Cinema Dispatch: Rings

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 2 Comments

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

Directed by F Javier Gutiérrez

What in the hell took them so long with this!?  Not only is this coming out over a decade since the last one, this one has been pushed back at least three times from its initial release date in November 2015 which is only a few months shy of Monster Trucks’s unimaginably long delay, and we all know how THAT turned out!  Then again, no one was stupid enough to mortgage their studio on THIS film, but I’m not all that optimistic either way.  There’s a hell of a lot going against this movie even before it was pushed back several times, so unless we’ve got the next  Fede Álvarez helming the damn thing, I don’t think there’s much hope of this being even halfway decent; otherwise they wouldn’t have waited until February to dump it on theaters.  All that said, you never know!  Hell, even Monster Trucks managed to be a LITTLE bit of fun, and it’s not like the first film was a sure thing either being a remake of a well-known Japanese horror film!  Maybe there’s something to this that the studios just didn’t see!  Yeah… that’s a bit of a long shot, BUT let’s find out anyway!

So if you’ve seen the trailers, it turns out they don’t actually tell you ANYTHING about the plot of the movie as they basically consist of the cold opening and the last five minutes.  What’s REALLY going on here is that Julia (Matilda Lutz) is a woman dating some dude who went off to college named Holt (Alex Roe) and she ends up worrying about him after he stops taking her calls.  Now in the REAL world this would mean that he’s found some campus squeeze, but instead she finds out that the Biology professor named Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) has him and a WHOLE bunch of other students working on some sort of study into a magic video tape that kills whoever watched it after seven days.  That is, unless the person makes a copy of the video and has someone else watch it, in which case the seven day curse resets and is put on the next person.  It’s not clear exactly what Gabriel’s end goal is here, but shit goes to hell when one of the students dies from Samara’s wrath (the ghost from the other Ring films) and it leaves Holt hanging who need someone to watch his copy soon.  Julia volunteers herself as tribute, but something goes wrong as the video is different, she can’t make a copy herself, and she gets some weird scar on her hand that no one else has gotten.  Clearly Samara is changing the rules on them, so the only way to stop her once and for all is to solve the mystery of what happened to her and why she’s so damn pissed!  No, not the mystery from the FIRST film!  This is a whole NEW mystery about her past that no one bothered to mention until now!  Can Julia and Holt figure out… whatever it is they need to figure out, before it’s too late?  Did Gabriel learn anything USEFUL by messing with the ghost for this long?  So can she just come through ANY screen now; even ones that aren’t TVs?  I wonder what would happen if she haunted a 3DS…

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“These fifty inch TVs are really nice!  So much roomier!”

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The NekoCon Diaries 2016: VOCAMERICA

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The biggest event at NekoCon this year (even more so than Mike McFarland!) has to have been the VOCAMERICA concert; the first (relatively) major Vocaloid concert made entirely by Western producers.  Sure, we’ve had Miku Expo here in the US for a few years now, but that was part of a bigger worldwide tour and frankly there are so few shows they have in the US that it’s almost impossible for most Vocaloid fans to go without a WHOLE lot of cash to drop on it.  VOCAMERICA is still small so the accessibility issue is still there, but if this gets enough momentum going, it could be the start of something that may never eclipse Hatsune Miku in terms of popularity but can be enjoyed by more fans of the genre; especially those outside of major cities.  Some of you may be wondering, just what IS a Vocaloid and who is this Hatsune Miku person?  Okay, if you’re reading this to begin with, you PROBABLY aren’t asking those questions, but let’s answer them anyway!

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Super Recaps: Riverdale Chapter 2 (A Touch of Evil)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

Riverdale and all the images you see in this recap are owned Warner Bros Television Distribution and The CW

Episode directed by Lee Toland Krieger

We’re back with another episode of Riverdale: The Next Generation!  Now the first episode didn’t give me a WHOLE lot of hope that this is gonna resemble the original comics in the least, and adding some questionable subplots and story decision on top of that only lessened my enthusiasm.  Still, Betty and Veronica are great and Cheryl is fun if completely over the top and goofy, so there are definitely some things to like about it and room to grow as the series goes along.  Does this episode build off of what was good in the first one, or are we already getting the best that this series can offer?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with Jughead Marlowe as he narrates to us the events of the last episode with that same pulpy film noir style that continues unabated from the last episode.  Raymond Chandler, this guy is not, BUT it at least adds SOMETHING to the standard PREVIOUSLY ON recap that you see in front of shows like this and we also get a few details on what has happened since last time.  What DID happen last time anyway?  Well it turns out that the body of Cheryl Blossom’s brother Jason finally washed up on shore but it has a bullet hole right between the eyes which points to MURDER instead of merely an accident which is what Cheryl has been telling the police this whole time (the boat tipped over and he drowned) so I’m sure they’ll be wanting another chat with her sometime soon.  Of course, there’ still one piece of the puzzle that the cops aren’t aware of yet and that’s the secret Archie is hiding from everyone.  On The Fourth of July which is the day that Jason went missing, he was at the river where Cheryl and Jason were, and while he didn’t SEE anything, he definitely heard a gunshot.  However, he hasn’t told anyone yet because he was with his WAY older music teacher Miss Grundy (you can read my recap of episode one if you want my thoughts on THAT situation) and she’s convinced him that he can’t go the police.  Of course, finding out that Jason bid farewell to this cruel world with the help of Smith & Wesson isn’t making it any easier to keep this secret from eating away at his hunky insides.

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“All this deception is making my abs sad…”

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Cinema Dispatch: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

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Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and all the images you see in this review are owned by Screen Gems

Directed by Paul WS Anderson

It has been quite a ride, hasn’t it?  I’ve always been a fan of Paul WS Anderson and his work, especially considering that he’s the only director other than Uwe Bowl who’s attempted to make more than one video game movie and is the one who ACTUALLY made it work.  People STILL say that we don’t have any good video game movies, but what they really mean is that there hasn’t been one that’s been critically acclaimed, and even THAT criterion is rather nebulous.  So what if Resident Evil or Mortal Kombat didn’t win Oscars?  Neither did Taxi Driver or Dr Strangelove!  It truly is the end of an era though considering how few franchises from the early years of the new millennium are still around, recent revivals like xXx non-withstanding, and there really isn’t anything like it to take its place now that it’s over.  Hell, this series DARED to be different from the source material which I can’t imagine ANY film getting away with now considering everything is about franchise management nowadays!  It’s kind of a sad day to see this series go, though it will be doubly so if this final chapter turns out to be a poor note to end things on.  Does Mr. Anderson manage to give us one hell of a sendoff to this beloved series, or has this franchise finally run out of steam right as it was about to reach the finish line?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with the world having ended for at least the second time and Alice (Milla Jovovich)  is all alone in the wastelands of what the world once was.  Of course, being the savior of all humanity that she is, someone eventually comes a-knocking for her to be the big hero once again.  This time, it’s… THE RED QUEEN!?  Yes!  The AI from the other films (played this time by Ever Gabo Anderson) that has been trying to kill her apparently wants to help her because Wesker (oh, spoiler alert: Wesker’s a bad guy again and is still played by Shawn Roberts) is just forty eight hours away from wiping out ALL of humanity and Alice has to stop him before then!  How?  Well apparently Umbrella developed an antidote for the T-Virus that no one bothered to mention up to this point and if she can release it into the world in time, all the zombies will die and humanity will be saved!  Of course, the antidote (along with Wesker) is all the way back in Raccoon City so she has to travel back there, go back to the secret underground Umbrella base, and punch as many zombies as possible in the process!  Can Alice save the world one last time before it’s too late, by which I mean the Resident Evil film rights expire?  What exactly brought upon this change of heart from the Red Queen, and could this all be one giant trap to finally destroy her one true enemy?  So wait, did she get her powers back or is she still human Alice?

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Practical?  Not really.   Awesome?  ABSOLUTELY!

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The NekoCon Diaries 2016: Anime, Feminism, and You!

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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So there were a few more panels this year that I didn’t talk about in my earlier pieces, and the reason why is that they covered topics that I wanted to go into with a bit more depth and nuance than I did with the others.  We’ll cover VocAmerica next time, but for now I think it’s time we had a talk about sexism in anime.  Now keep in mind that this is all my own recollections and interpretations of what was discussed at these panels, and my opinion should not be taken in isolation.  There are PLENTY of people who talk about these subjects with much more authority and eloquence than I could possibly muster.  Let’s get started!!

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Super Recaps: Riverdale Chapter 1 (The River’s Edge)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 4 Comments

Riverdale and all the images you see in this recap are owned Warner Bros Television Distribution and The CW

Episode directed by Lee Toland Krieger

The day has finally arrived for Archie and the gang to get their grim and gritty reboot that I’m SURE at least one person out there was asking for!  Alright, the trailers didn’t give me a whole lot of hope for this series considering it looked more like The Vampire Diaries than its source material, but adapting ANYTHING from one medium to another does require there to be some changes, so I’m more than willing to give this a shot even if my expectations have been lowered based on what I’ve seen so far.  Does the pilot manage to assuage my fears and deliver on the legacy that these characters have, or is this a subpar teen drama with Archie branding splattered all over it?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with narration by Jughead (Cole Sprouse) that reminds me more of an embittered noir detective rather than the easy going burger chomping bro who inexplicably wears a crown, but at least it’s better than whatever the hell they were doing with him in the LAST live action adaptation.  At the very least, he does provide us a bit of backstory as the all the interesting stuff seemed to have already happened before we go here.  So what DID happen?  Back on The Fourth of July, the Blossom twins, Cheryl and Jason (Madelain Petsch and Trevor Stines) pulled a James Franco and went off to do something dangerous without letting anyone know and apparently without any cellphones.  The dangerous act in question turns out to be an early morning boat ride on the Riverdale River (I assume that’s what it’s called) where they don’t even bother to bring safety equipment or even life jackets.  Then again, I assume those would be ripped off right away ALONG WITH ALL THEIR CLOTHES.

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“Did we really need to get a boat to do this?  We could have just driven to a motel or something.”

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Super Recaps: Archie: Return to Riverdale

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Archie: Return to Riverdale and all the images you see in this recap are owned by NBC

Directed by Dick Lowry

I was given my first Archie Double Digest by my grandma as reading material for a field trip I was taking in Middle School.  Seems apropos considering I had discovered Calvin and Hobbes on her book shelf, and sure enough I was hooked right away.  Now this was ALSO a time in my life where I didn’t have disposable income, so I couldn’t get as many books as I had hoped, but those characters are still endearing to me to this day and I’ll try to catch up on them every once in a while.  A somewhat foolish endeavor considering how dense the continuity is and the breadth of the content there is out there, but it’s certainly better than trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Marvel or DC at any given time.  Now were on the cusp of the CW series Riverdale which I will absolutely be recapping even if the trailers haven’t inspired a whole lot of hope for me.  Seriously, WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE IT’S GONNA BE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, AND WHY IS MISS GRUNDY A HOT TWENTY FIVE YEAR OLD MUSIC TEACHER!?  That’s all for another day however, as I have something else to show you right now!  Did you know that the CW series isn’t the first time that Archie has been in Live Action!?  In 1990, NBC premiered a Made for TV movie called Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again which was shortened to Archie: Return to Riverdale when it was released on VHS.  I just so happened to find this thing in a Goodwill about a month ago, as if by fate.  Like this was in my destiny or something!  Is it any good?  Well let’s find out!!

The movie takes place fifteen years after the events of… let’s say MOST of the books.  For the most part, Archie is a high school student , and while there are plenty of books out there about him AFTER high school such as the reboot of Life with Archie also known as Archie: The Married Life, if you go to the grocery store and pick up a Double Digest, the dude is gonna be racing to his math class and drinking milkshakes at Pop’s Diner.   We basically get a montage of the three main characters in this, Veronica Lodge (Karen Kopis), Betty Cooper (Lauren Holly), and of course Archie Andrews (Christopher Rich), who are all preparing for their fifteen year high school reunion; the former two by the way are PARTICULARLY excited to see the latter despite Betty already having a boyfriend and Veronica having been recently divorced.  Could you blame them?  I mean, look at the guy!

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How long did it take you to get that dye job?  Ah hell, I can’t really blame him for wanting to look his best when he’s got two sweethearts waiting for him, now can I?

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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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