Jersey Boys

Plot: This is a bio-pic about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the 1960's pop band. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Jersey Boys really makes me appreciate how bad music was before the Beatles. 

I know someone likes this music, but it isn't me, and I couldn't wait for the movie to end. The film is punctuated by songs, and the scripted action isn't enough alone. The film is slow and the characters are stereotypes. 

Finally real stories  are usually boring. The real world ending is especial boring. It would have ended better with a plane crash or a suicide. Maybe earlier too. 

John Lloyd does have a nice voice though. He has a few albums, and they are this same archaic style of music. 

Cast: John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza

Directed by: Clint Eastwood: he must like this style of music after all he is 84. Jersey Boys was based on the stage play

Rating: 1.5 star

More: The real ending is a dull let down, but the post ending is a Bollywood style dancing blowout. Clearly the best part. 

Even More Here is the real band.

22 Jump Street

Plot:  Undercover cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) search for a drug dealer at a local collage. Jenko joins a frat and the football team, but Schmidt doesn't fit in at the frat, and meets pretty girl Maya (Amber Stevens) at a poetry slam. That is the set up, and lots of sitcom humor unwinds from that. Spelling out any more is just repeating the jokes.  In the end, they are in Mexico for Spring Break and catch the bad guy. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: A clever and funny movie that was more intelligent than the original or most frat house movies.

In my review of 21 Jump Street I commented on the poor taste in gay-bashing jokes, and this movie clearly shaped up.  Having said that, 22 Jump Street pushes the Bromace trope past irony into delicious absurdity with a relationship counselor, a breakup and naturally a happy reunion.

Jonah Hill carries the movie with his facial expressions. Channing Tatum is the likable set-up with some good gags of his own. Ice Cube plays an great angry boss.  

Cast: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Ice Cube, Wyatt Russell, Amber Stevens

Directed by: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

Rating: 3.0 stars: Why 3? Because my DW told me that I'd give it 2.5, and I can't have her be right.

More: I loved the spoof spin-offs shown during the credits. 

Even More.

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How to Train your Dragon 2

Plot: Hiccup (really his name is Hiccup) tries to maintain the peace as a rival dragon master tries to capture all the dragons. On the way he meets a surprise character, who gives him advice. In the end there is a big battle with flying dragons. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: You really can't trust the critics for kid's movies. This had stellar reviews, and it was unremarkable and not fun.  

The basic dramatic action was never that strong. They tried to set up parent-child tension, but that never worked -- partially because Hiccup is just to cynical to show real emotion. Similarly the interaction between the Hiccup and his friends just isn't strong enough to be entertaining. When the surprise character is introduced -- it is interested for a while, but the movie slows way down while it processes the plot change: sleep inducing. The final battle was not dramatic enough for various reasons. 

The flirting between Hiccup and Astrid was fun though. The stud-infatuated Ruffnut was a running gag that worked too.

The dragons were comic and not cool. The animated people was great however - especially the hair. Computer animation of hair has really advanced. The sound track was also good. 

They deliberately gave Hiccup and his friends modern sounding dialog whereas most everyone else had a stilted, pan-britania accent. This heightened the sense of irony and decreased the dramatic tension.

Written and directed by: Dean DeBlois, based on the books by Cressida Cowell

Rating: 1.5 stars: Maybe it deserved two stars for the message about peaceful reconciliation, but it was no fun. I felt cheated: like I wanted to see another movie to compensate me for the dull and sleepy time I had lost.

More: I rated the first movie 2 stars. Nonetheless, I remember it as having had fun parts and a happy ending. My memories of this are not so good. 

The first movie had a problem with joke-y dialog about family members getting eaten by dragons, and way too high a body count for such a light tone. This movie had a lower body count, but was no fun.

Even More: I still love Stoick's beard. 

Edge of Tomorrow 3D

Plot: Aliens have invaded, and Major Cage (Tom Cruise) gets sent to the front line because he pissed off the General. He accidentally captures an alien technology to control time so that every time he dies, he gets sent back to the beginning of that day. He plots with war hero Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) to learn from his experiences in combat, and gradually turn the tables on the aliens. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Edge of Time has a clever plot and Tom Cruise's performance is strong as he re-lives many similar combat scenes, but knowing more each time: a lot of good facial & voice acting. Cruise undergoes a personality change from privileged softy to tough-guy somewhere in the middle. Cruise is fun to watch as a cocky, tough guy in the comic relief segments. 

Emily Blunt plays a very tough warrior woman. She is more someone to respect and admire rather than a believable character -- obviously the coolest character in the movie. In keeping with a long tradition of female sci-fi heroes, Rita is like a male character in a female body; not like recent women heroes from young adult fiction like Hunger Games, Divergent or even X-Men. Rita doesn't talk about her past just like male tough guys; in contrast Marvel Comics heroes never stop talking about their pasts.

The chemistry between Cruise and Blunt is the strongest part of the movie. The second best is the puzzle solving as they work their way to alien's vulnerability.  

The big downer was the dreariness and hopelessness of the battle scenes though the vast middle of the movie. Perhaps it needed to be dreary to have something to contrast the end with, but I never thought the movie was fun to watch. It seemed like every one, but Rita hated Cage, and the rest of the time Cage was getting battered by practice robots or getting killed by real aliens. The comic relief parts were not enough to lighten the mood. 

The drum-heavy sound track Christophe Becke was good. The special effects were solid. I did not like aliens who just seems to roar. They moved fast, but were otherwise not very interesting. The scenery was always dreary, battle field images. There were no cool visuals.

Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt

Directed by: Doug Liman

Based on the novel in Japanese by: Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Rating: 2.5 stars: Recommended, but it felt a little hollow to me. My wife liked it a lot more.

More: It is interesting to think about whether women could be heroic warriors if they had those robotically-assisted suits in real life. It seems Lockheed Martin has developed one. 

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Million Dollar Arm

Plot: Struggling agent JB is going broke so he and friend Amit (Pitobash) create a contest to give an cricket player from India a trial with a US baseball team. JB goes to India, has tryouts, brings back two players, Rinku (Suraj Sharma) and Minesh (Madhur Mittal). They start out badly but improve. Meanwhile JB starts a relationship with his cute tenant Brenda (Lake Bell.) [imdb]    [photos]

Review: There isn't much drama, and the action is slow. Good sports movies are full of suspense, but they never play a baseball game. Players Sharma and Mittal are not very interesting characters. 

The best part were the business scenes when Jon Hamm made sales pitches to clients -- its just like Mad Men. The second best was the love story with Brenda. Brenda had some interesting dialog with JB. Million Dollar Arm didn't have enough Jon Hamm and Lake Bell, and too much baseball. 

Visually, there were some interesting travelog scenes in India -- they call it poverty-porn. There were a few pop Indian songs that I liked, but not enough to look up on iTunes. 

This is supposed to be a charming, feel-good story about likable amateurs getting to the pros, but the amateurs were not that engaging, and the baseball action was never suspenseful.  

Cast: Jon Hamm, Pitobash, Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal, Lake Bell, Alan Arkin, Bill Paxton

Directed by: Craig Gillespie

Rating: 1.5 stars: I just wasn't that in to it. 

More: True stories are not usually as good as fictional ones. 

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X-Men: Days of Future Past

Plot: In present day, killer robots have nearly killed off all the X-Men. In desperation, they send Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to the past to prevent the deadly robots from being built. They identify a key event, when Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawerence) kills robot inventor Bolivar Trask, and then is captured: her mutant DNA is built into the new robots making them unstoppable.

Logan/Wolverine finds the younger Charles/Prof. X (James McAvoy) and Erik/Magento (Michael Fassbender) and they find Raven/Mystique, but not in time, so they have to improvise. In the end, it is a struggle between the use of force to defend themselves versus the hope for peace -- like previous X-Men stories. [imdb]    [photos]

Review: Good characters with interesting relationships between them,  a suspenseful story, and top special effects. It is a great "Action Movie", and I am glad I saw it.

The best part was the team-oriented fighting scenes as it plays up the cooperation between the characters in the present, and it is punctuated by the terrible death scenes of so many characters -- this amps up the intensity. Even though there are a lot of death scenes, it is comic book action (breathing fire) so the high body count does not seem morbidly gross.

Also tops is the relationship between Charles, Erik, and Logan both with the old actors and the young actors. Very well written. I loved both Charles, but I did not like Michael Fassbender at all. Jennfer Lawrence's character is in many scenes, but often disguised. She did not have too many scenes to show her acting, and she missed a chance at the final climax, but underplayed it. I think it called for tears, or hair-pulling or maybe shape-shifting into a pretzel.

The cast is so big that I only see my favorite characters for a few minutes, and there are teases of so much comic-book backstory.

The music drifts between boring 70's pop and drum-heavy orchestral music -- nothing special here.

A top popcorn movie. Never dull. Often fun and gripping.

Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, Michael Fassbender; and many many more. 

Directed by: Bryan Singer

Rating: 3.5 stars: Well made. Well acted. Gripping. Extra points for intensity. Misses a perfect score because the societal message is stale, and 2-3 quibbles.

More: They quote Star Trek episode "City of the Edge of Forever" about the rules of time travel, and cleverly have the episode playing in the background. 

Even More: No cameo for Stan Lee, but two of the senators were comic book writers. 

Yet more: In the preview at the end, En Sabah Nur is the other name for X-Men bad guy Apocalypse, who will be in the next X-Men movie called X-Men: Apocalypse. 

Godzilla

Plot: In 1999, there is a disaster at a Japanese nuclear power plant by the sea, very much like the real-life Fukushima Daiichi tsumami disaster in 2011. Ford Brody's (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) parents worked at the plant, and his mother is killed. His father Joe (Bryon Cranston) spends the last 15 years trying to figure out what the Japanese government is hiding. Turns out the disaster was a monster attack, and Joe predicts the monster is coming back.

When the monster does attack, Ford, survives and heads back to the US via Hawaii, but the monster comes too. Ford is a Lieutenant in the Navy, and his wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen,) is a nurse in San Francisco. There are additional monsters in the story, and I am not going to spoil the details. It ends with a big battle in San Francisco: Ford is there with a nuke, and the monsters are fighting each other.  Action. Heroics. Smashed Buildings. Cute Children in Peril.  [imdb]    [photos]

Review: The first part of the movie is a shadowy suspense where we don't know what is the horror in the shadows. It is always suspenseful. In the second part, the same characters are witnesses to the action as the monsters journey from Japan to San Francisco -- smashing buildings along the way. 

The special effects are great. The plot is well-written, and we all root for Godzilla to win. Elizabeth Olsen has a small part as Ford's wife, but she does a nice job with facial acting. 

Godzilla is excellent for a monster movie, and I recommend it. Godzilla is fun to watch, and is cool in places. It is a movie for spectacle, and when the film is over -- there isn't much to talk about. Godzilla is not trying to be more than a spectacle. (Monster movies aren't my favorite genre. Godzilla is not a horror movie.)

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen

Directed by: Gareth Edwards

Rating: 2.5 stars: The best monster movie since Pacific Rim.

More: Godzilla is a big monster. It is as big as an aircraft carrier. 

Even More: I still like the Blue Oyster Cult song Godzilla, and it final lyric "History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man."  Seems to fit this movie.