Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A satisfactory ending to a sprawling epic. Ugh, time travel.

Here we are at the end of a Marvel era. “Avengers: Endgame” is kind of a reset point for the Marvel Universe. Some stories are ending and some are just beginning. The journey to get here has been a lot of fun. Let’s dig into it and see what “Endgame” has to offer.

When last we left our hero, Thanos (Josh Brolin) had used the Infinity Gauntlet to snap half of the universe’s population into non-existence and retired to live out the rest of his existence in peace and harmony. A renegade group of super-powered individuals took exception to this new utopian universe and plots to find Thanos and steal the Infinity Gauntlet from him and reverse what he has done leading once again to the overpopulation of the universe and all the societal ills that go along with it. These “heroes”, as some misguided people call them, selfishly concoct a scheme using time travel that could put the entire universe at risk and will drastically alter the lives of the trillions of people that have been living the new reality for years. All because they think their own sorrow at missing their companions is greater than all the others’ happiness that they have newly discovered.

What’s great about the Marvel universe is that while the stars are superheroes, they are only nominally so. Mostly they’re just vain and self-important and only play well with others when it suits them. Clearly, Thanos isn’t the hero, but wow does it take some major lack of introspection to think that bringing back everyone five years after they were all turned to dust and everyone still alive has lived five years of existence without them is a good idea. And they do this mostly because they want their own people back.

What’s not great about “Endgame” is the time travel. I mean they do a decent enough job as far as time travel plots go, but there are just so many things that don’t make sense and so many questions left about how everything turned out. But that’s time travel. The biggest flaw with the time travel in this movie was how they spent so many lines of dialogue talking about how the vagaries of time travel aren’t at all like they are in the movies (and they mention a bunch of time travel movies that get it wrong) only to make their time travel exactly like those movies.

This was a fun movie and a fitting ending. It will be interesting to see where The Avengers go from here and what new adventures await. At least one baton has already been passed and a few others are left to be received.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Fun and entertaining fluff. DC finally gets a good villain. And a good story. And a good hero. Ok, that’s not entirely fair, Wonder Woman was good too.

DC Comics has gone the comedy route with “Shazam!” and has largely succeeded. It is a very welcome change to their all-darkness-all-the-time motif that they have been following. The movie takes a very silly premise and recognizes that it is silly and runs with it. Serial foster home runaway Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a teen who is whisked away to a lair where a Wizard (Dijmon Hounsou), the last of 5, tells him that he is the pure of heart person necessary to wield the wizard’s power and defeat the Seven Deadly Sins. Somehow, this transfer of power turns him from a 13 year old boy into a prototypical adult superhero complete with silly costume instead of a wizard, but who cares. Given zero instruction on how to be a superhero, Billy, along with the help of his foster brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), proceeds to do what any teenage boy with superpowers might do: run amok.

As I have often commented on the good Marvel movies, what makes a good superhero movie is a good villain and Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) is wonderful. Thaddeus met the Wizard when he was a child too, but he was incredibly meanly rejected which sent him on a quest to find the Wizard once again and get the powers he believes he should have been given. Childhood trauma informs both Billy’s and Thaddeus’ world view, but only Billy was given the nurturing to overcome that trauma even if he routinely rejected it. Morals. This movie contains them.

Another moral and my personal favorite of morals in movies is that of family. You bilogicals may suck. You have no control over that. Screw them. Find your family where you can find them. The ones that treat you well and you want to treat well back. If that’s a foster family, so be it. One of my favorite parts in the movie is a throwaway scene in which the foster mom Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans) and foster dad Victor Vasquez (Cooper Andrews) swing into action and back mom’s car out of the driveway to reveal a closeup of the bumper sticker “I’m a foster mom: What’s your superpower?” which is just perfect.

“Shazam!” also happens to be really funny. It takes a while to get going as it seriously develops the villain and establishes the plot, but once it gets going, it’s all smiles. I mean, come on! Think of being a teenager and discovering you have superpowers. That’s not the only source of comedy, but it’s an infinite well of which they tap wisely.

It may somewhat be benefiting from low expectations, but “Shazam!” was a delight. The re-watch value is strong with this one, methinks. A good mixture of story and comedy and morals. Is it just me or has the last year or so been a goldmine of comedies of varying sorts? Regardless, “Shazam!” is fluffy fun for the whole family. Ok not really, it’s kind of violent and deserves its PG-13 rating.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A heartwarming true story of a victory against racism in the Deep South when segregation was illegal, but still widely practiced by racists. Brilliantly acted. Could use with some trimming of length.

If you aren’t going to watch “The Best of Enemies”, do yourself a favor and read about Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell). Atwater was a single mom and community activist fighting for equality in a place where doing so was still pretty dangerous. Ellis was a father and gas station owner and unabashed racist and president of the local social club known as the Ku Klux Klan. When the Black school burns down, they are both chosen to represent their side as the community decides whether to integrate the remaining school. Both are absolutely fascinating individuals and their similarities brought them together at a fortuitous moment in history to bring some good to the world.

“The Best of Enemies” is wonderfully acted and both Taraji P. Henson and Sam Rockwell deserve nominations for their portrayals. The movie could have portrayed Ellis as evil, but Rockwell and the script bring out his humanity and show that he’s really just another human being trying to get by in the world. That’s the big secret. Racists are like you and me, only racist. It may seem incongruous, but you can be a decent person and a racist and C.P. Ellis is just that. The difference between C.P. Ellis and most racists, though, is when Ellis is confronted with the sheer incongruity of his racism, instead of doubling down on his racism or denying his racism, he does some real honest to goodness soul searching and knows that his views cannot stand up to scrutiny and he does the most amazing and difficult thing a human being can do: after a lifetime of being wrong, he accepts that he is wrong, he changes his views to what is right, and he actively expresses his changed views despite enormous social pressure and ostracization. We should all try to be like C.P. Ellis. This is not at all to take away at how amazing of a human being Ann Atwater appears to be. She fights the fight and has absolutely no fucks to give. She grows as an individual too throughout this ordeal, but she started clearly on the side of right so her story is slightly less dramatic than Ellis’.

The movie does run a bit longer than it needs to. There are some weird montages throughout that don’t really much serve a purpose. There are also a couple “women in danger” scenes that don’t really add to the story and are of questionable authenticity. This shouldn’t take away from the amazing story but it does take away from the movie, though it is still easily worth watching.

Depressingly, this movie can be seen as how massive an effort the people on the right side of an issue need to attempt to change just one person’s mind. That’s all that happened in this movie. One person changed his mind. In this case, that person happened to be in a position to actually effect positive change. This is an exception. This is why we are at where we are.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: Towards the end of the movie, Alan Arkin exclaims, “This is a disaster! Let’s go get some hot dogs.” This summarizes my take on the movie better than anything I could write. Of course, this is not going to stop me from writing about it anyway.

How do you make a live action film out of a beloved Disney classic cartoon? Well, first you take everything good about the cartoon and throw it out the window and now that you have the skeleton of the original story, you fatten it up with a whole bunch of good actors in really crappy roles and have them act as over the top as possible while throwing in some lessons about science or something. There you have “Dumbo”! On the plus side, while they were throwing everything out, they also threw out the casual racism.

There isn’t a single character in this film that I didn’t wan’t to punch in the face at some point or another in this film. Including the child actors. They, at least, can be forgiven because they are too young to know any better. All the adults, I am just going to assume that their own children forced them to take their roles under punishment of ostraciization from the family. It is the only explanation. The best of the bunch, such as it was, is Eva Green as the trapeze artist Collette Marchant. The rest? Ugh. Danny DeVito: horrible. Colin Farrell: revolting. Michael Keaton: 2,000 feet over the top. I like to believe that the only person cognizant of how bad a film they all were in is Alan Arlin and his “This is a disaster!” line was adlibbed and he refused to do another take so they had to leave it in.

There are quite a few homages to the original cartoon which ranged from appreciated to crimes against nature. Timothy Q. Mouse is present, even though he doesn’t have a speaking role. They do a short tip of the hat to the racist crows, replacing them with a Black jazz band. They also completely bastardized “Pink Elephants” into a gaudy and stupid CGI-ed circus show, which I really could have done without. Some of the original soundtrack was remade for the movie, most prominently “Baby Mine”, but also “Casey Jr.”, “When I See An Elephant Fly”, and “Pink Elephants”. Danny Elfman did the rest of the score and, well, he’s Danny Elfman so you know it’s enjoyable.

This movie was directed by Tim Burton, but I can only imagine that Disney kidnapped him, shackled him, and waterboarded him any time he came up with any uniquely Tim Burton idea that didn’t fit with the Disney persona. This is all Tim Burton ideas so I don’t understand why he was captured to direct.

The elephant was legitimately cute and the off-the-wall-ness of all of the characters might be something that kids these days go for, I guess. The kids in my showing seemed to be enjoying themselves, at least. There is certainly better children’s entertainment out there, though. Go see that instead.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Delightfully creepy. Wonderfully acted. Builds up the suspense well. Kind of falls flat at the end.

“Us” begins with a typical American family during a typical American outing until the daughter gets lost and something so scary happens to her that she loses her voice. It then transitions into the same daughter, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), now an adult, American Dreaming with her American Dream family all over the American Dream America. Summer vacation homes, delightful husband, coveting thy neighbor’s car, well adjusted kids, boats! The Wilsons may not have the perfect life, but it’s all anyone could really wish for. And then Us appears.

This is one of those movies that almost has to be talked about as two separate movies, which is unsurprising given the duality of almost everything that happens in “Us”. As a horror film, “Us” is pretty darned entertaining. There aren’t really any jump out of your seat scares, but there is plenty of tension building and the creepiness is sky-high. The first three-quarters of the movie had me. When the explanation of what was happening started to happen, things fell apart for me. Some things didn’t quite fit together for me. There seemed to be too much explanation, but not enough explanation, and by explaining just this much, it ended up confusing the horror story. All the explanations are necessary, not for the horror part, but because…

This movie is also rife with social commentary and symbolism. Curse you Jordan Peele for making us think! The main point being made is no matter how American Dreamy your American Dream is, it was and continues to be built on top of people you have either forgotten about or ignored. You’ll also see 11:11 appear constantly, among other symbols. The Jeremiah 11:11 in the movie refers to this bible verse: “Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”

Jordan Peele is now two for two with horror movies. First, the wonderful “Get Out” and now this. “Us” did fantastic in the box office raking in more dollars in the first weekend than any other original horror film. With two smash hits in a row, I expect people to backing dumpster trucks full of money into his yard to fund whatever his next 20 projects will be. I also have to add that holy cow is Shahadi Wright Joseph, who plays Umbrae, creepy as all get-out! Her cock-headed smile will haunt my nightmares. I have no idea how she pulled off that transformation, but yikes!

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: The recurring theme of airplanes flying overhead symbolizes my wishing I were anywhere else except watching this movie.

Ok, I will admit to “Roma” being a technically spectacular movie. Each background, each camera angle, each musical choice is painstakingly and lovingly chosen. It is a masterpiece in movie making. Cuaron, in this movie, emulates Michelangelo carving out the statue of David if he instead used all of his masterful talents to carve a turkey made of marble. What a turkey it would be! But it’s still just a turkey.

Here’s the main problem; the story is so incredibly boring. The action, the storytelling, the suspense is as thrilling as if you watched me typing out this review for an hour, only it goes on for two hours and fifteen minutes, two hours of which is looking at dog poop. The other fifteen minutes tells the story of a middle class family and their domestic worker who loves the children as her own, whose lives get turned upside down by the father abandoning them and the domestic worker becoming pregnant by her boyfriend who abandons her, all under the backdrop of the Mexican Dirty War with the Massacre of Corpus Christi playing a pivotal role, though none of it is mentioned by name. The Dirty War, by the way, was funded by the CIA, shocking no one. So what we have here is an everyday family’s everyday problems being told during an incredibly volatile and interesting time in Mexico’s history, of which we learn almost nothing about.

The acting in the film is wonderful. Or so I’m told. I’m not sure how one can measure the acting abilities of actors when one is busy reading the subtitles of a language one doesn’t understand. Yes, one can tell a lot from body language, but I don’t really much recall a lot of body language in Cuaron’s sweeping wide angle constantly moving and rotating around scenes, which I admit was a beautiful way to unfold scenes.

“Roma” probably deserves the Oscars that it won. Well, except maybe for Best Foreign Film, as I plead ignorance having not seen any of the others, but I have to assume at least one of them was a better film if not as technically masterful. If you get off on all those fancy movie making techniques, there’s a lot to love in this movie. Other than that, though, there’s not much there. Unless, I guess, you like watching paint dry.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Empowering. Fun. Funny. Great chemistry. Flerkens!

“Captain Marvel” is three origin stories in one. First and foremost, it’s the origin of Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) as Captain Marvel. Brie Larson is very well cast in this roll. She exuded confidence and power as she slowly accepts her role as defender of Earth. Second is the origin of the Avengers itself. Captain Marvel is the spark in Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) eye that leads him on his quest to start The Avengers Project and the events in this movie set up everything for the first “The Avengers” movie. Third is the origin story of Nick Fury’s eye patch. Oh, the horrors!

Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson are great together throughout the film. They have this natural chemistry, which I hear is true even off camera, and each plays off the other wonderfully. This may be one of the greatest film bromances in history. What I found most interesting is how Danvers never really talks down to Fury despite her being supremely overpowered and him being a normal human. There are moments of almost motherliness too, which work really well.

The mid-credits and post-credits scenes set up both “Avengers: Endgame”, which is up next in our time, and “The Avengers” which is up next chronologically in the Marvel Comics Universe. They are probably the most straight forward credits scenes in any Marvel movie and you don’t need an advanced degree in Marvel Comics literature to figure out what they mean if you’ve been following along with the movies thus far.

My only mild complaint about the movie is the special effects. It actually turned out much better than I feared when watching the previews for it, but there was still an overly CGI feel to many of the effects that was distracting at times.

“Captain Marvel” did, shall I say, Marvel-ously (yes I shall!) in the box office, raking in $455M worldwide, making it the 7th largest opening weekend of any movie and the second largest of any Marvel movie. Girl Power! All this despite a fairly concerted effort by misogynists to game online ratings systems to make it look like the movie was not worth seeing. That effort got a lot of decent press and backfired on the misogynists spectacularly.

I think “Captain Marvel” is probably in the top five Marvel movies so far. “Black Panther” still reigns supreme and probably one or both of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies are better too, but “Captain Marvel” is worthy to be in their presence and is definitely worth repeated viewings. Whenever this chapter in the Marvel epic is through, it would be fun to have a Tesseract viewing party where we watch all the Marvel movies featuring the Tesseract in chronological order. Because the Tesseract is clearly the real star of the Marvel Universe.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Fun, but not much of the magic of the original. Kids will still get a kick out of it, though.

Everything is no longer awesome in Legoland. It has become a wasteland where things are destroyed faster than they can be built. Alien Legos from space routinely come down to smash anything pretty that is built. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is still happy as can be, though. Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) is just trying to survive this apocalyptic Legoscape. They soon go off world to attempt to confront Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish).

It is very difficult to recapture something as magical as the first Lego Movie. It was pretty perfect and it spawned a series of less than perfect sub-genre movies. None of them were bad, per se, but neither could they capture the essence of the first. “The Lego Movie 2” is similar, though it should have a leg up on the others since it draws from the same delightful characters of the original. There is still fun to be had in the movie, but it is more just your average children’s movie fun versus genre busting fun and wonder.

Movie number two falls back on its catchy “Everything Is Awesome” song from the first movie to somewhat lackluster effect. There are a couple of new songs that are pretty good, thankfully. First is the wonderful Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi song “Not Evil” and the aptly named synth-dance song “Catchy Song”. In general, the whole soundtrack is pretty good, but those two stand out.

One weird thing that I’m sure has an explanation for it is the mysterious disappearance of Will Ferrell. His voice is still in the movie, both as President Business and as Dad, but Dad speaks from off camera all the time. The good news behind that is we are treated to the delightful Maya Rudolph as Mom in his place. I wonder if it was just a scheduling thing and Will could get to a sound studio but couldn’t get to the film studio.

Judging from the general audience reaction, kids will still like this movie despite its not living up to the first. It was a high bar to achieve and should not be faulted for not making it. It’s still a fun movie with a decent amount of delightful moments interspersed.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Easily the best Transformers movie. Not a compliment.

I saw “Bumblebee” because nothing else was showing and Michael Bay was in no way associated with the creation of the movie except in the amorphous “producer” bucket which also contained Stephen Spielberg. I lie. I want to never see a Michael Bay movie ever again, but I know I will go back no matter how much he hurts me. I can’t quit you Michael!

Here’s what you get in “Bumblebee”: bad acting, John Cena having some decent John Cena moments, lots of schlocky scenes, a generic but ok enough story, action you can actually follow. The latter is huge if you’ve ever seen another Transformers movie where you are treated to scene after scene of Baysian nightmares as indistinguishable movements of metal morph and clash and boom. Unlike those other films, “Bumblebee” seems to put at least some thought into not trying to make the audience motion sick.

The worst part is the acting is just atrocious. I mean there wasn’t much material to work with, but it was sometimes painful watching what was happening on screen. This includes John Cena’s role though he was entertaining at points when he cranked the Cena to eleven. The only props I’ll give is to Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie. It’s not easy when the most charismatic actor you have to work with is a CGIed car that morphs into a robot and she did a good job of making you believe she was talking to the robot instead of the thin air of real life.

I read somewhere that people were comparing “Bumblebee” to “E.T.”. I can only assume that all those people were secretly Stephen Spielberg because aside from the whole “young person accidentally finds alien and tries to hide him from the government who wants to do tests on him and young person finds friendship and acceptance from alien” thing going on, there’s nothing similar at all. Oh. That was all “E.T.” was about. This movie is exactly like “E.T.”. “E.T.” wasn’t that good either.

There was a bit of oversexualization of Hailee Steinfeld throughout the movie as is fairly typical for the franchise and Steinfeld is an adult, I guess, but she’s supposed to be playing a high schooler which always makes it creepy. Good news is someone actually had the sense to make it much less creepy by having her wear bike shorts underneath her short shorts so the questionably chosen camera angles were more modestly revealing than they otherwise would be. Or maybe that’s just a style kids are wearing these days? Regardless, either hurray for the adult in the room or hurray for teen fashion sense!

If you’ve liked previous Transformers movies you should really get your head checked, you might have a tumor or something, but you will also probably like “Bumblebee”. Nostalgic Transformers fans will look wistfully upon the initial Cybertron fight as they see a handful of fairly loyal representations of some classic toys from back in the day. Other than that, best to stay away from this film.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A reasonably entertaining Odd Couple movie. Kevin Hart did not annoy me. Bryan Cranston is still a better comedic actor.

I will see Bryan Cranston in anything. I will avoid Kevin Hart like the plague. What is one to do when a movie like “The Upside” comes along starring both? See the movie, apparently.

“The Upside” is an occasionally endearing American remake of a, I have heard, much much better French film called “Les Intouchables” which broke box office records in France. I would like to see that movie instead. It is not that “The Upside” is bad. There are plenty of good laughs and the chemistry between Cranston and Hart is pretty good most of the time. It’s just that it’s formulaic. Worth seeing, just not worth seeing again. Or wasting your time writing a review about. Ok, perhaps that’s a bit too harsh. The basic premise is a quadriplegic billionaire named Phillip Lacasse (Bryan Cranston) hires an ex-con named Dell Scott (Kevin Hart) to be his caregiver and they learn important life lessons from each other. And because it’s an American movie, you also have to shoehorn in a love interest in the form of Phillip’s former business partner, Yvonne Pendleton (Nicole Kidman).

Bryan Cranston is always awesome and so is Nicole Kidman even if her role is limited. I was also happy to see Julianna Margulies show up in a small part as a pen pal of Phillip. Then there’s Kevin Hart. I dislike his shtick. Even before his recent homophobic non-apology apology tour that lost him the Oscars hosting gig. His shtick appears for brief moments in this movie, but thankfully not much. When he turns that off, he’s a decent actor. I mean he’s no Bryan Cranston or Nicole Kidman or Julianna Margulies, but there is definitely some potential there. I hope he explores it more.

Anyone know of a way to see “Les Intouchables”? Go see that instead. Take me with you. If not, “The Upside” is an enjoyable enough movie to fill your time. It has a little bit of soul and a little bit of comedy and a little bit of Hart. See what I did there?