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Hot Take: Oscarbait account of The Pentagon Papers. Highly competent newspaper tale along the lines of Spotlight without the emotional weight.

Take a true story. Add Steven Spielberg as director. Add Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as the stars. Add a number of competent supporting cast members including Bob Odenkirk, Bradley Whitford, Tracy Letts and others. Throw in a score from John Williams. Tie it to the current political climate and some similarities to the past and you have a film capable of scoring an Oscar nomination or two. The Post, a historically accurate account of the publishing of The Pentagon Papers from the point of view of The Washington Post and a subplot of Kay Graham (Streep) as the first female president and publisher of an American newspaper, is high octane Oscarbait and received 6 Golden Globe nominations which could be a sign of things to come for The Post come the announcement of Academy Award nominations next week. Read More →

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Hot Take: Guillermo del Toro is a visionary and Sally Hawkins is brilliant but there’s just something that keeps The Shape of Water from being great. 

Currently, I rank The Shape of Water as the 16th best film of 2017. While that is nothing to sneeze at, The Shape of Water is expected to be nominated for Best Picture and some think it should win. It’s hard for me to get behind the notion. While The Shape of Water has a ton going for it, there’s something about it that just doesn’t quite make it feel worthy of such accolades. Sure, Guillermo del Toro is a brilliant director with amazing imagery but we’ve seen Beauty and the Beast before so the story at its core isn’t too fascinating. Even with a renewed mistrust of Russia thanks to recent political events, the added twist of a covert U.S. operation surrounding torturing an exotic find in a South American river during the Cold War in a Baltimore government facility just doesn’t, pardon the pun, completely hold water. It’s what you come to expect from del Toro who does dark fantasy so well but when thinking about it in terms of Oscar, it feels like it comes up just a bit short.Read More →

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Hot Take: Another great showcase for Jessica Chastain… even if they might have started resembling each other.

Last year, Jessica Chastain starred in Miss Sloane. Personally, I thought she should have been nominated for her performance but didn’t think it was going to happen because the film wasn’t critically acclaimed. She carried that film and elevated it from good to very good (almost great) status with her performance alone. At the time, John Madden’s Miss Sloane was occasionally referred to as “Sorkin-esque” albeit written by Jonathan Perera and directed by John Madden. So, this year’s Chastain entry to Awards season feels a lot like last year’s entry as Chastain carries much of the film as the titular character in Molly’s Game (although she gets more help from supporting cast member Idris Elba than anyone who appeared in Miss Sloane) and this year’s movie is actually written and directed (in his directorial debut) by Aaron Sorkin. Read More →

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Hot Take: I expected to hate it. Didn’t hate it.

There was something that didn’t sit right with the idea of another Jumanji film. Maybe it was the passing of Robin Williams or maybe it was the fact that I just didn’t think the original Jumanji was all that great but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It took some time to settle in and no one will mistake it for cinematic genius but Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle manages to be very entertaining and even laugh out loud funny at times. It’s misplaced summer popcorn flick that found its way into the winter season.Read More →

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Hot Take: The nifty trick of making Kevin Spacey disappear and replacing him with Christopher Plummer is more interesting than this facts heavy thriller from Ridley Scott. Very good but not great with more drama off-screen than on.

Sometimes the sum is greater than the parts but occasionally, the reverse is true. That’s what we get in All the Money in the World, the latest film from Ridley Scott which is based on the true events surrounding the kidnapping of the grandson of J. Paul Getty. While the movie is solid (as is almost anything helmed by Scott), the performances from Christopher Plummer and Michelle Williams stand out well above the quality of the film. Plummer’s excellent performance is especially fascinating considering he was added to the film after a sexual assault scandal rocked former co-star Kevin Spacey. The cast and crew got back together to re-shoot Spacey out of the film and replace him with Plummer in the role of J. Paul Getty. Re-shoots took 10 days at the end of November and the film premiered just 19 days later. As for Williams’ role, there’s no fascinating story behind it, just another excellent performance that could earn her another Oscar nomination. Read More →

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Hot Take: Aca-awful story with some fun but familiar a cappella singing from characters you probably love if you’re here for a 3rd installment. Not a very good movie but it has its moments if you’re a fan of the series.

When you end up with John Lithgow with a terrible Australian accent singing Chicago’s “Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry”, you know something has gone terrible wrong with the plot. Enter Pitch Perfect 3, the 3rd installment of the Pitch Perfect series which features the Bellas now 3 years after the end of Pitch Perfect 2 (which if you told me it was about the Bellas saving the world from a natural weather phenomenon with their singing, I would probably believe you) and graduated from college. It looks like the entire cast was signed on to return but honestly, I didn’t pay enough attention to the first 2 to know the names of anyone beyond Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Hailee Steinfeld and Brittany Snow. Sorry. Thanks to a convoluted plot, the only thing going for Pitch Perfect 3 is nostalgia and some good a cappella singing that keeps the movie entertaining when not trying to tell us a story we don’t really care to follow. Just give us more singing. Seriously.Read More →

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Hot Take: Lots of great music and an occasionally fun piece of fiction that is entirely too rushed… too bad it’s supposed to be based on the true story of P.T. Barnum.

It’s tough to evaluate a film like The Greatest Showman without factoring in the true tale it is portraying. It’s expected for all films based on true events to take liberties but it’s another thing when the film adds or subtracts tales of fiction that skew the overall depiction of the subject matter. That’s very much the case for the often fictional tale featuring the real life P.T. Barnum as a character. Hugh Jackman stars as Barnum in this original musical which took over 7 years to find its way to the big screen. Jackman was attached to the project from the beginning but the risky proposition of an original musical (the original plan to release came about pre-La La Land) kept the film from seeing the light of day longer than expected. The result though leaves a little bit to be desired and while the music is fun and the cast is game, there’s a bad taste left by how often the film veers from the facts and presents an alternate reality for Barnum, his entrepreneurial endeavors and the people around him. Read More →

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Hot Take: For this Star Wars fan, the GOAT of Star Wars films.

WARNING: Expect lots of spoilers here. This is likely to be the longest review I’ve ever written on this site. You’ve been warned.

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” The words have Kylo Ren have stuck with me throughout my multiple viewings of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the 8th installment of the Star Wars saga. (That’s not counting Rogue One: A Star Wars Story which dropped last year.) It was one of those “F you!” moments which are littered throughout the superbly written and directed Rian Johnson entry. I remember watching The Force Awakens for the 3rd time and thinking about how much I loved the movie but realizing how inferior it was because it was such a blatant rip-off of Star Wars: A New Hope, the introduction which launched the phenomenon in 1977. My expectations for The Last Jedi were more of the same and the trailer did nothing to squelch those expectations. If anything, it stoked those flames of nostalgia. I wouldn’t have hated it but I’m so ecstatic it played out in a completely different direction. Yes, I loved Star Wars: The Last Jedi. More than Return of the Jedi, Empire Strikes Back and A New Hope, my 1a, 1b and 1c prior to this glorious turn in a completely unexpected direction from where we thought this story was going. Plenty of people hated it. The Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at 51% and dropping. Let’s be fair, though. This is the same audience who had to be issued a disclaimer at AMC Theaters regarding one of the most spectacular scenes later in the movie because there was no sound… Really?Read More →

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Hot Take: I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a James Franco fan but as the eccentric mind behind possibly the worst movie in film history Tommy Wiseau, he’s bizarrely brilliant. 

Many reactions to the bizarrely awful 2003 film The Room lead people down a path of wanting to know how a film like that ever gets made. Enter The Disaster Artist. A biopic featuring the main culprit behind the film, Tommy Wiseau whose mysterious bottomless bank account was able to help him write, direct, produce and star in a $6 million production. Starring (and directed) James Franco in his best role of his career, The Disaster Artist takes the audience inside the film, provides an interesting back story that’s almost as bizarre as the film and tries to shed some light on how The Room became what it was. Read More →

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Hot Take: Why?

Ron Shelton had not worked on a feature film since 2003. He was the writer/director of Hollywood Homicide which failed with critics and failed at the box office. Shelton, the man behind such hits as Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump and Tin Cup, took a break. Unfortunately, for anyone who has been subjected to his latest “effort”, Just Getting Started, this wasn’t a retirement. It took 14 years for Shelton to get back in the saddle and what he was able to produce was a highly unwatchable, embarrassingly bad waste of everyone’s time, especially the audience. If you think that’s harsh, it’s the rare film that both critics and audiences universally detest. At the time of this writing, Just Getting Started is carrying an abysmal 8% Tomatometer from critics and a 20% Audience Score. Typically, audiences are much more forgiving than critics and a bad Audience Score is usually anything below 50%. Up until the release of Just Getting Started, the worst film of 2017 was The Emoji Movie. This isn’t really something we’re going to debate. It’s just a fact. Even The Emoji Movie, as bad as it was, received a 40% Audience Score. Let that sink in. A movie featuring Patrick Stewart as the voice of Poop pleased 40% of the Audience which saw it… that’s how bad Just Getting Started has been received.Read More →