Tag: Vincent D’Onofrio

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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Jumping the Soapbox: 10 characters that should be in Marvel vs Capcom Infinite

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Marvel vs Capcom Infinite and all the images you see in this editorial are owned by Disney, Marvel, and Capcom

So with the announcement of a new fighting game, particularly one that has as much fan service potential as this one, the number one question on everyone’s mind is who they’ll be adding to the roster.  Well, since I have my own little platform to scream from, here’s my list of the ten characters they should add to the new game!  Oh, and if you notice a lack of Capcom characters on this list, well you should probably read what I wrote about the game’s reveal trailer.

Honorable Mention: Agents of Shield Stage

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Look, I love Coulson too, but the characters in this show don’t have enough going for them to take up a spot in this game.  All together though, there’s definitely enough there for a really cool stage on the Globemaster where you could have Coulson and Melinda cheering on the action while Leo and Jemma are doing science stuff or whatever.  That’d be pretty cool to see, and they’d be able to fit all sorts of Easter Eggs in the background for the big Agents of Shield fans out there!  You’re not gonna be able to fit everyone from the MCU in here as playable characters, nor should you, but there are still plenty of ways for them to be a part of this game otherwise.

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Cinema Dispatch: The Magnificent Seven

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Magnificent Seven and all the images you see in this review are owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia Pictures

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

The original Magnificent Seven is a movie that’s on my depressingly large list of movies that I really should see at some point and unfortunately I didn’t get around to it before this remake came out.  That said, the premise isn’t all that hard to grasp and it’s definitely trying to reach a new young audience if the advertisements are anything to go on.  That and the addition of Chris Pratt doesn’t hurt either as the guy couldn’t be hotter with the younger demographics after star turning roles in Guardians of the Galaxy as well as Jurassic World.  Does this reinterpretation of one of the most classic stories of all time turn out to be a modern day classic, or is it doomed to live in the shadow of its predecessor?  Let’s find out!!

The movie begins with the town of Rock Ridge… I mean Rose Creek, being under siege from the EVIL rich guy Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) who wants to drive everyone out of there so he can mine the shit out of the place for gold and other valuable resources.  After burning down the local church and killing a few of the locals, they realize they can’t handle this on their own and they need some help.  After all, they worked too damn hard killing off all the Native Americans to build this town on their land for some rich asshole to take it all away from them!  Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) who is the widow of one of the dead guys goes to a nearby town with her friend Teddy (Luke Grimes) to find some tough guys to chase Bart’s friends out of town!  For their efforts, they find the bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) who then helps them gather the rest of the crew which includes the Chris Pratt archetype Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), an old-timey sniper Goodnight Robicheux (Ethan Hawke), his best buddy with the kick ass name Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), a wild mountain man Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), some random outlaw Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Ruflo), and a Comache hunter Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).  Now all of them have their own reason for taking on such an impossible task (some less plausible than others as I still have no idea what Red Harvest is after), but it’s not going to be an easy fight as they’ve got an army to go up against and they have maybe a few dozen farmers to train up and give them support once the shit hits the fan.  Can this town be saved from the onslaught of Bart’s men?  Why exactly did Sam accept this job in the first place, and could he have ulterior motives?  Who thinks they’re gonna accurately predict which ones will die?  Think you can do better than me!?

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For the record, two of my guesses were right!

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Cinema Dispatch: Jurassic World

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 4 Comments

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Jurassic World and all the images you see in this review are owned by Universal Pictures.

Directed by Colin Trevorrow

Two hundred MILLION dollars in the opening weekend!?  Oh I’m, sorry that FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS when you include the international box office.  What exactly about this movie (other than it being a new entry in a franchise that has nostalgic appeal to multiple generations of people) could bring in that kind of cash!?  Jurassic Park was never really that important of a franchise for me (only got through the first one and half of the second one) which means this movie was barely on my radar.  The only thing that caught my attention was Star Lord driving a motorcycle with his personal posse of velociraptors (and of course this amazing gif).  Needless to say, the movie caught my attention after everyone starting to go nuts over it, so I went ahead and saw the damn thing to find out what the fuss is about.  Now big box office numbers are never a reliable indicator of quality (just look at the Transformers films) but there was still a bit of optimism what with the decent trailers and the undeniable coolness of dinosaurs WITHOUT feathers.  Also, Chris Pratt.

No matter what it is, just keep running.  Dinosaurs, cops, Parks and Rec fans, doesn’t matter.
No matter what it is, just keep running.  Dinosaurs, cops, Parks and Rec fans, doesn’t matter.

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