Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Passengers had one of the most promising trailers of any movie this year.  They made it seem like we might be getting an interesting sci-fi mystery movie for Christmas about two people, namely Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, who inexplicably find themselves alone on some kind of spaceship cruise liner.  Worse, they've apparently "woken up 90 years too early" and the ship appears to be going a little haywire. That's a pretty cool premise...but unfortunately Passengers flushes it right out the window by spoiling all the mystery right at the beginning, which might make it the biggest bait-and-switch movie of the year.  You can imagine this made me pretty cranky, enough to do this review while I was still being dogged by the Christmas flu:

Well, we knew once Disney had control over Star Wars they were going to put that brand back to work, and so they have.  This year, they've given us Rogue One,  a prequel about stealing the Death Star plans, to hold everyone over until Episode VIII comes out next year.  Since Episode VII was a total retread of the original Star Wars , it's a pretty safe bet Episode VIII will be a retread of The Empire Strikes Back .  Rogue One though has a shot to be something we haven't seen before. Unfortunately, it's a little hampered by the premise.  After all, if you've seen Star Wars you have a pretty good idea as to whether or not they actually get the Death Star plans and put them to good use.  But, sometimes you can overcome that with good character work and a fun, engaging story.  Did Rogue One succeed in doing that? Well, I'm sure most of you have seen it a few times already and have your own opinion on the matter, but here's what I thought:

Hey look Disney decided to make another animated feature, and this time they brought Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson along.  I haven't seen Zootopia yet, but I didn't much care for the previous two non-Pixar Disney flicks, Big Hero 6 , which was just kind of lame, and Frozen , which I have ranted at length about in various places.  Suffice it to say, that movie is completely broken because they simply couldn't bear to give their stupidly catchy song to the villain character since that would've undercut the whole GIRL POWAH message they were using their movie to send. That's why I didn't rush out to see Zootopia, and almost didn't go to see this were it not for The Rock always being entertaining and the wait time at the bowling alley being long enough to make seeing a movie a better option.  So, did Moana turn out to be a bunch of eye-roll worthy feminist agitprop you should skip?  Check out the full review to find out: