Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Movie Review: Ghost In The Shell

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective recreation of the original anime, which I hated.  Some cool action and a good enough story line.

With extremely rare exceptions, anime sucks.  My vague recollections of “Ghost in the Shell” from back in the day put it firmly in the suck category.  Why would I go see a real-life remake of an anime I hated?  Curiosity of how they’d bring it to the big screen, mostly, but also partly because the hybridization of humanity with bio-enhancements is an interesting concept and I wanted to see how they’d explore it.

For the “Ghost in the Shell” uninitiated, Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a first of her kind totally synthetic body merged with a human brain.  For reasons that don’t make much sense, she goes to work with a special police force to combat terrorism.  The movie starts with her creation and jumps to her being on the force where she has to investigate the systematic murders of scientists that work for the company that created her, all the while dealing with the existential crisis of being not-quite-human.

I believe that fans of the anime will be happy with the rendering of the characters to the big screen.  The entire feel of the movie is very reminiscent of anime.  The movie does the bigger than life Batou (Pilou Asbæk) and his enhanced eyes especially well and does a good job of reproducing Aramaki’s (Takeshi Kitano) hair.  The action sequences are also sufficiently anime-ish with their ridiculous plans and flawless execution.

The major downfall of the movie is the complete lack of depth to the plot.  Major is a very compelling character with a lot of background to explore, but she, and Scarlett Johansson’s superb acting ability, goes mostly unexplored except for simplistic plot points.  I know it’s asking a lot to be able to dive deep into an existential crisis in an hour and forty-five minutes, but Major ends up with as little flesh on her character as she does on her body.  And that’s a shame.

“Ghost in the Shell” is a fun movie.  There’s a lot that is left unexplored, but it can be forgotten if you just buckle up for the ride.  A word of warning, however.  There is a spider tank at the end.  And as my brother said, “I’ve never seen a good movie that features a spider tank.”  True words have never been spoken.  Also, I hate this movie because it kind of made me want to watch the anime again.

Bombing Syria Was NOT A Good Thing

My god, nothing gives Americans of all stripes more of a raging hardon than launching penis shaped objects at brown people.  The United States threw $82 million dollars at an airbase in Syria yesterday and there is lots of rejoicing from pretty much everywhere.  “Something” needed to be done, you see.  Assad killed kids with gas, you see.  Well, “something” was accomplished, I guess.  There are definitely holes in easily repairable runways now.  A bunch of hangars appear to have a layer of soot on them.  Possibly, some planes were destroyed.  Possibly, up to 16 civilians have been killed, including children.  Not that we should trust Syrian news agencies (or Trump’s word for that matter), but let that sink in.  The only reported casualties so far are civilian.  So, our grand retribution for Assad killing children might have entailed killing children.

Oh, and by the way, remember that last time Assad used gas to kill children?  Turns out that the evidence that he did so was shaky at best and the “evidence” that he did so were retracted.  This isn’t to say that he didn’t, mind you, because he’s certainly capable of it in both cases, it’s more to say that there is an almost zero percent chance that we can be assured that Assad was the culprit two days after the attack or that the air base we attacked was the genesis of the gassing.

“How can 59 Tomahawk missiles rain down on an active air base and kill no military personnel?”, you may ask.  Actually, you’re not asking that.  Why the fuck are you not asking that question?  Well, here’s the answer: We told Russia that we were going to bomb the air base and Russia, of course, told Syria, just like we expected them to.  “Why would we tell Russia?”, you may follow up.  You see, Russia is an ally of Syria and they have many troops embedded in all areas of the Syrian army.  If we bomb any Syrian facility, we need to be damned sure that there are no Russian citizens there because we are already on very shaky grounds both legally and morally, but if we happened to kill a Russian citizen, we will likely start a war.  So the best we can do is tell Assad what we are going to bomb, let him clear it out, and then bomb it.  This is the best case scenario.  Let’s go through some worse ones.

Tomahawk missiles are not precision instruments.  They’re more precision-ish.  We bombed an air base that we say contained sarin gas.  What if we had hit that storage and released the gas?  This, to me, means that we were damned sure there was no gas present at the base.  But, since we have to inform Russia, who then will inform Syria, what’s to prevent Assad from planting gas there for us to blow up?  What’s to prevent him from then saying that WE were using sarin gas in our attacks?  We are, after all, one of the few countries in the world to use weapons of mass destruction to further our goals.

As I said, we need to make damned sure we don’t kill any Russians in our attacks.  This requires informing Russia of whatever we’re going to bomb.  What’s to prevent Putin from strategically placing a few soldiers and guaranteeing Russian casualties?  The results would be catastrophic.

All this should lead anyone to the conclusion that our attack on Syria was the definition of pointless.  There is no way forward from this.  This was not a show of strength.  It was a show of helplessness to anyone that was actually paying attention.  But, boy, did we eat it up!

Book Review: The Best Of Spanish Steampunk edited by James & Marian Womack

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

I do not know who to blame for the piss poor editing in this collection of short stories.  It’s either the Womacks or whatever hack digitizer that was used to make the ebook version of the collection.  There are typos on just about every page.  Some are inconvenient like changing ‘he’ to ‘the’ and requiring a rereading of the sentence to make sense of the story, while others take multiple rereads to try to suss the original meaning.  In an original English manuscript, this would all be difficult enough, but the stories contained herein were translated from Spanish, also by the Womacks, and while they did a pretty good job, there are more than a few translational weirdnesses that make digestion even more difficult.

Another big minus to this collection is that it’s only nominally steampunk.  It’s steampunk in the same way that dude at the Renaissance Faire on Steampunk Day that is wearing a top hat with goggles attached to it is steampunk.  Most have just an amuse bouche of steampunk, a flying ship here, a gear there, a ridiculously complicated contraption tertiarily related to the plot.  That sort of thing.  None of this really bothers me, mind you, as I don’t really fall into the steampunk fiction wheelhouse, but it would certainly piss aficionados of the genre off to find out it’s more “waterpunk” than “steampunk”.

The biggest strike against the collection is the misuse of the superlative “best”.  If this is the best that Spanish steampunk has to offer and the definition of “steampunk” was stretched this thin to make up the collection, then Spanish steampunk doesn’t have much to offer.  That isn’t to say that there aren’t good stories contained therein.  There are.  But there are also no excellent stories and plenty of dullish stories.

All of the above make it very difficult to recommend this book.  The biggest frustration was definitely the crappy editing, though.  Maybe the print version is cleaner and would lead to slightly better enjoyment.  If you do decide to get this collection, definitely stay away from the ebook version.

Movie Review: Life

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Let’s watch super-intelligent scientists make super-stupid choices.  I wish this movie would die.

“Life” starts with incredibly bad science and works its way down from there.  A probe coming back from Mars with soil samples has malfunctioned and is spinning out of control towards the International Space Station where it was supposed to dock.  The only correct solution to this problem is to move the station out of the way and feel bad about the destruction of some, possibly, really good science.  That’s not the direction they decide to go because there’s a movie going on here and that would make it a very short movie.  Instead, they decide to send an astronaut outside the station and have him use the station’s claw arm to play catch with Mars’ 10,000+ miles per hour fastball.  And they catch it.  Of course.  This scene does not further the  plot in the least.  It’s only value is to warn science nerds that this movie is going to more resemble Trump Administration science than reality.

Despite astronomic odds, this minuscule soil sample happens to contain exactly one single celled organism.  There is life on other planets!  The world celebrates!  The organism appears to be alive but in suspended animation.  Send in our biologist, who also happens to be paraplegic.  Now, there is no way any space agency in the world is going to send a paraplegic biologist up in space to do a job that any biologist could do despite the scene where they establish that this biologist is one of a kind and is literally the only person that can do this job.  I can forgive that just because it’s kind of cool how they get into a little bit about what it would be like to be paraplegic in space.  What I can’t forgive is using his lack of use of his legs as one of the most inane plot points in movie making history.  But I digress.  This one-of-a-kind biologist then goes on to treat the ever-growing organism, which shows pretty high intelligence, like a pet with nary a bat of the eyelash from the rest of the crew.  This, despite the fact that the sole purpose of one of the scientists is to maintain “firewalls” which basically means protocols to make sure whatever life they find doesn’t escape from the quarantine zones established.  And all the time, me thinking, “Oh, they’d either freeze or kill that thing right now”, throughout.

Needless to say, the now monster escapes and runs amuck.  We are then treated to a cycle of “there it is”, “let’s stop it”, “oh, it’s got me”, “I’ll save you”, “you’re dead”, “run away”, all the while the biologist lamenting on how this super-intelligent, highly adaptive predator is only killing because it has to, despite all evidence the thing leaves behind to the contrary.  We are then treated to a “final firewall”, that for some reason was kept completely secret from all but the one “firewall” crew member, part of whose fulfillment entails a manned Soyuz capsule when an unmanned one would have easily performed the same function.  Then there’s a bit of a twist and, mercifully, the credits.

If you can throw away science and common sense, this might actually be a good horror film.  I, sadly, cannot.  I prefer my nonsensical horror films to contain horny teenagers at summer camp.  All teenagers make stupid mistakes.

Movie Review: Get Out

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective horror/suspense film that keeps you guessing and doubles as a biting social commentary on being Black in America.

“Get Out” has a wonderfully simple premise: Black man going to visit white girlfriend’s parents for the first time.  So it basically starts as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and then morphs into a horror film.  The Black man in this case is not Sidney Poitier, but Daniel Kaluuya who is every bit as good an actor as Sidney Poitier.  Seriously, I think an entire acting class could be taught about Kaluuya’s facial expressions in this movie.  I think I could just watch him reacting to racist micro-aggressions all day except for the fact that is a horrible thing to wish upon anyone.  And if Daniel Kaluuya looks familiar to you, you might be a “Black Mirror” fan.  He’s the lead in the episode where everyone is biking for credits.  If you’ve never seen “Black Mirror”, you should.

The movie was written and directed by Jordan Peele of “Key & Peele” fame.  While Peele has written tons of stuff, “Get Out” is his directorial debut and he really couldn’t have asked for a better result.  He transitions the movie from socially horrifying to horror movie horrifying wonderfully and I’m not sure I can really point to where the movie became a horror film.  Probably the silent auction.  In doubly awesome news for Peele, he is also the first Black director to ever have his first film reach the $100 million mark.  Maybe Hollywood will start taking Black actors and directors more seriously now.  One can hope.

Also starring in the film is Bradley Whitford whom I just love.  I didn’t know going into the film that he was in it and it was a nice surprise.  You may remember Whitford from “The West Wing” where he played Josh Lyman.  You also may currently be pining over having a competent President like Jed Bartlett in the White House.

“Get Out” is an incredibly effective horror film and if you’re a fan of the genre, you really owe it to yourself to go see it.  The movie has it all, biting social commentary, wonderful acting, legitimately scary moments, and an actual good ending.

Movie Review: The LEGO Batman Movie

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An entertaining enough addition to the LEGO universe. Contains plenty of Moments inside an ok story.

It’s hard to fill the shoes of “The LEGO Movie” and “The LEGO Batman Movie” just can’t do it.  In many ways this is unfair.  “The LEGO Movie” was lightning in a bottle that somehow made an hour and a half commercial both meaningful and enjoyable.  But comparisons are inevitable and “The LEGO Batman Movie” is like the son that you’re still proud of, but your other son is Barack Obama.

The movie itself is very good at creating Moments, just like its predecessor was.  There are all sorts of side gags and obscure references and plays on words to the point that if you’re not paying attention, you’ll likely miss them.  A fun time could be had discussing the Moments you remember vs the Moments your friends remember.  The story is kind of blah, though, so there’s not the coherence of Moments like there was in the original.  Add to that action sequences that are a little too visually loud and you get a meh movie.  Despite that, the voice acting was wonderful, including Will Arnett (Batman), the lovable loser Michael Cera (Robin), Rosario Dawson (Batgirl), and Ralph Fiennes (Alfred).  Really, the only acting miss was Zack Galifianakis as Joker, which at times was good, but at others seemed a little awkward.  But then again, everyone will always complain about anyone who is not Jack Nicholson or Heath Leger or Mark Hamill playing Joker.  Come to think of it, it would have been funny if Galifianakis switched between the three of them and had Batman comment on it.

“The LEGO Batman Movie” is a fun enough movie and still worth seeing, but again, you can only impress people so much when your brother is Barack Obama.  If you haven’t seen the original, watch this one first and I think your enjoyment will go farther.  This movie is still good for kids who I think will like it more than adults will so plop your couch potatoes in front of the TV and go do some gardening or something else sowing related while they’re being entertained.

In “only in Hollywood” news, I saw the movie while in LA visiting my friend and assistant editor extraordinaire, Sally O’Brien.  She is friends with Ben Murphy who was the assistant editor on “The LEGO Batman Movie” and he invited a bunch of people to see the movie with him.  So I got to see the movie with Sally and Ben and a bunch of other movie biz folk.  It was a wonderful experience and you should immediately hire both Ben and Sally for all your assistant editing needs.

Movie Review: Logan

Jean-Paul’s rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: A gritty, depressing look into the future of our beloved X-Men.  Combines a well crafted story with some great action scenes.  It is also a lot of fun to watch a little girl kick all sorts of ass.

The X-Men universe has never been a happy universe.  The main theme has always been mutants vs humans and how the two can learn to live peacefully.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of all the ways that can go sideways and believe me it does.  Even by those standards, “Logan” may be the most depressing entry into the X-Men universe.  It begins with Logan (Hugh Jackman) driving a limo for a living and basically drinking himself to death.  Not an easy accomplishment when your superpower is quick regeneration.  He’s basically a modern day Prometheus, but Logan’s liver is being eaten by alcohol instead of an eagle and instead of being chained to a mountain, he’s become chained to Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) who is slowly losing control of his psychic powers due to old age and dementia.  As you can see, the future is fun!

Do things get better?  Of course they don’t, they get worse.  Into Logan and Charles’ live steps Laura (Dafne Keen), the ass-kickinest girl who ever kicked ass.  Oh, the ass she kicks!  I was in absolute awe of every fight scene that Laura was in.  Violence is bad and we shouldn’t teach children to solve their problems with violence, but man did I get a thrill out of watching a girl of 10 dishing out a whirlwind of mayhem against those that got what’s coming to them.  And, boy, are there a lot of people that need their comeuppance!  *squee*

“Logan” is a movie with a story wonderfully told.  There is no beating around the bush and no watering down of a truly depressing tale.  That is a rare thing to see from Hollywood.  Besides a few minor story complaints and not being thrilled with their choice of a Big Bad, I loved this movie.  It is well worth your time and I believe it will hold up well to repeated viewings.  Sadly, this will be the last time we see either Hugh Jackman or Patrick Stewart in their respective roles, but they could not have gone out in finer style.

Movie Review: John Wick: Chapter 2

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A kind of weak story.  More than makes up for it with brilliantly choreographed violence.  I mean seriously, it’s almost art.

As the ticket taker ripped our tickets in half when we entered the theater, he emphatically proclaimed, “Best. Sequel. Ever.”  He was wrong.  But if you go to see the movie, you can understand where he was coming from.  Keanu Reeves is the action hero you have been waiting for.  Dude just mixes it up for 2 hours straight.

The second movie appears to start shortly after the first movie left off.  John Wick (Keanu Reeves) still needs to get his car back.  He does so in glorious fashion.  The action scenes in this movie were made with love and meticulous attention to detail.  It is a dance and an orgy of violence and destruction.  The comments interspersed by the Russian crime boss are just icing on the cake.  You know right away that you are in for one heck of a ride.

But then comes the story.  It’s…meh.  It gets really quickly into the mythos of the John Wick universe, which was a large part of the pleasure of the first movie and is still pretty cool in the second, but then it wraps a ridiculous story around it.  In simplest terms possible so as not to give anything away, a crime boss forces Wick to perform another assassination, because he’s an assassin and there wouldn’t be a movie without it, and then immediately double crosses Wick when the task is complete.  We can ignore the fact that the assassination was ridiculously easy despite Wick’s protestations that it was impossible, because movie.  But if you have this large underground of assassins I would think that very high on the list of rules is that you can’t then go and kill your hired help.  Apparently not.

Ignore all that though!  John Wick kicks some real ass in this film and it is glorious to watch.  This movie has probably the best action sequences since “The Matrix”, also starring Keanu Reeves.  And it finally answers my question from my original review as to why it ended so weird.  Because the second was going to start where the first left off.  And the third looks like it will do likewise.

Movie Review: A Dog’s Purpose

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: You’ll need to survive past the first half hour.  Bring tissues.

“A Dog’s Purpose” is about a dog who lives multiple lives but still retains memories of the previous life.  As it goes through those lives, it tries to make sense of why it is here and what’s the meaning of it all.  Since there are multiple lives, there are also multiple deaths.  Animal lovers, you will cry.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to get through the first half hour of the movie before you get to a fun movie.  And the first half hour is really bad.  Like, really bad.  Like, take every animal movie cliche and throw in every teenage romance cliche and condense it into a half hour of poorly written dialogue bad.  I briefly considered leaving the theater.  Thankfully (?!?!?), then the dog dies for the first time and the movie turns itself around.

The rest of the movie is cute without being saccharine.  The death scenes are only slightly sanitized for the consumption of the little ones and will ring true to anyone who has ever lost a pet.  The dog goes through a couple more reincarnations putting it in different circumstances before the movie brings the story full circle.  The ending isn’t bad, but it’s definitely disappointing.  It turns out that a dog’s purpose is to “just be there”.  I can not think of a worse message to tell people.  Given owners, all to often, a dog’s purpose should be “be anywhere else”.

The deciding factor on whether to see this movie will probably be whether you are an animal lover or not.  If they took a poll, I bet they’d find that animal lovers like the movie and others do not.  I think I can safely say that this movie is probably not nearly as good as I think it was since it used easy triggers for heartstrings pulling.  Emotional manipulation for the win!

This Is Not Normal: Day 15

Happy Black History month!  Let’s celebrate by watching Trump’s really weird speech about it.  Or him.  Mostly him.

Donald Trump’s first military action resulted in the death of two U.S. citizens , one of them an 8 year old girl,. The other was a Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a member of SEAL Team Six.  Numerous civilians were also killed in the operation.  This is every bit as abhorrent as when Obama killed a U.S. citizen, that one 16 years old.

Trump’s recent Executive Order about regulations is completely toothless.  It’s basically just a bone thrown to the Libertarian crowd who have no idea how regulations are crafted.  Almost all regulations are crafted based on laws and most can only be removed if the requisite law is overturned.

Let’s not ignore bills at the state level.  Bills like this have been growing in popularity since the GW Bush administration, but they seem to really be picking up steam under Trump’s reign.  States are passing laws that punish protestors with fines and charges for police protections that they already pay for with taxes.  This is an attempt to severely curtail free speech and will only harm those whose voices can be heard through protest.

Donald Trump has already filed the papers for reelection.  This is the earliest any sitting president has filed for reelection.  This allows Trump to start collecting donations from “supporters”.  I put “supporters” in quotes because it allows those who would like to influence his decisions a direct doorway to the presidency through financial contributions.  It also prevents non-profits from speaking negatively about him because he is now a “candidate”.  Doing so puts their non-profit status at risk.

It’s hard for me to get terribly worked up about Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch.  He’s basically exactly what you’d expect from any Republican.  That isn’t to say he’s not horrible for separation of church and state and isn’t pretty corporatist.  He is.  I’m just not sure this is a battle worth fighting.  Although, it did produce one of the more chuckle worthy tweet’s I’ve seen, “Trump shouldn’t be allowed to choose a justice in the last year of his presidency.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone that a president with no ethics whose right hand man has no ethics has ignored the federal government’s ethics watchdog by not performing any sort of ethics vetting on any of his nominees.  That’s how you get nominees like Steven Mnuchin who lie in their financial disclosure forms, because, you know, it’s easy to forget $100 million here and there.   Or Tom Price who lied about profiting by passing legislation on stocks that they are actively trading in.  This is why senate Democrats have boycotted both their committee votes.  Republicans shattered norms, again, by using a parliamentary trick to bypass Democrat participation.

Trump continues to make a mockery of the United States and violate norms on the foreign stage.  The scariest is that they turned off their recording devices during Trump’s recent call with Putin.  Because that’s exactly what you’d do when you don’t want people to know about your many ties to Russia.  Trump called Mexico’s president and basically told him that if Mexico didn’t take care if its shit, we’d invade Mexico.  Meanwhile, Trump’s war against immigrants continued apace, but this time against Australia of all places.  Trump wants to renege on a deal between the U.S. and Australia in which take some refugees off Australia’s hands, whose refugee process is  horrendous, and abusive.  In return, Australia will accept some Central and South American refugees.  It’s a great deal in which we rescue Australia’s refugees from horrendous conditions and we settle an equal amount of refugees in Australia.  And finally, Norway’s former Prime Minister was recently held at our airport because he once visited Iran.