‘Fate of the Furious’ is solid

Posted on April 14, 2017 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

7/10 Remember when these guys were just stealing Playstations?

In Fate of the Furious, after 30 disposable minutes of honeymooning and little league soccer, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, who also produces) inexplicably betrays his team, stealing an EMP device and landing Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) in German prison. The gang learns from their super-secret government buddy, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), that Toretto is now working with a super-dooper-secret cyberterrorist called Cipher (Joe Pantoliano Charlize Theron). They band together with the last movie’s villain, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), to take Toretto down.

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Anime adaptation a generic ‘Ghost’ in a switched-up ‘Shell’

Posted on March 31, 2017 by reelentropy

Johansson, for her part, looks mostly bored in the role. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

5/10 Boring. Risk-free. Done to death.

White-washed, and not just in the controversial casting decisions. Ghost in the Shell is a uniquely Japanese property, and much needed to be changed for it to translate from late ’80s Japanese audiences to mid ’10s global audiences. But instead of identifying how to do that while maintaining its potency, producers simply extracted everything from the movie that isn’t in the current American mainstream, which is almost everything that makes the property unique, and replaced it with essentially nothing. Such is the sad destiny of Japanese media in Hollywood.

In the future, more than 70 percent of the population uses cybernetic augmentations. Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) uses cybernetic prosthetics for almost 100 percent of her body after the one she was born with was mangled in an accident. With her new highly tactical shell, she leads Japan’s Section 9 counter-terrorism unit.

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‘Power Rangers’ doesn’t cut it, go see it anyway

Posted on March 24, 2017 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Lionsgate.

4/10 Calling it “Saban’s Power Rangers” doesn’t really do this film justice. For everything wrong with it, the title is what’s going to prevent most people from taking it seriously. It’s so overambitious and dramatic, I really think they should have gone with something like The Rangers in the Rye or Power-dise Lost.

Power Rangers follows five teenagers with attitude stuck in a life of Saturday school in dreary Angel Grove, the kind of drive-through town that escaped wealth even with its healthy fishing industry and large gold mine. While fooling around in the mine for a variety of reasons, Jason Scott, Kimberly Hart, Billy Cranston, Zack Taylor and Trini Kwan (Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Ludy Lin and Becky G) discover colorful power coins that grant them fantastic abilities. The teens soon discover they have joined a long heritage of warriors sworn to protect all life in the universe, and they must learn how to morph in preparation for the return of the fallen green ranger, Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks).

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The Open Bar Review – The Belko Experiment

Posted on March 21, 2017 by reelentropy

In which Paul and I take an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s tax returns.

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Afterparty podcast – Beauty and the Beast

Posted on March 21, 2017 by reelentropy

Instead of watching the awful new live-action movie like most of America, we decided to look back at the 1991 classic Beauty and the Beast to see how well it holds up. Sync up the special edition and watch along.

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