalo, who acts as a kind of annoying embodiment of journalist determination.

I wouldn’t call Spotlight an overly flashy film, and yet I found it to be about as engrossing as anything I’ve seen this year.  I would attribute this to the film being so much about the process of investigative journalism — the pounding on people’s doors, the dozens of phonecalls to the same sources, the banging your head against the wall trying to uncover something.  Spotlight recognizes that this process is endlessly fascinating, which becomes even more fascinating when it concerns a story that has such high stakes and deals with a subject that is so hard to believe could happen.  But at the same time, the film paints a pretty clear picture of how such an insane amount these molestation cases could be covered up, as it makes it apparent that Boston has always felt like a small town, and in particular one that has often found itself being deeply influenced by the Catholic church.

This doesn’t happen to me often, but Spotlight is a movie that I have a hard time finding really any huge faults with.  As I said, the cast, the pacing, and the setting all seem perfectly calibrated to this particular story, but with just enough emotional depth to these characters to ever make things feel too mundane or mechanical.  Even the way the film treats the subject of child abuse is just about perfect, as it doesn’t shy away from the psychological implications this stuff had on the young boys that were affected by it, but also it never veers in to manipulative territory.  There’s even an Oscar-y type speech that Mark Ruffalo gives late into the film that could’ve derailed things, as he’s telling Keaton to publish the information they have at the time, in the hopes of nailing one particular priest.  But then the scene feels less schmaltzy when you realize that Ruffalo is totally wrong about this thing he’s speechifying about.  Because with a story of that magnitude, you’ve got to get every little detail right, and I’d say Spotlight does just that.

Oh, and the fact that this movie is set in 2001 and is completely treated as a period piece made me feel super old.

Pixar has lost its individuality. Don’t get me wrong, the beloved studio still makes ambitious films. Inside Out was one of the most conceptually ambitious films I have ever seen. What I mean is it is becoming more and more common for Pixar films to look and feel like films produced by other studios. Brave is How to Train You Dragon, The Good Dinosaur feels like a recycled Ice Age plot line and Cars 2 feels about as bold and exciting as that Fox film about the racing snail. Pixar is no longer the king of the CGI world. Even films being produced under Disney’s regular ‘ol Animation Department are rivaling Pixar. Anyone see Big Hero 6? I cried for days.

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When it came out, Halo 3 seemed like the biggest deal in the world. It was everywhere – there was a Mountain Dew Flavor, Paul made a song about it… It was huge. I remember hearing about it, and later one of the Call of Duty games, in the context of video games usurping film as the biggest media releases of a year. That was then. The last eight years have made the world a lot more corporate. Now, I could barely hear anything about Halo 5‘s release between ads for Star Wars jewelry.

Seriously, it’s been about a month since Halo 5: Guardians came out and it feels like nobody is talking about it anymore. The holidays are coming, isn’t this supposed to be a system seller? Microsoft called Guardians the biggest Halo launch yet, for what it’s worth, but it simply doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. It’s not an event like these games used to be, and for non-hardcore fans of the series, that’s probably a fair level of excitement.

Guardians has moved me very little, a dismaying reality since I’ve dug pretty much all the main Halo games. This is Halo‘s big debut on modern consoles, it should be a massive showcase for the Xbox One, and to be fair, it doesn’t falter at most of what it tries. Maybe it’s just sequel fatigue, but Guardians just doesn’t stand out for me compared to games like Titanfall, Destiny, or that brief bit of Overwatch I got to play this weekend.

Take the fact that the game looks good, for an example. Not great, not the best looking game this generation or even this year, but good. And it runs at a solid 60 frames per second, which is great. But characters all look big and bulky, your guns take up a ton of the screen, and a few of the environments are pretty bland. So it’s solid, but not amazing, you know?

That problem extends to the single player story too, which I’m inclined to give a pass to since none of the Halo stories have been good. But I won’t because this one is short, bares no resemblance to any of the trailers we had been shown, and ends on a disappointing cliffhanger. You spend your time switching between a desperate Master Chief and his squad searching for Cortana, and a new, misled Spartan team led by the guy who plays Luke Cage for the Netflix branch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was super confusing, with much left unexplained and again, a big dumb cliffhanger way too soon. But people don’t play these games alone anyway (which is why it’s disappointing there’s no split screen story mode).

At this point, almost everything you’d expect to be in Halo multiplayer is there. They recently patched in big team battle, and the other essential modes are all available in the Arena. I never really cared for most of them. The big new addition is a second multiplayer mode, called Warzone, separate from the Arena, which is like an even bigger team battle. It’s an evolving mode that challenges you with different objectives, like taking out powerful NPCs, while you battle the other team for territory. It’s pretty cool and definitely the most fun I had in Guardians, even though it’s centered around the game’s most troubling aspect.

This is a game free of map pack DLC, which I think is great. Map pack DLC is terrible in multiplayer games, all it does is fracture the community. Unfortunately, in its place is a card pack system. You get points for completing matches and performing well, and you can use these points (or real money) to buy packs of cards. These cards give you weapons and vehicles for Warzone, as well as boosts and cosmetic unlocks. Those cards are the only way to get better weapons and vehicles in Warzone, aside from taking them from an enemy player. It fucked with my head that, for example, when my team needed a tank, I was inclined to not spawn one just because I only had one tank card and I didn’t want to waste it. Of course, for really good players and rich players, this won’t be a problem, making the whole system all the more distressing.

Mostly my problem was that because of the cards, my incentive to keep playing the game was just gone. Sure, there was cool armor I wanted to get, but without a direct path to it, why bother? I have no interest in grinding booster packs, I did that once with Mass Effect 3 and don’t really want to do it again. At least a game like Hearthstone gives you an alternate path to acquiring a card you want if you’re really unlucky, here you’ve just gotta wait and cross your fingers.

On the other hand, free maps are great. Making sure everyone who plays Halo 5 has access to everything that really matters is great. But as someone who plays online alone, and consistently places in about the middle-to-lower third of my team’s leaderboards, there’s just not enough incentive here to really get into the game. At least not right now, when so many great games are begging for my time. Halo used to be the biggest thing in the world. Now it will have to settle for having been the biggest thing that week.

Every film should be able to stand on its own.  Whoever first said this probably had not anticipated this recent trend of taking bestselling book franchises, turning them into blockbuster movie franchises, and then turning the final film in to two-part stories in the hopes of squeezing as much money out of one franchise as possible.  Because not only to you have to have seen all the other movies in the franchise to have a clear idea of this world and its characters, you also have to have seen the first part of this final saga to know what the hell is going on in this particular story.  So then why would I take it upon myself to see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 despite not having seen Mockingjay Part 1 nor any of the other movies in The Hunger Games franchise?  Well, let’s just say my friends dragged me to it because they thought it’d be a funny experience to put me through (which it kind of was, especially since I got to see the gloriously stupid trailer for Gods Of Egypt).  But also, I think I was geniunely curious to see if a film like this — which relies so heavily on the audience’s knowledge of previous films — would hold up on its own at all.

As you may have noticed from some of my previous movie reviews, I hate having to summarize the plots of movies.  Even more so, I don’t think I could actually summarize the plot of Mockingjay Part 2, because I only vaguely knew what was going on at the heart of this movie.  Like yeah, I knew that the basis of the first Hunger Games movie was that there were kids killing each other in a kind of futuristic bloodsport, while I’m assuming in the second and third installments Jennifer Lawrence and other future people are trying to overthrow the evil government led by evil president Donald Sutherland.  Because in this movie we get a lot of J-Law and her crew of futurefighters running through the wartorn streets of The Capital (which I believe is the capital of the country this movie takes place in), and fighting off machine-gun robots with the intent of killing evil president Donald Sutherland.  So there you go, there’s your plot summary.

The descriptor I keep hearing in regards to this final Hunger Games movie is “dark”.  Granted, I feel like the word I hear in regards to the final chapter of pretty much every final film in a recent movie franchise tends to be “dark”.  I don’t know if this stems from the creators of these franchises getting restless over continually making easily digestable popcorn entertainment and eventually vying for something a bit more sinister after the first few movies, or if we just live in undeniably dark times that demand this kind of entertainment.  Regardless, the Hunger Games franchise strikes me as one that was already inherently a bit morbid, since as you may know, it revolves around the idea of kids killing each other for sport while set against this grim dystopian future.  Which strikes me as a bit strange that a story like this would be such a zeitgeist-capturing piece of mainstream entertainment, though I imagine this grimness might account for the fact that it seems like people have gotten a bit burned out on these movies since the opening box office grosses for Mockingjay Part 2 were good, but not earth-shattering.

And even though there were a lot of confusing things about this being my first exposure to The Hunger Games franchise, whatever enjoyment I was able to get out of it stemmed from its similarities to another film with a heart of darkness — Apocalypse Now.  I don’t know if I’m the first person to make this comparison, but taken on it’s own, HG:MJ-Pt.2, much like Apocalypse Now struck me as another journey into the heart of one man’s insanity-driven quest for power, and who must be stopped at all cost.  And I think if taken just on those terms, HG:MJ-Pt.2 does hold up on it’s own.  And sure, there are lots of political discussions that take place between Jennifer Lawrence and Julianne Moore, as well as her sidekick (the departed and sorely-missed Philip Seymour Hoffman), which I wasn’t able to get much out of from not having seen the previous films.  But just as a movie about a bunch of rogues running through a ravaged city on a quest for justice, it’s entertaining enough.  There’s a particularly thrilling scene where J-Law and her cohorts are forced to fight this horde of underground sewer-mutants, which had a bit of an Alien vibe, and was surprising for me, because I had absolutely no idea if The Hunger Games world was a world in which monster-type creatures existed.  Turns out it is, sort of.

Still, regardless of the fact that I was able to enjoy some of the more action-heavy, spectacle-based elements of this movie, there was a lot of pay-off that I had to sit through that I obviously couldn’t get a ton of satisfaction out of.  In particular, the love triangle between Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Thor’s brother didn’t seem terrible compelling, to the point where it feels hard to call it a love triangle when it all seemed to play out in such a casual manner.  But maybe because the movie does a fairly good job of calling back to earlier moments in the franchise, and maybe because I’ve been vaguely aware of this franchise just from its place in the popular consciousness, I wasn’t quite as bored or lost as I thought I’d be.

So does that mean that I am now in favor of this habit of breaking up book adaptations into as many sagas as possible?  No, absolutely not.  It’s dumb and manipulative towards fans, and just an illogical and unsatisfying approach to storytelling.  Still, I will say that while watching this multi-million dollar, multi-part franchise come to an end, I had an alright time.  And isn’t that the best I could’ve hoped for?