#2,286: Star Trek Beyond

The Purge - ★★★☆☆
There are two kinds of movie I used to skip in the theater: big broad blockbuster comedies and a lot of horror stuff. Except, when I end up watching them later, it turns out that I like the horror stuff. Sometimes just to admire the economy of it.

Plus, the premise of this one makes me laugh.

The Infiltrator - ★★★☆☆
Felt to me like a throwback to the kind of movie made in the time this movie takes place. Like a 70s movie about the 70s, made last year. I thought it was pretty tense, just waiting for the shoe to drop. Cranston has a streak going of doing movies with unusual structure. I wonder if he insists on it.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - ★★☆☆☆
I was oddly eager to see what is supposedly the worst movie in the series. It didn't seem all that different from Beyond, really. I like how the transporter isn't made of, like, tiny complicated circuit boards and electronics. It seems to be run on gears and pipes and things you need a huge wrench to fix.

I hope they get Ricky Gervais to play Sybok in the remake.

Star Trek Beyond - ★★½☆☆
A little bit boring, but possibly the movie in the reboot series that is most like the original series. Less galaxy-spanning wild action and more talking to people in goofy makeup in small rooms. More broken technology things. More sciencey stuff that doesn't make sense in our world OR theirs. And a thing at the end that's supposed to be really awesome that is really silly.

Escape Room Reviews: The Bunker

Company: Room Escape Live
Room: The Bunker
Date Played: 11/1/15
Player Count: 4

Success:  Success! With a hint or two.

Premise: Some military guy launched a nuke and then killed himself, so go through his office and find a way to stop it!  (Not strictly an escape, you could walk out at any time, but that won’t stop the missile launch!)

Immersion: Sufficient. I mean, it doesn't make any sense that this guy would have so many padlocks in his office. How would he get anything done? On a scale of '1 - Office Park' to '10 - Actual office in a missile silo' I'd say this gets a '6 - Set of a Game Show,' which was great.

Highlights: The main prop and all the things it gets used for is a lot of fun. There are a couple of multi-step puzzles that also stood out. This room always had plenty of stuff for the four of us to be searching or doing. So much so that we had to debrief after to make sure we all knew what all had transpired. We solved the dexterity puzzle (we're learning that there's always a dexterity puzzle!) that the minder told us most people don't solve. (Apparently they use a hint instead.) 

Lowlights: Kind of a lot of the same kind of regular locks. We got hung up in the beginning on a searching failure. 

And Finally:   We had a great time in this room, and we reached the very cinematic conclusion. However, our minder didn't stop the soundtrack, so the bomb still went off while we were taking victory photos and chatting, which was a good laugh. Not every object in the room was part of the game, but it felt like everything was 'in-bounds' and explorable. Fun gadgets, clear objectives, cool set. You would need a minimum of two people to physically accomplish the tasks in this game, but our foursome kept plenty busy.

Out of 2 escape rooms played, The Bunker is #1!

How to book this room yourself: Visit http://losangeles.roomescapelive.com/reservation/index/game/bunker

DDMTA Big News Drops!

You want your big news? I've got your big news!

Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse has been selected as one of the ten flagship films of the 2016 Austin Film Festival! This is where the movie will – at last! – be hatched unto the world!

Here's an Entertainment Weekly story about it, and please enjoy yesterday's post for the official trailer!

DDMTA Trailer Drops!

So like I sometimes talk about, Diani and Devine Meet The Apocalypse is this movie I helped to produce, and it's actually good, and it's actually coming out soon. Here's the full trailer. 

Find out more at DDMTA.com!  It's a good time to find out more because BIG SECRET NEWS is coming tomorrow!

Escape Room Review: The Castle

Company: Maze Rooms
Room: The Castle
Date Played: 8/8/15
Player Count: 4, which was perfect!
Success:  Success! No hints.

Premise: You are trapped in castle by evil wizard. 

Immersion: Our host seemed a little bit embarrassed by the premise. He sat us down to tell us "You are trapped in castle by evil wizard. It's me! I'm sorry!" and we were never able to decide whether this represented sheepishness about having to put a frame around the game we were about to play, or comic genius. Either way, it's how we've thought of the start of every game since. 

The room itself looked a lot more like rented office space than a medieval castle. Luckily, after a couple of minutes, this didn't really matter.  

Highlights: There was a lot to do, and a mixture of regular locks and neat gadgets. A lot of custom tech stuff, actually, but what each thing expected from us was fairly clear. There was more than one way to solve certain puzzles, which I thought was especially cool - if your group isn't good at puzzle type X, you might just discover while working on other things that there's a solution to the same problem available via puzzle type Z. 

Lowlights:  Not enough light! We had less lamps than players, which surely slowed things down a bit. One or two puzzles' solutions were hinted at by traces of previous players. One object was broken / falling apart. The mostly cool non-linear nature of some parts meant that we got ahead of ourselves and solved at least one thing before we discovered it was a puzzle. This wasn't a big problem, but it was definitely a question for our keeper afterwards. 

And Finally: This room will probably always sit on a special pedestal for me and my team because it was our first room. I think it was a great introduction. None of the lows would stop me from recommending this room to you. 

Out of 1 escape room played, The Castle ranks #1!

How to book this room for yourself: Visit http://la.mazerooms.com/quest/castle/