6/15/07:  "I can't say I read a lot of Fantastic Four comics as a kid (The Avengers were my Marvel Super-Team of choice), making it a lot easier for me to accept some of the sillier, more sitcomish decisions director Tim Story made when bringing The World's Greatest Comic Magazine to film in 2005.  I liked that cheerful, unpretentious superhero flick quite a bit, but I have to say I was expecting to see less of Mr. Fantastic using his stretching powers upon running out of toilet paper and more scope and gravity in a sequel.  And yes, that sequel, Fantastic Four:  Rise of the Silver Surfer, does pit the title heroes against galactic forces seeking to destroy the Earth.  But it struggles to put away childish things, and gets off to a brutally slow start before kicking into gear.  Like so many sequels, it relies on residual goodwill and game performances by the returning cast to sell material I wouldn't otherwise view so charitably.

The Fantastic Four are a media sensation, and the wedding of Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd, aka the shape-shifting Mr. Fantastic) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba, the Invisible Woman) is swarmed by media." MORE

10/8/08:  "I often worry that in our society's eternal struggle between ethics and expediency, expedience has dug a deep hole, dumped ethics in and buried it under a mountain of cash.  It's easy to see why:  we've witnessed the last few weeks just how much Wall Street holds our economic well-being by the throat.  All Wall Street wants is to make money by any means necessary, so why wouldn't we all just fall in line and say “Just shut up, take what you can get and keep the economy running?”  In fact, someone whose rights were violated would almost have to be crazy to challenge Corporate America on principal:  the best you could possibly hope for if you've been wronged is to be written a check to go home, but don't ever expect an admission of guilt or to be “made whole” in any way you can't pay for with that check.  Flash of Genius tells the story of Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, and his long, costly battle with the Ford Motor Company to prove they'd stolen his invention.  Not to get paid for his invention, mind you, to PROVE it had been stolen.  To PROVE he had invented it.  To regain ALL the rights that might come with that invention had it never fallen into Ford's hands.  And yes, Bob Kearns was crazy, but an excellent performance by Greg Kinnear made me feel for that crazy guy and his need to do what was right in a world that sees no right or wrong that doesn't start with a dollar sign." MORE

2/9/08:  "All movies are products:  the best we as moviegoers can hope for is that what we are being sold is a rich storytelling experience filled with entertainment.  Sadly, many filmmakers lack the nerve to sell us “a vision”, “a story”, or even “a movie” and are content to fire action, comedy, romance and wacky gay sidekicks into the audience like T-shirts out of a cannon at a sporting event.  And when it works, I'm dutifully entertained and keep my mouth shut.  When it doesn't, you get something like the aptly titled Fool's Gold, a reunion of the stars of the hatefully cynical romantic comedy blockbuster How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that glistens with high production values and good intentions but just can't deliver the goods.  In their absence, we get a parade of demographically diverse characters and desperately pandering moments trying to give every single audience member something to hold onto.

Eight years ago, Tess (Kate Hudson) went to Florida on Spring Break and ended up married to and invested in the treasure hunting life of Benjamin “Finn” Finnegan (Matthew McConaughey).  Together they became obsessed with an 18th-Century shipwreck that scuttled a huge Spanish treasure called The Queen's Dowry." MORE

4/25/08:  "I've said it before:  stars are cool.  They bring iconic weight to characters, allow us to measure their range from role to role, and generally distract us in material that needs the goose.  Something else that's great about them is that you can put two stars together, then stand back and watch the sparks struck by their combined starpower.  Action stars rarely team up:  it's a solitary genre, telling stories of lone wolves taking on impossible odds and even sidekicks are usually little more than cannon fodder.  So I guess it's not all that surprising that it's taken this long for the two biggest Asian martial arts stars of our era, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, to finally make a movie together.  If they were waiting for the right vehicle, their patience has been rewarded by The Forbidden Kingdom.  It's a nifty kung fu fantasy pitched at teens but enjoyable by anyone whose pulse quickens when I mention that yes, the two titans take time out to fight before joining forces.

Teen Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano) loves kung fu movies, so much that he makes frequent trips to Chinatown to buy bootleg videos from Old Hop (Jackie Chan), whose shop includes an ancient staff that's been waiting for years to be picked up “by its' rightful owner”." MORE

6/27/07:  "There's a great Haunted Mansion ride at the Knoebel's Grove amusement park in Elysburg, PA.  You take a seat in a little roller coaster-style car and then ride along a track through the mostly dark “mansion” while the lights rise and fall and “spooks” of all kinds are either suddenly in front of you or come popping out of various holes in the walls.  For extra disorientation, there's a tunnel of strobing lights, an oncoming train whose lights come on about two feet in front of you and a little shower of water at the very end.  I love that ride (I've been on it a couple dozen times over the years), and I thought about it repeatedly during Mikael Hafstrom's new Stephen King adaptation 1408.  Just like the ride, it excels at springing jumping spooks upon you.  And just like the ride, its' plot never really goes anywhere. 

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a once-promising writer who's been reduced, after a personal tragedy, to touring the country and visiting “haunted places” for a series of third-rate Spooky Travel Guides.  An unsigned postcard in his Post Office Box inspires him to visit New York's Dolphin Hotel, where the mysterious Room 1408 has seen the death or dismemberment of pretty much everyone who's ever stayed in, or in some cases even cleaned, it." MORE

4/21/07:  "I love a good thriller.  The prospect of seeing a clever mystery solved by clever people with danger around every corner hits so many visceral and intellectual hotspots that it's easy to forget how rarely these movies really work.  There are lots of reasons thrillers go wrong:  crafting a convincing mystery is hard, populating it with likable characters isn't as easy as it seems (after all, many of them have to be lawyers), and the need for twists and turns makes it easy to break faith with the viewer.  Director Gregory Hoblit is best known for Primal Fear (although he also directed the sensational Frequency), a movie that I felt was fatally tripped up by its' own cleverness.  But his new film Fracture is a model thriller:  a battle of wits between two great characters, one of whom is trying to get away with an exceedingly clever “perfect murder”.

Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) is a brilliant engineer whose wife (Embeth Davidtz) is having an affair with police hostage negotiator Rob Nunally (Billy Burke).  One night, Ted confronts her with the truth, then calmly shoots her in the face.  Staging a “hostage situation”, he draws Rob to his home, where he turns over the murder weapon and confesses." MORE

11/11/07:  "I'm a sucker for Christmas movies.  There's something about the holiday and the Hollywood imagery about giving, magic, redemption and flying reindeer that totally hits me in a personal soft spot that wants to believe in some sort of transcendent human goodness.  And that's probably why I enjoyed Fred Claus, an initially awkward holiday reunion of Wedding Crashers star Vince Vaughn and his director David Dobkin.  It gets off to a slow, painfully unfunny start, but once it settles into its' tale of a troubled North Pole family reunion that, yes, might just Save Christmas, I was surprisingly moved.  Of course, in the interests of full disclosure, I also cried at the end of It Nearly Wasn't Christmas.

At some point in the distant past, Mother (Kathy Bates) and Papa Claus (Trevor Peacock) had two children:  the older, Fred (played at different ages by Jordon Hull and Liam James) lives in the shadow of saintly young Nick (Theo Stevenson).  In fact, Nick grows more and more saintly until in some mysterious fashion, he ends up as Santa Claus and celebrates the (unmentioned) birth of the Baby Jesus by handing out toys to Good Girls and Boys each December 25." MORE

1/11/07:  "Storytelling serves many different purposes:  it cautions, amuses, thrills and inspires.  Any story can do these things, but there's a special thrill that comes with depositing the word “true” in front of it:  the feeling of possibility that comes from knowing the one person really did overcome the odds, and maybe they're not the only one who can.  I think that's why most teacher movies these days are at least “inspired” by real-life tales:  sometimes the news can really wear us down about our educational system and, by extension, our society's future.  It's good to be reminded that the right teacher in the right place at the right time can still make magic happen, just as Erin Gruwell did.

After the LA Riots, Erin (Hilary Swank) decided to abandon her goal to become a lawyer and become a teacher instead, to try and save people before they wound up in court.  She arrives at Wilson High in Long Beach with no experience but boundless optimism.  Cynical administrator Margaret Campbell (Imelda Staunton) assigns her an English class of freshmen with the school's worst behavioral and academic problems, and Erin's early classes are disastrous.  The students know nothing but the violence and racial division of their day-to-day lives and believe they have no use for an education." MORE