Chappaquiddick tells the true story of a political scandal that ended the presidential run of Edward “Ted” Kennedy in 1969.

Kennedy, brother of President John Kennedy and candidate Bobby Kennedy, was planning a run for president in 1972 when his car went off a bridge into the water, claiming the life of a political strategist Mary Jo Kopechne.

According to the scandal, Ted left the scene of the accident and did not report it for 9 hours, thus leaving Mary Jo to die in the submerged car.

Ted Kennedy, played here by Jason Clarke, is shown as a damaged man who was desperately seeking the attention and approval of his father Joe (Bruce Dern).  Too drunk to be driving, Ted drove the car off the bridge.  However, the film does not show us how Ted escaped the car or why Mary Jo (Kate Mara) could not.  According to the film, Ted retreated to the party that he had come from to find his two friends/associates Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) and Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan) to help him.  They returned to the scene of the accident and tried to get into the car to save Mary Jo, unsuccessfully.  Joe and Paul left Ted with the expectation that he would report the accident, but he does not until the next morning.

The film indicates that Mary Jo survived for a while breathing in a small pocket of air in the car.  Had Kennedy called immediately, would she have survived?  He certainly believed that after he and his friends had returned that she was already dead, thus reducing the immediate need.  This was still left up in the air for the audience to infer what happened.

The film also played with the spinners after the event happened.  They were coming up with reasons why this had happened and how they would make it not destroy Kennedy’s career.  They kept claiming he had a concussion and was in shock.  Though the film hinted that that was not the case with a flash to the face of the doctor, I do believe that the film showed Kennedy in a state of shock after the events happened.  Maybe not concussed (though I would believe it), but certainly diminished.  Was he thinking straight?  I don’t know.

The performances were strong.  The story was well tole, but it did feel as if there could have been so much more to this story than what we got.  Maybe a mini-series on TV would be more effective.

What the film does very well is show the character of Ted Kennedy and the drawbacks he has.  The relationship between Ted and his father was very compelling and I could have used more of that.  It really was a psychological character study of a man who some believed would be president, but who failed to live up to the dynasty of his family name, especially inside his own head.  Ted’s lack of confidence lead to this entire situation, while the strength of his last name led to the lack of results in the criminal case.  I think there is no doubt that this prevented Kennedy from becoming president.

I still wonder how Ted Kennedy escaped from the car while Mary Jo did not.  There are several questions in this film that are left unanswered.  Sure it would have called for speculation, but some of that would have helped the overall quality.  Still, good performances, in particular from Jason Clarke, Ed Helms and Bruce Dern, carry this to a decent biopic.

3.35 stars

This past week, The Top 10 Show did the Top 10 Raunchy Teen Movies list and I had a definite problem filling my list (which I do every week after their podcast) up with films. In fact, I could only find six that I could rank.

Now, Blockers would be number one on that list.

As I stated, this genre of film is far from my favorite, but I really found Blockers to be more than just the sex jokes and the raunchy teen film.  It had some real heart, some very strong characters and a lot of really funny humor.  Who would have guessed?

Three senior girls(Kathyrn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon), who had been best friends since the first day of school, make a pact that all three of them would lose their virginity on prom night.  #sexpact2018.  Their parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz) accidentally discover this pact and decide that they would prevent their daughters from being successful in their pursuit of sex.

And so hilarity commences.

There were several things about Blockers that caught me off guard.  Mainly, I really liked how the story played the girls part of the story in a realistic light and showed three young female characters who were strong, brave and knew what they wanted.  These three young ladies were very different, but their friendship absolutely came through on screen and that chemistry between the three of them was a huge plus for the movie.  It was especially nice to see this type of a film coming from a female perspective that did not feel the need to play the girls off as the victims or as naive.  And all three actresses do a fantastic job, in particular Geraldine Viswanathan, who looks like a star.

The other half of the film featured the adults, chasing their daughters and this part of the film was considerably more slapstick or cartoonish, and these three actors do a great job with that.  Leslie Mann is great here, bringing the most experience in the role.  John Cena continues to show that he has skill in comedy and, while he still is learning, he provides a very solid and believable performance.  However, Ike Barinholtz was probably my favorite character because of how much his character played with the expectations of who he was.  He was shown originally as a scumball who cheated on his wife, but we learn more and more about him and we see him play against that type most of the time. This sets up the emotional reveal at the end that is a very strong pay off.

Most importantly, this movie has laughs.  It is well written and expertly executed, which is even more amazing when you consider that this is director Kay Cannon’s directorial debut.  She does an admirable job of balancing the two parts to the story and creating a group of characters in this ensemble that really stretch across the spectrum seamlessly.

The trailers make this look like a film that relies on the low brow humor, but I did not find it that way.  Sure there are jokes that would fall into that, but there are many other instances that are extremely funny and, most of those low brow jokes actually do fairly well.

However, I had to deduct a huge part of the score because of an extended puke scene and I HATE puke scenes.  Sure, this scene was not particularly realistic in its projectile vomit use, I still hate those.  I just do not like them.  It is a personal preference.

I also liked the three boys whom the girls take to prom.  Each of them play on typical stereotypes of characters but switch things around to make them fresh.  They felt like real kids who might actually like being together.

I will say that there were a couple of moments at the end of the movie that did not necessarily ring true.  At least one of the storylines between the parents and the kids turned out to be too easy of a fix- almost as if it were on a sitcom that had reached the end of the episode and needed to wrap up.  It felt as if the girl (without spoiling) should have been more angry with the parent than what she was.

Either way, Blockers was considerably better than I ever thought it would be.  It was very funny, keeping me laughing consistently throughout, and had unexpectedly sweet and pretty developed characters.  There are great performances and these characters end up playing against type.  Blockers is a very entertaining comedy, and that is something I don’t say too often.

4 stars

(sorry Chris…)

Hoo-boy.

A Quiet Place is a horror/thriller, heavy on the thriller as I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, desperately looking to grasp on to anything to brace myself.

I have not been this full of tension and apprehension in a film in a long time.  And A Quiet Place starts off filled with this intensity and just never lets up for the entire 90+ minute run time.  I felt the need to inhale and try to be as quiet as I could while in the theater just because…

A Quiet Pace is the story of a married couple, Lee (John Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), who are the parents of three children (Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, and Cade Woodward).  This family lives in what seems to be a post apocalyptic world where alien monsters arrived and, while blind, respond violently to any sound that is made.  So in order to avoid being immediately slaughtered by these hideous creatures, the family is forced to live their lives without making any sound whatsoever.

Therein lies the tension because the human race is not meant to be a quiet race.

John Krasinski is also the director of this film and he does an absolutely tremendously spot on job.  Despite the fact that the dialogue is basically eliminated from the film, the manner in which he tells this story is amazing.

One of the best parts to me is that Krasinski does not waste time with endless exposition explaining what has happened to the world, or how this family has survived up to this point.  None of that is important.  Krasinski provides some newspaper clippings that help fill in some of the blanks, but the rest of it is left up to the imagination of the audience.  The cold open begins with a black screen with the words 89 days on it.  This tells you that whatever it was that caused this apocalypse has happened.  Then after the opening (which leaves you breathless, by the way) the film jumps to day 472 (around there).  Because of that, it seems obvious that this family has spent most of the last 390+ days figuring out how to live with the minimal use of sound.

And I accepted that completely.  I did not feel the need to know every little detail about how things work or what had happened to get them to this point. The film drops you into this point in time and you go with it.  Exposition weighs down so many movies that the distinct lack of exposition was a novel way to go.

The sound editing of this movie is absolutely brilliant.  The silence is played perfectly, and every little sound is masterfully placed for maximum intensity.  There are some jump scares, but they are well done and are placed int he film in exceptional locations.  They fit and this movie by no means depends on them.  They are just simply another tool that this film uses with utmost proficiency.

Then, the performances are mind blowing.  Emily Blunt has so much skill in conveying what she needs to with her face and her body and her attitude.  Krasinski is powerful here and he had me completely engaged with his character.  Both main children, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe are amazing.  Simmonds is in real life deaf and so is her character Regan, and the film does this very creative technique to demonstrate that whenever Simmonds has the point of view.  It was very effective.

They also showed the use of sign language, which was one of the way this family communicated with one another and it was compelling.  I have never seen someone yelling at each other in sign language, but I did see it here.  Amazing job by these actors.

There is a great connection between these characters who are dealing with so much more than just these monsters that will kill them if they make any sound.  There are intricate problems between each character and these actors bring out the best in each other.

Another great thing is this family of characters are shown to be very intelligent instead of the bumbling idiots that usually take up horror movie space.  I love that.  They were doing things that made sense and even those choices that might not be wise are done in service to the characters.  It is apparent that the characters are the most important part of this story and everything else just goes to help show who these characters are and how they are going to grow.  And you believe it totally.

The creatures were made by Industrial Lights & Magic (ILM) and it shows because these monsters are terrifyingly authentic and look to be right out of someone’s nightmares.  There is no troubled CGI here.  However, Krasinski wisely does not over use the shots of the monsters and use them at the proper time to illustrate the characters and the terror of the situation.

There are so many moments when I was simply holding my head and wondering if this film could be more tense…and then it topped itself.  I legitimately came out of this movie with a physical visceral anxiety, amazed at what I had just seen and shaken by the process of seeing it.  I sat through to the end of the credits not because I wanted to see them or expected any post credit scene, but because I needed to take a breather.

This is maybe my favorite movie of the young year so far.  I was completely invested in the film and the characters as I gritted my teeth and held my breath through each anxiety filled scene.  A Quiet Place is an original film with great performances, a well-told story that does not bog itself down with unnecessary exposition and tension from the get-go.  Great job to all involved.

5 stars

Building on the cult classic status of The Room and the recent success of James Franco’s film based on the making of that film, The Disaster Artist, stars and creators of The Room are back together for the first time since.

Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, who were Johnny and Mark respectfully in The Room, bring their “acting” chops to Best F[r]iends, a weird and eccentric movie that goes all over the place incoherently while displaying the idiosyncrasies of the one and only Tommy Wiseau.

Oh, and it is Part 1.  Part 2 comes out in June.

Greg Sestaro plays Jon, a drifter who shows up with blood on his shirt (never explained, by the way) and a lemon in his pocket.  He winds up crossing paths with an eccentric mortician who makes masks for corpses that have been scarred in their deaths.  He also apparently pulls out their gold teeth to store in his back room.  Jon realizes that he could make some money selling those gold teeth as dental scrap and steals some from his new best friend.

Okay, that’s as much of the plot that I am going to explain (mainly because I am not sure what else happened).  This is nowhere as bad as The Room, however, it is nowhere as fun as The Room was either.  Sure, this new movie has moments of Tommy Wiseau that are vintage Tommy Wiseau, but there seems to be more of an attempt to string together something of a story here. Perhaps the fact that Tommy Wiseau was not directing this helped (directorial duties fell to Justin MacGregor).

These characters changed motivations and personalities from scene to scene…sometimes within a scene even.  In particular, Wiseau’s Harvey was wildly inconsistent in his character choices and thoughts.  The film starts many different potential storylines but drop them just as quickly.

It really made little sense and unfortunately was just not as humor-inducingly bad as The Room.

However, Tommy Wiseau does say, “Oh, hi Jon.”

What more could you want?

1 star

Not quite a biopic here.

More of a farce than a history lesson, The Death of Stalin is uproarious and consistently funny as you see a great comedic cast bring humor to the last days of the violent Soviet leader and the ensuing struggle for power that followed.

The great cast here included an exceptional turn from Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev.  Buscemi plays Khrushchev as a manipulator and an opportunist, taking the events surrounding the death of Stalin and morphing them into ones that would benefit him.  Jeffrey Tambor is wonderful as the wishy-washy Georgy Malenkov.  Simon Russell Beale appears as Lavrenti Beria, another member of the Council of Ministers and head of the secret police.  Khrushchev and Beria clash with one another because they both have their eyes on the head of the Soviet Union in a post-Stalin world.

It is a very dark comedy, however, as many scenes were very brutal, despite being played for comedic effect.

Clearly, the farce is not specifically concerned with details.  For example, there isn’t any Russian spoke in the film.  They all just talked in English, as if they were all just naturally English speakers.  It was kind of funny at times, and I would be lying to say that it did not disrupt my viewing at least a few times.

The film did not fail to play up the seriousness of the times in the USSR, as people were being killed for reasons only familiar to Stalin and many of the normal Soviets were frightened of their leader.  The scenes where the theater owner makes the orchestra stay and re-play their concert a second time because Stalin wanted a copy was a great example of the fear the Soviet people had to endure.

Oh, and Adrian McLoughlin as Josef Stalin is a thing of beauty.  The tyrannical dictator was played much like an unruly youngster with too much time on his hands. And yet, they never backed away from showing how evil Stalin was.  It was a very nice juxtaposition of the character.

The Death of Stalin was a good time involving some of the darkest times of the world.

3.65 stars

Based on the best selling book of the same title, Steven Spielberg’s new directorial effort is the CGI heavy Ready Player One, which if nothing else, shows how amazing Spielberg is at compiling character’s rights for a movie.

Not sure how he was able to navigate the rights issue, but there seemed to be no lack of nostalgic characters in the world of the Oasis, the futuristic virtual reality that most of the human race escapes into to avoid how terrible their lives are in the real world.

Steve Jobs-like creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died and he pulled a Willy Wonka on the world.  He hid three keys in his VR World and said that anyone who could find them would be given all of his money and the rights to control the Oasis however they choose.  Problem?  No one can solve the riddles.

Enter our hero- Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who, as his avatar Parzival, enters the game with his own desire to find the keys.  While inside the VR, Parzival meets Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and he immediately falls for the hot gamer chick.  However, he has no time for romance because the evil corporation IOI, led by evil CEO Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) is also hot on the trail of the keys for their own nefarious purposes (mainly dealing with advertisements a la Net Neutrality).

I have mixed feelings about this movie.  There was just something about the film that I did not enjoy.  It was extremely long, and felt it too.  The first half of the movie felt like an exposition-heavy, info dump that I found very dull.  I understand that it is challenging for a movie with this much of a mythology to introduce said mythology to the audience without it feeling like an exposition dump, but I feel that someone the caliber of Spielberg could have found a more successful way to do it.

The villain of the story came off to me as unbelievably one note.  I thought Sorrento was nothing more than an evil corporate figure.  They tried to connect him to Halliday in flashbacks, but none of those were very effective.

I was not a fan of the dialogue used by the characters, particularly in the Oasis.  The different avatars were clunky and undeveloped and most of the humor hit the skids.

I also found much of the film predictable and lacking the adventurous spirit that I had hoped it would have.

There were some things that I did enjoy.  There were a couple of the big set action pieces that were effective.  I did not hate the race for the first key.  I loved the trip to the Outlook Hotel for the second key and the third act super slugfest was fun.

The biggest reason these were fun was the nostalgic factor.  It was fun seeing these different characters and objects appearing here.  The film had everything from the Deloreon to the iron Giant to Batgirl, TMNT, King Kong etc.  It was a feast for the eyes trying to spot all the different characters that were seen on screen. I did love the use of a certain character by the villain in the third act, even though his use of that character did not really fir with the villain’s character.

I really did like Olivia Cooke in this role as well.  She was so sweet and lovely that I was charmed by here the entire time.  I preferred her real world persona to the avatar in the game.  Tye Sheridan was fine as Wade, which is about the best thing I can say. I liked his avatar much more.  The rest of the group of kids and gamers were pretty underwhelming, if not basic stereotypes.

If you think too much about ready Player One, the story and the common sense falls apart.  It works much better if you just do not think about it and allow yourself to fall into the days of your youth.

This felt like one of those 1980s movies that I would have loved when I was younger, but not like near as much when I looked back upon it as an adult.  Something bugged me about the film through much of the run time and I could not put my finger on it.  There were definitely sections that I liked about the movie, but that nagging feeling just never fully went away.

2.75 stars