I’m a Jersey boy and, until the Brits invaded, the music of the Four Seasons formed the soundtrack of my teens. So this is personal.  I remember when they hit the radio with “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”  Like a sock on the jaw.  No one had ever heard anything like Frankie Valli’s falsetto.  Yeah, it got old after a while, but it bolted onto the scene like a road-to-Damascus epiphany.  I knew every note of those early records, but knew nothing about the band members.  After seeing this film, I don’t know much more.  For instance: Founding member Tommy Devito was kicked out because of debts to the mob and raiding the group’s account, but where the money went, who knows?  And really, who cares?  Clint Eastwood’s direction seems perfunctory and never engaged me. Without my connection to the records, I’m sure I would have bailed.  Tactical error: playing the original “Sherry” over the closing credits.  While the singer playing Valli does a credible imitation, hearing the original only emphasizes how sui generis was Valli’s tone and phrasing.

FF=0

If I gave stars, this would get 5. GotG is what film is all about: visual entertainment.  Take a bunch of arresting heroes (really, how can you not love Rocket and Groot?) and a goofy-looking, aggressively kohled, monomaniacal villain, add snappy, clever dialog, relentless pacing, and you’ve got yourself a movie (not a film – a movie).  The big surprise is how good Dave Bautista comes off as Drax.  The plot?  Well, the fate of the galaxy is at stake – ’nuff said?  Sure, you can point out all the derivations (so can I) and improbabilities (like that cassette tape player still working) and impossibilities (Groot’s defiance of the laws of conservation of mass and energy), but this amalgam works.  That’s all you need to know.

FF=0

Alan Rickman and Bill Nighy as hairdressers? How did I miss this?  It has a Best in Show vibe while following (like another Nighy film of a few years before, Still Crazy) the formula of trying to reunite or build a team for an event or competition; inevitably one key member can’t or won’t cooperate but comes through in dramatic fashion at the end. (So thoroughly skewered in South Park’s “You Got F’d in the A” episode.)  No surprises, but a fun film to watch while you’re doing something else.

FF=0

I went on something of a Bill Nighy kick after the Worricker trilogy and someone recommended this.  A fun if predictable film about the trials and tribulations of reuniting the 70s-80s hair band called Strange Fruit.  It has Spinal Tap moments but, like Nighy’s later film, Blow Dry, it follows the tried and true film formula (thoroughly skewered in South Park’s “You Got F’d in the A” episode) of trying to reunite or build a team for an event or competition; inevitably one key member can’t or won’t cooperate but comes through in dramatic fashion at the end.  Watch it for the performances – a great ensemble cast.

FF=1

I’m not an Angelina Jolie fan but I loved this retelling (obviously inspired by Wicked) of Sleeping Beauty from the evil fairy’s side.  The visuals are sumptuous but the script is what makes it work: so many layers of conflict, all meticulously laid out and resolved.  Most screenwriters (hell, most novelists) could take a lesson from this film.  Trust me and see it.  You won’t regret it.

FF=0

Against all odds, I enjoyed this preposterous film.  The high concept: veteran superspy is being tracked down by his expert protégé. (Where have you seen that before?) And if you don’t figure out Mila’s identity ten seconds after her alter-ego appears on the screen, well, I don’t know what to tell you.  But it’s well executed (Brosnan’s Bond chops are on display)  and directed and efficiently paced.  With one twist I didn’t see coming (I wasn’t looking for one and it doesn’t alter the path of the story) it all ends as it should after the requisite gunfights and car chases.

FF=2

I stumbled across this in the On Demand list.  Never heard of it.  Gave it a try because it stars Samuel Jackson, though that’s hardly a guarantee of quality.  My first thought was that these folks have been watching lots of Luc Besson, especially District B13. I mean, the teenage female assassin orphaned by criminals and out for revenge has got Besson all over it. (I later learned it’s based on an erotic anime.) There’s decent post-financial-holocaust world building and the graffiti-laden locations in Johannesburg are depressingly effective in telegraphing civilization in collapse.  Graphic violence and Besson fans will feel they’ve seen it before, but it offers an entertaining 90 minutes.

FF=1

Exactly what you think it will be.  The CGI twisters vary from meh to awesome, and not a single surprise as to who survives and who is sucked into the vortices.  For disaster porn fans only.

FF=3

I watched OBLIVION and MOON back to back. I’d been told that the former ripped off the latter. Both are future SF and certainly have parallels, but Moon is a psychological drama while Oblivion is an action flick. The subject matter (I won’t spoil it for you) demands certain dramatic epiphanies that make the second acts very similar. Moon is a one-man show starring Sam Rockwell who could easily have played Tom Cruise’s role in Oblivion, but I don’t think the opposite would work nearly as well. (That sentence makes sense to me, hope it does to you.)
Oblivion FF=1
Moon FF=2
(Moon has a higher FF because the first act, though necessary to set up the rest of the story, is plodding)