The NekoCon Diaries 2016: Aniplex and Guest Panel Recap

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 2 Comments

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Alright look.  I KNOW it’s been a while since I did the last one of these and that NekoCon has been over for almost three months now.  Things got… complicated after the convention, and that coupled with the Holiday Season means this was put on the back burner for a while.  I’m getting to it now though, and hopefully my memory as well as my notes can bring you a proper look at the guest panels I was able to attend!  Anyway, let’s start with the big one!

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Aniplex Industry Panel

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Ah yes!  The good ol’ runner up in the anime biz!  Sadly there was no Funimation Panel this year which is a shame considering the one they put on last year was very professional and actually got me interested in some shows as well as their streaming service.  Compare that to what Aniplex shat out in 2015 and there was no contest.  It was just a viewing of one episode a show and then they randomly handled out swag at the end.  Now thankfully they seem to have taken a page from Funimation and managed to put together an ACTUAL presentation of their upcoming releases which is preferable to… whatever the hell they did last year.  Now that being said, when I name the anime I love it usually comes from Funimation, while Aniplex had… I don’t know, that Fullmetal Alchemist series that I actually still like but everyone seemed to turn on when Brotherhood came out?  Well, you never know!  Maybe they’ll surprise me and show something that’s an ACTUAL must see!  Let’s see what they had to show us!

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Your Lie in April

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Trailer

Right off the bat, there’s this which seems to be all about this one dude who’s talented and sad being cheered on by a girl who’s talented and sad; the former on the piano and the latter on the violin.  I don’t know what to tell you, the trailer was one big pep talk to this guy who doesn’t seem all that interesting and there’s nothing in here to elicit the tiniest bit of interest for me.  If there’s one genre I’m just so freaking tired off, aside from cruelty gore fests, is the overwrought school drama.  Hell, if it was for occasionally awesome comedies like Nichijou, School Rumble, or Lucky Star, I’d be happy to never see another freaking show set in a school ever again.  It’s just not an interesting place to set anime at this point because of how overdone it is and I’m just sick to death of everything this show seems to be.  If I were to give this many praise, it looks like the animation is done well, particularly in the performance scenes which look really smooth and carefully choreographed.  I highly doubt they were rotoscoped, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were modeled after records of someone actually playing those instruments.  However, that’s still not enough for me to even bother with this so… I guess check it out if you’re not as jaded as I am.

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Cinema Dispatch: Split

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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

Directed by M Night Shyamalan

We all want Shyamalan to have a comeback and to find a way to make up for the last fifteen years of his career; especially when it includes such unmitigated disasters like After Earth, The Last Airbender, or even The Happening which is fun to watch but for none of the reasons he intended it to be.  Now he did manage to knock out at least one decent film recently which was The Visit, but it was also a clear sign of how far his status has fallen that he was picking up Blumhouse scraps on a dopey premise with a found footage gimmick.  Now it WAS probably the best thing he made since Signs, but even with that it still wasn’t all that great and wasn’t something that I could imagine a dozen other much less accomplished directors directing along with three other direct to video horror films that year.  With this movie though, it seems he’s making a much more earnest effort; not just a paycheck to keep his name relevant, but an honest attempt to make the next great M Night movie that we’ve been waiting for since Bush won reelection.  Does the latest M Night thriller finally bring him back into the spotlight, or is this the final curtain call for the much maligned filmmaker?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with the teenagers, Claire, Marcia, and Casey (Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, and Anya Taylor-Joy), being kidnapped by a mysterious dude for clearly nefarious purposes.  Once they wake up from this… spray the guy uses (do they actually make Knock Out spray?), they find themselves in some sort of basement with two beds, a small bathroom, and a locked door.  Not long after they wake up, they are confronted by their captor Dennis (James McAvoy) who doesn’t give much details but makes it clear that he isn’t about to let them go.  Sometime later, they meet Patricia (James McAvoy) who apologizes for Dennis’s rude behavior, and eventually they meet young Hedwig (James McAvoy) who tells them they’re all screwed.  Now if you couldn’t pick up on it yet, or you haven’t seen the trailers, these are all the same person as their captor, given name Kevin, has Dissociative Identity Disorder and is said to have 23 distinct personalities, though maybe five or six are relevant to the movie.  From there, the movie just builds the tension as more time passes and the women are dreading what their captor has planned for them which, according to Hedwig, are PROBABLY not good things.  While that’s going on, Kevin’s therapist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) is getting messages from one of his identities, Barry, claiming that they DESPERATLEY need to see her, but whenever he comes in, he seems perfectly fine and is sorry to be wasting her time.  Hm…  So just what does Dennis, Patricia, and Hedwig have planned for the women in his basement?  Will the good doctor find out that everything is certainly NOT fine before it’s too late?  What exactly are those other identities we don’t to see really like?

 

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“Did Igor bring you here so we can work on our experiments?  I mean, I prefer the bodies to be cold BEFORE I bring them back to life, but I can work with this.”

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Cinema Dispatch: xXx: Return of Xander Cage

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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xXx: Return of Xander Cage and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures

Directed by DJ Caruso

I know I’ve SEEN the first xXx movie, but the only things I can recall are a fake diner, non-lethal bullets with fake blood in them, and a bunch of scientist being killed by the bad guys because reasons.  Needless to say that it didn’t leave much of an impression on me considering how poorly I can recall it as well as the fact that I never felt the need to go back and rewatch it.  Still, what with The Fast and the Furious becoming the most popular international franchise outside of Marvel, they obviously had to milk this franchise again; something that didn’t seem to go well the last time they did it with Ice Cube, but I guess now that XANDER CAGE is back, we can take one more swing at it!  Does the return of Vin Diesel breathe new life into a franchise that’s been comatose for over a decade, or is this just one big Weekend at Bernie’s scheme gone even worse than any of us could imagine?  Let’s find out!!

The movie opens up with NSA Agent Augustus Eugene Gibbons (Samuel L Jackson), who I guess was in the first movie, trying to recruit some football player (as in Soccer) to be a member of xXx, though I’m not sure if that’s a title, the name of the organization, or both.  It doesn’t really matter though because both he and the football player (Neymar) are killed by a satellite that drops out of the sky.  Normally these burn up on reentry LONG before they could really cause THAT kind of damage on the ground, but this is no the movie to be asking those kinds of questions in.  The more important question is… WHO’S RESPONSIBLE!?  Well, government operative Jane Marke (Toni Collette) seems to have an idea of HOW if not exactly WHO as the government JUST SO HAPPENS to have some sort of box that serves NO OTHER PURPOSE than to drop satellites from the sky.  Okay… well the box is stolen by a bunch of badasses (Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone, Tony Jaa, and Michael Bisping) which means the government has to find an EQUALLY badass person to hunt them down; namely Xander Cage (Vin Diesel).  It doesn’t take long for Jane to recruit him for the mission, and he brings along a crew of people with a certain set of skills to help him out.  Adele the sniper (Ruby Rose), Tennyson the stunt driver (Rory McCann),a nd of course Nicks the DJ (Kris Wu) because apparently you need one of those for this kind of mission.  Can this rag tag crew of Gatorade chugging XTREME athletes save the world before the OTHER Gatorade chugging XTREME athletes destroy it?  What was the government planning to do with that ridiculously specific doomsday device anyway?  Most importantly, does Vin Diesel look cool in this?

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“Would you fuck me?  I’d fuck me.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Live by Night

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Live by Night and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Pictures

Directed by Ben Affleck

Look, we’ve ALL had a rough year, but let’s a take a moment to remember the less fortunate among us.  Ben Affleck somehow managed to be in a WORSE super hero movie than Daredevil; a movie made EVEN WORSE when compared to the brilliantly done Netflix series.  Not only that, but he’s roped himself into what SHOULD have been a sure bet franchise (how could they fuck up with characters like BATMAN!?) for the next decade or so which is probably gonna be longer than the current administration, provided he doesn’t change the rules and have to start calling him King or Führer.  I kid of course, but for someone who clawed his way back from obscurity the way Ben Affleck did, it’s kinda disheartening to watch him get stuck in the middle of that mess.  Oh well, at least he gets to make his own movies while Warner Bros tries to get its shit together.  Does this gangster flick that is MUCH more in the Affleck wheelhouse the kind of film we need right now, or is this the huge let down we all deserve?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows affable rogue Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) who’s some bank robbing punk in Boston that plays by his own rules and answers to no one!  Not even the two major mobs in the city, the Irish led by Albert White (Robert Glenister) and the Italians led by Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone), can seem to tame this wild beast!  Well… there is ONE person who’s thumb he’s under, and that’s his lady love Emma Gould (Sienna Miller) who JUST SO HAPPENS to also be one of Albert White’s mistresses.  Needless to say that shit goes down with Albert, and Joe is left for dead as is Emma who the movie ASSURES us is dead despite not bothering to show it (hm…) which means this movie is about one thing.  REVENGA!!  As soon as Joe is out of jail, he goes straight to Maso to work for him (giving up on his play by his own rules principals) to see if he can deliver Robert White on a silver platter.  Maso agrees, but in return Joe has to run his operation all the way in Florida for the foreseeable future which is where the majority of this movie takes place as the Boston stuff is pretty much an extended set up for the rest of the movie.  While there, he has to wrestle with the Cubans, the Klan, and religious nuts just to name a few in his hopes of keeping Maso happy enough to eventually deliver on his promise of dragging Albert White back out into the open.  During his stay in Florida, he’ll come across many friends like Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina) and Graciela Corrales (Zoe Saldana), as well as just as many enemies like scumbag klansman (but I repeat myself) RD Pruitt (Matthew Maher) or the really annoying preacher girl Loretta Figgis (Elle Fanning) who came to Jesus SUPER hard after getting off heroin.  Will Joe eventually get the REVENGA he’s so desperate for?  Will any of that even matter now that he’s building up this new life for himself?  Is this AT LEAST more cohesive than Batman v Superman?

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“So we buy this grocery on Fifth Street, and that will cut down on transportation since we would have an interim distribution center for our products.”     “And that’s gonna get me closer to Robert White, right?”     “What?  Oh right!  You’re still on about that?”

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Super Recaps: Dragon Ball Super Episode 2 (To the Promised Resort! Vegeta Takes a Family Trip?)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 2 Comments

Dragon Ball Super and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Toei Animation and licensed by Funimation

We’re back with another episode of Dragon Ball Z-2: Electric Boogaloo!  While the first episode didn’t quite get the ball rolling as much as it should have, there’s still a HUGE amount of potential for where this series can go.  Do they pick up the pace with episode two, or is it gonna take a bit longer for this series to find its groove?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with a recap of Beerus’s horrible destruction in the last episode (he may have only destroyed half of a planet but that doesn’t bode well for the OTHER half!) and Goku going off to visit King Kai now that he’s free from his familial responsibilities.  That doesn’t matter though because it’s VACATION TIME MOTHER FUCKERS!!  The Briefs family, which consists of Bulma, Vegeta, and Trunks, are heading out to a tropical resort to spend some quality time together and to hopefully get Vegeta to drop his scowl for maybe five seconds.  Too bad they couldn’t convince him to wear his pink shirt, though he probably had that destroyed several years ago.

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“How you doing up there buddy?”     “THE PRINCE OF ALL SAIYANS DOES NOT NEED YOUR CONCERN!!”     “Love you too dear!”

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Cinema Dispatch: Monster Trucks

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Monster Trucks and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures

Directed by Chris Wedge

Like alien crop circles and the Loch Ness Monster, this movie about trucks and the monsters that inhabit them remained a legend as the story behind it was ludicrous (some executive’s kid came up with the idea) and the release date kept being pushed back.  The day has finally come however for theaters to finally keep this around for maybe a week or two before it disappears forever and everyone forgets that they spent over a hundred million dollars on it.  Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh.  A troubled development doesn’t NECESSARILY mean the final product is going to be a mess, and maybe it will work better for the target audience than people give it credit for!  Will this be a film that lives up to the legend around it, or is this the last chapter in a long tale of infamy?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with some oil baron with a REALLY bad accent, Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) digging for that sweet bubbling crude right in the heart of Dakota, but they manage to hit something else instead.  Three monsters come out of the hole they drilled, and while they aren’t quite the heraldersof Cthulhu that you would expect from monsters that rise up from the Earth’s core, they still are gumming up the works for Reece’s operation.  Therefore, he orders all his hired goons which includes the head goon Burke (Holt McCallany) and The ScientistTM Dr. Dowd (Thomas Lennon) to round these creatures up and… do something with them.  One manages to escape however and finds its way to a junk yard MANY miles away where supposed high school student Tripp (Lucas Till) works at all the time; even on school nights.  He finds the creature and eventually finds that he JUST SO HAPPENS to like hanging out inside of his truck, so he modifies the it for his new monster buddy who he calls Creech to surreptitiously drive it with his Monster Magic.  Of course, things can’t quite go the way he wants them to as Burke is out there looking for the monster, his step dad Sheriff Rick (Barry Pepper) is already pissed at him for… reasons, and will probably do… something, and Reece is HELL BENT on killing all these monsters so he can get to the oil beneath… even though discovering monsters would probably net him just as much cash.  Can Tripp and Creech, along with the extraneous love interest Meredith (Jane Levy), save these monsters from the evil Rob Lowe?  What kind of hi-jinks and mischief, as well as felonies, can this lovable crew get involved with in the process?  Did Paramount REALLY have to sink a hundred million into this!?

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See, they had to spend EXTRA money to make a good truck look crappy!

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Super Recaps: Dragon Ball Super Episode 1 (A Peacetime Reward: Who Gets the 100,000,000 Zeni?)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

Dragon Ball Super and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Toei Animation and licensed by Funimation

As many of you might know, Dragon Ball Z was a HUGE part of my life and is one of the most important series to ever exist; not just for me but for an entire generation who grew up with these characters and what they represented.  Goku as the Super Man for the modern era who was always there when we needed him and has the biggest heart imaginable.  Vegeta as the manifestation of our own sense of pride and anger; reforming as the series goes on and always being taught the folly of his ways.  Gohan trying to live up to the legacy of his father and trying to find his place in the world while having more than enough potential to be whatever he wanted if he could just open up and tap into it.  These stories resonated with a lot of people, and while it wasn’t always great (it started fading fast during the Buu saga), it was always important, so bringing back an official series after so long is a pretty big deal; especially now that it’s back in the US with an official Funimation dub for old fans and new fans alike (though I’m PRETTY sure most who are gonna see this are in the former category) to enjoy the way we enjoyed DBZ back in the day.  First though, a mea culpa.  I had every intention of reviewing this series as it was originally coming out with the subs, but it became clear pretty quickly that I simply didn’t have enough time to devote a recap series of that in anything resembling a timely fashion, so I decided to wait until the dub was released and do a recap of that instead.  Seems appropriate though considering I’ve never known this series outside of the dubbed version, so why would I start watching the Japanese version now?  Sure… that will work as an excuse.  ANYWAY!  Does the return of Dragon Ball usher in a new era of anime once again ruled by Toriyama’s iconic series, or is this a desperate move to squeeze a few more dollars out of a dying cash cow?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with the new opening sequence which was specifically done for the English dub and as far as I can tell is just a cover of the song from the Japanese version of Super.  It’s honestly not that big of a deal for me considering that the openings and closings were never something that connected with me in the original series either like similar shows I love from that era (Yu Yu Hakusho, Case Closed, etc), so I’m not gonna knock points off just yet.  It looks cool at least featuring plenty of well-choreographed action, though I’m annoyed that we’re STILL going with the Chi-Chi as a nagging wife jokes in 2017… or whenever the hell this came out.  It couldn’t have been any earlier than 2015, right?  The opening also confirms we’re not picking up pretty much right after the Buu Saga, give or take a few years as Gohan looks like he’s out of high school but Goten is still rather young.

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THEY’RE BACK!  THEY’RE FINALLY BACK!!  NO, I’M NOT GETTING OLD!!

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Jumping the Soapbox: Games of 2016 (Part 2)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

Here we are with the second and final part of my look at games I played in 2016 (part 1 can be found here) that were interesting enough to talk about!  Like before, any game that I didn’t play on PC will be note specifically which platform I did play them on because it was way easier for me this year to play on my computer than to do so from a console.  I mean, I’m ALREADY sitting in from the damn thing most of the time!  Anyway, let’s not waste any more time and just get started! This is gonna be fun, right?

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Mr. President!

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Developed by Game Developer X

Sigh… You know, this game was a lot funnier when we weren’t months away from a tax payer funded Thunderdome or some asshole House Rep putting forth a Purge bill.  Still, the fact that Bossa Studios hasn’t jumped on this is kind of surprising as I was reminded of games like Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread while playing it even though it’s clunky and as all hell and riddled with poor design decisions.  The game’s primary purpose is political satire, so naturally the timing of the game’s release was just as important as making a good game, but behind all the frustrating elements and damn near impossible stages, there’s a brilliant physics based puzzle game to be made here.  I don’t know who Game Developer X is or if they’re even interested in this concept outside of its use as a political lightening rod, but I do want to see what they end up making next; whether it’s a refinement of this formula or if they’ll continue to push buttons with even zanier games.  If it’s the latter though, PLEASE let someone else make a sequel to this so we can see its full potential!

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Cinema Dispatch: The Bye Bye Man

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 2 Comments

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The Bye Bye Man and all the images you see in this review are owned by STX Entertainment

Directed by Stacy Title

See, I thought I wouldn’t have to talk about STX Entertainment again until that damn Mars YA movie finally came out (ENOUGH WITH THE TRAILER ALREADY!) but it looks like they’re here to fill the January Horror Movie quota which was met in previous years by gems such as The Forest, The Devil Inside, and Texas Chainsaw 3D.  Then again, The Boy came out in January of last year, and that was ALSO a film from STX Entertainment, so maybe there’s just a TINY bit of hope here.  Can STX pull off the impossible yet again and give us a January horror film that won’t embarrass the genre, or is this movie just as stupid as its title suggests?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins in the late sixties where a guy (Jonathan Penner) shoots a bunch of people because they had heard of THE BYE BYE MAN, which I’m sure was the most sensible solution to that problem.  Jump ahead five decades and we find ourselves in modern times where three college students, Elliot, John, and Sasha (Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, and Cressida Bonas), just moved into a new house off of campus and are cleaning up all the crappy furniture that the landlord left them.  Of course, one of the tables has something crudely etched on it that Elliot ends up reading.  Of course it’s the words THE BYE BYE MAN, and in doing so he… I guess invites The Bye Bye man to take permanent residence in his brain.  You know, at least when they summoned the deadites in Evil Dead, they had to read a WHOLE passage from an ancient Sumerian text instead of just a dumb name!  Anyway, the name eventually reaches his two roommates as well as some sort of psychic who is obvious slasher fodder (Jenna Kanell) and so The Bye Bye Man just starts messing with all their heads; making them see things that aren’t there and driving them more and more insane in the process.  Will the three of them find a way to get past this monster’s illusions before it makes them do something they’ll regret?  Why did that dude in the sixties end up shooting everyone who had heard of this… ghost, I guess?  Did anyone stop to read the script before filming this, or were they winging it the whole time?

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“Just watch it, don’t question it.  I wonder what that means…”

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