The Assassination and Disneyfication of Heroes Continues in Solo: A Star Wars Story

I said back in February when I saw the first trailer that Solo: A Star Wars Story had train wreck written all over it. Sadly, I underestimated the magnitude of the disaster. This thing got nothing right.

To start with, the casting was a fiasco. Alden Ehrenreich brought none of Harrison Ford’s overconfident yet charming swagger to his portrayal of young Han Solo. Han, in this film, was nothing but an annoying kid. Then there was Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra, Han’s love interest. We all know she can’t act, so no surprise there, but she had a painfully large amount of screen time. Han’s love for Qi’ra was supposedly his driving motivation for much of the film, but you wouldn’t have known it if they hadn’t explicitly stated it every so often because Ehrenreich and Clarke had zero chemistry. The emotional bond and sexual tension between Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his social justice spewing droid (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) was considerably more convincing. Beyond his profound love for his sex bot, however, Lando was little more than a smarmy douche. If Billy Dee Williams’ Lando is Frank Sinatra in a fedora, Glover’s Lando is a sad copycat in a trilby. The rest of the supporting cast were boring, clichéd, and largely forgettable. Continue reading →

Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman in The Tick. IMDb.com

The Tick – Second Half of Season 1 Review

Amazon released the second half of the first season of The Tick a couple months ago, but I just got around to watching it. All my criticisms from the pilot and season 0.5 continue to hold true, only much more so. The writers seem to be attempting to solve the jarring juxtaposition of camp and depressing bleakness by throwing the camp out the window and going full dark. The lighthearted fun of the pilot and first half of the season is mostly gone, and all we’re left with is yet another grim, supposedly edgy superhero show. Continue reading →

Dwayne and George go on a Surprisingly Fun Rampage

Rampage the video game couldn’t be more mindless. You take control of a mutated gorilla, wolf, or lizard and run around destroying things and eating people until your health bar runs out. That’s it. Pure mindless destruction. And I enjoyed playing it immensely.

I remember seeing the trailer for Rampage the movie for the first time. It started out looking like just another stupid Dwayne Johnson movie. Then the gorilla started wrecking things. When the wolf showed up, it began to dawn on me. “No, it couldn’t be” I thought to myself. But gradually it looked more and more like someone had actually made a movie out of one of the most simpleminded video games ever. Literally 2 seconds after I thought “Where’s Lizzie?” the giant alligator appeared.

That's a big alligator

That’s a big alligator. IMDb.com

I smelled a train wreck, and I walked into the theater feeling a tingly mixture of excited anticipation and dread, but I found myself liking this movie a lot more than I ever expected to. Continue reading →

Ready Player One Allows Middle-Aged Nerds to Pretend They’re Cool for a Couple of Hours

Ready Player One takes place in 2045. Life is miserable for most people. To escape their wretched existences, they log into a virtual world called the OASIS. Created by socially awkward genius James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the OASIS allows anyone to become whoever or whatever they want to be. Just before Halliday dies, he channels Willy Wonka and sets up a contest to find 3 keys that lead to an Easter Egg. The first person to find the egg inherits Halliday’s fortune and gains control of the OASIS. Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), avatars of real-world Wade and Samantha, are determined to find the egg and keep the OASIS out of the clutches of evil business executive Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to take control and put up advertisements. Yeah, that’s the existential evil the inhabitants of the OASIS are facing. Annoying adds.

If you unplug your brain and don’t think about it, Ready Player One is another soulless CGI-heavy spectacle. We’ve seen a lot of them these past few years. The characters are poorly developed, the story is thin, and the whole thing is just an excuse to cram as many pop culture references as possible into the 140-minute runtime. This film exists to give middle-aged nerds an opportunity to squeal with delight at their ability to spot call-outs to their lost youth. It very quickly crosses the line and becomes downright patronizing. Plenty of movies are all style and no substance, but I had hoped for more from a film directed by Steven Spielberg. Continue reading →

Ponyo

If You Like Acid Trips, You Might Like Ponyo

Created by celebrated director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Ponyo is clearly not one of their better efforts. In this story, an aquatic, human-headed blob that we’re told is supposed to be a goldfish escapes from her human-looking wizard/alchemist father. After riding on a jellyfish for a while, she has a dangerous encounter with a trawler, gets stuck in a jar, and washes up on shore, where she is found and rescued by Sôsuke, a five-year-old boy who lives with his mother while his sea captain father is mostly away. He names her Ponyo. In the process of breaking her out of the jar, Sôsuke cuts his finger. Ponyo licks it and instantly heals it. More importantly, the taste of human blood gives her magical powers. Ponyo and Sôsuke form a bond, and she decides she wants to become a human girl.

Ponyo and Her Father

Ponyo and Her Father. IMDb.com

Ponyo’s father is having none of it, however, so he sends his magical water spirits to reclaim her. During a heated quarrel, she starts to transform, but her father uses magic to force her back into her original state. He leaves to summon Ponyo’s mother, and while he’s gone, she completes her transformation, gets into the storehouse of magical elixir, and unleashes a watery apocalypse upon the unsuspecting humans.

Ponyo Wreaks Havoc

Ponyo Wreaks Havoc. IMDb.com

Continue reading →