As we speak Jaume Collet-Serra‘s The Shallows has a Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings of 76% and 56%, respectively, while Gary Ross‘s The Free State of Jones has a 53% rating on Metacritic and a 33% on RT. Which seems slightly unfair. The Shallows is a total throwaway while Jones is at least trying to be serious and substantial. It’s not a bad film — it just isn’t radical or special enough.

I agree with the complaints about Jones that some critics have brought up. Too much of a white savior movie. Decently done (realistic milieu, nice battle scenes) but feels a bit rote. It places Matthew McConaughey on too high a pedestal with one too many noble speeches. A respectable TNT-level history drama.

I saw Jones last night. This morning I told a critic friend that “it didn’t offend me as much as I was expecting, given all the pans. My general view was ‘well, this isn’t great but it’s not exactly bad either.’ It felt to me like a mezzo-mezzo thing, a dutiful historical drama that doesn’t really tarnish cinema culture or create something odious that needs to be strongly argued against or suffocated.

“More often than not I was shrugging my shoulders. I was telling myself, ‘Well, at least it’s a lot better than Ross’s Hunger Games.'”

Critic friend: “I think that’s exactly right. It’s not offensive, or even egregiously bad. It’s just…kinda dull.”

There’s a familiar Hollywood two-step process that famous plus-sized or zaftig women have gone through. I’m thinking of Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Hudson, Gabourey Sidibe and Kate Winslet of the mid to late ’90s (i.e, “Kate Weighs-a-lot”). Step #1 is about acceptance and self-love, step #2 is about “look at the new me!” Step #1 is “I am who I am…get used to it because I love myself and my womanhood, and all the body shamers out there can kiss my ass.” Step #2 is “okay, I did step #1 but I might be looking at a shorter life span if I don’t exercise more and watch my diet. Plus I want to be around when my kids grow up.”

Melissa McCarthy in 2011’s Bridesmaids.

Shot sometime earlier this year or in late ’15.

Today’s McCarthy looks seriously great compared to the woman she was in Bridesmaids. Hudson was step #1 when she was doing press for Dreamgirls eight years ago, but she’s blown that off and then some. Sidibe has also cut down on whatever she was doing that made her morbidly obese when she filmed Precious. Sooner or later Amy Schumer, who embraces the step #1 mindset when she talks to the press about her zaftig-ness, will follow in their path. Ditto Lena Dunham. You can be a step #1 practitioner from your 20s to mid 30s, but you have to cut that shit out as you approach your 40s.

Jaume Collet-Serra‘s The Shallows is relatively inoffensive for the first…what, 25 minutes? Lulling, I mean. A tropical Mexican (actually Australian) surfside setting. Brief glimpses of Blake Lively‘s tanned bikini bod. A tranquil, crescent-shaped cove under radiant blue skies. Hefty surfer swells rolling in.

And then the dumb shark tale begins, and it gradually gets harder and harder to accept. The big ending, trust me, is ludicrous. But it’s a fairly lightweight, see-it-and-forget-about-it thing. I didn’t hate it. I just sat there and smirked. Okay, a single shock cut made me jump but that’s it.

The film pretty much rests on Blake’s shoulders, and to be fair she delivers as well as can be expected. She works it, I mean. Gives her all in conveying the fear, panic and pain. It’s the damn shark I didn’t care for, or more precisely his behavior. This is one determined predator who wants to feed, yes, but his main purpose is to eat Blake Lively. She does what she can to elude and survive, but Sharky-poo won’t quit. “I’m really after you, bikini babe with the Oakland booty…I can’t wait to sink my teeth into your flank!”

In this American Masters clip from a 2006 segment called “Marilyn: Still Life,” Gloria Steinem talks about the doomed Marilyn Monroe and how she might have been saved by the women’s movement if she’d somehow lasted until the late ’60s or better yet the early ’70s. I can’t find the URL but I wrote something similar two or three years ago, about how Monroe might have felt less trapped or certainly more understood if she’d managed to stay afloat until the arrival of ’60s freak culture and everything that followed. Or maybe not. Monroe was so brutally abused by her mentally-unstable mother that she might never have found stability under any condition.

But living with feelings of vulnerability and putting yourself through contortions to live up to expectations of the opposite gender has never been a women-only thing. I went through a lot of this in my 20s and especially my 30s — job anxiety, creative failure, crash-and-burn love affairs, being found wanting for fickle or substantial reasons, heartbreak and anger over the constant ‘no, no, no, no, no’ of things — and a lot of it was truly hellish. The Steinem narrative is that women of her generation (reared in the ’40s and’50s, early adulthood in the ’60s and ’70s) had it much tougher than guys of that era. Maybe they did but life is never a picnic for anyone. It haunts from all sides, cradle to grave.

In yet another N.Y. Times piece about Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters (Sony/Columbia, 7.15) and the sight-unseen loathing by hardore, mostly-male fanboys, Dave Itzkoff asks the four leads — Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones — to analyze the adversity.

But before I quote from it, it’s important to reiterate that while I took an instant dislike to this film based on the trailers, I’ve never said to myself “the original over-worshipped 1984 film shouldn’t be remade as a girl thing.” My reaction from the get-go has been (1) “the trailers have suggested there isn’t anything the least bit funny in this film” and (2) “I’m getting a sense that it’s CG-driven if not CG-dominated, and there’s nothing less funny than being carpet-bombed by expensive CG.”

Itzkoff: Was there a point at which you noticed that because of the film’s premise and because the leads were female, some subset of your audience was not happy?

McCarthy: You mean the crazy people?

Jones: You mean the people that don’t know that it’s a movie?

Wells interjection: In other words the proper attitude in Jones’ view should be “it’s just a movie so sit back and chill.” There are some who look at moviegoing this way, as a check-your-brain diversion. And there are many, of course, who go to movies for a kind of theme-park experience…CG, CG and more CG. But there are others who would never say movies are “just” anything. They regard theatres as churches and movies as experiences that might, if the moviegoer is lucky, deliver intensity, enhancement and even joy, even if the film in question is apparently some dumb flick about fighting ghosts. They regard movies as experiences that can potentially cleanse your soul (at least temporarily), that can deliver the kind of emotional devastation that rarely seems to happen in real life, that might even take the viewer on some kind of transcendent voyage. It would appear that Jones is not one of these people, but the Ghostbusters haters, trust me, are made of almost nothing but moviegoers like this.

In response to the BBC ballot that people are responding to all over, here are my top…I can’t. I can’t choose ten.  Here are my top 42 (but in no particular order): Manchester By The Sea, Leviathan, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Zero Dark Thirty, A Separation, Moneyball, The Social Network, The Fighter, Zodiac, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, Children of Men, Adaptation, City of God, The Pianist, The Lives of Others, Sexy Beast, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Collateral, Dancer in the Dark, A Serious Man, Girlfight, The Departed, In the Bedroom, Talk to Her, Bloody Sunday, No Country For Old Men, The Quiet American, Whale Rider, Open Range, Touching the Void, Maria Full of Grace, Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, Man on Wire, Che and Volver.

“Sometimes you have to do something out of the ordinary. Sometimes you have to make a way out of no way. We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time. Now is the time to get in the way. We will be silent no more. The time for silence is over.” — Rep. John Lewis speaking this afternoon on the House floor, just prior to the gun legislation sit-in.

From 6.22 N.Y. Times story, “House Democrats Stage Sit-In to Push for Action on Gun Control,” by David M. Herszenhorn and Emmarie Huettaman:

“While the speeches in the House chamber veered all around the gun-control issue, making it difficult at times to ascertain what specific legislative action protesters wanted, a spokesman for the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said Democrats were seeking votes on measures similar to two proposals by Democratic senators that failed to advance in the Senate.

“One of those sought to restrict gun sales to people on the government’s terrorism watch list, while the second would expand and toughen background checks for gun buyers. Those two measures were defeated on Monday in the Senate, along with Republican alternatives.

I don’t how it happened, but sometime during the 20th Century an observation about African American women caught on and became legend. The legend is that certain ladies of this heritage (i.e., those with a little meat on their bones and who aren’t slender as bankside reeds) have hefty, haunchy, cow-sized asses. This cruel stereotype needs to removed from public consciousness. Blake Lively found this out last month when she posted an Instagram of her front and back with a caption that read “L.A. face with an Oakland booty.” Why Lively wasn’t immediately brought up on charges I’ll never know, but where did she get the idea she can just body-shame with impugnity? If it were my call she would be feeling the wrath of the p.c. court right now. There are no “Oakland” booties — there are only beautiful variations of the female form, and anyone who’s catty and cheap enough to suggest…I refuse to discuss it any further.

I knew after watching last February’s two-hour Vinyl pilot that it was toast. If asked I would’ve told HBO executives to pull the plug then and there. But no — they hung in there, tried to create buzz by offering free episodes on HBO Now, approved a second season and then changed their minds and pulled the plug.

Here’s what I wrote 17 weeks ago: I sat through Martin Scorsese‘s two-hour Vinyl pilot last night, and I’m sorry, man, but it didn’t quite cut it for me. Here and there, yes, but overall no. The greatest rock music era was not the glitter-trash early ’70s but the mythical explosion-and-transformation period between ’64 and ’68 — the arc that began with Motown, early British invasion (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, etc.), schmaltz and bubble-gum succumbing or getting swallowed or pushed aside by Bob Dylan and folk rock finessings and then the Yardbirds and the Velvet Underground and early-to-advanced psychedelia. (And don’t forget the Boxtops!)

I’m also unable to believe in a loud, crude, non-levitational guy named Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) as a kind of electric talent-spotting, trend-spotting savant. Cannavale has been playing none-too-bright New Jersey goombah types for too long to attempt this kind of transition, and I just didn’t care what happened to him or what he lucked into or what new rock group is about to restore his faith in rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t mean to sound harsh or dismissive but I didn’t like or care about anyone.

This Benicio del Toro Heineken commercial (which is over three months old) is all but ruined by two things. One, the tourist couple with the GoPro camera gleefully announcing that they’ve run into Antonio Banderas and two, the parenthetical statement that “this is not Antonio Banderas.” If the whole Banderas thing had been dropped and if the couple knew it was Benicio, the look of deflation and disgust on Benicio’s face would have been perfect because it would have said “God, I hate tourist low-lifes who take selfies and can’t contain themselves.” Instead it says “Jesus, I thought I was well-known but not so much, I guess.” The contempt-for-humanity thing is hilarious because we all feel the same way. (Okay, I do.) But the “gee, I’m not as famous as I thought I was” is on the level of a Bob Hope one-liner from the ’50s.

It feels like decades since Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) directed a major narrative film. It’s actually been three and a half years since ZDT, but it feels like a whole lot longer. First there was talk about Bigelow and producer-writer Mark Boal (i.e., the entity once known as “Biggie-Boal”) collaborating on Triple Frontier, a South American drug dealing movie that might’ve starred Tom Hanks, but that went south. Then she was planning to direct a Bowe Bergdhal film but who wants to watch a movie about a flaky deserter who was held by the Taliban for five years? In any event the Bergdahl thing has been temporarily shelved in lieu of his court martial yet to happen and his story being incomplete.

Bigelow and Boal are currently planning a 1967 Detroit riots film — presumably shooting this summer or early fall for an Oscar-bait release next year. Why am I doubting that a 2017 release will happen? Because John Boyega was just announced as a cast member, and it’s nearly July. The Detroit riots happened in mid-summer weather.

When’s Bigelow going to start shooting? I’m told that “Untitled Kathryn Bigelow Film” has been casting day players and soliciting background in Boston via CP Casting, and that the shoot is slated for late July thru September. Then again the last few years have taught us that Bigelow works in slow-mo time. Prepare fully and painstakingly, dig in, get it right. If I were around I would be whispering in her ear like that slave whispering to the Roman conqueror, “All glory is fleeting….life is short, hubba-hubba, no slacking off.”