Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: This movie is much better than it any right to be. Pretty consistent laughter from start to finish.

“Stuber” is a ridiculous movie based on a ridiculous premise. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, goodness was this a fun movie! The reviews for this movie have not been good and I can only assume that those reviewers were expecting a different movie because the movie I saw delivered a fairly consistent lineup of jokes and laughs even if some were pretty long in the setup. For instance, there is a scene where they are stocking up on arms for the big showdown and Vic (David Bautista) packs in some propane tanks which Stu (Kumali Nanjiani) exclaims are completely unnecessary. Fast forward to the end of the movie and Stu’s electric car explodes and Stu exclaims “It’s an electric car! Electric cars can’t explode! Oh, the propane tanks.” Somehow, and I cannot tell you why, that is absolutely hilarious.

Much of the humor revolves around Vic’s manliness and Stu’s unmanliness and exploring the nature of manliness, but it does so in a very constructive way. Vic is almost always wrong and Stu is almost always right. Vic’s manliness is toxic and gives him a skewed world view that makes him neglect his daughter Nicole (Natalie Morales) while still believing he’s a good father. Stu has his problems and Vic really only kind of sort of helps him solve them, not by “manning up” as Vic suggests, but by simply confronting them and having a conversation and firmly but politely saying how things need to go. Don’t worry, though, while these are pretty serious topics, you can rest assured that they are not handled in any serious way at all and the results are hilarious. The scene in the strip club for instance. Be sure to watch the background at all times during that scene.

“Stuber” was a delightful surprise. From the previews, I thought the premise had promise, but when the reviews started hitting I kind of assumed the premise failed. Fake news! I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t use Natalie Morales more than they did because she has a great straight person humor. As long as you aren’t looking for a plot that makes sense and are ok with a series of scenes designed for the humor material and not for the furthering of the plot, you’ll probably have fun with “Stuber” too.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Surprisingly lazy story but still fun in all the ways a Spider-Man movie should.

Alright, let’s do this one last time. His name is Peter Parker (Tom Holland). He was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for four movies, he has been the one, the only Spider-Man. This time, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is off to see Europe on a class trip because that’s what science and technology schools do these days. This is sort of a coming-of-age story with Peter extremely uncomfortable with being an Avenger and his unwillingness to step up from being just the friendly neighborhood type. He is also still bummed about the death of Tony Stark and freaked out by Tony’s belief in him and the immense responsibility that Tony seems to be putting on him.

This is also a revenge film. The main bad guy is angry at Tony Stark for turning down his brilliant ideas and going a different direction than the villain wanted so he assembles a group of other brilliant people who Stark ignored to take control of the vast Stark weapons array. The Marvel Universe has stood apart from others like DC by creating realistic villains, but it fails with this movie. The biggest failure is the fact that the villain already seems to have both unprecedented wealth and much of the weapons array that they are trying to take over. The way the villain does so is also quite convoluted and relies on some serious 10-dimensional chess to make come true.

The good news is that Tom Holland continues to be a really awesome Peter/Spider-Man and does an excellent job of being the best mix of live-action and comic-booky that has always made Spider-Man fun. His awkward attempts at winning MJ (Zendaya) with the help of his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) are fun and amusing and it’s a shame that they didn’t just stick to that.

I hope that the laziness of the story is not a harbinger of things to come for the Marvel Comic Universe as we progress into stage four of Disney’s master plan for movie domination, but there’s still some good comedy and fun characters that pull this film up from mediocrity. I sincerely hope that they push for more things like the fantastic “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and lean into more Spider-Man movie magic like that.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A reasonable, if forgettable, denouement to the Toy Story franchise. Ah, who am I kidding, there will be a billion more stories.

“Toy Story 4” is a movie about letting go and moving on. In this case, it’s Woody (Tom Hanks) who is having trouble doing so. He is no longer the top toy in the closet and is often forgotten there, but he still is compelled to protect his kid even in his new unwanted status. When a new “toy” named Forky (Tony Hale) becomes the favorite toy, Woody must pull out all the stops to protect Forky and keep his kid happy.

The whole Forky story is an interesting sidebar about belonging and self-worth, but man does the setup for it go on for way too long. It is like every Saturday Night Live skit where the gag just keeps going on well after the laughs have died out. The movie is only an hour and forty minutes long and I think twenty minutes are Woody rescuing Forky from the trash can.

For a Pixar film, “Toy Story 4” turns pretty dark with the introduction of Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a 50s style doll with a broken voice box stuck in an antiques store. She rule the antiques store with a bunch of ventriloquist dummy henchtoys as her muscle. Those ventriloquist dummies are creepy as all get out. Added to the creepiness is the fact that they do not talk for some toy-logic reason that is not explained. And added to THAT creepiness is that they walk around like you’d expect a ventriloquist dummy to walk when it didn’t have a hand in it to control it.

Besides the creepy factor which may make it a bit too scary for younger children, “Toy Story 4” hits everything on the fun kids movie checklist. There is also enough adult enjoyment for parents or older kids at heart, but the fourth in the series is certainly the least in the series. Surprisingly and sadly, there was no short film at the beginning. Not sure if this is a move away from that tradition by Pixar or if the film was long enough by itself to not warrant a fun time filler.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: You’ve got monsters. You’ve got monsters fighting. That’s all you need to know. Either it appeals to you or it does not.

I spent so much time discussing this movie with a friend who can only be described as a Godzilla super-fan that I completely forgot to write my review about it. For shame!

Clearly, anyone who is going to see a Godzilla movie for the plot is woefully ignorant of every Godzilla movie that has come before. If it can be called a plot, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” wants us to believe that a well-respected scientist has proven scientifically that the only way to save the Earth from environmental destruction is to release all the monsters and balance will be restored to Earth by science. Also, science. It’s absolutely ridiculous. If the entire dialogue just consisted of people saying “Science science science” to each other, it would have made more sense. But those monsters aren’t going to release themselves so we have to suffer through the plot. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as stuff has to be loosely tied together somehow, but G:KOTM spends entirely too much time on the plot and not what it’s supposed to be: big bad monsters duking it out for supremacy.

When the movie does actually get to the big bad monsters duking it out for supremacy, it’s pretty good. The fights are as epic as you’d expect from monsters the size of skyscrapers. Special attacks are peppered throughout in order to keep the fighting spicy. The only time the fighting gets annoying is when they continually show the ant-humans foolishly traipsing underfoot of the titans. I mean WHY?!?! I mean, I get you can’t predict where they are going to decide to throw down, but when commence fisticuffs, run! AWAY! Not back and forth. Maybe it would have been worth it if they showed more stupid humans being splatted, but there are woeful few of those too.

A lot of the Godzilla mythos is pretty cool and it is explored fairly well in this movie, enough to appease both Godzilla novices and superdorks. The fights really are super fun so if you think that’s enough of a reason to go see a movie, you will likely enjoy G:KOTM. If you want a movie with plot, stay reasonably far away unless you also like making fun of bad plots.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Colorful and lively. Magical and whimsical.

I have not been much of a fan of the Disney live action retellings of their classic animated films. One was horrible and the others range from just fine to decently made. So when I saw that the blue cartoon genie made popular by the voice of Robin Williams was going to be reprized by and equally blue live Will Smith, I, like the rest of the interwebs, met the news with mockery. To be fair, the early previews really did make Will Smith look silly in the completely wrong way and there are still moments in the movie where there is a bit of creepy weirdness to CGI Genie, but for the most part Will Smith absolutely nailed it. He gets back to his roots as a singer and dancer and hams up Genie just so in a way that would surely have made Robin Williams proud.

The story of this “Aladdin” is pretty much the same as the cartoon one only with an added Oscar bait original song (and it will likely be nominated) and a much more woman empowering theme throughout. There are plenty of other minor changes, but nothing terribly important. The only real disappointing part is that Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) seems more watered down than I remember him in the cartoon. The third act where Jafar’s evil plans come to fruition seems kind of hurried and anti-climatic. Besides that, though, everything was absolutely delightful! The musical numbers were incredibly well choreographed. Aladdin (Mena Massoud) was remarkable in all acting and singing and dancing. Jasmine (Naomi Scott) was maybe a bit off at times, but still brought lots of magic and strong-willedness. Dalia (Nasim Pedrad), the handmaiden to Jasmine who wasn’t in the cartoon was also a wonderful addition to the story with her comedic touches.

The movie was directed by Guy Ritchie of all people. Not remotely who you would expect to be directing a Disney musical, but he did quite a wonderful job. The movie also pretty seamlessly blends true live action with CGIed moments throughout, not just with Genie, but all the moments where Aladdin is doing his acrobatics that even stuntmen couldn’t pull off. It would be very interesting to slow motion parts to see if the transitions are more apparent.

If you haven’t taken your kid to see this movie yet, you should. It is a wonderful delight and will hopefully replace “Frozen” (ugh) as the movie of choice for children everywhere for the next few days. The movie is beautiful in both costume design and art direction and the scope and color of the scenes make it well worth watching it on the big screen with a good sound system.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: All the excellent stylized violence you’ve come to expect from John Wick movies. Gets a bit too bogged down in trying to develop a plot.

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is back and movie number three starts out where movie number two left off. John has just been declared excommunicado for violating the rules of The Continental, a hotel for assassins, and killing the bad guy from the second movie on Continental grounds. A $14 million bounty has been put on his head and he has just a one hour head start before all the assassins will be after him.

The first “John Wick” movie was the essence of stylized violence. The second “John Wick” added 20 minutes of plot that detracted from its core mission, but was still quite fun. The third “John Wick” movie adds yet another 20 minutes of plot that makes much of the movie drag. There is some more good John Wick backstory that is interesting, but the whole rigamarole with The Table is a little boring and doesn’t really go anywhere interesting. There is also a switch from the up close quick takedown violence of the first two films to more elongated fights that tend to go on for uncomfortably long minutes. The quick violence is still there and when the show sticks to that it really shines. Imagine John Wick getting into a fight in an antique store filled with knives or fighting in a horse stable. The extended violence stuff is mostly people getting smashed into glass case after glass case and passing up on the easy and quick kill opportunities for..reasons.

The end of the movie sets up an obvious fourth “John Wick” movie. I can only hope that they return to the roots of the first movie and keep it at the hour and forty minutes length and cut out much of the boring extras. There’s still a lot of fun in this movie, but with each successive one, the quality slips a little.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Yes, I went to see this movie. No, it wasn’t bad at all.

I do not know how this movie was made. I imagine a pitch meeting where someone had spiked the water with LSD. The entire premise is ridiculous. A guy loses his father and discovers that he and his father’s Pikachu Pokemon can talk to each other and they team up to solve the mystery of his father’s death. Oh, and this all takes place in a live action environment. Oh, and we’ll somehow get Ryan Reynolds to play Detective Pikachu. It’s preposterous on its face. Yet, it kind of works. This is not stellar movie making by any stretch of the imagination and it is clearly marketed as a vehicle to stretch the Pokemon brand into a new generation of young minds, but it’s kind of fun for what it is.

The star of this show is clearly Ryan Reynolds. He seems to know he is in something silly and just goes with it. He has lots of asides and comments that are easy to miss between the rest of the dialogue that is happening, but you really want to pay attention to him. Imagine Deadpool were a sweet, innocent Pikachu and you have Reynolds’ performance in this movie. The rest of the cast is fine. Justice Smith is a bit uneven as Tim Goodman and is more believable talking to a fake Pikachu than when talking to other actors. Kathryn Newton does an acceptably over-the-top job as Lucy Stephens.

The story tries to throw some plot twists into the mix, but none of them land terribly well and much of that is even thrown completely away when the final evil plan is revealed. None of it really makes sense and it detracts greatly from the movie, but up until that point, it’s pretty fun.

If you’ve got nothing else to do, this is a fun and stupid movie to go see. Not being a Pokemon person, I cannot say if they got all the Pokemon references correct or if there were lots of little Easter eggs for Pokemon fanatics, but they give you enough information so that even if you’re a Pokemon novice, you can tell what’s going on with all the different creatures. Pika pika.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A satisfactory ending to a sprawling epic. Ugh, time travel.

Here we are at the end of a Marvel era. “Avengers: Endgame” is kind of a reset point for the Marvel Universe. Some stories are ending and some are just beginning. The journey to get here has been a lot of fun. Let’s dig into it and see what “Endgame” has to offer.

When last we left our hero, Thanos (Josh Brolin) had used the Infinity Gauntlet to snap half of the universe’s population into non-existence and retired to live out the rest of his existence in peace and harmony. A renegade group of super-powered individuals took exception to this new utopian universe and plots to find Thanos and steal the Infinity Gauntlet from him and reverse what he has done leading once again to the overpopulation of the universe and all the societal ills that go along with it. These “heroes”, as some misguided people call them, selfishly concoct a scheme using time travel that could put the entire universe at risk and will drastically alter the lives of the trillions of people that have been living the new reality for years. All because they think their own sorrow at missing their companions is greater than all the others’ happiness that they have newly discovered.

What’s great about the Marvel universe is that while the stars are superheroes, they are only nominally so. Mostly they’re just vain and self-important and only play well with others when it suits them. Clearly, Thanos isn’t the hero, but wow does it take some major lack of introspection to think that bringing back everyone five years after they were all turned to dust and everyone still alive has lived five years of existence without them is a good idea. And they do this mostly because they want their own people back.

What’s not great about “Endgame” is the time travel. I mean they do a decent enough job as far as time travel plots go, but there are just so many things that don’t make sense and so many questions left about how everything turned out. But that’s time travel. The biggest flaw with the time travel in this movie was how they spent so many lines of dialogue talking about how the vagaries of time travel aren’t at all like they are in the movies (and they mention a bunch of time travel movies that get it wrong) only to make their time travel exactly like those movies.

This was a fun movie and a fitting ending. It will be interesting to see where The Avengers go from here and what new adventures await. At least one baton has already been passed and a few others are left to be received.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Fun and entertaining fluff. DC finally gets a good villain. And a good story. And a good hero. Ok, that’s not entirely fair, Wonder Woman was good too.

DC Comics has gone the comedy route with “Shazam!” and has largely succeeded. It is a very welcome change to their all-darkness-all-the-time motif that they have been following. The movie takes a very silly premise and recognizes that it is silly and runs with it. Serial foster home runaway Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a teen who is whisked away to a lair where a Wizard (Dijmon Hounsou), the last of 5, tells him that he is the pure of heart person necessary to wield the wizard’s power and defeat the Seven Deadly Sins. Somehow, this transfer of power turns him from a 13 year old boy into a prototypical adult superhero complete with silly costume instead of a wizard, but who cares. Given zero instruction on how to be a superhero, Billy, along with the help of his foster brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), proceeds to do what any teenage boy with superpowers might do: run amok.

As I have often commented on the good Marvel movies, what makes a good superhero movie is a good villain and Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) is wonderful. Thaddeus met the Wizard when he was a child too, but he was incredibly meanly rejected which sent him on a quest to find the Wizard once again and get the powers he believes he should have been given. Childhood trauma informs both Billy’s and Thaddeus’ world view, but only Billy was given the nurturing to overcome that trauma even if he routinely rejected it. Morals. This movie contains them.

Another moral and my personal favorite of morals in movies is that of family. You bilogicals may suck. You have no control over that. Screw them. Find your family where you can find them. The ones that treat you well and you want to treat well back. If that’s a foster family, so be it. One of my favorite parts in the movie is a throwaway scene in which the foster mom Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans) and foster dad Victor Vasquez (Cooper Andrews) swing into action and back mom’s car out of the driveway to reveal a closeup of the bumper sticker “I’m a foster mom: What’s your superpower?” which is just perfect.

“Shazam!” also happens to be really funny. It takes a while to get going as it seriously develops the villain and establishes the plot, but once it gets going, it’s all smiles. I mean, come on! Think of being a teenager and discovering you have superpowers. That’s not the only source of comedy, but it’s an infinite well of which they tap wisely.

It may somewhat be benefiting from low expectations, but “Shazam!” was a delight. The re-watch value is strong with this one, methinks. A good mixture of story and comedy and morals. Is it just me or has the last year or so been a goldmine of comedies of varying sorts? Regardless, “Shazam!” is fluffy fun for the whole family. Ok not really, it’s kind of violent and deserves its PG-13 rating.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A heartwarming true story of a victory against racism in the Deep South when segregation was illegal, but still widely practiced by racists. Brilliantly acted. Could use with some trimming of length.

If you aren’t going to watch “The Best of Enemies”, do yourself a favor and read about Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell). Atwater was a single mom and community activist fighting for equality in a place where doing so was still pretty dangerous. Ellis was a father and gas station owner and unabashed racist and president of the local social club known as the Ku Klux Klan. When the Black school burns down, they are both chosen to represent their side as the community decides whether to integrate the remaining school. Both are absolutely fascinating individuals and their similarities brought them together at a fortuitous moment in history to bring some good to the world.

“The Best of Enemies” is wonderfully acted and both Taraji P. Henson and Sam Rockwell deserve nominations for their portrayals. The movie could have portrayed Ellis as evil, but Rockwell and the script bring out his humanity and show that he’s really just another human being trying to get by in the world. That’s the big secret. Racists are like you and me, only racist. It may seem incongruous, but you can be a decent person and a racist and C.P. Ellis is just that. The difference between C.P. Ellis and most racists, though, is when Ellis is confronted with the sheer incongruity of his racism, instead of doubling down on his racism or denying his racism, he does some real honest to goodness soul searching and knows that his views cannot stand up to scrutiny and he does the most amazing and difficult thing a human being can do: after a lifetime of being wrong, he accepts that he is wrong, he changes his views to what is right, and he actively expresses his changed views despite enormous social pressure and ostracization. We should all try to be like C.P. Ellis. This is not at all to take away at how amazing of a human being Ann Atwater appears to be. She fights the fight and has absolutely no fucks to give. She grows as an individual too throughout this ordeal, but she started clearly on the side of right so her story is slightly less dramatic than Ellis’.

The movie does run a bit longer than it needs to. There are some weird montages throughout that don’t really much serve a purpose. There are also a couple “women in danger” scenes that don’t really add to the story and are of questionable authenticity. This shouldn’t take away from the amazing story but it does take away from the movie, though it is still easily worth watching.

Depressingly, this movie can be seen as how massive an effort the people on the right side of an issue need to attempt to change just one person’s mind. That’s all that happened in this movie. One person changed his mind. In this case, that person happened to be in a position to actually effect positive change. This is an exception. This is why we are at where we are.