Hey, thanks for the suggestions on renaming Screen Rant’s weekly podcast! I’ve decided to go with regular commenter Chip Chief’s suggestion and from here on it this will be called:

The Weekly Rant

With the popularity of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I thought I’d highlight a related collectible. Sideshow Collectibles is running out of these 1/4 scale maquettes of the Ben Grimm/Thing character so you might want to check ‘em out and maybe grab one for yourself. It’s a big piece, standing 16″ tall, and this detailed, lifelike solid polystone maquette was used as the control design model for the fabrication and sculpture for the full sized suit seen in the first film.

When reviewing movies, I form my own opinion – but one of my favorite websites for helping me decide whether or not to go see a movie is RottenTomatoes.com. I really like the “consensus” approach they use in determining whether or not a movie is good or bad in a general sense.

If you’re not familiar with the site, it gathers reviews from across the web and based on the ratings of individual reviews determines whether the movie gets a ripe or rotten tomato. 60% and above overall positive reviews garners a film a ripe tomato, indicating that it’s a good flick according to the majority. Anything under that gets a rotten tomato. My experience is that anything down to about 50% can be a pretty good bet depending on the genre and your personal tastes, although the lower you go the more likely you won’t like a movie no matter what.

Up until this past week I’ve almost always been in agreement with the overall consensus, but I think the majority of reviewers out there really need to lighten up based on the ratings for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

By Vic Holtreman

Short version: Although at times it felt like a made-for-TV movie, a far better film than the first and more entertaining than the super-serious Spider-man 3.

So it’s possible.

Not only can a sequel be better than the original, but it can be done with the same director and writer. By process of elimination, it would seem that the blame for how bad the first film was can perhaps be laid at the feet of the one guy missing from the new production crew: writer Michael France. I can’t say for sure, but at the top level it seems like pretty much everyone from the first film was still there for the second one. Pure speculation on my part, of course.

Anyway, on to the review…

Just a grab bag of stuff from the last week and half including my server crash, thoughts on Fantastic Four 2 being rated PG, Jericho’s return, Lost’s ending, why I’m worried about the recently announced Captain America movie, and more!

Holee crap… it seems like every other day another three movie clips and 24 new images come out for either Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer or Transformers.

I refuse to post another video clip or new image from either of these upcoming films here at Screen Rant. Seriously, just how much of these movies do you want to see before you ever set foot in the stinking movie theater?!? I understand the concept of the Hollywood Hype Machine and it’s ever increasing need to beat the last box office record (most money made on a 3.5 day weekend in an odd numbered month during the summer solstice, for example).

Is the pendulum finally swinging the other way? For the longest time action movies pushed the PG-13 envelope, doing razor thin trims until they just barely escaped the R-rating and slid in to theaters as PG-13 for those lucrative teen and preteen dollars.

Now I hear from /Film that Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer has gotten a PG rating! I did not expect that at all… I had assumed it was a given that it would get a PG-13. Very surprising as far as I’m concerned.

With Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer only two weeks away, Fox has release yet another trailer, with some new footage in it:

So it’s almost here. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (don’t you love super-long movie titles?) opens on June 15th and the marketing blitz is in high gear. It almost seemed like 20th Century Fox bought up all the advertising time on the season finale of Heroes to pitch this sequel. Is it possible that the sequel could be better than the original?

The final trailer for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is out and it’s much more impressive than the original teaser trailer that was released a while back.

One of the complaints about the first Fantastic Four movie was the fact that Ben Grimm as The Thing did not have his trademark big honkin’ brow ridge.

Based on the photo on the left it looks like the folks making the movie heard that and fixed that particular issue in Rise of the Silver Surfer. The first image is from the first film and the second image is from the sequel.

At least it looks like they’re going to do one thing right in the upcoming film.

Ain’t It Cool News has always been a huge movie site, with it’s founder Harry Knowles becoming a bit of a celebrity among the geek fanboy movie crowd (don’t be offended, I’m IN that crowd). Like many movie websites out there (including this one) they report rumors based on information sent to them, but usually their sources are pretty solid.

However right now they’re getting pretty hammered in regards to recent reports about Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Wow, this has got to be the most interesting story I’ve read so far today. On the heels of some very bad preview reactions to Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, comes the news from AICN that Galactus will appear in the form of:

A giant cloud.

The big news this week is supposedly that Laurence Fishburne may be doing the voice of Galactus, but I think that this tidbit from Ainitcoolnews is a lot more newsworthy: There was a screening of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a couple of days ago and the reaction was, to put it mildly, not good.

The specific quote that was sent to AICN was: