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Creed (II) (2015)
2/10
Predictable and weak entry
5 January 2018
Warning: Spoilers
So many things wrong with this film. Misplaced casting, with every fighter in the film besides the main character (Michael Jordan's Adonis Creed) looks like a fighter but our guy looks he's more apt to be seen stuck behind a desk in a cubicle, and while he's in shape, he's obviously not prepared for the role and obtained a fighter's physique. Something Stallone did like crazy back in the day, and had a reputation for.

The story is pretty weak, with Adonis wanting to make his own name but then after getting his ass beat in a local gym by a real pro, he sucks up immediately to Rocky Balboa, trading on his dad's friendship with Rocky to get some training. So most of the film makes little sense with Adonis trying to hide this at all. Also, I don't care who you are, but giving up what appears to be a lavish lifestyle living in a giant mansion with plenty of opportunities to succeed in life, including endless funds for a private boxing trainer and ring, you go seeking out a retired champion who doesn't even actively train anybody? Come on.

Stallone does well in this movie, but it's largely because for the first time in a long while, he's not playing an over the top character. He's depicted as just owning his wife's restaurant and living a pretty modest life, with some indicators that Paulie was living with him up until a few years prior to the events in the film, which is odd considering the history the two characters had. He is depicted as being diagnosed with cancer which provides for some limited emotional moments, but the film quickly forgets about this in favor of the ending fight debacle.

Michael Jordan's acting is also just lacking any charisma. He succeeds mostly in the film through his interactions with a girlfriend he acquires, and the two have some on screen chemistry, but beyond that he's just some guy, and lacks anything about him that really stands out. His boxing motivation is very weak and he never comes across as really wanting anything very much, and even his apparent willingness to get into fights are constantly strained overacting, especially given his lack of apparent boxer mentality. He again is just seriously miscast.

The fight scenes in the films are also just beyond realistic. In every one of the fights, Adonis gets big hits landed on him repeatedly, something no boxer can really survive more than one or two of. Yes, the original Rocky films showed an excess of this, but this is 2017 and other fighting films have set the standard for how a fight should be depicted today, and this film just gets it all wrong. Other problems are that the actor Michael Jordan also just (again) didn't really get much training for the role as a boxer, and there's repetitive slip ups with his fighting stance and actions in the ring, whereas his opponents appear to be very disciplined about it, likely being real boxers or at least having taken their roles more seriously.

The final fight in the film tries too hard to be a repeat of what we saw in the first Rocky, and results in a pretty weak ending. He doesn't win the fight, and by any scorecard, lost it badly despite not being knocked out.
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Ant-Man (2015)
7/10
Very enjoyable
14 December 2015
Ant-man was a great introduction of a new hero to the Marvel Universe. Paul Rudd was well cast for the part.

A great mix of seriousness and humor ("Baskin Robbins always finds out") to boot.

Although I felt like the ending action was overly fast-paced, and the villain's final moments were a little typical, the movie up to that point was well paced and really introduced you to the range of powers the character has. I became much less skeptical of the character concept after seeing the film, and he should fit in well in sequels or other films.
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Star Wars: Rebels (2014–2018)
3/10
The Lucas disease has struck again
11 June 2015
Fans of the original and new trilogies can all agree, the insertion of overly childish characters and elements seriously struck a blow to the franchise. Instead of continuing the more adult themed action/adventure/swashbuckling style of SW and ESB, Lucas added in the Ewoks, an Emperor who was just too one dimensional, etc. Launched again with Phantom Menace, we got Jar Jar binks and the Gungans, and an Anakin Skywalker who was simply depicted far too young than he should be for his rise to evil. Phantom should have begun with Anakin already in his late teens, not unlike Luke was considered to be in SW. But Lucas insisted on appealing to children, not aware seemingly that children already loved SW and ESB as they were.

Anyways, it's more of the same with Star Wars Rebels. Ignoring the lessons of the Clone Wars series that gradually gave us some dark story lines and great action with no holds barred, we're now dumbed down to PBS kid level animation, plots, characters, etc. The bad guys are ultra bad, and the good guys are ultra good.

The animation is indeed, nigh unwatchable. It's really hard to get behind it, even the physics of the action is clunky. This might've worked nearly 15 years ago, but it just appears....LAZY.
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Dinosaur 13 (2014)
3/10
Not really about a Dinosaur
12 January 2015
This film isn't really so much a documentary about the 13th Trex skeleton found, but rather, the intense legal battles and drama over this find. Basically put, their Trex discovery is so important/valuable that the land owner they initially buy the fossil from after digging it up decides to reneg on his arrangement, then the govt steps in, and then half the planet becomes involved in trying to settle the claims over the fossil. 3/4 of the film focuses on the dizzyingly boring legalities of this struggle, which could have been concluded in a single sentence. Only the very beginning of this documentary focuses on the finding of the fossil itself.

This could have been a very interesting introduction to paleontology and dinosaurs, and I was expecting this very thing, but instead just gets lost in uninteresting and complicated legal drama. Who cares?
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Interstellar (2014)
1/10
A bag of poo
10 December 2014
Warning: Spoilers
The dustbowl...I didn't understand the usage of old interview footage from survivors of the early dustbowls... made no sense.

Corn is the only viable crop? Okay....

I didn't get the whole anti-science Apollo faked landings schtick. It was irrelevant to the plot. In fact, the plot points out that science is man's only hope here......

Why indeed have our future selves placed a wormhole next to Saturn and not the Moon where it's more convenient? Why can't our future selves, if they are so advanced, simply contact us directly, or 'show up'? Why can't they appear in the past when it wasn't too late to save the planet? What was the deal with the barely habitable planets of ice and water and rocks? Earth is a jewel, yet these places wouldn't support any human populations, and indeed they even pale to the dustbowl earth depicted in the movie.

How is it that we've got advanced enough technologies for AI robots and blackhole venturing spacecraft, but we can't save the earth? Enters a black hole, enters a tesseract of space time, and the best he can do is ping a watch's second hand? (back to my comment about our future selves). Right.

There's only ONE thing that's rewarding in this movie, and it's the rather recycled but still fun to watch aspects of the various launches and spacecraft operation. Yay. Unfortunately, this is a grand total of about 5 minutes of footage.

The sound in this movie is impressive, but at several points, it overwhelms the (lame) dialogue.
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6/10
Not quite the hype
28 October 2014
I had high hopes for this movie, not knowing much about this lesser known comic series, and hearing all the early reviews.

I will say, it's squarely aimed at younger teens. The humor, while there, isn't very witty and rather obvious, stuff that would have made me chuckle when I was a little kid, but now? No. This was disappointing as most of the other Marvel films often had a lot of clever adult wit to them. The plot is also very basic, and just isn't very inventive.

The action is all very PG-rated stuff too. Much as there was all sorts of things going on, you weren't worried about any of the characters at all, nor in how the story would turn out.

Groot turns out to be ridiculously overpowering and he eliminates a lot of the perceived danger to the other characters. He quite literally smashes something like 30 guys all at once.

The main villain is as cardboard as you can get. I can't even remember his name, or what his motives were. He was just like the bad guy from THOR Dark World. Just kinda 'there', with another big scary looking ship.

Rocket Racoon, while expertly crafted in CGI, his voice acting was just terrible. In fact, everything about him was very wooden. I had thought that a Racoon whose been experimented on with cybernetics and such and with a penchant for heavy caliber weapons and street slang would be funny, but its obvious that his character is just trying too hard to BE that diminutive overachiever... His dialog really needed a better voice actor who sounded more like the character should, and with some sharper lines....

I just don't know with this movie. It just doesn't rank very well compared to most of Marvel's other outings. It has all the splash and dash 'appearance' of those films, but lacked the adult angle that the others have had. The last thing I expected was such a child oriented film. I guess the good news is, I can show this to my son a lot earlier than the other films due to their content.
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7/10
What a great film
3 September 2014
This movie had me hooked as a kid, and growing up, I've come to appreciate the nod to historical events, the aircraft on display like a time capsule, and the sci-fi plot that presents a host of interesting questions for the viewer. That, and a great musical score....

I have to wonder though.....

How does Yelland end up explaining the dead Marines and the body of the Japanese pilot to his superiors? His gear? The lost helicopter and crew? Not to mention, the pilots who splashed the two Zeros...what will they tell people? Also, the entire ship's crew that was told they were prepping for war with the Japs, the recon photos, the radio transmissions of old 1940's broadcasts....

Yelland makes the comment at the end that "They'll never believe it", but I think in the end, there's bound to be swift reaction to what happened on that ship in the present day. I'm tossing that one up as a bit of a good though, because I think the intention of the filmmakers was that they come back with no real proof that it ever happened outside of the dog.....and the curious case of Mr. Tideman.

Even historical evidence remains, as there's the downed Zeros in what is probably shallow waters, and the remains of the helicopter that exploded off the island, and also the equipment/supplies left behind that were intended for the Senator and the girl?
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