Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Hey look, another sequel! This time it's for Disney/Pixar's license-to-print-money, Cars . I actually hadn't seen the original Cars or its sequel because it was a concept that never appealed to me enough to bother, so I actually went back and watched both before I headed off to Cars 3 . I found that Cars 1 is, as others before me have noted, basically just Doc Hollywood with talking cars. Since I liked Doc Hollywood , and Cars did an ok job of translating it (existential questions about this universe aside), I enjoyed it. Cars 2 was just terrible. If Cars 1 is Doc Hollywood , Cars 2 is like Mr. Bean or The Tuxedo , one of those awful movies where some dumbass character trips their way into a spy movie and is comically better at being a spy than the professionals. Meanwhile Cars 3 got off on the right foot with a very dark teaser trailer, and it seemed like we might be in for a Cars version of Rocky III , and you can't go wrong with Rocky III even if ...

I finally got around to watching the much lauded Hacksaw Ridge the other day.  It suffers quite a bit from being obvious Oscar Bait, but overall it was a decent movie.  I'm not really interested in doing a review here though; I just found the movie incredibly instructive for another discussion that continues to rage in the social media circles in which I run.  This time it was re-ignited by a couple of people disrupting a version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" that features a Donald Trump lookalike being brutally murdered instead of the Roman Emperor. As usual, one side asserts that disrupting the play goes against their principles and should be condemned, while the other insists that these are the rules imposed upon us by the Left and they should therefore be made to suffer them just as we do.  Or, to put it more succinctly, Be Better Than Them vs. Payback's a Bitch. I of course fall into the latter group for many re...

Now that Marvel and Disney have made all the money, everyone's gotta have a shared movie universe.  Universal tried to get theirs started with Dracula: Untold , but nobody wanted more of that movie, so now they're trying again by rebooting The Mummy .  To increase the odds of this one actually working, they recruited some Grade A star power in the form of Tom Cruise to play the lead. For a brief moment, that idea had incredible potential.  With the first trailer it actually looked like they might unceremoniously kill him off, thereby demonstrating their universe actually was a "Dark Universe" in which anybody was fair game for monsters that have often been seen as goofy in the past. Of course that moment passed as quickly as it came since they would shortly show him surviving in another trailer clip, thereby ruining all of the tension the scene could have had in the movie as well as dashing any hopes for this thing to be a serious effort. Despite...

I've been pretty clear about my distaste for the current crop of DCEU movies, which is why I went into Wonder Woman expecting yet another train wreck of epic proportions despite it having obscenely good buzz.  Obviously one always hopes these movies are going to be good, but given the track record it's impossible to do anything but put the bar on the floor going in. Meanwhile, we had the usual political firestorm surrounding this movie because feminism can't leave anything well enough alone for people to enjoy.  In addition to the usual hot-takes about "first female superhero movie evah!" (it's not), The Alamo Drafthouse announced a women's-only screening, including only female employees(!?), and when people rightfully pointed out how a men's-only screening of say, Thor: Ragnarok would result in the theater being burned to the ground by screaming harpies, the screaming harpies complained about having their safe spaces invaded.  Just can't win ...

Damn that is a long title for a movie, which I suppose makes sense since each successive installment of Pirates of the Caribbean seemed to be exponentially longer than the last.  (Not to mention more confusing and just generally less entertaining.) But hey, we can't just assume because it's the 5th movie in a franchise that really didn't need a sequel in the first place that it'll be terrible right? I mean Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow's usually pretty funny, the previews have some cool effects like a zombie shark, and they even showed Will and Elizabeth coming back.  How can you go wrong with getting the band back together to fight zombie sharks? Turns out you can go pretty wrong, so let's just get to it and I'll tell you about the pratfalls of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales :