Royce's Top Ten/Worst Ten 2015

Royce’s Top 10/Worst 10

2015

1- The Martian- Lots of good movies.  Read the book first then saw the movie. Loved both!  I thought Matt Damon was great as was the rest of the cast.

2-Trainwreck- I rarely laugh out loud at movies.  Having an entire theater and my Hottie laughing along with me made it even better. Amy Schumer is VERY funny.  Story lags in the middle due to a first time movie script by Schumer, but funniest movie I have seen in a while.

3- Spotlight- A very well made and acted movie on a tough subject.  Definitely worth watching .  I see several Oscar nominations in the future.  I’m sure it will get a Best Picture nod.

4- Creed- Much better movie than I thought it would be.  We will be seeing Creed II, Creed III, ect.  Michael B. Jordan holds his own.  One of the better acting jobs for Sylvester Stallone.  Good movie.

5- The Big Short- Takes a complicated subject of the housing crisis of 2007 and not only makes it understandable but also entertaining.  A good cast.  I would see this one again.

6- Steve Jobs- Best movie so far about a complicated man.  Highlights three periods in his life and the complicated relationship with his daughter.  Michael Fassbender will surely get an Oscar Nomination from this one. 

7- The 33- Almost no one saw this underrated movie about the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground in 2010.  Antonio Banderas’s best work to date.  I really enjoyed this movie.  Make sure to bring your tissues.  Good rental.

8- Kingsman: The Secret Service- A sleeper hit about an English Secret Service group.  Colin Firth is great and newcomer Taron Egerton is starting what will most likely be a long successful career.  Good movie.

9- Star Wars- Okay, it was a near carbon copy of the first Star wars and there are plenty of plot holes.  Maybe my little stamp of approval here will help the poor guys with some box office support?  While it did aggravate me I felt it deserved a spot on the list.

10-The Intern-  This movie came out last January and many will have forgotten it.  Out now on dvd and worth a rental.  Not a unique story line.  Young/hot clothing designer has a business that is taking off yet unorganized.  In a publicity stunt they hire several retired people as interns.  Anne Hathaway is very good and I think this is some of Robert DeNiro’s best work.  He leaves the squinty eyed mafia guy that he has played a million times behind and is very likable.

Honorable Mention

1-Man from U.N.C.L.E

2- Ant-Man

3- The Duff

4- El Machina

5- Whiplash

Worst Ten

1- Jupiter Ascending- This movie is bad on so many levels.  Mila Kunis tries.  Channing Tatum has such a ridicules outfit and make up he could never recover.  Save your $1.29 on RedBox and don’t waste a couple hours of your life.

2- Magic Mike XXL- Wow, Channing Tatum holds down my top two on my Worst list.  I hope his career can recover from this.  : >  When the female audience this was clearly aimed at walk out you know something is bad wrong.  MM-I was bad.  This was ten times worse.

3- A Walk in the Woods- I know Robert Redford is getting up in years and has become a little more picky on his roles yet he choses this dog?  Nick Nolte looked such poor health I worried he might pass for real before the movie was over. This is a bad movie.

4- Taken 3- Liam Neeson is hot or cold.  He either makes very good movies or very bad movies.  This one falls in the second category.  I hope he got a good paycheck for this one.  He is a likable guy and good actor.  Wish he would pick better movies.

5- The Gunman- Sean Penn must have been hoping for a come back as a tough guy.  He clearly worked for months on his abs and biceps.  Sadly they worked minutes on the script. 

6- Fifty Shades of Gray- Oh good lord.

7- Minions- I LOVE the two Despicable Me movies.  Own both dvds.  I was never one of those that laughed hysterically at the goofy little yellow guys with no necks.  This movie was like scratch on a chalkboard for me.

8- The Good Dinosaur- Not a good year for animated movies.  Some did well at the box office because parents will sit thru anything to keep their little ones quiet and entertained for a couple hours.  This movie was too brutal in parts for little ones and too boring for adults.

9- Our Brand is Crisis- This movie couldn’t make up it’s mind if it wanted to be a funny political satire or a do-good tree hugger save the world film.  Ended up being neither.  This movie had lowest opening weekend for any Sandra Bullock movie and went downhill from there.

10- Point Break-  The X-Game scenes were indeed breathtaking.  The problem is most of those fit in the two minute movie trailer.  Then they had to fill in that time between.  Sorry.

Should have been better

1- The Hunger Games

2- Tomorrowland

3- Mad Max

4- SELF/LESS

5- Spy

The Revenant

The Revenant

Rating 7 out of 10

I was in on this movie from the first trailer I saw.  I tend to like these out in the wilderness type movies although of the top of my head I can't think of one.  I had very high hopes for this movie.  Maybe too high.  I think Leonardo DiCaprio is a good actor.  He will get an Oscar nod on this for sure.  Maybe the big win he has been shooting for.  He does an amazing job here.

I know the job of a movie trailer or preview is to give out enough information to make people want to put their butts in the seats.  Sometimes they give a little too much info.  Watching the preview for the Revenant (Said to be taken from the French word to return) we see that Hugh Glass (Leo) is in the wilderness with a bunch of white men and his indian son.  He is brutally attacked by a huge momma bear and barely alive.  One of the guys in the group (a thinner than usual Tom Hardy) points out he needs to be put out of his misery.  When he tries to do just that the indian son tries to stop him and is killed.  Glass is left for dead in a shallow grave.  He fights back and comes to kill the man that killed his son.   This is in the preview.

The movie is a nearly three hour beautifully filmed version of just that.  It is pretty brutal from the indian attack in the first couple minutes to the bloody end.  On a gore scale where Braveheart is a 10 and Bambi is a 1, I'd give this movie a 14.  Tastefully done.  Not like a gory horror movie.  But consider yourself warned.  The bear attack is amazing.

I was definitely entertained.  I think they could have cut 45 minutes out of this and made it better, but I say that to most three hour movies.  Acting is first rate all around and the scenery is amazing. I came out of the theater being happy I was not alive back in those tough days.  Good movie.  Just try to keep expectations down.

Point Break

Point Break

Rating 3 out of 10

The preview for this movie pushes all the testosterone buttons to get male bottoms in seats.  Riding hundred foot waves. Racing an avalanche of rocks on a motorcycle.  Skydiving after stealing large pallets of money.  What more do you need?  A plot that makes a nickels worth of sense would be great.

This is supposed to be a remake of the 1991 Point Break movie with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves.  They problem is besides the title and character names this could have been called a remake of Top Gun.  It's very different from the first one.

In this movie after a couple X-Games style robberies FBI agent in training Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) figures out this group is trying to complete the Miyagi Eight or was it knock of the Nakatomi Tower?  Doesn't matter.  Utah is promoted to temporary FBI agent and goes undercover to track down Bodhi (Edgar Ramirez) and his gang of thrill seeking criminals.

Utah goes through a fight club, riding huge waves, flying in those flying squirrel suit things, ect. trying to catch the guys in the act.  They take Utah under their wings and explain that an Asian master figured out if you can complete a certain eight adrenaline filled activities (skydive, ride a huge wave, snowboard down the side of a mountain, climb another mountain with no ropes, etc) while giving back to the planet they can reach the ultimate nirvana.

While the story is complete nonsense the visuals are quite good.  The acting by mostly unknown is okay.  Did I mention the visuals are quite good?  It's worth renting for those visuals only leave the volume down on the tv.

In the Heart of the Sea

In the Heart of the Sea

Rating 6.5 out of 10

I have been a fan of Ron Howard directed movies since the beginning.  He had an amazing string back in 80's and early 90's.  Splash, Cocoon, Willow, Backdraft, Parenthood, Apollo 13 to name a few.  More recently I think he has made some very good yet under appreciated movies.  If you haven't seen Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe you are missing out.  Great movie.  In 2013 he came out with Rush.  A movie about a racer driver that was good although it had a small target audience.

I like many were amazed with the previews of this huge whale attacking and destroying a gigantic whaling ship while hunky Chris Hemsworth yielding  a mighty spear thing vowing to take this beast down.  The bad reviews and low attendance helped put this movie on the back burner.  Lots of rain days with nothing else to do so I grabbed the Hottie (She is entertained with anything Hemsworth is in) and off to the theater we went.

This movie starts in the early 1800's.  This is before people realize oil is in the ground and can be pumped out to light and heat our homes.  Whale oil is used in place of candles as bright burning and long lasting fuel.   Whale oil is a hot commodity  and business men are building ships as fast as the trees can be cut down and hiring sea captains to make them rich.  On this fateful voyage the captain takes the ship out to sea further and further hunting for that large pod of whales they hear is there.  They also hear stories of a white whale more than 100 feet long and mean as a snake.  They mark that off to fisherman's lore and see dollar signs.

When they find the pod of whales they also find the story of the white whale to be true and things do not go well.  The ship is destroyed and the seamen left alive are 2000 miles from land in small lifeboats trying to survive.  Here it becomes a survival movie.  There is also a side story of Moby Dick author Herman Melville interviewing the last living survivor of this voyage to get the inspiration for his whale book.

I was entertained with this movie.  The scenes of the way they harpooned and brought in whales much bigger than their little boats is amazing.  Was a little disappointed in the big whale.  Literally what you see in the two minute trailer is about thirty seconds shy of all the screen time for the great white one  Hemsworth is hunky and entertaining as always. This will make a good rental.

The Big Short

The Big Short

Rating 8.5 out of 10

When the big housing meltdown happened in early 2007 into 2008 I read up on it trying to understand what went wrong.  Had several try to explain it to me.  I should have just waited for this movie.  The Big Short does a good job of explaining things in a way an average Joe like myself can understand and makes it entertaining to boot.

The movie starts with Michael Burry (Christian Bale).  He is a trader that smells a rat in the market for sub prime mortgage loans.  The packages started out a good idea in packaging large groups of AAA mortgage loans of people with good credit and paying history.  The problem (as I remember) begins when the packages run out of good loans and not wanting the lucrative money train to stop the bankers start filling in with worse and worse loans.

While this could sound like a boring documentary director Adam McKay explains much with scenes like Margot Robbie in a bubble bath describing how loans are bundled or Selena Gomez at a blackjack table explaining other things.  It's pretty scary how close we came to a total economic meltdown and sad how not that many things have been fixed.

Great acting is what makes this movie sing.  Steve Carell is fantastic.  Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Jeremy Strong to name a few.  This movie is like one of those films they showed in Economics class that you dreaded yet turned out to be very good.  I was definitely entertained and plan to go see this again to catch what I missed.

The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight

Rating 6 out of 10

Quentin Tarantino movies are a special breed in themselves.  You can't say you don't know what you are getting with the guy.  Lots of dialog.  Often pointless dialog.  Long movies.  You get your monies worth as far as minute per dollar.  Lots of bad language and blood by the 55 gallon drum.  Over the top violence.  Heads exploding, severed limbs, ect.  I have enjoyed several of Quintin's movies.  Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Inglorious Bastards and Django Unchained.  Was never a fan of Pulp Fiction like so many others were.

I was looking forward to The Hateful Eight.  Fantastic cast.  Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern to name a few.  It's a basic Western which I am also a fan of.  This is two separate movies.  Literally.  The movie is right at three hours long with an intermission in the middle to break it up.  The first half of the movie is alot of talking.  The hottie and I actually dozed off for a few minutes in the warm theater and food in our bellies.  The second half is much better.  The action and story picks up and is far more entertaining.

John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is a bounty hunter on a stagecoach taking the evil Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a Wyoming town trying unsuccessfully to out run a blizzard snow storm.  Along the way they pick up another bounty hunter (Jackson) and a man saying he is the new sheriff of the town he is taking Daisy to. Ruth is known as the Hangman because while other bounty hunters will bring them in dead (in the dead or alive) where he wants to bring them in alive to not cheat the justice system.  When weather forces an extended stop at an outpost called Minnie's Haberdashery there are already other seedy looking guys there also stranded by the storm. There the gang has conversations.  LOTS of conversations.  Tarantino likes his bad words.  This movie it's the N-word.  It gets thrown around more than a rap concert and clan rally combined.

We finally realize atleast one of the eight is planted there to free Daisy from the noose.  Once you get back from your bathroom break and refill the coke cup during the intermission (several around us were discussing leaving at the intermission) the action picks up a bunch. This is where the bullets fly and blood flows like rivers.  I was awake and entertained.  I give the first half of the movie a 4 and second half an 8.

If you are a Tarantino fan you will most likely enjoy this movie and know what you are getting into. Much was made about watching the movie in the 70MM screens as Tarantino wished.  Not sure why. 94% of the movie is inside one small outpost.  There are some cool stagecoach riding thru snowy mountains scenes that are pretty amazing.  The second half is almost entertaining enough to make you forget how boring the first half is.  Almost.

Star Wars: the Force Awakens

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Rating 8 out of 10

In all my MANY years of movie watching I don't recall one ever having the pre-release hype as this one.  I have actually seen this movie twice, but have held out in doing a review mostly for fear of giving away any type of spoiler and having my house burned down.  In a week or so I'd like to have a SPOILER conversation.  This one should be spoiler free. I hope.

This movie takes place many years after the third Star Wars movie: Return of the Jedi.  It's the one with the furry teddy bear looking guys and I hardly remember the movie.  After the good guys destroyed the death star life is good without all that evil.  Luke Skywalker has opened a school for budding Jedi's.  When one of the Jedi in progress students goes rogue and kills all the other Jedi Luke becomes so distraught he exiles himself to a far away secret planet.  With the Jedi gone the dark side has been able to flourish.  They have built ANOTHER death star.  This one many times bigger and weapons that can destroy several planets at a time.  The only hope we have is to find Luke Skywalker and return the Force to battle the Dark Side.

Director JJ Abrams does a good job mixing the action, comedy and drama to the new reboot that will surely bring us many more Star Wars movies in the future.  It's good seeing our old favorites of Hans Solo and Chewbacca.  Princess Leia (now General Leia) looks like the years have not been kind but does a good job.  The newcomers Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac- probably my favorite character actor) are great.

My lone problem (You knew there had to be one) is... Movie starts with our star on a sand filled desert planet that happens upon a droid that has a secret video with information that can save the universe.  If she can just get that information to the good guys life will be saved.  The bad guys know of the droid and will stop at nothing to capture or destroy it. There is a guy with a dark helmet mask and deep scary voice and a death star that is impenetrable except for one secret spot that if you can just slip a well placed missile it will blow it to smithereens.  Does this plot sound familiar?

I have heard this movie is supposed to be similar to the first one for a reason.  I'm not sure I understand the reason.  Either way I was entertained.  Almost impossible to live up to the hype.  This is a good movie and I'm sure I'll be in the seats when the next one comes out.