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Is there a Crouching Tiger in Southpaw? A Movie Review

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

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If Southpaw is supposed to unseat the renown held by the Rocky film series, then it’s certainly drawing first blood. In one corner, we have the rising talent of Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie Nightcrawler showed him delightfully playing a seedy character and this new one sees him as Billy Hope, a distraught family man when he loses his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), to a gunfire incident. To make life worse, the courts take his daughter Leila (Oona Laurence) away when he shows signs of self-destruction.

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Giving a School Presentation with What We Did On Our Holiday, A Movie Review

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

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Two of Scotland‘s favourite sons are paired in a family comedy drama, What We Did On Our Holiday. David Tennant and Billy Connolly headline this film about a dysfunctional family attempting to come to terms before Gordie McLeod’s (Connolly) 75th birthday. This patriarch of the family is about to celebrate a milestone if he does not succumb to his cancer first. But when his grown up boys Doug (Tennant) and (Ben Miller) are constantly bickering with him or their respective spouses, he wants nothing to do with them. In his glory days, he was a well-known soccer player — he’s had his share of experiences from the school of hard knocks.

His grandchildren, however, are still innocent. Their outlook on life is very different and that perspective is very refreshing to see. Gordie has to carefully choose what he has to say around them, and in what he reveals, these youths receive some very important perspective defining lessons before his passing. At the same time, they provide the best laughs and steal the show. Lottie (Emilia Jones), Mickey (Bobby Smalldridge) and Jess (Harriet Turnbull) have a charm that works very well on the screen. When their characters prove themselves wise beyond their years after their little education from Gordie, they certainly show that they understand grandpa better than the two men trying to give their father the best celebration amongst his peers.

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Tut: Little Accuracy but Plenty of Fantasy. A Review

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By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

Spike TV’s Tut is a hefty melodrama that puts Cleopatra (1963) to shame. When the last of the pharaohs was simply trying to preserve a world that would later be unseated by the Romans, so too did the young boy king try to restore order prior to the rule of his father, Akhenaten. To change from a polytheistic society to monotheism was not welcomed by everyone. The worship of the Aten was deemed too radical. Tutankhamun sought to restore an old world order so that many Egyptians living outside of Thebes would welcome him. But his rule was a short-lived one. He had an inner circle of people conspiring to unseat him for their own sordid reasons. Not all of them were concerned about their country’s spiritual identity and that’s the basis of this three-part mini-series. Their motivations lay nowhere near what historians have ruled through meticulous study of the mummy and stories told on this king’s tomb walls.

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Analyzing Ant-Man’s Entry into the MCU, A Commentary and Review

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

_1432865109 A few big surprises are in store for true believers following the unraveling Infinity Stone story arc in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The latest entry, Ant-Man, may well hint at how they operate if one tiny tell-tale scene is supposed to be read that way. When the scene showed crystalline structures becoming protons and turning into quarks, just how small anyone can become begs the question of what lurks within singularity? When time and space become irrelevant, is what’s there still represented and controlled by thought (i.e. Stream of Consciousness)?

When the ideas presented in this latest film jives with what Guardians of the Galaxy unveiled about these stone’s origins, the truths revealed can be mind-boggling! When a singularity from a black holes are put into a containment system, a stone, just what kind of quantum states exist in there needs to be examined. Perhaps, when all these movies from the second phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are available to purchase, one enterprising fan will make an edit of the scenes specific to this story arc into a mini documentary about the upcoming Infinity War.

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Get your Kaiju on at ShoutTV! Gojira Movie Marathon

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Streaming live and FREE on July 18 is one monster movie of epic proportions that only Godzilla will approve of, and quite literally star in! Shout Factory TV has partnered with Famous Monsters to present a Kaiju movie marathon and for the remainder of today, August Ragone is hosting films from the Showa era (1954-75). This series of films is what helped catapult the monster to cult star status, and they are amongst the best films of what Eiji Tsuburaya, special effects wizard, has produced in his years at Toho.

Live tweeting is encouraged and users can use the hashtag of #godzilla to sound off about the king of all monsters.

The films that are being presented at ShoutFactoryLive.com are:

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Prepare yourself for LEGO Star Wars Droid Tales, A Review

By Ed Sum (The Vintage Tempest)

Some fans of a peculiar galaxy far, far away love LEGO, and it’s about time a new animation is made. The Yoda Chronicles was short lived and The New Yoda Chronicles (retitled due to rights ownership) just did not have the same quality that the previous season had. LEGO Star Wars: Droid Tales is suffering from a similar fate. Ever since Disney acquired the rights, the consistency of this spinoff world has not been perfect.

When the directors and executive producers have changed between products, perhaps that’s the cause. The only person involved in all these shorts is Lucasfilm writer Michael Price. His plotting is quite good. Somehow, as more products have been made, the execution has not matched what was presented in The Padawan Menace. The way young Anakin is characterized in the premiere is familiar. He’s a touch annoying in the films but the fact he almost becomes Darth Vader is toyed with much like how Lloyd Garmadon in Ninjago wants to be evil.

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