Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line:  A minimalist movie with a maximal punch.  Full of colorful characters and great storytelling.  In other words, your standard Quentin Tarantino fare.

Ah, good storytelling.  You don’t run into it very often these days.  Luckily, Quentin Tarantino is still making movies.  Say what you want about his excessive violence and grotesque use of blood (more on that later), the man knows how to tell a story.

After the success of the magnificent “Django Unchained” which was an expansive journey film, Tarantino has followed it up with what can only be called a minimalist journey film.  I mean, sure, 95% of the movie is set in a run down general store in the middle of the wintry Wyoming plains, but the whole story revolves around how the occupants got there and where they’re going.  As you can probably tell from the title, the occupants are hateful and there’s eight of them.  They’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect to find traveling the post-Civil War Wyoming wasteland; bounty hunters, prisoner, sheriff, hangman, cowpoke, confederate general, and stagecoach driver.  At least I think it was post-Civil War.  I’m pretty sure that Wyoming is still filled with the same characters and stagecoach continues to be the preferred method of transportation.  At least such is my understanding.

Quentin Tarantino has a list of about 20 people that he is allowed to cast in his movies and most of them are in this one.  Samuel Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, James Park, all in this movie and all in at least one other Tarantino film.  I’m pretty sure Tarantino keeps half of them in cold storage and only thaws them out for his movies.  That leaves just one of the eight unaccounted for: Jennifer Jason Leigh as the outlaw Daisy Domergue.  Because there can only be one woman in any Tarantino film.

It’s later.  I don’t get why Tarantino insists on ending his films with violent bloodbaths.  Don’t get me wrong, his stories always evolve in a way where a violent ending is assured, but the bloody splashes and head burstings just don’t do much for his films.  Don’t get me wrong, I like movies featuring fountains of blood and dismemberments with a rusty hacksaw as much as the next guy, but in Tarantino’s films, they always seem more of a stain on the movie than anything else.

I would put “The Hateful Eight” right around the level of “Pulp Fiction”.  So second or third best of Tarantino’s movies.  “Django Unchained” is clearly the best.  If you disagree, you continue to be not very fun at parties.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective, if not great, thriller.  Some motivations are unclear.  One of the creepiest workplace romance subplots ever.

I can’t do this review justice as I’m writing this three months after actually seeing the movie so this is going to be short and sweet.  C’est la vie.

“Secret in Their Eyes” is about a tight knit group of investigators/attorneys who fall apart after one of their own, Jess (Julia Roberts) loses a child in a brutal murder.  It is an enjoyable movie and mostly effective.  There are a few somewhat off subplots, one of which is germane to the plot and the other of which is creepy.  The creepy one involves the obsessed investigator, Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) (best name ever), and the district attorney, Claire (Nicole Kidman). I would best describe it as an accepted workplace harassment as Ray creeps on Claire.  It is exceedingly weird, all the more so since they eventually pseudo get together.  There’s also some motivation issues with the movie that are hard to suspend reality for.  For one, why does Jess go along with Ray’s plan?  The wrap up also leaves a lot to be desired.

The movie does have a great cast and they do a fine job of making their lives mostly believable.  Also, someone should really get a best makeup award for this movie because they did one hell of a job on aging the characters, especially Julia Roberts.  All this puts “Secret in Their Eyes” solidly in the “worth watching but you’re not missing much if you don’t see it” camp.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A bit empty story-wise.  Good effects but mostly video-gamey.  Pointless as a stand-alone movie but worth it to see the conclusion of the series.

Still catching up on my 2015 movie reviews…

Having finally read the “Hunger Games” books in between Part One and Part Two of “Mockingjay”, I had a fairly good idea of what to expect for this movie and my expectations were low.  “Mockingjay” the book wasn’t terribly good.  That said, this is a series where I can say that the movies were all better than the books.  THAT said, “Mockingjay Part 2” is a mostly pointless movie except for the fact that it ties up the series.  That isn’t to say that the movie is bad.  It’s just more of a money grabbing scheme filled with fluff before tying the story together at its conclusion.

All that said, I did still enjoy the movie.  It is certainly the weakest of the series, but it continues the streak of doing much more with the source material than you’d think possible.  It concludes Katniss’ quest for revenge against President Snow under the backdrop of a civil war against the Capitol.  There are a lot of weird plot points that you kind of have to stretch your mind to make fit, but they’re not so far-fetched to ruin the enjoyment of the movie.  Worse is the “oh, all of us knew you were lying all along” moment.  You’ll know it when you see it if you haven’t already read the books.

A lot of the fluff in the movie comes from the quest to reach Snow’s compound.  It runs like a poorly crafted Dungeons and Dragons session:

DM: You walk into a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings on all sides.  The only visible exits are where you just came from and a series of door which appear to be entrances to the buildings.  In the middle is a decorative archway.  What would you like to do?

Player 1: I’d like to walk through the archway!

Player 2: No, wait!  Let me check for traps. *rolls d20* 18!

DM: You find a machine gun trap.

Player 2: Everyone hide while I trigger it.

DM: The guns spring out of the wall and fire off a salvo of ammo that would have obliterated anyone inside the arch.

Player 2: I just saved all your asses!

DM:  Peeta, roll a sanity check.

A good portion of the movie is crafted like that.  It’s not what I’d call criminally bad, its more of a  “suspend disbelief to be mildly entertained” thing.  It’s the one portion of the movie that I had trouble not rolling my eyes.  But this is how Collins kludges in the pattern of the Games themselves with the Gamemasters thinking up inventive ways to kill even though it’s all completely superfluous in a war setting.

You’ll see this movie because you’ve seen the others.  If you haven’t seen the others, there’s no need to watch this movie at all.  This all should have been one movie, but when there’s money to be made, people will make money.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Makes collateralized debt obligations fun!  Makes you angry at banks!  Makes you angry at politicians!  But in a sort of feel good way.  It’s weird.

Ah, the good old days of the housing boom!  No money down.  Low teaser interest rates.  You could get the house you always wanted.  Heck, you could get many houses you always wanted.  “Don’t worry, you can afford it”, said every expert to every poor schmuck caught up in the scam.  If it ended there, those schmucks would have been out of a house and some banks and mortgage companies might have suffered.  But the deceptions went on.  All those bad mortgages got bundled together with good mortgages into an instrument called a mortgage backed security.  The ratings agencies gave these instruments their highest rating.  Low risk low reward.  Then those pretty safe instruments got diced up and collected into an instrument called a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), which would have been fine if anyone actually bothered to look what was in them and rate them appropriately.  The ratings agencies gave these instrument their highest ratings.  Then THOSE CDOs were again chopped up and mixed with other CDOs again and again and again and again until one mortgage was in many many different investment instruments and no one had even an iota of a clue as to what was in a specific instrument.  The ratings agencies gave all of these instruments their highest rating.  Then someone decided to look at what was in those instruments.  They found it was a house of cards ready to fall apart.  They were right.  At some point some banks recognized that the house of cards was about to come down and they artificially propped up the house of cards by deception and collusion until their asses were covered.  Then they let the house of cards fall.  Nobody goes to jail.

If you fell asleep reading the previous paragraph, “The Big Short” is just the movie for you!  It takes the above snooze fest and turns it into an entertaining, engaging, and enlightening movie.  How does it do it?  Charm.  Well, that and some of the best actors in Hollywood.  Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt all sparkle.  And, boy, if there were ever a setup for a Sesame Street “which of these things doesn’t belong” song, it’s the previous sentence, but of the four it’s actually Steve Carell that steals the show.

What’s weird is we basically have a movie about a bunch of people who decided to bet that the entire U.S. economy was going to go into the toilet and we end up rooting for them.  Or if not rooting for, at least empathizing with them.  What they saw was obvious and everyone just laughed at them and took their money thinking it was a fool’s bet.  Writer/Director Adam McKay deserves mad props for making that so.

If you’re old enough to watch this movie, you’re old enough to have lived through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and this is the story of how it started.  You owe it to yourself to get edumacated and learn a little bit about who you should really be mad at.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A solid Christmas movie. One of those irreverent, just this side of uncomfortable funny movies.  Seth Rogen trips balls throughout most of the movie.

My brother and I decided to be Jews for a day and hit the movie theater on Christmas.  It was the most crowded I have ever seen a theater for a matinee showing.  Not that “The Night Before” was crowded, given it’s on its last legs at this point, but much of everything else was sold out already.  Craziness.

The craziness that occurs in “The Night Before” stems from a touching story of friendship and loss that is really quite beautiful and well thought out for a movie that you just know is going to be one of those stupid men get into stupid predicaments and have to make up with their much more grounded significant others movies.  When Ethan’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) parents are killed, friends Chris (Anthony Mackie) and Isaac (Seth Rogen) comfort him and make sure he’s never alone on Christmas Eve by throwing together an epic night on the town.  This tradition continues for many a year until the three are well into adulthood and have changing responsibilities and decide to have just one more epic Christmas Eve together.

The movie works pretty well.  There’s nothing groundbreaking, just a solid buddy comedy like almost every other movie Seth Rogen has ever been in.  The man is the undisputed master of movies like this.  Mackie, Gordon-Levitt, and Rogen have real chemistry together and you can just tell that they and the other cast members had one hell of a good time filming the movie.  One has to wonder, though, if Rogen was just portraying a person tripping balls throughout the movie or if he was 100% in character so to speak when performing.

There’s nothing much else to say about “The Night Before”.  It’s a fun movie and probably one that you could watch once a year and enjoy every time.  Which is saying quite a lot, but it’s not even close to being a classic.  It’s more just solid.  If you like this type of movie, you’ll like this movie.  How’s that for circular logic?

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Tries really hard to be funny and scary.  Fails at both.

“Krampus” starts out decently with the whole “dysfunctional extended family getting together for Christmas” story.  It then does a pretty good job of building up the tension with scary snowmen and odd goings on right up until Krampus appears for the first time.  Then it’s all downhill from there.  This is disappointing on many levels, but what’s most disappointing is this is a great cast of C-list actors, probably the best ensemble of C-list actors ever, and their talents are wasted.

The movie starts to go off the rails when the cliche German grandma tells the story of Krampus visiting her home town as a child.  This can be a great storytelling arc as the grandma’s dire warnings of what’s to come are ignored or laughed at.  Which they are.  But the grandma’s story has almost no correlation to the events that happen to the family in the movie except for the fact that Krampus is involved.  The movie devolves into a grotesquerie of mindless comic monsters mixed in with vile, disgusting worm-creatures and bird-things.  The two creature types don’t mix together at all.  In fact, the only really effective monster in the movie is Krampus himself and he is oddly wasted by being portrayed mostly with foot stompings and glarings.

I will give props to the movie for a pretty good ending.  There can be much discussion on what it means and it will make you think if there were clues that might lead you to rethink all you’ve seen before. Well, except for one glaring fault.  The grandma again.

I had hopes for a good anti-Christmas Christmas movie and those hopes were dashed.  The Krampus tale is kind of awesome and deserves a good dark comedy/horror story.  This is not that story.  Save your money.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line:  BA da da DA da da DA ddla da da da DA ddla da da da DA ddla da da da DA.  BA ba.  ba ba ba BA ba. ba ba ba BA ba.  ba ba ba BA.

Star Wars! Yay! “The Force Awakens” was a fun romp of a movie if completely derivative.  Yes, just like a certain J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie reboot that shall remain nameless (*cough “Into Darkness” *cough*), “The Force Awakens” is taken almost full cloth from “A New Hope”.  So there, I just spoiled the whole movie for you.

Fear not, mortal!  The movie is still a fun ride even if you’ve seen it all before.  Probably only if you’re a fan of the series (I-III notwithstanding).  J.J. Abrams is a genius when it comes to crafting a movie that will suck you in even if his basket of new ideas is sorely lacking.  His plan when rebooting series seems to be asking himself “What worked before?” and then cramming that all into a single movie.  You can’t argue with results.

Fans will love seeing old faces.  Fans and newbies will also love the new faces.  Rey and Finn (Daisy Ridley and John Boyega) are absolutely wonderful characters, though it took a while for Boyega to grow on me.  I think that’s mostly because of my main complaint with the whole movie.  There’s very little character development.  Ridley and Boyega shine through because there’s real charisma there that wins you over despite their lack of depth.  The same can’t be said for Poe Dameron (Oscar Issac) who seems to be shoe-horned into the story.  And, in my estimation, the biggest strike against the movie is the lack of depth given to Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).  Much of the surprise twists surround his character, but it’s hard to feel anything about them because there’s really not a developed character to feel anything towards yet.  They’ll all be back, I’m sure, and much of the backstory will be filled in, but the storytelling in “The Force Awakens” is only moderately above George Lucas level.

Yep, I’ll definitely be seeing it again because it really is a fun movie despite its recycled story line and lack of character depth.  If this were a stand-alone movie, I’d probably be a lot more unforgiving.  But Star Wars.  And for those keeping track at home, the official ranking from best to worst is V, IV, VI, I, III, I don’t like sand.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Well costumed and well designed.  Interesting setup with little notable follow-through.  Goes for cheap scares that don’t really even play a part in the plot.

Ghosts are real.  This much I know.  I know this because Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) told me so.  She’s seen them all her life.  Well, except for the time between birth and when her mother died and then the time between when her mother died and when the main story starts.  So really, she’s seen one ghost many years ago as a child.  But who’s counting?  Well, ok, me.  Not a good start to a movie when you begin with a lie just to set mood.

Then comes a decent, if a little longish setup.  There are plenty of holes that can be poked in this setup, but most of those are only visible in hindsight.  If I weren’t writing this review, I’d probably never have even thought of them.  The one that did bother me is, this is supposed to be a ghost story, right?  Where are the ghosts?  Or, more to the point, where are the ghosts that actually mean something?  They’re used mostly as background noise with a little bit of dire foreboding thrown in.  Some talk, most just wail.  Luckily (?), the ones that could actually further the plot only wail.  The dire foreboding is soundly ignored like all dire foreboding should be.  It is giving away nothing so here is the sole dire foreboding: Beware Crimson Peak!  Edith Cushing, of course, then blindly follows Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) back to a severely dilapidated mansion on top of a hill surrounded by red mud that oozes out of the ground and literally runs down the walls defying all rules of gravity and then is shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to learn days later when Thomas casually mentions that they call the place Crimson Peak.  “Oh,” says Edith, “I thought of it more as a Scarlet Knoll”.  Ok, she doesn’t really utter those words, but she does express shock and finally realizes that she might be in trouble.

It is unfortunate that the story is so soft because the acting is pretty good and the design is outstanding.  This movie would have been better as a straight horror story or a straight whodunnit.  Instead it’s an amalgam of horror and whodunnit with little to like about either portion.  That’s Guillermo del Toro for you, though, top notch style always, very shaky on the substance.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Typical James Bond fare. Daniel Craig remains the best Bond. Christoph Waltz is tragically under utilized.

There are certain things that you expect from a Bond film.  “Spectre” has them all.  And it does them all with enough flair that I can proudly proclaim: Yep, this was a Bond film.

Opening Sequence: Pretty solid.  It takes place in Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos celebration.  It is both a vivid and gorgeous backdrop for the opening sequence.  I wanted to see more of it, but this is a Bond opening sequence so chaos must follow.  And it does.  We’re treated to assassinations and bombs blowing up and a harrowing helicopter sequence.  There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief necessary, but the backdrop is so pretty it is easily overlooked.

Opening Credits: Standard fare.  There is a decent enough opening song by Sam Smith called “Writing’s on the Wall” (YouTube).  Dude’s got an impressive vocal range.  The credits are your typical mostly naked silhouette ladies warping and gyrating in between semi-violent imagery.  There’s nothing terribly new or exciting about it.

Bond Babe: Lea Seydoux.  She is gorgeous and she kicks ass on her own. She is strong, successful, and confident.  Her only problem is believing that Bond is a good guy.  I mean, really?

Bond Villain: Christoph Waltz.  Nuff said.  But seriously, he is horribly underutilized.  I don’t recall if all Bond films were like this or if it’s more of a trend with the Daniel Craig Bond.  You get these great actors to play the villain and then you don’t really give them much of a part to play until you’re over half way through the film.  Tragic.

Menacing Evil Sidekick: David Bautista.  He is sufficiently both menacing and evil.

Evil Hideout: Crater in the middle of an African desert complete with trophy case containing the meteorite that created said crater.  Has this been done before?  Seems familiar.  Either way, classic evil lair.

Insane Plot to Take Over the World: Your usual “create a massive computer based spy network and convince the world to all use said network by a series of targeted terrorist bombings” plot.  It’s somewhat interesting if a little far fetched.

All in all, this is a solid Bond film.  It’s probably the second best of Craig’s Bond films behind “Casino Royale”.  Though, for the life of me, I can’t remember much details behind any of them besides the opening sequence for “Casino Royale” which was probably the best opening sequence of any Bond film.  And that’s really Bond in a nutshell.  Entertaining, but mostly forgettable.  Just like my movie reviews.