Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: After a disappointing start, this is a movie that is both entertaining enough and engaging enough to watch from the comfort of your own home.

Let’s get something straight right off the bat.  This movie is not about Hercules the Greek mythological being.  Wait, that’s not quite true.  This movie is about a man named Hercules who is both big and powerful and creates the myth of Hercules the Greek mythological being to help him and his crew of mercenaries land paying gigs.  After some initial disappointment of not seeing a movie based on Hercules’ twelve labors, I found that I liked what they did to spin Hercules’ myth around an all too human, if impossibly large, man.  Keep this all in mind if you plan to see the movie.

With that out of the way, what you have in “Hercules” is basically a better than average Dungeons & Dragons campaign.  You’ve got a rag-tag group of adventurers including a fighter, an archer, a barbarian, a thief, and a mystic who go on various quests for both gold and glory.  After completing a side quest, they are engaged in their main quest to save a village from an evil usurper intent on taking over a peaceful kingdom.  There are plot twists and betrayals and even some tying in character’s back-stories into the main plot.  Now I want to play D&D.

The humor in the movie is decent if a little over-acted at times.  The movie is also surprisingly endearing.  Hercules develops his mercenary followers by both helping them and treating them kindly and this is revealed throughout the movie.  How they do this is pretty cool.  The movie starts with a quick retelling of many of Hercules’ labors as the myths describe them.  Then, throughout the movie, you see the interactions between Hercules and his companions and get to know a little bit of how they came to follow him.  Finally, in the end credits, you are treated to a comic book retelling of Hercules’ labors showing how his friends actually helped him complete each of the labors.

“Hercules” is a fun if forgettable movie.  I don’t think I’d recommend seeing it in the theater unless you want to get your D&D friends together and geek out to it or if you just really like Dwayne Johnson.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A beautifully produced film that once again gets to show off the brilliance of Andy Serkis of Gollum fame.  Some third act implausibilities spoil the movie some, but it’s still a worthy successor to “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”.

Andy Serkis is pretty awesome.  He plays Caesar, the leader of the ape tribe that escaped in the end of the previous movie as it maintains its empire 10 years later.  Serkis does all of the acting for Caesar, the movements, the voice, the facial expressions.  He does such a good job that Caesar might as well be human.  That isn’t to say that the other apes are two-dimensional, but Serkis makes Caesar almost four-dimensional.

The other headliner apes are also well played and the personality of each was well fleshed out, all without words being spoken, but with sign language and facial expressions.  Not an easy feat.  My only complaint about the apes in general was the insistence of the director to adorn the female apes with jewelry so the audience could distinguish sex.  Maybe there’s something else going on there that I just don’t recognize, though.  It was also annoying how much of a backseat the female apes took given that I’m pretty sure that most ape societies are fairly egalitarian about such things.

While the apes definitely stole the show, there were some good human performances as well.  Jason Clarke and Gary Oldman play the leaders of New San Francisco, with Jason being the ape friendly one and Gary being the ape hostile one.  As with the ape society, the human society was very patriarchical with only one female (Keri Russel) given any real role to play.  At least they didn’t make her the damsel in distress, which they very well could have.

The plot is mostly believable except for a few sticking points.  There’s a part in the beginning where Ceasar claims they haven’t seen humans in 2 years which seems unlikely given how close New San Francisco is, but it’s really a throw away point that doesn’t add or detract from the story.  Then there’s the apes’ use of guns.  What do you think would happen if an ape society that has absolutely no experience with guns suddenly gets hold of an arsenal and attacks the humans with it?  The apes would pretty much accidentally slaughter each other in the attack.  But no.  In this, they are really good marksapes and are able to perform a successful frontal assault on the heavily guarded human position.  I know, this was for special effects fun and allowed the movie to keep moving, but it still bothers me.

Aside from those minor quibbles, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” is a good time and I would highly recommend it.  Be sure to see “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” first if you haven’t yet.  It’s not necessary to see the first, but it will add some context and it’s really a better movie in general.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: -10/ 5 stars

Bottom Line: Every time you see a Michael Bay film, god kills a kitten.

I am a masochist.  That is the only reason I can give you for why I went to see this movie after hating every other “Transformers” movie that Michael Bay has released.  “But this one will be different,” I reasoned with myself, showing all the signs of being in an abusive relationship.  “This one has Mark Wahlberg, I like Mark Wahlberg.  Michael Bay has changed, I just know he has.”  I need an intervention badly.

The movie started off decently enough in that “so bad it’s good” kind of way.  You have an intro where it is revealed that aliens destroyed the dinosaurs by turning them all into metal despite the fact that none of the present dinosaur remains are actually metal for some reason except one that they find in a mining complex.  There is all of this really amusingly bad dialogue and acting between Mark Wahlberg, the Michael Bay token hot chick, and the Michael Bay token annoying sidekick guy.  Then Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci show up as the villains and I’m thinking that this may be a decent movie after all.  Boy was I wrong.

The rest of the movie was an insult to good taste and intelligence.  There is not a single plot point that makes even the remotest sense.  For instance, all the transformers are being hunted by a special branch of the CIA because of their metal which should have been in abundance on Earth because of the previously alluded to dinosaur extinction.  The action scenes are an assault on the senses that make no coherent sense whatsoever (except for a pretty decent fight scene between Optimus Prime and random space robot dude #1).  This, too, must explode for no reason at all because there hasn’t been a good explosion for over one second.Even ignoring the fact that there were supposed to only be 30 enemy robots in the final epic battle but the good guys ended um killing umpteen millions of them, the enemy robots have the ability to transform into this swarm of metal that can apparently fly anywhere and yet they consistently decide to turn into cars and robots.  All the better to shoot you, my dear.

I feel stupider after having seen this movie.  The following is a partial list of what would have been a better use of my time than spending the 2 hours and 40 minutes it took to watch this clunker: watching lead paint dry, peel, and crack for 40 years and then eating the paint chips, running a barefoot marathon over a surface of broken glass, getting killed by a pair of tweezers that was only used to pick the skin off of my body one tweeze at a time.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A gripping, fun adventure that fails slightly in the third act.

When you go into a movie whose premise is time travel, you try not to get your hopes up.  “Edge of Tomorrow” sounded so cool from the previews, though, that my hopes were up and I am happy to report that the movie didn’t disappoint.

Most of Europe has been taken over by an alien species.  Tom Cruise plays Cage, a major in the U.S. army who starts the movie much like I’d expect Tom Cruise to be in real live; smarmy, manipulative, and just a general asshole.  Through a series of events that I won’t spoil, Cage ends up repeating the same day over and over again.  The montage of him performing this Groundhog Day makes for some really entertaining film viewing.

Cage eventually runs into Rita, played most bad assedly by Emily Blunt, who had once experienced the same thing Cage is now experiencing.  She eventually ends up training Cage to be as bad assed as she is and with the help of a theoretical physicist, they hatch a plan to defeat the aliens once and for all.

An interesting thing about living the same day over and over again is that you get to learn a lot about the people you interact with on that day, but they learn nothing about you.  Thus, Cage falls in love with Rita, but she keeps on just meeting Cage for the first time.  It was very cool how they developed this relationship even if the director decided to go the complete cop out feel good ending route.  Stupid test audiences.

The movie keeps up a pretty good pace throughout except for some slowdown in the third act.  They spend a little too much time on the day where Cage decides to go completely off script and visit London instead of joining the battle.  I also would have liked that day to end a different way, but that’s a small complaint for a decent movie about time travel.  There are some weird “oh, but this is what the enemy wanted us to do all along” problems with the movie that don’t really make sense when you stop to think about it, but the movie moves quick enough to make this stuff not really matter too much.

All in all, “Edge of Tomorrow” is an entertaining movie that kept my interest throughout.  You should go see it.

Jean-Paul’s Rating : 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: A much improved second and third act can’t save this sloppy retelling of a classic Disney villain.

This movie is purportedly supposed to be about the true telling of a story that got twisted to make Maleficent look like the bad guy.  I guess it delivers at that, but it does so so entirely sloppily that it insults the intelligence of anyone above ten years old and draws on so many stereotypes of women that even girls below ten years old should be insulted.

In the beginning, young Maleficent is the goodest of the goodie two shoes.  She heals the trees and is loved by all the fairy folk and has powerful wings that allow her to soar quickly across crappily drawn special effect backgrounds.  She is also, for reasons unexplained, the only of the fairy folk to be entirely human-like besides having the wings and the pointy ears and the impossibly high cheekbones.  She also always wears lipstick.  Even as a ten-year old.  Who is a fairy.  The mortal enemies of the fairy folk are the humans who hate the fairies because…well, just because that’s what humans do.

But then the human boy, Stefan, comes around and they fall in love.  They then wait until Disney thinks it is ok for teenagers to kiss which happens to be sixteen years of age.  Since they kissed, they are obviously in love.  But it wasn’t meant to be because Stefan soon disappears to pursue humanly pursuits like becoming king even though that’s not at all how kings are chosen.  This paragraph is just as long as they spend explaining the nascent love affair.

Because, as I mentioned before, the humans hate the fairies, one of the human kings decides to attack the fairies.  He does this because, and I kid you not, he made a campaign promise to his people.  Led by Maleficent, the fairies lay blood free waste to the human army.  Gotta keep that PG rating.  The fairies are so much more powerful than the humans that only a complete idiot would ever even consider attacking them.

Now, sorely defeated and dying from his wounds, the King declares that anyone who kills Maleficent will be the next King.  Enter Stefan, once again, who happens to be a pot-boy or something to the king.  He runs to Maleficent to warn her that the King has put a price on her head.  The intervening years just melt away and they quickly fall in love once again.  But, oh ho, what’s this?  Stefan isn’t really in love and he feeds Maleficent a potion that puts her into a deep sleep.  Why doesn’t he just feed her a deadly poison?  Well because then he couldn’t have second thoughts about stabbing her to death in her sleep, of course!  So instead, he cuts off her wings because that’s much more humane.

Thus, does Stefan become king and Maleficent immediately become pure evil.  Her evilness is mostly confined to taking over and enslaving the fairy folk in vague, non-descriptive ways, because isn’t that just like a woman to redirect her rage towards those that don’t deserve it?  Am I right, fellas?  Maleficent continues her exclusive, ambiguous, fairy reign of terror until the birth of King Stefan’s daughter, Aurora.

Maleficent curses Aurora to be beautiful and loved by all and sugar and spice and everything nice until her sixteenth birthday when she shall prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall into eternal slumber until awakened by true love’s kiss.  This causes King Stefan to destroy every spinning wheel in the country and to send Aurora to live with three fairies.  There are innumerable problems with this.  Why would he trust any fairy?  They are also quite obviously three of the stupidest beings alive.  They are also three of the most annoying beings alive.  They are also only one foot tall.  And, slightly besides the point, they are also the creepiest humanesque fairies that computer generated special effects has ever devised.  But, no, here you creepy, idiotic, annoying, anthropomorphic fairies, take my daughter and hide her away from no threat whatsoever for the next sixteen years.  I get that the fairies are there for comic relief, but these are the most piss poor comic relief characters ever devised by Disney.  They should be ashamed of themselves.

Finally, after all of this, the story starts to get, well, not good, but decent.  It should come as no surprise that this also happens to coincide with the retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty.  Of course, Its not the same as the original story since it is told from Maleficent’s point of view.  I won’t go much into this part except to say that while it is sort of saccharine, it’s effective and we finally get some good acting in the movie from Angelina Jolie as Maleficient and Elle Fanning as Aurora.  The movie continues to be decent until the very end.

Ugh, the ending.  “Maleficent” should be shown in art classes everywhere as an example of how many different ways you can screw up the ending of a movie.  First off, everyone lives happily ever after.  Including Maleficent.  It makes absolutely no sense for her to live in this story, since she did die in “Sleeping Beauty”.  Second, Aurora still appears to get the Prince even though he was more a side joke in the movie instead of a driver of the story.  This is Disney, so every girl needs a prince I guess.  Third, Aurora becomes queen of the fairies because…that’s what little girls dream of I guess.  Fourth, the whole point of the movie was to drive home the point that there are two sides of the story and you shouldn’t necessarily trust the first one you hear, but in this case one of them is so obviously verifiably false since Maleficent still exists in one whereas in the other she’s dead.  If “Maleficent” were true, “Sleeping Beauty” was told by the losers and “Sleeping Beauty” happened to get out there as truth despite all evidence to the contrary.  The problem is that there has never been an instance of the losing side of a battle being able to propagate a false story.  In order to make the telling of “Maleficent” make any sense whatsoever, the story of “Sleeping Beauty” must be true except that Maleficent didn’t actually die.  Instead she was able to sneak away and eventually capture both Aurora and Prince Phillip and ensorcell them both into telling the untrue tale of “Maleficent”.  I kind of like that thought.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: This is a movie with a fairly decent plot, a lot of imagination, and great use of special effects.

This movie has more X-Men than you can shake a stick at.  Luckily, only a few of them are actually relevant to the plot line and the ones that aren’t have way cool powers like creating portals and shooting fire and ice and absorbing mutant powers in order to charge a gun?  I don’t know about that last one, but the dude looked awesome doing it.  Their names are irrelevant and I know none of them, but I’m sure every X-Men geek was in full geek fervor at the giant lineup of mutants involved in this movie.

Surprisingly, this is a movie about time travel and the plot is not bad.  It might not be wholly internally consistent, but it does a journeyman job of making the time travel aspects work.  The basic premise is the future sucks because the Sentinels, mutant hunting robots, are doing a pretty bang up job and the mutants are quickly becoming extinct.  This leads to them using Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back into the 1970s to prevent Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing the inventor of the Sentinels, Trask (Peter Dinklage) because it starts the whole Sentinel War instead of preventing it.

The interactions of the characters are interesting and the conclusions they come to are believable.  That’s always been the strength of the X-Men movies, even when the movies themselves haven’t always been good.  You get what Professor X is doing and why he’s doing it, but at the same time you get what Magneto is doing and why he’s doing it.  They are one of the better silver screen frenemies out there.

This movie also contains one of the best special effects driven scenes ever made.  I won’t spoil it, but I will say that it is incredibly inventive, satisfyingly snarky, and magnificently mischievous.  The audience absolutely loved it.

There is some second act slowness, but it is not entirely wasted as there is some interesting character development to be had in it.  Other than that, “Days of Future Past” was a very enjoyable experience and I can seem myself wanting to see it again some day.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line:  Look, it’s a monster!  Look, we’re ineffectively doing things!  Look, we’re making extremely stupid decisions just so there is some sort of story line!

What a mess this movie is.  It has only two things going for it.  One, Bryan Cranston is in it.  Two, a lot of the effects are pretty cool.  Number one doesn’t last very long.

I get that the theme of Godzilla movies is basically man’s hubris in thinking he can stand up to nature without nature bringing down the hammer of justice, but something interesting should really be happening when making that point.  Instead, this movie provides stupid rational after stupid rational for stupid action after stupid action.  Case in point, the Yucca Mountain scene.  Yucca Mountain, if you are not aware is where the U.S. stores all its nuclear waste.  There is more radioactivity happening there than anywhere else in the world.  One of the monsters is at Yucca Mountain and is pregnant for whatever reason and needs radioactivity to feed.  Instead of staying there, she rampages across Las Vegas and heads to San Francisco because the Army is carting a single nuclear missile by train to San Francisco.  This is all to be with her mate, who she doesn’t really need because she’s already pregnant.  Now, maybe they decided to skip the funky monster love making scene for the sake of time, but come on!

Then there are other stupid decisions like running busses full of evacuees across the Golden Gate Bridge even though it is clear to everyone that the other monster is heading straight for said bridge.  Oh, and there’s also the main character (who I will just call Not Bryan Cranston) who tells his wife and child who are in San Francisco to wait there and he’ll come and get them even though he has full knowledge that there are three monsters converging there.  Come to think of it, that would have made the story somewhat interesting if he was actually trying to get them killed because his marriage really sucked.

The only thing this movie has going for it are its cool special effects.  Even that is kind of spoiled by the fact that the entirety of the monster fighting scenes are done in darkness and are most often only glimpsed at in the background while our heroes are vainly attempting to be hero-y.

“Godzilla” would certainly be in my skip it category.  The special effects are not enough to save it.  Though, it may be one of those movies that, once you recognize the ridiculousness of it, turns it into a good movie.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A fun raunchy comedy with some unexpectedly excellent chemistry between the actors.

Now, this may have been one of those movies where you go in with low expectations and it surprises you so much that you give it a better review than you normally would.  And who wouldn’t have low expectations when the plot revolves around a fraternity moving next door to a couple of new parents?  And who wouldn’t be surprised when that flimsy premise actually turns into a very enjoyable movie?

Obviously, with a plot like this, the movie is a bit unbelievable, but it does a really good job of making it as close to believable as possible.  The pranks that are pulled and the schemes that are concocted are all things that you might imagine doing if you were in a similar situation.  In fact, with the exception of the air bags stunt, which was both over the top and hilarious, it only takes a bit of a stretch of the imagination to see this movie happening in real life.

A lot of what makes this movie work is the acting.  What makes good material great material is the chemistry between the actors and there is chemistry aplenty in this film.  Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play off of each other so well as the new parents next door.  One set of comedic talent is enough to carry any movie, but this movie has two, for Zak Efron and Dave Franco also work off of each other well as the fraternity president and vice president.

Only time will tell if “Neighbors” has any staying power as a classic raunchy comedy.  I can see myself breaking out this movie every few years and laughing all over again.

This movie also contains, perhaps, the cutest baby that was ever created on this planet, played by twins Elsie and Zoey Vargas.  Disgustingly cute applies here.  Be sure to stay for the credits where Elsie and Zoey are dressed up to look like all of the actors as their names scroll by.

Jean-Paul’s Review: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: More of your standard super-hero fare.  Special effects are better than average and make good use of slow motion.  Suffers from super-villan overload which is a good sign that they’re out of ideas.

But first, another rant against 3D.  I try to avoid watching movies in 3D because it tends to not add to the enjoyment of the movie and it costs a few extra bucks more besides.  Sometimes time constraints force you into it as it did with my viewing of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”.  The use of 3D was actually distracting in this movie.  Imagine your normal movie shot.  Your primary attention goes straight to the people/actions that are in focus, but there is a whole other world of softly out of focus background existing peacefully in your field of view.  Not so with this movie.  All the background was not only out of focus, but in 3D and out of focus.  It draws your attention away from the primary focus so your brain can take the time to identify what the heck these floating pixies of light are doing in the background.  It was so annoying.  Why won’t 3D die the death it so richly deserves?  Oh yeah, because it makes money.

Now on to our regularly scheduled review.  “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is enjoyable for what it is and that’s about it.  The movie takes a bit of time to get going but when it does, it sails along prettily from action sequence to action sequence and super-villan to super-villan.

Speaking of super-villans, Jamie Foxx is completely wasted in this movie as Electro/Max Dillon.  The crappy 3D in this movie had more depth than the Max Dillon character.  Electro is a super-villan for three year olds.  Spider-Man good, notice me!, now Spider-Man bad.  The movie would have been so much better if they could have given Max Dillon a compelling back story.  It’s movies like this that make me hope that Disney’s upcoming movie, “Malificent”, will do gangbusters so people will realize that evil’s where the story’s at.  One can only hope.

The other main super-villan was, once again, Green Goblin/Harry Osborne.  The good news is the story is a bit different from the first series, though the broad brush strokes are still the same.  The better news is that Dane DeHaan, who plays Harry, was very well cast if just for his looks.  He just screams evil even well before he turns into Green Goblin.

As per usual with super-hero movies, there’s very little female acting to report besides your standard Hollywood approved female roles.  There’s love interest Gwen, and sage matron Aunt May.  The angsty teenage romance between Peter and Gwen got a bit annoying, but I suppose that’s what angsty teenage romances are all about.  The Aunt May stuff is a bit better, but is mostly rushed.

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is not necessary super-hero watching material.  It’s fun and light and you won’t hate yourself for watching it and there’s not really much showing at the moment to compete with it so you might as well go see it if you’re in the mood for a movie.  How’s that for a ringing endorsement?

Jean-Paul’s Review: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Interesting subject, but poor execution.

I’m writing this on an airplane so I don’t have the use of IMDB to look up character names.  Oh, the humanity!

You ever have one of those dreams where there were all these separate parts and you know that they are supposed to fit together somehow, but they don’t?  “Transcendence” is kind of like that.  It starts with a terrorist attack by a neo-Luddite group on artificial intelligence labs and a bizarre assassination attempt against Johnny Depp that fails.  But the bullet was loaded with a radioactive isotope so it kills Johnny Depp anyway. But not before his wife and business partner upload his consciousness into a computer.  So far so good except for the needless death by radioactive isotope part.

Johnny Depp and his wife then perform a bunch of crimes and steal a lot of money and build a massive data center in the middle of the desert.  The terrorist group is all like “Oh, we have to stop him!”  Two years pass.  They are the most ineffective effective terrorist group ever.  Meanwhile, Johnny Depp and his wife are creating cyborg people by taking close to dying people and giving them super-human strength via nanobots, of course, with the added ability to network with Johnny Depp who can take control of them at any time.  This, obviously, must be stopped by all means, and the terrorist group is just the people to do it.  Or so says the government anyway.  So the government teams up with the terrorists and puts a stop to the machinations of Johnny Depp.  The end.

I’m not really giving much away.  Everything stated above is either ridiculous plot twist or obvious progression of the story.  If it sounds disjointed, that’s because it is.  The objectives of the terrorists makes no sense.  The objectives of the government makes no sense.  The objectives of Johnny Depp only make sense in retrospect.  The objectives of Johnny Depp are the only ones which are clear, but even those become muddled as the movie plods on.

I’ll give you a good for instance of how muddled things are.  Shortly before Johnny Depp’s transference into AI, the terrorist group kidnaps his business partner because they just know that Johnny Depp is up to something.  How do they know?  Well, because they were able to find out that some of the quantum processor cores from Johnny Depp’s lab were stolen, of course.  As they are interrogating the business partner, they are able to determine the location of Johnny Depp with some internet jujitsu completely without the business partner’s help.  They then continue to hold him prisoner for some reason until he becomes one of them.  WTF?

The whole movie has weird instances like that.  Obviously, from the above, you could guess that this movie is completely skippable.  How it got so many big name actors involved in it, I have no idea.