Category Archives: Reviews

Movie Review: The Hateful Eight

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line:  A minimalist movie with a maximal punch.  Full of colorful characters and great storytelling.  In other words, your standard Quentin Tarantino fare.

Ah, good storytelling.  You don’t run into it very often these days.  Luckily, Quentin Tarantino is still making movies.  Say what you want about his excessive violence and grotesque use of blood (more on that later), the man knows how to tell a story.

After the success of the magnificent “Django Unchained” which was an expansive journey film, Tarantino has followed it up with what can only be called a minimalist journey film.  I mean, sure, 95% of the movie is set in a run down general store in the middle of the wintry Wyoming plains, but the whole story revolves around how the occupants got there and where they’re going.  As you can probably tell from the title, the occupants are hateful and there’s eight of them.  They’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect to find traveling the post-Civil War Wyoming wasteland; bounty hunters, prisoner, sheriff, hangman, cowpoke, confederate general, and stagecoach driver.  At least I think it was post-Civil War.  I’m pretty sure that Wyoming is still filled with the same characters and stagecoach continues to be the preferred method of transportation.  At least such is my understanding.

Quentin Tarantino has a list of about 20 people that he is allowed to cast in his movies and most of them are in this one.  Samuel Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, James Park, all in this movie and all in at least one other Tarantino film.  I’m pretty sure Tarantino keeps half of them in cold storage and only thaws them out for his movies.  That leaves just one of the eight unaccounted for: Jennifer Jason Leigh as the outlaw Daisy Domergue.  Because there can only be one woman in any Tarantino film.

It’s later.  I don’t get why Tarantino insists on ending his films with violent bloodbaths.  Don’t get me wrong, his stories always evolve in a way where a violent ending is assured, but the bloody splashes and head burstings just don’t do much for his films.  Don’t get me wrong, I like movies featuring fountains of blood and dismemberments with a rusty hacksaw as much as the next guy, but in Tarantino’s films, they always seem more of a stain on the movie than anything else.

I would put “The Hateful Eight” right around the level of “Pulp Fiction”.  So second or third best of Tarantino’s movies.  “Django Unchained” is clearly the best.  If you disagree, you continue to be not very fun at parties.

Book Review: 2015 Revue

Another year, another revue.  Books.  I don’t read enough of them.  16 this year.  Partially, this is because of the size of the books I read (Close to 3,000 pages just for Ken Follett’s trilogy).  Partly, this is because I was uncharacteristically busy and preoccupied.  I never thought I’d long for the 2 hour a day commute, but boy did I get a lot of reading done then.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau – 3/5 stars

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett – 3/5 stars

Winter of the World by Ken Follett – 3/5 stars

Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett – 3/5 stars

A Mercy by Toni Morrison – 4/5 stars

Unnatural Creatures by Neil Gaiman – 4/5 stars

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift – 5/5 stars

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – 4/5 stars

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – 2/5 stars

Mockingjay by Susanne Collins – 1/5 stars

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman – 4/5 stars

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee – 4/5 stars

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates – 5/5 stars

The Martian by Andy Weir – 4/5 stars

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson – 3/5 stars

Constitution by Nick Webb – 2/5 stars

Movie Review: 2015 Revue

Year 3 of movie reviews.  Still haven’t indexed all my reviews.  This was the year of “oh yeah, I did see that movie”.  47 movies in all.  2015 started out poorly but finished strong.  The European Union International Film Festival was a bust with the exception of “Farewell, Herr Schwartz” and “Open Up To Me”.  I think I have more 1 and 2 star reviews this year than in previous years, but I’m too lazy to count.

Into the Woods – 3/5 stars

Taken 3 – 3/5 stars

American Sniper – 3/5 stars

Mordecai – 2/5 stars

The Interview – 3/5 stars

Kingsman: The Secret Service – 5/5 stars

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 – 2/5 stars

Focus – 3/5 stars

Still Alice – 4/5 stars

Amour Fou – 2/5 stars

Run All Night – 3/5 stars

Farewell, Herr Schwartz – 4/5 stars

The Lazarus Effect – 1/5 stars

The Gunman – 1/5 stars

Open Up To Me – 4/5 stars

The Chambermaid – 2/5 stars

Furious 7 – 3/5 stars

Woman in Gold – 4/5 stars

True Story – 4/5 stars

Avengers: Age of Ultron – 3/5 stars

Ex Machina – 4/5 stars

Max Max: Fury Road – 4/5 stars

Tomorrowland – 3/5 stars

San Andreas – 3/5 stars

Jurassic World – 3/5 stars

Terminator Genisys – 2/5 stars

Inside Out – 4/5 stars

Ant-Man – 3/5 stars

Trainwreck – 4/5 stars

Fantastic Four – 1/5 stars

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation – 4/5 stars

Straight Outta Compton – 4/5 stars

Mr. Holmes – 4/5 stars

No Escape – 3/5 stars

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – 3/5 stars

Everest – 4/5 stars

The Martian – 5/5 stars

The Last Witch Hunter – 3/5 stars

Bridge of Spies – 4/5 stars

Spectre – 3/5 stars

Crimson Peak – 2/5 stars

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – 3/5 stars

Krampus – 2/5 stars

The Night Before – 3/5 stars

The Big Short – 4/5 stars

Mockingjay Part 2 – 3/5 stars

Secret In Their Eyes – 3/5 stars

Movie Review: Secret In Their Eyes

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An effective, if not great, thriller.  Some motivations are unclear.  One of the creepiest workplace romance subplots ever.

I can’t do this review justice as I’m writing this three months after actually seeing the movie so this is going to be short and sweet.  C’est la vie.

“Secret in Their Eyes” is about a tight knit group of investigators/attorneys who fall apart after one of their own, Jess (Julia Roberts) loses a child in a brutal murder.  It is an enjoyable movie and mostly effective.  There are a few somewhat off subplots, one of which is germane to the plot and the other of which is creepy.  The creepy one involves the obsessed investigator, Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) (best name ever), and the district attorney, Claire (Nicole Kidman). I would best describe it as an accepted workplace harassment as Ray creeps on Claire.  It is exceedingly weird, all the more so since they eventually pseudo get together.  There’s also some motivation issues with the movie that are hard to suspend reality for.  For one, why does Jess go along with Ray’s plan?  The wrap up also leaves a lot to be desired.

The movie does have a great cast and they do a fine job of making their lives mostly believable.  Also, someone should really get a best makeup award for this movie because they did one hell of a job on aging the characters, especially Julia Roberts.  All this puts “Secret in Their Eyes” solidly in the “worth watching but you’re not missing much if you don’t see it” camp.

Movie Review: Mockingjay Part Two

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A bit empty story-wise.  Good effects but mostly video-gamey.  Pointless as a stand-alone movie but worth it to see the conclusion of the series.

Still catching up on my 2015 movie reviews…

Having finally read the “Hunger Games” books in between Part One and Part Two of “Mockingjay”, I had a fairly good idea of what to expect for this movie and my expectations were low.  “Mockingjay” the book wasn’t terribly good.  That said, this is a series where I can say that the movies were all better than the books.  THAT said, “Mockingjay Part 2” is a mostly pointless movie except for the fact that it ties up the series.  That isn’t to say that the movie is bad.  It’s just more of a money grabbing scheme filled with fluff before tying the story together at its conclusion.

All that said, I did still enjoy the movie.  It is certainly the weakest of the series, but it continues the streak of doing much more with the source material than you’d think possible.  It concludes Katniss’ quest for revenge against President Snow under the backdrop of a civil war against the Capitol.  There are a lot of weird plot points that you kind of have to stretch your mind to make fit, but they’re not so far-fetched to ruin the enjoyment of the movie.  Worse is the “oh, all of us knew you were lying all along” moment.  You’ll know it when you see it if you haven’t already read the books.

A lot of the fluff in the movie comes from the quest to reach Snow’s compound.  It runs like a poorly crafted Dungeons and Dragons session:

DM: You walk into a courtyard surrounded by tall buildings on all sides.  The only visible exits are where you just came from and a series of door which appear to be entrances to the buildings.  In the middle is a decorative archway.  What would you like to do?

Player 1: I’d like to walk through the archway!

Player 2: No, wait!  Let me check for traps. *rolls d20* 18!

DM: You find a machine gun trap.

Player 2: Everyone hide while I trigger it.

DM: The guns spring out of the wall and fire off a salvo of ammo that would have obliterated anyone inside the arch.

Player 2: I just saved all your asses!

DM:  Peeta, roll a sanity check.

A good portion of the movie is crafted like that.  It’s not what I’d call criminally bad, its more of a  “suspend disbelief to be mildly entertained” thing.  It’s the one portion of the movie that I had trouble not rolling my eyes.  But this is how Collins kludges in the pattern of the Games themselves with the Gamemasters thinking up inventive ways to kill even though it’s all completely superfluous in a war setting.

You’ll see this movie because you’ve seen the others.  If you haven’t seen the others, there’s no need to watch this movie at all.  This all should have been one movie, but when there’s money to be made, people will make money.

Movie Review: The Big Short

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Makes collateralized debt obligations fun!  Makes you angry at banks!  Makes you angry at politicians!  But in a sort of feel good way.  It’s weird.

Ah, the good old days of the housing boom!  No money down.  Low teaser interest rates.  You could get the house you always wanted.  Heck, you could get many houses you always wanted.  “Don’t worry, you can afford it”, said every expert to every poor schmuck caught up in the scam.  If it ended there, those schmucks would have been out of a house and some banks and mortgage companies might have suffered.  But the deceptions went on.  All those bad mortgages got bundled together with good mortgages into an instrument called a mortgage backed security.  The ratings agencies gave these instruments their highest rating.  Low risk low reward.  Then those pretty safe instruments got diced up and collected into an instrument called a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), which would have been fine if anyone actually bothered to look what was in them and rate them appropriately.  The ratings agencies gave these instrument their highest ratings.  Then THOSE CDOs were again chopped up and mixed with other CDOs again and again and again and again until one mortgage was in many many different investment instruments and no one had even an iota of a clue as to what was in a specific instrument.  The ratings agencies gave all of these instruments their highest rating.  Then someone decided to look at what was in those instruments.  They found it was a house of cards ready to fall apart.  They were right.  At some point some banks recognized that the house of cards was about to come down and they artificially propped up the house of cards by deception and collusion until their asses were covered.  Then they let the house of cards fall.  Nobody goes to jail.

If you fell asleep reading the previous paragraph, “The Big Short” is just the movie for you!  It takes the above snooze fest and turns it into an entertaining, engaging, and enlightening movie.  How does it do it?  Charm.  Well, that and some of the best actors in Hollywood.  Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt all sparkle.  And, boy, if there were ever a setup for a Sesame Street “which of these things doesn’t belong” song, it’s the previous sentence, but of the four it’s actually Steve Carell that steals the show.

What’s weird is we basically have a movie about a bunch of people who decided to bet that the entire U.S. economy was going to go into the toilet and we end up rooting for them.  Or if not rooting for, at least empathizing with them.  What they saw was obvious and everyone just laughed at them and took their money thinking it was a fool’s bet.  Writer/Director Adam McKay deserves mad props for making that so.

If you’re old enough to watch this movie, you’re old enough to have lived through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and this is the story of how it started.  You owe it to yourself to get edumacated and learn a little bit about who you should really be mad at.

Movie Review: The Night Before

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A solid Christmas movie. One of those irreverent, just this side of uncomfortable funny movies.  Seth Rogen trips balls throughout most of the movie.

My brother and I decided to be Jews for a day and hit the movie theater on Christmas.  It was the most crowded I have ever seen a theater for a matinee showing.  Not that “The Night Before” was crowded, given it’s on its last legs at this point, but much of everything else was sold out already.  Craziness.

The craziness that occurs in “The Night Before” stems from a touching story of friendship and loss that is really quite beautiful and well thought out for a movie that you just know is going to be one of those stupid men get into stupid predicaments and have to make up with their much more grounded significant others movies.  When Ethan’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) parents are killed, friends Chris (Anthony Mackie) and Isaac (Seth Rogen) comfort him and make sure he’s never alone on Christmas Eve by throwing together an epic night on the town.  This tradition continues for many a year until the three are well into adulthood and have changing responsibilities and decide to have just one more epic Christmas Eve together.

The movie works pretty well.  There’s nothing groundbreaking, just a solid buddy comedy like almost every other movie Seth Rogen has ever been in.  The man is the undisputed master of movies like this.  Mackie, Gordon-Levitt, and Rogen have real chemistry together and you can just tell that they and the other cast members had one hell of a good time filming the movie.  One has to wonder, though, if Rogen was just portraying a person tripping balls throughout the movie or if he was 100% in character so to speak when performing.

There’s nothing much else to say about “The Night Before”.  It’s a fun movie and probably one that you could watch once a year and enjoy every time.  Which is saying quite a lot, but it’s not even close to being a classic.  It’s more just solid.  If you like this type of movie, you’ll like this movie.  How’s that for circular logic?

Book Review: Constitution by Nick Webb

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Never trust Amazon book reviews.  Or maybe online user reviews on any generic website.  I finished my previous book and needed something to read at short notice so I decided to take advantage of Amazon Prime’s Lending Library and the reviews for this book were pretty high with the caveat that it followed very closely to “Battlestar Galactica” the TV show.  I can deal with that.  Nope.  To say that “Constitution” follows “Battlestar Galactica” is like saying that “Romeo Must Die” follows “Romeo and Juliet”.  Sure, there are similarities to the story, but how the heck do you eff up the source material so bad?

The truth is that “Constitution” is just your standard pulp military sci-fi book and nothing more.  If it can be said that someone has plagiarized a genre, Nick Webb has done so with this book.  There is not a single original idea and every character and plot point is a cliche.  This doesn’t necessarily make for bad reading, but it definitely doesn’t make for good reading.  If you decide to read this book, “Constitution” will forever be in the “books you have read” category, but not much more.

As the story went on and I knew there wasn’t going to be much enjoyment to be had, I changed my reading style from “enjoyment” mode to “guess the author’s political bent” mode.  I came to the conclusion that Nick Webb is either a libertarian or decided to make his main character attractive to libertarian fanboys by having him casting dispersions against the incompetent government that happened to create the very ship he is in charge of and which will certainly save the human race but only if the captain can do what he wants when he wants with the tools that are given to him by that government.  Libertarianism in a nutshell.  I assume the former,though there is little Nick Webb information out there.  I still give some credence to the latter as being possible as military sci-fi seems to be inundated with libertarian readers and they would certainly explain all the good reviews given to this simplistic book.

The best things I can say about “Constitution” is it’s not bad and it’s a very quick read at 362 pages, half of which are taken up by chapter titles.  I kid you not.  There are 71 chapters in this book.

Book Review: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

“Seveneves” contains everything that is wonderful about Neal Stephenson and everything that is frustrating about Neal Stephenson.  It starts with a bang.  Or an explosion.  Or something.  Regardless of what it is, the moon is now broken up into many large chunks.  No one knows why it happened and what starts as a curious search for answers quickly becomes a desperate fight for survival as pieces of the moon continue to ping pong off of each other and some tear through the atmosphere to collide with the Earth.  Thus is the story of Part One of “Seveneves”.  Neal is on very solid Stephensonian territory here.  Good story.  Good characters.  Lots of dense science grounded mostly in reality.  It’s a very fun read but there’s all sorts of minutiae seeded throughout that, if you don’t make sure you understand and remember, will make latter parts of the book mostly incomprehensible.

And how does Stephenson make sure that he loses most of his audience in the latter parts of the book?  By creating a Part Two that is a novel unto itself and mostly puts on hold much of what were introduced to in Part One.  Still, it continues to be a great story.  A desperate fight for survival in the kludged together space station filled with daring rescue missions and plenty of political intrigue as the Earth below burns.  By the end of Part Two, we finally learn why the title of the book is “Seveneves”.  It would have probably been wise to end to story here.  Stephenson is still on terra firma even if the Earth in the novel is still a molten hellscape.  It would be a little open-ended of an ending, but plenty of ideas are planted in the reader’s mind to make you think about what kind of a future, if any, the human population might be in for.  But then Stephenson decided to add another novel telling us the kind of a future he perceived that human population will be in for.

Enter Part Three.  Five thousand years later.  Imagine you were thrown back into Earth history five hundred years and had to put into words for that population how things worked in the present day.  Now imagine that you had to do it for the chimpanzees of that time.  A fairly impossible task.  Stephenson tries.  Boy, does he try.  There is page after page after page after page of descriptives as seen from the point of view of a single brand new character.  Inflatable gliders and bot-guns and flynk chains and bola-like space elevators and a slew of new races and an incomprehensible habitat ring with a Cradle and an Eye and Boneyards and somehow divided up between a Red and Blue faction.  I really have no idea if I got any of that right.  The descriptions are dense and thrown at you at a speed impossible to digest.  Much of this could be forgiven if the story that goes along with the descriptions were captivating or if the descriptions had anything to do with the story, but it is not and they do not.  What’s even worse, the ending is so incredibly disappointing.  It just kind of…ends.  There’s no resolution.  There’s no attachment to characters.  I’ve not seen an ending to a book this bad since every Michael Crichton book ever.

This is the first Neal Stephenson novel that I can safely say you should probably pass on.  Or maybe just read the first two parts, because they are worth it.  There aren’t any of those “wow, that’s just brilliant” moments that made his “Cryptonomicon” one of my favorite books or that made his “Baroque Cycle” still worth reading despite its ponderously slow parts, but the first two parts still tell a compelling story.  Thus three stars.

Movie Review: Krampus

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Tries really hard to be funny and scary.  Fails at both.

“Krampus” starts out decently with the whole “dysfunctional extended family getting together for Christmas” story.  It then does a pretty good job of building up the tension with scary snowmen and odd goings on right up until Krampus appears for the first time.  Then it’s all downhill from there.  This is disappointing on many levels, but what’s most disappointing is this is a great cast of C-list actors, probably the best ensemble of C-list actors ever, and their talents are wasted.

The movie starts to go off the rails when the cliche German grandma tells the story of Krampus visiting her home town as a child.  This can be a great storytelling arc as the grandma’s dire warnings of what’s to come are ignored or laughed at.  Which they are.  But the grandma’s story has almost no correlation to the events that happen to the family in the movie except for the fact that Krampus is involved.  The movie devolves into a grotesquerie of mindless comic monsters mixed in with vile, disgusting worm-creatures and bird-things.  The two creature types don’t mix together at all.  In fact, the only really effective monster in the movie is Krampus himself and he is oddly wasted by being portrayed mostly with foot stompings and glarings.

I will give props to the movie for a pretty good ending.  There can be much discussion on what it means and it will make you think if there were clues that might lead you to rethink all you’ve seen before. Well, except for one glaring fault.  The grandma again.

I had hopes for a good anti-Christmas Christmas movie and those hopes were dashed.  The Krampus tale is kind of awesome and deserves a good dark comedy/horror story.  This is not that story.  Save your money.