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All Female Ghostbusters? I Am In!

ghostbusters

So according to TheWrap the new Ghostbusters director Paul Feig wants it to be all female.  This is a good idea.  If they did a Ghostbusters 3 or a normal Ghostbusters reboot they would either have to try and get the old (and I do mean old) gang back together, or try and recapture the same “spirit” with a new cast, and both of those things seem to be impossible.

By using an all female cast it will create some excitement, and they will not have to deal with any preconceived notions of what the movie should be.  They can do whatever they want because they would have changed things up enough.  It may sound a little gimmicky, but sometimes a good gimmick is all you need.

Now the other argument is that we already have two good Ghostbusters movies (well a great one, and an okay one), so why do we need another one?  Well those movies came out in the 80’s, so there is whole generation that still needs to be introduced to these movies, and by making a new one it keeps the franchise fresh and relevant.  I hope this idea gets this movie rolling, because I would love to go to the theaters to watch the Ghostbusters!

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Guardians Of The Galaxy Save Summer!

Guardians-of-the-Galaxy

It turns out that after a summer of box office misses it would take a team of misfits to save the day, and in August of all months.  Which is usually the month that movie studios send their movies that they have no faith in to languish and die.  Disney should have faith in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy because it is a lot of fun.

The story primarily follows Peter Quill AKA Star Lord (Chris Pratt) as he leads a group of outlaws to try and stop Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) from attacking the planet  Xandar.  His group includes Drax the Destroyer (Dave Batista), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a tree named Groot (Vin Diesel), and Rocket the Raccoon (Bradley Cooper).  They are outclassed and outgunned, but they are crazy enough to get the job done.

The writers of this movie were very smart.  Introducing the Marvel space universe requires giving the audience a lot of names and places, so they did their best to make this movie as fun loving as possible.  That way even if you didn’t get it all you still had a good time.  This is probably the most comedic of the Marvel movies yet, and that is a good thing.  I also liked that they made this a group origin story, sure they did talk about all the characters’ backgrounds a little, but this movie is about the group not the individual which feels a little more fresh.

If you are going to make an action comedy, you are going to need a lead that can deal all those jokes with good comedic timing, and Chris Pratt was a perfect choice for that.  All his years on Parks and Rec helped him get the comedy side down, and it turns out that he knows how to throw a punch too.  Zoe Saldana apparently just wants to do space operas, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Star Trek, and Avatar.  She is good at it, so I would keep letting her do it.  In this movie she gets to be in the middle of the action more, and she handles herself well.  Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel got to prove their talent as voice actors.  They managed to steal every scene they were in, and Dave Batista is a good professional wrestler that may have a good acting career ahead of him too.

James Gunn had to tone himself down a little, and bend to the Marvel movie “look”, but he still got some of his trademark weirdness in.  Especially in the scenes with Benicio del Toro as the collector.  The amount of random Marvel stuff he “collected” in those scenes was incredible.  I may just have to watch that part of the movie over and over again just so I can find all the references.  Since James Gunn usually directs horror-comedies, action-comedy apparently was right up his alley.

This movie promises that the Guardians of the Galaxy will be back, and that is an exciting thought.  I can’t wait to see what trouble Star Lord and his group of numbskulls get in to next.  I just hope that they can keep the next movie as fun as this one because if they do, they will have a great new franchise on their hands.  Not that Disney was lacking any.

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This Is Not The Hot Dog Toaster You Have Been Waiting For!

ne-rs-hot-dog-taoster

The Nostalgia Electrics Retro Series Hot Dog Toaster looks to be a hot dog lover’s dream, but sadly that dream is a bit of a nightmare.  There are few things easier in this world to cook than an American Hot Dog.  I mean they are already pre-cooked.  You can, fry them, grill them, boil them (please don’t), steam them, hold them over a camp fire, wrap them around a light bulb, or just about any other heat source you can imagine, so you would think that a toaster would be up to the job, but I have found it to be lacking.

Like any toaster it is easy to operate.  Well in theory it is anyway.  You have twist dial on the side that goes from one to five to pick how long you want to cook your dogs and buns, and a leaver which you pull down to start the cooking.  There is also an emergency stop button, just in case.  So being the accomplished toaster-user that I am, I turned the dial to four and put in two hot dogs and two buns, and I pushed down the leaver.  The dogs came out undercooked.  The next two I turned the dial to five, and guess what?  It burned the crap out of them.

It is crazy to me to think that the one thing this toaster was designed to do, it would be bad at.  Sure it did indeed heat up my hot dogs, but it didn’t do a good job!  It has one reason for its existence, and it does it poorly.  I guess I could put the dogs in at five and then watch them, and then push the button when they are ready, but that defeats the purpose of a timer.  Plus it can only do two at a time, so if you are cooking dogs for friends, you would have to use something else anyway unless they like to wait while others eat.  If I had to give this toaster a classroom grade it would get a D+.  It toasted the dogs, but just barely successfully.  It gets the “+” because it looks good doing it.

Pretty much anything that heats stuff up in your kitchen or backyard is going to do a better job of cooking your hot dogs than this thing.  Sure it kind of works, but not well enough to recommend it.  It is such a shame too, because it does look cool.

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Please Don’t Apply For The Internship!

the-internship

You have got to give Google credit, The Internship is a heck of an add.  That doesn’t mean it is good.  Because it is really not (It is so Bad!).  It is just good for a two hour long employment video.  The fact that they got Shawn Levy to direct it, and Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson to star in it is just icing on the cake for them.  I hope Google paid 20th Century Fox a lot for this 2013 film because it is incredibly bland, and a little creepy.

The film is about two out of work salesmen, Billy McMahon (Vince Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Owen Wilson), who decided to lie their way in to an internship program at Google.  They of course get paired with a group of misfits in quest to get a full time job at the tech company.  They have to use their old school charm and wit to overcome their complete lack of tech savvy.  Who knew lying on your resume, and being a smarmy salesmen could land you a job at a Fortune 500 company!

Honestly that description doesn’t sound like that bad of a movie.  Fish our of water comedies can be very good.  This movie is not.  It was a lazy cash grab.  Google must have agreed to this because it makes them look good, and everyone else involved gets paid.  Everything about this movie is derivative, and then to make things worse they pad the running time everywhere: a quidditch match, a bonding strip club scene that refuses to end, and a long support call montage to name a few.

Lets talk about the strip club scene for a second.  It feels like it is half the movie, and it is awkward to watch as these kids “live it up”.  It is even worse when you consider that Wilson and Vaughn are like twenty years older than the rest of the cast, so it makes them feel like those creepy uncles you won’t let your kids hang out with.

Vaughn and Wilson can be funny, and when you see them on screen you want to root for them, but they just play less funny versions of their Wedding Crashers characters.  They are just going through the motions with this film, and looks like the rest of the cast is on cruise control too.  It is a waste of talent all around.

You shouldn’t see this movie.  It is disappointing on just about every level, and if you paid money to see it you are just encouraging bad film making.  Luckily if you do see it, it is completely forgettable.  If I hadn’t had to write this review, I would have blissfully forgotten all about it.  I hope Google got what they wanted out of this film because the people that had to watch it sure didn’t.

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EA Access Is A Good Start

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Yesterday EA announced a new program for Xbox One called Access.  Access will either cost you $5 a month or $30 a year, and in return for your hard earned money you will get “access” to a bunch of their older games.  In this first round you would be a able to play Madden NFL 25, Battlefield 4, Peggle 2, and Fifa 14.  Since I already own two of those games, it is not a very compelling package for me.  Though they have said they are “working” to add more very soon.  I am not sure what working means.  It must be hard to allow people to download games or something.

On top of old games they will also give early “access” to new games, but unlike normal demos your progress will transfer over to the games.  So if you are really excited about Dragon Age: Inquisition it might be enough to get you to try out the service.  You will also apparently get discounts on EA games, though I haven’t seen any specific numbers for that.  So if you really like EA’s upcoming lineup this might be the service you have been waiting for!

This seems like a no brainer move.  It allows EA to leverage their old games so that you will be more inclined to buy the DLC for those games, or use your discounts to pick up the new ones.  For now however, I don’t think the games being offered are enticing enough, and even though I love RPGs, I have never gotten in to the Dragon Age series, so I don’t really want “early access”.  Once there are more games, and a better range of titles coming out for Xbox One I might be more inclined.

I would much rather have had this come from Microsoft or Sony themselves, so it wouldn’t just be EA games, but games from all publishers as well.  They both kind of do it already with Games with Gold, and PlayStation Plus, but you only get a chance to activate those games for a month, and if you forget you miss out.  It would be much better if the games kept getting added to a pool of “free titles” instead.

EA Access seems like where the future is headed, and even though I am not swayed by the service now, it will definitely be something to watch.  Now if there was a super EA Access for $10 a month that gave me “access” to all their games and DLC, I would probably sign up.  Somehow I don’t think that is going to happen anytime soon.