#2,169: Jurassic World

Spy - ★★★☆☆
Better than I thought it'd be. It's like a good Mortdecai. I liked how the movie kind of pokes at the idea of how we typecast Melissa McCarthy by making all her disguises the kind of roles you'd expect her to be cast in instead of cool action spy, but then the movie still puts her in situations that seem like we're meant to laugh at her, not with her, so I'm not sure whether we've made any progress or not. I guess we're good for another three months until the next not-so-great spy comedy comes out.

The Wizard - ★★★☆☆
I don't think I'd ever seen this all the way through before, or realized that some of the internet jokes based on it were from this movie and not commercials. (A fine line, perhaps.)

Kind of fun to spot that it's shot by the guy who shot recent watches Spy and Love & Mercy, and stars Jenny Lewis whose name keeps popping up in movie theaters at the end of the ubiquitous Rikki and the Flash trailers. I mean, not very fun, but kind of.

Avengers: Age of Ultron - ★★★½☆
My original 5 stars was based on fan-wow, more or less the Harry Potter problem I described earlier. I did, and still do, want to see more of all of these heroes on the screen, but this is pretty cluttered.

Jurassic World - ★★☆☆☆
This reminds me of, like, Airport '77. It's a 70s disaster movie where we just cut away to the control tower to see people react to more bad news to help us understand that the news is bad. And we do that here because there's no character we care about. Nobody learns or grows or changes.

JP4 also makes me think of Birdman, because of the open contempt it has for audiences, who apparently love it.

Hike Mic: Nazi Bunker Edition vol. 4

In the 1930s, Nazi sympathizers spent $4 million ($32 million in today's dollars) building a fortified compound in the hills behind Pacific Palisades, from which Hitler, victorious in World War II, would rule over the Americas.

This July 4th, celebrate freedom by joining us for a hike into the hidden valley where the crumbling ruins of this alternate future have been reclaimed by nature. We'll eat snacks and tell jokes. We'll explore the woods and marvel at all the graffiti. 

This is an Open Mic. This is a Picnic. This is an Adventure. It's a Hike Mic! Join us, won't you?

#2,166: Dope

Love & Mercy - ★★★★☆ 
I could have watched a whole movie with re-enacted studio sessions. God only knows how much more fun this movie is for someone who really knows the album.

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - ★½☆☆☆
A lot of times when I pick a documentary to watch, I pick something that addresses a topic that I'm interested in.
And: a lot of documentaries are primers to the topic they discuss.
So: they cover a breadth of information about their topic, but don't get especially deep.
But: because I'm already interested in that thing, I'm already familiar with the basics, and then I'm kind of bored with the movie.

This is not that. This is a movie for someone with a deep love of Wilco. Or maybe at least a passing familiarity.
Also: I couldn't help but wonder whether the filmmaker actually liked the band by the time this was all said and done.

Nightcrawler - ★★★★★
A lovely portrait of a sociopath. I think I understand what we're meant to think of him, but as an LA resident, I also admire his drive.

I wonder if this is the first time I've seen a Jake Gyllenhaal movie that's about the character Jake Gyllenhaal is playing.

Dope - ★★★★☆  
This is turning out to be a great year for high school movies. Probably, one of the best trailers of the year too, in that the trailer was a weird music video kind of thing and I had no idea what this movie was really about. And the movie continues to be surprising in it's form almost throughout.

The scene where a character replaces the letter c in his speech with the letter b was a lot like the Monty Python scene where a character replaces the letter c in his speech with the letter b.

Nintendo E3 2015

This year's E3 experience was much less frenetic than last year's. The Treehouse Live booth, an improved version of my after-the-fact schematics from last year, is now run by Nintendo. So instead, I helped to produce some videos for their YouTube channel. In brief:

• The Star Fox Zero reaction video you see above,*
• The 360º booth tour video I posted the other day,*
• A Super Mario Maker reaction video,*
• A recap of the Nintendo World Championships 2015,**
• A recap of Nintendo's entire E3 experience,***
• A couple of fan videos made by a guy who turned up in several of our official videos.****

I'm really glad I got to work on some more stuff for Nintendo this year. Plus, I had a little more time to wander around the show floor (as evidenced by the Yoshiller videos). I haven't played a Star Fox game since the original, but of the demos I played on various systems it was the most fun game I got to try. 

Of course the internet is always mad, but it really struck me this year how wide the gulf was between the angry, angry online opinion and the truth of actually being on the ground. This is a shot from just before the end of the last day of E3, when booths are turning to tumbleweeds:

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* editor
** co-editor
*** assistant editor
**** dude playing game demos, then suddenly cameraman

Nintendo's E3 2015 Booth Tour Video

Here's something I helped to make this week.  Watch it on your awesome smart phone.