Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: What. The. Hell. Was. That.

“The Circle” has one thing and only one thing going for it.  There are some beautiful scenes of Emma Watson kayaking near the Golden Gate Bridge and various other natural landscapes.  Yet somehow, it even manages to ruin that.  This is a complete mess of a movie.

Let’s focus on the characters.  Or should I say programmable robots?  Because I’m not sure human beings were used in the filming of this movie.  Characters need motives and reasons for their actions while this movie has them completely changing personality from scene to scene with little to no explanation.  Mae (Emma Watson) goes from questioning the culture of the company to completely drinking the kool-aid for the company culture and does so after literally having a conversation with another questioner of the company, Ty (John Boyega), in which they mock the whole kool-aid drinking culture.  Mae got the job because of her best friend Annie (Karen Gillan) who starts as a workaholic high level exec and immediately changes to being Mae’s enemy and suffers a nervous breakdown and questions everything about the company.  Ty, who is supposed to be super brilliant, stands powerless as he watches all this stuff he rails against happen even though it’s within his power to change everything pretty much at any time, but he waits for Mae to have a change of conscious in order to do so.

There’s supposed to be a moral to this story, I’m sure, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.  As best I can tell, the moral is “Technology is good…sometimes?” or perhaps “Privacy is good…sometimes?”.  To which I can only reply, “Thank you, Captain Obvious!”  And those question marks definitely belong because the movie leaves no clear answer.  About anything.  There is no depth to the story as it tries to beat you over the head with these morals through painful scene after painful scene.  You end up not giving a damn about any of the characters at all because of it, even Mae’s dad who has MS.

I can think of many things you would enjoy more than going to see “The Circle”.  Get that root canal that you’ve been putting off.  Spend some time with your racist uncle.  Take a tour of a wastewater treatment facility.  Read the entirety of Trumps Twitter account.  Whatever it is, you’ve made a better decision than my seeing “The Circle”.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A little too all over the place, but with some terrific scenes.  Plus, it’s a true-ish story.

“The Lost City  of Z” is one of those movies that I’m not sure translated well from the book to the screen.  Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is an interesting character and his life is certainly worth reading about, but it was also very chaotic and jumps from continent to continent so much that scales of time and distance seem lost when on the screen.  The movie does a fairly decent job of managing this sprawling story, but I can’t help think it would have made a better mini-series than movie, especially when episodes like World War I seem kind of superfluous to the main story.

Percy Fawcett is a man of contradictions.  He is driven and dedicated, ambitious and more than a little arrogant.  He dedicated his life to finding a lost city in the Amazon and trying to convince the mighty British Empire that the native Amazonians are not the savages his peers claim them to be.  But his wife, oh, she belongs in the home barefoot and pregnant and tending to however many broodlings he manages to pump into her during his sparse visits home.  It is safe to say that Mr. Fawcett is slightly more enlightened than his contemporaries.  Baby steps.

There are some wonderful scenes in this movie, the best of which is when Fawcett is trying to convince the Royal Geographic Society to fund his trip to find his lost city.  It reminds you of just how weird the British Parliamentary system is.  Another is when his wife is trying to convince him to let her go back to South America with him next time.  But they are interspersed within a lot of views of traveling down a river or mini-National Geographic specials as they interact with native villages.  All of this adds to the uneven feel of the movie.

So is this movie worth watching?  Maybe?  I’d say as a movie for sheer entertainment, no.  But as a historical drama delving into the goings on and mores of early 20th century Great Britain, the movie has a lot to offer and it certainly piqued my interest in reading more about Percy Fawcett.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Good action.  Crappy plot.  Vin Diesel should not be allowed to speak.

You know going in to any “The Fast and the Furious” movies that you’re in for a certain level of ridiculousness.  That level is high.  Very high.  If you accept that, you can usually have a lot of fun watching these movies.  Not even that acceptance could save this movie.

Before I get into the plot, let me start by saying, man, is Vin Diesel a bad actor.  He is only capable of saying three words with any sort of range or emotion and those words are “I am Groot!”  The man is the luckiest SOB in the world that this whole mythology was built around these movies with him in the lead role.  Fortuitously, the writers realized both what they had and how bad Vin Diesel was and developed a strong supporting cast of hardbodies to pick up his slack, including Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.  And, in what must have been a ‘you’re going to pay me how much?” moment, Charlize Theron is also in this movie as the main villain,

I know, I know, making fun of the plot of a “Fast and Furious” movie is kind of like mocking the athletic ability of the kid that always gets picked last in gym class, but man, what a ripe target!  You may know that a lot of the premise for the series is based off of the “do anything for family” creed.  Well, throw that right out the window!  In this one, Dom (Vin Diesel) is blackmailed by Cypher (Charlize Theron) to turn against his family and steal an EMP device from his team, the execution of which causes Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to be sent to jail.  Bye bye, family!  Dom, of course, keeps the reasons behind the blackmail secret from his family and plays the perfect villain because reasons!  Of course, he’s not really a villain and he hatches a hair-brained plot to make everything right and save the day at the last minute and everything is executed perfectly.

But you don’t want to hear about the plot!  You want to hear about the car chase scenes!  I’m happy to report that they are quite entertaining.  You have the necessary drag racing for ownership of a car that has a lot of “been there, done that” to it, but that’s more to satisfy a certain demographic of the audience than to add to the movie.  The best part by far is the final chase which has Dekard (Jason Statham) hand-to-hand fighting his way out of an airplane while carrying a baby.  Statham has some fine comedic chops.  Really, though, the entire final chase is terrific and an honorable mention should be paid to the scene where hundreds of cars are hacked and go careening through the streets of New York en masse.

Money making idea!  Take all of the “Fast and the Furious” movies string them together and remove everything except the car chase/action scenes.  I think I would pay for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!