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Catch A Ride With Baby Driver!

Ever since Edgar Wright’s dramatic exit from Marvel’s Ant-Man, we have been waiting to see what was next from this unique director, and if Baby Driver is anything to go by, Wright has got a lot left in the tank.  Baby Driver is cool, fun and funny.  Even if it could have used just one more chase scene.

Since Edgar loves to play with movie genres it should be no surprise that Baby Driver features a lot of clichés and tropes for him to manipulate, make fun of and ultimately revel in.  It is about, get this, a tormented getaway driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), that has to do just one more job to free himself from his scary crime boss, Doc (Kevin Spacey).  Baby just wants to skip town with his girl, Debora (Lily James), and leave his life of crime behind him.

Now Baby Driver isn’t the crazy comedy that makes up the bulk of Edgar Wright’s work: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, but it still offers plenty of laughs.  This slightly more restrained version of Wright is no doubt what we would have seen from him if he would have been able to complete Ant-Man.  Which is a shame because Marvel could have stood to have its own studio turn its cinematic universe on its head.

The acting was all terrific.  Elgort was able to portray a kid who is gifted at his job but hates it, and Hamm, Foxx, and Gonzalez are all able to play varying shades of crazy gangster.  Spacey’s job was to deliver on the nose dialog without actually winking at the audience, and Spacey was in peak Spacey.  I am sure Wright’s direction for him was, “Can you be more Spacey in the next scene?”.

Baby Driver isn’t perfect.  It drags a little in the middle.  I think Edgar was worried that the audience may not like Baby, so he did some character building which I didn’t think was necessary, and for a movie about driving, it could have featured just a little more.  The reason I say this is because the driving that is in it, is excellent, but then it kind of tapers off as the movie progresses.

Baby Driver is a very good modern gangster film that knows and has fun with the fact it is a gangster film.  It is another great film to add to Wright’s portfolio.  Which already has a lot of great films in it.  It is a fun summer action movie to go check out if you are a little tired of them all featuring tights and capes these days.

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Did You Want A Little Tron With Your Breakfast Club? Jumanji Thinks So!

They have obviously changed up the Jumanji formula quite a bit.  Instead of the game coming to life in our world.  It now sucks you in to its world giving you 90’s style videogame avatars.  Complete with special powers.  Of course this time around the game sucks in four teenagers from different walks of life during detention, and they will have to overcome their differences to survive Jumanji’s jungle.  It looks funnier and like more fun than I thought it was going to be, but I am going to wait for reviews before I spend my hard earned cash to watch this flick.

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The New Star Wars Web Series Looks A Little Too Webby!

You remember when guys and gals were making web shorts in the late 90’s and early 2000’s?  That is what the new Star Wars: Forces of Destiny looks like.  It looks like somebody loaded up Adobe Animate and made some Flash films for their Star Wars fan fiction.  That doesn’t mean that I will not watch it.  I will.  It just looks like they could have put a little more effort in to this short series.  Especially if it is the launch for a bunch of new toys and dolls.  I believe it is going to be the Star Wars version of the very successful DC Super Heroes Girls, which sounds good, but it looks like they could have tired harder.

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Bohemia’s New Game Argo Is Free!

Do you like playing video games, but hate paying for them?  Well Bohemia Interactive of Arma fame has a deal for you!  Its new game Argo is completely free!  That’s right you can play the full game without spending a dime.  The question is do you want to?  I would say it is a definite maybe.

Argo takes a lot of what Arma does and simplifies it to a five on five format, so it is like Arma and Counter Strike had a baby.  I am not sure it is as good as either of those games, but it is fun.  I also like the more realistic weapon damage because if you shoot someone they die.  They don’t spin around and then kill you.  You also get to customize your trooper any way you want, and the more you play, the more guns and customizations you get.  For $10 you can jumpstart all that with the “Developer Support Pack”.

Anyway.  It is not my favorite game, and I am not sure I will play it a lot, but for free it is sure to become a LAN party favorite.  A word to the wise though, start off playing Argo on the “easy” servers because like all Arma games, friendly fire is on, and if “easy” is turned off the game turns off the player team identification, so it seems like half the game is being shot in the back by your own team.  Which is not fun.  If you have a decent PC, and you like military first person shooters, Argo is worth the download since bandwidth is all it will cost you.

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Shmee Knows The Secret To Making A Shared Cinematic Universe!

We live in a post Marvel Studios world were everyone wants to build a shared universe.  So far only Marvel is really succeeding, but everyone else is trying.  Though the Warner Brothers MonsterVerse is starting to pick up, and after Wonder Woman’s astonishing success there is hope for the DCEU.  Meanwhile Universal’s Dark Universe is dying for the second time.  So to all you movie executives out there that want to make that sweet, sweet shared universe cash, I will tell you how to do it: MAKE GOOD MOVIES.

Why is the MonsterVerse taking off?  Godzilla and Skull Island turned out to be pretty good.  Marvel movies? For the most part, good.  The struggling DCEU? For the most part, not good.  Then Wonder Woman came along and was awesome, so now people are excited to see her again in Justice League.  Know who we don’t want to see again? A kind of evil and bland Tom Cruise, who is not the Mummy, but more of a reincarnated evil god who killed the Mummy, and thus the Dark Universe no longer has an iconic character.  Instead it has a jerky god-ish Tom Cruise.

There you have it.  Focus on making good films, and for the most part people will watch them.  Especially if you have that major movie studio marketing power.  Do no make movies that are advertisements for future movies.  If you want to included a few Easter Eggs that is fine, but focus on the story at hand, not the story three movies from now.  Believe it or not we don’t care that much if it doesn’t hang together that well.  It will just give us something to talk about later.  So get out there and make those cool flicks!