Challengers and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

To my disappointment my friends changed our movie plans last weekend, instead of seeing The Fall Guy we went to see Challengers. My friends were quite excited by Zendaya in the trailer and wanted to see her newest outing. Two hours and eleven minutes later my friends opinion on Zendaya had changed.

Challengers is about Tashi, a tennis prodigy, who meets Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig, who are best friends that both have a huge crush on her. Eventually Tashi becomes injured on the court after an argument with Zweig who had become her boyfriend. She then ends up marrying Donaldson who was there for her after her injury. She becomes his coach and Donaldson and Zweig stop being friends.

Donaldson becomes a multi-slam winning player and Zweig continues his career but never achieves anything. Donaldson loses his confidence towards the end of his career and enters in a small challenger to help him get back to winning. Things go bad for him and his wife when they find out that Zweig is also taking part in the challenger. Zweig presents a challenge to Donaldson’s path to winning and to his marriage.

Now the way I describe the movie it actually sounds good, unfortunately it was not. While there is a love triangle where both guys like Zendaya’s character the movie instead makes viewers think that they are more interested in each other. This is not how the marketing made the movie look and was not what we were expecting going to watch it.

On top of this the story felt very annoying as Zendaya’s character was always acting angry but then would change her mind and make bad decisions the whole time.

I feel like this movie really showed that my opinion about Zendaya is credible. She is very overacted. She got her start on Disney playing too very self confident characters on different shows. These characters really mirror how she is in real life. As she has gone on to be in movies she has basically played herself in each movie. She has been in three Spider-man movies, two Dune movies, several animated movies and just two original movies besides Challengers. Each of these movies she plays a cocky character who thinks they are always right. This has gotten annoying and she has been my least favorite character in many of these movies. I hope that the film industry starts to recognize this and she either changes her acting or gets less roles.

The soundtrack of the movie was very annoying. It was so bad that over time it became a joke in the theater to my friends and I. About every 10 minutes the movie would stop having sound and would just have really intense club music, as the movie went on we would start making the sound of the beat for each other when we thought it was about to pick up in the movie, we were right every time (There were only four other people in the theater and we did not sit near them so this was not bothering them).

A few points of the movie were actually a tad bit funny but I do not feel like that was the intention of the movie as the other people in the theater did not laugh. I think we just thought it was so stupid that we were laughing.

As we left the movie I asked the other people in the theater what they thought about it, they sat there for about a minute thinking before saying, “it was alright”. I think this is a good indicator that they were disappointed as well.

If you had thought about going to see this movie I definitely suggest you think twice about it and consider either The Fall Guy, the new Planet of the Apes movie or Civil War.

I believe that this weekend my friends and I are going to see the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. One of our other friends are getting married on Friday so we have not decided if we will then do something Saturday night too.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set several years after the reign of Caesar. At this time a young ape goes on a journey that leads him to question all that he has been told about the past. He begins to make choices that will

define a future for apes and humans alike.

Before this week I had never seen the Planet of the Apes movies, I had always wanted to but they were not on a streaming service that I had. Luckily Hulu recently added them so I was able to get caught up on the story.

I really liked these movies, it was interesting to see how the relationship between humans and monkeys changed over time. Going into this movie it looks like humans and monkeys have changed roles as the apes now rule the world.

The trailers for the movie look very good. The CGI for the monkeys look very realistic and the action looks like it will be exciting.

It does not look like there will be too many returning characters from the Caesar saga. It looks like the main human in the movie may have been a baby in the older films.

Production companies have made it seem like this should be a big hit as only two smaller movies are releasing this weekend as other movies will try to avoid the first weekend battle in the box office.

Besides Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the two new movies that release are Not Another Church Movie and The Image of You.

Not Another Church Movie is about Taylor Pherry who is commanded by God to write a movie inspired by his crazy, dysfunctional family, but the devil has his own plans. This movie is a spoof on Tyler Perry and the Madea movies. Jamie Foxx and Mickey Rourke star in the movie.

The Image of You is about identical twins Anna and Zoe. When Anna meets a stock trader she thinks he is perfect. Zoe does not trust him so she begins to discover the truth about him.

The box office was topped by The Fall Guy this weekend. It had a weekend gross of $28M. I think this movie could beat out Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes next weekend at the box office. If it doesn’t then it will at least be second. Over its first full week of release it has grossed $34M.

A re-release ended up taking the second spot in the box office, this was Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. This movie was re-released for May the 4th and for its 25th anniversary. This was one of the most successful re-releases of all times as it had a weekend gross of $8.7M taking its total gross to $485M. It was cool to see people going to see this when we were at the theater, we saw a kid who had never seen it before come out so excited about the movie.

Challengers fell to third in the box office (I hope it keeps falling) with a weekend gross $7.6M. Over two weeks of release it has grossed $32M.

Tarot took fourth in the box office. This movie has received pretty bad reviews so I am surprised that it even made it on this list. It had a debut weekend gross of $6.5M and has grossed $8.1M over it’s first full week of release.

The final spot in the top five belongs to Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It had a weekend gross of $4.5M and has grossed $189M over six weeks of release. I think that next weekend may be the first weekend that it falls out of the top five, if not it will for sure drop in two weeks.

I wanted to add a special review of a show I have been watching recently. This show is The Bear which streams on Hulu.

The Bear follows Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto who once ran the most successful kitchen in the country, he now runs The Original Beef of Chicagoland which is a family business that he took over after the death of his brother.

The first season follows Camry as he gets used to the restraint and works with his new staff to bring The Beef back to what it was when his brother first ran it.

At first I was really not into the show, I felt like it bounced around too much and did not focus on any of the storylines. The final three episodes of the season turned this around and got me really into it as it started to tie everything together and finally answered a lot of questions about Carmy, his brother and his staff.

The acting on the show is very good, each character has an interesting background which makes them feel real. Jeremy Allen White who plays Carmy, Ebon Moss-bachrach who plays Carmy’s cousin Richie and Lionel Boyce who plays Marcus are all my highlights of the show.

It is really cool for me to see Lionel play an important role on a successful show. He has really grown in his career. He got his start on Loiter Squad, a tv show that was made by his friend, Tyler the Creator. On this show they would do dumb pranks and sketches, now he is on an award winning show.

I have one more episode left to watch in season two, so far this season has been even better as each episode has focused on a specific character to help show their background a bit more. A special episode of season two was episode 6 “Fishes”. This episode was set in the past which helped connect everything together letting the viewers understand what the characters went through before being where they are now.

The best episode of the show so far was season 2 episode 7. This episode focussed on “cousin” Richie as he went to work at the top restraunt in the world for a week to help him learn. This episode really showed a lot about one of the most complex characters on the show.