Tag Archives: Anthony Ramos

Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Twisters” End Credits

August 2, 2024 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Twisters movie poster shows release date of July 19th above the two leads standing on a red ruck and looking at an imminently stormy sky.

So, how about that Singin’ in the Rain reboot?

If you think my usual movie entries suffer from subjectivity, don’t expect an exception here. The original Twister holds a special li’l place in my heart for a variety of reasons. Its director Jan de Bont, fresh off the Speed race, was also the cinematographer on my all-time favorite movie. My mom was (and is) a big fan of disaster films, which had a sort of Golden Age in my childhood, from the natural terrors of Earthquake to the man-made systemic failures of The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, and more. Along a more sensitive vein: in the darkest month of my life, pop culture manifested two welcome distractions to take my mind off my anguish when I needed that most: Rhino Home Video’s very first wave of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on VHS, and Twister hitting theaters. Setting my baggage aside, their timing was perfect, as the latter would make a great episode of the former.

Fast-forward 28 years and here we go again with Twisters! They’re back, and this time, they’re even windier. My stress levels aren’t as off-the-charts as they were in ’96 (well, as of this minute), but looking around me, I can’t say the same for the rest of the country, if not the world. Leave it to Lee Isaac Chung, director of the 2021 Best Picture nominee Minari and that season-3 hour-long episode of The Mandalorian that focused on reformed Imperial aide Dr. Pershing, to bravely decide it’s time again for humankind to pull together for a shared experience that’s not great, not terrible, just unapologetically crowd-pleasing and thrilling and extremely loud and filled with scenes of unironic smiling…well, when Mother Nature isn’t trying to murder everyone.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” End Credits

June 11, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
A cardboard standee at the theater with the good-guy Transformers lined up, animals on one side and cars on the other.

Action figures sold separately. May be a mental choking hazard for viewers over 12.

The shiny, tinny, explodo-driven popcorn-drek series that chewed up and spat out the dignity of Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Glynn Turman from The Wire, and Stanley Tucci’s Merlin is back! And it’s more toyetic than ever! Gone are the lumbering, turgid, 100,000-piece jigsaw monstrosities that didn’t resemble the cartoons of our youth, by which I mean Michael Bay’s poorly “written”, billions-earning quintilogy and its intricately hollow CG animated stars. The robot designs are simpler, the thin characters are thinner, the exotic location shoots are fewer, the camera’s male gaze is less lecherous, and the filmmakers remembered how Hasbro’s former key demographic — i.e., The Children — used to think these things were cool. That faint marketing memory lives on through director Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II, the least ambitious and pretty-okayest of that great trilogy) and five (!) credited writers, who, along two multinational companies’ worth of corporate overlords, have decided our alien car-robot heroes should make some new alien animal-robot friends!

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “In the Heights” End Credits

November 6, 2021 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
In the Heights!

How you doin’?

Usually whenever an entry dawdles in my head unwritten for such a ludicrous time span, I don’t preface its procrastinated release with hyperbole to the effect of “It’s an entry five months in the making!” as if I’ve been toiling away on it day and night, tinkering with every last clause and syllable with a mental toolkit until I achieved self-expressive perfection. Sometimes that is my writing process in my mind, till I unveil the end results and then spot three typos and six flat punchlines. That isn’t the excuse here.

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