TwinIon

Trade wars are good and easy to win.

Even thought I'm not a fan of 12, I can at least understand why people love it. It's a deconstruction of the heist genre and a meta commentary on making sequels in general. It doubles down on the more esoteric aspects of the genre and actively rebels against what made 11 work so well. It's an audacious thing to do, and I'll give Soderbergh credit for trying, even if I didn't love the result. Ocean's 8 is not that. It's much more like 13 in that it obviously wants to re-create each beat and success of 11, but consistently fails to do so, and fails much worse than 13 did on almost every level.

Incredibles 2 is going to be a real beast. If a $150M opening weekend can't slow it down, I don't expect anything else to either.

50% on RT $150M opening weekend Just as the dinosaurs themselves were reverse engineered from bits of left behind DNA, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feels reverse engineered from a trailer. It's a film that moves breathlessly from action set piece to action set piece, but seemingly without thought or reason. The driving force for it's two hour run time is never narrative or character, but a brash and brainless commercialism, focused almost entirely on creating brief, trailer worthy moments. If you've seen the marketing for this fifth installment, you've likely seen some of these shots: A T-Rex standing triumphantly on another carnivore, volcano exploding in the background, Chris Pratt's Owen Grady staring down any number of dinosaurs or jumping through the open mouth of another T-Rex. These shots are often impressive, well framed and scored, and for the briefest of moments, reminiscent of the awe this series is constantly chasing. The failure then, is everything that must precede and follow those moments. At virtually no point in this film does a character make a critical decision that feels identifiably human. The villains are transparent and necessarily insidious. It's not enough that their hubris and greed be their downfall, they have to go out of their way to kill innocent people and imprison little girls. The heroes though, are even worse. Save the volcano at the beginning, every disaster that we witness throughout Jurassic World 2 is directly the fault of our heroes. They put themselves in ridiculous positions without any clear motivation, they actively make every situation more dangerous for themselves and everyone around them, and when things get out of control they do nothing to neutralize the situation, preferring instead to make disasters into catastrophes. With Jurassic World, the long mishandled series had a clear idea for a compelling premise. Even though I will always bemoan the execution of that film, I can credit it for that. With Fallen Kingdom, the franchise reverts back to the issues that plagued the first two sequels to Jurassic Park; lacking any worthwhile ideas for where to take the series next. Fallen Kingdom then compounds this with a complete lack of character drama, the thinnest possible motivations, and the worst plotting this series has yet seen. Fallen Kingdom is certainly in the running for the worst in a franchise with more than a couple terrible entries.

Another good thread:

I've been using it for a while. I probably do save some money, since the monthly fee is less than an average ticket around here. Mostly though, I see more movies with it than I would without it. I don't have to feel bad about going to see Tomb Raider in theaters because I didn't really spend any extra money to see it. I also am just a little bit more likely to see smaller films, just because it feels like "less of a risk." I'm not sure I'd have gone out of my way to see Mother! or The Rider, but since they were available at my local Movie Pass theater, I found the time and was very happy I did. For me the worst part of it is that the two theaters near me that I'd very much prefer don't accept it. I also really wish I could buy a ticket online with it. There's a couple theaters in town that Movie Pass works with that way, but not the one near me. It's kind of annoying that you now have to take a photo of your stub, but not that big of a hindrance. I'm also not a fan of the surge pricing they're about to introduce. I don't often use it during times I expect will have surge pricing, but if it does show up I'll be unhappy about it. The big question with Movie Pass is how long they'll be around. They're running out of cash, the stock in their parent company has nosedived, they're getting more competition, they might need as much as $1.2 Billion more capital before they could be profitable, and their new business model of buying stakes in movies and boosting the attendance seems doomed to fail. The whole thing is a scam being temporarily and artificially propped up by venture capital. If it survives the year I doubt it survives the next. At least by then there will probably still be other options.

If it does, it'll probably be a year or so removed from the console release, and I'm unlikely to wait.

I'm no economist, but it seems like the current growth is rather precarious.

As with a lot of this stuff, it sounds like this is a case of "well, what will the next judge think?"

On the actual topic of the freaking Space Force. What is it exactly that Trump thinks we need to do up there that we're not already? I'd love to hear what the Air Force thinks about all this. Besides, what are we going to do, build a new division of the armed forces that we send to space on Russian rockets?

Good lord. The problem with EMALS isn't necessarily that it's a bad idea, and now that it's mostly ready it absolutely shouldn't be abandoned. The problem is the whole stupid notion of concurrency; putting a system into production while it's still undergoing significant design changes. Maybe that idea works fine for some systems, but for something so massive and so obviously critical to the mission of a carrier, it's a ridiculous proposition.

IANAL, but my understanding is that if a cell phone provider gives this data away without a warrant, it then can't be used in court. For location data gathered from cell phone towers, you would need to convince a judge and get a warrant in order to use that info. Someone please correct me if that's not the case. What is less clear after this ruling is exactly how broad it is. The court went out of their way to specify that this is a narrow ruling, but they also seem to limit it to location data, which itself is rather broad. So this ruling might be very specific to only data scraped from cell towers, or it could mean a warrant is required for any kind of persistent location tracking, regardless of the third party doctrine.

It certainly looked reminiscent. Wouldn't surprise me if it's true.

Even as a big fan of VR, I think this is for the best. A new Xbox will be out in 2 years, and even then it's not clear to me that VR needs to be supported. I think the PC is really the best place for high end VR experiences, but the real mass market for VR will almost certainly be stand alone headsets. The ones that exist now aren't where they need to be, but give them some more pixel pushing power and inside-out positional tracking, and those will be what drives any real VR adoption. Microsoft is still in catch up mode, and they're better off building the best possible system and the best set of traditional games to sell it than spending too much time or effort building out their own VR system. All that said, if they could find a way to partner with Oculus or Vive on their next gen headset, that might make sense to me. Take those PC experiences and make it plug-and-play with an Xbox Next and that could be a win for all involved. I don't imagine MS seeing such an agreement worthwhile, but it might be their best option to have a place in the VR landscape.

66% on RT $42M Opening Weekend Ocean's 8 is a film that is better than Gary Ross's very poor Steven Soderbergh impression thanks to some dynamite casting, but it's ultimately unable to overcome the many issues that the writer / director brought to the table. On the surface, it's all there. Great cast, jazzy soundtrack, cool caper, and interesting characters. It's a recipe that Soderbergh managed brilliantly in Ocean's Eleven, but even he wasn't able to recreate it in his own sequels. It shouldn't be a surprise then, that Gary Ross falls even flatter in his attempt to cook up the same magic. Ross is completely unable to match Soderbergh's pacing or use the soundtrack to similar effect. This is a film that is completely centered around a high fashion event, but it's never able to be as effortlessly fashionable as Soderbergh's remake. It completely mistakes what, why, and how Eleven was so cool. Ross's poor impersenation didn't end at Ocean's Eleven either. The villianless structure was reminiecent of Magic Mike XXL and the end of the film directly echos Logan Lucky. In each case, Ross took something interesting and made it less so when grafted into Ocean's 8. All that said, Ocean's 8 isn't a complete disaster. While the sum is less than that of its parts, many of those parts are unquestionably worthwhile. In particular the leads have excellent chemistry. I could watch Bullock's sly Debbie Ocean and Blanchett's disinterested Lou run petty schemes and cons for hours. Hathaway perfectly embodies the image obsessed actress archetype, and Helana Bonham Carter's perpetual fish out of water routine works very much in her favor here. The rest of the cast is solid even if not entirely put to the best use. There are small joys sprinkled throughout the film, the kind that could have made a good movie great, instead of a poor one mediocre. The heist itself is interesting, but ultimately a failure in the ways that count. By never introducing a real foil for the ladies of crime, the stakes are kept to a minimum. That can be overcome given that there's still something of a thrill in the act, but the bigger issue is one of satisfaction. Regardless of how the heist itself ends, what the mark was or the reward, a successful heist film will leave you satisfied with the work. Inception's payoff is ultimately a single phone call and a business deal not going through, but there are both stakes and a real gratification in what they accomplish. That isn't present in Ocean's 8. Ross tries for it, but it feels hollow and ham fisted. He knew what it was he needed to do, he just wasn't good enough to get it done. In a film full of professional lairs, it's a shame that it's the director that couldn't make the disguise work. Given the rather reasonable box office performance I'd be happy to see another entry in this franchise, but I really hope they find someone else to put at the helm.

I really enjoyed it. Everything with Jack Jack was hilarious. The action was really excellent and inventive. Sure, there were some things that were repetitious from the first film, but overall I still really enjoyed it. I haven't really unpacked the themes of the film, because it certainly seems to say a lot at different times, and I'm not really sure it all comes together in a satisfying way.

Between Rian Johnson's trilogy and the Benioff and Weiss trilogy, I don't expect we'll run out of Star Wars films anytime soon. What I want from Disney here is simply to raise the bar for what gets greenlit. If someone has a great take on a great story in the Star Wars universe, then by all means, make the movie. What they don't need to do is go through the OT with a fine tooth comb and make origin stories or spinoffs of everyone and explain everything just because we heard someone talk about it.

Not a huge surprise that Disney would make a better offer. I don't expect Comcast to beat it.

Seems like a fine deal, but the AMC that is nearest me is pretty small. It's a great theater. Recently remodeled, assigned seating, big recliners, alcohol available, but the availability of films is more limited. Once Moviepass inevitably goes out of business, I'll consider this option.