Cranky T-Rex's Blog

"What is the greatest Christmas movie of all time?"  Why Die Hard of course, followed closely by The Ref , and yet this year, for some inexplicable reason, it seems people have begun to question Die Hard 's status as a Christmas movie. I imagine this is just some attempt to troll people who don't think A Christmas Story or It's a Wonderful Life should be in the top spot, but it's been a while since I wrote a post and it's a good a reason as any.  The fact is Die Hard is unquestionably a Christmas movie. Critics of this classification boil their argument down to two points: 1. Die Hard  was not released around/marketed towards Christmas 2. Die Hard  is not about Christmas That first one seems reasonable enough, except for the fact that the release and marketing of a movie are not bound by what's in the movie or by the people who made the movie.  For example, Miracle on 34th Street ,  a film I doubt an...

Nothing plagues the human mind so much as "What if?" What if I had chosen to study law instead of business?  What if I had told that girl how I really felt about her?  What if I had just kept my mouth shut and gone home? What if I had made that left at Albuquerque? With the George Zimmerman case, there have been all forms of malpractice by the media and certain folks with agendas, but the most reckless and infuriating of them all is damning Zimmerman because "if Zimmerman had just stayed in his car, Trayon Martin would be alive." In point of fact, Trayvon Martin's death is the result of a chain of events, any one of which changed ever so slightly may or may not have affected the outcome.  In hindsight, we can say George exiting his vehicle to follow Martin contributed to this chain, but it's absurd to point to an event so ambiguous in its outcome as getting out of one's car to continue observing a suspicious person and cal...

Bet that knee's starting to hurt.   So DC and Warner Bros. have finally gotten around to re-rebooting live-action Superman with Man of Steel , and it's taken me about a week to figure out how to sum up my thoughts on this movie because I didn't hate it, I was entertained most of the time, and yet I didn't like it either. Ultimately, the  redlettermedia.com  guys crystallized it for me with a part of their discussion of the movie. They were talking about how one of the scenes felt like it was just trailer fodder, and to me, the whole film feels like it was made just so they could then cut really awesome trailers from it. Everything looks great.  The cast fits and acts well.  The score is excellent.  ...if you cut it into a 2 minute trailer of the highlights.  The fantastic bits are perfect out of context, but in context they are unearned, disconnected, and undermined by the rest of the movie. I lay that problem at the feet ...

The Gay Marriage Debate in this country is the one I find the most eyeroll-worthy because ultimately, it’s a debate over not just semantics, but legalese semantics. It’s about what, if anything, we’re going to call a little piece of paper you can get from the government that 1. acts as a series of default partnership contracts such as shared assets, next of kin, etc. and 2. puts a couple in a special tax status. Gays can already do the actual marriage part. You know, it’s that part about vowing to stay and live together as a couple, in sickness and in health till death do them part. As such, it’s not a question of civil rights, since nobody is looking to stop that (save for maybe the crazy Westboro baptist people that we all despise), and it’s not a question of morality or the end of our culture as we know it because it already is permitted by our society. (Unlike say pre-civil rights interracial relationships, wherein a black man could be hung in some places for so much as looking a...