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Where I Traveled in 2017

 

2017 was the year Ana and I had baby Ember in July so some travel leading up to, and certainly, was cut back substantially just as I bolstered our PR efforts on Screen Rant to cover more in our main verticals.

Still, despite having to pass up dozens of exciting opportunities, I managed to do attend some incredible events throughout 2017 and knock a few items off my bucket list. Here are the highlights, in order:

  • February 2017 – New York – For Hugh Jackman’s last movie as Wolverine, Fox let me host a contest and bring a fan to New York to interview Jackman for Logan. His name is Sean Harrigan and we’ve been pals ever since. You can catch his writing and hear him on the radio on Cinescape.
  • February 2017 – Atlanta – I got hear frequently for set visits since its one of the top production destinations and this one was for another Marvel Studios feature: Black Panther. Since Atlanta’s Pinewood location was full for other movies (Avengers) this one was actually being shot at Sony Studios and right next door was the cast of Stranger Things shooting season 2.
  • March 2017 – San Francisco – I finally got to visit Pixar Studios! Every year there’s at least one Pixar movie in theaters and therefore, one long-lead interview event to preview the film and chat with its amazing creative team and artists. In previous years, I’ve sent various members there for The Good Dinosaur and in 2018, sent someone for Incredibles 2, but I went for Cars 3. The day after our time in the studio, we went to Sonoma Raceway for interviews, press conferences, and racing!
  • April 2017 – Orlando – Last year I traveled to London for Star Wars Celebration Europe and my first ever Celebration event. This year, less than a year later, I got to do it again but in Orlando and participate in my first ever Galactic Nights event at Walt Disney World. This was my second time a the theme park having gone with Ana the previous February for the Zootopia junket.
  • April 2017 – Iceland – One of my top three go-to destinations that I’ve never been to before was Iceland and I got to go for EVE Fanfest 2017, but first to spend a few days in the countryside with Ryan and Angela who rented an SUV and got an amazing AirBnB near one of the hot tourist sites.
  • May 2017 – Los Angeles – Disney Parks Canada reached out for the first time ever and brought me out to Disneyland California – also a first – to participate in the grand opening of the Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout! ride. It was amazing and I got to have a conversation with Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige while there.
  • June 2017 – Atlanta – It’s become an annual event travelling to Atlanta since Marvel Studios made it their home for film productions. This year was the biggie though and we got to see the set of Avengers: Infinity War and grab some great photos along the way!
  • September 2017 – Budapest, Hungary – Working with National Geographic (NatGeo) for the first time allowed me to visit the set of Mars season 2.
  • October 2017 – New York – It’s been a long time since I went to my first NYCC staying at my business partner Ben Kendrick’s place many years ago. This time he wasn’t able to make it but we had our own giant media room and film crew in the round table VIP area. This was a wonderful learning experience for next year.
  • October 2017 – Montreal – I travel to Montreal all the time for work, and this year, 3-4 other times for Valnet, but this time I went to visit an Electronic Arts studio for the first time. Specifically, the new studio EA Motive where the story campaign for Star Wars: Battlefront II was being developed.
  • November 2017 – London – In 2016 I visited the set of Justice League during E3 2017 so had to fly to London from Los Angeles. I did that trip again, but this time with my mom, for the Justice League junket. We attended the screening and a cocktail part in the Warner Bros. lot in LA and checked out the Chinese theater before flying to London for a wonderful dinner, a preview of the Justice League setups (featuring a room for each member of the JL) and then did the press conference the next day. Wonderful food and great people, and I got to visit my mom’s home country with her! We even did the London Eye!
  • November 2017 – Hawaii – Another first for me, visiting the beautiful Hawaiian islands. I went for the Jumanji film junket and got to visit the ranch where Lost, Kong: Skull Island, Jurassic Park and many other greats were shot. And I got to interview The Rock, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart on camera!
  • November 2017 – Orlando – visited Walt Disney World just for a day to preview the Star Wars Galactic Nights events coming in December.
  • December – Orlando – I had the opportunity to visit Disney World two more times at the end of the year, first in November for a preview event of the next Galactic Nights, and then in December I brought my brother as a Christmas gift and ‘thank you’ for his work helping paint my home. We did Galactic Nights and spent three more days visiting all the main attractions at all the parks.

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X-Men: Apocalypse Review

X-Men: Apocalypse Review

X-Men: Apocalypse is the most X-MEN comic book movie event yet  and it covers a lot of ground for better or worse.

As a followup to X-Men: Days of Future Past tt of course brings back all of the key First Class players and adds a ton of newcomers and does a great job in doing so, staying faithful to characters, designs, details, and locations from the comics and previous films.

The new young team, bolstered by the return of Quicksilver in a bigger part, is awesome and bolds well for the future of the series. Nightcrawler and Storm have their appropriate accents, keeping in line with Colossus 2.0 also getting his proper accent in Deadpool. Bryan Singer and the studio are finally embracing the diversity and international flavor of the mutants that they shat on in most of the earlier movies (Looking at you Banshee, Colossus, Gambit, Pyro, etc.).

The marketing for X-Men: Apocalypse was notoriously bad and does a major disservice to the franchise’s biggest project yet because it’s simply way better than that. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll enjoy it, and if you’re a longtime reader, there’s a lot more to enjoy too – a lot of EPIC things I was surprised to a see all in one movie. Not everything was spoiled in the trailers…

What X-Men has always done best is ground itself in reality with its harsh look at the awfulness of historical world events (racism, sexism, Cuban Missile Crisis, WWII Nazism, etc.) and uses that with personal connections to help rationalize the motivations of its antagonists. That’s why Magneto and Stryker are better developed and better utilized villains than anything the other rival franchises have.

And the titular villain this time around, Apocalypse, has a bit of that too – especially when he gets started. Ultimately though, he’s not as epic he should be given his stature in the source material. The concerns over Oscar Isaac being wasted were warranted. He’s just sort of the big bad guy who can do anything but not all the time… and when he converts/recruits his horsemen those key characters become blank, personality-less slates, and not for too long.

That main story, which should be grand in scale, is partly forgettable due to being overshadowed by the tangential plots which can make for their own spinoff movies, but much of it is familiar. Perhaps the rushed nature of it all and nods to the past were all intentional to ensure the series rewrites history in a way that Singer and producer/writer Simon Kinberg wanted it to for the future of the brand and for the fans. They’re clearly trying to rush through a lot to make up for several of the previous films and to again re-establish the norm for the next movie which we’ve always known would be set in the ‘90s. That’s undoubtedly the one that will shoot next summer in Montreal for a summer 2018 release and New Mutants could come before it.

For the most part, every time you’d ask why a character does or doesn’t do something, the filmmakers do a commendable job in playing it properly though there are a few things left unanswered by the end (like the alien tech powering En Sabah Nur). With so many characters, most of them have a role to play, even if some are stuck on the sidelines and are underutilized (Angel, Psylocke).

X-Men: Apocalypse definitely delivers as a theater-worthy blockbuster even if it’s seemingly mostly setup and rewriting of familiar territory. Bring on the next one!

X-Men: Apocalypse is the most X-MEN comic book movie event yet  and it covers a lot of ground for better or worse. As a followup to X-Men: Days of Future Past tt of course brings back all of the key First Class players and adds a ton of newcomers and does a great job in doing so, staying faithful to characters, designs, details, and locations from the comics and previous films. The new young team, bolstered by the return of Quicksilver in a bigger part, is awesome and bolds well for the future of the series. Nightcrawler and Storm have their appropriate accents, keeping in line with Colossus 2.0 also getting his proper accent in Deadpool. Bryan Singer and the studio are finally embracing the diversity and international flavor of the mutants that they shat on in most of the earlier movies (Looking at you Banshee, Colossus, Gambit, Pyro, etc.). The marketing for X-Men: Apocalypse was notoriously bad and does a major disservice to the franchise's biggest project yet because it’s simply way better than that. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll enjoy it, and if you’re a longtime reader, there’s a lot more to enjoy too – a lot of EPIC things I was surprised to a see all in one movie. Not everything was spoiled in the trailers... What X-Men has always done best is ground itself in reality with its harsh look at the awfulness of historical world events (racism, sexism, Cuban Missile Crisis, WWII Nazism, etc.) and uses that with personal connections to help rationalize the motivations of its antagonists. That’s why Magneto and Stryker are better developed and better utilized villains than anything the other rival franchises have. And the titular villain this time around, Apocalypse, has a bit of that too - especially when he gets started. Ultimately though, he's not as epic he should be given his stature in the source material. The concerns over Oscar Isaac being wasted were warranted. He’s just sort of the big bad guy who can do anything but not all the time… and when he converts/recruits his horsemen those key characters become blank, personality-less slates, and not for too long. That main story, which should be grand in scale, is partly forgettable due to being overshadowed by the tangential plots which can make for their own spinoff movies, but much of it is familiar. Perhaps the rushed nature of it all and nods to the past were all intentional to ensure the series rewrites history in a way that Singer and producer/writer Simon Kinberg wanted it to for the future of the brand and for the fans. They’re clearly trying to rush through a lot to make up for several of the previous films and to again re-establish the norm for the next movie which we’ve always known would be set in the ‘90s. That’s undoubtedly the one that will shoot next summer in Montreal for a summer 2018 release and New Mutants could come before it. For…

X-Men: Apocalypse Review

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My Interview With Chris Pratt on The Set of Guardians of the Galaxy

My Interview With Chris Pratt on The Set of Guardians of the Galaxy

The embargo lifted Friday so I can finally reveal that last September I traveled again to London’s Pinewood Studios to visit the set of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. I had traveled to the same place, stayed in the same hotel, all for the same studio the year prior for Thor: The Dark World so the formula was familiar.

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‘Star Wars 7′ Cast Finally Announced

‘Star Wars 7′ Cast Finally Announced

After crushing the hearts of at least a few longtime Star Wars fans who grew up playing the video games and reading the novels that made up the Expanded Universe, Lucasfilm, under the new leadership of Kathleen Kennedy and the ownership of Disney, made it official last week that everything not in the actual Star Wars films is not canon. Sorry, but don’t worry, that stuff will still come out and profit will be made from it. It just ain’t legit anymore.

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Jeff Goldblum Laughing Remix

What would Jurassic Park and Independence Day be without Jeff Goldblum? Something I don’t care about for a start. Why Goldblum isn’t playing half of the superheroes we’re so excited to see in movies this year blows my mind.

Man-crush aside, the think tank known as the internet geek community has birthed something incredible once again – a song based on Jeff Goldblum’s laugh. And yes, we’re talking about the infamous introductory laugh by Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm from the helicopter scene in the first Jurassic Park.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Trailer

Instead of airing during the Super Bowl, Disney took to ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live to debut the first full trailer for their riskiest project yet, Guardians of the Galaxy. For the geeks, comic readers and internet savvy, where it airs means nothing. It only matters that it’s finally here!

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