Ugh… what a pile of

How did I feel at the Emoji Movie?              

What else do I have to say?  Some kids might like it.

1.5 stars

Sleight came up on iTunes and I wanted to see it.  I had hoped to see this when it was out in theaters,  but it never came to my area.  Of course, these days there are a ton of outlets that provide movie content besides the theater.

The story is a small one but that is not a knock against it.  Bo (Jacob Latimore) is a street magician by day, but has to supplement that income by dealing drugs at night.  He is the sole guardian of his little sister Tina (Storm Reid) and his love for the sister is apparent.  Bo meets the beautiful Holly (Seychelle Gabriel) who also has a tough life with a physically abusive parent.   After being forced into a violent act by the head drug dealer Angelo (Dulé Hill), Bo comes up with a plan to fix it so he can rip off Angelo and get out of the drug dealing that was doomed from the start.

Oh, did I mention that Bo also has some electromagnetic power?  I’m not too sure about the origin of the powers, but there is some indication in the film that he cuts into his shoulder to implant some kind of electromagnet to help with his magic tricks.  Honestly, the film does touch upon the background of the powers, but it is not a major part of the story.  It is actually just a part of the character.

And lets speak about the character of Bo.  He is a very interesting protagonist as he is not the most honest of people.  He makes some choices that really question his person character.  Even his plan to rip off Angelo felt like a stupid idea.  That was contrasted by a young man who clearly loved his little sister and was extremely tender with his girlfriend.  The fact that he does some of the things that he does in this movie made me wonder exactly how much of a hero Bo really was.   I think those tender moments went a long way in making sure that the audience did not turn on Bo and gave them a reason to root for him.

Jacob Latimore is very solid in this movie, which completely depends on the character of Bo to carry the film.  He was very subtle and restrained consistently and brought a real emotion to the character.  We like Bo so it is easier to excuse the bad judgement as youthful mistakes.  The relationship with Tina and Holly grounded the youngster and helped us overlook the fact that he did chop off a guy’s hand.

The final confrontation with Angelo is fun and the final scene of the movie leads you to wonder exactly what was going on.  I doubt that a film that barely made any money will receive a sequel, despite obviously being set up for one.

The film is very small and quiet and that was a welcome tone.  This could have been big and bombastic, and I don’t think we would have liked Bo as much as we did. The humanizing of the hero helped this become a much better film.

3.3 stars

Luc Besson, the writer and director of The Fifth Element and Lucy, returns to the big screen with his new science fiction space epic, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.  This movie was based on a classic French graphic novel, Valerian and Laureline, which inspired many other sci-fi creators (including George Lucas when creating Star Wars) and brings as much creativity and originality to the theater as any film has in a long time.

Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a major in the military, on board the gigantic space station Alpha, where over decades races of humans and aliens have come together to create this hub of all information from the universe.  Valerian’s partner is Laureline (Cara Delevingne), whom Valerian has feelings for.

The pair head out on a mission to retrieve a certain macguffin that the officers aboard Alpha want to find.  Along the way, Valerian and Laureline discover their feeligns for each other as well as a mystery involving an unknown race living in the red zone of Alpha.

I really enjoyed this movie.  The visuals for Valerian is simply astounding.  There was so much to look at throughout the movie, it made you think of Besson’s past movie The Fifth Element, but also films such as Avatar and, to a lesser extent, Jupiter Arising.  The CGI was one of the most amazing aspects of the film.

There was also more creativity here than I have seen in a long time.  Some of the great ideas and sci-fi concepts worked really well. There was a great scenario where Valerian had to go to a desert planet to retrieve the macguffin.  The planet looked like a desert until you wore special glasses and special gloves that allowed you to interact with the market in a different dimension.  This chase through the market between dimensions was as breathtaking and imaginative of a scene as you will see in movies this year.

I have seen some criticism of the two lead actors in this movie, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, for not having chemistry or being very good actors, but I enjoyed them in this film.  I did not feel taken out of the film by either of them.  In reflection, the criticism that they looked to be too young for the parts may have some credibility, but, honestly, I did not think about that during the film’s run time.

Speaking of run time, this is one of the issues I had with Valerian.  It is too long and needed to be edited down some.  I think there were several scenes that could have been condensed to make the film feel more tightly woven.

The dialogue was hit or miss at times during the film, in particular between DeHaan and Delevingne.  The early part of the film’s dialogue in particular where the movie takes a lot of time to explain to us about these two characters by having them talk about each other seemed unneeded.

Some people have complained about Bubbles, the character played by Rihanna in the movie.  This is a character that does not spend much time on screen, but was one that I really liked.  She reminded me very much of the Diva Plavalaguna from The Fifth Element for impact.  Her dance performance was extremely visual and entertaining, but don’t go into the movie thinking that Rihanna will be a major player, because she is not.

I do worry that this movie will flop dramatically at the box office.  Reportedly with an $180 million dollar budget, Valerian seemed like the type of film that won’t come anywhere close to that figure.  It has been spoken that this has been Luc Besson’s dream project for years, but one wonders if there was a way to make this at a lower cost level to be able to regain its money.  I’m fearing that this could be in the range of John Carter type flops.

And that would be a shame because this is one of the most original, most creative, most imaginative films made in years and such creativity should be seen as a good thing.  The few negatives in the movie do not take away from the epic nature of the film and I can honestly say that I enjoyed this a great deal.

4.4 stars

I saw this film on iTunes and I had no idea what it was.  I noticed Tom Felton (from the Harry Potter series) was one of the stars, so I figured I would give it a try.

Matt (Tom Felton) and Olivia (Troian Bellisario) are twins.  Olivia is a great student, expected to be the valedictorian.  The twins were as close as they could be and they promised to always be together.  Tragedy struck as one of them die in an accident.  The other had to try to continue without their sibling.

It is hard to write about this without spoiling.  I will say that the story started on a path that I wasn’t really liking, and then the story switched and I was suddenly engaged.

The film becomes a story about eating disorders and it was much more interesting at that point.

Without spoiling anything else, I did like this film.  It made for a decent weekend rental.

3 stars

This is another film where I am split on my thoughts.

Girls Trip is the story of Ryan (Regina Hall) and her husband Luke Cage (err… I mean Stewart played by Mike Colter) who are heading to New Orleans to promote their new self-help book and finish up a big time promotional deal at Essence Fest, and Ryan wants to use the weekend to reunite with her “Flossy Posse” friends from college, Sasha (Queen Latifah), Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Dina (Tiffany Haddish), who were wild during the day but who had grown apart in the real world.

As the ladies come together, they engage in a series of over the top, raunchy situations that put a stress on the friendship and the deal (and already weakening) marriage of Ryan and Stewart.

This film’s concept is much like Rough Night, another buddy girl gone wild film from earlier this year, but Rough Night turned darker while this film remained in the raunchy comedic category.

The cast of this film is tremendous, and you completely believe that these four ladies are friends.  They call each other on their bull and support each other like true friends do.  Pinkett Smith, Latifah, King and Haddish have A+ chemistry with one another which allows much of the over-the-top comedy to work where as if they did not have such great connection then much of the comedy would have fallen flat.  Tiffany Haddish, in particular, is downright hilarious in Girls Trip, finding a new level of vulgarity and lewdness, but doing it in a charming manner.

And it helps that there are a lot of laughs to be had in the movie.  There are many scenes that are really funny, and are carried off by these ladies.  Not everything worked, mind you, but it succeeded more than it failed.

Now, as a personal preference, there are a lot of drug/drunken jokes here, and I am not a fan of that kind of humor.  I have never been a huge fan of the “wild party” comedies that you see on a semi-regular basis.  Because of the solid cast, this one gets some help.

The movie is definitely predictable in story beats.  You should be able to predict what happens right up to the last moment, if you have seen any number of films like this.  Girls Trip does not find a whole lot of new ground to cover.

And the film is too long.  Girls Trip is over two hours and that was too much time to fill.  Many of the problems that the ladies had could have been solved considerably earlier and thus shaved off 20-30 minutes of the film.

So I am torn on Girls Trip.  I enjoyed a lot of the film, but I don’t think the movie itself was a great film.  There was funny moments, especially the crass ones, but there were also moments that fell flat.  Haddish was exceptional, getting most of the best lines, but all three of the other ladies were great too.  In the end, my initial thought leaving the film was that this would be just under a fresh film for me, so I will stick with that.  If you like a bawdy, crass comedy like the Hangover or like Bad Moms, you’ll find things to like here.

2.9 stars

This might be the most difficult movie to try to review that I will have this year.

The newest film from director Christopher Nolan is Dunkirk, which tells the true story of how 400,000 British soldiers were stranded at Dunkirk, just across the English Chanel during World War II.  I did not know much, if anything about this moment in history, so the movie had the unknown going for it.

There are people who love Nolan more than I do.  He is great as a director, but I was not a huge fan of Inception.  I thought Interstellar fell apart in the second half of the film.  I disliked much of The Dark Knight Rises.  Sure, I loved the first two of the Batman trilogy and I like other work that he has had, but I am not opposed to disliking Nolan.  I believe there are people/critics who hear the words “Christopher Nolan” and immediately dub the film a masterpiece.

I have heard the term masterpiece bandied around in reference to Dunkirk as well, but I would take an issue with that.

I have not been through a movie like this in my life.  I will tell you that I saw Dunkirk in IMAX and the sound was just unbelievable.  The problem was the sound was so immersive that I felt as if I had actually been through the war myself.  The sounds of the bullets, the airplanes and the bombs rattled my seat and my chest.  I actually felt kind of nauseated at times.  The spinning sky during some of the aerial fight scenes was also a challenge to watch.  I was uncomfortable physically watching Dunkirk, and, despite how the sound effects were remarkably realistic, I think that did take away some of the enjoyment of the film for me.

So I squirmed and tried to ease back during excessive times during the film. Because of my efforts to keep my pretzel down, I was also having problems following what was happening in the movie. I did not realize until later in the movie that the film’s narrative structure was not being followed in a chronological order.  Scenes would flash back and forth between night and day and I did not understand what was happening.  Now I knew the structure was like this, but, again because I was so intent on how I was physically feeling, I did not realize it until near the end.

Another issue I had with the structure was I did not know any of these characters.  This movie was more of a film about an event that had happened, and not about how that event affected people.  We had just a bare minimum of character development – going as far as not naming most of the characters we were following.  At least, I did not know who we were following and so I had trouble following the time jumps for these people.

The main characters that had some kind of development were on the boat piloted by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance).  We got his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his friend, George (Barry Keoghan).  I did feel some connection to these three because I got to know them slightly.  Not a lot, mind you, but more than the others.

There was a great cast.  Tom Hardy played the heroic airplane pilot.  Kenneth Branagh played the British Commander.  There is Cillian Murphy who played the pilot who had been shot down first (listed literally on IMDB as the ‘Shivering Soldier’).  There are multiple actors playing multiple soldiers who all seemed to look alike to me.

Sure the situations of the film were ones where you simply hope to see the soldiers survive, if I had more of a connection with them, or an understanding of exactly what was happening to them, I would have cared more about what the movie was trying to do.  I understand that one of the themes of the movie is how war can be all encompassing and how it can be a true horror, but I wanted to care more about the soldiers than I did.  Where as I was physically going through a lot in this movie, I was surprisingly emotionally distant for much of it.

There was very little dialogue in the film, which did not bother me.  I can understand that there would not be much dialogue going on during this circumstance and you can tell a story with other techniques than just talking.  In fact, I think the dialogue itself was about right for Dunkirk.

Having said that, the film itself was a masterpiece in cinematography and imagery.  It was shot beautifully and had an epic feel to it.  The effects were stunning and every visual moment (when I could watch it) were breathtaking.  It is certainly a marvel with its action scenes.  I thought the ending section of the film was well done and was emotionally satisfying.  The score was deeply amazing as well.

I am going to say that I respect Nolan’s efforts to make something different than all the other WWII movies out there, and he certainly does that.  I just did not enjoy my theater going experience with Dunkirk as a whole, but I think that is part of the idea.  As a movie itself, you should see it because the film making is tremendous.  Just know that the film is about the event and not the characters.

3.1 stars

There have been some very well done, low-budget horror films this year.  This is not one of them.

Low-budget…sure.  But well done?  Hardly.

And truthfully, to define this as a horror movie is stretching the genre

Clare (Joey King) is an unpopular and picked upon high school girl, whose mother (Elisabeth Röhm) committed suicide in front of her, and whose father (Ryan Phillippe) has spent the last years of his life dumpster diving for salvage.  During one of those dumpster dives, the father, Jonathan, finds a discarded Chinese wish box and decides that this would be a cool early birthday gift for Clare.

Once she has possession of the box, Clare is able to read some of the writing on the box (conveniently she is taking Chinese in school) and it says that the owner of the box will be granted seven wishes.  At first, she did not believe what was happening and it was all a joke, but Clare realizes soon that the wish box has more power than she expects.

For those of you who watch Once Upon a Time, you know that magic always comes with a cost, and this Chinese wish box is no different.  For every wish Clare makes, something bad must occur as well.

That is your basic plot to this film.  I am going to go into spoilers for the movie, because it just must be spoken about it those terms.  Clare is clearly a selfish and spiteful girl and you, as the audience, find a severe dislike for her.  Her friends were just a rotten, and you are immediately shown that they are mean spirited.

Yes, Clare has been picked on in high school.  Of course, the bullies are the popular kids and the main bully is a beautiful blonde.  This is, of course, stereotype number one.  Darcie throws a latte on a poster that Clare had spent all night working on.  She posts things on the internet about Clare, including about her dumpster diving father (who has to go through the garbage outside the school… seemingly every day.  Never when the students are in class…only when they are out front so everyone could see them).  So the first wish Clare makes is wishing that Darcie would rot.  Now, she did not believe this was real, but the next day, Darcie has been admitted to the hospital with a flesh eating disease.  Clare and her friends (particularly Sydney Park’s Meredith) laugh about it and are happy that Darcie has contracted this terrible, potentially fatal, disease.  That was especially cruel… and these were meant to be the film’s protagonists.

As the film continues, Clare keeps making wishes that make her own life better.  And people keep dying.  They keep dying in the stupidest and most ridiculous ways.   Poor Uncle August (Victor Sutton) slips in the bathtub and hits his head, slumping under the water.  Now, you would think that this would be enough, but you would be wrong.  Uncle August’s eyes pop back open and he tries to sit back up…only to strike his head on the faucet again.  This was one of the first moments when I laughed at something in the film.

Seriously, this movie was very unintentionally funny.  There were some really funny laughs to be had in Wish Upon.  I cannot wait for the guys at RiffTrax Live to get their hands on this one.

When Clare talks to her two best friends, the aforementioned Meredith and June, (played by Shannon Purser…Barb from Stranger Things), they rightfully call her out on her selfishness.  Meredith says that she would have wished for world peace or a cure for cancer.  Or at least something for herself and June.  Not kidding.

June wants Clare to throw the box away, but Clare has become obsessed with it.  She found out, through the typical horror movie trope of researching the item on Google and approaching an expert to help them, that if you lose or throw away the box, all of your wishes revert back.  Clare did not want that because the wishes had made her a popular girl with a lot of money, and helped her father become cool and stop dumpster diving.

So even though Clare knows that the wish box is causing people to die around her, she keeps on making wishes.  This leads to another hilarious scene where Clare and June fight over the box at the school and June falls down the stairs in the most awkwardly funny way possible.  Jeremy Jahns does a great example of it near the end of his review.

The kills were mostly all funny, not tension filled or suspenseful.  The film seemed to want to be Final Destination, but really plays more like a spoof of Final Destination.  In fact, this might be a better horror movie spoof than Haunted House or Scary Movie.  Too bad they are not trying to make it a spoof.  This is played straight-up seriously, but the laughs are just everywhere.

Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne on Twin Peaks) appears as a neighbor who is killed when she gets her hair caught in a garbage disposal and it breaks her neck.  This was after the film spent about three minutes teasing her sticking her hand down the garbage disposal and nearly hitting the switch to turn it on with her hip (yes, the garbage disposal switch is at hip level in this film.  Certainly a lawsuit waiting to happen.)

The performances are all weak to terrible.  Joey King is giving it her all, but there is just so little here.  It feels like it is more the direction than the performances though.  The director of this film is John R. Leonetti, who has directed such classics as Annabelle, The Butterfly Effect 2, and Mortal Kombat:  Annihilation.  That is not the oeuvre that will earn you acclaim.  Wish Upon fits right in with those.

As I said, there is entertainment to be had at Wish Upon, but it is not the type of entertainment that was intended.  It is a great spoof movie of a low-budget horror flick, but, as a low-budget horror flick, it truly fails.

1.3 stars

People have been calling The Big Sick a romantic comedy, but I am not sure that is the most accurate term for this movie.  That seems to surface for such a wonderful and powerful film as The Big Sick.  Maybe a better term is a relationship comedy.

Whatever you call The big Sick, it is an outstanding movie that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish.

The Big Sick is based on the real life story of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, the married couple behind the writing of this movie.  Kumail played himself in the film, while Emily is played by Zoe Kazan.

After heckling Kumail’s act at a Chicago comedy club, Emily meets him and they start “dating.”  However, Kumail’s family is still trying to arrange a marriage for him up with a list of Pakistani women.  Kumail’s mother (Zenobia Shroff) is very old school and wants her son to follow all the traditions of Islam.  Kumail tried to keep his feelings about Islam away from his mother so he would come to dinner and she would bring in the next woman she had arranged to “drop by” in hopes of fixing him up.

However, Kumail and Emily are growing closer the whole time.  When the topic of parents came up, the couple found something they could not overcome.  Soon after they break up, Emily falls ill and has to be placed in a medically induced coma.  Kumail ends up at her side, and has to call her parents.  Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) arrive knowing about the problems that drove Kumail and Emily apart, and are displaying their own personal issues.

Kumail and Beth and Terry have to spend a good chunk of the second act getting to know each other and bonding over their individual feelings for Emily.

The film is downright hysterical.  I laughed constantly through The Big Sick.  Kumail Nanjiani was wonderful in this.  He was laid back and real, with great comedic timing and sharp dialogue.  I did not know this was about his real life relationship until the film was over, but you can see that he was amazingly comfortable here.  He also carried himself exceptionally well during the more dramatic scenes, including an epic meltdown on the comedy club stage.

The rest of the cast is tremendous.  Holly Hunter is great Emily’s mother Beth, the over protective mom who simple does not know what she can do to help.  And Ray Romano is amazing as Terry, Emily’s father.  His deadpan delivery is really funny, and you can see that he has his share of problems.  These two parents connecting with the former boyfriend of their daughter is some of the best scenes of this movie.

I really found myself connected to these characters and I was seriously concerned that things were not going to work out.  Again, I did not know that this was based on their real relationship, and that knowledge might have changed the way I viewed some of the scenes, so, because of that, I am pretty pleased that I did not know that fact.

Some of the jokes were really funny, even though some of them play on the racial stereotypes of Muslims.  There is a great scene where Holly Hunter nearly gets into a fight in a comedy club with a heckler who is heckling Kumail about his ethnicity.  None of these jokes are mean-spirited.  They are just smart and funny.  Humor helps depower these racial stereotypes and The Big Sick does that brilliantly.

I hope people do not take that the wrong way.  For example, in the film, Ray Romano says to Kumail that he wants to have a conversation with him about 9-11.  Kumail said ‘you never had a conversation about 9-11 with people?’  Romano continued the awkward conversation with a ‘what do you think?’  Kumail said that it was a tragedy and that they lost 19 of their best men that day.  I laughed out loud at that line, as he played on Romano’s character’s awkwardness and unintended bigotry with humor.  Thing was… while I laughed out loud, I was the only one in the theater that laughed at that.  I hope people did not think that was a joke that shouldn’t have been made because laughter can really help cure problems.

I really don’t have much to say as a criticism for the movie.  Perhaps it was a little too long, but I am not sure what parts I would have left out.  I really enjoyed The Big Sick and I think it is one of the best movies of the year.

5 stars

Tonight, I attended a triple showing of the three recent Planet of the Apes movies, including the brand new War for the Planet of the Apes.  The new trilogy has been considered one of the best of all time.  So I was really excited about seeing the third installment.

And, I was pretty disappointed with what I saw.  It was okay.  But it was nowhere near what I had expected.  After seeing all three films together, I believe that War of the Planet of the Apes is the weakest of the three films.

The battle between apes and humans have been going on for two years, and there has been problems on both sides.  Caesar (Andy Serkis) wants things to end, bringing peace to the apes.  However, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson) is not ready to give it up.  After some tragic losses, Caesar’s darker instincts take over and he sets out for revenge.

Let’s say that, of course, the film looks beautiful.  The effects of this film continue to blow your mind.  You look at these apes and are constantly amazed that they are not real apes.  The look of these characters are astounding.  The cinematography was lush and rich and amazing to watch. Plus, apes on horses… what else do you need?

Unfortunately, this felt like the least compelling the character of Caesar has been.  This character did not work nearly as well with the vengeful concept as it did with the first two movies.  I was the least interested in Caesar than I had ever been.  I was also less involved in the performance by Andy Serkis.  It seemed as if all Caesar would say was “I don’t know” and do things that was out of character for him.  Sure, i understood why the character was acting as he was, but it just did not feel right.  I think as a narrative, it just did not work to place Caesar into this situation.

I though the addition of Steve Zahn’s Bad Ape to the cast was a misstep.  This character brought an element of humor into the film that just was out of place.  It was more uncomfortable most of the time than it was funny.  I did enjoy the character of Nova (Amiah Miller) for what she was.  The little girl had a decent character arc and had a fascinating tie in with the original (1966) film.  The connection between Nova and Maurice was very fun and sweet.  Nova never felt as if she stepped over the line into too saccharine sweet, which could have been a danger for this type of character.

The best part of the film was clearly Woody Harrelson as the Colonel.  Harrelson was thrilling and downright frightening as the psychotic soldier who is preparing for all out war.  I enjoyed the way Harrelson interacted with Caesar and I also liked the ironic resolution of the character.  Some of the horrific things that the Colonel does really resonates with the audience and brings a hatred of him as the villain.

The film did drag a bit for me in the initial stages, picking up dramatically in the second and third acts.  Speaking of the third act, without spoiling anything, there is a big old deus ex machina that reared its ugly head near the end of the film that comes along at the perfect time.  Deus ex machina tends to be a lazy way to bail out the characters, and this is really no exception.

The action was very good and I liked that it was not overused.  The action scenes really punctuated the feel of the film properly.  My problem with War for the Planet of the Apes was not a lack of action.  It is kind of difficult to put a finger on it.  I wonder if seeing the two superior films prior to the third one affected my thoughts.

There were several scenes meant to elicit the feels from the audience and some of them work fairly well.  Others of them were forced and were not as effective.  A couple were predictable and lacked the necessary oomph for what the film was going for.  There is heart in the film, but it is not as strong as the previous two films.

I don’t mean to be overly negative, because I am going to give this a moderately fresh review and recommendation, but I suggest not going into the film with expectations too high.  It is not your typical summer blockbuster and if you are looking for that, you will be disappointed.  War for the Planet of the Apes does bring the trilogy to a satisfactory conclusion, but the third film just does not feel as substantive as the first two films.

3 stars