Book of Life Review Part 1
Cute, fun, and visually striking.
But at the end not a lot of sticking power. When I see a film and the next day have to strain to remember what I saw that speaks of a middlin’ movie. This film was not bad and the art style and animation were stunning. It does pass my Wreck It Ralph test, which is where at the end of the film I ask am I happier having seen this film then I would have been staying home watching WIR for the umpteenth billionth time and the answer is yes. However the next day after seeing Ralph I was aglow with memories and striking scenes where this one kind of got flushed out of my memory like a functional hands free toilet.
But like I said this film is really fun and has a strong cross cultural element that is missing in a lot of American media. If you want to expose your children to something other than white America and Hip Hop this would be a (very small) step in that direction. The story is good and all the characters memorable (as long as you are OK remembering either of the duel sword wielding heroes as one character). An artistic triumph really.
However veteran readers of my blog will know it is rare that I walk out of a film without at least one annoyance nibbling at my jock strap and in this case it’s the music. You see, in a story about Dios De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and set in the heart of Mexico you would imagine they might either pull some great Mexican cultural music or at least written some new music with some Latin flair and that is exactly what they did, as long as by “Latin flair” you really mean having the Mexican musician play Creep by Radiohead. 
Why not just have them do a cover of Bugz on my Nugz by Insane Clown Posse (Hatchetman image courtesy of the music t shirt category)? It’s effectively the same. I’m not looking for accordions here but the contrast was startling and really took me out of the theater. Maybe a little Spanish guitar?
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Book of Life Review Part 2
There were a couple other annoyances. The Candlemaker was another “let’s force the audience out of whimsical Mexico and into a movie theater that smells like feet” character and he did it every time he opened his mouth. 
He was as out of place as Megatron in a line up of kids picking teams for dodge ball and by the end of the film contributed nothing more than another set of fingernails scraping the blackboard in my head (image courtesy of the Transformers t shirt category). The entire film was much longer on comic relief then it needed to be up to and including the big bad bandito everyone was terrified of.
The story itself was kind of meh too. The whole thing played out as a lovers tiff between La Muerta, the queen of the Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, the king of the Land of the Forgotten (played, BTW, by none other than Ron M-F-ing Perlman. That part was cool) and was about as interesting as watching a typical couple fight and purposefully leave the toilet seat up or down to annoy each other. Again as a kids movie I know I can’t expect Donny Darko level complexity or story quality but a little more motivation for anyone to do anything would have been appreciated.
For all that I can’t say it’s not worth watching. I’m sure your kids will love it and it’s pretty enough to keep you entertained as well. The visuals are truly stunning and I absolutely loved the animation. It has a couple of cool messages about loving and cherishing your relatives (although when you think about it there is also a pretty grim message about what will happen to us all once we are forgotten) and ancestors while being true to your own nature. There are a couple of good action scenes and the fight at the end bordered on excitement.
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Book of Life Review Part 3
I will say this film is a great date movie and in truth I wish I had taken the girl I am seeing to see it (4 dates! A new record!). It is good wholesome family fun and once you get it on DvD or streaming you can use it to park your rugrats comfortably for 95 minutes. I just don’t see it as a cherished childhood memory when your kids grow up (although these days what is?).
Story recap: La Muerta and Xibalba bet on which of two boys young Maria will marry. Xibabla choose Juaquin, a brash soldier he gives a medal of indestructibility to, and La Muerta chooses Manolo, a musician from a family of bull fighters. They each try to prove themselves to her in their own way. Xibabla cheats, killing Manalo and sending him to the Land of the Remembered where he meets all of his ancestors. They team up to make him alive again and win the day.
3.5 out of 5.
So worth seeing? I’ll say yes. Go see it. The part of your brain that likes pretty things will thank you. Take the kids. Load up the minivan full of all the kids in your neighborhood and that night feed them all burritos. There is a good chance you will feel like you aren’t raising your kids to be the next generation of white suburban drones by exposing them to something other than Christmas at least for a while. I’ll give this film 3.5 out of 5 Phasers. Pretty good but could have been better. Sorry for the short review but honestly there isn’t a lot I can do with kids films.
the Infamous Dave Inman
PS I was contacted by a guy doing a Kickstarter Campaign for a documentary on comic books called Comix: Beyond the Comic Book Pages. He seemed like a cool dude and has interview with a ton of great artists including Stan Lee. As a fan of classic comic book artists (Jack Kirby image from one of my favorite comic book t shirts) I say if you can help him go for it. His goal doesn’t sound ridiculous to me and he does have some cool swag to hand out. Mostly he needs funds to buy the rights to comic book panels for his documentary.
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Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 20 Court Martial
Kind of a throwaway episode in my opinion. Not really bad enough to be great, but not really great. I did like seeing McCoy bitch out Spock for playing chess only to have Spock throw it back in McCoys face, but not an episode that comes rushing back to my head when I think about Star Trek.
However I did like this episode because it, like a couple others (Obsession for one) gives us a nice glimpse of Kirk as a junior officer. During the series and in TWOK he refers to himself as a very serious and by the book student at the Academy and young ensign. 
Too bad JJ Abrams never saw any of that and just wrote Kirk as Spicolli meets Johnny Bravo (image courtesy of our cartoon t shirt category).
The other cool thing from this episode is for once Kirk got bit on the ass by all his womanizing. One of the women he had a “close encounter” with, Lt. Shaw, shows up and takes the case as prosecutor against him. She claimed it was merely professional duty but there is a part of me that likes to believe she relished roasting Kirk over the coals.
The Infamous Dave Inman
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 21 Return of the Archons
This is an episode that is fun yet at the same time problematic. BTW if you ever wanted to get into Star Trek cosplay the Lawgivers uniform is basically a brown robe and a metal tube. Super easy. So this one was kind of cool in concept but when you think about it the Festival is pretty much just an excuse to commit rape. Not exactly forward thinking as far as women’s liberation is concerned. There were many episodes with strong misogynistic tendencies and I think this one (along with Spocks Brain and Turnabout Intruder) was one of the worst.
However I like to think they tried and TNG made up for a lot of prior poor gender decisions. However my problem with this episode is the fact that they fell back once again on the old “talk a computer into killing itself” trope. That one is used almost as much as having red shirts die. This was the second episode to us it and after a while it just got lazy. In order to prove what a hard core Trek fan I am I will list all the episodes that use this cliche off the top of my head: What are Little Girls Made Of, I Mudd, the Ultimate Computer, and The Changeling. Seems like standard SOP is when faced with any kind of artificial intelligence just have Kirk argue with it for 5 minutes and run away from the self destruct. 
He’s like Deedee from Dexters Lab’s father (not impossible knowing him. Image courtesy of the cartoon t shirt collection).
Nevertheless fun episode with some half baked social commentary messages.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Fury Review Part 1
Tanks for a great movie!
When you really think about it, the outcome of WWII was kind of a disappointment. Sure, we won the war and for like six months America was the hero of the world but all it really did was set us up for the Cold War like your best friends date setting you up with her ugly cousin (and that date went for 50 years). It didn’t take long for France to start hating us again no doubt based on their belief that in time they would have cast out the Germans through the strength of their Résistance (you know, I almost managed to type that whole sentence without laughing out loud) and over time some of the more morally ambiguous decisions we made started to haunt us (American internment camps of Japanese-Americans (thanks to George Takei for educating me on the proper term. You rock!), dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a means of seeing what it would do, the ultimate rise of the American military/industrial complex that is steadily grinding our economy into dust, etc.). Honestly when you really think about it the only good thing to come out of World War II (from an entertainment perspective at least) is the Nazis.
Not to say Nazis are good. They are horrible people and the epitome of how bad humanity can get. If I could go back in time to kill three people first off would be Adolf Hitler (followed by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the hated Dewey Decimal System and George Lucas at the premier of the Return of the Jedi. 
Sure we would lose American Graffiti but it would a small price to pay for never having to watch the Phantom Menace or any of the other horrors. Losing Red Tails would be a bonus. Image courtesy of my own private collection of cool Star Wars t-shirts). However, due to the increased importance of global ticket sales and the namby pamby super PC I-just-soiled-my-designer-Underoos fear of offending any potentially lucrative minority Hollywood has been cursed with the modern list of groups to be considered movie villains has been reduced to white trash racists, North Korea, rogue CIA elements, and Mexican cartels. Literally every other group in the world has someone who will sue, protest, or potentially not buy a movie ticket.
However, when doing a movie in WWII all those problems dissipate like a mild fart in a wind tunnel. Nazis are the perfect villains. They are by definition all white so you don’t have to worry about offending any minorities, the are demonstrably evil, and even most of the Germans dislike or disavow their existence. By being evil from the get go you can have them be as evil as you like and anything you do to them is fair game. If you dressed a bunch of babies in SS uniforms and filmed a scene of them being tossed into a wood chipper no one would blink because they are Nazis.
(Notice we don’t have a lot of films involving the Japanese because that might be racist. Also the Japanese are now our friends and are cute perverted wierdos who have game shows where guys in loincloths eat bugs and buy used panties from vending machines.)
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Fury Review Part 2
From the first trailer I knew I was going to love Fury. You see I am what wargammers call a treadhead. I love tanks and always have. On the rare occasion that I travel if there is a tank museum anywhere around I will always try to visit it. The addition of a tank of any kind will automatically make a movie better. The Bridges of Madison County would have been an amazing film if Clint Eastwood had driven around in an M60 Patton. Here is a list off the top of my head of movies that rocked because they had tanks in them: Tank, the Beast (amazing movie BTW), Time Bandits, Tank Girl, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, A Bridge Too Far, and Patton. Some of these films sucked, but the tank made them better. So naturally I was inclined to love a film about a tank crew.
I was extremely gratified to see that David Ayers either knows a thing or two about tanks or he did some research because he accurately showed how good American tanks were in WWII and that is they were crap on a stick. American tanks sucked back then and we made up for that failure by just making over 50,000 of them. Kind of hard on the crews but we really didn’t have a choice. 
This film accurately showed what would happen if a Tiger I (the Hulk of WWII tanks. Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf.E. Image courtesy of the Hulk t shirt category) encountered four M4 Shermans: the Tiger kicked seven kinds of ass on the Shermans and only by being very lucky was Fury able to beat it. I was also thrilled to see they actually got a hold of the last working Tiger tank in the world and used it for the film. That kind of tread accuracy does my heart good.
This film was also great in showing what it would be like to be a crewman in a tank in battle. The accurately captured the claustrophobia and terror. The action scenes were great. During the many battle scenes I experienced the rarest gift a film can give an audience member: excitement. I was actively gripping my armrests after watching the tanks in action knowing that any one of them could blow up at any time. The action was also horrific and gruesome. If watching men burn alive in battle isn’t your thing this might not work for you.
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Fury Review Part 3
I also have to say I loved the cast and their characters. Even Shia LaBouf didn’t put me off my feed and that is saying a lot. 
Of course having Jon Bernthal from the Walking Dead is worth Shia at his worst (and honestly he wasn’t bad. Image courtesy of the Walking Dead t shirt category). David Ayers has done many movies involving the simple yet complex dynamic of men and their relationships with each other. Films like Training Day and End of Watch really explored how men interact with each other in all their testosterone glory. This film explores that to the nth degree with the crew of Fury both loving and hating each other. You can’t spend months in the same metal can with five other men without some conflict and you can’t survive that long without developing a true bond of brotherhood. The introduction of the new recruit mixes that dynamic up a lot and the story digs into it in a very pleasing way.
On the other hand David Ayers did not exactly strain his brain writing this story. It boils down to the tank gets a new crewman who sucks and no one trusts and then drives around Germany shooting Nazis. I’m not kidding when I say that’s it. There was some character development (mostly for the new recruit) but the idea of a story arc and/or three acts is foreign to David. However when you do look at his other movies you realize that is kind of his signature style. End of Watch was almost a vignette documentary and even Training Day moved from set piece to set piece like chapters in a book. I don’t think this movie really need a lot more but at least on paper it was lazy.
The other lazy part was the fact that David must have gotten a book on WWII character cliches and checked off the first half dozen from the first page. For simplicities sake I am going to name them after Saving Private Ryan counterparts. There is the grizzled but combat fatigued commander dedicated to the safety of his men with a mysterious past and education beyond his station (Captain Miller). There is the new recruit who no one trusts and manages to get some of his comrades killed (Corporal Upham. BTW I don’t want to harp on this but the Fury guy was a clerical typist and in Ryan Upham wanted to bring his typewriter). There is the loudmouthed troublemaker (Private Reiben). There is the religious gunner (Private Jackson). Then there is the token minority (this one no direct Ryan connection although he was kind of the group conscious so I’d match him with Private Mellish). It was almost laughable but there is a reason stereotypes actually work. In other words, sure these characters were grossly borrowed from other sources but they really worked.
Oh, yeah. Like I said before the action was brutal and if you have a problem with the idea of American soldiers not always acting like the paragons of virtue we like to pretend they are this movie might throw you off. There is the execution of prisoners, fighting between soldiers, engagement of prostitutes, and a scene of romance that in a different light could have been construed as rape and definitely misogynist. Also children used as soldiers. You have been warned.
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Fury Review Part 4
For all that I thought the movie was awesome. In a business that claims to want to generate excitement but then produces nothing but the blandest crap ever this movie was exciting. You get engaged with all the characters with a minimum of exposition and feel hurt when something bad happens to them. The action was adrenaline pumping for sure. The Nazis were evil, the Americans mostly good, and best of all the film had tanks in it. Win win win.
Brief story recap. Sgt. Collier “Wardaddy” (Brad Pitt) and his crew gunner “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf), driver “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña), and loader “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal) get back from a battle and have a new recruit Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) assigned to them as their new bow gunner (the last one having died). They are given a mission to go help some guys against the Germans and Norman screws up, getting another tank killed. Wardaddy tries to toughen up him up and eventually has him hooked up with a local girl. They get sent somewhere else and an epic battle ensues. Most of the world blows up.
Worth seeing? Absolutely. The only issue I really had was the blatant use of stereotypes for all the characters and that is more upon reflection. During the movie I thought they were all cool. 
You don’t have to love tanks to love this film but if you do you will be in pig heaven (in a tank. World of Tanks image from our video game t shirt category). Pacing was great, filming amazing, action awesome, and the characters well worth your time. I’d say definitely not a date movie especially if your date is the type to focus on one little thing (like humans burning alive) and they bitch about it all night. Guys film for sure. Bathroom break? Honestly I’d hold it. It is 134 minutes so it might be a bit of a strain. If you can’t go that long I’d say the dinner scene is the most disposable but even that one is good. Try to hurry. Final rating? 4.5 out of 5 Phasers.
4.5 of 5! Great!
Thanks for reading.
the Infamous Dave Inman
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Gone Girl Review Part 1
Good but not as great as everyone else seems to be going on about.
mi·sog·y·ny (məˈsäjənē) noun – dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
mi·sog·a·my (məˈsäɡəmē) noun – the hatred of marriage.
I’m starting my review with these two definitions due to the fact that if you have ever been on the fence about being either a misogynist or misogamist this film will push you over into the miso yard. If you have ever had a reason to distrust a woman, your wife, or the idea of marriage but are trying to get over it do not see this film. You will walk out seriously distrusting your wife, your mother, your female friends and relatives, the girl who serves you coffee at Starbucks, and any mammal lacking a Y chromosome (and possibly certain female birds and reptiles).
Not to say it’s a bad movie. It’s actually quite good. Compelling story, fun twists, great characters, excellent acting, very good pacing, and overall a truly flowing story. It even has a couple of very positive female characters in the sister and the cop. It is by David Fincher, director of my all time favorite film Fight Club and as such I would expect it to be at the very least masterful and it is. 
Of course the only female character in Fight Club is a sex crazed borderline personality ball busting kleptomaniac so it seems clear that Mr. Fincher has never planned on building his career through the uplifting of the female stereotype. (I did feel the need to show a better female stereotype so I pulled this image from the Wonder Woman t shirt category)
However to see a positive role model male or female is not why you go see a David Fincher film. He is the master of the flawed protagonist and this film definitely falls into that slot. Therefore it is not the issue I have with the film. The problem I can’t seem to get past is the fact that at one point about 3/4 of the way through the 149 minutes of the film a scene that was supposed to be both horrific and pivotal had most of the audience (including myself) laughing uproariously and the suspension of disbelief, which had been hovering nicely at the 12-14 ft mark, shot up to the upper stratosphere and left us all gasping for oxygen. The last 1/4 of the film stopped being a gritty and realistic crime drama and turned into a fantasy with comedic overtones that were really hard to take seriously.
I will be dropping spoilers shortly and will most definitely give you warnings ahead of time but for a minute I want to talk about plot holes. A plot hole is like a pot hole; some are bigger than others and some streets might have one or two or be covered with them like a teenager with acne. Sometimes you can drive past them or even swerve to avoid one that you see coming. Sometimes they are small enough that you drive right over them with just a little bump and sometimes there are so many packed together that the street is more pot hole then asphalt and you can move along at a slow pace with a steady vibration through your seat.
Sometimes, however, you can be driving along a perfectly smooth street with no sign of anything and all of a sudden hit a gigantic pot hole that bottoms out your car and bends your axle, leaving you driving along listening to the sound of your tire rub against the side of your wheel well. That’s what happened for me. Smooth ride for almost two hours and then bang! Gigantic plot hole (see what I did there?).
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