"The End of Oak Street" - The Burbs.

If I'm ranking all of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, it would go like this - Jurassic Park, The End of Oak Street, tie between Jurassic Park 2 and 3, fifty feet of crap, and then a four-way tie at the bottom by the Jurassic World movies. No, The End of Oak Street is not a Jurassic Park/World movie. But it has the same plot (people trying to not get eaten by dinosaurs), minus that whole cloning thing. If nothing else, it's a spiritual cousin.

When creating a dinosaur chase movie, the key is to come up with a good premise that answers the question - how do the humans find themselves being chased by extinct animals? Not one of the sequels to Jurassic Park offered a premise that can be described as good or interesting or thoughtful or not Jurassic Park's premise warmed over; they all sprinted in the opposite direction. Oak Street took that lesson to heart and landed on "random time bubble swaps chunk of 1982 Detroit suburb with same chunk of land from dinosaur times." Ok...it's nowhere near as clever as cloned-dinosaur theme park, but it's also nowhere near as stupid as mutant dinosaur military auction. But it's easily good enough for us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the show.

That show centers on the Platt family. They are seemingly the ideal middle-class nuclear family consisting of husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), and teenage son Brian (Christian Convery). They even have a scruffy, troublemaking dog named Starbuck. So, when the proverbial (dino)shit hits the fan, we're preprogrammed to root for them. There's no reason to introduce family strife, right?

Wrong. I'm sure there's a narrative reason for all families in all movies to have family issues, but I have yet to hear one that actually matters. And all is definitely not right with the Platts. Greg has lost his job with one of the big auto companies, kept it secret from the family, drinks too much, and has resorted to delivering pizzas to make money. Denise is angry and frustrated with Greg because she's not stupid and has eyes. Brian accidentally broke a kid's arm and is anxiously hiding out from the kid's vengeful older brother. Starbuck keeps digging holes in the neighbor's yard and that neighbor has a gun. Audrey wants to go to college to study astronomy and is a lesbian – neither of which is inherently a problem.  But it's 1982 and society gave extra side-eye to a smart, motivated female who doesn’t fit the misogynistic mold. The point is that none of that stuff matters once the running and screaming begins.

Oh, that stuff comes up again, but none of it furthers the plot at all. It's good for a little character building, but mostly just serves as annoying little sidetracks when there's a break in the action. For example, that older brother does find Brian (well after the time bubble swap) and beats him up a little bit. But his little brother gets him to stop and they run away, never to be seen by cameras again. We don't know if they get eaten, find another time bubble and escape, or accidentally step on a butterfly which leads to a future where Earth is ruled by cyborg octopi. And since they aren't used as a plot device to grant Brian absolution, or allow the Platts to escape being a T-Rex snack, why introduce this subplot at all?

The good news is that's the extent of this film's problems. And they are truly small problems, particularly considering they consume precious little time of the film's brisk ninety-nine-minute runtime. In fact, the film as a whole is quite good and very entertaining. You see the thoughtfulness of the filmmakers early in the excellent pacing of the film. The family dynamics are set up rather quickly, then a solid amount of time is spent building up to the reveal of their situation. The film does an excellent job of feeling like a slow burn without making the audience think "get to it already." And the thoughtfulness shows itself throughout the film. Action scenes that don't come off as contrived. Excellent CGI of the dinosaurs and surrounding environment. Subtle displays of Denise's strength and Greg's weakness (Denise is always driving when they jump in cars). Great camera work, one example in a living room scene where the Platts are discussing their plight and the camera angles nudge us through each character’s perspective.

But perhaps my favorite examples of the thought and care put into the film are a bunch of tongue-in-cheek winks at the audience that the movie is not that serious about itself. Nothing so direct as quipping or breaking the fourth wall. Instead, we have karma rearing its head on multiple characters to resolve earlier conflicts in fun and relevant ways. The film almost intentionally ignores early setups (Audrey's Carl Sagan fandom and general nerdiness do not lead her to the eventual solution to their problem). And a scene where Denise asks Greg to pose for a photo in front of a couple of non-threatening creatures so she can "remember this absurd situation forever." I see what you did there, Denise. Well played.

If, like me, you're tired of an endless string of garbage Jurassic sequels, The End of Oak Street is the cure. It's entertaining, it's clever, it's exactly the kind of popcorn flick on which to end the summer. Even if it doesn't end with an octopus with robot arms.

Rating: Don't ask for any money back. The "absurd" scene is worth it alone.

"The Odyssey" - The OG.

Did you know Homer's The Odyssey was originally written as twenty-four books? Maybe you had to read The Odyssey in a class back in school and that factoid just dusted some cobwebs off a decades-old memory. So, you can honestly answer yes, you did know that. But I'm betting you didn't read the whole thing, did you? It's written in a style called dactylic hexameter. If that's even half as obnoxious as iambic pentameter, you probably just vomited in your mouth a little bit when recalling trying to read something in dactylic hexameter. The good news is Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey has translated the story from whatever-meter into good old-fashioned epic blockbuster movie.

Full disclosure, I've never read The Odyssey either. If you're like me, you've heard of at least some of the elements in the story. The Trojan Horse. Odysseus' ten-year voyage home after the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus' wife Penelope and son Telemachus enduring a host of suitors trying to woo Penelope into marriage. The cyclops. The sirens. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I knew Odysseus encountered the sirens, but am actually remembering the sirens from Jason and the Argonauts. At least I've got the correct civilization's mythology.

This being a Nolan movie, it shouldn't be surprising to learn that the story isn't presented linearly. Don't worry, there's no time travel or dreams within dreams to melt your brain. Instead of depicting a straight timeline of Odysseus' voyage home and the events that occur during that voyage, we get the highlights in a series of flashbacks. Odysseus (Matt Damon) has been trapped on an island without his crew for seven years and his only company is a sea nymph named Calypso (Charlize Theron). Parallel to that, we jump every so often to Odysseus' palace in Ithaca, where Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has been humoring suitors for nearly two decades. Her now-grown son Telemachus (Tom Holland) is aware that the suitors are looking for any reason to kill him, given he's the heir to the throne. Among the suitors is Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who definitely has murder in his eyes.

The jumping back and forth between Odysseus (and Odysseus' flashbacks) and Penelope/Telemachus does a great job of building tension toward a climax. The drama of the film is in if Odysseus can make it back to Ithaca to reunite with his queen, prevent his son's exile/murder, and resume his place as king of Ithaca. The journey to get there is all of that other stuff. And all of that other stuff is just as exciting and tense to sit through, but for different reasons.

And that's the reason you should watch The Odyssey - the hero's journey. Yeah, that's where the hero's journey came from. Odysseus is THE hero. Practically every fiction movie ever made is based on the hero's journey (even a lot of non-fiction movies use the structure). Same goes for most books. And once you know that, you can't help but map other movies using The Odyssey. One of my favorite examples of this is my wife's breakdown of The Natural. It has a hero, a hero lost for many years, a cyclops, suitors trying to usurp a king, sirens, and more. As I've said in other reviews, my wife is a genius.

The other reason you should watch The Odyssey is...every other film reason that exists. You want great characters and character development? All of the above, plus John Leguizamo (Eumaeus), Lupita Nyong'o (Helen of Troy), Samantha Morton (Circe), Jon Bernthal (Menelaus), Himesh Patel (Eurylochus), Zendaya (Athena), and Elliot Page (Sinon). Do you like great visuals? Nolan blends CGI with practical effects (filming exclusively with IMAX cameras) to perfection. And the way he presents such things as Charybdis, the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the Trojan Horse, the underworld, and even Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie) is the sweetest of eye candy. I could go on about the sound, the costumes, the cinematography, the pacing, the everything else that makes this movie so very, very fantastic. But words can't do it full justice. Not even in Greek dactylic hexameter.

Rating: Worth twice the cost of IMAX tickets and you should see it at least twice.

"Mother Mary" - Wake me up before you go girl.

Up until the screening of Mother Mary, I had seen three of director/writer David Lowery's films. Here is what I said about them in my year-end reviews.

·       A Ghost Story (2017) - This movie could be the new title of my "A Waste of Time" category as it is literally 85 minutes of Casey Affleck in a sheet doing and saying nothing.

·       The Old Man and the Gun (2018) - What if elevator music robbed a bank?

·       The Green Knight (2021) - A very weird movie, with possibly the most shoulder-shrugging ending I’ve ever seen. And not weird in an intriguing way, but weird in that same shoulder-shrugging way.

I didn't know Lowery wrote and directed Mother Mary until ten minutes ago. In other words, I didn't go into the film expecting weird, boring, or weird and boring due to seeing those other three films. In fact, I wasn't expecting anything because I only knew three things about the movie beforehand - the title, starring Anne Hathaway, and the synopsis of the film saying a pop star reunites with her former costume designer. The obvious question now is if Mother Mary is weird and/or boring.

On the first count, yes, it's weird. It's not remotely as weird as The Green Knight, but it's definitely weird. Just look at the movie poster. It depicts a red sheet skewering a falling Hathaway. And there are two other versions of the poster that say "This is not a love story" and "This is not a ghost story." It's weird that a movie poster has to tell you what it's not. Twice. That's a pretty good sign that the movie is going to be confusing. Incidentally, the poster with the ghost story disclaimer was displayed on the screen of our theater prior to the film starting and my immediate thought was "wait, there's a ghost in a movie about a dress? That's weird."

Hathaway plays pop star Mother Mary. Mary is starting a comeback tour following an on-stage accident and she needs a dress that is "her," to put it in Mary's words. She decides that only one person knows her well enough to create such a dress - her former friend and designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Cole). Mary shows up at Sam's estate to make the request, Sam reluctantly agrees, and the rest of the movie takes place in Sam's studio, which is a repurposed barn. And when I say the rest of the movie, I mean all but two minutes of the entire one hundred twelve-minute runtime.

On the surface, that sounds really boring. And it very well might be. Mary and Sam have been estranged for ten years after Mary unceremoniously dismissed Sam as her costume designer. Now that Mary has come back begging, Sam takes the opportunity to talk everything out. And I do mean talk. Like, the entire movie. With the exception of one scene, the two practically never stop talking. They even talk when the movie shows us flashbacks of various events in Mary's career. And they aren't just talking like normal people. Sam insists on speaking in cryptic metaphors. At one point, Mary even calls Sam out on it, asking "are you going to keep speaking in metaphors? Because it's exhausting." Amen, sister.

I'd like to say the movie stops being boring when it gets weird, but even a couple of seances and an actual ghost can't save this movie's tedium. Neither can two great performances from Hathaway and Cole break the ennui. It isn't just the speaking in metaphors or being stuck in a barn that makes the movie a challenge to stay interested in. Much of the dialogue is delivered in a sing-song way that threatens to the lull the audience into a sleep-like trance. On paper, lyrical-sounding dialogue is an interesting idea, but Lowery fails to pull it off. It doesn't help that the lighting in every scene is dark and shadowy, including the flashback concert scenes. Put those things together and you have a recipe for a very soothing nap.

If there was one thing I was very interested in was that same preshow screen promising songs performed by Hathaway (written by various artists like Charlie XCX, FKA Twigs, and Jack Antonoff). And they didn't disappoint, at least the bits that actually played during the film. All of them are weird songs, but in ways that really appeal to me. So, you can sympathize at how annoyed I was when the movie would move on before much of the songs got played. If there was anything that would break through the boredom, it's good music, but I guess that would have taken too much time away from the barn scenes. The answer to our question is pretty boring and weird in the mostly the wrong ways.

Rating: Ask for twelve dollars back and don't be weird about it.