12/15/07:  "If you have a festering feeling that things aren't going so well in the world, Hollywood agrees with you.  Over the last year, we've witnessed some of the most harrowing apocalyptic visions ever committed to film, led by Children of Men and The Mist.  Add to that list the opening hour of I Am Legend, the third filming of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel (but the first to go by its' name:  the 1964 version was called The Last Man on Earth, followed in 1971 by The Omega Man).  What follows cannot live up to the sensational cloak of despair that opening throws over its' future world, but it, and another top-shelf performance by Will Smith, are more than reason enough to see this flawed but gripping thriller.

The film opens with a morning news show interviewing Dr. Krippen (an uncredited Emma Thompson, setting just the right tone of well-meaning, self-assured naiveté), whose team has engineered a measles virus to instead attack cancer.  The result:  an honest-to-God, 100% effective cure for The Big C.  Flash forward three years to a deserted New York City being reclaimed by plants and wild animals." MORE

7/8/09:  "Because it includes dinosaurs and happened to be playing at my favorite drive-in, Ice Age:  Dawn of the Dinosaurs marks my first trip into the chilly prehistoric world of the Ice Age franchise.  On its' basis, I feel vindicated in my decisions on all three movies:  the regular characters are as bland as they are family-friendly, but an injection of vicious dinosaurs and a movie-stealing guest character brilliantly voiced by Simon Pegg make up for what they lack, making the third Ice Age in all likelihood the first worth bundling up for.

It's a stressful time for the oddball “herd” made up of Woolly Mammoth couple Manny (voice of Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah), giant sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), sabertooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary) and assorted other ice age mammals.  Ellie's pregnant, and Manny's turned all his attention to preparing for his new family, which leaves Diego feeling like it's time to move on and Sid looking for a family of his own.  He finds it in a clutch of dinosaur eggs he discovers at the bottom of a huge hole.  Hatching and raising the eggs as his own, Sid's new dinosaur kids wreck their share of havoc, but nothing compared to what happens when their Mom shows up." MORE

4/26/09:  "Hollywood sells us a lot of fantasies, most of which we know aren't real.  We can't fight aliens, become pro sports stars with no experience, take on magical powers by getting struck by lightning or conduct two-way conversations in English with our dogs.  But that doesn't stop us from believing in the way people interact in the movies.  Love and friendship are so easy to find in that universe that screenwriters must dream up silly contrivances to get in their way.  Rare is the movie that confronts how hard it actually is find lasting love.  Rarer still is one about how hard it is to make friends.  For most of its' running time, John Hamburg's I Love You, Man tells an uncannily observant story about a man with no trouble finding love who just can't connect with his fellow dudes.  Powered by another awesome comic star turn by Paul Rudd, the movie makes it almost all the way to the finish line before those nasty contrivances rear their heads.  Even so, I Love You, Man is as hilarious as it is observant.

Peter Klavin (Paul Rudd) is in love.  Girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones) has just accepted his marriage proposal and can't wait to call all her friends.  Peter doesn't have any friends to call.  He's a self-professed “girlfriend guy” who doesn't really know any guys outside of his brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) and dad Oswald (JK Simmons)." MORE

1/18/10:  "Some footnotes loom so large over a film that they eclipse all else about it, and that's never more true than when a beloved star dies during filming.  That effect doubles when extraordinary measures are required to finish the production, and as such, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will always be, first and foremost, the final screen appearance of Heath Ledger.  While he'd been a popular movie presence since bursting onto the scene in 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot, his performance in Brokeback Mountain showed that he was far more than a mere movie star:  he was one of the finest actors of his generation.  His Oscar-winning work in The Dark Knight only cemented that fact, but by then, he was already gone, leaving roughly 2/3 of a finished performance in Terry Gilliam's first film since he first directed Ledger in the underrated The Brothers Grimm in 2005.  Determined to finish, Gilliam recruited 3 of his star's talented friends (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to complete his performance under circumstances that somehow make narrative sense.  The result is a wonderful moment in time, a splendid tag-team performance by 4 of our best actors.  Pity that the movie that surrounds it only works in patches.  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus makes sense about half the time, and even then it's often rambling like it was getting paid by the minute.  Heath Ledger's fans really do need to see Parnassus, but that doesn't mean they'll enjoy it." MORE

11/23/07:  "Are you one of those people who's frustrated with the overriding sameness of Hollywood movies?  Their slavishness to three-act structures, Syd Field screenwriting models and test audience-approved endings?  Their refusal to mix live action and claymation?  Then I've got a movie for you!  Imagination, the feature directorial/writing/animating/composing debut of the multitasking Leiser Brothers, tells a disturbing, bizarre story of a pair of twin girls whose fantasies may actually be prophetic visions through a swirling vortex of film styles, many of them animated.  I'm not sure it all works, but that creepy chill I had as the credits rolled made me pretty sure it doesn't not work either.

Dr. Reineger (Ed K. Gildersleeve), a specialist in children's behavioral and developmental problems, has been testing twins Anna and Sarah Woodruff (twins Nikki and Jessi Haddad):  one is losing her sight, the other has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of Autism.  The girls are so close and their interactions so linked that they have become a kind of uni-mind.  And their mother Janice (Courtney Sanford) is worried about poetry and artwork that might be doing more than just expressing their inner world:  it seems to predict the future." MORE

6/15/08:  "Allow me to start by throwing objectivity to the wind:  two movies in, I think Marvel Studios' attempt to craft an epic, multi-movie saga about the formation of their iconic super-team The Avengers (my favorite comic as a kid) is just about the coolest thing ever.  It started with Iron Man, the origin story of armored superhero Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and continues with The Incredible Hulk, a quasi-sequel to Ang Lee's spirited but disappointing 2003 flick about Bruce Banner, the irradiated scientist who reluctantly fights evil as an angry green giant.  Hulk lacks Iron Man's depth of characterization and hipster swagger, but it compensates by building a delightful bridge between the monster-bashing adventure of the comics and the soulful drama of the late 70's TV series.  While the Downey Jr. blockbuster is a comic book movie for the ages, The Incredible Hulk is satisfied to be a fast-moving summer thrill machine.  But it's a great one, filled with big action, quality performances and the same high level of craftsmanship we now expect from Marvel's product.  And it's peppered throughout with little flakes of geeky grandeur.

Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is on the run, his blood infected during an ill-conceived experiment with Gamma Radiation that, when he becomes too angry or excited, transforms him into a gigantic green monster who's virtually indestructible." MORE

3/1/08:  "If you're Catholic, or if you get all of your theology from the movies, you probably believe in Purgatory, the place where souls neither so pure as to ascend to Heaven nor so wicked as to be damned to Hell endure a process of purification which may allow them to move past their sins.  Ray, the emotionally damaged goofball hero of In Bruges, finds himself in such a place, caught between one man who seeks to offer forgiveness for some very severe sins and another who plans to dole out the ultimate punishment.  Bruges, the feature debut of Oscar-winning short film director (and noted playwright) Martin McDonagh, is laugh out loud hilarious at times and darkly thoughtful at others.  Shot in the Best Preserved Medieval City in Belgium, it's also a beautiful movie to look at, even if the wonders of that city are lost on a jittery, suicidal criminal like Ray.

Something has gone horribly wrong on a job undertaken by hitmen Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleason), and their boss Harry (Ralph Finnes) sends them into a very specific hiding place:  the Belgian city of Bruges.  The quiet, thoughtful Ken takes an immediate liking to the Medieval architecture, canal rides and historic sites, while Ray can't wait to get out.  He needs action and he needs it now, not the least because the quiet only makes him think more about the heinous crime he's just committed." MORE

5/22/08:  "Every fanboy and fangirl has their dream projects they'd desperately love to see filmed (you guys can get back to work on the other four Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels any time now, thanks, and about a Buckaroo Banzai sequel...), but I feel pretty safe to say that if America could speak with one cinematic voice, it would have a single demand:  more Indiana Jones, please.  It's not so much that either sequel to the iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark is regarded as any kind of cinematic classic (although the last half hour of The Last Crusade is amazing), it's just that we LOVE Indy himself like pretty much no other character identified with only one actor.  Even the American Film Institute had to reserve a spot for him right behind the sequel-unfriendly Atticus Finch at #2 on its' 50 Greatest Movie Heroes list in 2003.  So for almost two decades, we've waited for Indy's three equity players, director Steven Spielberg, writer/producer George Lucas and star Harrison Ford, to find a script they could all stand to collaborate on.  At last, it's here:  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a spirited, albeit virtually schematic adventure that pits the man with the bullwhip against Russians, man-eating ants and the kinds of things they hide at Area 51 (aside from The Ark, that is).  Friends old and new join Indy for the ride, and references to the other movies abound.  It's not a great movie, but it is a quality geekfest, and it's pretty much got Indiana Jones in it.  What more do you want?" MORE

10/4/09:  "Steven Soderbergh can be an astonishingly gifted director of plain old stuff (Erin Brockovich or Out of Sight, for instance).  But he really doesn't want to be.  From the moment he followed up his breakthrough on Sex, Lies and Videotape with the fascinatingly icy/brainy metaphysical Eurothriller Kafka, it's been clear that to Soderbergh it's the experimentation, the chance to do what not only he, but no one, has done before that holds his interest.  The whole joke of the Ocean's... franchise that's given him the freedom to pursue his interests these last few years is how often they're not showing you what you paid to see.  His latest outing, The Informant!, is no exception to his career full of them.  It tells the  story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-ranking corporate official ever to turn whistleblower, as an absurdist comedy rather than the Insider-style paranoid drama we'd expect.  The result is light on its' feet and funny, though it's also fairly forgettable.  Depending upon your feelings about its' real-life subject, it's also either a stinging indictment of modern corporate greed or an insensitive burlesque of mental illness.

In the early 90's, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is making billions on corn-related products and is about to add another blockbuster product to their stable if a project overseen by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) can just get the bugs out of a new process." MORE

8/30/09:  "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are poured into disastrously managed companies judged “too big to fail” with little or no accountability.  Political administrations both Democrat and Republican blatantly break the law without punishment because we're “looking forward, not back”.  Pro athletes and celebrities literally get away with murder.  If you're frustrated by the nagging sense that nobody ever gets what they have coming anymore, has Quentin Tarantino got a story to tell you!  Tossing out insignificant things like facts and history, his 8th feature unleashes the full fury of Hollywood on one of the 20th Century's least sympathetic parties:  the Nazi party, to be specific.  Inglourious Basterds writes a new ending to World War II that should delight anybody who's ever mused that Hitler and Company got off too easily in their ultimate fates.  But while his payback is indeed a bitch, the Pulp Fiction auteur is just as good with the quiet moments, constructing a literate, suspenseful, funny thriller that knows more about the movies than just about anybody watching it.  And also knows how to bust heads.

The film unfolds in five “chapters”.  First, we watch “The Jew Hunter” Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) politely put the screws to a French farmer (Denis Menochet) who's hiding Jewish refugees beneath his floorboards." MORE

1/29/09:  "To me, it didn't even seem like a good idea at the time, but in the aftermath of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and with the Harry Potter franchise kicking into high gear, studios spent much of the mid-00's buying up the rights to fantasy trilogies that had, we were assured, sold a whole lot of copies and as such were EXACTLY like those Internationally-beloved properties. Many of those first installments have reached the screen, and we're still waiting, after the likes of Eragon and The Golden Compass, for one of them to spawn even one sequel, let alone two. After shuffling around the release schedule for two years (production began in 2006), Inkheart seems unlikely to reverse the trend. Adapting the first of Cornelia Funke's German-language Inkworld trilogy (which also includes Inkspell and Inkdeath), writer David Lindsay-Abaire and director Iain Softley have most of the pieces of a great fantasy adventure lying around, but can't seem to assemble them into anything but a momentumless, mildly diverting disappointment. A couple of good performances (including a truly standout turn by Paul Bettany) and some nifty special effects keep the plates spinning for a while, but Inkheart is the kind of movie you're forgetting even as you watch it, not the kind that leaves you clamoring for more." MORE

9/1/07:  "The movies and history have walked hand-in-hand since the medium's creation.  Films witness, shape, and reflect the times from which they come, allowing us to get a sense of what it was like to live in an age when social attitudes we now take for granted were considered shocking or subversive.  Just as women and racial minorities have faced long, uphill struggles to have their complexities and value recognized both in society and on film, the gay community now finds itself trying to convince their heterosexual neighbors that they have more in common than their prejudices allow them to believe.  Hopefully there will soon come a time when I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is seen as much ado about nothing.  But for now it's a silly, fun and even kinda thoughtful flick that asks fans of lowbrow comedy not only to laugh at their squeamishness about gay marriage, but to feel what it would be like to walk in the “other side”'s shoes.

Chuck Levine (Adam Sandler) and Larry Valentine (Kevin James) are best friends who work together as firefighters.  While Chuck is an insanely promiscuous ladies' man, Larry continues to mourn the death of his wife a few years ago." MORE

5/3/07:  "Of all the fantasies popularized by romantic comedies, I think my favorite is that there are strangers out there in the world, just waiting for you to become mixed up in their lives, who hold the secret to magically fixing what's wrong with your own.  You, of course, will oblige by then fixing what's screwed up about theirs.  I suppose the best example of this formula is James L. Brooks' endlessly rewatchable As Good As It Gets.  But in practice, this is tough to pull off, as tricky as answering the question “what really constitutes fixing someone's life?”  Lawrence Kasdan gave it everything he had in 1991 with Grand Canyon, a movie that, like many of his directorial efforts, proved far less than the sum of its' great characters and performances precisely because it couldn't answer that question.  A similar problem bedevils his son Jonathan's feature directing debut, In the Land of Women.  It's a funny, highly watchable movie that left me with a nagging sense that things hadn't really worked out as well as I was told they had.

26 year-old, LA-based Carter Webb (Adam Brody) finds himself at a crossroads.  His girlfriend, popular actress Sofia Bunuel (Elena Anaya), has dumped him."  MORE

1/12/08:  "My favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 tended to be one of two types.  There were the films so insipid and formless that they barely qualify as movies (Manos:  The Hands of Fate, the entire Coleman Francis oeuvre) and those that, in addition to being totally awful, have actual three-act plots and casts that are familiar with the concept of acting (Time Chasers, Riding With Death).  In the Name of the King:  A Dungeon Siege Tale, the latest cinematic misadventure from German-born “Master of Error” Uwe Boll, would have made a great Mystery Science Theater 3000 (if those words mean nothing to you, I'd advise you to stop reading right now).  While it borrows its' plot entirely from other sword and sorcery fantasy epics, that at least ensures that it has one.  Its' diverse cast of actors both in their element (John Rhys-Davies as a wizard) and wildly out of it (Ray Liotta as a wizard) are mostly director-proof pros.  And the finished product is both fast-moving enough to hold a bad movie fan's interest and God-awful enough to keep the laughs coming.  As Tom Servo would say, it's exactly like Lord of the Rings, except that it's no good." MORE

10/22/07:  "I tend to think of myself as having been born at the best possible time:  since my birth in 1972, we've witnessed explosions of tolerance, individual liberty, and awesome technology and I managed to get through high school before they got all draconian and shooting-filled.  There's not a whole lot of stuff I missed that I'd have really liked to have been around for, but the Moon Landing is on the short list.  It's hard to imagine in our modern, partisan country:  everyone rallying behind a National goal that seems crazy and unreachable, but by getting the best and the brightest together, we'd all be able to sit back and watch on TV as something out of science fiction actually unfolded.  But such was the case in 1969, and the new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon gets together almost all of the tiny fraternity of men who've actually been to another world to let us know how it happened and what it was like.  The film is short on detail and fails to wrap their eyewitness testimony in a particularly compelling cinematic package, but these guys were to the friggin' moon, so I really didn't mind just sitting back and listening to anything they cared to share about it."  MORE

10/5/07:  "We don't get it.  Liberal or conservative, pro- or anti-war, we presume to speak for “The Troops”, to tailor our public face and those of others to what we think might make their jobs easier, and generally to make decisions on their behalf so certain that even though the vast majority of us has never gotten closer to a war zone than our TV set, we KNOW what it's like Over There.  Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah is superficially a murder-mystery, and a well-crafted one at that.  But its' heart lies in a greater mystery:  what the war in Iraq is doing to the hearts, minds, and souls of the people fighting it.

Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is proud of his time as a military policeman, and proud of his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), who's currently stationed in Iraq.  Or so he thought:  he gets a call stating that not only has Mike's unit returned to the States, but he's gone AWOL.  Hank loads up his truck, tells his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) not to worry, and hits the road to do what he does best:  investigate.  When he arrives at his son's base, he's greeted with nothing but sympathy and support.  But the answers he gets from the officers there are all subtly inaccurate, and he turns to the local police and Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron).  She tells him there's nothing they can do, and there doesn't seem to be much they WANT to do."  MORE

2/15/09:  "Banks are collapsing all over the world, prompting unprecedented pumping of taxpayer dollars into their coffers in hopes that we can beg them to loan our own money back to us without causing the entire global economy to slide into depression.  Moviegoers are itching for payback.  Instead, we get The International, a somnambulistic thriller that spends two hours ensuring that an increasingly enraged Clive Owen learns that you can't fight City Hall.  Or in this case, the First Bank of City Hall.  Well crafted in almost every way that doesn't involve Eric Singer's bone-dry screenplay, The International is the wrong movie at the wrong time.  It would always be boring, but now it's also a sad missed opportunity.

Let me tell you about the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC):  because the banking business is all about debt, they've decided to go all in on international arms trading so they control the debt of all the people waging war all over the world (I know, I know, this is the kind of thinking that got us into the Financial Crisis in the first place).  Interpol agent Louis Saligner (Clive Owen) has had about all of this crap he can stand and has waged a one-man war against the IBBC for years, including “that thing” that happened two years ago (like everyone in the movie, I will politely decline to discuss it in detail)."  MORE

8/18/07:  "Each time we go to sleep, we quietly hope against hope that we will wake up.  Each time we put our trust in someone we know, we take a leap of faith that they have not “changed” since the last time we trusted them.  And each time we are alone in a crowd of strangers, there's the slightest subconscious fear that they might all be preparing, as one, to turn against us.  When Jack Finney wrote The Body Snatchers in 1954, he seemed to pull his story directly from our collective unconscious, hitting so many universal fears and nightmares that it's difficult to craft a film version that's not disturbing and resonant.  That extends to its' political subtext as well, since just about everyone views the groups that disagree with them as monolithic entities determined to destroy all resistance to what they stand for.  The Invasion, the 4th film version of Finney's novel, leans perhaps a bit too heavily on its' potential as a political allegory, and seems to go out of its' way to wear a troubled production history that included multiple directors on its' sleeve.  But it remains sensationally creepy and might make you think twice the next time someone offers to make you a cup of coffee."  MORE

12/20/09:  "We spend a lot of time thinking about how our nation and world's problems are too big to solve, the opposing parties too ideologically dug in, the issues involved too divisive.  As such, it's helpful from time to time to think back to the 80's, when Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize, Nelson Mandela was in his third decade in prison, Little Steven Van Zant and friends declared that they weren't gonna play Sun City, and there was no nation on Earth that seemed less likely to ever know peace than South Africa, where decades of Apartheid held the black majority under the thumb of a ruling white minority.  But yet, Apartheid did end, Mandela was not only freed, but became his nation's President, and somehow whites and blacks managed to live in peace about 100 years faster than they did when slavery ended here in the United States.  How did it happen?  Well, for one thing, Mandela may just be the world's greatest living statesman.  And Invictus, Clint Eastwood's new film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament held in South Africa, tells us a great story about how he used the event to help heal the nation's divisions, and how the team, led by Captain Francois Pienaar, came through for their country when it needed them most.  The movie probably bites off more than it can thoroughly chew, and sometimes it simmers when I'd have preferred it to boil." MORE

5/16/07:  "If you've seen trailers or TV ads for The Invisible (and if you haven't, you mustn't have been to a movie in at least 6 months...), you've probably seen a lot of a ghostly old man in a hospital gown explaining some really hard facts to star Justin Chatwin:  “You'll never be seen again.  They can't touch you.  They can't hear you.  But if you can solve the mystery of your own death, then you'll have the chance to live again.”  These clips are interesting for a couple reasons:  1)the old guy does not appear anywhere in The Invisible, and 2)what he says is at best partially true.  Certainly this is not the first movie to feature a deleted scene prominently in its' ad campaign, but I bring it up because it speaks to a larger issue with the film.  Brilliant in spots, almost nonsensical in others, it's the kind of movie that screams “I'm been back in the shop for repairs!”  And because it seems that the filmmakers never did quite lick the story, I'm not surprised to see that they changed their own rules a few times while they tried.

Nick Powell (Chatwin) is a “good kid” ready to explode under the weight of his cold, distant mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and a pre-planned destiny.  Just before high school graduation, he plans to hop a plane to London, leaving behind his screw-up pal Pete (Chris Marquette), who's run afoul of Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva), kind of a small-time kiddie crime lord."  MORE

5/4/08:  "I grew up on Marvel comic books, particularly the super-team of The Avengers, whose founding members included The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Thor and Iron Man.  I've kinda lost interest in the comic book form over the years (the only title I read now is Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8), but those characters and stories still hold a special place in my heart.  Unlike DC, which has successfully exploited their iconic Batman and Superman characters brilliantly over the years, Marvel took decades to get its' act together where film was concerned.  But this decade has finally brought a wave of pretty good films about their characters, particularly Spider-Man and the X-Men.  But even at their best, these movies always had to make changes, compromises and concessions that allowed them to at best scratch the surface of the Marvel Universe I loved as a kid.  But now, the company has finally taken the step into producing its' own films rather than simply optioning the rights to others, and the first product of that new business model is a knockout.  Iron Man has walked off the pages of his comic book not only as good as I remember, but actually better.  Jon Favreau's film is so good, it could stand on its' own as a tale of a profiteering defense contractor who decides to put his advanced technology to better use as a self-made superhero." MORE