Vacation (2015) Ed Helms, Christina Applegate – Movie Review

Econo Airline pilot Rusty eavesdrops on a conversation in which his wife Debbie discusses how bored she’s become of the routine in their marriage, exemplified by the usual Sheboygan cabin they rent every year around Memorial Day, Rusty decides to surprise her and their sons with something new — a cross-country road trip from Chicago to So-Cal’s Walley World, just like he had when he was a lad. Renting a similar family wagon in the Tartan Prancer, which contains features seemingly just to have them, the family of four set off for a whole series of misadventures, including road rage incidents, attempts at public sex, and a treacherous white-water rapids excursion with a suicidal rafting instructor at the nadir of his depressive state.

Pixels (2015) Adam Sandler, Kevin James – Movie Review

In 1982, Sam Brenner was one of the best video gamers around his local arcade. But not THE best, as he would eventually lose in a Worldwide Video Arcade Championship competition to the cocky, pimp-voiced, and mulleted Eddie “The Fireblaster” Plant, who bests him at the wildly popular “Donkey Kong” to steal the victory. NASA had sponsored the event, and used the footage from the competition to send up to space, where it would eventually be found by aliens who take what they find as a declaration of war, and who come to Earth, ‘Space Invaders’-style, to take over things using representations found from the video games they viewed from the original video.

Flash forward to today, and Will is now the President of the United States. Along with conspiracy theorist whack-job Ludlow Lamonsoff and fresh-from-prison former-nemesis Eddie Plant, Brenner, who now works as a low-level home electronics install guy, has to go to wherever the action is in order to apply his video game skills to thwart the advancing aliens in their various glowing cube forms, and in the process, save the Earth from destruction. He also finds that one of his customers, the hot single mom Violet Van Patten, is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that is heading the front against the invasion, though they have to rely in the gamers because the military lacks the kind of hand-eye coordination necessary to best these games. What a chance for a geek to impress the hot babes by saving the world!

Trainwreck (2015) Amy Schumer, Judd Apatow – Movie Review

Comedian Amy Schumer gets her chance to shine on the big screen with Trainwreck, playing, appropriately, Amy, working by day as a journalist at a men’s lifestyle and celebrity gossip publication, but who drinks hard, gets high, and carouses with the opposite sex even harder when not on the clock. Life’s in a predictable pattern of not getting too committed to things until she is assigned a piece on a famous sports doctor named Aaron. Meanwhile, Amy has even more on her plate when her philandering, hard-drinking father, Gordon, is hospitalized and put into assisted living, while Kim, Amy’s pragmatic married sister, is constantly trying to get her to give up her hedonistic ways. It culminates in Amy coming to rely on the rock-solid support of Aaron, while all the while fighting off getting in too deep due to her own feelings on the kind of life that she should be leading.

Marvel’s Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) – Antman Movie Review

There’s actually more than one Ant-Man in the film, as we start with the original, Dr. Hank Pym, a leading scientist, and inventor of the “Pym Particle”, which allows things, including people, to shrink own to ant-size, or more, but with enhanced strength. Through a series of ingenious plays, Pym manages to get his Ant Suit into the hands of resourceful (but jobless) cat burglar Scott Lang, recently released from prison for theft on a corporate scale, though he did it to return money the company reportedly bilked form its customers. The reason for the ruse: Pym wants Lang to thwart the plans of his power-hungry former protégé Darren Cross in using his designs to create his own method shrink people down to miniature size in the form of the flying, weaponized Yellowjacket suits, which he aims to do for nefarious purposes. Pym’s shrewd and scrappy daughter Hope still works in the company under Cross, which gives them the inside knowledge they need for Lang to breach Cross’s tight security and stop the Yellowjacket project before it disrupts global warfare as we know it.

Terminator Genisys (Emilia Clarke Jai Courtney) Movie Review

Terminator Genisys starts in 2029, with the end of the rebellion against Skynet HQ, which makes it, essentially, both a prequel and a sequel to The Terminator, as we see the T-800 played by Schwarzenegger go back to 1984 and try to assassinate Sarah Connor, to make sure her son, John, will never be born, and therefore, not be able to lead humanity to victory against the machines. Following not long behind to keep this from happening is Kyle Reese, who soon discovers that he and the the killer cyborg aren’t the first ones to travel to the past in this timeline, as he is soon met by an older form of a T-800 that was sent even further into the past to serve as Sarah’s protector (earning him the nickname, “Pops”), as well as an even more dangerous T-1000 out to take them all down. Sarah, who is fully aware from an early age on what to expect will happen in the year 1984, barely needs protecting, and might only be interested in keeping Reese around because he is also needed to create John in the future. Together, they seek to keep the Terminators from killing the seed of Resistance in Earth’s future, while the humans seek to stop the creation of Genisys, the seed of what will eventually become Skynet — it’s a race against time through time.