Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: More fun than I’ve had in a long time at the movies. Daring animation. Rich background. Wonderful character development. I will see this movie again and again.

Oh, delight of delights! What a wonderful movie “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is! I will start by saying that this isn’t a perfect movie. There are small things here and there that don’t quite make sense if you think about it and I also really wish that the movie delved more into Uncle Aaron’s (Mahershala Ali) and Jefferson Davis’ (Brian Tyree Henry) relationship, but these complaints are nothing compared to the sheer joy of watching this film. Let’s sling some praise, shall we?

First off, the animation is both ground-breaking and familiar. Comic book fans will recognize it immediately for the style borrows heavily from the original source material. The style is a little hard on the eyes at first because of its unusual nature, but the brain quickly takes over and everything starts to blend seamlessly into a comic book come to life. This allows the animators to play with all sorts of comic book tropes like thought-bubbles and onomonapoedic special effects worded on the screen. I don’t want to make it sound like this is a cartoon version of a comic book, though, because the animation is so much more than that. It’s kind of like those flip book animations you created as a kid if instead of a flip book you had ninety million dollars.

It is also amazing how rich and complete the backgrounds of all the characters are, given both how many characters there are and the two hour movie time limitation. All of them are complete human beings by the end of the movie. This is quite an accomplishment given that they are all cartoon characters. You know enough about them to feel for them, from Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to Aunt May (Lily Tomlin) to Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) and the rest. This speaks volumes for the talent of the people behind the cameras, the writers and the director and the editors.

Do you want to go see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” again? I want to see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” again! It had a decent enough opening weekend, but give it some love so they make more movies like this! It is certainly better than most of the Superhero movies out there. If it doesn’t win every Best Animated Movie awards this year, I shall pout.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A bit cliche, but it turns out that most rock star’s lives are a bit cliche. An interesting story of an inventive band who really did a lot to change the way music is both listened to and experienced. Holy cow do the actors look like the band members!

Queen is the band from the Island of Misfit Toys. You have a baggage handler, a dentist, an astrophysicist, and an electrician. All four were incredibly talented, but three were more nose to the grindstone musicians who believed in musical experimentation without flair. The other, of course, was Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek). Freddie was larger than life in the way that only lost human beings can be, constantly searching for a missing part of himself. Mercury’s talent and charisma are unparalleled in rock and he may be the single most entertaining live performer ever to walk the Earth. He also had a very interesting life before the band, or I should say, his family did. It is explained in bits and pieces throughout the movie.

The movie is a bit cliche. Who’da thunk it, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll is actually a thing. You’d also be forgiven if you swear you’ve seen this movie before as Freddie Mercury’s rise and fall in “Bohemian Rhapsody” is eerily similar to Easy-E’s in “Straight Outta Compton“, which was also wonderful. Of course, their lives were real and both of them suffered and died from complications due to AIDS in the early years of the crisis. What might both of them have accomplished if the breakthroughs of today were available to them then?

There were concerns prior to the movie’s release about glossing over Freddie Mercury’s sexuality, but it’s pretty prevalent in the movie. I don’t know if there was an early preview that omitted much of it or if it was some plot to drum up buzz for the movie or if it was just a bunch of Internet trolls doing what Internet trolls do, but you can be assured that the movie gives a pretty accurate picture of the real Freddie.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” ends with an extended recreation of the band’s famous, for really, really good reasons, Live Aid concert performance, which you should watch if you haven’t seen it yet. In fact, I recommend watching it before you go to see the movie to compare the two and see how lovingly it was redone.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Wonderful story that just tells it like it is without beating you over the head with a moral lesson. Surprisingly funny. A little schlocky.

For those of you who are unaware, the title of the movie refers to a book called “The Negro Motorist’s Green Book” which was a travel guide for Black people navigating the Southern states of the United States. during the time of Jim Crow and the extreme racism and violence that went with it. The book was published from 1936 to1966 and contained a list of safe establishments that Black human beings could eat, sleep, and shop at. That such a book needed to exist at all in our history is horrific. That such a book needed to exist a scant 52 years ago is terrifying. That a not insignificant portion of our population harkens wistfully back to that era and even further back to the Confederacy is a dark shame we should all carry.

Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) is the most accomplished person you’ve never heard of. He held doctorates in music, psychology, and the liturgical arts and spoke eight languages fluently and painted. He was also an amazing pianist and traveled the world showcasing his talent. He was also a Black man in the U.S. during the heart of Jim Crow. He embarked on a tour of the Jim Crow South and enlisted a bouncer/body guard/driver named Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) to help guide him through the travails of being Black while in the South. “Green Book” tells the story of their unlikely friendship and their journey through the South.

What most surprised me about “Green Book” was its wit. The movie can legitimately be labeled as a comedy. Much of the humor is of Tony Lip’s Italian fish out of water persona interacting with the refined and intelligent Don Shirley. They grow from a boss-employee relationship to a legitimate friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. And while Viggo Mortensen’s portrayal of Tony Lip is about as stereotypical as you can get, it is possible that Tony Lip was actually like that. They get into the jams that you expect a Black man being driven around the South by a White man would get into and there’s no moralizing about the things that occur to them. Everything, from the constant little slights that wear on one’s soul to the glaring injustices are just presented as they were at the time and if those constant little slights and glaring injustices look a bit familiar, that’s because they are.

The Golden Globe nominations are out and “Green Book” has a lot of them and rightfully so. It was well written, well directed, and well acted. It also happens to be funny and hopeful in the face of despair. I fail to see why Viggo Mortensen was nominated for Best Actor while Mahershala Ali only gets Best Supporting Actor given the two were equally important, but I will admit that the story more follows Tony Lip. I’m not sure Mortensen deserves the nod, but Ali definitely does.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Effective social commentary disguised as a heist movie. Great acting and a smooth running storyline.

I have a confession to make. The opening scene of “Widows” made me very uncomfortable and I don’t know why. It features Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry (Liam Neeson) laying in bed playing tongue hockey for a decent amount of time. In that time, my mind went from yay, interracial relationship in a movie, to ok, we get it, move along please, to THE HORROR MAKE IT STOP! I’m not generally squeamish about public displays of affection so I don’t really know what it was. I like to think it’s because no one should be subjected to the Lovecraftian shapes Liam Neeson’s tongue made, but I am not sure. The rest of the movie features legitimately loving and touching moments between the two that make you go dawwww, but this one part…ick.

The basic premise is this: Harry is a heist artist who is meticulous, but on one of his heists, things go wrong and he and his gang all end up getting killed by the police and the money they stole gets destroyed. The money belongs to a well known and well connected gang leader, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) who wants his money back and sees Harry’s wife Veronica’s comfy lifestyle and demands that she make him whole again. Veronica knew nothing about Harry’s misdeeds and has none of the money to perform restitution, but she does find Harry’s heist notebook with future heist plans and she recruits the other heist widows to steal the money from a Chicago Alderman named Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) who also came by the money by illegal means and who is currently running for reelection and his main opponent is the aforementioned gang leader.

The plot sounds convoluted, but it works and its main purpose is to bring together these disparate groups to focus on some fairly insightful and artistic social commentary. For instance, there is this brilliant one minute soliloquy where Jack is just complaining about life as he gets into his chauffeured car after a campaign event in a severely economically depressed section of his Ward. As Jack talks, the camera is focused across the front hood of the car and the economics of the neighborhood quickly change until he disembarks on his block with mansions galore on it just a minute later. Stuff like that is peppered throughout the film. Then there are the similar but quite different plights of the female protagonists. Veronica finds that the life she had and the love she knew were all a lie. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) finds her shop repossessed by people her husband owed money to. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) was in an abusive relationship and is left with nothing after her husband dies. Besides the heist story undertones, these are issues that affect many women and they are stories that should be told and are told in this film.

“Widows” is directed by Steve McQueen, who has been around for a while now, but has only really been given a chance to shine recently. You may remember him from such films as the brilliant “Twelve Years a Slave”.  He has a couple more films under his belt, but I’ve not seen either. I would think that he’d be directing a film a year at this point, but it doesn’t look like he has anything new lined up yet. I wonder why. Don’t wait for his next film to come out, though, go see “Widows” and definitely rent “Twelve Years a Slave”!

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective but in the end, disappointing horror film because of a pacing problem. Has some amazing war action in it, though.

The premise of “Overlord” is brilliant. It is set during World War Two just before the Normandy invasion. A team of paratroopers needs to drop into a remote location in order to take out a radio tower that would surely cause the Normandy invasion to fail. As the clickbait articles say, what they find there will surprise you! The radio tower is just outside a small town on top of an underground bunker and inside that bunker are horrors beyond those you find in war.

The movie starts with all the main characters in an airplane flying towards their mission. They come under heavy fire as they approach their target and what follows is some wonderful special effects and camera work as you follow the main character Boyce (Jovan Adepo) from the airplane and through his harrowing descent to the ground. War is a horror show in and of itself and “Overlord” effectively portrays that both in the air and on the ground. This goes on for a while too. In fact, for the first 45 minutes or so, you feel like you’re simply in a war movie before it starts peppering in all these minor clues about the horror within the horror that is about to begin.

The horror portion of the film is a little cliche, but not in a burdensome way. You’ve got your brutish Nazi SS officer and your sadistic Nazi scientist and your rag-tag band of heroes and your damsel-not-quite-in-distress. These are good cliches for a horror film to build on and they work well for the story being told, but the problem is all in the pacing. As the movie switches from war film to horror film, everything slows down and it kind of ruins the effectiveness of the horrors yet to come. There is a really good creepiness factor to everything that follows and a satisfying fight with the big bad at the end, but much of the in-between feels like a lost opportunity for lots of fun stuff to happen.

I am being a bit nit-picky as I did legitimately enjoy the movie. I mean who besides our President doesn’t like seeing Nazis getting what’s coming to them? The war parts were great fun and the movie is worth seeing just for them and the horror parts have enough of it to be entertaining.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Ridiculous premise. Cliches galore. Lots of lose ends. Some moderately cool submarine action.

Pretend for a second that you are the U.S. Navy. For years, you have been overshadowed by your much cooler brothers: The Air Force with all their cool gadgets and space stuff, the Marines with their oorah and general bad-assedness, heck, even the Army has drones and cyber-security and whatnot! Sure, the Navy has their SEALs,  but even if you asked people what branch the Navy SEALs belonged to they’d probably say Marines. What’s a poor Navy to do to up their cred? Create “Hunter Killer” would be my guess because this is the type of movie you get when a bunch of people who think it would be cool to make a movie but have no idea how to make a movie. Here is a conversation that I assumed happened between the Navy and the editor and director of this movie:

Navy: You know what would be cool? Let’s shoot a scene where it shows the submarine submerging quickly and all the crewmen on the bridge are shown tilted in order to stay upright since the submarine is going down at a steep angle!

Director: Hey, that’s pretty neat! I never knew that happened. We will film that!

Editor: I’ll throw these 5 seconds in showing them all tilt as the submarine starts its dive.

Navy: Yeah, but what if we throw in more? People are talking and stuff when this happens. Lets have some dialogue while they’re all tilted.

Director: Ooh, yeah, I like it! I’ll film these lines with them both standing tilted and various other ways.

Editor: Um, that’s probably unnecessary and will look a little weird, but I see where you’re coming from. We’ll throw in the next few lines with them tilted.

Navy: And what if we cut away to some other action happening in the sub to show what other people are doing while the sub is diving and then cut back to everyone tilted? And get this, what if we show them like that for the entire length it takes for the submarine to actually dive that far?

Director: You have given me money so I will do this thing you ask of me!

Editor: *head explodes*

Yes, that is an actual scene in the movie. Add to that a bucket full of Navy cliches and dubious plot points and what you have is a real flop of a film. The movie starts with a U.S. submarine being blown up by a rogue Russian submarine for reasons that are never really explained except for the fact that now the U.S. needs to send another submarine to see what happened to their missing sub. It basically gets more preposterous from there. Treaties are broken with abandon. Plots are hatched with little forethought. It’s a complete mess of a movie.

There are a bunch of submarine movies that are pretty awesome. This is not one of them. Go rent “Hunt For Red October” or “Crimson Tide” or “Yellow Submarine” rather than “Hunter Killer” if you have a submarine fix that needs sating.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A decent enough movie with two great actors and a useless Casey Affleck.

There are some movies that you just watch and enjoy and take them for what they are and then never really think about again. “The Old Man & the Gun” is such a movie. It is based on the true story of Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) who was a career criminal and prison escape artist and geriatric bank robber. Mostly, though, it’s a story about getting old and not going gentle into that good night. This is an incredibly appropriate story for Robert Redford given this will also be the last movie he ever acts in.

The heart of the movie is Forrest’s relationship with Jewel (Sissy Spacek). On some level, it is a romantic relationship, but mostly it is just platonic with some great chemistry between the two. The best parts of the movie are just the two of them sitting on the porch of Jewel’s farm contemplating life. These parts contain some good dialogue and let two wonderful actors shine.

Since this is a robber movie, there also has to be a cop. That cop is John Hunt (Casey Affleck). I do not begrudge them having a cop, but 90% of Hunt’s involvement in the movie was just pointless. There is this whole side-plot with him versus the FBI that comes to absolutely nothing. There are all these moments with his family that I guess are meant to humanize Hunt in some way, but there’s not much to Hunt except these moments and the moments where the movie makes clear that he’s hunting Tucker. If it were up to me, there would be less Hunt and more moments with Tucker and his accomplices, Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits!) just shooting the shit.

“The Old Man & the Gun” is worth seeing even if it won’t make a lasting impression. It is an enjoyable time and a fitting homage to two great actors, one of whom will never act again. Whenever it pops up on the streaming service of your choice, be sure to give it a watch.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A unique retelling of the United States’ attempts to put a man on the moon. Beautiful and awe inspiring.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the first men to reach past our atmosphere. Their mission: to boldly test the limits of engineering and science and the human body with the goal of being the first people to set foot on the moon.

“First Man” tells the story of the Space Race almost solely from the perspective of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy). This gives the movie a very personal touch. You get a real feel for what it’s like to be an astronaut and a real feel for what it’s like to be an astronaut’s wife. Neither is easy. The movie starts with the Armstrongs taking care of their young daughter, Karen, who has cancer and ends with Neil walking alone on the moon and leaving a little keepsake for eternity. In between these bookends are all the trials and tribulations that the Armstrong family goes through to get to that first moon landing. Neil is loving, but distant. Claire is strong and loving and the glue that binds the family together.

This is a solidly acted movie all around. Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy acting opposite each other is a delight. It is not easy to stand out in Ryan Gosling’s acting shadow, but Claire Foy shows that her shadow is equally as large and her ability to portray nuanced emotion is a wonder to behold. They are backed up by a solid ensemble of supporting actors including Jason Clarke as Ed White who was about the closest thing to a friend that Neil Armstrong had.

It is a bit strange watching this movie if you know the history. Going to space is a fairly dangerous occupation and this is all in the past. You see the lives of these men who you know are going to die and you know when they’re going to die and you are then at the scene when you know they will die and yet you feel that maybe, just maybe they’ll be able to avert their fate.

The mood of the movie is set wonderfully by the music. Space scenes are an homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey”. And I would never in a million years think that I would utter these words, but the music also makes effective use of a theremin. The theremin brings out this haunting sadness in the music that I would never have imagined possible for such a revolting instrument.

I am guessing that the people who would like this movie fall into two camps: those who like space history and those who like Ryan Gosling. The Venn diagram of those two is probably one giant circle for Ryan Gosling and one tiny circle for space history with the space history circle being almost entirely subsumed by Ryan Gosling’s circle. Which is as it should be. We are all just living in Ryan Gosling’s world.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A passable but lifeless story that, for reasons beyond me, tries to cast Tom Hardy as a loser.

I don’t want to get all Neil deGrasse Tyson on this movie, but it should have lasted only five minutes. Any vehicle that size that loses its heat shielding tiles upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere would burn up into tiny bite-size chunks and no human or alien could survive. This is especially true of aliens whose primary weakness happens to be fire. I’m glad I could get that off my chest.

Well, Marvel had a good run of fun, exciting, and worth watching movies. That streak has ended with “Venom”. This is a shame because giving villains their own backstory and their own motion picture vehicle is a great idea whose time has come. The problem is that Venom’s (Tom Hardy) motivations are minimally defined and kind of stupid and Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is the kind of good person who is really mostly just a dick pretending to be a good person when it suits him. Yes, Eddie Brock is Brett Kavanaugh. He even treats his girlfriend, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), horribly. Come to think of it, the whole movie is basically about a being who nonconsensually invades people’s bodies and everyone around those people being mostly alright with it or afraid to speak up. Ugh. Did I just make this movie into a euphemism for rape culture? Even all the relationships are horribly dysfunctional! Anne inexplicably keeps Eddie in her life and helps him even though he shamelessly takes advantage of her and cruelly violates her trust. Eddie somehow learns to like having Venom inside him even though Venom is clearly using him. Gah! I have completely ruined this movie for me.

Ok, so, besides the whole “Marvel deciding to make a major motion picture whose lead character is a rapist” thing, there are parts of “Venom” that are fun. I couldn’t for a minute buy the whole Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock as a loser thing, but there was some good banter between Eddie and Venom at times and there are some legitimately funny moments. The action scenes are fun, though I could have done without the exploding on impact drones and the CGI is sometimes a little over used and hard to follow. The movie doesn’t quite know what to do with Michelle Williams, which is a shame because she is great. She should have her own superhero movie.

As I wrote the review, I came to the realization that I should probably have rated the movie two stars instead of three, but my rating is all the way at the top and here I am way down here at the end. The effort of changing it is too much for me. And really, three stars is an accurate assessment of my enjoyment level for the movie before I decided to let my brain take over and ruin my fun. I must now go try to kill it with alcohol. Oh, and you can probably skip “Venom”, though there’s almost certainly going to be a sequel and it’s going to star Woody Harrelson so I’ll probably end up going to see it because Woody Harrelson is delightful!

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A dramadey that had me smiling from start to finish. Also a crime thriller. Also a satire. What I’m trying to say is there’s a lot going on here.

Emily Nelson (Blake Lively) is the kind of mother that all suburbanite parents hate; beautiful, successful, confident, wonderful husband, self-absorbed, narcissistic. Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is the kind of mother that all suburbanite parents hate; beautiful, over-achieving, aims-to-pleasing, perfect in every way, all while being a single mom. Emily is the spider to Stephanie’s fly and all the suburbanite parents know it so when the two meet, they all know one thing: This is going to be fun. The two quickly strike up a friendship and become besties, but Emily isn’t exactly the type to have a bestie, but she is the type to have a pet. And like a determined pet, when Emily goes missing, Stephanie will stop at nothing to find out what happened to her.

“A Simple Favor” starts as kind of a satire on suburban life. There’s a lot of petty sniping at the very perfect Stephanie and at the very easy to dislike Emily. It then morphs into this weird, uncomfortable drama as the friendship between Stephanie and Emily grows very one-sidedly deeper as Stephanie falls completely in awe, if not in love with Emily. Then it turns into a who-done-it when Emily mysteriously disappears. Throughout the whole thing, the movie has a delightfully wicked sense of humor that ties everything together.

Both Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick are wonderful in this movie. They play almost polar opposite characters but have this perfect chemistry even as opposed characters that I so want to see them in either a buddy comedy or as a superhero duo. Or maybe as the evil and good conscience sitting on the shoulders of Kristen Bell who gets into wacky hijinks.

The movie also stars Henry Golding as Emily’s husband, Sean Townsend. First off, how lucky is Henry? He has gone from relative obscurity to being in two awesome films in a single year, the other being “Crazy Rich Asians”. Second, it didn’t click with me when watching the movie, but the married couple are Emily Nelson and Sean Townsend. They kept their last names! Not only that, but their child is named Nicky Nelson. They used the mom’s last name! Little thing, but still kind of cool.

“A Simple Favor” is fun and well acted and has a few “why in the world did they do that?” moments, which can be forgiven. It is well worth watching and you would be doing yourself a disservice if you do not see it. I had a smile on my face for quite some time after leaving the theater.