Tag: Alan Ritchson

Cinema Dispatch: Fast X

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Fast & Furious as a franchise has been quite the ride with one of the more bizarre gear shifts that any franchise has gone through. Sure, the series was always ridiculous, but the change in scope from simple street racers to international super spies has given the series a lot of room to experiment and hone in on its core appeals. For all the jokes we make about Vin Diesel’s bottomless well of familial aphorisms, the cast is really what keeps it compelling enough for audiences to return year after year. Still, all good things must come to an end and it’s been stated that this is part of a two-part finale for the main series before it gets spun off into side projects like the already-released Hobbs & Shaw and the long-awaited female-led movie. Does this penultimate feature set us on the path to a graceful ending, or will the series crash and burn right before it hits the finish line? Let’s find out!!

Life for Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family has been going smoothly since they saved the world and turned his brother Jakob (John Cena) back to the good side, but after living such an extreme life and crossing so many paths, can he ever truly hope to live peacefully with his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and his son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry)? Well not if Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) has anything to say about it! Yes, it looks like the criminal mastermind that Dom and his crew robbed and killed back in Fast 5 had a son and he’s come back after all this time to exact his revenge and starts by taking on Cipher (Charlize Theron) and stealing her tech which allows him to play with Dom and his crew like a cat plays with its food. After orchestrating a disaster in Rome with Dom and his crew in the center of it, they all end up on the Most Wanted list, and Roman, Tej, Ramsey, and Han (Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Sung Kang) are forced to go into hiding while Dom tracks down this new threat to end his reign of terror and clear his family’s name. Can Dom reckon with his past and come out the other side unscathed? What does Dante truly want out of all of this, and is the answer more terrifying than Dom could ever imagine? Will we ever learn the secret to Dom’s barbeque chicken, or does that come with its own convoluted backstory as well?

“It all started thirty years ago today.” “Come on, man. You’re just supposed to say grace.”
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Jumping the Soapbox: Teen Titans NO! – The Titans Trailer and Toxic Fandom

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Titans and Teen Titans Go are owned by Warner Bros Television Distribution and DC Entertainment

All other copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

It’s that time of year again where Hollywood sprinkles a dash of hype here and a pinch of news there right in the middle of San Diego for the yearly celebration of fandom known as Comic Con!  What does this mean for everyone who CAN’T book a ticket for California and drop ridiculous amounts of money on hotel rooms and cab rides?  Why trailers of course!  And this year we start the event off with something BIG!  DC and Warner Bros have been teasing us with a new Teen Titans live action show for some time now, and they’ve finally released the first trailer for it!  Let’s see how far we can get into this before I find something to criticize!

*ONE SECOND IN*

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Explicit language, adult themes, and violence.  Well those are certainly the first three things I associate with these characters!!

NOPE!  Sorry, DC and Warner Bros!  You couldn’t have missed the point harder if you actually FOUND the point and then threw it into the Mariana Trench so that no one could ever find for all eternity!  Now look, I don’t want this to be a rant about COMIC BOOK ACCURACY (mostly because I’ve never read a Teen Titans book) or about how it doesn’t match my nostalgia for that original Teen Titans cartoon (something we’ll talk about soon enough).  No, my problem is that this trailer is cynical garbage.  It’s a list of bad ideas that you could only make if you were TRYING to be this awful, and maybe in a cynical way that’s what they’re going for here.  It’s no accident that the trailer takes great pains to show you Robin straight up murdering dudes (he stomps that dudes’ neck, shoots a gun, and gushes someone like a sprinkler; I don’t care if they explain in the show that they were “just injured”) and to also have him shout FUCK BATMAN while covered in blood.  This is what a very immature person sees as COOL and MATURE (never mind that maturity is not the ability to withstand and consume dark material but to learn to empathize with your fellow people and take responsibility for yourself and those you care about) and it hews far too closely to the toxic nightmare that comic fandom has become in recent years (or at least has revealed itself to be now that its victims have platforms available to them).  Who would want to see Robin snap someone’s neck or Starfire set criminals on fire?  Probably the same “upstanding folks” who wanted Batman to kill people and are yelling at everyone about a Snyder Cut.

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Damn you, Frank Miller!  Will your awful influence on the Super Hero genre ever come to an end!?

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Cinema Dispatch: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and all the images you see in this review are owned by Paramount Pictures

Directed by Dave Green

The first Bay-Turtles movie was pretty damn awful.  Maybe not as bad as the WORST Transformers film, but certainly no better than the arguably best one (Marky Mark for the win).  With this one though, there seems to be a conscious effort to integrate more of what people ACTUALLY liked about the cartoon and incorporate it into the Bay-Turtles universe, so maybe a middle ground can be struck here between big budget extravagance and nostalgic sincerity.  Does this manage to AT least be better than the first one?  Let’s find out!!

The movie picks up some time after the first one with the Turtles (Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, and Alan Ritchson) continuing their hero shtick in the shadows while Vernon (Will Arnet) is taking all the credit for defeating Shredder (now Brian Tee instead of Tohoru Masamune) and putting him in Jail.  Eric Sacks by the way is not even mentioned here.  At first they made him NOT The Shredder, and now they’ve retconned him out of existence!  The turtles are restless about all the lack of kudos they get or kicking so much ass, but those concerns will be secondary soon enough as Shredder escapes jail with the help of Super Nerd Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry) and recruits two new soldiers in his army in the form of Bebop and Rocksteady (Gary Anthony Williams and Stephen Farrelly AKA Sheamus) so that they can build a teleporter device that will bring Krang (Brad Garrett) and The Technodrome into our world.  Oh, and I’m pretty sure April O’Neil (Megan Fox) is around doing something.  So is Casey Jones (Stephen Amell).  ANYWAY!  Can the turtles stop Shredder from his latest evil schemes?  Will they do as the title says and come out of the shadows to stop this latest threat?  Seriously, how much longer before they do a crossover?

 

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“Can you say… CHA-CHING!?”     “COWABUNGA DUDE!!”

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