While Pitch Perfect had a modest box office gross, it received a much larger life in home video through word of mouth advertising by those who were pleasantly surprised at it’s funny lines and charming pop mashups. Considering Anna Kendrick’s “Cups” is still in regular rotation on top 40 stations, it’s not a surprise that a sequel was conceived.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a post apocalyptic action ride through Australia. This is the fourth Mad Max film and serves as a reboot, but also not really. The story and the characters stay the same, only the actors have changed. Max gets dragged into the middle of an uprising against a tyrannical leader in the midst of a vast desert. George Miller once again helms this film serving as the director and one of the writers (and yes he did direct Babe and Happy Feet). The film stars; Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is about our favorite superhero team venturing out on another mission to save the world, in this case, it’s a mechanized creation that that’s highly intelligent, highly resourceful, and highly charismatic. The film is written and directed by the great Joss Wheadon, and stars an all-star cast; Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Anthony Mackie, Hayley Atwell, Idris Elba, Stellan Skarsgård, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. It opened at $187.7 million this weekend.
Ex Machina is about a guy who’s working on creating the most advance artificial intelligence out there. He brings in an outsider to “test” his newest creation. The film is written and directed by Alex Garland, you may know him from 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Never Let Me Go.
Finally got around to seeing Chappie. After the critics panned it, and those great trailers, and the poor opening weekend, I waited and I waited, and waited…
Chappie is about a robotic police force in South Africa, but one of these robots gains sentience. Throw in a pair of rap/pop artists who play gangsters and Wolverine as the antagonist and that’s what you get.
Daredevil premiered on Netflix last week. Took me a while to get more than one episode in, but I’m liking it. For those who don’t know, Daredevil is about a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock (played by Charlie Cox) who lives in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. When he’s not practicing law he’s keeping the city safe by beating up bad guys.
Disney’s Frozen is nothing short of a hit. It had a terrific run at the box office, generated a ton of revenue (theaters, home video, and soundtracks), and it’s music has became an instant classic among fans. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a sequel is in the work.
While Pixar has managed to raise the bar with sequels (Toy Story/Monsters Inc), we’re a little skeptical about Disney Animation’s efforts (think Cars). Thankfully, the same team behind Frozen is on board (Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck) as well as Josh Gad (Olaf). There’s no date yet, although it seems Disney has it’s hands full already with with Star Wars and Marvel movies scheduled for us well beyond next year.
Source: Variety
The Chromecast may not be in every house yet. There’s plenty of competition from the likes of Apple TV, Roku, cable set top boxes, and home theater PC’s. One of it’s key advantages is price and ease of use.
After over a year of wait, Vimeo now has an easier way to get to your big screen. While there have been some workarounds, the official app (just iOS for now) now lets you cast Vimeo video to your TV.
I don’t use Vimeo much because I just generally prefer YouTube. It’s been available on my Roku forever, but browsing videos on that interface isn’t always that great.
So now that it’ll be easier to watch original shows like “High Maintenance” on your TV.
Chromecast support is currently limited to iOS devices right.
Source: Vimeo
McFarland, USA is a sports drama that based on the true story of the McFarland high school cross country team. The team is made up of Mexican-Americans and they’re the underdogs in a more privileged sporting event. The film is directed by Niki Caro and stars Kevin Costner as Jim White, the white coach that brings this Mexican-American team together.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is about a super secret spy group comprised of gentleman whose codenames are that of the Knights of the Roundtable. They’re on a mission to stop Samuel L. Jackson as he lisps his way to mass genocide, throw in slick action sequences and over the top violence with an underdog recruit, and that’s what we have here.
The good; the movie is just fun, it knows what it is and goes with it, meaning, it self references itself and almost winks at the audience. From the opening credits, you know what you’re getting.
The movie is rated R and it really earned a hard R rating. But back to being fun, it’s everything we’ve grown to know about Mark Millar (who wrote the graphic novel the film is based on), he takes a teenage boys’ angst and cathartically channels it through media. Gary “Eggsy” Unwin is recruited by agent Harry Hart to be a Kingsman, Eggsy is the typical teenage male with a chip on his shoulder, but through this training he learns to shot guns and kill the bad guys, what boy doesn’t want that??
Eggsy is played by Taron Egerton, and he does a great job carrying this movie. I’ve never seen Egerton in anything else, to me he’s an unknown, Matthew Vaughn took a gamble casting him in the lead role for this movie, and it paid off.
Harry Hart is played by Colin Firth, a job well done playing the gentleman spy/agent/killer. Mark Strong as a mentor is a nice change of pace, really compliments the who group.
The bad; other than Mark Millar’s creative works being made by the devil spawn that is 20th century fox international distribution management…
There were some bad effects shots. They probably had to trim the budget in certain areas, but it was the small stuff that stuck out. Put aside the over the top violence, I’m talking stuff that you don’t normally take a second glance at, but when done hap-hazardly sticks out. The example that comes to mind is the brick wall in the elevator in to the secret chamber, obvious green screen. And some of the shots when the private plane lands in the mountain headquarters… just odd.
*SPOILERS* Oh and there’s a thing that happens with President Obama in this movie that felt… wrong. I get it that all the world leaders are in on the devious plot, but we should’ve seen some of the others suffering from the same fate. It just didn’t sit with me very well, hahaha, I guess I am patriotic. *END SPOILERS*
I haven’t read the source material, but I was hoping that the movie would be about a group of gentleman secret agents fighting the bad guys in tailored suits, oh well.
Overall, very fun, there hasn’t been a fun secret agent movie in a while. Kingsman does a great job in being meta and calling out that “this isn’t that type of movie,” where villains spout off their entire plan while they have the hero captured. The casting is brilliant. The action is sublime. The suits are tailored.
Oh and there’s a scene at a Kentucky church where things go extremely wrong and agent Hart is in the middle of it, he does something very irredeemable and pays the price. It’s shocking but yet justified, bravo for that.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cover to a song we all know, but it’s a great cover.
The Super Bowl is an interesting event in that the NFL managed to attract a higher volume of viewers that don’t care about the actual main event. Think about other events. Is anyone watching PGA tournaments for commercials? Think you’d tune into the Oscars if you never watched any of the movies that were nominated? Indeed the power of advertising has turned the Superbowl into a platform for companies to pour huge amounts of their budget into capturing the short attention of audiences. In many cases the products or services being advertised are completely unrelated to football (I’d bet the average football fan has little use for domain services like GoDaddy). But what makes some ads more memorable than others?
Advertisers enlisted the talents and imagery of some of the best iconic characters in pop culture this year. One of my favorites was the Walter White Esurance ad. This didn’t feel like a subtle tribute to Breaking Bad, this was Heisenberg in a deleted scene giving a comedic performance. If you didn’t watch Breaking Bad (why wouldn’t you?!?), you probably didn’t care for the commercial or even recognize one of the biggest lines “Say my name”. As a late-but-passionate fan of Breaking Bad, the concept felt like a home run as the show has forever created a footnote in history of the (elicit) pharmaceuticals industry.
The Mindy Kaling commercial was also a hit for me. If you watch her show, you’ll know how caught up her character is in her image. Seeing Mindy Kaling run through a car washer, eat ice cream from the tub, and sunbathe nude in a park all seem like plausible scenes if she were to be granted the power of invisibility. Again, this context makes the commercial appealing. The impact simply would not be there if Nationwide were to use an anonymous face.
Probably the most surprising ad came from Clash of Clans maker, Supercell. The ad shows Liam Neeson enraged at another gamer, acting his best like Taken character, Bryan Mills. Like the Esurance ad, we’re transported to a character’s world. It’s easy to wonder if Hollywood has already conceived the plot of Liam Neeson getting revenge on a troll.
So what’s different between these loveable ads and the loathsome ones I endure on Hulu or live TV? It seems like they connect so much better with the viewers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the same boring Disneyworld ad on Hulu while watching “Mindy Project” or “Jane the Virgin”. Just imagine if services could get people excited for ad supported content the way they do for the Super Bowl. Isn’t it reasonable to think Hulu could just run the Esurance ad for the “Mindy Project”? Hulu could at least mix up the commercials a little bit. If I’m paying for content that’s ad supported, at least show me some really entertaining ads.
It’s been over a week since Wavelength launched and it seems the new “social” Ultraviolet service is off to a rough start. I’m not sure you can call their beginning a start as I was never able to experience any of Wavelengths promised features due to their site having trouble keeping up with the high traffic once folks became aware of it.
The first somewhat alarming flag I noticed while registering was a prompt to enter your Vudu login. That seemed a little odd considering Vudu itself is just another gateway to the Ultraviolet service like Flixster and even M-GO. Why would Wavelength need access to my Vudu account if my Vudu account has titles that aren’t Ultraviolet?
Wavelength seemed to crop up out of no where and I suspect they may have put the cart in front of the horse. Perhaps an initial invite only launch would have kept their service, which seems to skirt around the terms of service for Ultraviolet, under the radar more.
Ulltraviolet could really leverage Wavelength as a marketing tool to help debunk myths that the nearly universal cloud service is as easy to use as its hard core users try to pitch it as. Until then, we’ll have to patiently wait for wavelength to sort, what I assume, its legality issues out.
It also remains unknown if Wavelength is planning any connected apps for devices like game consoles and the Roku. One of Vudu’s strengths as an Ultraviolet provider is their high bitrate video and surround sound that really makes watching movies immersive. While having access to our friends’ collections is swell, I’d much rather watch movies on an actual home theater than my computer screen.
In the meantime, don’t forget to link your Disney Anywhere account to your Vudu and Google Play account to maximize/consolidate your digital locker collection.
Source: Wavelength