Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Ah Rampage , a game I spent untold hours playing on my NES as a kid, mainly because it had no save option so either you played it until the end or you had to start over.  Since punching every building in the United States to rubble takes a few hours, it was exceedingly rare that I got to play long enough to see the end. I also never expected to see it turned into a movie.  After all, it's a pretty sparse story. Humans get turned into giant were-monsters and devote themselves to leveling America.  I guess that means you're not especially confined by existing narratives when creating the movie, but it's pretty hard for that not to come across as a goofy Godzilla knock off. After all, that was kind of the point of the game, to be a goofy Godzilla spoof. But hey, as I said on Twitter at the time, if anybody could make a good video game movie, it'd be Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  He's kind of the king of ridiculous action flicks today, and he was teamed up a...

Chappaquiddick would probably be up there with Watergate in terms of political scandals if it weren't so hard to spell. For those who not might be familiar with it, some decades ago, just as we were landing on the moon, Ted Kennedy got drunk one night and drove his car off a bridge and into a pond. He walked away from the accident just fine, but his passenger, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, was not so lucky. Unlike the heir to the Kennedy castle, Mary Jo slowly suffocated over a period of three to four hours, having been left trapped within an air pocket inside the submerged vehicle because Kennedy was too concerned about his political future to report the incident until he was forced to the next morning when civilians discovered the car. Then he and his political fixers massaged the story just enough so voters desperate to see the Kennedy dream realized at last could look the other way and not feel bad about him going essenti...

We have finally reached the next phase of using nostalgia to sell people on entertainment. It used to be you had to reboot a property people already loved, or at least make a sequel or prequel to it, but with Ready Player One , they decided to try just cramming one movie full of references to every video game, movie, TV show, book, band, or concept you ever might have found memorable. DeLorean from Back to the Future ? Check. The Iron Giant? Check. Chun Li? Check. Akira's motorcycle? Check. King Kong? Check. Jurassic Park T-Rex? Check.  And that's just some of the stuff you can spot in the trailers. For me, the shamelessness of this sort of product placement seemed almost insulting, as if Spielberg was saying he doesn't even have to tell a story anymore, he can just flash things you love on the screen and you'll love his movie.  After all, it seems to be working out pretty well for Star Wars. On the other hand, this is ba...

For a while there it didn't seem like we'd actually get a sequel to Pacific Rim despite its obvious sequel potential, and then along came Uprising with its new cast and more importantly, new giant robots. The original Pacific Rim is by no means a great film, but it is the kind of fun, popcorn shlock that makes for a nice night out at the theater with your friends, so on the whole I enjoyed it. After all, where else can you watch a giant mech smash a Godzilla-wannabe with a boat like a baseball bat? Even the Transformer movies don't get that creative with their giant robot battles. That's not to say the idea of a sequel to Pacific Rim thrilled me, but I had hoped with all the setup out of the way, we might have time for a more interesting story. To some extent, I got that, but unfortunately the movie falls down in a few other important ways that makes this one far less fun than its predecessor. Here's some of the reasons Pacific Rim: Uprising just doesn...