The new movie Paterson is about mundane, average, everyday, normalcy, the stark urgency and reality of having to make a living with a bad job. This film is about the dread many of us feel about facing another Monday. This movie is also about the beauty of simplicity. The actor Adam Driver plays a man named Paterson, who lives in Paterson New Jersey and he drives a New Jersey Transit Bus through the streets of Paterson New Jersey five days a week. He is married to an Indian woman named Laura who loves to think about fantasies about a what a happier life could be and expresses her artistic ambitions by painting many of the walls and cabinets in their tiny house black, with black and white dots and making cupcakes with black and white icing with small black dots. She also tries to be a singer, buying a guitar that they could barely afford. They have an English Bulldog. They seem happy together despite their very meager existence and the amazing thing about this highly unusual film is it is not about special effects or a high-stress story or gunfire but is at the same time very engrossing and entertaining. This very good film is only about one thing, real life, and what most of us in this world have to do to survive the life reality that is ours. We see a very good man trying his best to make a living and dreaming of escaping his depressing life by writing poetry. His dreams of something better help him survive his depressing and mundane day by day existence.

One of the things that also impressed me about this very small and simple film is that it gave me a much greater respect for Paterson’s job as a bus driver. When I thought about the day after day mindless boredom of driving a huge bus with many passengers over the same depressing streets I wondered how anyone could hold onto a job like this for a long period of time. I also thought about how important this job is because a bus driver transports people who have to get to a job, to the food store, or to the doctor. If you make a single driving mistake while driving a bus because you’re overly tired, or just plain sick of your boring job then someone could be killed and you would be held responsible. But somehow Paterson is able to get by day after day, going to a bar for one beer after work and then driving home to talk about his day and his poetry with his wife, who is the only good thing in his life. Paterson witnesses the real lives of many of his friends and acquaintances at the bar he frequents with the same numb look that he has when he drives the bus and listens to his passengers or when he writes his poetry. Paterson’s inspiration for his poetry is a famous poet from Paterson William Carlos Williams and his book of poems entitled Paterson. Paterson’s writing is displayed on the screen and we watch him write his poetry in what he calls a “secret notebook” and in narration throughout this film.  The poetry he writes is as simplistic as the story of this film and the simplicity and real life story of this very different kind of movie are ultimately what I appreciated the most including some of the scenery, bridges and parks of the city of Paterson New Jersey that also included some scenes at a park named after the late comedy actor Lou Costello.

I highly recommend Paterson, it is a one of kind type of small movie that we may never see again.

A few days ago I saw Matt Damon on “The Late Show with James Corden” and he described his new movie “The Great Wall”, while averting his eyes downward as “a series of attacks on the Great Wall of China by thousands of lizard-like creatures” and incredibly, that is entirely what this movie is all about. Rather than making this very bad mess of a film the producers could have come up so many better ideas that involve the Great Wall of China. This could include a documentary about the Great Wall, narrated by Matt Damon. A recreation of a major battle many centuries ago that involve the Great Wall. Perhaps a documentary that goes through the entire process and the decisions that were made for probably close to 2 years, that lead to the producers to make this ridiculous movie. A narration by Matt Damon where he explains how or why he ever decided to make this movie in the first place would be a better idea than making a movie this bad. Did Matt Damon owe someone a favor to did he lose a bet? On top of all this, making this bad movie also included moving for a long period of time to China to make perhaps the worst movie in his career.

There are a series of action scenes in this movie that summarize the absurdity of the whole 2 hours. On many occasions, Chinese soldiers in an attempt to kill these lizard creatures who are trying to climb up the Great Wall, bungee jump while holding a spear in an attempt to kill them, even though thousands of them are on the ground and climbing the wall and just about every attempt to kill these creatures using this stupid method, resulted in some soldier being eaten alive. You would think that after perhaps 2 futile attempts like this, they would figure out that this idea was not working? This is the same type of thinking that allowed for this movie to be produced in the first place. The idea of creating creating action scenes with CGI no matter how absurd is never going to rescue any bad movie.

When you consider the total budget for this film is 150 million dollars and hopefully this huge figure includes all of those costumes that had to be made its a wonder why any producer after reading this very bad script would be able to raise this amount of money to market a concept that is this bad. Essentially, the entire plot of this movie is: Matt Damon and his friend are attacked by a strange lizard creature, then they kill the creature and cut off its arm. Later they wind up captured by Chinese soldiers at the Great Wall of China and then are attacked by thousands of these creatures, several times. There is a small rock they find that is some kind of a magnet that they find has some control over them, and other than this there is really nothing more to this story.

This movie should have gone immediately to the DVD shelves. I am very surprised that Matt Damon decided to make this movie and as far as I have seen this is the worst movie of Damon’s career. This film is yet another example that special effects will never be a band-aid for a bad script or a bad concept. Do yourself a favor and run from this waste of 2 hours.

It is a rare thing in my experience that two actors were so perfectly cast for their parts in the same movie and occurs in the new film Fist Fight. Charlie Day is the perfect actor to play a very mild-mannered teacher in a nightmare school that has violence, constant pranks during what the movie called “senior pranks week” and over the top raunchy events that sometimes almost work, but most of the time, I heard nobody laughing in the audience. The actor Ice Cube is also perfectly cast in his role as the character he seems to play in all the movies he is in; a very angry bullying type of guy who always looks like he is a few seconds away from fighting someone. Underlying the main story of this movie, which is Ice Cube wanting to fight Charlie Day at the end of the school day is the subject of bullying that Day’s 10-year-old daughter is also facing at her grammar school. It doesn’t take this light, sometimes entertaining comedy movie about a bad high school to remind all of us, that bullying takes place in schools and also when you are an adult and have to make a living working for and with other people.

The fact that this movie is “all in” and entirely about one thing, an end of movie fight between two teachers is not enough of a strong premise to recommend this movie as an effective comedy and overall it is at best average because of my acid test for all comedy movies, which is, “did people laugh in the audience?” From the audience I was in, this movie got very few laughs, unfortunately. The appearance of Tracy Morgan is also not enough to rescue this movie as his lines were only mildly funny at best.

The scene at the end of the movie where Day’s 10-year-old daughter performs a Big Sean rap song that his laced with profanities I thought was in bad taste, much like the end of the recent film “The Comedian” where a young girl is using the worst kind of foul language during her comedy act at a school.

Considering the few moderately funny moments in this film and the majority of the scenes that did not work, I cannot recommend this movie.