Category Archives: Reviews

Movie Review: Ghostbusters (2016)

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Fun and funny.  A little short on plot.  A better villain would have been nice.

My childhood has been ruined by the remaking of a beloved classic only with an all female cast.  Oh, the horrors!  Ok, not really, but that was actually a thing that happened to Trump supporters, er, I mean misogynists around the world.  Holy crap, what is wrong with people?

First off, this movie is legit funny.  There are all sorts of different kinds of comedy to be found throughout.  Slapstick, black, deadpan, juvenile, you name it.  Besides a large comedic lull filled with a boring ghostbusting action sequence, I found myself both laughing and smiling throughout.  I’ve never seen a movie where various parts of the audience laughed at different things like they did in this one.  It’s a strange experience, but hearing someone guffawing at something I only cracked a smile at actually made for a better movie viewing experience.

When you’re rebooting a sequel, you have to walk a fine line between keeping yourself the same as the source material and making the material your own.  This reboot does a great job of walking that line.  First off, the cast is terrific.  They all mesh well and have believable relationships.  Erin Gilbert (Kristin Wiig) and Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) are estranged friends thrown back together by the appearance of the ghosts.  Jillian Holtzman (Kate McKinnon) is Abby’s science nerd sidekick.  Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) is the street smart know it all.  The show stealers are Kate McKinnon  and Chris Hemsworth as Kevin the extra stupid secretary.  I could spend all day watching Holtzman outtakes.  The movie is also full of wonderful secondary characters played by Zach Wood and Ed Beagley Jr. and Karan Soni, just to name a few.  The reboot movie also pays homage to the original movie like crazy.  Almost everyone from the original cast has a bit part walk on.  They tribute most of the iconic symbols throughout.

My biggest complaint by far is the completely one dimensional villain.  Rowan North’s (Neil Casey) only defining characteristic is picked on dork out for revenge.  Kind of lame.  It would have been comedy gold if they had made him a Men’s Rights Activist (MRA).  Make his whole raison d’etre trying to get back at women for the perceived slights done to him over the years.  Read an MRA site if you dare.  The material is endless.  Then a band of all female Ghostbusters shows up to defeat him.  In fact, someone should dub over Neil Casey’s voice with a litany of MRA complaints.  Maybe for the sequel.

Because of the various types of humor and the diverse audience reactions to said humor, I’d definitely recommend seeing “Ghostbusters” in the theater if you can.  If not, it’s still a very fun comedy worth your time to watch.  I’m a little worried that the humor might not hold up very well upon a second showing, but I’m looking forward to when it shows up on whatever streaming service hooks its tendrils into it.

Movie Review: Jason Bourne

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Horrible plot.  Lazy story.  Some good action.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is retired from retiring from retiring from retiring from trying to find out the truth about Operation Treadstone.  He spends his days looking disgruntled and knocking out menacing looking brutes in one punch in back-desert prize fighting matches.  Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is working for a brilliant hacker who wants to use information he finds to bring down The Man.  She spends her days breaking into hacking collectives and using their resources to hack into CIA databases gaining access to more than enough information to bring down The Man and inexplicably relocating Jason Bourne because she found an extra tidbit on Treadstone that he might be interested.  We’ll ignore the fast that she could just have gotten this information to Bourne by releasing it into the wild and accomplishing what she set out to do in the first place because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.

Maybe we shouldn’t have a movie, though.  I mean, if you’re going to make a spy thriller, can you at least make your super spies act even remotely competent at their job?  In a world where you know facial recognition is everywhere, can you at least make an attempt to blend in, Nicky?  Maybe a baseball cap?  Or at least dress like you didn’t just come off of a runway in Paris?  I know this is all Hollywood objectification of women BS.  If you’re going to be a woman, you have to look good and stand out even if you should be going for the exact opposite.

Then there’s The Asset (Vincent Cassel), a man who has such an axe to grind with Bourne that he should never be put on the mission to eliminate Bourne to begin with.  You see, Bourne released sensitive data that compromised CIA programs and led to The Asset’s capture.  He cannot forgive Bourne for putting CIA personnel at risk.  So of course he starts racking up a CIA body count larger than anything Bourne ever did just so that he could get to Bourne and kill him.  Makes perfect sense.  And don’t even get me started on CIA Director Robert Dewey (played skeletally by Tommy Lee Jones).

The only redeeming thing about this movie is some of the action sequences are pretty cool.  That is not nearly enough to recommend spending time nor treasure on this movie.  Hopefully, Jason Bourne forgets about Treadstone for good from this point on.

Book Review: Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

The protagonist’s name in “Not Dark Yet” is Brandon Minamoto.  If you’re going to read this book, remember that because it is only mentioned in the very first sentence of the very first chapter.  In fact, I thought the main character was nameless throughout until I read someone else’s review and they said his name was Brandon.  I had to actually do a search of the ebook to see if the author actually did name him.  I can’t recall how far into the book I had read before I realized that I didn’t know this man’s name, but I do recall finally getting the style of the prose after I realized he was repeatedly not named.  It’s an interesting style and it reflects nicely the nothingness feeling of the character.  Until that point, I was quite confused and it was an ah ha moment that made me enjoy the novel much more than I otherwise would have.

The setting is somewhere in the near future and the planet is beginning to reap the whirlwind of global warming.  States and countries are mostly a thing of the past, though governments still exist.  Food and water shortages are rampant.  Riots are a daily occurrence.  The weather grows more unpredictable and more violent.  This is the world that Brandon is floating through.

The novel starts with a jumble of stories from random moments in Brandon’s life.  Only with some thought can you later piece together those snippets into some sort of chronological order.  By the end, the pieces are all there to figure out, but it’s quite the jumble.  The problem is there’s not much reason for you to want to care about reassembling the jumble since nothing really exciting happens throughout the book to make you want to care.  If you bother, you will see that despite the book’s bleak ending, the real ending is possibly hopeful.

Despite the zero-sum nature of the novel, I found it enjoyable to read, if slightly disappointing given the abundant attention to detail without the corresponding fleshing out of any real connection of the main character to anyone or anything.  For that reason, it’s difficult to recommend the book to those who are looking for a more novelistic read.  If upon reading my review, it still sounds worth it, I don’t think you will be disappointed reading it.

Movie Review: Star Trek: Beyond

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An enjoyable action movie that throws physics straight out the window.  Karl Urban is a better McCoy than DeForest Kelley ever was.

“Star Trek” has largely been a cerebral franchise.  It embraces science even if it has to make the science up in order to do so (see inertial dampers).  Sure, wars and fights occur, but the focus has been more towards the “meet new civilizations” aspect than the blow the crap out of everything aspect that most action movies boil down to.  With the reboot, “Star Trek” began its slow embrasure of the latter at the unfortunate expense of the former.  Now, with “Star Trek: Beyond” and Justin Lin in the director’s seat, we’re at the point of full on action movie.  The Star Trek geek in me weeps a little.  But, whatever, I know what I’m getting into, let’s review an action movie!

No, wait, the physics.  Can we talk about the physics for a minute?  I can ignore the holographic projections that are somehow smart enough to interact with the rough natural environment so perfectly that they can fool seasoned warriors (a new technology, by the way, that seems to be in the sole possession of one woman abandoned on a planet).  I can even ignore the action movie trope of a vehicle falling off the cliff and the person jumping and catching onto the cliff edge as it falls.  What I can’t ignore is the saucer section of the Enterprise crashing through mountains and remaining mostly intact.  What I can’t ignore is the same saucer section, now on the ground, also being used in a chase scene where the whole thing flips over and the villain gets crushed by it while the heroes somehow manage to clear the area and not even in one of those cool “the villain gets crushed by the very edge as the heroes slightly outrun them” ways.  What I can’t ignore is taking another, much older, ship and crashing it through even more mountains.

The movie also criminally under-utilizes the star villain.  I won’t say who it is because it’s kind of a reveal, but I’ll give you a hint: He’s black.  A movie where a black man is the villain?  Shock of all shocks! #blackrolesmatter

All that said, “Star Trek: Beyond” is a fun action movie.  It moves at a brisk pace so that the plot doesn’t really matter, which is good because it’s kind of weak and produces more questions than it answers.  And sure, there’s a bunch of technology created for the sole purpose of making a cool action scene, but those scenes actually work.  I sincerely hope that the movie franchise veers back to its more cerebral roots, but in the meantime I’m just going to enjoy the ride.

Oh, and Karl Urban! I want to see an entire movie of his Dr. McCoy riffing off of both Kirk and Spock.  I know it’s hard to say that someone does a character better than the original since Urban is basically out-DeForest Kelleying DeForest Kelley, but man does he nail the role.

Book Review: The Narrator by Michael Cisco

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

I can only imagine that this novel was an experiment.  Populate a world with both the mundane and the fantastical and blur them all together.  Add to it a special character called a “Narrator” whose job it is to follow along on the action and put into words all that he sees and does.  Make that Narrator very bad at his job.  Write a novel from that Narrator’s perspective.  What you are left with is a jumbled confusion.  While I was able to track the basics of the story, at very few points did I have a concrete picture of the how or the where or the why or the what of what people were doing.

Many of the descriptives in the book read like the author picked the most obscure words out of a thesaurus and sprinkled them throughout.  I have never used the dictionary more than while reading this book.  There are also many instances of the Narrator making simple grammatical errors and then correcting them in the next sentence.  Add to that the fact that this Narrator is describing a fantastical world with places and characters that require well thought out narratives in order to understand and you have one hell of a confusing jumble of a mess.  I mean, there’s never really even any explanation as to why there are these Narrators to begin with or why they’re entrusted with the telling of history.

I’m sure much of what I said above is exactly the point of the novel.  It’s an accurate description of what it must be like to go through war.  A jumbled mess of marching from place to place with randomly interspersed bouts of extreme violence.  Perhaps the Narrator lost his mind in the process and the result is the jumbled mess of his attempts to do his job.  Good reading material it is not, however.  If I had to describe the novel in a way that you might be able to understand, I’d say you start with the story of “Heart of Darkness”, add a hint of Lovecraftian horror, then sprinkle with a dash of “A Clockwork Orange” then mix with some “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, but that makes “The Narrator” sound much better of a read than it actually is.

Movie Review: The Secret Life Of Pets

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A mildly entertaining kids movie.  Not much for adults.  Visually gorgeous.

Pets have secrets.  The minute you leave them alone, they throw wild parties and visit other pets and talk and behave all around like teenagers.  Well, at least for the first fifteen minutes of the movie they do.  Then they mostly do all the same stuff right out in the open for all humans to see.  So really the movie should have been called “The Not So Secret Lives of Pets”.  The “Secret Lives” parts of the movie are clever and fun, but there’s only so much you can do with it while also trying to tell a story and advance a plot.  Except if you’re Pixar.  In fact, upon seeing the previews for “The Secret Life of Pets”, I started calling it “Toy Story 4” because of the similarities, but the truth is this movie is lazier than the worst Pixar film (“Cars”?).

The basic premise of the plot is that Max (Louie C.K.) has a loving owner who one day brings home another dog, Duke (Eric Stonestreet).  Max doesn’t like Duke and tries to get rid of him.  Duke returns the favor.  They find themselves alone on the streets.  If you had to guess what would happen to two pet dogs that find themselves in this situation, what do you think would happens next?  If you said, “They get caught by the dog catcher”, you win a prize!  Like I said, lazy.  The rest of the movie is them trying to get back home.  There’s enough to be entertaining, but nothing particularly worth recommending.

And now a brief word on stereotypes in Hollywood.  While the cast for this movie is slightly more diverse than a Republican’s list of summer interns, it still lacks diversity.  Where it does have diversity is in the form of the main villain, a psychopathic bunny named Snowball played by Kevin Hart who, you may know, is black.  So the one main role that goes to a black man happens to be the villain.  Wonderful.

If you want to see a good animated movie that’s out now, go see “Finding Dory“.  If you’ve already seen that, “The Secret Life of Pets” pales in comparison, but is still not bad, especially if you have children.  There’s plenty of cuteness, a tad of cleverness, and lots of beautiful.

Movie Review: Finding Dory

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: One of the best shorts Pixar has made.  Not quite as good as “Finding Nemo” but still very enjoyable.  I like shells!

“Finding Dory” has the adorableness knob turned to 11.  This begins even before the movie starts with the ubiquitous Pixar short that runs before the main attraction.  This time it’s “Piper”, a story about a newly fledged sandpiper and it’s first experiences on the beach.  The animation is gorgeous.  We’re talking almost lifelike.  You’d be hard pressed to be able to tell the animated ocean from a real ocean at times.   The short also introduces a theme that bleeds into “Finding Dory” itself; there is always more than one way to do something.  In the baby sandpiper’s case, it’s a clever way to catch shells 100% of the time.  If you don’t enjoy this short, you have no heart.

My main concern with “Finding Dory” was the ability to make an entire movie centered around a character whose shtick is constantly forgetting things.  It’s a great concept for a secondary character and Ellen DeGeneres is wonderful and the only person I can imagine in the role, but how do you translate that into a full length animation?  Partially, the answer to that question is backstory.  And you can not find a more adorable backstory than the one featuring baby Dory.  It really sets the stage for adult Dory’s adventures.  Another answer is you cram as many disabled characters as possible into the story.  You have Nemo with his one little fin.  You have Dory with her memory loss.  You have an octopus missing a leg.  You have a near-sighted whale shark.  You have a beluga whose sonar doesn’t work.  All have a part to play in helping Dory reunite with her parents.  It’s a great lesson for the kiddies.

The one thing I could have done without is the car chase scene.  “What’s wrong with a car chase scene?”, you might ask?  I would answer that it involves sea animals driving the car, or truck in this case.  If it were a quick five minute bit, it would have probably been ok, but this went on for some time and it just pushes the suspension of disbelief a little too far.  Other than that, it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie.

Parents be warned, taking your children to this movie may result in seeing this movie over and over and over and over again.  But since you’ve already decided to spawn, you’re probably already well aware of that fact because of all of the other Pixar movies known to man.  Others, this is a fun movie well worth watching and you’ll likely enjoy the hell out of it.

Movie Review: Independence Day: Resurgence

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Just like the original movie but with none of the charisma.

“Independence Day: Resurgence” answers the question; can Will Smith take a completely mediocre movie and make it a blockbuster success by sheer charm alone?  No one was really asking that question, but the answer is indubitably yes.  The two movies are almost interchangeable plot wise, but this sequel has all of the charm of a toaster with a fork stuck in it.

It is unclear how they got so many of the original stars to return to make this film.  My only guess is boatloads of money.  In some cases, even that appeared to be not enough.  Case in point: Bill Pullman.  I imagine the negotiations going somewhat like this:

Producers: Here’s the script, come on and do the sequel.

Pullman: *reads script and momentarily channels Will Smith*  Aw, hell no!

Producers: Here is a boatload of money.

Pullman: Tempting, but not enough.

Producers: That’s all the money we have.  We blew the rest on alcohol and drank ourselves stupid when we realized how crappy the script is.  Is there anything else we can offer you? *holds out a can of PBR*

Pullman:  *shotguns the PBR* Ok, I’ll do it, but I’m going to be drunk for the entire production!

Producers: Deal!

You watch the movie and tell me I’m wrong.

Though I am loathe to admit it, I did still somewhat enjoy the movie.  It required two things: 1) letting go of all of my critical thinking skills, 2) some really bad dialogue.  First some set up.  Generically Handsome Dude #1 (Liam “the lesser” Hemsworth) and Generically Beautiful Chick 1 (Maika Monroe) are in a generic relationship and GBC#1 wants GBD#1 to look at houses she has sent him but he hasn’t quite gotten around to it.  Aliens then attack (spoiler!) and cause devastation the likes of which the Earth has never seen.   While rushing off to fight the aliens, GBD#1 mentions that he looked at the houses and has picked the one they will buy together.  How he has had the time to do this while not having a second of time to spare is beyond me.  GBC#1 is all happy that her man has made this incredibly important decision for her.  GBD#1 then says, “If it’s still there…”  And they both have a good laugh.  At this point, I whisper to my brother, “It’s funny because billions of people have just died.”  And that’s how I learned to stop worrying and love ID:R.

I miss you Will Smith.  Generic Black Dude #1 (Jessie T. Usher) could not replace you.  Even the movie missed you as it showed your portrait on the wall and copious lines of dialogue were spilled about you to try to get your magic back.  Alas, it was not to be.  Thus, “Independence Day: Resurgence” will go down in history as the film that answered the question, yes, a single soul can save a relentlessly mediocre movie.

Book Review: Crandolin by Anna Tambour

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Imagine you are using drugs.  These drugs make you hallucinate a little bit.  They also take the ordered sections of your brain and shuffle them together just once, but you’re not really very good at shuffling either so the last parts just kind of get tucked down at the bottom of the deck.  Then, suddenly, there is a pen in your hand and a stack of paper in front of you.  You start writing.  That is the best description I can give behind the genesis of Anna Tambour’s “Crandolin”.

The book starts out in what can only be described as micro-chapters.  It flits and darts from place to place and time to time and person to person with so few words separating the chapters that you don’t know whether you’re coming or going and you don’t have a clue what the characters mean to each other or where or when they are.  It’s dizzying to the point that you stop caring.  Eventually, the book coalesces into something more tangible and you get a solid feeling for who is where and when, but there is still a disjointedness because it’s never quite clear who or what is being pursued or even if there is any point to the story at all.

This may be one of those books that you appreciate more when you read it a second time.  You know, if you’re an English major.  But since I’m here for you, the common bookworm, and not those ivory tower prigs, maybe if I explain the story a bit you’ll enjoy it a little more than I did.

There’s this guy named Nick Kippax.  You might call him an epicurean.  Always searching for new and exciting flavors and recipes.  One day, he finds this cookbook with a recipe on how to cook a crandolin.  Crandolins totally don’t exist.  On the page of that recipe is a mysterious stain.  Maybe it’s a stain from the last time someone cooked the recipe.  Why not taste it?  Thus Nick Kippax finds himself blown into tiny pieces and spread across time and space.  One piece finds him/itself as a Gorbachevian spot on the face of a young woman who works on a train in Russia with a bunch of people who are in love with her.  Another piece finds him/itself in some jars of honey belonging to the best honey maker in the world which a man who makes sweets envies and kidnaps.  Another is in a birds nest somewhere?  Maybe another is in a virgin’s pubic hair that some weirdo wants to make a mustache out of, I think?  There’s also this old dude who isn’t real, but is, and goes around planting factual stories in writers’ minds and is going senile.  There’s also this woman who isn’t real, but is, and goes around planting fanciful stories in writers’ minds and is looking for something.  There’s this bunch of dudes questing for a girl locked in a tower by her father who has just died.  A bunch of stuff happens to them.  The end.

Did I make you want to read the book?  No?  What if I told you there was lots of sex in it?  There isn’t, but would that change your mind?  I have failed as a book salesman.

Book Review: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

You know that scene in “Spaceballs” where Dark Helmet asks “How many assholes we got on this ship?” and the entire crew raises their hand and says “Yo!”?  The more I read about our Founding Fathers, the more I picture George Washington as Dark Helmet and the rest of the Founding Fathers as the crew of the ship.  They were all such assholes.  They were petty, vindictive, and cocksure.  This is also somewhat comforting of a revelation because it shows modern politics to be not nearly the black hole of pettiness and despair as it would seem without the historical context.  We revere our Founding Fathers like we revere our guns; with a tunnel-vision that is so narrow as to be awe-inspiring.

Without a doubt, the king of the Founding Assholes was Alexander Hamilton.  He also happened to be truly brilliant, a polymath of the highest order, and perhaps the most prolific writer the world has ever known.  His story is equal parts inspirational and a testament to the dangers of letting the demons of your past destroy you.  Ron Chernow’s biography does a good job of highlighting both the good Hamilton and the bad Hamilton.

The Good Hamilton:  Dude was a genius.  Anything he put his mind to he excelled at.  He overcame astronomical odds to rise farther above his station than would seem possible.  Before all you “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” people take him on as your personal hero, remember he had lots of help; free passage on a ship, free schooling, a decent support system.  People love to overlook those things.  Hamilton could also write.  And boy, did he write. Ask his opinion on the color blue and you’ll have a 10,000 word essay about its transcendent beauty by nightfall.  Personally, I also think that he’s by far the main reason why the United States has lasted as long as it has and grown as powerful as it has.   He wrote the book on American economics.  Probably about 100 books if you joined all of his essays and laws together.

The Bad Hamilton: Dude had skin as thin as your 100-years old grandmother.  Insult him, cross him, look at him funny, and you’ll soon see a 10,000 word essay published in the paper on how horrible of a person you were.  Partly, this was understandable.  People did hate him.  Irrationally so.  Many thought he didn’t deserve to be where he was just because of where he came from.  He suffered decades of bilious rumors and innuendo both during his life and decades after his death and was determined to fight tooth and nail against it while he could.  This also led him to see attacks where there weren’t any and to fight against ghosts of his own making.  Want some insight as to why Hillary Clinton is the way she is? Get to know Alexander Hamilton.  The worst thing about Hamilton is a shared dishonor.  He and Thomas Jefferson double-handedly brought into existence our dreaded two-party system through their often petty squabbles with each other.

I have a few minor critiques of the book.  First, it seems to diminish in readability during the post-Treasury period of Hamilton’s life, becoming somewhat of a slog to get through.  I am not sure if it’s because Chernow got tired of writing his 800+ page project or I got tired of the 800+ page book or Hamilton’s later life was that much less exciting.  Second, Chernow spills a lot of ink talking about Hamilton’s personal rise and fall, but having read the book, I see plenty of evidence of a rise and little evidence of a “fall”.  Hamilton was Hamilton from start to finish.  Even when he was out of favor politically, he was still always in the thick of things, if behind the scenes.  The only fall was his untimely death at the hands of Aaron Burr.

If you can stand to get through such a large book, Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” biography offers great insights into the life of the most interesting of America’s Founding Fathers.  There’s lots to love and lots to hate about the man.  Both are on display in this book.

A brief note to fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit “Hamilton: The Musical”: Mr. Miranda is a genius.  I am as overly obsessed with the musical as you are.  But please recognize the fact that he takes great liberties with historical facts to present a compelling story.  This should go without saying, but people are people.