‘Shape of Water’ enjoyable, can’t help but feel underwhelming

Posted on December 25, 2017 by reelentropy

So we’re just gonna gloss over how weird it is to want to have sex with a frog person? Call it a “love is love” thing? OK, I guess. Images courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

8/10 The no. 1 movie of the year at the box office is Beauty and the Beast. Its top Oscar contender is Mutey and the Frog Person.

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water follows Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who serves as the janitor at a top-secret government facility in Baltimore alongside Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer). One day, Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Col. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) bring in a top secret specimen to study in the hopes that it’ll help them in the space race. Esposito and Fuller are given access to the chamber to clean it, and they discover it’s a frog person (Doug Jones). Esposito was rendered mute as an infant. She starts teaching it sign language, and she starts to fall in love with the frog person. Eventually, she needs to boost it from the facility, because Strickland wants to dissect it.

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‘Greatest Showman’ not enough

Posted on December 25, 2017 by reelentropy

The Greatest Showman’s laziness is truly baffling when the talent level of the personnel involved is taken into account. High-level song and dance numbers would be child’s play to Jackman and Efron, but even in their one big scene, the singing is clearly dubbed and their dances are only captured with a careless three-camera coverage setup. Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

4/10 The Greatest Showman has some lofty ambitions, but it’s just kind of shitty.

The film is a heavily fictionalized account of the life of P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) and the founding of the circus in the 1840s and ’50s.

The main advertising boast for The Greatest Showman was its connection to last year’s breakout favorite La La Land — songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul wrote lyrics for both of them. So when we compare it to La La Land later, well, they asked for it.

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‘Jumanji’ is shockingly stellar

Posted on December 25, 2017 by reelentropy

God, it seems like half the frame is Karen Gillan’s bare skin — how did they think people would just go with this? Images courtesy Sony Pictures Entertainment.

9/10 Now this is how you do a reboot.

In the all-new, all-different Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the board game from the 1995 original has evolved into a video game. Where it used to bring the jungle to the players, now it brings the players to the jungle, absorbing them and transforming them into their video game avatars.

Lost to time, the game is unearthed by four high schoolers in detention, which it quickly ensnares. Disgraced football star Anthony “Fridge” Johnson (Ser’Darius Blain) becomes the tiny Franklin “Mouse” Finbar (Kevin Hart), the group’s zoologist and weapons specialist; popular girl and cell phone addict Bethany Walker (Madison Iseman) becomes the obese and extremely male cartographer Shelly Oberon (Jack Black); the shy Martha Kaply (Morgan Turner) becomes Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), a scantily clad assassin; and nerdy video game expert Spencer Gilpin (Alex Wolff) becomes the bold, muscle-bound archaeologist Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson). Their only way out is to finish the game by returning the sacred jewel, which is provided, to the jungle’s guardian jaguar, but Russel Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale), who is possessed by the jewel and commands all of the jungle’s beasts, will stop at nothing to reclaim it.

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‘Darkest Hour’ an outdated, uninspired snooze

Posted on December 25, 2017 by reelentropy

Hungry, Hungry Gary Oldman. Images courtesy Focus Features.

3/10 Set in World War II and marketed on the strength of a respected star with an empty mantel, Darkest Hour is exactly the kind of movie that’s going extinct as the Academy focuses more on social justice and diversity and its Greatest Generation holdovers start to die out.

Thank everything that’s holy for that.

Darkest Hour relates the first month of prime minister Winston Churchill’s (Gary Oldman) government, formed as the British were being beaten out of France by Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940. Churchill came to power replacing Conservative Party leader Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), who was ousted for his handling of the war, as an equally unpopular compromise from both the conservative and labour parties. In the film, Chamberlain and foreign secretary Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), Chamberlain’s first choice for the position, conspire to undermine Churchill and make peace with the Nazis, which amplifies Churchill’s silent uncertainty that Germany can be beaten. The tensions culminate into the Miracle of Dunkirk, which you might have heard of elsewhere.

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‘Disaster Artist’ doesn’t understand life, does it

Posted on December 25, 2017 by reelentropy

Images courtesy A24.

4/10 The Disaster Artist awkwardly begins with a bunch of director/star James Franco’s friends talking about how much they love The Room. Parks and Recreation star Adam Scott notes that even though The Room is an awful film, it’s widely remembered, and no one talks about whatever movie won the Oscar that year.

The 2003 Best Picture winner was Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which tied Ben-Hur and Titanic for the most Oscars won with 11, sired a steady stream of media that continues to this day and single-handedly brought high fantasy back as a genre.

Scott is making a generally plausible point — the Best Picture winners on either side of that are Chicago and Million Dollar Baby, two excellent titles you probably haven’t thought about in a long time now — but with the worst possible example because he’s not thinking. It’s a fantastic opening for a movie that spends the next two hours doing pretty much exactly that — plastering a generic story about big Hollywood dreams you’ve probably heard a thousand times over a unique and much more interesting specific example.

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