zwolanerd

I didn’t think it would come to this, and I’m sorry to disappoint so many who had hoped for so much, but…

I enjoyed the new Ninja Turtles movie.

I know! I can’t believe it, either! I don’t really know how to process this. I feel like I need to do a lot of soul-searching and self discovery, maybe take some time to fully realize who I’ve become.

This is all so weird, folks. I went into this movie knowing exactly what to expect, already hip to the things I was going to be angry about:

• “The Turtles all have weird lips!”
• “And noses! It’s too creepy!”
• “They changed the origin story!”

Turns out, two of those things did bug me. Weirdly enough, the tweak to the origin story didn’t bother me as much as I wanted it to. Again, I don’t get it, either.

Honestly, the thing I disliked the most was the choice for April. I kept imagining how perfect Emma Stone or Anna Kendrick would have been, I just didn’t care for the way the character was done here. And since a lot of the focus was on April, that just magnified it for me — and was also the other big problem for me: too much Turtleless time. The bits we got to see of the Turtles and Splinter were honestly a lot of fun. There just should have been more.

Raphael’s voice was perfect, but I kept wishing Donatello’s was still Corey Feldman. His current voice never seemed right to me.

For the record, I will never be comfortable with any of the Turtles (Michelangelo in this movie) hitting on April.

So that all seems like a lot of griping. What all did I actually like?

• Splinter fights and it is awesome. Remember how you always wanted to see Yoda fight in Star Wars and then when you did you thought it was cool, but later when you thought about it it wasn’t as cool? Splinter’s fight will still be cool later.
• The relationships between the Turtles – there were a lot of little character moments that felt perfect
• The fights in general were great. No shaky cam, just some hard-hitting visible smackdowns.
• Wil Arnett, though he wasn’t as smart-alecky as you might want him to be.

So, yeah, I liked it. I’m sorry. It’s way better than Secrets of the Ooze and III, and might be better than the animated TMNT, but I’d have to watch that one again.

Tags: TMNT

I have been to 24 movies in the theater this year so far. My gut tells me that’s a bit more than normal, but I’d have to look at the spreadsheets to be sure. Regardless, that’s a lot, right? For a guy who’s not getting paid to watch and review them it seems like a lot.

So as you might imagine, I’m always on the lookout for ways to make it cheaper to go to the movies. My main movie-going buddy and I try to go to showings between 4p-6p, as they are $2-3 cheaper than going later in the evening. Sometimes the local theaters are sneaky, though, and a really big movie that comes out will suspiciously not have a showing scheduled during those times. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s irritating when it does. Going to a movie at that time has the side benefit of leaving the rest of your evening free, but that’s not the main motivation.

The other big way I’ve found is to buy Blu-Rays, which doesn’t sound like it makes sense. The week or two before a big movie hits, the studios will package old maybe-related movies with a coupon to go see the new movie. It’s generally in the form of “go online and enter this code and print out a coupon and take it to the theater,” which is a little bit of a hassle, but not much.

This week, Best Buy was advertising several movies with a free coupon to go see The Expendables III next week. One of the Blu-Rays on the list was The Last Stand, a movie I quite enjoyed. I haven’t bought it yet because I’ve been waiting for the right price to come along. The sale price for the BD (I’m officially from here out just going to use the standard “BD” to refer to “Blu-Ray Discs” so I don’t have to type “Blu-Ray Discs” or “”Blu-Ray” any more) was $8, which is great because that meant I was getting it for $4 and getting to see The Expendables III for $4. So after work on Monday I zipped by Best Buy to pick it up.

NOPE.

Turns out all of the movies offering free tickets to The Expendables III were offering it in the form of Fandango tickets. Fandango’s fine and all, but our local theaters are not Fandango-enabled. I’d have to drive to Indianapolis to use the ticket, and a 2-hour round trip kind of cancels out the free-ness of the ticket. I’d gotten a free Fandango ticket for some other movie in the past (I can’t recall what), before I knew that our theaters didn’t take it. I ended up giving the coupon number to a friend in another part of the country, so that worked out okay for him. This time, though, I caught it before buy the BD.

As I dejectedly wandered around the store to if there were any other good deals I might be interested in, my eyes lit on some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVDs, the new Nickelodeon show. I’d seen a few episodes and really liked it – the humor, animation, and stories were pretty good – and had thought about buying the seasons when they were released on disc. (The DVD only has the first 6 episodes of the first season, which I think is weird. Why not just release them in whole seasons?) Lo and behold, these particular packages had free tickets – not for The Expendables III, but for the Ninja Turtles movie I’m planning to see this weekend. Score! The extra benefit is that I’m not specifically buying a ticket to the movie, which I expect won’t be very good. In the process I am getting a DVD of a product I already know to be good. It’s kind of a win-win for me.

Tags: TMNT