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
American Sniper is a biographical/action film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Jason Dean Hall. It’s about Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper and his tour in Iraq. The film is based off of the book of the same name.
The good; the movie does a good job of not focusing too much on war, we get enough flashbacks and time away from the middle east to balance out the intensity of fighting a war.
Bradley Cooper does a superb job as Chris Kyle. There’s a scene right at the beginning of the movie where he has to make a decision on who to shoot, Cooper does well in giving us the struggle that goes on inside of him. Then when he’s back home stateside we get the sense of him not belonging in civilian life, how difficult it is for him to adjust.
I believed that Cooper was Kyle throughout the film.
The action sequences are great. They aren’t overly bloody and gratuitous, but they’re appropriate for the horrors that go on in war.
Clint Eastwood knows how to direct conflicted characters, which makes his movies all the more compelling. Our main characters are developed and three dimensional, not these cardboard cut outs that pass for leading roles these days.
The audience at this screening was very well behaved, it was like a Christmas present to myself, everyone was attentive from the moment go until the end (oh the end credits, what a great tribute to Kyle’s life). This is how movies should be viewed in the theatres.
The bad; I’d have to place Sienna Miller here, it was unbelievable that she was pregnant. I found myself not connecting with the scenes she was in when Kyle was back home… maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be though?
Overall, I would go see American Sniper in the theatres. It’s only in limited release at the moment, but once it goes wide in January, go check it out. When they say all war movies are anti-war movies, this is the prime example. What’s more is that when you watch this film you’ll learn about an American Hero and the toll that took on his life.
Excellent film, I enjoyed every moment of it, bravo to Bradley Cooper, I might go as far to say I smell an Oscar nom.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the last installment in The Hobbit trilogy. It starts off where the last “film” left off, Bilbo witnesses Smaug incinerating Laketown while Thorin and his band of dwarves watch from the Lonely Mountain. Stuff happens and armies are amassed to take the treasures from Erebor. Friendships are tested, strengths are tested, skills are tested, computer capacity to render is tested and my interested is tested.
The good; the actors do a great job, Martin Freeman as Bilbo is wonderful, he brings a great humanity to the role. Ian McKellen as Gandalf is perfect, I can’t imagine anyone else for this role.
This film actually has stakes, Thorin’s obsession for the Arkenstone is both believe-able and tragically relate-able. The threat of life ending situations is actually realized in this final film, that’s what was missing from the previous installments.
The bad; the movie is basically battle porn. It’s scene upon scene of armies battling. It’s like a Michael Bay film (not a good thing) set in a fantasy realm. In the first five minutes of the film we get a climactic scene worthy of the third act… where do we go from here? Well, if it was like The Empire Strikes Back we’d focus on the inner character struggles and build up to a third act climax that deals with an emotional show down. Sadly in The Battle of the Five Armies the character stuff gets pushed aside with all the battle scenes upon battle scenes.
No more songs in this movie?? Ahem, lost opportunity.
Overall, catch it on tv or rent it to close the trilogy out.
Also, no talking during the movie.
If you live in Los Angeles, you may have noticed the food scene upping its game over recent history. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone as the diverse demographics are conducive to not only a wide variety of culinary palettes, but one of the biggest perks perks of living in a melting pot are the fusions of complementary flavors that push the boundaries of dishes you thought couldn’t be made better.
I used to in Santa Monica and was lucky enough to benefit from the food truck trend. If you head over to 31st and Ocean Park, you’ll see a variety of trucks serving anything but run of the mill food offerings from gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches to curry cheese fries. If there was a man to thank for the explosion of trucks that shattered the notion of mediocre food from roach coaches, it’s Roy Choi, and what could be better than his delicious food having a home at the Los Angeles International Airport?
In more recent media, if you’ve seen (and drooled while watching) the movie Chef, you’ll see why the residency makes sense. Any airport can have a McDonald’s or Starbucks, but bringing Roy Choi’s famous Korean taco fusion to the masses sends a bold message that Los Angeles is more than a home for sports teams, insufferable traffic, earthquakes, and the entertainment industry.
So if you’re looking for a reason to get to the airport earlier or dread layovers, maybe your next traveling experience will be more memorable after a bite of Kogi BBQ.
Source: Eater
The Living Sisters: Eleni Mandell, Becky Stark, Inara Geoge, Alex Lilly
I absolutely adore The Living Sisters. If you don’t know, they’re a supergroup of VERY talented artists with amazing voices that specialize in harmony. I played their first album “Love to Live” to death, but sort of struggled with their follow up release “Run For Cover” (maybe I just need to give it another chance?).
So they just released a holiday album (I can’t call it Christmas because there’s Hanukkah song) and I really recommend you check it out if you’re a skeptic about new holiday songs. The album also has 3 really great covers: Jingle Bells, Little Drummer Boy, and Silver Bells. I would even argue that their renditions are better than some of your favorites or original versions.
Let’s discuss the original tracks:
So check out this lovely album on your favorite streaming service or just buy it.