Author Archives: Matt Vetrano

Jumping the Soapbox: Games of 2019 (Part 3) – VR-A-PALOOZA!!

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Back in November I finally took the VR plunge and got myself a (VERY EXPENSIVE) Oculus Quest.  Now sure, it may not be the BE ALL END ALL of interactive experiences, but it’s definitely the most interesting new gimmick for the medium in a while.  The best way I’ve been able to describe it is the difference between beer and hard liquor.  Both are unique in their own way with pros and cons to each, but there’s no doubt that one is a more POWERFUL experience and that you can’t have as much of it without getting sick.  It’s amazing to be immersed in the virtual world in a way that no other gaming console can adequately replicate, but the weight of the hardware itself as well as the strain on your senses trying to understand the disconnect between what you’re seeing and what’s in the real world means that it’s best for short bursts rather than longer sessions.  In any case, we’ll take a look at many of the games I’ve played for it as well as any other impressions I had of the hardware.  Some games are from the built in Oculus store, some were side-loaded to the console through other means, all are worth talking about today!  Let’s get started!!

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Beat Saber

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Develop by Beat Games

Alright, I’ll admit it!  I mostly bought this ridiculous headset just to play this one game!  ARE YOU HAPPY!?  I’ve always been a huge fan of rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, and after playing this at a convention a year or so back I knew I had to get it as well.  The gameplay is ridiculously intuitive with the many slash patters becoming second nature after a surprising short amount of time; though some of that might be due to my experience with other rhythm games.  I don’t want to BRAG and say that I’m an AMAZING arm waver, but over time the connection between the visual cues and the body movement become more and more abstracted and the thought process between seeing a block on screen and knowing what to do with my arms became instantaneous and I was racking up high scores in no time; even if I STILL can’t do a good chunk of those absurdly difficult EXPERT+ songs, and that brings me to something worth discussing about this game.  The big elephant in the room is the custom songs you can add to the game through mods with very little effort; even on the Quest which is designed to be much more self-contained and therefore harder to mod.  Look, I love the game play on its own, but if I couldn’t play Shut Up And Dance, You Get What You Give, and Eating Food In The shower, my interest would have faded away almost instantaneously.  People uploading tracks that they do not have the right to upload is frankly the lifeblood of this game and the paltry tracks that come with your thirty dollar purchase as well as the small handful of downloadable tracks are simply not enough to sustain interest.  I don’t know if Beat Games has said much on the use of unlicensed music in their game, but they sure haven’t fixed the “problem” yet and I’m curious if this is a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.  Until it does though, this is easily the most fun experience there is to find in VR, and the first thing you should buy if you get a headset!

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Super Wrestling: AEW Dynamite (01-29-20)

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AEW Dynamite is owned by All Elite Wrestling, Shahid Khan, and TNT

The vacation is over, the beach has been thoroughly bashed, and it’s time for AEW to get back into the swing of things!  With their next PPV revolution just a month away, we’ve got a lot storylines to set up, expand upon, and pay off before then, so let’s get started and see what they do!

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Jon Moxley Promo – Preparing For Revolution

Not even five seconds into the show, the dude’s music hits and he comes out through the crowd wearing an ACTUAL eyepatch this time instead of just a bandage, so I’m gonna start calling him Big Mox for the rest of this episode.  After his win against Pac last week, it’s now official that he will be challenging Chris Jericho for the AEW World Championship Revolution and the man is just GIDDY at the prospect!  He calls Jericho out for being a coward and a Jabroni who got through his career with guile and manipulation rather than heart and honor, and he straight up calls him out to have the match RIGHT now instead of waiting for the big show.  Surprising everyone, Jericho DOES come out from the back to confront Moxley, but he stays nice and safe on the ramp rather than go down to the ring.  After all, what’s the point of having these really nice microphones if they’re not going to talk to each other from nice safe distances?  Jericho goes in on the insults and calls him a pirate, he talks about how he wants to bang his mother, all the heel classics, but there is one thing that hits home and is a genuine mark against Big Mox; Jericho calls out the Inner Circle because he’s GOT those teammates who will be there to watch his back.  Moxley on the other hand, has no one.  He’s got a bigger chip on his shoulder than anyone and certainly is one of the most skilled guys there, but without eyes in the back of his head and only one eye working on the front of it, he’s a bit out of his depth which is a great bit of characterization for the guy and it kind of reminds me a bit of the end of Moxley’s run at WWE where his final storyline was about him wanting to go it alone but realizing he’s a part of The Shield and is at his best when he’s with his bros.  Sadly he doesn’t have Roman Reigns or Seth Rollins here to join forces with, but I’m curious if anyone here will try to befriend him in the next few weeks.  Things get a bit weird here as, for whatever reason, Santana & Ortiz have brought a bunch of dudes from the Bronx with them (the show is in Cleveland, did The Inner Circle pay their bus fare?), and so now Moxley is EVEN MORE outnumbered than usual.  Moxley’s not perturbed in the least however because he’s in his home town, but this still seems like a bad guy no matter how brass his balls may be, and sure enough he’s SWIFTLY overwhelmed by the numbers and has to retreat before they take out his other eye.  This was a really great way to start the show and I really hope they develop Moxley beyond just the trash talking super badass, but only time will tell if they make good on him being the lone wolf who needs a pack.

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Cinema Dispatch: The Gentlemen

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The Gentlemen and all the images you see in this review are owned by STX Films

Directed by Guy Ritchie

So hey!  Now that we’re talked about our collective complicated relationship with Michael Bay, we might as well get to Guy Ritchie as well!  I actually haven’t seen most of his movies, even the ones that everyone else seems to like (no, I haven’t seen Snatch) but the general consensus is well known and can be seen even in the few films I’ve sat through; an over reliance of style over substance which coupled with the wrong material is utterly disastrous.  He SOMEHOW didn’t crash and burn with Aladdin even if that isn’t a great movie, but King Arthur was an absolute garbage fire of a movie; one that I’m sure we’ll all have fun laughing about for years to come.  Then again, his adaptation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a surprising fun little ride, and with him returning to his comfort zone for this movie maybe he’ll get back into the groove of things and give us something truly enjoyable once again!  Can Guy Ritchie still knock it out of the park when he’s doing the one thing we know he’s good at?  Let’s find out!!

Told to us by way of Fletcher the journalist (Hugh Grant), Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is the biggest grower and distributor of marijuana in the UK, and despite being so successful and sacrificing so much to keep his business afloat, well he’s approaching that age where there are more important things and so he decides it’s time to sell it.  His buyer to be is the much more respectable Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) who will need to pay a pretty penny for it as that kind of infrastructure will be primed to make BILLIONS once pot is legalized in the UK, but as it turns out there’s someone else vying for a chance to get it from Mickey; namely the Chinese-British gangster Dry Eye (Henry Golding) who’s uncle George (Tom Wu) basically controls all the other drugs in the country.  Mickey isn’t planning on selling to anyone else though and politely tells him to shove it which was probably the right move to make but still ends up causing headache for Mickey and his crew including his right hand man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) who coincidently is the person that Fletcher is telling this story to.  Kind of seems odd that he’s telling Raymond about things that he was already there for, but Fletcher assures him that there’s a twist to this story that he won’t see coming and is one that he’s certain Raymond and Mickey will be more than willing to pay twenty MILLION dollars to find out.  With so much at stake, what will Mickey do (or perhaps have already done given the framing device) to keep his empire from crumbling right before the big sale?  What could Fletcher possibly have that Raymond and Mickey don’t already know, and is it really worth as much as he says it is?  Will this be the redemption of both Charlie Hunnam and Guy Ritchie after that disastrous King Arthur movie!?

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“Is that what I think it is?”     “Yup. Every blu ray copy of King Arthur.”     “I think I’m gonna be sick.”     “Don’t lose your nerve now; you KNOW what needs to be done.  I’ll get the hammers.”

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Cinema Dispatch: The Turning

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The Turning and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures

Directed by Floria Sigismondi

January being the bad month for movies hasn’t ALWAYS been true as interesting stuff like has come out in years past, but it seems that aside from the ONE exception of The Boy, it’s always true for horror movie; something we’ve already seen this year with The Grudge. I certainly didn’t see much to get excited for in the trailers leading up to this, and even having a big name like Finn Wolfhard didn’t do much to capture my interest, but I’ve been blindsided by unassuming movies before and perhaps this will be the one to break the January horror film rule! Okay fine, it probably won’t be, but let’s find out anyway!!

Kate Mandell (Mackenzie Davis) has landed the job of lifetime as she’s hired by a very rich family to tutor the young daughter Flora (Brooklynn Prince) in their giant house on their giant estate. It starts off well enough as Flora is friendly and eager to learn, but the housekeeper Miss Grose (Barbara Marten) is rather cagey on the details that led to this position being open (up to and including the details on the death of the parents), and Miles the older brother (Finn Wolfhard) unexpectedly returns home from boarding school which means she has to babysit him and curb his rather disturbing attitude. While all this is going on, spooky things keep on happening that may involve a groundskeeper that died not long before Kate took the position, or maybe it has something to do with the family itself. Whatever the case may be, Kate is besieged by visions, nightmares, and that creep Miles from all sides which might just be enough to drive her mad. Can she solve the various mysterious about this house and the family that occupies it? What will she do when it becomes harder and harder to discern the spooky ghost stuff from reality? Does anyone else get the sense that Finn Wolfhard was REALLY banking on that Disney/Sony deal actually falling through?

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“I CAN BE SPIDER-MAN! LOOK!!” “That’s… not quite what we’re looking for, but we’ll keep your head shot on file.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Bad Boys for Life

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Bad Boys for Life and all the images you see in this review are owned by Sony Pictures Releasing

Directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

As I’m sure is true for many film fans out there, Michael Bay and I have a complicated relationship.  On the one hand, being upset at the Michael Bay Aesthetic and the crappy Transformers movies has become kind of passé and is better left to the Cinema Sins and Razzie hacks of the world.  Not only that, he’s more than capable of making REALLY great movies that are unique to his sensibilities; particularly Pain and Gain which is clearly his best film by a wide margin.  Then again, he’s also the guy who indulges in racist and sexist caricatures in the service of crass humor, and his disdain for the audience and basically all of humanity may be an asset in some films but is also reflected in just how shoddily some of them are put together; incoherent plotting, choppy editing, and an oblivious tone on top of being unfunny and tasteless.  I had never seen the Bad Boys movies until very recently and solely in preparation for this new one, and sure enough they contain everything I don’t like about the guy even if they are somewhat more tolerable than some of his later work; presumably due to Bruckheimer being the bigger name at the time which meant he could reign in some of Bay’s worst tendencies.  Now all that said, we are going Bayless for this one as he doesn’t even have a producing credit on here, so at least there’s hope that these filmmakers with a fresh perspective can take what elements DID work in the originals while taking out some of their more pernicious aspects to send this franchise off right.  Can we close this trilogy on a high note instead of get more of the same nonsense?  Let’s find out!!

Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowrey (Martin Lawrence and Will Smith) are still Miami cops doing their Bad Boys shtick, and while it’s been a fun ride for both of them, Marcus is starting to look towards the back half of his life and doesn’t want it to be filled with more violence, rough schedules, and close calls.  Mike on the other hand isn’t even SEEING this as the back half of his life and is trying harder than ever to stay fit, stay alert, and stay young despite the gray hairs showing in his beard.  One fateful night while partying with the other cops including good ol’ Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano, a.k.a. JOEY PANTS!) Mike gets the biggest reality check of his life as some masked assassin tries to shoot him to death and almost succeeds.  Marcus takes this as a sign to finally retire while Mike can only think of vengeance and wants his help in finding the person who did this to him, but perhaps Mike will have to go it alone.  Even worse, he may have to try and find this person with the help of the youngsters at the station who are in some sort of advanced CSI crew named AMMO led up by Mike’s ex-girlfriend Rita (Paola Núñez) who isn’t thrilled about working with the guy either given his history of blowing things up and how personal this case is to him.  Will Mike’s quest for vengeance end in him triumphing once again like he did so many times in the old days?  Will Marcus stay true to his retirement and be there for his family, or is his bond with his best friend enough to get him on board for one last ride?  Is it just me or is this like ten times more interesting than whatever was going on in the other films?

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“Dang, Mike!  It’s almost like we have competent writers now!”     “How does it feel?”     “It… sort of tickles.”

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Super Wrestling: AEW Dynamite (01-22-20)

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AEWDYNAMITEAEW Dynamite is owned by All Elite Wrestling, Shahid Khan, and TNT

We’re back with another episode of Spring Neck-Breakers as the second week of Bash at the Beach hits the high seas with this episode taking place on Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Cruise!  With last week doing such a great job of setting up some explosive confrontations, can they manage to pay it off here while ALSO making sure the guests have enough fresh towels!?  Let’s find out!!

First, let’s take a moment to talk about the ring.  They are in fact on a boat and fighting outdoors at night which looks pretty good all things considered!  It certainly doesn’t look like a typical stadium that these episodes usually take place in which gives things a nice bit of variety, and while the lighting is a bit harsh considering they can really only use a bunch of giant spotlights it does give it a very naturalistic feel while the shadows the wrestlers cast as they fight do look rather dynamic; giving it a hint of a noir feel to it.  Needless to say that they have a solid stage set for the first match of the show which is…

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Hangman Adam Page & Kenny Omega Vs. SCU (Kazarian & Scorpio Sky) – Tag Team Championship

SCU is accompanied to the ring by Christopher Daniels

I can’t even remember; has SCU had a title defense since they got the belt?  I’m SURE they had to have, but for the life of me I can’t recall what it was.  In fact, SCU’s reign as tag team champions has felt a bit underwhelming as they haven’t really have their own story line since their big win against The Lucha Brothers.  Sure Christopher Daniels got a little something with that whole botched move thing and Scorpio Sky had his match against Jericho, but as a tag team they feel more like McGuffins for the other tag teams’ stories rather than an integral and interesting part like how Jericho has been with the AEW Championship.  Speaking of being McGuffins for other peoples’ story, in case you didn’t know (JR spells it out just in case you weren’t paying attention) the big angle of this match is that Page and Omega have a shot at winning the title but only if they work together which is becoming less and less likely as Page sinks further into his heel persona and his straight up alcoholism.  The match itself was fine but I really couldn’t get into it and I’m not sure why.  Both teams were solid and they told a decent story in the ring where the singles wrestlers have a bit of an advantage when going one on one but SCU takes full control when they get even a small amount of momentum.  I guess it just goes on a bit too long as it feels like we’re warming up for close to ten minutes, and it’s not exactly the BEST showcase of either team even if they are doing a solid job.  The big standout was probably Adam Page who is actually putting a real CHARACTER behind his in ring performance as you can see him grimacing every time he has to involve Kenny Omega and how he’d rather just take the beating along than work with him.  It’s a good character for the guy, but it feels like we should have really paid it off here instead of kicking the can down the road once again, which is as good an excuse as any to talk about the ending.  Page has an impressive rally where he’s throwing Buckshot Lariats at anything that will move, and he eventually pins someone for the win.  That’s right, SCU has lost the belts and now they’re in the hands of Page and Omega.  I don’t know, I’d have rather SCU had a BETTER run instead of dropping it almost unceremoniously here, and I’m getting antsy to see Page truly betray Omega which if we keep postponing comes off as more and more inevitable and will surely make Omega look bad for not seeing it coming as well.  Maybe they have different plans and I’ll be glad to see how they play out in the coming weeks, but not my favorite opening match that they’ve done.

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Cinema Dispatch: Dolittle

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Dolittle and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures

Directed by Stephen Gaghan

My GOODNESS have studios been putting out some high priced nonsense recently!  We are definitely stuck in the Billion Dollar Blockbuster Bubble where every studio wants nothing but the most expensive movies to maximize their profits, but as is the nature with bubbles all the money Is usually dried up by the time everyone else tries to get in on it which is why Disney is still sitting pretty on their mountain of gold and everyone else is making stuff like Cats and that awful Tarzan movie.  With this being the current trend, someone making an overpriced adventure film about Dr. Doolittle feels almost inevitable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be bad!  I LOVE me some overpriced entertainment like Jupiter Ascending and Final Fantasy XIII, so maybe Dr. Doolittle being played by Iron Man and co-starring a wrestler as a CGI polar bear is just what I need to cleanse the palate and finally kick off the GOOD parts of 2020 which so far has been pretty plodding at the multiplex!  Is this retelling of the classic story the start of another beloved blockbuster franchise, or are we in for a disaster to rival even that of Cats!?  Let’s find out!!

Taking place AFTER what I presume is the actual Dr. Dolittle story, we find that the intrepid physician who can talk to animals (Robert Downey Jr) has gone fully Will Wonka and is holed up inside his giant wildlife preserve; refusing to see any visitors, human or otherwise.  That all changes when one day, out of PURE LUCK, he gets TWO visitors who insist on seeing him!  The first is Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado) who is on assignment from the Queen despite being all of twelve years old, and Tommy (Harry Collett) who shot a squirrel and has brought the wounded creature to Dolittle because he feels bad.  Lady Rose is there to inform him that the Queen is dying and requires his help which he reluctantly agrees to, and determines that she’s dying of McGuffin’s Disease which can only be cured by a fabled fruit on an uncharted island, so he takes some of his animals friends (Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, and Octavia Spencer just to name a few) on a boat to get the fruit and save the Queen; hoping that once this is finished he can go back to brooding in his house all day.  Oh, and Tommy is coming along too because… he loves animals too I guess?  Will the Dolittle Crew get to the magic fruit in time to save the Queen?  What challenges will they face along the way, and will some of it be intentional sabotage?  If one of the cats from Cats was in this movie, would Dolittle be the only one who could talk to it!?

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“So what you’re saying is that never was there ever a cat as clever as Magical Mister Mistoffelees?”     …     “What is that it?  I mean sure, throwing your voice is a skill but I wouldn’t call it MAGICAL.”

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