Gorgon Reviews

I don’t think we need a fucking introduction for Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!

But if I did, I would probably just point you towards Sharknado, Sharknado 2: The Second One, and remake the same joke about Cory Monteith’s last two tweets.

That is, if I was doing an intro, of course.

If this review had pictures, I’d maybe make a joke about patriotic violence here.

Now that LA and NYC have been filled with disaster, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) finds himself in the nation’s capital to receive a biggest honor a civilian can have from the POTUS (Mark Cuban) himself! Big deal! Then a sharknado happens of course. Don’t worry, we don’t have anything super drastic happen, like the president dying. Because Fin is there and he can protect the president!

But DC was just the start. Sharknados are starting to pop up all down the east coast, as a big…storm…thing begins to develop. Out of nowhere! So Fin has to get down to Orlando, where his wife, April, (Tara Reid), daughter (Ryan Newman), and mother-in-law (Bo Derek) are at for vacation. April is of course now pregnant, because that makes action movies more fun. Because if Fin doesn’t get down to Florida, clearly they won’t be able to survive on their own.

Thankfully, Fin runs into Nova (Cassie Scerbo) from the first film! She is with some dude, Lucas (Frankie Muniz), in a super armored RV, tracking where the storms will appear so they can fuck them up. Now he has a way to get down south.

Flashforward a bit, the only way they are going to stop the giant storm wall about to take out all of the East coast, involves going into space. That is how serious this film gets. And David Hasselhoff plays Fin’s father, an astronaut, which for some reason April also goes, regardless of her pregnancy.

There is also Blair Fowler, Jack Griffo, and Chris Jericho with notable smaller roles. And like, one fucking scene with Mark McGrath, the best part of the second movie.

Frankie Muniz should have been my McGrath in this movie. But he also was barely in it. 🙁

I feel annoyed at SyFy channel. They are intentionally making half-assed bad movies to achieve some sort of cult status. They have made tons of these, and unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Sharknado franchise has reached cult status. Probably due to good PR, I am guessing. But the franchise is not in the so bad it is good category, it is literally just in the so bad it is bad area. I feel like they don’t put effort into their film, so why should I put effort into the review?

This movie is not good. It doesn’t have amusing parts. It just has a lot of cheap parts. Clearly low budget for the sake of laughs, but it is just more of the same. “But wait, this one goes into outer space and terrorizes multiple locations!” Yeah. It does. New doesn’t make it a positive.

The only remotely interesting aspect is the death of Munez. And it was too ridiculous and nonsensical. So at the same time, even that is a disappointment.

And fuck. They of course confirmed the fourth one. Which includes whether or not a character will die at the start of it from the “cliffhanger” ending. So the internet will of course kill them off. And when it comes out, a month or two later I will end up writing what I hope is an even more half-assed review to match their franchise effort.

2015 has been a weak ass year for musicals. Basically we have a film or two that feature Anna Kendrick singing, a shitty terrible no good animated jukebox musical, and a made for TV mess. And the future doesn’t look bright either.

So I was a bit excited to hear about Lucky Stiff, a musical movie based off a real musical that was done in a theater. Because by golly, that means we are going to get something a bit unique with real singing in it. Not some quick to DVD jukebox musical that takes zero effort to produce.

There is still hope that a singing film without Kendrick this year is worth a watch.

This one lacks Kendrick, but its most famous actor in it is this guy so…fuck.

Harry Witherspoon (Dominic Marsh) is a poor, down on his luck, shoe salesman. He is the kind of guy who no one would care about. I don’t even care about him and we just met! But then he gets a telegram. Crazy right? Why would Harry get a telegram? Who would pay money to send him a message? Harry’s Landlady (Jayne Houdyshell) and I agree about this. It is bizarre.

Turns out he had an American uncle, Tony (Don Amendolia), who died and had his hands on some money. He is going to leave Harry, his last surviving relative, 6 million dollars in cash, but only if agrees to a few terms first. You know, like taking Uncle Tony to Monte Carlo and having a very detailed fun week of living life up to the max, which is something Tony always wanted to do. And don’t worry. His body has been prepared nicely by a taxidermist, so he won’t smell or be super gross. He will just be in a wheel chair and ready to party. So he has to Weekend at Bernie’s the whole situation.

But of course there is a catch. If he doesn’t follow the instructions to a letter, all of the money will instead go to a dog charity. For real dogs. Man what a waste! The humans in charge are interested in the money though, so they send Annabel Glick (Nikki M. James) to spy on them and potentially sabotage them to get that sweet cash.

That is still too easy. Which is why we have Rita LaPorta (Pamela Shaw), who claims to be the one who shot Tony accidentally, given that she is legally blind. They had an affair going on and her husband go jealous, but they also embezzled six million dollars of which he hid. So she wants it, and she wants her optometrist brother (Jason Alexander) to go with her.

There. Now we have a proper clusterfuck.

What? You want more? Fine. Let’s throw in Dennis Farina, Kate Shindle, and Kent Avenido, who was totally on like, three episodes of Glee, in which he was excellent.

“I’m too drunk to taste this chicken!” – I assume the Colonel Sanders looking motherfucker said this at least once.

Lucky Stiff was a weird movie. I sincerely hope you got that from the description. Very weird, bizarre at times, and technically because occasionally a character will break out in song makes it even stranger.

The average movie goer would look at this film and potentially quit halfway just because of how awkward it is, but thankfully I like strange films. I cannot say the acting is great. I can’t say all of the songs are enjoyable, nor can I say that any of them really stuck with me after the movie was over. In fact, the musical-ness was an afterthought. Everything was overacted (I believe intentionally) just to give this extreme zany atmosphere, I’d imagine it like a Mad TV sketch gone on too long.

But it was slightly entertaining, in the smallest ways, just because it was weird.

I should also note that the female lead, Nikki M. James, is actually a fantastic singer, and played the main female role in The Book of Mormon, winning the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. You should see her acceptance speech, because it made me tear up. And then it made me realize how sad it is that someone can win something like a Tony, but not be able to still necessarily make it as a great actress.

Because for what it is worth, this film is technically terrible. The weirdness element could only carry me so far, but by the end I was just waiting for it to end. Oh well. Hopefully some smaller good musicals pop up by the end of the year. Pleaseee.

When I was a very young kid, I was in a dark place. But then it was my birthday and since then my life has been nothing but light! I might take this joke out before I publish this review.

A few things intrigued me about Dark Places. One, the pretty heavy cast. A lot of people I like to see pretending to be other people in movies and television are in this movie!

And two, it is based on the book written by Gillian Flynn. No, I have never read any of her books before, but I have seen Gone Girl, which was based on her book. Gone Girl was CRAZY good too. If you missed the movie, you need to time travel back to 2014 and hit that thing up right now. Or find it through regular mortal beings.

If the author has the same awesome level of mystery and great dialogue, this film can be just as great. Even without Affleck.

Jeez, even more people who don’t know what to do with their hands.

Little Libby Day (Sterling Jerins) was the only surviving member of a massacre at her home. He mother (Christina Hendricks) and two older sisters were killed through various means. Her brother, Ben (Tye Sheridan) was accused of murdering his family and part of the reason for his sentencing is that Libby testified saying she saw her brother do it. But that was a lie. Libby Day began to live through the government and was given a nice fund by generous donations to help her live in the future.

Well, the future is now, and adult Libby (Charlize Theron) is practically out of money. She can’t jut ask for more, because no one cares about her. She is old news, and there are girls everyday surviving tragedies who actually need help. Libby has been extremely apathetic about everything in life so she has never gained any skills or actually gotten a job in her life.

But she has a letter from a fan, Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) who wants her to come down to tell her story and get paid. She tends to avoid these sorts of things because she doesn’t like to revisit her past. It is kind of a…dark…place…for her. Turns out Lyle is a member of a group called The Kill Club. They are a bit obsessed with murder stories and like to examine the evidence, clues, whatever to determine if the real murderer was caught. And some of them are creepy reinactors, but we don’t talk to them.

Desperate for cash, Libby agrees to go along with their questions and help talk to people for their investigation. They believe Ben (Corey Stoll) to be innocent despite him never choosing to appeal the details of the case! But that can’t be. Mysteries and shit.

Also featuring Andrea Roth, Chloe Grace Moretz, Denise Williamson, Jeff Chase, and Sean Bridgers.

Hendricks in something set in the past? New territory for her!

Have you ever been to a sweet restaurant and have the best time, only to return a second time where they burn your food and don’t even care enough to fix it? That is what watching Dark Places felt like. It is possibly unfair to compare this so much to Gone Girl, but the same person wrote both books that the films were based off of. Here are some notable differences though. Gone Girl was directed by David Fincher who is a fantastic director, while Dark Places was directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner who is not well known. He did the movie Sarah’s Key, which I thought was okay. The screenplay for Gone Girl was also actually written by Gillian Flynn, while the screenplay for Dark Places was written by…Gilles Paquet-Brenner, again.

So hey, maybe the reason this movie was so damn boring was the director/writer himself. But for all I know, the source material was also shit and Gone Girl is her own good book. Hard to say, but the talent behind the camera in this movie was not as great as Gone Girl.

But yeah, boring. Dark Places successfully created an overall dark atmosphere for the whole film, both in the past and present. But it never felt like it used these settings appropriately. It felt long and drawn out. The actual mystery was not only a let down, but kind of shit as well. It didn’t make a lot of sense and there wasn’t a real ability to figure it out from clues before the end, which is usually a nice feature for a mystery.

The let down the viewer will receive once all of the truth comes out it a complete bummer. More so in that it means the other 90% of the film you sat through with only the occasional interesting scene was also a bit of a waste. Dark Places put me in a dark place and made me not even want to write this review.

It’s The End of the Tour as we know it, and I feel fine.

Premiering at Sundance, I can say that I heard a lot about this film, but nothing about what it was actually about. I heard praise and more praise, that it was based on a true story, and even more praise and that is all I heard about it.

Based on the title alone, you would assume they were talking about a musician finishing possibly their final tour, and not a book author. Book authors are beyond un-sexy. Throughout history, the only sexy authors that everyone would agree on would probably just be Jack Kerouac and Homer.

I just wanted to make sure you knew that going into the film I was thinking positive, un-sexy thoughts.

After seeing this image, you can see that my initial reactions were confirmed!

The 90’s sure were a different time. We barely had the internet and we definitely didn’t really have cell phones. David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a journalist, writer, and author of fiction! He just wrote a book called The Art Fair that is loosely based on his own life. He thinks it has potential to be the best book of the year!

Then he finds out about Infinite Jest, a book written by David Foster Wallace (Jason Segal) and it is miles away the better book. Everyone loves it, it takes the country by storm and Wallace becomes an overnight sensation. But he is just a normal guy, who writes and teaches at the college level. He lives in a small northern town by himself with his dogs.

Lipsky sees a nice story behind the man though and appeals to the editors of Rolling Stone to let him do an all exclusive interview with Wallace. Sure, they don’t tend to interview authors, because (as we all know) authors aren’t sexy. But he is persuasive. So Lipsky gets to fly to his town, join him on the last stop of his tour, and spend five days talking with a newly famous and successful man, to see what makes him tick and how he is handling life.

Just so you don’t leave thinking there is literally only two people in the film, I can tell you the other characters, although they are all wildly unimportant. Anna Chlumsky plays Lipsky’s girlfriend, Mamie Gummer and Mickey Sumner play two of Wallace’s old friends, Ron Livingston plays an editor at Rolling Stone, and Joan Cusack plays a Minnesotan escort for the last leg of the tour.

Basically, the whole thing is like My Dinner With Andre, but several dinners.

I love movies where they focus mostly on the dialogue between a few characters and the other elements such as location, background, (action?), scenery, or other events aren’t at all important. A great script with a captivating dialogue can carry a movie and turn the silliest of ideas into something magnificent. Just look at Clerks!

Basically what I am saying is that I like plays, and this was one of the “play-iest” movies based on a book and not a play that I have ever seen. The dialogue is extremely top notch, and given it is based on a book that is based on a series of tapes that recorded everything they said, I have the highest hopes that these conversations actually happened word for word. Two intellectual writers talking the shit and talking about things that really matter. David Foster Wallace comes across as a very smart dude, the type of dude you just want to hear his opinion on literally anything.

And major props go to Segal, who gave by far his best performance in his career. Segal tends to be one of those actors who doesn’t change much in between roles, but he definitely captured a completely new persona in this film, where by the end I forgot it was Segal even acting, despite those distracting eyes of his. I don’t know if he will win best acting in any category, but I can definitely see some nominations in his future.

If anything, The End of the Tour did an impressive task that no other movie has done before: It has made me want to read TWO different books. The book by Lipsky about his time with Wallace, and of course Infinite Jest, which was apparently the hottest thing since sliced bread.

I recently just went through this crazy movie playing site called Netflix. It is honestly where most of the documentary reviews on this website come from. But it seems like every 2-3 weeks, I keep thinking there are no more documentaries left for to me watch, that are recent enough to be worth reviewing! Oh no!

So to give myself a few months of rest on the search, I went and scoured the entire site for documentaries that were appealing to me, recent, and hopefully worth writing about. I actually was able to find a good 10 or so titles. And then I picked them out of a hat and got The Widowmaker. This way, I keep having a hat to go to for my next review, if there is no inspiration in any given week or on the weeks that HBO doesn’t make a new controversial doc.

“What kills the most Americans?” you may ask yourself. Is it cancer? Nope. Gun violence? Nahh. Overdosing on Marijuana? Of course not. It is heart disease! The silent killer. The widowmaker because it is so sudden and hard to detect. Usually the first sign you have heart disease would be in the form of a fatal heart attack. I may not be a doctor, but I know that the odds of surviving anything fatal is close to zero!

But what if…just hold on and wait…what if…there…was…another detector?!

I love you like this heart loves…not having an awkward dark spot?

The Widowmaker is a documentary set up with a purpose. It wants you to know about all the research done into heart disease detection and how there are easy ways for doctors to test if you have that issue. The problem is that there is opposition in the field, because people profit greatly off of current practices used to help people with heart conditions, namely in the form of stents. They count as surgeries and they get paid a lot per stent. There is more to the issues than that, of course, which the documentary will gladly talk to you about.

But as it got longer and longer, like a kid with ADHD my mind began to wander and I wanted them to get to the main point quicker.

The beginning of the documentary had a good affect of hooking me in. Scattered throughout it are even a few 9-1-1 calls just to heighten up the sense of urgency and fear (which is arguably, a pretty unnecessary and silly thing to include). But after they talked about a guy developing a way to solve it, that is where my heart stopped caring. It has good information, sure, but something about the second half just felt like it dragged on forever.

Still, this is the kind of documentary meant to get the viewer off of their feet and write a congressman or something to demand change! I instead will just lay here watching movies, hoping I don’t have heart disease, but if I do, that other people are activist enough to make it so my disease can be detected before any crazy heart attacks.

I am a big Armie Hammer fan, which is a weird thing to say out loud (or through words in a review post).

Seriously.

I liked him as The Lone Ranger and I liked him in The Social Network. He was charming in Mirror Mirror and appropriately dramatic in J. Edgar. And hell, he was the best cameo in Entourage.

I realize that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is based on a television show from the 1960s, but that is super old and I will never watch it for research purposes. All I care about right now is that Armie Hammer gets more leading roles, and damn it, maybe one day he can play a super hero?

pic with henry canville asking if he is jealous

Set during the Cold War, the opening credits of the movie really really want you to realize that after World War II, Germany was broken up into East and West, with West Germany controlled militarily by America and East by the Soviet Union. Why? Because that is where our film starts, and is one of the many places of tension between USA/USSR!

It begins with Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) bringing his American self into East Germany! He is there to see a mechanic, Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander). It turns our her father was a great scientist, who of course worked with the Nazis. He was able to eventually head to America to work on their nuclear program, but two years ago he went missing. Shit.

Solo and the US government think that he is in Italy against his will, working for Victoria (Elizabeth Debicki) and Alexander Vinciguerra (Luca Calvani). They plan on building their own nuclear warhead and using it. No good at all. In fact, this potentially threatens the whole world. Which is why the Soviet Union and United States have to team up! They are going to send Solo, the CIA’s best agent, in with Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), one of the KGB’s best agents, two men who have battled before, to work together to save the world.

Also featuring Sylvester Groth, Jared Harris, and Hugh Grant.

I have heard that the movie that came out is actually nothing like the TV show outside of people sharing the names. You know what I think? Don’t care. I don’t base reviews off of the source material, just what is presented before me. And what was presented before me ended up being a very entertaining film.

First off, it’s a Guy Ritchie film. Outside of his Sherlock films, I haven’t been able to see one of his movies without subtitles because they usually go way too strong on the accents. That almost happened again at the start, with strong German talk, but we got over it thankfully. The movie itself is HIGHLY stylized. The tone, props, settings, everything screams out that decade. It is one giant love letter to the entire era. The cinematography was wonderful and so was the choreography. It is hard to describe how stylized the film became, with one action scene featuring a very comic book feel despite not being based on the genre.

As for the main characters, Cavill and Hammer both did great jobs with excellent chemistry together. The first scene where they were introduced was able to showcase how fully badass both individuals were, while never really making one seem like the lesser spy. This film has been in production for a long time, and the last guy on before Cavill was actually Tom Cruise, but he had to back out due to Rogue Nation. With Cruise, it would have been a very enjoyable movie, but probably not the same dynamic these two were able to pull off with each other.

The movie was also decently funny. The competition between the leads and them being forced into awkward situations had me laughing quite often. Longer jokes existed too, including the “watch gag” which featured obvious and subtle jokes throughout the film.

I hope at least one more film gets made as a follow up, because I could watch Hammer talk with the Russian accent all day. Not to be ignored, Vikander also held up her own as a relative newcomer to the action genre (because we all should ignore Seventh Son).

Shit. This one is honestly hard to describe. I definitely enjoyed The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but I feel like an eight year old trying to describe…well…anything. I think if I had to say anything, this movie was definitely very cool. Hell, I felt a bit cooler after watching it, almost picking up a pack of cigarettes on my way home while listening to popular band music.

If you see The Man From U.N.C.L.E., you can feel cool, too!

I have been actively stalling watching The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It used to be so easy, all I had to do was say, “Oh sorry Cathy. I haven’t seen the first one yet, that would be improper!” Cathy isn’t a real person, but the point is real. I was golden.

And then I fucking did it. I watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Part of me was feeling sentimental and I wanted to see Dev Patel since The Newsroom was over. And since Chappie disappointed, that was my easiest solution.

You may not remember, but both Chappie and TSBEMH came out to theaters on the exact same date, both featuring Patel. So logically, one would assume there is no way both of his movies on the same day would be a disappointment. Right?

At least the dancing is already better in this one than Chappie.

Since the last film, there are two major updates worth noting.

One, Sonny (Patel) is finally getting married to Sunaina (Tina Desai), yay!

Two, the hotel wants to expand! They want to make a second hotel, they just need investors. Muriel (Maggie Smith) is basically co-running the hotel at this point too, so she is involved with that. The main investor is going to send an undercover guest to see how the run their ship before bringing the cash, so they have to be on guard and make sure everything runs swell. What’s that? Two people randomly coming to stay out of nowhere (Richard Gere, Tamsin Greig). Gee, I wonder who could be the undercover person!

Back to the marriage plot, because Sonny is apparently a spastic piece of shit, he is way too over hyped to make the new guest feel amazing, to get the deal, that he ignores his wife and wedding preparations. Even worse, he lashes out on Kushal (Shazad Latif), who is back in town, because he thinks Kushal sucks and actually thinks he is trying to take his fiance away from him. Not that he does a damn thing about it but mope uncontrollably.

Ahem, we also have a bunch of returning people as well. We have Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, and Diana Hardcastle. I could tell you their plots as well, but then you would be drowned in information and well, not everything should be explained.

Including Gere probably doubled the entire movie budget.

Now that I have the nifty stars on top of the review, you can already tell I am disappointed in this movie. Which is a shame, because I gave an average rating to the first film and definitely believed in my head that the second movie would do better. It was like an origins story for a superhero. A lot of times the second film can be better, because we don’t have to deal with the character before they are a hero, they can be a hero the whole film!

No instead we got a couple main plot lines that just were not good. As I already mentioned, I hated Sonny in this film. In the first, he was a stubborn, lovable, idiot. In this film, he is obsessed, jealous, and a fool. He almost does nothing right. I have to say almost, because by the end of the film he does a few right things, because is the type of film to end on a happy note, not one that will end in failure and defeat. It is obvious going into it.

However these plot lines are just so dull, outside of Sonny’s character ruining it. As for the other stars, none of their plots are compelling either. Someone cheating, someone deciding on who to love, someone who can’t remember scripts, and someone who wants to make sure he doesn’t accidentally hire an assassin. Okay, that last bit was a little bit amusing, but that was it.

TSBEMH was a completely forgettable movie. I hope they don’t make a third, and I hope Patel gets better movies soon.

I know, I know, I’ve been reviewing too many movies lately. And I know, I know, recently I reviewed Teen Beach 2, a Disney Channel original movie, but that was for a special occasion. It and its predecessor were milestone reviews, and thus, weird things were acceptable. Add in High School Musical and you will see the only Disney Channel Original movies I have reviewed have been musicals.

So why Descendants? Is it just to confuse my readers who might it get confused with the amazing The Descendants? Nope. It is because I used to watch these movies all the time. Not to show my age, but the new monthly movie used to be something special. (WARNING! WARNING! NOSTALGIA APPROACHING!) I was able to see things like Zenon, The Luck of the Irish, Motorcrossed, Cadet Kelly and more. I am not including Halloweentown, because Halloweentown sucked.

And you know what, those films are probably terrible now. But maybe Descendants is just like them. The plot has potential for an adult to enjoy. Maybe it is better than them. Maybe they can make a decent film that involves no music.

Alternatively, someone should review every single one of these films, while drunk. I am sure your website would get way more visitors than my own.

Not a scene from the film, but damn it, too many important characters to ignore.

JUST KIDDING IT IS TOTALLY A MUSICAL TOO, I WAS WRONG.

Ahem. Ben (Mitchell Hope) is the son of the Beast (Dan Payne) and Belle (Keegan Connor Tracy, who is also in Once Upon A Time), and wants to make his first proclamation as almost king! You see, a long time ago, after his parents got married, they brought all the kingdoms together under one rule, which apparently is a bunch of Disney stuff. They then took all the bad people and left them on a magical island to live out their days all sad and shit.

Those bad people also had kids, so Ben wants to give a few of them a chance and bring them over to rich people awesome boarding school. He only wants the worst of them for now, for a trial run. And apparently the four worst on the island are…

Mel (Dove Cameron), daughter of Maleficent (Kristin Chenoweth), Evie (Sofia Carson), daughter of The Evil Queen (Kathy Najimy), Jay (Booboo Stewart), son of Jafar (Maz Jobrani), and Carlos (Cameron Boyce), son of Cruella de Vil (Wendy Raquel Robinson).

Great! Now their kids can carry on their parents wishes. Mel needs to steal a wand to free them from the island, Evie needs to find a prince to marry to take over his castle, Carlos needs to…I dunno, kill a puppy or something, and Jay needs to just steal stuff like a criminal street rat.

So it should be easy! They just need to also deal with, you guessed it, high school life. Girls, boys, class, sports, balls, homework, mutts. All of this wonderful stuff. And hey, a big plot line involves them using magic to make the hair of some of the girls at school prettier. Actually, that is a big plot line. Like, top 3.

Of course this asks the question, do you have to be like your parents, or can you sing yourself into a better position?

The rest of the cast is basically made up of people just to name drop. Like Mulan’s dauhgter, Lonnie (Dianne Doan), Aurora’s daughter, Audrey (Sarah Jeffery), Chad Charming (Jedidiah Goodacre), the Fairy Godmother (Melanie Paxson) and her daughter (Brenna D’Amico), and Doug! (Zachary Gibson), son of…Dopey. Sure. Whatever.

Yeah, no one likes Beast when he goes human. Booo. Hiss.

Somehow before this point, I have already reached 600 words in the review. Shame, because I have a bunch more to go!

I was definitely surprised to hear music in this film, kind of came out of nowhere. It was mostly okay. Some songs were bad. The Song “If Only” was decent, however it featured the worst lip singing from Mel and featured a lot of flashbacks from the movie during it. The movie isn’t that long and the song happened halfway through the film, so there wasn’t really much to flashback, or a need at all.

It also had too many central characters, not knowing what to do with them. Carlos was afraid of dogs at the start, and then liked them? Okay, boring. Jay just…stole things for a little bit then played sports and also was sent to the background. Jafar probably had two whole lines and waste wasted. Cruella de Vil was turned into a crazy lady.

Speaking of de Vil, how in the fuck is that the best they have to work with? Not only does 101 Dalmations not even remotely fit in timeline wise with the rest of them (And Aladdin is a huge stretch), it is a lady who wanted to kill some dogs for their fur. They say she is one of the top evil people there, and that is just bananas. I cannot even begin to let that be any amount of believable.

The villains all live together in one house too. And literally no one is married outside of Belle/Beast. Each of these kids only knows about their evil parent, the other member just completely gone.

Descendants is an average to good concept for fiction, it truly is. But it seems they half-assed the whole film. If they kept it to just Mel/Evie, it could probably be a stronger film (but the male demographic!!). Too much wasted potential. They are apparently going to turn it into animated series later this year, which is a great place for it. With a cartoon some of these characters can actual gain some depth and not just background pieces to Mel.

Is there a more universally hated super hero franchise right now than Fantastic Four? Specifically films with more than one movie. Catwoman, Elektra, Green Lantern are all bad but at least they stopped, and Daredevil redeemed itself with the Netflix series.

But Fantastic Four had two very mediocre films with big name actors, so they had to reboot it many years later or else they would lose the movie rights. Not unlike how the 1994 Fantastic Four movie came to existence. As expected, because people were already angry, the internet did not give Fantastic Four a chance. Every casting decision was scrutinized (The Human Torch being the most famous example), every time they didn’t appear at a con was noted, and when they finally came to a few, they were criticized for their trailer or being later.

It is a sad fate that no matter how good or bad this movie is, it is almost determined to fail because the internet has decided to hate it before giving it a chance. A lot like what happened to The Lone Ranger movie of a few years ago.

“What, do they not know what to do with their arms? This movie sucks based on a picture!” – The Internet

Sometimes when you are a kid, you have a dream for when you get older and it actually comes true. Like when Reed was in 5th grade (in 2007. Yes, the math works out and it indeed was that long ago), he wanted to be the first person to teleport and was already working on a device! He also befriended the slower Ben through his elementary experiments. Now, 7 years later, for his senior year science project, Reed (Miles Teller) has successfully built the device and is able to teleport something away and back! He doesn’t know where, but darn it, it works! And Ben (Jamie Bell) is still there, helping out by lifting things or buying supplies or something.

Needless to say, it draws at least some interest, namely from Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), who wants to offer Reed (yes just reed) a full scholarship to NYC as part of the Baxter foundation. A giant building where he can school, do science, and live. Yay! Apparently Reed had solved an issue they were having for years, so Franklin gets his old team back together, including Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who is a bit chaotic. He also adds in his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara) who will build suits for them and his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) who has gotten into some trouble and can “build anything.” This is all important, because what Reed has actually done is created a portal to another dimension and another world!

They should totally try to go there. That’d be fun. Hopefully nothing would go wrong, affecting the structural DNA of any of these right out of high school aged individuals. That would be terrible. Also Tim Blake Nelson as our government bad guy, because you need one when science is involved.

“And knowing is half the battle.” – Cobra Commander or whoever is in this picture.

I won’t say the hate on the internet for this film is justified, because most of it came before anyone had a chance to see it. However, they ended up being correct in that the final product was anything but fantastic.

Don’t want to get into source material comparisons, so I will still note that I am bit disappointed that they used a lot of the “Negative Zone” but called it Planet Zero or something, and not by its comic name.

As for the characters, the entire team seemed to lack any real personality. Before the specifics, I should note that I really like Teller and Jordan in most of their movies and Mara was great in House of Cards and Happythankyoumoreplease.

However, for The Human Torch they made him whiny, even having him utter “I’m an adult, I’m old enough to make my own decisions!” to his dad. The few times The Thing/Ben was on the screen, it felt like he was just awkwardly standing off to the side, never understanding what was going on. Reasons to bring him along on the trip were silly and the friendship that was supposed to exist between him and Reed didn’t show up well in the film. Additionally, his voice when he was full on The Thing didn’t seem to fit his mouth well and always seemed jarring.

It feels like they forgot to do anything with The Invisible Girl, outside of having her like music and patterns with some cringe inducing scenes. And Reed never felt like the genius he was hyped up to be, just a kid with lame powers and lame motivations. Dr. Doom himself was rushed near the end. The fight didn’t make a whole lot of sense, because the film had a problem explaining anything that occurred, hoping the audience wouldn’t think too hard by rushing through all the science talk.

The only real chemistry I found believable was between Johnny and Sue storm as adopted brother and sister, which is probably the hardest thing to pull off. Makes one wonder if they forgot about everything else and focused just on their relationship. Somewhat related, their dad also called Victor and Reed “son” at various points in the movie, so at some point he just became everyone’s daddy.

Stretching out this review with a third picture, much like how Miles Teller can stretch out a conversation with witty retort.

The film can be broken down into three parts. A long introduction, which includes getting the powers and training (which also almost put me to sleep). One scene that is more akin to a horror film. Then a short rushed final CGI fueled fight.

Outside of the weak characters, the biggest problem seems to come from the tone. The Fantastic Four group is inherently cheesy. My favorite story about them is actually a short Norm MacDonald sketch talking about how ridiculous their names are. But the tone of the film is going for a darker more serious approach that is popular nowadays. However it never feels dark, it just forced. It is still cheesy outside of the “horror” scene with none of the grittiness seeming to work. It doesn’t help that the film is almost void of any action until the final fight scene, leaving just poor character development science montages to pick up the majority of the run time.

The Fantastic Four reboot might have actually been what we all feared, a cheap and quick film to maintain film rights. I maintain that if they had just brought in Zac Efron as Dr. Doom, this could have been better as a spiritual successor to That Awkward Moment.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

Ohhhh, we got crowdfunding. Right here on the internet! With a Capital C, and that rhymes with “D”, and that stands for “Down with the old way of doing things, this is the future, man!”

If you are cool and hip, like me, you might have put your money on the internet to go into some business that is just starting out or trying something new. I’m taking Kickstarter, or Indiegogo for some of your more counterculture people out there. I guess I have some confessions. I didn’t back the Veronica Mars movie, but I meant to. I also didn’t back Wish I Was Here, but I never was going to. I have only backed one movie on Kickstarter, and it is a super indie film that hasn’t finished in three years yet despite my constant questions.

No, I use Kickstarter for board games and that is about it. But it is the thought that counts.

Some businesses got their start through Kickstarter though and are now financially-ish stable organizations operating in some specific niche that can’t succeed through normal business ways. And sometimes it is a celebrity or older company looking to get back in the game to bring more of what people liked in the past.

This documentary is about how crowdfunding has changed our economic landscape and the lives of a few individuals who have had some crowdfunding success.

This is the type of guy who would appreciate my The Music Man reference up top.

The companies featured include: Freaker! They made some stretchy sock contraption with cool designs to cover your beverage with. I think. They became a success, with constant communication to the consumer, and even got to go on Shark Tank! And then uhh, some bad things. Zach Crain is their main spokesperson.

We have an old computer game company, Interplay, lead by Brian Fargo, who has been trying for decades to get money to make a sequel to his late 1980s game Wasteland. Well, crowdfunding answers their question, leading to one of the most funded projects of all time, and helped lead them to even more title releases.

Finally, we have Jackson Robinson, a man with two last names, who started a kickstarter for Federal Playing Cards, which are basically just really sexy cards. He had a goal of about $8000 and ended up with almost $150,000. However he is just a one man company, with a wife and two very young kids, and his own full time job. He has to deal with the pressure of all of that and feeling alienated out of his own life, while also, maybe, doing a new campaign to get him something even better.

And that is it. Literally the bulk of the documentary is about three successful campaigns and the aftermath of their success and how their lives have changed for better or for worse. Sure, we have other speakers, professors, talking about the idea of crowdfunding in general and any other topic that will pop up. This doesn’t sound like a lot actually happens, but strangely enough it was incredibly interesting to see.

Part of it is to hear the stories, sure. The other reason is that the documentary is filmed with the utmost care of setting up every interview shot with the viewer in mind. It is beautifully shot, which is a surprise given it isn’t about nature or animals. Just people. Just people talkin’ ’bout computers and business. Some of the least sexy sounding words in terms of cinematography. But Capital C makes it work.