Cinema Dispatch: Live by Night

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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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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Cinema Dispatch: La La Land

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La La Land and all the images you see in this review are owned by Summit Entertainment

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Well this certainly jumped to everyone’s best of the year list, didn’t it?  Too bad I didn’t get to see it in 2016 as the wide release wasn’t until January, but hey, at least I get to see it AT ALL.  I mean who DOESN’T love song and dance numbers interwoven into a classic Hollywood love story, especially when it’s done as well as this one is supposed to be?  Does this manage to be a film for the ages like those it takes its greatest inspiration from, or is this a mere copycat that doesn’t have a true identity of its own?  Let’s find out!!

The movie takes place in present day Hollywood where we follow the struggling actress Mia (Emma Stone) and the struggling Jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they struggle their hearts out for their dreams and manage to find each other in the process.  While Emma wants to simply get her big break, Sebastian has much more specific aspirations as he wants to open his own Jazz club right in the heart of the city, which is gonna be difficult because he’s flat broke and can’t even keep a steady gig going because he doesn’t want to play the set list provided… because he’s an artist I guess.  Still, they manage to scrape by as they keep working towards their dreams while also putting on elaborate and non-diegetic song and dance numbers for our entertainment!  Will the realities of the business crush their spirits and drive them apart as more and more chances start to slip away?  Can a movie this unabashedly old fashion manage to work in a modern day context?  Did they manage to outdo Tarantino as far as movie references!?

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“What do you think?”     “It’s alright I guess.  Kinda derivative.”

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Cinema Dispatch: Hidden Figures

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Hidden Figures and all the images you see in this review are owned by 20th Century Fox

Directed by Theodore Melfi

FINALLY!  How long did we get trailers for this movie before they finally settled on a release date in January of all months!?  Well better late than never I suppose, and there’s been some seriously strong buzz prior to its nationwide release, so maybe the months of this trailer popping up in front of EVERY MOVIE will be worth it unlike other heavily promoted movies like The Secret Life of Pets.  Remember how many times they showed THAT trailer?  Almost ruined Downtown for me.  ANYWAY!!  Will this be a great way to start off this already rough year, or will this end up being a bigger let down than the Constellation program?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins in 1961 with three human computers (those were a thing apparently) who work at NASA but don’t quite get the credit they deserve for their work due almost entirely to them being women of color.  Our intrepid heroes are Katherine Goble (Taraji P Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), and they all get their chances to prove themselves once the government is gung ho about escalating the Space Race to beat the Russians to the moon!  Well… sort of.  Katherine gets assigned as a temp for the SUPER math department working with Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) who is an amalgam of three real NASA directors from that period of time, and Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) who is completely made up and pretty much just symbolic of crappy people that Katherine had to deal with.  Of course, she gets the grunt work, has to run to the colored restrooms (that was still a thing at the time) and was even given a separate coffee pot to use, despite the fact that she can number crunch circles around her coworkers.  Meanwhile, Dorothy is trying to get in on the ground floor of computing as the new IBMs are gonna make the human computers irrelevant at some point, and Mary is trying to be a full time engineer at NASA but is constantly hit with discriminatory roadblocks that make it that much harder for her to achieve her dreams.  None of that’s gonna stop ANY of these women though, as they’re smarter than everyone else and are out there to prove it!  Will they be able to get a proper seat at the table as everyone is working towards the launch of Freindship 7 and in doing so ensure that John Glenn makes it back to Earth safely!?  Well… okay, we KNOW that part considering he was still around as recently as a month ago, but that doesn’t make the journey any less compelling to watch!

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“If we hit this ramp fast enough, we can intercept the Friendship 7 and grab John before the whole thing explodes!”     “THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?”     “It’s all good!  I saw it in a Fast and the Furious movie!”

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Cinema Dispatch: Underworld: Blood Wars

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Underworld: Blood Wars and all the images you see in this review are owned by Screen Gems

Directed by Anna Foerster

They managed to fit both an Underworld sequel and the final Resident Evil movie in the same month!?  I mean sure, we’ve got a crappy horror movie and that Monster Trucks things as well, but way to step it up for January!  Okay so NEITHER franchise is what you’d call paragons of cinematic exceptionalism, but they’re both fun in their own right and I remember the last Underworld movie being the best so far which this is a direct sequel to.  Then again, the LAST direct sequel (Underworld Evolution) wasn’t a bright spot for the franchise, but maybe they’ve learned their lesson since then and can elevate this franchise to heights comparable to the MCU!  Okay, MAYBE that’s a bit hyperbolic, but at least it’ll probably be better than the DCCU.  Does this monster mash continue to kick ass and take names, or is this fifth entry the final stake through the heart that will finally kill this franchise?  Let’s find out!!

When we last left our fearless hero Selene (Kate Beckinsale) she had stopped some sort of plot by werewolves to kill all the vampires.  Standard stuff for this series, but the added twist was that Selene had a daughter… while she was in some sort of cryo-chamber or something.  Well this one picks up some time later where Selene has sent off her daughter to someplace that even SHE doesn’t know where so that she can be protected if the werewolves or the vampires want to use her super blood.  If you’ve been following these movies (or listen to the opening monologue that catches everyone up in this one), Selene and her one true love Michael (Sir Not Appearing In This Movie) are super special monsters; the latter because he’s half vampire half werewolf, and the former because… I honestly don’t recall.  I THINK it had to do with Evolution, but whatever.  The point is that Eve is the combination of a super vampire and a hybrid, so HER blood is AMAZING and everyone either wants a piece of Selene to get to her or they want her head on a stick because of all the super heroics she’s done previously, and this includes the vampires who are still salty about her cutting off half of Bill Nighy’s head that one time.  That said, even though I don’t remember the exact reason WHY that happened, I assume it was justified because it was Bill Nighy.  Alright, so that’s all the backstory leading into this movie, now what is the movie actually about?  Selene is given a chance to earn forgiveness from the vampires if she comes back and works as some sort of trainer for their raw recruits in their army which is of the utmost concern considering this damn war between the werewolves and vampires is starting to turn against them and they are desperate for anything that will help them turn the tide; even if it’s from the one who cut off Bill Nighy’s head.  The reason for this change of fortunes seems to be the werewolves’ new leader Marius (Tobias Menzies) who’s managed to corral them into an effective fighting force and also seems to be the primary one after Selene or Eve’s blood… for some reason.  Like I said, she’s a SUPER vampire now, so I’m sure the werewolves can figure out a good use for it!  Now with all that working against the vampires, including the fact that their basically down to two covens, you’d think they’d ACTUALLY work together, but unfortunately there are some bad apples there who are hoping to not only seize control of the coven, but frame Selene for awful crimes in the process.  Could it be returning characters David and Thomas (Theo James and Charles Dance), newcomers to the series Semira and Varga (Lara Pulver and Bradley James) or someone else that I won’t even name!?  What about those albino vampires that look like they’re stuck on top of a snowy mountain?  Where do they fit into all this?  The real question though is does ANY of this matter when you’ve got VAMPIRES SHOOTING MACHINE GUNS!?

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BANG-BANG-BANG!!

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