Author: Caillou Pettis

The broadway musical Hamilton premiered in The Public Theatre in New York City on January 20, 2015. Starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, and Phillipa Soo just to name a few, it depicts the life and career of Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the Caribbean island of Nevis. The first act covers Hamilton’s arrival in New York City in 1776, his work as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the American Revolution, and how he met and married Eliza Schuyler. The second act covers Hamilton’s postwar work as the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr.

Hamilton is a musical that I have wanted to see ever since its debut five years ago. Some people may not know that I absolutely adore musicals. Since I live in a city that doesn’t get a lot of Broadway attention, I have never gone to a musical in my life. But one of the ones that I’ve always wanted to see was Hamilton. Although I may not be able to see this story performed live in person anytime soon, I finally got to see this live-taped film on Disney+ and it was definitely worth the wait.

The greatest thing that this film does is inject a sense of enormous energy right from the opening scene and keeps it going right down to the very last minute. It’s a two and a half-hour long movie, and it admittedly does feel quite long and exhausting after a while, but it’s never boring per se. The charisma and energy that every single cast members brings to this production feel so lively and full of life. While watching them sing, dance, and tell a story on the stage, I could almost feel their passion for this story seeping out of them. I had a humongous smile on my face the entire time.

All of the musical numbers are hugely impressive, too, for a number of reasons. For one, they are all incredibly fun to listen to and have catchy rhyming lyrics that will surely stick in your head for a long time afterward. It’s even more incredible that these lyrics were written by lead-star Lin-Manuel Miranda. He manages to tell fascinating stories in each song and also incorporates amazing humor in a lot of them as well. It was a blast to listen to and watch.

There are some instances in which a lot of the lyrics are sung a bit fast, and so it can be quite easy to miss what some of the actors are saying, and as a result, you can miss crucial story beats along the way. But if you have a careful ear, you should have no problem having a great time with this production. Hamilton is one of the most alive and upbeat Broadway musicals I have ever witnessed. It’s ridiculously fun to watch and tells an interesting and captivating story. After watching it, I want to see it in person even more than I already did.

Hamilton is a powerhouse of a Broadway musical thanks to its incredibly catchy, well-written songs and its hugely talented and lively cast.

Nine-year-old Sophie (Chloe Coleman) catches JJ (Dave Bautista), a hardened CIA operative, spying on her family during a routine surveillance operation. In exchange for not blowing his cover, JJ begrudgingly agrees to show the precocious girl how to become a spy. What at first seems like an easy task soon turns into a battle of wits as Sophie proves you don’t need much experience to outsmart a seasoned agent.

When I first saw the trailer for My Spy as a coming attraction while in the movie theatre a while back, I basically had the same thought that everybody had – “this looks awful”. It reminded me of an extremely bad late 90s or early 2000s comedy. Some part of me was holding out hope that it would be a welcomed surprise, but deep down inside, I still had a feeling it was going to suck. Sadly, it did suck. My Spy is a painfully cringe-worthy film with a list of problems.

The first on the list is without a doubt the script, written by Jon and Erich Hoeber. Right from the start, it feels like it doesn’t work. We watch a scene in which Dave Bautista’s JJ is in the middle of a sticky situation after a bunch of people start to suspect that he is a CIA agent. What does JJ, who is allegedly a top-of-the-line agent, do in order to defuse the situation? He starts cracking jokes while there are several guns pointed at his head. Instead of shooting him right on the spot, everybody in the room gives him a sort of confused glare, but there is only a fight scene after this happens. In real life, this would have gone the complete opposite way.

I understand that this is a goofy, over-the-top comedy and it isn’t going for a completely grounded story, but it was just a bit jarring and it was hard to get into. Easily the strongest aspect to the film is the dynamic between Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman, who do their best despite the weak writing. Together, they are sweet and oftentimes fun to watch. It’s a standout duo in an otherwise lackluster movie.

One of the biggest missteps this film takes is that it tries to aim towards teenagers and young children far too much. This is a movie that tries to take itself seriously one minute, and then the next, we watch the macho-man Dave Bautista himself do the Nae Nae dance along to Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow”. Not only did this happen once, but twice. Each time made me shake my head in embarrassment.

Surprisingly enough though, the action sequences here aren’t too bad. There is one moment in the final fifteen minutes or so that was truly entertaining to watch and actually managed to include a couple of good jokes as well. Still, though, this is a remarkably tough film to sit through. Even though it’s only ninety-nine minutes long, it feels much longer. It will probably entertain young audiences occasionally, but I still don’t think that this spy comedy has enough up its sleeve to warrant a watch.

Dave Bautista tries his best in My Spy – a poorly written action-comedy that simply doesn’t have enough good humor up its sleeve or a good story to go along with it.

The footage of three filmmakers shooting a web series has been recovered. Intending to debunk famous Internet urban legends and rituals, they perform a blood ritual that summons an ancient primordial entity in the process. As the spirit’s unstoppable evil seeps into their daily lives the trio is left with a single choice: Submit to its will – or die.

No, Dustin Mills’ Ouija: Blood Ritual is not the next chapter in the commercially successful series of Ouija films, although it definitely feels like it could be one. But that’s not a good thing. The original film, which was released in 2014, was extremely profitable but it was panned almost universally by critics. Even a lot of the audience members that did go out to see it thought it was awful and wished they could have gotten their money back.

With that being said though, they did release a follow-up film two years later with the subtitle Origin of Evil which was ten times better. It’s a throwback to classic horror and actually has a hint of The Conjuring in there. Nevertheless, though, the Ouija series is one that not a lot of people are too fond of. I wasn’t a fan of the first at all, but somehow, this unrelated film with the subtitle Blood Ritual just so happens to be the worst film I have seen where the main plot revolves around a Ouija board.

Within the opening scene alone, the filmmakers use the tried-and-true, usually stale technique of putting text on the screen that says something along the lines of “The following video was recovered from *blank’s* cellphone. It has not been altered. The footage you are about to see is directly from their phone”. It’s a tactic that was popularized heavily with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, but in recent years, it has worn off and now whenever I see something like that happen in a movie, oftentimes I just roll my eyes. Director Dustin Mills probably included this in his movie because he wanted it to come across as creepy and mysterious, but it fell flat.

But easily the biggest problem with Ouija: Blood Ritual is its story and acting. In this film, we follow three filmmakers who are creating their own web series where they discuss and try to debunk popular urban legends and creepypastas on the internet. Familiar? Sure. But if done right, it actually could be a fun and interesting twist on the subject matter. Instead though, the script is chalked full of needlessly long scenes that lead absolutely nowhere. It’s a movie that’s only seventy-seven minutes in length, yet for whatever reason, more than half of that running time is eaten up by just watching these filmmakers goof around with one another.

For a film that mentions a Ouija board in the title, you’d probably expect it to be quite eventful and scary, but that’s not the case at all here. It’s obvious that the film has an extremely low-budget and that’s respectable. Most filmmakers simply do not have the massive budgets that many Hollywood horror movies have these days, and so you have to use whatever money you have to create your film. However, this causes a lot of problems when it comes to the actual “scary” scenes. They look incredibly cheap and unconvincing which is unfortunate because it’s something that Mills more than likely couldn’t have fixed. I’m sure he did the best with what he had.

Sadly though, this is still not a good movie by any means. It’s hard not to watch this film and constantly notice how, if they changed certain elements, it could have been ten times better. It’s ultimately a painfully boring, often unintentionally funny mess of a horror film.

Ouija: Blood Ritual is an uneventful and massively unscary found-footage style horror film with a recycled story and weak acting.