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Can you pleeeeeeease draw thattttt

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It’s Morphin’ Time!  Eventually... Power Rangers Review

Saban’s Power Rangers opens darkly.  You see a blasted torn up landscape of prehistoric Earth with the Red Ranger dragging himself across it, obviously injured.  He crawls to the Yellow Ranger, also lying prone who morphs into an alien and hands her coin to him, telling him to hide it before dying in his arms.  Yikes.  He morphs into Zordon (Bryan Cranston) and puts his coin with the others he’s carrying, instructing Alpha via communicator to fire a meteorite at his current location.  He turns to find himself face to face with a female Green Ranger named Rita (Elizabeth Banks) who he accuses of being a traitor and killing his team.  She boasts that she’s won when Zordon informs her it’s too late and a meteor comes crashing down on them sending her to the bottom of the sea.  Also wiping out the dinosaurs, I presume.  I guess nuking from orbit was the only way to be sure. Smash cut to a bunch of jocks leading a bull into a locker room as a prank and we meet Jason Scott (Dacre Montgomery) who informs us that he calmed the cow down by milking it.  Womp womp.  Your protagonist can’t tell an udder from a dong, not a great start.  The cops show up and after the most nausea inducing go-pro car chase I’ve ever encountered (Seriously, I saw Gravity on the UltraScreen in 3D and this almost made me vomit) he gets in a horrific wreck and we have a title screen. Go go Power Rangers?  If you never watched the show this may seem exciting.  If you did, well here’s why it might not be what you were expecting.

 Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers hit children in 1993 with a blast of popularity that overpowered the Ninja Turtles and kept kids riveted until Pokemon came along at the end of the decade!  A Japanese import, it was cheesy, silly, campy and formulaic and pre-teens ate it up!  As well as some teens.  I was just hitting the age where I felt like I was outgrowing Saturday morning/after school shows (Thank God that phase didn’t last) so I was never a die hard fan, but I knew enough people that were that I kept abreast of the original shows run.  I watched a fair number of episodes with my friends more due to our love of riffing it a la Mystery Science Theater 3000 than anything else…  Although I will admit that Kimberly (Amy Jo Johnson)  kept me on board a bit as well.  The premise was simple.  Five teenagers from Angel Grove are given magic coins that allow them to morph into Power Rangers.  Spandex clad ninjas with full coverage helmets who can summon robot dinosaurs called Zords and merge them Voltron style into a giant Mega Zord to win the day.  They answer to Zordon, a giant holographic head, and fight the monsters that Rita Repulsa repeatedly sends down from the moon.  Ninjas, dinosaurs and giant robots.  It was famous for the obvious cut between the American actors doing their day to day thing and the original Japanese footage being used once they were in costume.  Ever wonder why Kimberly was the only Ranger wearing a skirt?  Because the Yellow Ranger in that Japanese footage is a dude.  (The more you know!)  That’s all you needed and it’s still on the air in some iteration to this day!  Why mess with a good thing?  If it’s not broke, right?

 Unfortunately Hollywood is following a current and overused trend of trying to make things dark and gritty when they reboot them right now.  That’s not to say it can’t work, but it really feels like a forced excutive decision by the movie companies some times.  This new Power Rangers update has a lot of things that work really well for it as they try to make a serious and less campy approach to one of the most popular cheese fests ever.  They also make some big missteps.  I know that Zordon famously asked for “teenagers with attitude” in the original and wound up with the nicest kids in town, but this version makes an over correction by having three of them meet in detention and one of them just not go to school at all.  Turns out Jason has to wear an ankle bracelet now and report to detention for the rest of the year and lost all sorts of football scholarships.  As soon as he walks in he sees Billy (RJ Cyler) being bullied for OCD behavior arranging things on his desk.  Jason puts a stop to it and Billy immediately declares him his new best friend for sticking up for him!  I really liked Billy in this movie, but they make a very clear point early on to have him state that he’s on the autism spectrum and they play it pretty well until he becomes a Ranger.  Then it just seems to disappear and he’s merely giddy all the time.  He’s adorkable, sure, and probably the most likeable character but it would have been nice to see them stick to his spectrum tendencies.  Jason is fairly dismissive until he offers to use his skills to hack Jason’s ankle bracelet in order for them to hang out.  How all true friendships begin!

 Next we meet Kimberly Heart (Naomi Scott) who was set up by her cheerleader ‘friends’ for an incriminating picture that’s been circulating around school and they show up to inform her that she no longer gets to be a plastic.  It makes her so angry that she gives herself a kicky new haircut in the bathroom that Jason is immediately smitten by when she returns from the restroom!  After Billy hacks the ankle device, he and Jason go into a restricted area of the gold mine outside Angel Grove because apparently Billy likes to blast there.  Even though it’s an active mine with security.  Shrug  While Billy is setting his charges, Jason goes off to hike around and spies Kimberly cliff diving while We get Zack (Ludi Lin) and Trini (Becky G.) dropped in as just random kids who are also hanging out in an active work zone after dark.  Her to practice her Karate Kid poses and him to watch her through binoculars.  Like you do.  Anyway, Billy’s blast draws them all and they discover 5 glowing coins embedded in the rock.  After cutting them out, they each grab one and then alarms go off, summoning security and another slightly less vomit inducing chase that AGAIN ends in a horrific crash, this time with a train.  The next morning they all wake up at home with no injuries and no knowledge of how they survived the wreck, plus sick abs and super strength!  Wanna know how they managed that without being seen?  Or what Billy’s mom’s reaction is to the destruction of HER van?  (You see the wreck later on being pulled off the tracks)  You’re out of luck!  Anyway, they get together and decide to go back to try to find answers about the coins and discover a buried spaceship manned by Alpha 5 (Bill Hader) and Zordon’s memory in the ship’s computer.  He informs them that they’re the Power Rangers and they need to learn to defend the universe once they can learn to morph!  Eventually…

 I don’t know if it came with the casting of Bryan Cranston but the biggest drawback of this film is that at 2 hours almost every minute of the Rangers suited up has been shown in the trailers because it only happens in the films final action scene, similar to my beef with Godzilla not having enough Godzilla.  There are training montages aplenty and I really did appreciate the effort it made to give the core cast some substance behind there characters that wasn’t there before, but it’s pace could best be described as deliberate.  The film seems to work the best when it’s trying to have some fun and not brooding so much, which is all too often.  The scene of all the nerd kids idolizing Billy after he knocks out a bully without trying and then being in awe when he gets pulled from the table by Kimberly?  Great!  Fun little scene, use more moments like that as opposed to repeated instances of people mispronouncing Trini as DeeDee.  ???  I assume it’s a joke but I just don’t get it and boy do they keep pushing it.  I wish they had done more with Zack as he had a lot of potential in his backstory.  He doesn’t attend school any more because you find out he’s caring for his terminally ill mother but aside from that reveal he just gets all the “I’m gonna shout quips!” style lines.  Don’t try taking a drink every time he calls Trini “Crazy Girl”, it won’t end well.  Jason is fine in his role as the leader, but as is the curse of the leader role (Cyclops, Leonardo), is pretty bland.  Kimberly and Trini are both solid female role models although I wish they would have come right out with Trini’s sexuality/crush on Kimberly rather than just heavily alluding to it.  Although I was disappointed by him dropping the autism traits halfway through, I thought Billy in the second half was the most relatable character.  He’s just so giddy every time they bring up the fact they get to be Rangers!

 I was not a fan of the design choices for Alpha and the Zords.  Alpha was thankfully less obnoxious than the original, but his super long arms on the tiny body just looked weird and creepy.  Props to Hader for making me not hate him!  The Zords…  I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.  I’ll be honest, aside from the T-Rex and the Pterodactyl they could have been anything.  I had to go online after the movie because I couldn’t remember if the Triceratops was Blue or Black because I couldn’t tell them apart.  Turns out it’s Blue.  For as many montages as we were dealt and given the movies run time, I’d have preferred to see them learning their suits and Zords right off the bat as opposed to trying and failing to Morph a half dozen times and then finally getting it right just in time for the final battle where they go in operating things they’ve never used before.  I know I’m overthinking it, but I hate when people just innately know how to use things like that.

 Lastly we come to the villains.  I’ve got really mixed feelings on this part.  I appreciate they wanted to take it more seriously, and I like what they did with Rita but DAMN.  They may have made her a bit too intense for the audience that’s generally associated with Power Rangers!  Banks is great and and she is wonderfully creepy and terrifying but there is a scene where she’s killed some police officers and you see that she’s ripped the teeth out of one and has dismembered/is CANNIBALIZING the other.  This is while she’s still in her slightly mummified state after a fishing boat pulls up her body and it’s horror movie levels of creepy as she gets her power back to create Goldar.  Because he’s made of gold, see?  I don’t quite get her power set because at first she’s brutally murdering people for their gold, then eating it (WTF?) then just pointing at it and drawing it to her in liquid form.  At least she gets to say “Make my monster grow.”

 Overall, it’s not bad.  It’s not as action packed as you’d expect, but what references do show up are all well placed and fun.  You get some cameos and throwback lines.  Ay-yi-yi and what not.  My favorite reference was when two boys were arguing who got to be the Red Ranger while they’re playing and Trini tells them, “Why not Yellow?”  “That’s a girl!”  “How do you know?”  lol  Love the message and the nod to the original Yellow I mentioned earlier, but unfortunately undercut by the obvious sculpted boob armor on Pink and Yellow…  Best moment, bar none, was when they played the original theme.  Unfortunately it’s just one refrain then back to generic orchestration, but the theater I was in was electrified when it came on!  I’m not made of stone, that riff is freaking amazing.  You could tell everyone was a bit bummed when it didn’t continue throughout the fight.  As usual anymore, stay through the credits.  There’s a mid credit scene that I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to call before it happens but it’s there.  LOL at the guys behind me talking loudly throughout the film complaining about the very thing the scene was about and leaving before it happened.  That’s what you get for being terrible movie attendants!  If you were a fan of the show as a kid, I think you’ll have a great time!  If you’re bringing your kids because of how much YOU loved it…  Just be aware it gets really dark and creepy in places and might move a bit slow if they have to wait over 90 minutes to see any Morphin’ Time.

[ostermahaus]

Tale As Old As Time Beauty & the Beast Review

I'm clearly at odds with most of the critics, I thought that Beauty & the Beast was FANTASTIC! It exceeded all my expectations! My only criticism is that none of the new songs are anywhere near as good as the songs they should have imported from the Broadway version. The acting was great, they did a wonderful job fleshing out the characters and the backstories they gave added a lot of good emotional heft! Best of all, they fixed pretty much EVERY plot hole I had a beef with in the animated version! There is nothing about the curse being lifted by his 21st year, so he's already grown when he gets changed, there is no reference to how many years they've been changed; just that it's been a while. Best of all? They addressed why no one knew about this castle JUST OUTSIDE THE VILLAGE! That one was used the most effectively.

I loved Kevin Kline as Maurice, they humanized him SO MUCH more than the other versions and his reason for imprisonment was much more true to the story I remember reading. Gaston as well! I liked that it was more of a slow reveal to his true colors rather than him just being horrible right out of the gate! He goes from seemingly clueless to murderous and manipulative which is great to watch! Josh Gad IS LeFou in human form. People have complained about Emma Watson's singing but I really didn't notice. No, she wasn't incredible, but Belle isn't a part of any of the really big show stoppers which I've been thinking all along. She doesn't sing a note in Be Our Guest or Beaty & the Beast or Gaston. I thought she was fine with the singing and great with the acting!

Really there were no weak performances that I saw. McGregor, McKellan and Thompson were all fantastic as the objects and I thought Dan Stevens did an outstanding job bringing some more layers to the Beast. While I wasn't wowed by any of the new songs, the old standbys had me grinning ear to ear and humming along, particularly The Mob Song, which has always been my favorite (despite the fact they changed my favorite line). For as well as I know the story and as many times as I've seen the animated version there were a few places near the end where I was getting seriously choked up! Even the background characters were better!

I especially loved the Bookseller's character. It was small, but he did what I felt he should do in any version! He was always standing on Belle's side and taking to her defense, even walking away from it all when Gaston whips up the mob to light their torch and mount their horse! I may have been paying special attention since I played the character in the stage version at my local community theatre and frequently thought it was weird I was giving Belle a book and then going in to jeer her in every other scene. Well played Mr. Condon! As far as the live versions go, this was head and shoulders above both Cinderella (Very pretty, pretty slow) and Jungle Book (Impressive CGI, eh adaptation, awful ending). It got stretched to more than a 2 hour run length and I barely noticed, it breezed by as quickly as the version 30 minutes shorter! Absolutely loved it, can't recommend it enough! Only $4 to see it in 3D here in Grundy, 7:00 showtime and if tonight was any indication get there EARLY!

Sidenote: Parents, if your kid has light up shoes PLEASE find a way to restrain them from making 20 trips up and down the aisle. No one wants the movie to be repeatedly interrupted by their strobe light pacing. Thank you.

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It’s On Like Kong! Skull Island Review

Kong: Skull Island takes a completely new approach to a classic character with mostly entertaining results.  Gone is the beauty and the beast/damsel in distress storyline.  This new Kong has no need of sacrifices and ceremonies, nor does photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) need saving.  It’s one welcome change to the story to modernize it a bit.  Set in 1973 (Fear not, it’s far better than it’s actual 70’s counterpart) against the backdrop of the last days of the Viet Nam war.  William Randa (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) have discovered an uncharted island in the South Pacific shrouded by a perpetual storm and want to get a military escort to take them there for a survey before the troops pull out and also so they can chart the island before the Russians get their own satellite images of it.  Enter Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and his unfortunate band of soldiers.  They’re all ready to ship off back home, but he feels the Army is giving up and abandoning the war so he jumps at the opportunity to take his men out for one more mission to prolong his time in the field.  Also along for the ride is former British officer and expert tracker James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) who comes along for a hefty sum of money despite listing immediately all the ways they’re sure to die on a completely uncharted island.

 Another big change is the lack of a long sea voyage and after rewatching all the previous versions in the past week, I can’t say I miss that aspect.  Changing the approach to helicopters made a lot more sense and also made for a great entrance from Kong, who is slightly miffed that these things are flying over his land and dropping charges to map the terrain.  It’s not the first glimpse of him we see, as the opening scene was set back in ’44 when a U.S. and Japanese pilot both crash and fight until Kong shows up to make them forget what they were fighting about.  The scene is awkward at first, it seems very random considering it’s brevity and the immediate jump to nearly 30 years later.  As the trailers show, the team gets stuck on the island and that opening scene makes more sense when they run into the downed pilot, Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly) who is thrilled to see people from the outside world.  During the initial skirmish with Kong, all the choppers are separated.  Scattered across the island and all trying to find their way to the pick up zone that was arranged before all hell broke loose.

 This cast is stacked and everyone is enjoyable to watch.  Larson and Hiddleston make very compelling leads and strong protagonists and it made me so, SO happy that it showed them working together and forming a strong team/camaraderie without turning it into any kind of a love story.  This is an action story and has enough going on that it doesn’t need to be slowed down unnecessary side plots.  While it worked alright in the original, it definitely hindered the two prior reboots.  For what it’s worth, I’m 10 times more stoked than I already was to see Brie play Carol Danvers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now!  Jackson brings all his wild eyed, shouting craziness to this role (he even gets to say “Hold onto your butts!”) and you know he’s the villain from the word go.  The movie isn’t subtle.  I was pleasantly surprised by Reilly’s turn as Marlow, all of his lines in the trailers came off as forced and jarring, but in context, he works pretty well!  Mostly.  There a few clunkers, but the film plows ahead at a brisk enough pace that you aren’t left time to dwell on them much.  Goodman does alright with what they give him, but for as pivotal as he seems at first, they really don’t spend a lot of time on his backstory which could have been really interesting given that he’s the primary tie between this film and Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla from ’14. 

 As for the story?  It’s not nearly as strong as the actors making it happen.  Visually this film is BEAUTIFUL.  A lot of gorgeous shots, great music choices, fun action scenes.  In the end?  It feels very hollow.  As much as I enjoyed them breaking with the traditional story of trying to capture Kong and save the girl, without it there really isn’t much drive.  Oh crap, we’re stuck on this island, we need to get off.  That’s it.  That’s all there really is.  Of course the objective is hampered by the fact that Packard’s blood lust cannot be sated, which is another issue.  Most of the deaths are caused by his vendetta against Kong for killing some of his men.  It eventually turns into a crusade for him.  I don’t get why anyone followed him after he declared it his mission to kill Kong out of revenge, I feel everyone would have bailed.  None of his men wanted to go on another mission in the first place.  The most disappointing aspect is that once all is said and done it just feels like a really long trailer for the Kong Vs. Godzilla mash-up they have planned down the road.  I’m sure it will be fun and this movie was fun, but it didn’t feel like King Kong to me.  In name only.

 Speaking of Kong, I wasn’t crazy about his design.  He was too upright.  Too human.  It reminded me way too much of the awful ’76 version where it was CLEARLY just a guy walking around in a monkey suit.  The best part of the ’05 version was that he looked like an actual ape.  He and the other creatures looked very lifelike in this  go round, but we’ll see how they stand the test of time.  I remember being wowed by Jackson’s ’05 version when it came out, but CGI does NOT age well and with the exception of Kong himself, most of the creatures in that now look like hot garbage.  I was also a bit disappointed by the lack of dinosaurs.  The Skullcrawlers were alright, but seemed kind of generic.  The major thing that drew me to King Kong as a child was the fact I heard he fought dinosaurs and I was a dinosaur fanatic!  They had some good nods, but mostly the fights with the Crawlers felt like a tease for the fact we know Godzilla is coming.  Make sure you stay after the credits for a glimpse of where that’s all going down the road a bit.

 To sum it up, it’s definitely not a traditional Kong film, but if you’re looking for an explodey, loud, action flick with lots of big monsters punching each other, some great visuals and cool action scenes, check it out!  Just turn off your brain and have a good time!  Hoping to make this an every Friday thing here, planning to do Beauty & The Beast and T2: Trainspotting next week!

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Pocket Princesses 194: Espresso

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This issue brought me back to life, you guys.

And Jason is just so freaking precious.

Source: Batman #16

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Yesterday, Hank Green offered to donate 5$ to the ACLU for each person who replied to him on Twitter with a hand-drawn message of support for immigrants, Muslims and/or refugees. I did a quick sketch, then finished it today. I offered it to him to sell as a print and donate any profit to the ACLU Nationwide, I will let you know if/when that happens. I stand with everyone protesting today, and I stand with the ACLU.

“The New Colossus” : “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. ‘Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

The author of that poem is Emma Lazarus. “Emma Lazarus was the first American to make any sense of this statue,” Esther Schor, who wrote a biography on Lazarus, told the Times in 2011. Lazarus, who was born in New York City in 1849 to a wealthy Jewish family, composed “The New Colossus” for a fundraiser benefiting the Statue of Liberty in 1883. (While the statue was a gift from France, the United States was responsible for covering the cost of its base and pedestal.) Lazarus drew inspiration from her Sephardic Jewish heritage and from her work on Ward’s Island, where she helped Jewish refugees who had been detained by immigration authorities, according to the National Park Service. “Wherever there is humanity, there is the theme for a great poem,” she once said, according to the Jewish Women’s Archives.

[ostermahaus]

This tweet makes me see red.

You know who else comes across that border? The people who do all the hard, dirty work your rich, white hands won’t touch, Trump. I want to make it clear that I’m not generalizing about whites. But you, Trump, come from a position where you’ve never had to experience being labeled as “other,” as lesser, for your skin color or ethnic background, and the lack of empathy that’s resulted is so painfully obvious in your words. The worst part is that there are so many folks like you in this country, so many who share your sentiments and are desperate to preserve the dichotomy reflected in your speech.

I come from from an immigrant mother who held so many jobs at once looking after your wealthy children, or cleaning (sometimes literally) the shit in your homes, or putting up with your verbal and physical abuse at her workplace because there were no other options for a brown woman with limited English who needed to raise a child. If she complained, she lost her job(s). If she lost her job(s), she had to go back to a country that had no promise for her or her daughter. This is the most hard-working and determined woman I know, and she had to teach herself English by watching reruns of Friends over and over.

Please, tell me about the drug dealers, rapists and killers from across the border when a presumably American-born citizen just shot and killed nine people in a church on your own soil. Please, tell me about the threat of immigrants when domestic terrorism and shootings have become disturbingly frequent headlines and we can’t even squash the racism-fueled violence at home.

I worked for years with Dominican and Mexican mothers and their children, interviewing them in an effort to better adapt the American school system for young Latino students. Many of these women were too afraid to even speak to me because of people like you, Trump, who make assumptions about them and their family and see “illegal alien” before “person.” I want you to know that they are exceptional women who have made bigger sacrifices than you will ever understand to earn their space in this country. One of these women came hidden in the bottom of a car under all sorts of debris while seven months pregnant, fighting heat exhaustion and dehydration and putting her trust in seedy Coyotes just so that her unborn son would start life with a better chance than she had. One of these women broke down while talking with me, fat tears rolling down her face as she admitted she was forgetting what her mother looked like and feared she would never be able to see her again, because the risk of returning home was too great.

These are women with proud but tragic, powerful histories, whose husbands often labor for pennies to the dollars they should be earning, “stealing” the 12+ hour-a-day manual labor jobs that no one else wants to do. You know who cooks the food in your restaurants, who cleans after you, who gathers the crops and milks the cows for the goods in your supermarket, who unloads the trucks that bring your beautiful clothes? It’s them.

I don’t know who you think you are, Trump, but one thing is clear: you’re not good for this country.

[ostermahaus]

Muslims are and will always be welcome to the true American. That we even need to fight for this says a lot about the state of our country.

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Pocket Princesses 190: Happy Lunar New Year!

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REBLOG IF YOU ARE JEWISH, SUPPORT JEWISH PEOPLE, OR JUST WANT TO PUNCH NAZIS IN THE FACE

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Hey there, internet! Been a while! Been swamped with rehearsals for Les Miserables at the Waterloo Community Playhouse and we finally opened last night, so I have a little bit of time again! :D If you're in Iowa at all this month you should come see it! The cast is AMAZING! Get your tickets at http://www.wcpbhct.org We run through July 26th! In honor of opening night, I made a thing! Joke was running through my head for a while and now it has happened. Enjoy!

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Jessica Rabbit and Rapunzel watercolor :)

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YES!!!!!

Sailor Moon Crystal cast announced, Sailor Jupiter being voiced by Ami Koshimizu recently heard as Ryuko Matoi on Kill la Kill

felt like this had to be done.