Category Archives: Reviews

Movie Review: It

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line; All the hairs on my body stood up on end multiple times! Lots of nostalgia for us older folks. This was only Part 1, though they don’t say such until the very end.

“It” is two horror stories rolled up into one. The first features an incredibly creepy clown determined to suck children down into the sewers. The second features said children navigating the horrors of growing up. I’m not entirely sure which is more scary.

The thing I like about Stephen King novels in general and this movie in particular is that he often takes the horrors of everyday life and then makes it worse. No more is it more apparent than in his coming of age horror stories like “It”. Navigating childhood is rough even with good parents. With bad parents, it can be a nightmare. I think King focuses on those children of nightmares because those who live through nightmares are more realistically equipped to handle the clownish nightmare that is Pennywise. With so many horrific adults and bullies in their life, what’s an extra horrific clown thrown into the mix? And, oh my goodness, is Pennywise a nightmare! I don’t think I’ve had all the hairs on my body stand up on end this much in a movie since “The Exorcist”.

For those of you who saw the Netflix series “Stranger Things” and related to the children, you’ll recognize a lot of the feelings of coming-of-age nostalgia in the movie. Especially if you are, shall I say, of the dorky persuasion. In fact, I wonder if “Stranger Things” was paying homage to “It”. The makeup of the group of children was pretty spot on between the two. “It” definitely has more of a sexual bent to it because much of the nightmares of growing up a female are being perved on by adult males, but there’s also the healthy boys discovering girls part well represented.

I had warning of it going in and I’d like to pass that warning along to you, my five viewers. This is part one of the movie. That’s not a bad thing, but it could be annoying to not know it in the end. Fear not, though, this is a fully contained movie and by the end, the nightmare is over. Or is it? Of course it’s not, there’s a part two!

Stephen King movies are a crap shoot. For every “Misery” there’s five “Pet Sematary”s. This one is a definite winner, though. Tense, eerie, creepy. Major props to both Bill Skarsgård who plays Pennywise and the editors who, for some scenes, I don’t know how they had the patience to splice that crap together. Simply amazing. Go see this movie if you’re not a chicken.

Movie Review: Wind River

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: A riveting and compelling character driven drama. From the same guy who brought you “Hell or High Water”, which was also awesome.

Despair, grief, loss, and the absence of hope. Welcome to “Wind River”. This is not a happy film, but my god is it beautiful. It is set in the Wind River Reservation of Wyoming, a rough and rugged land where, as they say in the movie, you sometimes have to travel 50 miles to get 5 miles away. The movie is written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who also wrote the excellent “Hell or High Water”. Like “Hell or High Water”, it is a crime drama, but only as a vehicle for portraying desperate characters in desperate situations.

The crime in which this tale is wound around is the death of a young Native American woman under suspicious circumstances. A Native American dying under unusual circumstances on Reservation land triggers a call to the FBI who have jurisdiction under such circumstances. The FBI, unfortunately, doesn’t give two shits about a woman dying on Reservation land. Luckily, the FBI sends Jane Banner (Elisabeth Olsen) who is both competent and has a heart even if she has no idea what she’s getting into. She asks Fish and Wildlife employee Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), who found the young girl’s body, to help her find out what happened.

Through this young girl’s death you get a glimpse into life on the Reservation. All the Native Americans know that the rest of the world has forgotten them and it shows in their disdain for Jane. Cory is divorced with a son who stays with his ex and lost his own daughter under similar circumstances and never found out exactly what happened to her so he has personal reasons to help Jane in her investigation. Martin (Gil Birmingham) is the father of the dead girl, Natalie (Kelsey Asbille), who was his last thread on sanity having to live with a son who has lost himself in drugs and a wife who is mentally ill. You can see that this is not a happy movie.

The Wind River Reservation may be rugged and unforgiving, but it is picturesque. That, along with the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack make “Wind River” even more compelling. It is also very sad. If you don’t like sadness, stay away. Other than that, this is a movie you should definitely go see.  Then see “Hell or High Water” after it.

Book Review: This Side Of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jean-Paul’s rating: 5/5 stars

Man, can F. Scott Fitzgerald write. Often, when I read books, I have delusions of grandeur that I could have written that book. With Fitzgerald, I fee like a complete hack and illiterate.  There are so many moments of absolute prosaic brilliance in this novel. There are definitely parts where my mind wandered, only to be shaken into stark clarity by what I was reading. Kind of like you feel when you jar awake while dosing behind the wheel.

“This Side of Paradise” is a novel for wanderers and travelers, both of the soul and of the body. It’s not quite a coming of age story as much as it’s a discovery of self story. The novel revolves around Amory Blaine, which is appropriate because Amory Blaine thinks the world revolves around himself. He is every spoiled rich kid you have ever met. He spends much of his youth disdaining everything and coming up with simplistic ideas about society, always with him smack dab in the middle of the spiderweb. Basically, take any teenage with time on his hands to think profound thoughts with little guidance and you have Amory Blaine. Here’s the trick, though, he’s actually likeable. Fitzgerald has a way of making deeply flawed, obnoxiously rich people very likeable. As Amory grows older, his methods of questioning the world mellow, but even to the end he is a selfish person, but by then he knows that of himself.

Fitzgerald’s prose is very scattershot in this novel. It’s much of the reason I enjoyed it so much. He switches often from long paragraph prose inside Amory’s mind to back and forth banter between friends to poetry to a play format to a weird question and answer session with himself. At times, especially the long periods inside Amory’s brain, it can be difficult to focus, but the journey is well worth it. I especially loved the play format where Amory’s love Rosalind enters the picture. It had such a delightful, almost Jane Austiny feel to it. It was an “I can’t put the book down” moment that is difficult to recapture these days. Second favorite was the back and forth banter between Amory and some random rich dude about socialism. These moments all just kind of come out of nowhere and are almost short stories thrown into the middle of a novel, but they are wonderful.

Many people will probably be upset with the ending, but I think it is perfect. I will not say what it is, but it’s almost like Amory has come full circle. A little wiser, perhaps, but just as directionless and just as despairing. At the beginning of the novel, I really disliked Amory Blaine. By the end I had to ask the question: oh my god, am I Amory Blaine? Was I like Amory Blaine when I was in school? We are all Amory Blaine. Well, without the money.

I have a theory about Amory Blaine. I didn’t really know what the book was about when I started reading it and reading it doesn’t really help you to know that answer so I was kind of searching for meaning or direction in a directionless and meaningless novel. There was a part when Amory was in Princeton where he sees a ghost of a friend who had died. Many pages are used describing this period of time where Amory sees this ghost. At the time, I thought that this may be a story about a young man who develops schizophrenia and here was his first episode. There were some holes in this theory. A friend saw the ghost as well. But maybe that friend was part of the schizophrenia as well. Amory did seem to only see this “friend” in his house. Then other friends saw the ghost as well and the premise started to get ridiculous. Nothing was mentioned of the ghost after that, which is pretty par for the novel. But then, there was this really weird question and answer period between Amory and himself. It was almost as if two distinct personalities were talking to each other. The rebuttal to that, of course, is who doesn’t have conversations with themselves? But it didn’t feel quit like that was what was happening. Then you take into consideration the fact that his wife, Zelda, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and I have to wonder if there were any other hints that this might be what was happening to Amory. I guess we’ll never know.

Movie Review: Detroit

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A disturbing look at a disturbing period of history. Could have done without the last half hour of the movie.

“Detroit” follows the events of the 1967 Detroit Riots with a focus on the Algiers Hotel incident. And by “incident” I mean the abuse and murder of Black people by police officers. You know how this ends. I came out of the movie angry. Not because of the injustice of the events in the movie, though they are infuriating, but because I can see no progress from 1967 to 2017. What happened at the Algiers Hotel can happen today and does happen today with worrying frequency. And when a movement springs up to try to combat those injustices, they’re equated with Nazis. Welcome to America 2017.

The events surrounding the Algiers Hotel incident are confusing and the movie does a really good job of portraying that while also keeping a very close hold on the truth of what happened that night. You will leave the movie with questions and that’s a good thing. My biggest question of all was who is this Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega) character? He was a security guard hired to guard a nearby store and somehow got tangled up with everything that happened at the Algiers. The police just seem to accept his presence there, which is weird. My best guess is he was a police wannabe, the security guard industry being filled with them. Boyega portrays him as a decent fellow, but there’s just a wrongness of him being there and abetting some really bad police/national guardsmen. I wonder if there is more to know or if that’s all we really do know about him.

The last half hour of the movie is a puzzle to me. First, it’s pretty boring. The main story has been resolved and it just follows Larry Reed (Algee Smith) who quit The Dramatics because of the events of that night. Second, it takes away a lot of the impact of the movie. It’s as if they didn’t want to leave the audience feeling like crap so they tagged on this feel-goodish ending as if to give a bit of a feeling of hope. It would have been much more powerful if they ended the movie with the not guilty verdicts being read and the murderers walking free as the entire police force cheers them on.

“Detroit” is a compelling movie and should be watched by all. It is often not easy to watch, but it should be known and said out loud frequently that this stuff happens even to this day and we should not stand for it and silence is complicity.

Movie Review: Dunkirk

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An enjoyable war story but not worthy of the hype.  Beautifully shot.  Strangely edited.

The evacuation of Dunkirk was an undertaking of immense proportions the likes of which may never be seen again.  Over 300,000 people were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk over the course of about a week.  Over 800 ships, mostly civilian, helped in the evacuation.  Over 200 of those ships were sunk.  300 airplanes went down, equal amounts German and British.  This movie only captures rare glimpses of the depth and breadth of this undertaking.

I will admit that “Dunkirk” is absolutely beautiful from start to finish.  The cinematography is out of this world.  Every scene, every camera angle is chosen with exquisite care.  And I didn’t even see it in the glorious 70mm format, which is probably absolutely breathtaking.  But that’s Christoper Nolan for you.

And speaking of Christopher Nolan, boy has he Christopher Nolaned the crap out of this film.  It is broken up into three parts: land, sea, and air.  The land part takes place over a week.  The sea part takes place the last day of that week.  The air part takes place the last hour of that day.  He takes them and puts them into a blender so that the timeline is all mixed up.  There are air parts before land parts and sea parts before air parts and land parts before sea parts.  You get introduced to characters from the future before you see them for the first time in the past.  It is quite the jumble.  I assume this was in order to project a sense of chaos into the war environment that wouldn’t necessarily translate well to a film with no epic battle scenes and death coming from a surprise torpedo to the side instead of human to human contact.  Otherwise, you’d be stuck with a bunch of people sitting on a beach for a week occasionally getting strafed by planes or a ship going down as it races home with a full compliment of soldiers.  I get that, but I think the real reason is it covers for the fact that the enormity of this event is kind of given short shrift.  There is some semblance of enormity seeing all the soldiers lined up on the beach waiting to be rescued, but the air portion follows only 3 planes and the sea portion doesn’t come close to the epic level of ships used to rescue 300,000 soldiers.

“Dunkirk” is a story that needed to be told and Christopher Nolan does a good job of telling it.  He should be commended for making a beautiful movie.  But a beautiful movie does not a great movie make.  It’s good.  it’s worth seeing.  Maybe even a few times for those that appreciate the movie making art.  It’s just not the “ooh, you HAVE to see this” level that it seems to be getting portrayed as.

Movie Review: Atomic Blonde

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Uneven action.  Convoluted story line.  Dull at times.  Exciting at times.

“Atomic Blonde:” is a spy movie filled with the usual spy intrigues set mostly in Berlin just at the end of the Cold War and the falling of the Berlin Wall.  There are some awesome Berlin sites to be seen in this movie.  If you have Berlin nostalgia, especially the Cold War variety, there’s a lot of visuals for you that most others may not appreciate.  Of course, you also have to get through the movie and that may be a challenge.

The challenging part: There are crosses and double crosses and triple crosses and it’s really confusing keeping them all straight and it might possibly all make sense in the end, but I’m not quite sure and I’m pretty sure a simple phone call at any given time would have cleared the entire mix up.  There is also a bit of a “trying too hard to be cool” vibe to it that kind of takes away from the flow some.  For instance, David Percival (James McAvoy) is supposed to exude cool and careless, but every scene he’s in, all I could think of was I’m watching someone doing a Tyler Durden cosplay.

The non-challenging part: The action is uneven in this movie, but when it’s good, it’s almost laughably good.  Seriously, I was actually laughing through some scenes I was enjoying it so much.  It’s as if they hired one choreographer for some scenes and a completely different choreographer for other scenes.  Charlize Theron, as Lorraine Broughton kicks all sorts of ass in these scenes.  And she takes quite the beating as well.  Which, come to think of it, is kind of fucked up.  How many male spy heroes go through hellish fights with only a black eye or a cut lip for show?  I, for one, love seeing the lead spy taking slightly less damage than is dealt for reality’s sake, but the disparity is there.  In fact, the very first scene in the movie is to show a naked and bruised from head to toe Lorraine climbing into a tub of ice water.  As if to say don’t worry your fragile little egos, boys, she’s tough, but not as tough as your manly spy men.  I think too much.

In the end, I think “Atomic Blonde” tries to promise too much.  It wants to be a legitimate spy thriller and a legitimate action move and, in doing so, fails at both.  It’s still decent fun, especially when it’s hitting on all cylinders.  Nothing about it screams “see me in the theaters”, but we’re getting to the summer lull and if “Atomic Blonde” stays in theaters for a few weeks, it’ll probably be the best thing worth watching.

Movie Review: War For The Planet Of The Apes

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Wait, this is a revenge movie?  Amazing what you can do with little dialogue.  Good story line and effects.  The setup is complete for the original story?

“War for the Planet of the Apes” is, in all likelihood, the first ape revenge movie.  I was not expecting that.  It follows Caesar (Andy Serkis) as he changes role from leader of his apes to revenge machine determined to kill The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), who killed Caesar’s wife and eldest son, thinking that the latter was Caesar.

With a revenge movie, it is important to have an effective bad guy and Woody Harrelson as the Colonel is as effective as they come.  Driven.  Relentless.  A little crazy.  But his world view is coherent and consistent and given the context of the world in which they live, it makes complete sense that people would follow him.  And his end is also perfect justice.  What a great combination!

The show stealers are still the apes, though.  Throughout the trilogy, I have been constantly amazed by their emotive ability and the director’s/whomever’s ability to express so much with only a handful of lines of dialogue.  I think they got a little sloppy with their American Sign Language as the movies have progressed, but if you’ve ever watched an ASL interpreter, that gives you a feel at how expressive the apes are.

I wonder how many homages to the original move are in “War for the Planet of the Apes”.  I was able to catch two.  Caesar’s son is named Cornelius who was the ape played by Roddy McDowall in the original and the young girl is named Nova who was Charlton Heston’s mute mate in the original.  I only have a cursory remembrance of the original and I was able to point those two out.  Can anyone mention more?

The “Origin of the Planet of the Apes” trilogy is complete?  All the pieces are now there and the ending of this movie was ambiguous enough as to whether there will be another.  It was a wonderful trilogy and the evolution of the apes was wonderful to behold.  It is rare to see a trilogy evolve with such brilliance.  This would be a great trilogy to re-watch back to back to back on some lazy Sunday.

Book Review: Days Of Blood And Starlight by Laini Taylor

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

While the first book in this trilogy, “Daughter of Smoke and Bone“, was light-hearted fare with hints of darkness, “Days of Blood and Starlight” is dark fare with hints of blackness.  Karou, after re-experiencing the trauma of her own death as Madrigal and the revelation that the Seraph she loved both as Madrigal and then again as Karou is responsible for the near annihilation of her fellow Chimaera, is almost unrecognizable from the first book.  She has gone from messenger to the Chimaera resurrectionist, Brimstone, now dead at her lover’s hand, to the heavy burden of resurrectionist for the rag-tag leftovers of the Chimera army and taking unquestioning orders from the new Chimaera commander, Thiago.  This is a little jarring given there’s no real build-up to this and she’s gone from unknown participant in an unknown war to the key element necessary to keeping the war going.  This change of personality is understandable, but it’s a weakness of the book that it’s glossed over.

Much of the rest of the book follows Akiva on the Seraph side and Karou on the Chimera side.  They follow twin paths leading to the same conclusion and their paths cross and separate multiple times throughout.  On Akiva’s side, he’s already dedicated to figuring out a way to stop the madness of this war and must tread a delicate line to see his dreams to fruition.  Karou, on the other hand, starts out as pretty much dedicated to the war effort and only slowly realizes that she’s become kind of a monster and must slowly back away from staring into that particular abyss.  The Akiva story-line is well thought out and the evolution of his two partners is explored in a depth that makes that evolution make sense.  The Karou story-line, on the other hand, is kind of a mess.  If you read it as the tale of someone suffering through post-traumatic stress disorder, Karou’s actions and reactions make a little more sense and this is why a bit of a fill-in narrative about Karou for the time between book one and book two would have been appreciated.  Taylor also kind of shoe-horns Zuzana and Mik from book one into book two and while their interactions between themselves and with Karou are delightful, they really don’t add to the story and it’s obvious that Taylor just needed to include them for the sake of letting people see their favorite characters again.

The biggest problem by far with the book is the facile use of a violent attempted rape to further the plot.  Sadly, I can’t even say that it does that, since the rape scene is immediately followed by a strange coincidence that remains unexplained and made the rape completely unnecessary.  The only possible explanations are to either make the reader hate the attacker, even though there was plenty of reason for the reader to already to do, or to make the victim fear the attacker, even though there was already plenty of reason for her to do so.  If you read the story without the rape, you would miss literally nothing from the book.  It was so distasteful, I pushed my review down a star.

Despite that major bit of distastefulness, I did rather enjoy this book.  Probably better than the first one.  It is certainly not a happy book, but there are good surprises throughout and the Akiva arc is definitely Taylor’s best thought out portion of the series to date.  War makes fascists of us all and this book made that clear while wrapping a compelling story around it.  I’m still kind of on the fence as to whether I would recommend the series to anyone except to the young adults they’re supposed to be written for, but we’ll see if book three can kick me off that fence one way or another.  “Harry Potter” this series is not, but that’s an impossibly high standard.

Movie Review: Spiderman: Homecoming

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Marvel does it again.  Good mix of humor, action, and story.  Tom Holland is a star.  Michael Keaton is good, but wasted in his role.

Ok, this is going to seem weird, but my favorite thing about “Spiderman: Homecoming” is how it challenges the preconceived notions of family and race.  Spiderman has, of course, always done that to some extent.  Peter, after all, is being raised by his aunt and uncle prior to becoming a superhero.  In this movie, he is now being raised solely by his Aunt May, played by a very 70s hippy looking Marisa Tomei.  The only thing nuclear about this family is Peter from his radioactive spider bite.  Peter’s main crush is a black girl who is also taller than him.  Bye bye Mary Jane.  The debate team that Peter is on is also very diverse, which was nice to see.  There is also a reveal that I will not get into because it’s tangentially plot related which had me almost laughing with delight.  Marvel knows who its audience is and it knows who his audience will be and it’s doing all it can to include everyone.  it’s good to see.

The story starts with a preface just after the first Avengers movie (I think) and then fast forwards to recap the Spiderman events from “Captain America: Civil War”.  It then follows Peter/Spiderman (Tom Holland) as he tries to be something more than just your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.  He has Avenger envy, you might say.  He discovers a group of people led by Adrian Toomes/Vulture (Michael Keaton) who have been stealing the alien technology left over from the first Avengers movie and re-purposing it and selling it on the black market and tries to take them down himself.  Oh, and he also suffers through high school.  Not sure which is more dangerous.  One physically, one mentally.

I was a little disappointed in Marvel’s use of Michael Keaton as the main villain.  This, to me, continues to be Marvel’s weak spot.  Keaton’s a great actor and the Toomes/Vulture character has much to explore, but they give him some weak-ass “anything for my family” background and run with simply that.  I know that Spiderman is the main attraction, but bad guys are cool and I wish Marvel would focus on them a little more, especially when getting top talent to play them.  That said, it really is Tom Holland who steals the show.  He has that perfect mix of awkward teenager/superhero that Spiderman deserves.  And at just 21, it seems obvious that Marvel plans to build their future around him.  The Marvel franchise is strong with this one.

Marvel continues to rule the movies.  It really is astounding how well they have done.  I don’t know if this is Disney’s doing or if Disney has let them have free reign with their creative license, but I don’t really care.  Whatever they’re doing, more of “Spiderman: Homecoming” please!

Book Review: Daughter Of Smoke And Bone by Laini Taylor

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

“Daughter of Smoke and Bone” belongs firmly in the glutted young adult “teen doesn’t know who she is but discovers she is so much more” genre, but does a good job of distinguishing itself from the pack.  Taylor does this by giving the main character a pretty weird life right from the get go.  Taylor does a good job of giving her characters, both human and other, an exotic flavor while keeping them relatable at the same time.

The main character is Karou, a 17 year old with blue hair and tattoos living in Prague and going to art school by day and owning one of the coolest names of bookdom.  By night, Karou is a messenger/gofer for an individual named Brimstone who lives in some sort of trans-dimensional space and collects teeth in exchange for wishes.  Karou was raised from birth by Brimstone and his assistants who are all chimaera, animal/human hybrids of varying sorts.  Karou keeps this portion of her life secret from her human friends, including her best friend Zuzana, a spunky, wisecracky, ball of energy who goes to school with her.  Obviously, since this is a book they want you to read, Karou doesn’t keep her secret for long after it is revealed to Karou that seraphim have invaded Earth and that the seraphim and chimaera have been at war for thousands of years.

Taylor has built a very interesting world here and there is a lot of material that I wish she had covered, but was sadly left unexplored.  This is especially true of the chimaera, of whom very little is explored.  I would have loved to see some anthropological (chimaerapological?) diggings into their society.  Perhaps this will be done in the next book.  Yes, this is the first of a series.  The whole chimaera vs seraphim war is intriguing and the bleeding of it into the human world and its impact therein is well thought out.  The whole system of wishes is well thought out, having varying denominations like currency (scuppy, shing, lucknow, gavriel, and bruxis, from weakest to strongest).  Imagine what you would have done as a teenager with almost unlimited scuppies, which can’t do much more than cause jock itch, and you have an idea of what happens to them in Karou’s hands.

My biggest problem with the book is that there are chapters and chapters dedicated to describing a relationship between the teenager Karou and a hundreds of years old angel named Akiva.  First off, eww.  Second, it’s not that the relationship was there which bothered me, but the superficiality of it.  Everyone is just so beautiful.  Karou, her ex Kazimir, Akiva, all the seraphim.  And if that weren’t bad enough, much of the evil/betrayal portrayed in the novel is done by ugly people or people jealous of beauty.  And before you simply accuse me of not liking romance, there is another romance story in this book that worked well and that I enjoyed.  There is also a lot of heavy-handed foreshadowing which I rolled my eyes at, but in Taylor’s defense, delivers quite effectively even if it is the very end of the book.  That the book just ended there was annoying as there was much left hanging and there was really no sense of accomplishment felt plot-wise.

Quibbles aside, this was a very enjoyable book to read and I’ve already started reading the next in the series.  Given that Taylor most likely started right in on the second book, I don’t have hope that she received much feedback about the first and thus will continue to populate the second book with my quibbles, but that’s ok.  I just have to remind myself that this is young adult fiction and not meant for masterpiece theater, though they are working on a film adaptation of the first book as we speak.