Cranky T-Rex's Blog

If you haven't seen Cobra Kai or at the very least up to Season 3 of Cobra Kai , here is your spoiler warning. Read further at your own peril.

Well by now it's on its sixth or seventh episode, but when Star Trek: Discovery 's premiere came out I did review it like I did with The Orville because hey, I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I had to at least give it a shot despite my poor first impressions from trailers and such. Like with The Orville , I did my level best to give it a chance to prove me wrong.  Despite the tone, the weird look with the Klingons, the SJW nonsense with the casting decisions, and the political commentary by the cast and crew, I went into it hoping for a good show because I wanted to see good Star Trek again. Sadly,  Discovery  is not good  Star Trek.  Frankly this show isn't Star Trek at all.  It doesn't even fit in with the JJ Abrams reboot, which itself already turned Star Trek 's corpse into a mindless zombie searching for brains, and unlike the reboot which could at least claim to be paced well enough to make you forget how stupid it is, Discovery fails on just...

I am Groot.  I...am Groot. I AM Groot. I am...Groot. I aaaaam Groooooot. Or in human speak: at last, the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel has arrived.  Like most people I was skeptical of the first one when Marvel announced it and then pleasantly surprised at how good it was when I got to see it, though it wasn't without a few issues . Then, again like most people, when the sequel was announced I wondered if they were going to be able to recreate whatever dark magic allows them to make a movie featuring a talking raccoon and a tree that can only says his own name and not have it turn into complete garbage. Of course this is one of those movies where what I have to say about it really isn't going to matter. Everyone loved that first one so much there's no way anyone was missing out on this even if the reviews were Batman v Superman -level bad, but for what it's worth, I can confirm that Marvel does in fact keep dark wizards chained up in the basement...

I suppose it was only a matter of time that the Power Rangers got their gritty live-action reboot given all the properties from my childhood that have now been gobbled up by Hollywood and turned into generic explosion fests so the studios can cash in on the licenses while they still mean something to someone.  Usually it's Generic Action Plot #5: rebellious teenager with daddy issues learns he has a great destiny and must save the world with his awesome inherent expertise in everything.  And of course they can't give these things subtitles since that might keep people from confusing this new thing with the thing they actually like.  Far be it for them to make it easy for us to distinguish between the franchise Power Rangers, and the new movie Power Rangers open-parenthesis, 2017, close-parenthesis. It's also not the first time somebody tried to do a Power Rangers movie, and that first one doesn't exactly hold up.  So the odds against this thing bei...

As something of a giant monster myself, it was a foregone conclusion I'd get out to see Kong: Skull Island opening weekend.  Unfortunately, the last time my hairy friend got to appear on the big screen, he was murdering innocent dinosaurs just because some cute blonde showed him she could juggle.  Given what Hollywood has done to Godzilla in the past, I can't really blame the guy for that, so I had high hopes he'd find some redemption in this one. From the trailers, it certainly appears they learned something from the painful slog that was Peter Jackson's King Kong , since it looks like my man gets to throw down early and often with everything from pesky humans to Godzilla-wannabes, with nary a dinosaur in sight.  Speaking of Gojira, that's actually the polar opposite of the last Godzilla movie, which I enjoyed thoroughly but was received poorly by a lot of people for not having enough Bryan Cranston or kaiju on kaiju action.  So does this second entr...

Other than the obvious Trump jokes, just about the only thing that put The Great Wall on anyone's radar is the controversy over Matt Damon playing the lead. As usual, many people were up in arms that a white guy got a role in an Asian-centric movie.  Never mind that he's playing a white character that wanders into Asia looking for black powder and runs into a giant wall and the massive Chinese army staffing it, so it's not exactly like he stole a role from an Asian actor. Of course had the complainers bothered to note it's a Chinese studio making the movie, they wouldn't have had much reason to whine in the first place since it's the Asians making the call, and doing so for the specific purpose of getting their first big breakout film in the US.  What better way to do that than cast a superstar like Damon and split the movie's time between him and its Asian characters? There are however still plenty of good reasons to trash The Great Wall , and surpris...

Like John Wick , The LEGO Movie was also an incredibly pleasant surprise.  It looked like it was going to be some shameless attempt to sell toys (it was), but it turned out to be an incredibly funny and well-written film that did incredible justice to the little plastic blocks.  Anybody who grew up playing with LEGOs got to delight in seeing all the interesting ways they used familiar pieces to build things in this world.  And it gave us a brand new Batman. LEGO Batman was so well received that they decided to give him his own full feature, which as with John Wick: Chapter 2, made me pretty nervous.  In small doses this semi-parody of Batman is really funny, but I worried that trying to drag that out into a full couple hour movie would just get old and repetitive. Still the trailers looked promising, so did The LEGO Batman Movie deliver?  Let me tell you all the ways everything was in fact, awesome.

John Wick  was an incredibly pleasant surprise.  It's an action movie where you can actually see the action, and it built an incredibly interesting underground world of assassins that gave the whole thing a cool new feel.  Plus it has one of the single-best character introductions of all time, making their hero look like the ultimate badass before he even does anything. Then when he actually does things, he looked even more badass thanks to Keanu Reeves putting in enough work to do his own stunts. That's why news of a sequel made me super nervous.  John Wick was a perfectly reasonable standalone movie, and those tend to be the ones that make for the worst sequels since they have to invent convoluted reasons to not only do another one but also to try and raise the stakes in some way.  Usually what you end up with is just an unsatisfying, messy retread of the previous movie. So the question is, did John Wick: Chapter 2 fall into that trap?  Well, l...

So I finally decided to do the whole Youtube review thing.  My first one is for the first game I've gotten to purchase and play all brand-new like in quite some time, the new DOOM.  To summarize, it's pretty damn fun, but it still makes me cranky:

"What? I'd rather be in The Avengers too." The Amazing Spider-Man could best be summed up with the word “unnecessary.” It was a reboot made to keep the rights to everyone’s favorite wall crawler from going back to Marvel, and nothing about it was the least bit remarkable. It could’ve been a passable superhero flick on its own, but it’s a bad case of déjà vu when held against the previous Spider-Man installment made by Sam Raimi. Now we’ve got the sequel to the reboot…just typing that phrase I feel a disturbance in the Force. In fact, any time Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman write a script, a shiver goes down my spine as though…well you know how it goes. I didn’t realize they had written this one going in, but as soon as their names appeared in the credits, I said “well, that explains everything.” They’re the genius pair who gave us such exceptionally written films like Transformers and the Star Trek reboot. That is to say, they’re exceptionally full of ridiculo...

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,...