We have had a lot of biopics about music icons recently.  From Freddie Mercury to Elton John, the music industry has been a hotbed of movie subjects.

Add one more to the list with the film based on the last year of the life of Dorothy Gale herself, Judy Garland.

In an attempt to get money to provide a more secure life for her children, Judy Garland (Renee Zellweger) accepted a tour of London despite her own struggles with alcohol and medication as well as her own tragic past.

Renee Zellweger is the absolute best thing about Judy. Her performance is transformative and powerful.  I believe she has to be considered the front runner, if not the lock, for the Academy Award for Best Actress from this performance.  She brings such an emotional depth to the character, from the lows of her addictions to the highs of her performances.

The character of Judy Garland is not shown through rose-colored glasses either.  We see the bad choices and the mistakes that she makes and the consequences of those actions.  One of the stronger aspects are the series of flashbacks back to the Dorothy-aged Judy (Darci Shaw) which detail the downright abuse heaped on Judy by the movie studio and her handlers who were more concerned with the image of Judy than the actual person.  There were some shocking instances of cruelty and potentially even abuse by those in power over the young girl that you understand why Judy grew up to be such a mess.

The film had a huge tragic feel to it for much of the run time.  The life that the young girl had to live through to the challenges facing the older version who was just looking for a way to be a mother to her children were heartbreaking.  Renee Zellweger was able to remain this woman riddled with poor choices without losing the connection to the audience.  Even when her own worst behavior was her undoing, you could relate to the pain and the challenges faced by the songstress.

One of the best scenes of the film included a gay couple who had waited after a show and met Judy.  Judy was so lonely that she invited them out to dinner and wound up spending an evening with them.  It was such a lovely, emotional scene that it truly helped to humanize Judy Garland.  It also effective when the couple returns later in the film.

Speaking of later in the film, the final part of the movie was just epic.  I loved how they ended the movie and I found myself with tears in my eyes from the power of the moment.  It was both sad and tragic, while at the same time uplifting and hopeful.  It ended with such a strong couple of scenes that any other flaws that might have been in the film were brushed away.

The film may have been a slow developing one, but I was riveted the entire time.  Renee Zellweger was special in her performance and the ending scene was one of the most emotional times of the year.  Judy is a terrific biopic.

4.75 stars

The new DreamWorks animated movie came out this weekend and it features a Yeti trying to get back to his home on Mount Everest before he is caught and dissected by some evil businessman.

Agents of SHIELD’s Chloe Bennet voices Yi, a teenager who finds the Yeti on the rooftop of her building.  Yi, sad over the death of her father, would go to the roof to play her violin and, little did she know, this Yeti was hiding out there.

The Yeti, which Yi calls Everest, bonds with the girl and, along with her friends, Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) and Peng (Albert Tsai). she tries to help Everest find his way home.

While I enjoyed the movie, there was just something about it that felt as if the film was trying too hard.  I’m not sure what it was, but, despite there literally being plenty of it in the actual storyline, the film felt as if it were missing some magic.

Everest was revealed to have some kind of magical mystical powers that, apparently, get stronger the closer he gets to Mount Everest.  Maybe I just did not accept that premise or maybe I had never associated magic with Yetis before, but it just seemed to be a weakness in the storytelling.

The animation was beautiful with the shots of nature and the Himalayas, but the characters were anything but original.  I did like how the characters were Chinese and were very much fully fleshed out.  This was a co-production between DreamWorks and China’s Pearl Studio and I enjoyed the change.

I also enjoyed the twist of the character reveal that caught me off-guard.  It seemed as if the villains were fairly typical and then something happens that makes you look at them in a different light.  I don’t want to spoil it, but I did like the unexpected shift.

I do think this is a decent family film that kids will love and that parents will not hate.  That is a success, because the target audience is certainly the children.

As for me, despite what I felt was something lackluster at times, there was enough here to enjoy what I saw.  The film has some nice animation, a sweet story and a twist in a character that was unexpected.  Despite the flaws, Abominable was a solid animated movie and worth the 90+ minutes.

3.5 stars 

Haunt is a low budget horror movie recently released that I found on Vudu.  I had heard online critic Chris Stuckmann praise it as a really solid haunted house movie and so I figured I would give it a try.

Produced by Eli Roth, Haunt turned out to be a decent horror film that provided some serious scares and some well earned moments of fear.

A group of friends get together on a Halloween night and they decide to go to a haunted house.  The haunted house turns out to be very extreme and, eventually, turns deadly.  As they struggle to find their way to freedom, the “actors” in the haunted house reveal their true motivation.

Katie Stevens played Harper, the main protagonist of the group of friends.  She has a back story that gets interwoven into the story that is being told with the haunted house in a very effective manner.  Stevens performs her role well, truly emoting the fear and panic that is gripping her character.  Still, I like how Harper does not become a cowering victim.  She is a kick ass female and steps up when she needed to.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods direct the movie and they do an admirable job in what is clearly a low-budget film.  They are able to create some serious tension and anxiety among the viewers with some real scares.  They do not depend on the jump scares that are prevalent in the horror genre these days.  Instead, each scare feels earned and natural.

With Halloween right around the corner, Haunt is a great addition to the haunted house genre and uses the tropes in creative and engaging manners.  It is creepiness at its finest.

3.8 stars

Ad Astra is the second movie this weekend that I saw that was receiving rave reviews but did not reach those expectations for me.  I did not like Hustlers, and Ad Astra, while I liked it more than Hustlers, was not as brilliant as I thought it would be.

Now, having said that, I will state that there were two magnificent parts of the film.  One was the special effects.  This film looked beautiful.  And the second was Brad Pitt, who delivered a special, understated and subtle performance in the movie.

Brad Pitt played Roy McBride, an astronaut who was recruited by the government to fly to Mars and attempt to contact Roy’s father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legend who was involved in a project searching for intelligent life in the universe.  The project was causing problems back on earth called The Surge and the government wanted Roy to try and appeal to his father, whom Roy believed was dead for years.

Brad Pitt played Roy as if he were damaged goods, with a deep seeded anger that he shoved down, preventing him from having a life worth living.  Pitt is great in this movie and his performance was nuanced and compelling.

However, the film is slow through most of the run time.  It feels long and there are distinctly dull moments that work as character points, but can really drag out.  By the time they get to Tommy Lee Jones, a lot of the steam had been let out of the plot.

However, there was an epic scene involving space monkeys that I was just not sure how it happened.  Maybe I missed something with that but the monkeys were a sudden and unexpected shock in an otherwise slow burn.  (I really did not understand why the monkeys were there.  I wonder if I missed a reference)

As I mentioned, the look of the movie is amazing.  I never once wondered about something looking CGI.  I was completely enthralled by the effects and I bought them completely.  There may have been some moments where I was not sure if what they did would work (and…monkeys of course) but it never looked wrong.  I also saw the film in IMAX which made it look all the better.

Most of the cast was pretty well wasted outside of Pitt and Jones.  Ruth Negga was just there.  Donald Sutherland seemed as if he was going to be more important than he was.  I did not even realize Liv Tyler was in the movie until I saw her on the credits afterwards.

When there were good scenes, they really hit well.  It just was mixed in with too many scenes lacking pace or intensity.  Still, I think this was the best film of the weekend for me and I would recommend it, if for nothing else, but Brad Pitt’s performance and the wonderful CGI.

3.3 stars

I missed Hustlers last week, and I heard good things about it so I wanted to make sure I saw it this week.  Unfortunately, I did not find it as entertaining as I expected.

A group of women strippers, led by Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) and Destiny (Constance Wu), in order to make ends meat, start drugging high brow strip club attendees to steal money from them.

Honestly, I was bored at the first half of the movie.

I thought both Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu were really good in their roles.  Lopez, in particular, delivers probably her best performance ever.  The problem, for me, was the rest of the film was not as strong as I thought it would be.

There are some funny moments in the film, but that is countered by the rottenness of the characters being shown.  In the end, they absolutely are criminals who are stealing from these men. Yes, these men are from Wall Street and shown as cheaters, and the film does its best to dehumanize the men (for the most part, which is an interesting contradiction to typical films), but that still does not make it right.

The relationship between Lopez and Wu’s characters are definitely the drawing point for the best scenes of the movie, but there is a lot of ugliness involved as well.

Based on a true story,  Hustlers was not the movie I was expecting, and, while I did not like this movie much, I was very much impressed with Jennifer Lopez and think she legitimately has a chance at an Academy Award nomination.

2.75 stars

Of course, maybe my opinions were altered by the jerks beside me who kept going on their phones.  I hate that!

I have heard some online critics say, “What are you expecting?  It’s a Rambo movie” when they explain why there does not need to be a good movie as long as Rambo is murdering a bunch of scumbags.

John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is retired and on his farm when his soon-to-be college niece (Yvette Monreal)heads off to Mexico to find her absentee father, who deserted her years ago.  Of course, she gets in trouble with all of the “hombres” in Mexico and gets tossed in a sex ring.  John has to go down to try and save her from their evil clutches.

That whole father subplot took all of five minutes to resolve.  It was resolved in the most basic and unsatisfying way imaginable.

This film is truly a mess.  What many people are claiming as its great final scene of the third act felt like a more bloody, more violent episode of The A-Team to me.  We see Rambo working on his farm to set up the traps in a montage and the villainous Mexicans stumble right into his traps.

And then the gore factor just shoots into orbit.  Some of the most brutal moments I have sen on film.  I have never been a fan of the real bloody gore, so I found myself not enjoying the final act.  And what was even worse was the bad guys were so stupid that they did not vary in the slightest from Rambo’s death traps.  They just blindly ran directly into them.  Oh, and every one of them worked perfectly.  Good job B.A and Face!

By the way, there seemed to be a political tint to some of the scenes.  Why, there was one scene where Rambo arrived at the USA/Mexico border and just drove his truck easily through the barbed wire fence.  I wonder what message that was trying to send.

I found the dialogue and much of the acting to be poor, but … what do you expect from a Rambo movie?  As long as Rambo kills people, nothing else matters.

I thought I might enjoy this one, but I was wrong.  I thought this was not a good movie and it had a bunch of things that checked off boxes of things that make me uncomfortable.  Too much gore for me, and the villains are as stupid as the victims in a slasher movie.  If you are a big Rambo fan, this will probably thrill you.  I have actually not seen any other Rambo movie so I am only approaching this as an audience member and I did not like it much.

1.8 stars

You’d think that a novel that won a Pultizer Prize could be adapted into a halfway decent film.  However, in the case of The Goldfinch, you would be wrong.

The Goldfinch is the story of a 13-year old boy named Theo Decker (played as a youth by Oakes Fegley and as an adult by Ansel Elgort), whose mother is killed in an explosion at a museum they were visiting together.  Theo sees a painting of a goldfinch chained to its perch at the site of the attack and sneaked it out of the museum as a way to remember his mother.

The rest of his life was tainted by this moment.  It seemed that things would be okay when he was taken in by the kindly Barbour family, led by Nicole Kidmon, but when Theo’s absent birth father (Luke Wilson) arrived, he had to go with him.

Theo wound up in Vegas where he met Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a Russian (kind of) speaking kid who introduced Theo to drugs and alcohol.

Meanwhile, we flash forward to Theo’s future life with Ansel Elgort where he had reunited with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), an antiques dealer he knew as a child.  They formed a partnership that gets threatened by the presence of the painting that Theo basically stole from the museum.

This film is such a mess.  Honestly, there is such a lack of narrative progress or story structure that it is amazing that it came from such an award winning novel.  There are several scenes that are included here to set up a certain storyline that are never paid off or returned to as the film progressed.  The flash forward sequences felt completely unneeded and the last act of the film took it in a completely different direction than the entire movie had been going.

The film itself is very long and very boring at many times.  It is amazing that The Goldfinch was as long as it was as I have a hard time thinking about what happened.  There was little memorable in the movie at all.

The performances were good, for the most part.  I liked the performance from Oakes Fegley.  He was one of the best parts of the movie.  Finn Wolfhard was good too despite being saddled with a silly Russian accent.  Luke Wilson and Sarah Paulson felt as if they were in a different movie.  Still, they were decent with what they had to do.

There are some good shots as the film’s cinematography was done by the legendary Roger Deakins, but even his classic eye could not save this wreck.

The Goldfinch had a few parts that were decent, but it failed to bring them together into any sort of competent, understandable narrative.  Good performances and some nice shots were not enough to overcome the failing of the movie.

1.5 stars

Luce makes one think, and that is a rare feat these days.

Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr) is a star high school student.  Quite the distance from where the boy lived until he was 7 years old, in the war-torn and violence-ridden Eritrea.   He was adopted by a white family, Amy Edgar (Naomi Watts) and Peter Edgar (Tim Roth).  After years of challenging behaviors, Luce has settled into an existence of a top notch student.

However, with some incidents involving dedicated teacher Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), some doubt begins to rear its ugly head.  When Luce writes a questionable paper, Harriet becomes concerned with the boy’s true thoughts.  A search of his locker makes her even more worried.

The best part of the movie, Luce, is that you are never quite sure if what it seems has happened is what actually happened.  Are Harriet’s suspicions realistic or is she reading too much into it.  Is Luce being misjudged or is he manipulating everything to his liking?  You are fairly certain about a scene, and then something happens and you are not sure once again.  I like that in a script.

The performances are tremendous.  I loved the work of Naomi Watts, Kelvin Harrison and Octavia Spencer especially.  These three actors dominated the scenes that they were in and they were able to create deeply imperfect characters whom you can see as real and flawed.  Tim Roth is just as compelling, though not used as much as the other three.

This is a movie that demands attention and leaves you feeling uncertain and uncomfortable in all the best ways.  I realized after a while in the film that I was not sure what the film was about, and that was all the more intriguing.

Is Luce a hero or a villain?  Is he the next best thing or the dark evil of this generation?  Is it possible that he could be equal parts of both?  And is he being given the proper chance?  There are some powerful ideas flowing through this movie and the performances provide some amazing moments.

I’m not sure this is a movie that I want to see again, but the first viewing experience was strong and stick with you for time.

4 stars

Based on a true story, the film Brittany Runs a Marathon has its moments of humor and good will, but it also has times when I really could not care less for its lead star.

That is not to say that actress Jillian Bell who is very good in this role, but the character bounces from funny to downright obnoxious so much that it was difficult to form any lasting emotional connection to her. In fact, I preferred every secondary character in the movie to Brittany.

Brittany, a plus sized 28-year old in New York, wound up at a doctor’s office and the doctor told her that she needed to lose about 45 pounds.  To do so, Brittany started to do some running and before long decided that she was going to run the New York City Marathon.  The movie was her life as she trained for the event.

However, the more weight she lost, the less likable she became.  She clearly had traumas involving her weight from her past, but many of them did not feel as authentic as I wish they had.

As a heavy person in my own right, I kind of resent the theme here that heavy people are failures and unhappy all the time, and, by the time they bring around someone to counteract that image, it is much too late.  Brittany makes her weight be the issue that has cost her so many plans and that is unrealistic.

As she was such a jerk to all of her friends, I just do not understand why this crew of really nice people would continue to want to be her friends.  She was mean and, downright verbally abusive at times, but these people stuck with her for unknown reasons.

However, I would be lying if I said that I did not feel some emotional tug during the third act and that there was no humor here.  There were many good scenes as well.  I just have trouble with films where I can not like the main character.

Brittany Runs a Marathon is a mixed bag of a dark rom-com that misses the mark at times, but ends with a strong finish.

3.1 stars

Sick day.

Not feeling well today, so I stayed home from work and I figured I would go to Vudu and watch what may be the worst movie of the year.

In the Vudu section for the “In theaters now” where they have the smaller, independent features, there was The Fanatic.  I had seen online movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann include this film in his Hilariocity Reviews (of movies that are so bad they are good).  I rented The Fanatic from Vudu and watched it this morning.

It was just terrible.

John Travolta starred in it giving what could be the worst performance of his career.  Travolta played an obsessed fan named Moose who wanted to get an autograph of his favorite action star Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa), but Hunter rebuffed him.  Moose then finds Hunter’s home and begins to stalk him.  However, Moose would become very frustrated and angry if anyone called him on being a stalker.

I really think the movie wants us to relate to and feel sorry for Moose instead of his chosen victim, Hunter Dunbar.  The film goes out of its way to show Dunbar as a jerk, being excessively cruel to Moose.  Moose has friends who tell him what a good person he is.  I really think the film wants us to back Moose.

This is despite the fact that Moose has broken into Dunbar’s house, accidentally killed his maid, eventually tied Dunbar to his bed and tormented him.

I never once felt as if Hunter was too negative towards this guy.  He has probably had to deal with fans before and he had to respond as he did.

The whole film is simplistic and has some of the worst acting, dialogue and plot of the whole year.

I could see this movie being one where RiffTrax would make it more fun.  I can see someone liking this in the way they like The Room or Birdemic.  However, as a feature film, this is atrocious.

0.75 stars