Cranky T-Rex's Blog

"Let SHIELD go!" - Elsa auditioning for Avengers 2 It occurs to me I never reviewed Captain America:  The First Avenger despite the scathing rebuke I had written  about the director's plans for the character.  Suffice it to say, his first outing was actually a pleasant surprise that I rather enjoyed. Now we’re into Phase 2 of Marvel’s plan for their movie world, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier continues the story of WW2 super soldier Steve Rogers following The Avengers ( which was pretty awesome. )  It seems a common notion that The Winter Soldier has dethroned that movie as the best thing Marvel has done to date, and those folks do have a convincing argument. While Iron Man is Marvel’s most consistently good movie (and my favorite) and The Avengers is the most fun ride, The Winter Soldier is the best story they’ve told.  Instead of your standard Guy Becomes Hero/Supervillain Needs Stopping movie, we have a man trying to hold on to t...

We T-Rexes are familiar with this problem. Wreck-It Ralph is not really a video game movie, or even a movie about video games.  It is instead a movie about finding your place in life, and how the simple connections we build with others can really make the difference between feeling like you're a meaningless cog in a wheel and feeling like the hero of your own story. So what is the story with Ralph? Well, Wreck-It Ralph is the bad guy in an 80's style arcade game called Fix-It Felix Jr. His job is to smash up an apartment building, which the titular hero Felix uses his magic hammer to repair until Ralph is defeated and summarily tossed off the building by its tenants. It's basically Donkey Kong meets Rampage . Since he's the villain, Ralph is completely ostracized by the denizens of his game, and after 30 years, he's tired of being the bad guy. The last straw for Ralph is finding out he wasn't even invited to the 30th anniversary party for the game,...