After a two week break from widely released movies, we are back - but it doesn't look like we have some great material to welcome us. Hell, Hollywood just should have taken another week off before the bonanza that will ensue sometime next week. This time around we've got Just Getting Started.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at This Rotten Week has to offer.
Just Getting Started feels like a kind of movie comes out multiple times a year. Someone throws a comedy script together as an excuse for a bunch of older actors and actresses to collect an easy payday with minimal laughs. In this one, a bunch of actors you recognize live in a quasi-retirement community for ultra-rich people, and partake in activities you are supposed to think are funny - leading up to the revelation that one of them is in witness protection.
Back in the day, director Rob Shelton made some pretty good movies, like Bull Durham (97%), White Men Can't Jump (76%) and Tin Cup (69%), but those days seem long behind him. His last directorial work came back in 2003 with Hollywood Homicide (30%). He's dusting off the old chair and working with some of Hollywood's aging elite in Morgan Freean and Tommy Lee Jones. Just Getting Started looks like nothing more than begging some older folks to hit the theaters around the holidays.
There was only one movie on the docket a fortnight ago and it was a predictive and critical win with Coco (Predicted: 95% Actual: 97%). There were already a bunch of reviews in on this one so I had a head start, but honestly, I would have come in around this range even if it were still under embargo. This is Pixar after all, and like I summed up in the write-up, they are averaging around 90% in their non-Cars franchise movies. That's simply incredible, and they remain the top of the movie-making mountain. They've been doing it for a decade and a half, and Coco shows they are still the example by which other studios should set themselves.
Next time around we've got Ferdinand and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It's gonna be a Rotten Week!
