If you’re going to re-imagine a bit of written fiction through film, and if you plan to treat the source material as canonical inspiration for an amendment of that same canon, you’re setting a high bar for yourself.

Goosebumps clears it.  Pan does not.

I’ll grant that Pan had a higher bar to clear, what with Barrie’s work being a century-plus-ten-percent old. Still, Goosebumps has been part of the popular consciousness for many moviegoers’ entire lives, so for those folks, both have been around for as long as they can remember.

Pan was clumsy. It was a very by-the-numbers origin story painted over the top of the heroic monomyth, and as others have already said, its biggest mistake was giving us a Peter Pan who was kind, brave, and heroic. That’s not really who Peter Pan IS. Not really.

I have neither time nor patience to enumerate the other mistakes. Pan was pretty, but it made an absolute mess of its mythos, and was head-scratchy and disturbing in the wrong ways (“why did they even MAKE this movie?”) rather than the right ways (“oh, this says so much about the parallels between innocence and evil…”)

Goosebumps, on the other hand, went way out on a limb and gave us a single meta-story in which all of the Goosebumps stories share canon.  To its infinite credit, I did not think of Jumanji even one time while in the theater. If you’re going to borrow a high concept, this is a sure sign you’re pulling it off correctly.

Goosebumps is more of a spooky-action-comedy than a “horror” movie, but the trailers make that pretty clear. Yes, there are creepy dolls and jump scares, but there’s also a lot of running around and successfully DOING things, which makes everything less horrible. The performances were all solid, and Jack Black was very entertaining to watch.

Fun-wise, Pan enters my 2015 list at #26, below the Threshold of Disappointment. Goosebumps comes in at #17, which is respectable, but still not above the Threshold of Awesome.

I was pretty sure I didn’t actually need a cinematic event to convince me not to put climbing  Everest on my bucket list, but I’m extra convinced now.

The film was powerful, and beautiful, and tragic. The various accounts of May 10, 1996’s disastrous Everest ascents have appeared in at least half a dozen books, but I doubt the books can convey the story in the way IMAX 3D can. The filmmakers used some cinematic shorthand to make the tale fit a single sitting, of course, but I think they did the story justice.

I came home with a nice feeling regarding my own objectives in life. Climbing to the summit of a really tall mountain is an obvious sort of “look at me” thing, but the overwhelming majority of human people shouldn’t need that specific accomplishment to feel complete. It serves as a nice symbol, and let’s just leave it at that while we get on with doing the things that are important to us.

Everest‘s emotional arc pretty much precluded record-setting “fun,” but I did enjoy the film. It enters my list at #17.

Let’s get this out of the way.  The Transporter: Refueled, is 2002’s The Transporter, rebooted. It’s not really a refueling of the franchise, and I can’t help but think “booting” as that thing with the wheel lock that allows parking enforcement to impound a car in place while they wait for a tow-truck.

There came a point in the movie when I had the feeling that it had been going on too long, because I was getting kind of bored. I checked my watch. That was the 68-minute mark. This is a good litmus test for a movie that is failing to entertain me.

We have a kitchen-sink arsenal of “stylish action movie” tropes here: mysterious femmes fatales, murderous Eastern European mobsters, career prostitutes who look like supermodels, a grizzled ex-spy, the French Riviera, impossible vehicle physics, and an amoral hero who is very good at everything he does.

In this stylish action movie the filmmakers fuse an underdog heist with the high-concept of  2002’s The Transporter. Our overpaid, overdressed, over-trained automobile courier gets drawn into a scheme that runs contrary to his contractual code, and of which he is merely a player, not a planner.

How well does it work? There were some really cool moments in the film, like the hydrant scene from the trailers which is what got me to plunk down money for tickets. Ultimately it was too linear and predictable for a heist, and there were not enough car scenes for the Transporter franchise. The villains were cardboard cutouts, our female leads were presented in a way that made them unfortunately interchangeable, and the extremely skilled actor who was told to fill Jason Statham’s shoes seemed to be doing everything right with the part, while not actually seeming right FOR the part.

A three-word summation of the film’s failures is “style over substance.” The Transporter: Rebooted falls below my Threshold of Disappointment, entering my 2015 list ranked at #23, a position that suggests it was not as much fun as Minions, but was more enjoyable than the numerical F-twins, Fantastic Four and Furious Seven.

(Note: Several of this year’s films have played directly into the super-spy genre: Spy, The Man from Uncle, Kingsman: the Secret Service, Mission Impossible—Rogue Nation, American Ultra, Hitman: Agent 47, and now The Transporter: Refueled. They’re not interchangeable, but if I wanted to ruin the genre for someone, I’d make them watch all of those during a movie-marathon weekend.)