Jean-Pau’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Takes a while to get going, but fun when it hits its stride.  Worth seeing just for the completely unnecessary controversy it caused, but a comedy that can be viewed multiple times this is not.

I don’t normally do reviews on movies I see in the comfort of my own home, but if ever there were a reason to make an exception, the fooferaw surrounding “The Inteview” is it.  For the sake of posterity, since this movie will likely be quickly forgotten, “The Interview” was supposed to be released around Christmas 2014, but hackers broke through Sony’s defenses and stole a whole gob of data including emails where executives insult A-list stars, scripts, complete unreleased movies, etc. and then released the lot to the masses.  Those that care about such things got a good chuckle at how vain Hollywood can be.  It is widely accepted that North Korea was responsible for the hack, but there is not much actual evidence of that.  Then came the bomb threats and threats of general mayhem if the movie was released and Sony cancelled the release.  A few art houses here and there still went through with showing the movie, but mostly it went straight to pay-per-view and quickly to Netflix a month later.

Why would anyone be so upset over a movie to even bother going through the trouble of trying to get it shut down?  Well, people are stupid, but when your entire raison d’être is to be a living god to millions of North Koreans, I guess I can see getting a little upset when a movie comes out that tells the world that you have to pee and poo and can die.  That little stunt has probably quadrupled the number of people who have seen the movie.  Oops.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around celebrity news personality Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer, Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen).  Aaron is sick of doing celebrity puff pieces and wants to do serious journalism.  A piece of serious journalism sort of falls into his lap when he learns that Kim Jong-Un is a big fan of Skylark Tonight and they score the interview of the century with the president of North Korea.  When the CIA learns of the interview, they recruit Dave and Aaron to attempt to assassinate the young leader.  Hijinks ensues.

The movie itself isn’t good and isn’t bad.  It starts out a bit slow but picks up nicely after meeting Kim Jong-Un (Randall Park, who absolutely nails it).  Other than that, what you have is your standard Rogan/Franco buddy comedy without much to set it apart from every other film they’ve done together.  That said, this is a fun moment-in-time piece.  Its relevance to current events makes it a much more worth seeing film than it otherwise would be.  See it now because I’m guessing its relevance has a fairly short expiration date.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Moderately funny at times.  Has some charm.  Complex plots in a comedy are never a good idea.

And yet another movie that tries to get by on the premise of Johnny Depp playing a quirky fellow.  I assume Depp takes these roles not for the money but for the ability to show us his acting chops.  Though, I’m sure the money doesn’t hurt.  Mix a quirky Depp character with a good script and you are almost guaranteed to have an eventual hit on your hands even if it’s an after the fact cult hit.  Mix a quirky Depp character with a whole cast of quirky characters and a middling story and you get “Mordecai”.

Some of the humor in “Mordecai” hits the mark, but much of it is quite repetitive.  You can only laugh so many times at a man-servant being shot.  It is possible that this humor works better in book form and that pleasure can be derived from seeing the movie after reading the books the movie is based on.  Judging from the two women sitting behind me who thought the movie was hilarious, I can only assume they were book readers because what we were watching was not that funny.

There’s not much to say otherwise.  “Mordecai” tries very hard to be charming, but except for a few brief moments, mostly between Charlie Mordecai (Johnny Depp) and Johanna (Gwenneth Paltrow), it mostly fails.  Like the paintings in this movie, there may be a masterpiece hidden under the surface of this mostly unfunny convoluted plot of a movie, but it would take a master restorer to make a gem of this film.  Look elsewhere for your entertainment.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Good look into the psychology of a soldier.  Very strange way to tell a story, but it works.  Not sure about the Oscar buzz surrounding the movie.

Here it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I’m reviewing a war movie.  Oh, the irony.  Good news is this is not a movie that glorifies war, though Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) certainly believes in his mission.  Chris Kyle was a real person and this movie was based on a book based on his life.  There are a lot of soldiers alive today because of his exploits with a sniper rifle.  The Navy SEALs trained him to be a killer and he excelled at it and, like so many veterans, he lost his humanity in the process.  That’s about as good a one sentence synopsis of the movie as I think you’ll find.

The story is told in jarring clips.  We flash from Chris about to make his first human kill to his childhood and killing his first deer.  He’s on the phone with his wife when a firefight breaks out then he’s suddenly home with her.  Such is the life of a soldier.  You hold on to the memories that allow you to keep going and everything else is background noise.  It is very strange to watch a movie unfold like this and it’s really only after thinking about it after the fact that I think it worked well.

I did not know going into the movie that this was a true story and knowing that certainly changes how I viewed the movie post-hoc.  If this were not a true story, I do not believe there would be any Oscar nominations in the offing.  It is still a decently told story and worth seeing, but knowing that there is a person who actually experienced this filters our perceptions immensely.  Add to this America’s glorification of the military and our wanting to do everything for our soldiers except give them the equipment they need and the care they deserve and you have yourselves an Oscar nomination or six.  It certainly deserves the lesser nominations for screenplay, editing, and mixing, but best picture or best actor?  Nah.  Bradley Cooper was very good at displaying no emotion whatsoever, but I’m not sure that actually takes much skill as an actor.  I see the nominations as more an homage to Chris Kyle’s life.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A mess of a movie, but enjoyable nonetheless.  Not as much Liam Neeson kick-assedry as I would have liked.  Don’t try to make sense of the plot.

There isn’t much that can said about “Taken 3”.  If you’ve seen the first two, you know what to expect.  If at all possible, the third in the trilogy has an even more absurd plot, but plots are secondary when you’re watching a movie like this.  This one, though, the absurdity of the plot gets in the way and, in some ways, enhances the enjoyment of the film.  This doesn’t put it in “so bad it’s good” territory, but it helps you keep a sense of humor about the movie you are watching.

One thing missing is an astronomical body count.  This is mostly because of the plot.  Much of ass-kickery in the movie is Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) escaping time and again from the police.  And if you’re a good guy, killing police is a big no-no unless said police are corrupt.  The police in the movie are shown as mostly bumbling incompetents except for Detective Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker) who is mostly useless except for his OCD habits and providing multiple opportunities to tell us how Mills is too smart for them.  There is quite the body count tally at the end but it’s more of a spree killing than a sustained bad-assedness campaign.  Then there are your unnecessary explosions, which I admit are cool even as you’re rolling your eyes at the over-the-topedness of the amount of flame and damage caused by a rolling car.

“Taken 3” is a movie that makes fun of itself.  At least, I hope that’s what they were doing.  The ending suggests to me that they were making fun of themselves the entire time, but it is really hard to tell.  My suggestion is to go into the movie assuming it’s true and it will make the movie more enjoyable.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 Stars

Bottom Line: The songs are done right.  The story is more fleshed out than the play.  Sadly, the fleshing out makes for a boring second act.

“Into the Woods” is one of my favorite plays due to a certain redhead with an amazing singing voice who introduced me to it many generations ago.  I’ve seen the play a few times and was trepidatiously eager when I heard Disney was making a film of the play.  Because Disney.  It’s a fairly adult themed play.  Would they tame down the Wolf?  Would they gloss over the adultery?  Would they dance around the death?  Would they do the magnificent musical score justice? The answers are no, somewhat, yes, and YES!

Act 1 was a marvel.  The casting was perfect except, maybe, for Johnny Depp as the Wolf.  Though it is easy to see Johnny Depp as a creepy pedophile, he doesn’t really do “Hello, Little Girl” justice.  It’s not bad, but neither is it fantastic.  It’s just there.  I also was a little put off by the kid they cast as Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) at first, but he grew on me.  Other than that, my goodness, did they do the first act right.  It contained all the magic and beauty that I wanted to see for the movie.  No one can top Bernadette Peters as the Witch, but my does Meryl Streep give her a run for her money.  Even the odd choices for cast members like Chris Pine as Prince Charming worked well.

Then, sadly, Act 2 happened and all of the magic disappeared.  Even the play suffers somewhat in the second act, but the movie, instead of using the time to make sense of a fairly convoluted plot, decides to go on a half hour long song drought where there’s lots of exposition on what’s going on before just throwing together all of the remaining songs together in a haphazard fashion.  The songs are still great, but even I saw my interest waning by the time they got around to them.  If they threw in an original number in that half hour gap, maybe making fun of the craziness of the entire situation, the second act would have been much more enjoyable.

They really should have just ended the film at the end of the first act.  It’s certainly a little “happily ever after”, which Stephen Sondheim doesn’t do, but it’s a complete movie and was thoroughly enjoyable up to that point.  What you end up with is another movie with a fantastic soundtrack that is well worth getting.  I can see getting the DVD and fast forwarding through the bad parts to get to your favorite song, but it’s not worth sitting in the theater for.

So, yes we’ve had this moment.  Even though it was a bad one.  And Rob Marshall’s made atonement by making “Chicago” which is a rad one.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Very well acted.  A very fascinating story if you don’t know anything about Alan Turing’s life.  Somewhat clichéd.

I’m fairly positive that almost anyone who sees “The Imitation Game” will like it better than I did.  Alan Turing was an amazing person and almost single-handedly brought an end to the Second World War.  All this and he was treated like a pariah after the war just for being a homosexual.  My problem is partially that none of this was new to me.  It’s a great story for those who know nothing of the goings on at Bletchley Park.  For me, it fell a little flat.

I think the main problem with the movie is how it treats Alan Turing.  The flashbacks to his childhood at the academy are the most touching and humanizing scenes in the film and I have nothing but praise for how they depict the already wildly different young Turing being picked on and very delicately exploring his homosexuality.  The adult Turing, though portrayed brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch, just comes off as another clichéd mad genius who is incredibly difficult to work with.  This does lead to some very humorous moments like when he tries to appear more humane and gets his fellow cryptanalyst some apples and attempts to tell a joke.  But even then, I was laughing before he even started to tell the joke because I knew what was coming.

The movie also fails the Bechdel Test miserably by only having one female of any note, Joan Clarke played wonderfully by Keira Knightley.  This can be forgiven because, well, it was a man’s world back then and they were pretty true to the story.  What can’t be forgiven is the one main interaction she has with another woman, they talk about boys.  The scene was complete fluff and it’s only purpose seemed to be so they could stick their thumb in the eye of the Bechdel Test.

These are all nits that can be picked only by someone who is familiar with the story.  Those that aren’t will likely be lost in the story too much to notice.  Personally, I would have been happier if they went more into the Ultra project and made a better show of exactly how they broke Enigma.  But that would probably be pretty boring for most.  They did have a few easter eggs for dorks like me.  For instance, in the background, you often saw them using Zygalski sheets which were actually used in attempts to decipher Enigma messages.  I’m sure there were others as well.

Despite my three star review, I would actually recommend this movie to most people.  It was a fascinating time of history that the world didn’t really discover until decades after it occurred due to the top secret nature of the project.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Yay, I never have to watch another Hobbit movie again!

This marks my first review of an entire trilogy.  First, there was “An Unexpected Journey” which was middling but left me with hope.  Then came “The Desolation of Smaug” which was almost completely filler with some added confusing “Lord of the Rings” back story thrown in.  Now, at long last, we are at the end of our grueling journey with “Battle of the Five Armies”.  Thank the Valar!

I’m just going to say it: I hate Legolas.  How much do I hate Legolas?  Let’s just say that I find Jar Jar Binks to be a better useless addition to a movie.  Every scene he’s in he’s all like “Look at me!  I am Legolas!  I am here solely as a familiar face for the rubes to recognize because our lazy director didn’t bother to create any memorable characters that are unique to this trilogy.”  What?  Don’t believe me?  Name me more that two of the dwarves.  See?  I only can because I read the book.  Legolas is lazy storytelling at its worst.  But that’s what you get when you try squeezing every penny out of a franchise that has already made billions.  I can’t wait for the fan released “Hobbit” remix with all of Legolas’ parts removed.  Never again do I want to see his false gravitas or his idiotic action sequences.

Besides the lazy storytelling, the movie is middling.  As with the first of the trilogy, there’s nothing really awe-inspiring or memorable, but it does an ok job of finishing off the story.  There is a lot of stuff that can be confusing if you don’t remember some of the events of the completely forgettable “The Desolation of Smaug”.  I couldn’t for the life of me remember why Gandalf was sitting captured in a cage or why he went there in the first place.  I’m sure it was some sort of foreshadowing to events in “The Lord of the Rings”, but it fell so flat, it was like a penny left on the railroad tracks.

As for the eponymous battle itself?  All style, no substance.  I know next to zero about battle tactics and I was able to point out a myriad of flaws in strategy.  Yes, artistic license should be allowed, but a battle should be somewhat grounded in reality as well.  The battle had no sense of scope and felt like it was planned by kindergardeners playing with toy soldiers.  For instance, why didn’t the orcs just burrow into the the mountain and allow them direct access to a completely unguarded dwarven kingdom rather than pouring out onto an open battlefield?  You’d never see the Fremen use such poor tactics when riding Shai-Hulud into battle.  Plus, how were the orcs able to control the burrowing worms to begin with?  Plus, why would the orcs attack a completely useless and undefended town instead of pouring their forces against the actual armies that they greatly outnumber and have the advantage of higher ground against.

What pissed me off the most is when Tharanduil gives his ever-watchful archers the order to shoot anything that stirs in the dwarven fortress only to have the very next scene show Bilbo very clumsily escaping the fortress by climbing down the front barricade and trotting up to the town.  I mean how lazy can you get as a dirctor?  All you had to do is swap the scenes and things would make some sense.  But nooooooo!

Ok, I’m done complaining.  If you ever find yourself in a mood to sit down and watch a trilogy and think to yourself, “Oh, I should watch ‘The Hobbit'”, please have someone slap you in the face and scream, “What are you thinking, man!?”.  Maybe that will make you come to your senses and allow you to watch a good trilogy like “The Lord of the Rings”.  Now let us never speak of “The Hobbit” trilogy again.