"My name is Elton Hercules John."

When I was a kid he was Captain Fantastic, and I spent a lot of time and money on Elton John records since the early 1970's. I was a 12-year old kid when Goodbye Yellow Brick Road came out, and I've been a pretty huge fan ever since. I'm a veteran of about 50 concerts over the years, and I was looking forward to this movie in the same way I used to anticipate a new Elton record for decades. Most of the time I was rewarded with brand new songs that would quickly become part of my own story growing up. Once in a while I was disappointed. I hated Victim Of Love so badly that I threw the record across the room, and there is still a stain of peach paint on my copy. I wish that I could say that the film Rocketman was more like those wonderful vinyl treasure chests, but it was more like the latter, and no one is more frustrated than I am. I wanted terribly to love this film. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a middle finger to Elton's fans, and I think it's going to be a long, long time before I get over it.

Back in 2014 when Godzilla came out, I had a blast with the film, though one of the major complaints people had seemed to have been that there was not enough fights or not enough of Godzilla.  Personally I didn’t see how this could be a complaint to take too seriously; after all, if you watch some of the older films, we’d only get maybe 15 minutes of screen time, but thankfully this wasn’t always the case. Now with the release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the human story is a bit of an afterthought, and it’s the titans that carry this blockbuster bonanza.  Is this a good thing?  You bet it is, though I’m sure there are plenty of stuffy critics who will complain about there being too many monster fights; for those critics, this movie wasn’t made for them.  This is a movie made for the kid in all of us who wanted to believe in the possibility that giant monsters could exist, and seeing these hulking giants duke it out while destroying cities in the process just made us smile.

If you think the movie Get Out was shocking, wait until you see the diabolical Ma. You won’t have a clue to what this party woman has cooked up until just the right moment.  Then, as it unravels, even some of the hints are misleading.  When you do know the truth, then it’s just one sick scene after another. Being transferred from LA to a new school in her mom Erica’s (Juliette Lewis), small hometown in Ohio, Maggie gets noticed by a clique.  The in-group members, Haley (McKaley Miller), Andy (Corey Fogelmanis), Darrell (Dante Brown), and Chaz (Gianni Paolo) are the wild bunch of the school crowd who like to get drunk and smoke pot.  But, Maggie likes that they were the first to greet her and makes friends with them. She also has an instant connection to Andy.

"I think it's time I told you about Aladdin, the princess, and the lamp."

There is very little new coming out of the Walt Disney Studios in recent years. For the last few years and into the near conceivable future, there has been a concerted effort by The Mouse House to remake as live-action films the vast library of animation classics. It pretty much started with the huge success of The Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau in 2016. The film did a wonderful job of bringing these jungle creatures to life through the modern-age miracle that is CGI. Somehow the film captured the very heart of the original animated feature and immersed us more fully into that world. No, it wasn't the first time Disney recreated an animated feature with live-action releases. But it was so dominant at the box office that it appeared to set the mold for these conversions going forward. This summer Disney set an ambitious schedule, delivering no less than three of these remade films to the summer schedule.