Category: Movies

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I Really Hope The Death Star Isn’t In The Han Solo Movie!

Ron Howard has seemingly tweeted out a pic of the Death Star interior from the set of his Han Solo movie.  I hope that isn’t what it is, and that he is just throwing us off.  Because as much as I love the Death Star, I am done with it.  It has been featured in three of the eight Star Wars films.  Four, if you count the brief scene with the plans in Revenge of the Sith, and five if we all agree that Starkiller Base from the Force Awakens is just a bigger Death Star.  In other words, giant death balls have had plenty of Star Wars screen time.  There has to be other stories to tell in the Star Wars Universe.

Not to mention it wouldn’t even make sense in this case.  If Han had known about the Death Star, surely he would have told someone, or at least not been surprised when he saw it for first time in A New Hope.  Plus I am sure he would have been a little more wary about taking a job from people not wanting to be caught by The Empire if he knew a massive murder orb was out floating around.  It would screw up his whole origin story.

The Star Wars writers need to dig through their massive pile of scripts and throw out everything that has anything to do with massive balls shooting planet destroying beams.  They can do better.  So help me if the newly announced Obi Wan movie is just him trying to track down the plans to the Death Star from Dooku’s cronies.  If that  happens, I am only going to watch it once!  JUST ONCE YOU HEAR ME!

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Shmee Visits The Accountant!

Ben Affleck was in two action movies in 2016: Batman v Superman and The Accountant.  Interestingly they were both released by Warner Brothers and they both feature Affleck as a rich violent loner.  That however is where the comparisons between the two movies stop.  Instead of wearing a cape and a cowl in The Accountant, Affleck is an autistic math wiz who does taxes for very bad people, and he is also really good at killing people.

There is a lot going on in The Accountant.  In one story line we find out how Affleck’s character gets the way he is, it turns out his military dad wasn’t great at dealing with an autistic kid.  In another the Treasury Department is tracking Affleck down for his many crimes, and then in the main story Affleck is trying to find where a large corporation’s money has gone.  Only to find himself and fellow accountant Anna Kendrick targeted by the people with sticky fingers.  Turns out he is the wrong person to try and kill.

For the most part I enjoyed The Accountant.  It is an interesting story, and Affleck plays a different kind of character from what we are used to.  Though the trope of kids with special needs being good at killing is troublesome.  I will say at least The Accountant tries to treat autism respectfully, and not just as some sort of magic that makes his brain better at math and murder.  Even if that is the end result.

While the script has a few shortfalls, the cast mostly makes up for it.  It turns out that if you hire a ton of talented people and give them interesting things to do, they make a movie better.  The only person who seemed like he was coasting was J.K. Simmons, but to be fair to him, how many times has he played the chief or director of something, so he pretty much played muted J.K. Simmons.  Which again to be fair, is still pretty good.

There you have it.  The Accountant is a decent action movie based around a slightly worrisome cliché.  There are far worse movies to watch on a Friday afternoon, and it shows that Affleck is more than the sad Batman the internet has come to know and hate.  Now just make sure that your finances are in order because you wouldn’t want a visit from this accountant!

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Teen Titans Go Gave Us The Best Possible Version Of Fall Out Boy!

Teens Titans God made an 80’s throwback rock opera, and it was sooooo good!  Now they released a music video to top it all off!  Fall Out Boy has become the new They Might Be Giants in that if you need a theme or a song for your show or movie they got you covered.  That is not something I would have expected from them when they started out their career, but hey, we all got to make a living somehow.  For now just enjoy this lovely video!

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We Are Getting À La Carte TV. Proving You Should Be Careful What You Wish For…

Disney announced that after its two year deal with Netflix is done it will pull all of its movies and shows off of the popular streaming service.  This is so it can launch its own online streaming network.  There has been no word yet on how this will affect the current Marvel/Netflix co-produced TV shows.  Though I am guessing due to their success they will continue to stay on Netflix and continue to be made by the same team.

The real news is that there will soon be yet another streaming TV service.  It will be joining the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, CBS All Access, CW Seed, and the soon to be launching yet to be titled DC/Warner Brothers online network.  Plus who knows how many others are in the works.  Netflix opened Pandora’s TV box, and now every TV Service provider who’s ratings have taken a hit due to streaming media want a piece of the action.  This would be fine if the channels were going to be cheap, but it looks like they will start around $5.99 a month a piece and then go up from there.  Heck HBO Now is $15 a month.  You thought à la carte programing was going to save you money.  Well guess what, it won’t.

People are going to have to think long and hard about what services they are going to watch and need, and if these services keep dividing up their content and charging a lot for it, it may force people back to cable to ‘save’ money.  For some reason when people said they wanted to be able to pick and choose their channels they assumed that they could still just pay the $1 to $2 a channel like they are now.  That of course is not the case.

The à la carte future everyone said they wanted is almost here, and it is going to cost us all a fortune.  Not to mention the services we using now are going to continue to have less content as shows and movies are added to their IP owners’ own services.  Somehow the future is always less cool than we hoped it would be.

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There Is Nothing New To See At The Dark Tower!

I did my best to read all the books before watching The Dark Tower, and I am glad that I did, but the books didn’t help me gain any understanding with what was going on in the movie.  Not that the movie is confusing in any way, because it is constantly going out of its way to inform the audience with what is going on, but because it is a radical departure from the books.  That is not my main issue with The Dark Tower however, my issue is that they turned one of the craziest Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Western universes out there in to something generic.

The Dark Tower is about Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), who see visions of a strange land and a Dark Tower, and an ongoing battle between a Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) and The Gunslinger (Idris Elba).  Jake seems to think that the current series of world wide earthquakes are due to the Man in Black attacking The Dark Tower.  No one believes Jake of course, so he has to travel to Mid-World himself to find The Gunslinger and save The Dark Tower.

It probably made sense to the writers to make the movie about Jake instead of the Gunslinger because then Jake could be the avatar for the audience seeing all these strange things for the first time.  Of course if any of this was strange it probably would have been fine, but in all honestly had you told me that this was just the next Maze Runner movie and in this one they can hop dimensions, I would have believed you.  Mid-World is just a random place with a lot of broken stuff and a creepy Matthew McConaughey constantly feeding us Gunslinger trivia.  The only part of The Dark Tower that really works is when The Gunslinger comes to New York and does his best Last Action Hero impression.

Thankfully the cast they hired was excellent.  Even new comer Tom Taylor sold his role.  The fact these actors had almost nothing but exposition for dialog and almost pulled it off as natural is a minor miracle.  The Dark Tower would have been so much better had people just stopped explaining everything and just started having meaningful character interactions, or better yet shown us what they were explaining.

I don’t know if it was budget or lack of vision that kept Mid-World from being as interesting in the movie as it is in the books, but it was a shame that it felt stripped of everything that made that place feel unique.  I didn’t need a homicidal train in the movie, but it would have been nice to feel like one could have shown up at any minute.  Thanks to the great actors and the brisk pace The Dark Tower ended up being okay.  Almost like the cheep cable version of the book that made you want a real movie.  For people that haven’t read the books this movie might be easier to watch because they don’t know what they are missing.  Though they could also go out and watch The Maze runner or Divergent again and have just as much fun.