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I LOOOooooooooooooooooooooVED Pacific Rim. Listen until Wonder Woman came out, the Pacific Rim theme was my ring tone. (Now it's the WW theme if that wasn't clear.) My love for it was only partially because of my love for Idris Elba in pretty much every role he's ever in, the other part was the depth Guillermo del Toro put into what was essentially a robots vs. monsters movie. Good old GdT doesn't do sequels and the writer Travis Beacham didn't return for Uprising... but I know how to go into a movie with low-to-middling expectations, so that's what I did. I'm not going to go into detail here, this is after all supposed to be spoiler-free. But, I will say that if you're going into this movie for a lot of plot... or science... or solid ties to the original... you might not find what you're looking for. But if you, like me, are going into Uprising looking for a robots vs robots or robots vs kaiju extravaganza, well, buckle up and prepare for a good...

I'd planned to take my little sister out to see Love, Simon tonight but it was nearly a sold out show, which rarely happens at our theater. So, rather than wait for a later show, we went to see Tomb Raider instead. I wasn't sure what to expect, I've seem some pretty cynical reviews and some really shitty ones from manbabies that care more about the size of Lara's chest than anything else in the movie. Taking everything I've heard with a huge grain of salt, I thought we'd check it out. I was never a fan of the early Tomb Raider games, they felt unnecessarily difficult and way too focused on Lara's appearance (they were). In recent years with the reboot of the video game series, I decided to check them out again. And I fell in love with Lara, the story, the game play. They're fantastic games. A little bit open-world, a little bit puzzle-platformer, a little rpg. They've got good story, good puzzles and a great protagonist. I've never really gotte...

My completely spoiler-free review. 1) IT'S AMAZING 2) See #1 I want to say that I hope this media trend continues wherein we have these Gen Xers and older Millennials making media for audiences, but especially younger audiences, saying we don't have to keep doing things the same way they've always been done just because that's the way they've always been done. We can change. We can leave the past where it belongs, in the past. We can look at our forefathers mistakes and we can do something different.

I love a good surprise movie. The Super Bowl was over by the time I saw the announcement for the new Cloverfield movie, so I finished what I was working on and hopped over to Netflix. Now, I never watched the first movie. I wanted to, but knew I wouldn't be able to handle the shaky-cam production. However, I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane at the theater and loved it. I'm a huge fan of horror movies -- especially ones that build really well, and ones that tease you about just how threatening the thing you think might be threatening really is. You're supposed to spend all of that movie wondering what the real threat is. Is it John Goodman's character or is he really a nice guy protecting our heroine from what's happening outside? Sure, it's not ideal, the situation, but how much can you trust about what's happening inside that bunker? I'm a sucker for that ambiguous villain.  The Cloverfield Paradox feeds on another one of my favorite horror g...