For the last seven years fans have been wondering how we’d recover from the disappointment that was Star Trek: Nemesis, the film that broke the even/odd scheme we’d come to rely on. For everything that J.J. Abrams has done right in Hollywood, had he done enough to take over one of the oldest and most beloved franchises in the industry? Could the writers, actors, director, and studio withstand the undying fanatical cries from the devoted fanbase? Could Star Trek actually become relevant again after a prematurely canceled prequel series and two straight disappointing Next Generation-headlining films? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, a resounding “Yes” as the forty-plus year old franchise is reborn and revitalized under the direction of a capable director, excellent casting, and an excellent story.

All the gushing aside, Star Trek isn’t a perfect film, but its many hits almost completely negate its misses. For every gaping plot hole we get a shout out to the original series or a great line of dialog. For every canon-bucking event, we get pitch-perfect casting and an excellent rapport between characters we’ve known and loved.

The most daunting aspect of the new film would be how to fill the shoe’s of some of sci-fi’s most iconic characters including, but not limited to, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Mr. Spock, Bones, Scotty, etc. The entire cast is fleshed out well with even smaller supporting rolls like Chekov (Anton Yelchin) getting enough meat and potatoes for the audience to fully understand the character. Enough can’t be said for Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, he isn’t trying to fully emulate the late DeForest Kelly, but his perfect delivery of classic lines, demeanor, hatred for the “green-blooded hobgoblin” all sink in so well with the audience.

A lot has been said about Zachary Quinto as Spock and Chris Pine as Kirk, Quinto’s performance as the emotionally troubled, younger Spock works so well in the middle-stages of the film as a dramatic event really tests the half human/half Vulcan. Pine’s performance as the womanizing, eff-authority Kirk is just what you would imagine. We already know Kirk has a history of disregarding orders from a superior (as seen in Star Trek III), and it becomes fully realized how very good he is when we finally see his solution to the Kobayashi Maru test.

The rest of the cast is filled out nicely with Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, and the stunning Zoe Saldana as Uhura. A welcome addition to the cast is Bruce Greenwood as Captain Christopher Pike who’s character is fleshed out nicely compared to what we knew of him from the original, unaired Pilot, and subsequent TOS episode “The Menagerie”.

The aforementioned script issues and underwhelming menace don’t detract too much from the overall picture, however keen observers will blow open the fallacies and breakdown of basic logical thinking, but, honestly, you’re having too much fun to care. Even after repeated viewings you’re more than willing to let a few things slide as you gear up for the next set-piece, the next joke, the next overwhelmingly cool CGI shot that modernizes and energizes the film.

The thing about Star Trek is its exciting, from the moment it begins with Nero’s (Eric Bana) attack on the USS Kelvin, to the closing scene of the Enterprise warping away, its never tedius, the two hour runtime flows along, never ebbing, always keeping your eyes glued to the lens-flared screen and still provoking you like no Star Trek film has since The Undiscovered Country, or possibly First Contact.

It seems almost generic these days to call Star Trek a hip reboot of a successful franchise, and if there’s a less cliché term, please use it, but Abrams Star Trek adventure is just that, an adventure, a continuing voyage of the wagon train to the stars where heroes do exist, enemies lurk, and the faithful crew of the Federation flagship keeps us protected, even 40 years later.

There should be a special level of hell for adaptation writers. Truthfully there can’t be a harder job in Hollywood that someone who is tasked with taking an existing story, universe, or timeline and adapting it for a feature film. Over the years we’ve seen hits and missing to both extremes, and at times we pleaded Hollywood to give up, but then rays of hope appear like Iron Man or The Dark Knight and our lust for our favorite properties on the big screen is renewed. Then there are films like Wolverine, which is sure to feel the wrath of fanboys and general comic book fans for years to come for basically not caring at all.

Wolverine is a passable action movie if it didn’t include some of host hallowed Marvel mutants this side of Captain America, as a comic book movie the film is terrible throwing caution to the wind the filmmakers, producers, and writers tear down one of the most beloved characters in comic book history and reassemble him, with a few other mutants in a film that should never have been made. Regardless of how you feel about prequels and origin stories, these types of films, if done right, are usually a great way to reconnect with characters created in a great film. Bryan Singer’s X-Men ushered in the new wave of high-budget, well written comic book movies only exemplified by the aforementioned Batman reboot, Spider-Man 2, and the X-Men series’ pinnacle, X2: X-Men United. Sure what Singer did wasn’t totally perfect, and the liberties that he took to modernize the series were also ambushed by the rabid, but his film started a franchise that has been run into the ground. Wolverine is to X-Men as Batman & Robin was to Batman, the fourth film in a franchise that basically murders it just for the hell of it.

The biggest obstacle for Wolverine was to meet up with the original X-Men film, after all, we see Sabertooth, Cyclops, Storm, and Wolverine all again. As the film ends you wonder how Liev Schreiber’s Sabertooth (who looks and acts totally different than Tyler Mane’s in X-Men) basically becomes a pitiful dumb-ass in the course of fifteen years. Here he’s able to sustain direct blasts from Cyclops (or Cyclops’ power, more on that later), jump off a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant and survive yet in X-Men he falls off the statue of liberty, into water, and dies. That’s consistency, look it up. Its like everyone who made this movie didn’t bother to even watch X-Men, even Hugh Jackman, who was IN the movie, let this pass. Didn’t he think anyone and everyone would call him out on this stuff? Lets not even get nitpicky with stuff like adamantium bullets, how Wolverine can heal his metal skull, how Stryker knew that Wolverine would survive a bullet to the head, but his memories wouldn’t, how Deadpool can have full swords in his arms, and still bend them.

While we’re on the subject, why did they even include Deadpool, or Wraith, or Gambit, or Silverfox, or Blob or anyone besides Wolverine? Each of the aforementioned gets about 10 minutes of screen time total, with the exception of Silverfox, and one of the biggest hyped additions was Reynolds as Wade Wilson, who basically has one scene and doesn’t even play Deadpool when he’s created. Each of the above characters is mutilated to the point they’re almost beyond recognition.

There’s just so much wrong with the film that it would take pages to explain just how terrible it is, how clearly and utterly pissed off a lot of people are, and should be, after viewing this train wreck. There was no care and no love put into this film, and the few good parts are marred by everything that’s bad. This film is a testament to what’s wrong with modern comic book filmmaking to the point where X-Men: The Last Stand starts to look like Citizen Kane.

Observe and Report was supposed to be the antithesis of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a product of the Happy Madison machine that goes for cheap laughs and not much substance. However, somewhere along the line Report turned itself into what it never wanted to be, a below average comedy, stooping to cheap, shock thrills to get a laugh, and never really powering up as a comedy. The movie trolls along for just over 90 minutes, throws a few laughs at you, you’ll smile a few more times, but it ultimately falls flat.

With the amount of talent present in this production its really surprising to see the end result fail so hard. Seth Rogen, who’s in just about everything these days, really misses here as the law enforcement obsesses Ronnie Barnhardt who’s delusional nature makes the character almost unlikable for the entire runtime of the film. Just when you think he might finally catch on to how strong he’s coming on, he completely loses it. The jokes that get the most laughs were so played out in the trailers that the theater was completely silent when they finally came up.

It isn’t just Rogen who lays an egg here, the normally charming and impeccable Anna Faris is completely wasted as Brandi the make-up girl. Ray Liotta, taking a stab at comedy, can’t seem to figure out any sort of cohesive timing for the funny lines he’s suppose to deliver. The supporting cast is a collection of one-note, one-joke caricatures that we’ve seen time and time again to the point they aren’t funny anymore.

The weak story only adds to the even weaker whole of the script. When Barnhardt becomes obsessed with catching a flasher at the mall he patrols he eventually takes a magical journey of blaming everyone of ethnicity, then attempting to be a police officer, mockingly blow away a psychiatrist with an invisible shotgun, take down five drug dealers, and finally fall from grace, get his redemption, and ride off into the sunset in a golf cart. The film as a whole is really paint-by-the-numbers at its best, and derivative at its worst.

Again, its incredibly surprising to see such talent collected and distilled into a cheap comedy you expect to see late-night on TBS. Maybe the explosion of Paul Blart earlier in the year turned people off to a mall cop comedy, or maybe it was Observe and Report‘s own undoing by simply not being good enough to run with the big boys, but after the movie is over you just kind of want to completely forget it ever existed.

Comedic-drama Rescue Me returns in its fifth season with more of what we love, funny jokes interspersed with serious drama as the dysfunctional lives of Number 62 Truck play out in front of all of us to enjoy.

Creators Denis Leary and Peter Tolan have crafted a fine example of how to see into the lives of the FDNY and the situations that everyone finds themselves in are both uproarious and hard to grasp at the same time. But it’s really the characters that bring everything back, with each member of the house bringing something new to the table and the dynamics of how well they play together only aids the believability somewhat lost on the incessant drama each character experiences.

Season five picks up where the last ended. Tommy Gavin’s (Leary) father has passed away at a baseball game with his son and we’re reintroduced into the fold shortly after with Tommy day dreaming about desecrating his father’s coffin at a mock memorial in his head. The episode also introduces the highest profile guest star thus far, Michael J. Fox, as Janet’s (Andrea Roth) new boyfriend. Fox plays the a-hole card really well confusing Tommy if he’s being mocked. Fox’s story will surely play out more as the season continues, so it would be unfair to judge his character and performance based on this three minutes of screen time.

The major subplots to the season seem to be Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) being injured, and Garrity, Franco (Daniel Sunjata), and Probie (Mike Lombardi) attempting to open a firefighter oriented bar to score with the ladies after hearing the successes of their favorite establishment of the same theme.

As mentioned before, Rescue Me is one of the finest examples of bi-polar drama on TV today. In one pivotal scene where Mickey Gavin (Robert John Burke) relapses and its up to Tommy to pull him from a church where he’s hassling a baptism, the conversation goes back and forth between philosophical enlightenment and the image of a dog defecating in a pantry. As the conversation continues neither participant knows what’s subject is really being talked about. These are times when you both think and laugh at the same time, and these are the times that make Rescue Me one of the best shows on TV.

With both Paul Walker and Vin Diesel’s careers in somewhat of a freefall after ill-advised projects like Running Scared (which wasn’t half bad) and Babylon A.D. respectively, they both needed a return to the franchise that made them famous. In swoops Universal with a fourth entry in The Fast & The Furious series, stripping out the new cast employed in the third installment, shaving off the “The’s” off the title and reinstalling the original core cast members.

The results are marginally better than you would expect. The storyline isn’t anything special, but is a solid narrative when compared to the rest of the series. The motivation and happenstance to bring Walker’s FBI agent Brian back to face off with Diesel’s Dom seems a bit contrived from the get go, but once the fast cars and scantily clothed women begin to grace the screen once more, the story just falls by the wayside.

Walker has seemed to tone down the surfer-dude persona employed in the series’ first two installments, turning O’Conner into a more serious FBI agent who goes against the grain when necessary and has a boss who allows it, to a point. Basically the typically movie-screen agent, mulling around L.A. with a map, looking for bad guys in a non-discrete car. Dom is still the quiet type, although the script attempts to paint him as more of a quiet romantic, leaving his Mexican heist lifestyle to protect those that he loves. Dom eventually runs afoul of a big time Mexican drug dealer who is also wanted by the FBI (how quaint).

The series action is intact from the pre-credits get-go with the scene we’ve all seen in the trailers as Dom and his new crew steal gasoline trailers from a ridiculously long tractor-trailer. Eventually things blow up, cars can still fit under things, and we’re back in L.A. for more action. The film is a literal balls-to-the-walls pace with street races through the City of Angels with some of the new technology that’s come on the scene since the original’s release. There’s nods to the original ¼ race between Brian and Dom about using nitrous at the right time, but there’s very little exposition on what happened to all the supporting characters like Leon and Vince.

Fast & Furious is easily the best entry in the series and it isn’t expected to be the last after its monster opening weekend. Where the story goes from here is unknown, those who have seen Tokyo Drift (which actually happens after this film) will know Dom’s eventual fate, so will we see a sequel in a year or two? Let’s hope so, although there’s dangerously few words left in the title, hopefully Universal thinks to either add a few back in, rather than take more out.

Halestorm’s sound is best described as chick rock for guys, where else are you going to hear a female-fronted rock band sing about how she gets off knowing that you get off watching her undress as in the album’s lead off single, appropriately titled, “I Get Off“;, makes you plainly aware of? This isn’t to say that Halestorm is for girls only, anyone with a love for rock music will find something to like here, but there aren’t too many good female-leading rock bands on the scene, so when a new one comes along, notice must be taken. It doesn’t hurt the case that Halestorm’s full-length debut is a competent and engrossing release either.

While “I Get Off“; is the band’s lead off single, the best track on the disc is the lead-off “Its Not You“; with Lzzy Hale’s piercing vocals and a collection of great riffs and hard driving drums. Other standouts include “Innocence“; with more a calm demeanor Lzzy is able to be a bit more melodic than some of the harder tracks on the album. The record seems to be front loaded, as most of the single-ready, rock-steady tracks are contained in the first half. “Familiar Taste of Poison”; could almost be mistaken for Evanescence at times with Hale’s vocal performance mirroring that of the great Amy Lee in tone and inflection. The album finishes out strong with the guitar-infested “Dirty Work“; and another of the album’s more memorable tracks, “Nothing To Do With Love“; with Hale screaming over herself in the chorus and sound damn good in the process.

The self-titled album is immediately accessible which is both good and bad for the band. The album, is at times, a little safe, and while the song writing is top notch, the sound can be culled into a collection similar sounding bands like Paramore, Lacuna Coil, and to a point Evanescence in that there’s nothing dramatically new here to stand out amongst the crowd. Now Lzzy is easy on the eyes, and her openness with lyrics like those contained in the aforementioned single will certainly get noticed, the band just needed more of a breakthrough. However, Halestorm will be new to everyone outside the state of Pennsylvania, and the band’s formation as pre-teens will certainly have critics talking and taking notice. Its almost as though this album is a safe way to get the word out and let the band grow and evolve once a national fan-base has been established.

This shouldn’t detract from an overall good record, but where it could have been outstanding the opportunity was lost a little. It certainly looks like this band is here to stay though, with major backing of a major label, the debut already digitally available for those who pre-order the physical disc, they’re riding the technology curve that has engulfed and destroyed other bands. While the sound may be trued and true, the old adage of if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it comes into play. Halestorm certainly does rock, as their motto goes, and there’s nothing holding them back from rocking for the next decade or more, hopefully they’ll take that next step in doing something truly special.

As most rabid fans of a comic book series can attest to, you really don’t want anyone screwing with your source material making it lose everything that made it special to being with. There’s a line that must never be crossed, yet is completely obliterated time and time again by greedy studios, hack directors, and ill-informed screenwriters. Watchmen was suppose to be the film that broke that trend, and for the most part, it is going against the most nihilistic expectations of fanboys, but after witnessing Zack Snyder’s ode to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons perennial work, maybe things would have been better off without this adaptation.

There’s a lot to like about Watchmen, the film is oozing style reminiscent of the graphic novel using the carefully drawn frames of the twelve-issue series to frame cinematic exploits of not-quite-super heroes like Rorschach, Night Owl, and Dr. Manhattan, but there’s also a lot of disappointment surrounding the film as well.

As a stand alone film the cinematography is great, the direction is tight; the script is well done and involving. The audience is introduced to the characters and through carefully interwoven bits is introduced to their past as well. However as an adaptation of the graphic novel the film is a big disappointment. Everyone know concessions were going to have to be made to accommodate a movie’s runtime and the dialog heavy graphic novel may have worked better as a miniseries than an actual film. While every scene cut from the film isn’t pivotal, there are bits and pieces, secondary characters, plot points that all build up and give the ending much more impact when the reader realizes what has happened. Here those missing elements are filled in by the minds of those who have read the novelization, but novices will find themselves lost.

The ending itself deserves plenty of talk as it is completely changed as far as the events portrayed. While the basic principles of who lives, who dies, who is to blame, and why they did it are left intact, certain elements that are part of the harrowing climax of the source material are sadly missing or altered beyond recognition here. Those viewers who already had problems with how the comic ended will have even bigger problems now as the vilification of a beloved character just doesn’t fit.

This work was called unfilmable at one point in its decades stuck in development hell and Snyder’s release proves that to be false, there was a film made here, and a pretty good one at that, but all people are going to talk about is what is missing, what is present, and how much of the cut material we’re going to get back in the eventual director’s cut on DVD.

There were a lot of claps during our screening of the film, there were also some groans and giggles by those who can’t handle the sight of a blue ding-a-ling on a 70ft screen, but I didn’t really hear any indifference, people either loved it or hated it, there appears to be no middle ground.

Knowing the development hell this film has gone through, the scrutiny that would follow it up to and after its release this had to be expected, but after all those gushing early reviews from fanboys and comic books geeks you just had to expect and adaptation akin to The Dark Knight instead of the passable interpretation we received.

For the past two and a half years jokes have been made round the dinner table about a certain part of the male anatomy in a cubic container and now the full CD from comedy troupe The Lonely Island finally drops with a collection of SNL digital shorts, new original recordings, and a whole lot of laughs.

The Lonely Island is like an unholy combination of Weird Al and The Beastie Boys (as per our own Executive Editor John Simons). The trio makes clever work of lampooning the hip-hop genre on nearly every track sans for a few pokes at electronica, R&B, and rock. Every SNL Digital Short from “Lazy Sunday“; to the most recent “I’m On A Boat“; can be found here including Natalie Portman’s foul-mouthed rant on her life.

There are highs and lows to the disc, a majority of the songs are pre-packaged for TV coming in under three minutes and trying to fit in as many jokes and lines as possible and seeing what sticks. The advantage here is that the lesser tracks are over relatively quickly, however the better tracks, with more hooks end far too quickly.

Some of the tracks, especially “Dick in a Box“;, with videos available come off clever, but the visual accompaniment added a little bit of spice that is sadly missing. Stand-outs on the album, that weren’t heard on SNL, include “Sax Man“; featuring Jack Black, Andy Samberg’s “Like A Boss“; and the ludicrously gross at times “Boombox“;.

Disappointments like basically all the interlude tracks and the never-going-to-be-funny “Ras Trent“; and “Space Olympics“; hamper and otherwise tightly crafted disc. Most of the tracks that don’t feature Samberg but instead only co-writers Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone seem to come up short. Even after the shock value of tracks like the euro-pop-farce “Jizz in My Pants“; wear thin the finely crafted lyrics and timing will still be present so while the initial knee-jerk is gone, the cleverness will remain.

The surprising aspect of the CD is the sheer number of guests present including Justin Timberlake, Portman, Norah Jones (singing about Chex Mix), Black, T-Pain, E-40, and SNL-alum Chris Parnell. This alone gives each track a unique selling point picking up some of the music industries biggest stars and dropping them into something completely out of their normal element.

Incredibad has its moments, and the songs you’ve grown to love over the past few years will certainly keep you entertained as well as a few new tracks here and there, but overall the disc falls short of comedic greatness.