Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A visually gorgeous movie with great acting and a middling story.  Ploddingly long at points.  How can you make plagues boring?

Given that a vast majority of the population of the United States is either Christian or Jewish, the story of Exodus will be familiar.  Moses grows up like an Egyptian prince, later finds out he’s a Hebrew, gets told by god to free his people from Egyptian slavery, leads his people to the promised land.  Throw in some plagues and you got yourself the basics of the movie.

Visually, the movie was stunning.  Given, life at that time was much harder, more brutal, and shorter than any of us would be comfortable with, but man, would I want to see Memphis in its prime.  I don’t know how much historical accuracy Ridley Scott went for in portraying it, but it was beautiful.  It is too bad, the visuals were the best part of the movie.

The acting was great, as you would expect from a movie starring Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley, and Sigourney Weaver.  The kid who played Yahweh was also quite good, though I can’t seem to find his name.  There was this one part where he goes all Old Testament that was just exceptional.

None of that can make up for the plodding length of the movie, however.  Weighing in at 150 minutes, much of the movie just goes from scene to scene without much background and often leaves you wondering why things happened the way they did.  The missing background, like Moses’ youth, would have made a much better story.  Also surprising was how boring the plagues were.  They seem to have been an afterthought of the movie.  It went kind of like this: story, story, story, story, plaaaaaaaaagues, overly long death of the firstborn, story, anticlimactic Red Sea showdown, story, story.  Yes, there was a completely pointless rationalization of the plagues thrown in the middle somewhere, but that didn’t seem to fit at all.

This one’s difficult to recommend.  There’s some good stuff, but I’m not sure it’s really worth the time investment.  Oh, and you can ignore all the biblical criticisms of the movie that you read.  Yes, liberties were taken, but choosing Moses to speak to a child-god just makes dramatic sense.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Eddie Redmayne has an uncanny likeness to Stephen Hawking.  Not much science.  Parts of the movie were engrossing, parts plodding.  Somewhat annoying soundtrack.

Stephen Hawking is an amazing individual and without a doubt one of the top minds so far in the 21st century.  He has also led, as you can imagine, a very complicated personal life.  This movie focuses more on the personal life than his life as a cosmologist.  At heart, this movie is a love story with maddeningly tiny bits of science intertwined throughout.  In the movie’s defense, what Hawking works on is well over the top of most lay people, including myself, and it does a pretty good job of describing the science it delves into so that most people can at least conceptualize it.

I am not sure how true to life the movie is.  It is based on an autobiography by Jane Hawking, Stephen’s love interest in the movie.  Having read things about the Hawkings’ personal life in the past, I get the feeling that this movie represents the sugar-coated, lipstick-on-a-pig version of the real story.  Not that I’d blame anyone for trying to put a better face on what is undoubtedly a compelling story regardless of the glossing over of sordid details.

It was amazing watching Eddie Redmayne portray the degeneration of Stephen Hawking from awkward nerd to the wheelchair-bound, speech-synthesized professor most of us are familiar with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ravages his body.  Equally amazing, but easily overlooked, was Felicity Jones’ portrayal of Jane Hawking.  If this were a better movie, I’d say they would both be nominated for various awards.

The pacing of the movie was somewhat awkward.  One could be so inclined to say that this was on purpose and represented Hawking’s awkwardness as his ALS took over his body, but I’m guessing that was not the intent.  Much of the awkwardness in the movie, I think, is due to the halting soundtrack.  Most of the more compelling parts of the movie are shot with emotion capturing silence, while others have a not out-of-place, but not quite fitting soundtrack that suddenly launches which, for me, almost always detracted from the scene.  Then there were the parts that were likely necessary, but lasted a bit too long so your interest would wane slightly.

All in all, though, this was a good biopic of the Hawking family.  They are certainly an intriguing family on many levels.  I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone.  There is no need to see this movie in the theaters, though, so save your money and wait for it to come to the small screen of your home.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: As good as or better than “Catching Fire”.  More great acting.  More great design.  For once, a movie where I get the bland, interchangeable, good-looking men confused.

And we’ve come to the final book of the “Hunger Games” series.  The studios, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to split the final book into two movies because money.  This is always something to be wary of, but there’s enough material in “Mockingjay Part 1” to make it both enjoyable and to leave you guessing as to what will happen when Part 2 comes out.

If you recall from my “Catching Fire” review, I’ve been looking forward to seeing “Mockingjay”.  “Catching Fire” had a lot to recommend itself and I’m happy to see that “Mockingjay” is a worthy successor in the series.  Whereas I though there was some silliness in “Catching Fire”, there was none of that in “Mockingjay”.  “Mockingjay” was also more internally consistent, which I assume is what you get when you have two movies to tell your story.

Once again, we have some superb acting jobs by the inestimable Donald Sutherland (President Snow) and by the better every time you see her Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss).  In fact, there’s a scene in this movie where Jennifer Lawrence has to pretend to act poorly and you totally believe it.  So yeah, she acts really well acting poorly.  That’s talent.  New to the series in Julian Moore who portrays President Coin very effectively.  It is also good to see the now deceased Phillip Seymore Hoffman back as Plutarch Heavensbee (He died after filming most of his “Mockingjay” lines).  Other than that, the performances are all effective to meh.  I’ve always found Josh Hutcherson’s portrayal of Peeta to be sort of annoying, but he’s better in this one.  The one thing that I found funny is how I could not tell Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Finnick (Sam Clafin) apart through most of the movie.  If they had switched roles halfway through the film, I would have been none the wiser.

Another good thing about this movie is how much the great design work really shines through.  It was just as good in the previous films, but the gaudy pomposity of the Capitol always kind of drowned out the attention to detail paid in the Districts.  Here, with very few Capitol scenes, the amount of detail paid to the scenes can really take center stage.

My only real complaint about the movie is that I think they ended the movie wrong.  There is this one scene, which I will not spoil, where I whispered over to my brother and said “Right there is where they should have ended this movie”.  You’ll know it when you see it.  Some stuff happens beyond that, but it saddens me when definitive shocking endings are wasted.

I would probably recommend a rewatching of “Catching Fire” prior to watching this movie as there were times when I was scratching my head trying to recall things that they referenced from the prior movie.  Other than that, what we have here is another winner in what’s turning out to be a very effective series of movies. Needless to say, I am looking forward to seeing the next as well.