Monster Trucks was like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial if E.T. really sucked.

To be fair, if I were ten years old, this film might have been more entertaining.  There were many moments in the film that felt like throwbacks to my youth, seeing those old ’80s movies with a monster/alien/animal meeting a kid and getting help to go home.

Honestly, Monster Trucks has beat for beat story points to E.T.  Cute alien.  Oil=Reese’s Pieces.  Trying to get home.  Evil oil company=government agents.  Bicycles=mo9nster trucks.

See.  There are a ton of similarities.

Tripp (Lucas Till) is a young boy who is trying to build his own truck out of parts from the junkyard where he works.  Trying to avoid a troublesome home life, Tripp meets a monster that had been released from a subterranean environment by an oil company drilling for a huge oil pocket.  Bonding, Tripp and Creech (named by Tripp) found out that Creech could be used as his truck’s motor.  Unfortunately, a group of cruel mercenaries, led by the one-note villain Burke (Holt McCallany), was hired by oil executive Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) to recapture the creature.  You see, he did not want to let anyone know that there was a new species of creature living in the water pocket above the oil he wanted to drill because that would stop them from drilling.  And Tenneson was ready to do whatever he had to to get it done.

The story has so many dumb things happen.  The amount of property damage caused by some of the chase scenes were so unrealistic that it took me out of the story.  Tripp just crashed through other cars without even one concern over it.

There were no other interesting characters. Honestly, Creech was almost more interesting than any of the human characters.  The relationship between Tripp and Creech was fairly cute, so much so that it almost makes you forget that Tripp was at first tried to crush it to death with a car compacter and that he was then taking advantage of Creech to be his truck’s engine.

The CGI of the creature was decent.  Some of the stunts with the truck did not look great.  Some of the “live-action” stunts looked ridiculous.  There were so many things that were stupid and I sat in the theater and thought to myself, “Why are they doing this or that?”  The action sets are poorly thought out and put together.

Again, the action set pieces look great if you are ten years old.

The dialogue is ridiculous.  The characters are wooden and dull.  The action is boring.  Jane Levy, who played Meredith, was a really cute girl who I did like.  She had a sweetness about her that was appealing.  She should have better material than this junk (she was in Don’t Breathe, which is considerably better material).

Monster Trucks was not as offensive as I thought it was going to be.  It is, by no means, good, but I did not come out of it angry about seeing it.  I can see many ten-year old kids really liking this, and then, when they are older, realizing that they really didn’t know what they were watching.

1.9 stars

This film really should have been great.

Live By Night was directed by Ben Affleck, who has been amazing as a director, and it was released in December in limited release as if it were up for Oscar contention.  There shouldn’t be any Oscars for this film.

This was not a good movie.

Set in Prohibition time, Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) is a low-level crook who has tried to avoid becoming a gangster.  He is a son of a police captain so he gets some extra breaks.  However, when his latest bank robbery led to the death of some police officers, Joe cannot avoid prison.  After getting out, he gives up the ghost and joins in the gangster life anyhow.  Moving to Florida, Joe leads the illegal rum trade.

Oh, there was a relationship with Joe and the wife/moll/girlfriend of mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister).  She was played by Emma Gould.  There was zero chemistry with ben Affleck and it made no sense.  Then she died.

Then, later Joe gets involved with another woman, a Cuban woman named Graciella Suarez (Zoe Saldana).  This relationship did not work either.

The character of Joe was widely inconsistent.   At first he was never going to be in the mob.  Then he was in the mob and doing anything he wants.  Then he wasn’t a killer.  Later on he is killing everyone.  You never knew what this character was going to do next because the writing was so poor.

Then with this film, there were rapid switches in plot.  It was like they took a bunch of plot points and threw them into the film.  At first, the film was a love story with Joe and his love.  Then it became a revenge movie but it immediately changed from that into a crime drama.  Then, suddenly, there was the Klu Klux Klan and it was a racial storyline.  After the Klan was gone, then we got a female Christian preacher story fighting against the casino.  There are so many other plots involved here that this movie did not know what it was.

Be Affleck did not seem to be giving his best work here either. Maybe he just did not fit the part, but I have seen many more performances better by Affleck than this one.

This could have been better, should have been better, but it was not.  This film was too long and jumped around too much.  I do not think that they knew the theme that they wanted to have because the message was so mixed up.  Quite a disappointment.

2 stars

Please do not ask me why this movie is titled “Sleepless.”  I have no idea.  It feels like they used one of those random name generators and this was the first name that popped up.  Unfortunately, the film deserves a throwaway title since it would then match the throwaway movie.

Jamie Foxx played Vincent, the cop who is supposed to be dirty but we all know he isn’t really.  Vincent and his really dirty (but not so much, as we find out later) partner T.I (who plays Sean) steal some drugs from a gang of criminals.  Those drugs were meant to be passed along to criminal Novak (Scoot McNairy) by criminal Rubino (Dermont Mulroney) but since Vincent stole it, Novak was mad and Rubino was mad too.  So (somehow he knew who had stole these drugs) Rubino kidnaps Vincent’s son Thomas (Octavius J. Johnson) and blackmails Vincent into bringing him the drugs.  Vincent does so but hides them in the bathroom before going in to see Rubino (I guess to keep some leverage) but Internal Affairs cop Jennifer Bryant (Michelle Monaghan), who has been investigating Vincent and his partner for months, follows Vincent to Rubino’s casino and finds the drugs and hides them again.  Then, hilarity ensues.

Okay, maybe no hilarity ensued.

This was a really stupid movie with so many plot holes and moments of ridiculousness.  Jamie Foxx, who is a solid actor, really deserves better than this crapfest.

And, worst yet, there is someone in the police working with Novak, and the minute after the film let that drop, I immediately thought, “Oh, that is going to be [SPOILER}.”  And of course, I was right.  It was the easiest twist to guess I have seen in a long time.  Any time a film is that easy to predict, especially with the supposedly shocking surprise, it loses me.  Sleepless lost me pretty quickly.

Plus, our main characters appeared to be impossible to kill.  They were shot and stabbed and damaged multiple times but they survived easily.  Bryant, who appeared to be [spoilers] at death’s door from a gunshot wound (and a horrible car crash) at the end of the movie, makes some kind of amazing recovery and, I guess, left the hospital the same day.

Characters also do the stupidest things.  Thomas is able to escape from his captors (because they left the door open…not kidding) and he finds the phone of the secret crooked cop just sitting around. He then called his father Vincent, who tells him to wait for him in the club.  Now, this kid is still being looked for by all the killers and drug dealers that were running around the casino, so his advice was wait for me in the club area?  How about you tell him to head for the exit and get the hell out of the building while you still can?  There are so many stupid situations in this movie that I could be writing all night long.

The villains are underdeveloped.  Poor Dermont Mulroney is just terrible.  I’m no sure why he did what he did.  At least he survived [spoiler].

And Jamie Foxx has an amazing, self-cleaning suit coat.  After getting a bunch of white sugar all over it, a scene or two later, it was completely clean.  These were the things I kept seeing.

Sleepless was not a good movie.  It is January.

1.3 stars

2016 was a year full of great horror movies.  The first one of 2017 does not continue that trend.

In fact, there was a point early in The Bye Bye Man where one character looks to another one and said, “Want to go watch something dumb.”  I thought to myself, “I already am.”

It’s bad when the characters themselves are giving me the easy straight lines.

The Bye Bye Man is about three friends who are moving out of their college dorms into an old house.  In the house, there is an old end table with writing inside it that said “Don’t say it, don’t think it.”  It also had the name “The Bye Bye Man” carved into it.  The Bye Bye Man turned out to be some kind of evil creature that ends up killing people who say his name or who know about him.  He kills people by driving them crazy and having them do the killing themselves.

There are so many things that are atrocious here that I am not sure where exactly I should start.  First, the performances here are Oscar worthy…

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Okay… maybe not.

The acting in this film is horrendous.  With all due respect to the actors in this movie, this is the worst acting I have seen in a long time.  This would be bad for TV movie of the week performances, let alone a wide release feature film.  There were many times when the lines of dialogue was downright laughable or characters would deliver them either monotone or way over the top.

The characters here are just stupid.  The young characters, Elliot (Douglas Smith), Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and John (Lucien Laviscount) are so stupid and underdeveloped.  Elliot and John are supposed to be childhood friends but I did not get that impression.  They kept showing a picture of the two characters on a youth baseball team, but that is not enough to show this connection.

There were multiple characters that felt completely irrelevant.  Carrie-Anne Moss shows up in a completely wasted role. She really does nothing in the movie and, honestly, when she does something, it is completely ridiculous.  Faye Dunaway is here too.  No, really.  She is a wasted role as well.  Honestly, why were either one of these women in this movie?

The horror cliches are everywhere in The Bye Bye Man.  The weird sounds in the old house?  Check.  Changing music when something scary is happening?  Check.  Stupid people doing stupid things?  Check.  Bad cell reception? Check.

There is a CGI dog in the film that belongs to the Bye Bye Man and it is some of the worst CGI you are going to see.  It feels very much like CGI from the 1980s or 1990s.  I literally laughed when we first see the glowing eyes of the dog in the dark room.  That is never a good sign.

Nothing is ever explained about the Bye Bye Man.  We are given no reason or origin or explanation for why this creature is doing what it is doing.  We don’t know where it came from.  We don’t know anything about it except you are not to “say it, or think it.”  That drove me nuts too because, how is it possible not to think it?  I mean…don’t think of a pink elephant.

There was a scene at the beginning of the movie where we see a reporter going crazy and killing his family and other people who he had told about the Bye Bye Man.  This scene was terrible and dull.  Much of the movie was dull as well.  Honestly, not a lot of things happen in the early part of the film.  Then near the end, there are so many laugh inducing scenes.  When the librarian gets run over… hysterical.

The Bye Bye Man is an early leader for worst film of the year.  January is once again the place where bad movies go to be released and this is the epitome of that rule.

The Bad Bad Man.

Bye Bye

0.75 stars

In January, we usually get some of the worst movies of the year, but we also get the films opening wide release that had opened in December to become eligible for Oscar consideration.  This is the category that Patriots Day falls into as this is an awesome movie based on an unbelievable story of a city facing terror and overcoming.

Boston, 2013.  The Boston Marathon is underway when two homemade bombs go off, injuring several and killing a few bystanders.  The next few days led to a manhunt throughout Boston in an attempt to capture the bombers.

There has been a lot of complaining about Mark Wahlberg’s character as Sgt. Tommy Saunders is the only main character in this film who is not based on a real life person.  However, this did not bother me at all.  I found this character to be meant to be a compilation of many individual heroes and first responders from Boston.

I also give Wahlberg a break here because he is awesome.  This is one of the best performances I have seen him give.  The scene where he broke down at his house with his wife (Michelle Monaghan) was tremendous and choked me up.

Wahlberg is not the only great performance though as Patriots Day is full of them.  John Goodman is great as Police Commissioner Ed Davis.  J.K. Simmons played Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese of Watertown.  Kevin Bacon gives his typically strong performance as FBI Agent Richard DesLauriers.  Jimmy O. Yang is great too as Dun Meng, someone whose role in this story I did not know.

This movie plays as an extremely effective thriller as the different pieces of the puzzle are introduced individually.  As they all come together, you find yourself engaged in the story and the suspense is sky high.

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg team up again to create an effective and engaging adventure based on a true story.  Deepwater Horizon from 2016 was a thrilling and breathtaking from this pair as was Lone Survivor.

One of the cool things that Peter Berg does here is that he mixes real security footage from the event into the movie.  He does it so smoothly that you do not even realize that it is happening several times.  At times in the film it has that documentary feel to it.

Another thing that this film does admirably is portray the brothers who committed this horrendous act as real characters.  Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze take the roles of the Tsarnaev brothers and make them real people who have real lives.  When we see real security footage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev going to get milk after the bombing, it has a surreal feel to it.

I must say that I am not sure the purpose of the scene where Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife (Katherine Russell) is interrogated.  It felt unnecessary for the narrative and was just shoehorned in to the film so it could be used in the trailers.   I think that whole scene could have been removed to make the film tighter.

Patriots Day is really a love letter to the people of Boston who rose to the occasion during these days of uncertainty as the whole nation looked for answers to this terrorist attack.  We saw many normal people serve very important roles in the capture of the brothers.  I really enjoyed the emotional roller coaster.

4.6 stars

Martin Scorsese has created a new film that is quite a departure form his other filmography, showing that he is not afraid to take a gamble on something different.

Silence is a beautifully shot film, with amazing exterior shots, that focuses on a story that is as unexpected as it is haunting.

It is in the 1600s and there are two Portuguese Christian priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to spread the word of Christianity, and to search for a missing priest (Liam Neeson) who has reputedly denounced the Christian faith publicly.   Father Rodrigues (Garfield) could not believe his former mentor and teacher would ditch his religion and he spearheaded the trip to Japan.

However, the pair of priests faced opposition in Japan from the Buddhists, who saw the arrival of Christianity as a direct threat to their own religion and reacted violently to attempt to break those deeming themselves as Christians.

During the exceedingly long run time of the film, Father Rodrigues is captured by the Buddhists and they attempt to crush his faith and get him to denounce Christianity through several devastatingly tough, if not torturous, situations.  Rodrigues shot the gamut among his beliefs as he struggled to come to terms with the silence to his prayers.

Let’s start off with Andrew Garfield.  He is magnificent in this role.  I think this might be a better performance than Hacksaw Ridge, which was a brilliant job by Garfield.  Garfield really had to run the full range of emotions through this film and he did so with an amazing display of acting.  This film follows Garfield’s character throughout and his personal struggles gives the audience the chance to support someone.  His co-star Adam Driver gives a wonderful performance as well, one of the better performances I have seen out of our very own Kylo Ren.

As I said earlier, the movie was visually stunning and you can see how Scorsese really frames the story with breathtaking shots of the scenery.

Now, Silence does feel long, and tends to drag a little bit in the middle.  They really try to set up Father Rodrigues as their own martyr and make him their own Jesus.  There are a ton of religious implications here and I can understand if some people feel that this is too much religion.  I do not think that they beat us over the head with religion, but I can see the argument.

There are some brutal aspects here too, which are very effective.  It is amazing the horrible things that people will do in the name of their religion.  There was a whole “putting their foot on a picture of Jesus” thing that did not seem to have the same feel to me as it seemed to have for the characters on screen.  It was meant to show them discarding their faith, but it did not have the same gravitas for me than it seemed and that made me not feel what they intended.

Scorsese’s new film is very solid, but it does have a few flaws.  Andrew Garfield is not one of them.  He is brilliant here.  Adam Driver is great.  Liam Neeson does a very good job in a smaller role.  The story is well told and beautiful looking.  It is a haunting movie that can be very difficult to watch at times.

4 stars

Anybody got a tissue?

A Monster Calls is a movie adapted from an award winning novel by Patrick Ness, who also was a screenwriter for this film.  The novel is a children’s book, but this film really tackles some big time themes that would raise many questions for young kids and would be a difficult viewing for older kids.

In fact, A Monster Calls just destroyed me.  I sobbed through the second and third act of this film.  There have been few films that have touched me, grabbing my insides and ripping them apart like A Monster Calls.  I was very emotional in Room with Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson and when Bing Bong “died” in Inside Out.  This was like that.

Conor (Lewis MacDougall) is a twelve year old boy dealing with the illness of his Mum (Felicity Jones).  In order to face the pain in his life, Conor imagines a giant tree Monster (Liam Neeson) who comes to see Conor and tell him stories that are meant to teach the boy lessons about life.

However, these stories are not designed to ease Conor’s pain and they are more confusing to the boy than helpful.  Of course, these stories are allegories that directly deal with the situations that Conor is facing with his mum and his detached grandma (Sigourney Weaver)

The movie is focused completely in the point of view of Conor and, because of that, the performance of young Lewis MacDougall is vital to the film.  He just knocks it out of the park with his painful and poignant role as Conor.  You feel for this boy because he is dealing with a situation that many of us have had to deal with in our lives and having to deal with it at such a young age has to be all the more scarring.

The film is beautifully shot and animated.  The section when the Monster is telling Conor the stories appears almost in a watercolor animation and those scenes are astonishingly beautiful.  The Monster is masterfully created as well.  The only drawback to the design of this character is the Monster looks very much like Groot from the Guardians of the Galaxy.  The Monster had that same look in the novel as well and it is difficult to believe that Groot (or perhaps Treebeard and the Ents from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) are not a heavy inspiration for the Monster.  I would have liked a little difference in the physical look, but, of course, they are both trees.

Director J.A. Bayona tells this story in a masterful manner, weaving the stories, much like fairy tales, told by the Monster into Conor’s life and handling complex storytelling of the human characters as well.  Bayona, who also directed The Impossible with Tom Holland, seems to have a knack of telling the story from the POV of the young children and really wrenching the emotion from these actors.

A Monster Calls dives deeply into seriously dark and tormented themes that could make this too much of a downer for some people.  However, if you simply look at it in that manner, you miss the real truth of the film.  It is showing that it is okay to deal with grief in whatever manner you can, even if that means letting out the monster within.

I also have to talk about Sigourney Weaver who, as the apparently cold Grandma, takes a role that could have been cliched and typical and delivers a wonderful performance.  We see the levels of this woman and her own pain at the thought of losing her daughter and her uncertainty of how she can deal with the grandson that she struggled to connect with.  Just when you think Weaver’s character is going one way, she takes a turn and rewards you with a subtle characterization for a complex person.  She does a fantastic job in A Monster Calls.

That is not to say that Felicity Jones was not great as well.  She was amazing as the cancer-stricken mother who was trying every treatment imaginable to keep fighting so she could be with her son.

This is a beautiful story and film, rendered with a visual brilliance by the animators, by  the CGI and by the director, and is packed full of amazing acting, in particular, by the young Lewis MacDougall.  The boy and his depth earned my tears, and, man, did he get them.

This is a painful film and is not a family-friendly film, but I would say that it is an important film for families to watch together. Just be prepared to have a deep discussion afterwards.  That would be a real benefit of A Monster Calls.

5 stars

Hidden Figures is the true story of three African-American women who were employed by NASA during the early sixties during the time period when the space race with the Russians was in full swing and when segregation of whites and blacks was a typical thing.

Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine (Taraji Hanson), Mary (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) and their lives as remarkably intelligent black women in Virginia.  They faced the expected racial and sexist challenges as you would expect for the country at the time, yet each of them, with their intelligence and their charisma, were able to continue to advance in their professions.

In fact, the film tells us this true story of how much these women contributed to the launching and successful return of astronaut John Glenn from his orbiting of the earth.

All three of the ladies involved gave us remarkable performances, especially Octavia Spencer, who I enjoyed every time she was on screen as the under appreciated employee who wanted but would not be receiving a well-deserved promotion to supervisor.  Taraji Hanson (from Empire on FOX) was the de facto lead of the group as she was the character front and center in NASA as a woman who was genius with mathematics and numbers.  Janelle Monáe’s character was attempting to become an engineer, and had to attend classes at a segregated high school to accomplish that goal.

We had other pretty solid performances in Hidden Figures as well, especially Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, Katherine’s boss at NASA who was just trying to get the work done.  Costner had some really strong scenes throughout the film that stand out from the rest.

There is a lot about each woman’s home life which helped flesh these characters out, but the NASA material is so spot on that the rest of the film feels a little underwhelming.  Not bad, just not as great as the work stuff.

This film does a wonderful job of showing the way the world was at this time in American history.  It made you wonder some times how we as a nation were ever allowed to have the blatant racism of segregation be a part of our world.  It was inspiring how these three women found their way through the quagmire of the racism and sexism to contribute so mightily to our space program.

There were many scenes of levity and moments that were touching.  This was a well rounded biopic of a story that I did not know about.  It is awesome to think that there are these kind of stories out there to be told.  It was told with so much heart and positive energy that it was very easy to root for our heroes.  I’m glad I was able to see this.

4 stars