Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: You would think that a movie about a kid’s game being played by adults would be bad. You would be wrong.

Yes, this is a movie about a bunch of grown men playing tag. Yes, you should be wondering who in their right mind would create a movie about such a thing. Yes, it seems impossible that a movie with such a premise would ever be even remotely close to good. And yet, here we are. “Tag” is a super fun and funny movie that also has heart. Whodathunkit?

The movie starts with Hogan Malloy (Ed Helms) infiltrating his friend Bob Calahan’s (Jon Hamm) company and interrupts Bob’s interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Crosby (Annabelle Wallis) in order to tag him and to get him in to the plot to get the gang together to tag the ever elusive Jerry Pierce (Jeremy Renner) who has never once been tagged it. Rebecca decides to drop her story about Bob’s company and follow this crew in their quest. The cast is rounded off by Randy Cillano (Jake Johnson) and Kevin Sable (Hannibal Buress) as the tag crew and Hogan’s extra competitive wife, Anna Mallory (Isla Fisher). All are a delight and have a great chemistry where you can actually believe that they were childhood friends.

Besides the laughs, of which there are plenty, this movie also has heart. It’s kind of emotionally manipulative the way it has heart, but it has heart nonetheless. Behind it all is the not-Ben Franklin quote, ““We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” Friendships are things to be treasured. Miles may separate you. Cities may separate you. States may separate you. Continents may separate you. Never forget who your friends are. They are the family you choose. Reach out to them today. Give me a moment, I’m all verklempt!

Yay for fun, silly movies! We can all use a bit more fun and a lot more silliness in our life and “Tag” fits the bill nicely. Get all your friends together and see this movie and rediscover what it is to go out and play! By sitting there. In the dark. In a theater. Watching a movie. I can’t remember where I was going with this.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Nothing great. Nothing horrible. Acting is meh. Except for Donald Glover. He rocks. Some scenes were cool. Some were annoying. Some made no sense.

So yeah, they did a Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) movie and it was fine. There’s really not much else to say about it. The movie puts to the big screen almost every throw away line uttered by Han Solo during Episodes IV-VI with some extra thrown in to show how Han met Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo).

The end.

Ok, not really.

The acting in the movie is pretty shaky all around except for Donald Glover’s Lando. Boy, did he Billy Dee the heck out of Lando! He had ALL that casual cool. I look forward to Donald Glover’s future Colt 45 commercials and they really need to do a Lando movie. The rest of the cast is effective at times and downright bad at times. They can be somewhat forgiven for this because the script can generously be called pretty good for a Star Wars script. There is one exception to the bad acting and that would be L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who was just about perfect as a feisty droid’s rights droid. Though some people who shall remain nameless and are CLEARLY wrong thought L3 was annoying.

And speaking of annoying, here is an incomplete list of all the things that annoyed me about this movie: the entire beginning, the escape from Corellia, the Kessel run, that stupid space monster, whatever the heck that stupid sliding move was that they did to the Millennium Falcon, what they did to L3, the double crosses (ok, I kind of love/hated this), the Jedi that appears with absolutely no explanation, Han speaking Wookie (though in fairness, this was pretty hilarious).

I don’t really see this movie as much worth watching unless you are a Star Wars fan. It’s a good movie for the Star Wars universe, but there’s not much value add as a one off movie for someone to just go see. But yes, if you like the Star Wars universe, this is a pretty fun background story to one of your favorite characters.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Incredibly weird introductory short. Main movie has moments, but often feels lost. The Jack Jack stuff is fun and inventive as is the final fight sequence.

Let’s talk about “Bao”, shall we? There’s going to be some pretty big SPOILERS here because I don’t know how else to talk about this short without revealing the big moment so skip this paragraph if you’d rather not know. “Bao” is the introductory short that has become a mainstay of the Pixar universe. Boy, is it weird. And depressing. A Chinese woman makes bao (Chinese dumplings) for her husband who quickly devours them and leaves her to go to work.Feeling ignored and sad, she eats her bao alone. Her last Bao suddenly comes alive and anthropomorphizes. She raises the Bao from infancy to adulthood in a series of touching vignettes. When the Bao brings home a white girlfriend and is going to leave with her to start its own life. She begs and pleads with the Bao to stay, but the Bao insists on leaving. Instead of allowing this to happen, the woman eats the Bao. Holy crap, yes, she just ate the Bao! WTF?!?! She immediately regrets it and is super sad about it, but the damage is done. The Bao is gone. It is all then revealed to be a dream as her real son who looks very much like the Bao comes home with his white girlfriend and mother and son reconcile and they all make bao together. There is so much to unpack here. First off, let it be said that I am not remotely “Bao”‘s target audience; no kids, no plans to have any, and I abhor parental possessiveness as if children are something you own. But while the plot did not speak to me, there is a lot to learn from the short. Chinese culture permeates “Bao”. There’s the woman’s marriage, the woman’s possessiveness, the woman’s downright rancor at the son going out with a white girl, and I’m sure many other aspects that I just don’t understand. The best thing about “Bao” is how refreshingly honest it is. It is also the first Pixar short directed by a female, which is awesome/sad. Out of 20 films, just one woman. Maybe that will change now.

On to “Incredibles 2”! I have less to say about this one. It was, at points, fun, but there was a lot of setup and the plot is kind of see-through. It is definitely one of Pixar’s lesser endeavors. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching, though. Everything with Jack Jack is hilarious and well choreographed. The family dynamic is interesting, if a little stereotypical. They get into the inherent sexism of that stereotyping, though, which is nice. The final fight scene is pretty darned cool as all the various Supers use their powers in interesting ways. Of course, we have to ignore that there was a much simpler solution to the entire problem to see it all, but whatevs!

Somewhat surprisingly, the children in the theater (of which there were unsurprisingly many) really seemed to dig the movie despite what I considered slowness. At least one parent also really liked the movie as she laughed loudly at just about everything. Her laughter was often more funny than what was occurring on screen. So yeah, kids like it, parents like it, I thought it was fine and worth seeing. Even Pixar’s poorer attempts tend to be good enough to be worth seeing. What else is there to say?