I've Moved!

Due to some of the better features, I've decided to move my site to tickettravelerreviews.wordpress.com. The site should look cleaner and shouldn't have the text formatting issues that I've had.

Sucktastic 4

If you think you want to see the Fantastic Four, just don't bother. The first ten to fifteen minutes are mildly entertaining and the rest is just a joke.  It could have been a good movie, if, as a friend pointed out, it wasn't for the bad script, bad acting, bad graphics, bad direction, and bad storyline. 

The acting was simply attrocious. No one had chemistry and everything was wooden. The characters were cliche at best and it felt as if they were trying too hard, and just failed. The "end battle" was anti climactic and seemed to take only a half a minute. 

The graphics were cartoonish - even by the standards of Bugs Bunny.  When Reed is clamped down in the Area 57 room, he was "stretched out" and you could clearly see when his own arm ended and the graphic stretch began.  The other dimensional world looked extremely fake and the fire on Johnny Storm was really weird looking. 

The script tried to be funny but wasn't and jumped around all over the place with boring conversation and no character development. It felt like someone was trying to outline a film and forgot to put it all in.  The line delivery was terrible as well. Ben Grimm should have been a primary character and seemed rather secondary.  I didn't feel invested in the story at all.  

My friend mentioned that it felt like a SyFy channel movie. The only difference, I added, was that SyFy didn't try to take itself so seriously.

This is further proof that Fox is only good at X-Men and needs to hand the rights to Fantastic Four back over to Marvel.  Even though Marel had a logo on there and Stan Lee was listed as a producer, it was not a true Marvel Studio or MCU film.

Congratulations, Fantastic Four, you get worst movie of the year to date!

As my friend put it on our way out of the theater, the original cast of the Fantastic Four probably got together to watch it and laugh! (And we wouldn't blame them a bit!)

Minions - Letting Down More than Villains

I'm not sure what I expected when I went to see the new Minions movie.  What I got wasn't what I signed up for.  At best, the movie was fair to okay.  I usually walk out of movies hyped about what I've just seen.  When I left the Minions movie, I wondered why they bothered to make it.  Then I realized what it was: all the really funny parts were in the trailer.  Yeah there were "cute" parts but the more it went on, the more I just wondered when it was going to get good.

The beginning was funny, but again, most of it was in the trailer and they only expanded some of the scenes rather than adding more.  A warning, if you don't like or appreciate the 1960s, or making fun of Britain or British culture, then you won't like this.

I kept wondering why the movie was such a disappointment and what I really expected.  I guess I really expected a heist movie, based on the trailer.  I expected to see a lot of scenes of them trying to get to the queen's crown in the Tower - as suggested by the trailer - and see lots of the minions at work.  That would have been funny.  But just having those three as the only minions wasn't as funny as it could have been.  Quite frankly, as I watched the little clips in the credits, I thought that train of thought would have made a better movie than what I had just seen.

It really is a shame.  I love Despicable Me one and two, and I was really looking forward to this movie, but the plot was blah and they just seemed to do the same jokes over and over (someone can count how many cups of tea each British person drinks).  It seemed that they tried to cram so many tropes into the movie, that it just became too much.  I usually like Sandra Bullock, but her character was typical and flat.  I really wasn't invested in any of the characters except Bob.

If you decide to see it, then don't bother with watching it in 3D.  There were only two moments that I can remember that were truly well-utilized by the 3D element and they didn't last more than a couple of seconds each.

While I would welcome another "Despicable Me", I think we need to dispense with the Minion movie idea.  They work well as they were intended, but not within their own movie.

Jurassic World: A Thrilling New Tail of Terror!

      

This movie has dinosaurs.  If you see it, I don't want to hear anything about it "not being believeable" that people would go to a park after all that's happened.  In fact, let's be real.  If by some miralce we found live dinosaurs today, I know quite a few people who would go who have seen the Jurassic Park movie lots of times.  So get off that train (or in this case, geosphere) and let's claw into this film!

The film isn't perfect, but dude, RESPECT!  The new Indominous Rex was the absolutely most terrifying creature to make it to the big screen!  I would defy the team up of King Kong and Godzilla to be able to take this one down without a major fight.  I don't want to give spoilers, and we can talk about the traits of this dastardly dino at a later date, but this was a film experience I will never forget.

Like I said, it wasn't perfect.  Bryce Dallas Howard's character needed to convince me a little more at the beginning and to be honest, the set up for the movie felt a little stiff.  She did really well playing along side the two younger actors and Pratt, and pulled it off in the end.  I'm also not sure why they wasted three minutes on Nick Robinson's charcter with his girlfriend, but it happened.  I oso applaud them for addressing what John Hammond did in the first movie and for actually getting setting up a working theme park this time.  It's plausible for what it is: a movie about dinosaurs living in the 21st century.

I was extremely impressed with the two young actors in this movie: Nick Robinson - who is known more for comedy - and Ty Simpkins.  Simpkins in particular had a stellar performance and the two were very believable as siblings.  The had to carry much of the movie, even more so than the brother-sister duo in the first movie.

I know what you're thinking, "what about Chris Pratt?"  I couldn't leave him out and decided to save the best for last.  I had grown to love seeing the two great actors Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil together in the first movie and alternately the heroes of the second and third movies.  And even though I like Pratt as an actior, it would be a hard sell for anyone new coming into the series.  I hae to admit that he defied my expectations.  I was worried that I would see Peter Quill, Star Lord, fighting dinos and telling off the JW version of Kingpin, Vincent D'Onoffrio's new villanous character.  Pratt was very believable as Owen Grady and did a great job balancing his consciencious nature towards animals with his survival skills.

A new and interesting take on this was actually having someone to "train" the animals.  They talked about imprinting, about making sure that the animals knew who was the alpha and understanding where they came from.  For something that has to be pure conjecture, they made it interesting by combining what I can only describe as combining dog training concepts (the alpha, hunting in packs, and the clicker training) with bird training (many birds, especially crows, are extremely intelligent and and scavengers).  Both species have a strict social scale.  To apply this to the Indominous Rex was pretty brilliant.  I am not a scientist, so don't ask me to comment about the genetic reasoning behind everything, but I know a lot about animals and I was impressed that they actually tried this.

Interwoven with some great humor and lots of fun references and omages to the other Jurassic movies, along with some really great pokes via Jake Johnson's character Lowery, the movie had a great flow to it.  In the words of Samuel L. Jackson's character Ray Arnold from Jurassic Park, "Hold on to your butts." Once the action starts, it doesn't let up.  And just when you think it can't get any crazier, it does!  

For those giving it bad reviews, please, don't expect this to be an Oscar winner, unless it's for the visuals, or even as ground breaking as Jurassic Park.  It's not going to be,  It is, however, a highly entertaining movie that's guaranteed to thrill!  This one is worth traveling to see on the big screen.

P.S. Make a game out of counting the number of JP references throughout the film.  There are A LOT!

Civil War and Martin Freeman - Marvel on the Move

It's been no secret that Marvel has fans ultra-hyped about Captain America Civil War which is set to release May 6, 2016.  The storyline has to do with registering superheroes . . . 

. . . Hmmm, sound familiar?  That's because if you saw X-Men, that was what Xavier and his crew were fighting Magneto about (except for them it was mutant registration).  But this would affect the X-Men as well.

With Iron Man on the side of hero registration and Captain America staunchly opposed, this could get preachy political if Marvel isn't careful.

But fans are largely optimistic and expectations are high.  People expect Captain America to be better since it has historically done better than most of the standalone Marvel movies.  We will be introduced to the Black Panther, have the added Scarlet Witch and Vision as characters, and there are even talks of Spider Man making an appearance.

Not enough new faces?  That's okay.  Marvel Announced yesterday that Martin Freeman (Sherlock & The Hobbit) is joining the cast of Civil War.  They have intentionally refused to name which character he will play (taking a page from Star Wars?) and leave us all with the question: hero or villain?  Maybe it will depend on which side you choose . . .

Mr. Holmes Trailer - Good Idea? or Leave on the Streets of London?

While I absolutely love almost everything Sherlock Holmes, there have undoubtedly been many liberties taken with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most memorable character over the years.

That's why, when Miramax and Roadside Attraction production companies released the trailer for Mr. Holmes, I had to admit that I was skeptical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJwgItmobFE

And for the record I still am.  Sir Ian McKellan is a fantastic actor, there's no doubt about that, and if anyone could portray an aging Holmes, I would have picked him for the job.  However, I am very skeptical about the script and the plot.

From the trailer it appears Holmes is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease and is desperate to find out what happened in probably his only unsolved case.

Some of the movie looks true to form.  Doyle did have Holmes retire in Sussex and tend to bees, and Mrs. Hudson went with him as his housekeeper - he couldn't stand anyone else who did not know his habits.  However, some of this seems to be almost a Sherlock Holmes affront.  There are so many story scenarios in which you could take Sherlock Holmes.  My hope is that they take this one seriously.

Set to release on July 17th and directed by Bill Condon, I guess I will have to wait and see.  I will see it, simply for the fact that Holmes is one of my all-time favorite literary characters, but I remain skeptical.

Do you think the new Mr. Holmes movie looks good?  Let me know.

Celebration Panel Announces "Star Wars: Rogue One" Film

In case you missed it, Disney announced at the Star Wars Celebration that they will be starting a line of individual movies about Star Wars characters - taking a page from the Marvel franchise.  They announced that the first film would be entitled: Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One and showed a teaser trailer to excited audiences.

In case you're wondering where the trailers are, YouTube took them down - except for two:

The first is someone filming the trailer from their cell phone camera at the announcement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDursxEoUvI

The second is a very creative re-rendering of the trailer with LEGOs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p8aPxzbzJs

So is this really a good idea?

Should we have standalone Star Wars films about the characters we don't even know yet?  Perhaps they will have cameos by our favorites?  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Set to release in December of 2016, it will be directed by Gareth Edwards who also directed last year's Godzilla.   The only confirmed cast members are Felicity Jones and Ben Mendelsohn, neither of whom are in listed as starring in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Sam Claflin (known for his portrayal of Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay Part 1) and Riz Ahmed (Four Lions and Centurion) are rumored to be cast but there are no parts listed by anyone's name.

Do we really want a Marvel version of Star Wars?  I'm not knocking having Star Wars come to theaters again, but I do not want another craptastic set of movies that was the prequels disaster (especially Episode II).

What do you think?