9/25/08:  "I hate the New York Yankees.  My baseball team of choice is the Texas Rangers, who've appeared in a grand total of 3 postseason series, all Division Series losses to the New York Yankees in which my Rangers were wildly outplayed and won only once in ten games.  These were soul-crushing, heartbreaking losses and could have processed them by directing anger and disgust at the players I rooted so hard for who let me down.  But that would require introspection about the choice to root for an out-of-state team that almost always loses and recrimination of players who'd once again be my favorites the following year.  The better, the easier choice:  hate the Yankees.  And, oh, how I do!  I try not to live the parts of my life that actually matter that way, but don't always succeed.  We're all guilty of hating third parties that remind us of the things we don't like about ourselves or our lives, and at its' best, Neil LaBute's Lakeview Terrace is a fascinating meditation on our enthusiasm to embrace hatred of random people.  It's also a throwback to the “Neighbor From Hell” cycle of thrillers that held sway in the late 80's and early 90's, but it's a smart and well crafted one.  Terrace is not a movie for viewers who need to like characters to empathize with them, and the ending is pat when it should have been complex."  MORE

2/17/07:  "“Nobody cares about Africa.”  If it's not already there, add it to your list of movie cliches.  Every movie set in a war-torn African nation must feature at least one character laying out this fact:  the West can see as many images of atrocities and innocent victims as the news can muster and will still be unable to rouse itself to offer more than a brief humanitarian mission and a few benefit concerts.  I'm not saying this sentiment isn't true, it is.  But it does help when the movie itself cares more about Africa than, say, The Last King of Scotland.  After an intriguing buildup, and despite a first-rate performance by presumptive Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, the film all-too-quickly loses interest in anything other than getting the Hell out of Kampala.

Feeling the weight of an already mapped-out future in the family medical practice, Nicolas Garrigan (James McAvoy) wants to run off to someplace exciting.  He spins the globe and, when his finger lands on Canada, spins it again.  This time, he hits Uganda.  He gets there, knowing nothing about the country and little at all except how to use his medical degree to land one night stands with the local women.  People in the countryside are celebrating the military coup that's led Man of the People Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) to power."  MORE

3/29/07:  "I'm a big believer that every movie should be seen in a theater.  You're locked in there with the story, without your attention drifting to that TV Guide sitting next to your chair or you wandering off to the kitchen during the dull parts (OK, you CAN wander off to the bathroom or the concession stand, but that's on you!).  As such, I never really understand why people are so quick to say “I'll wait for DVD for that one” while the trailers run (I do understand why they're quick to say “Why are there so many friggin' trailers?!?”).  However, in this case, I might make an exception. The Last Mimzy is a nice, pleasant little kiddie sci-fi thriller that starts slow, picks up steam around the middle and then loses it again toward the end.  Lacking much in the way of spectacle and with a plot that's best thought through only once, it's good enough to merit 90 minutes of your life, but I will understand if you choose to spend those 90 minutes on your couch shooting occasional glances toward the refrigerator.

The Wilder family is happy but kinda stale.  Dad David (Timothy Hutton) spends way too much time at work and sends Mom Jo (Joely Richardson) and kids Noah (Chris O'Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) ahead on vacation without him.  On the beach, the kids discover an ornate box which, when opened, produces a set of weird “toys”."  MORE

5/4/08:  "Like a young actress who sells issues of Maxim more easily than movie tickets, George Clooney has done a sensational job parlaying the respect of critics and peers, old school movie star good looks and a seemingly bottomless well of self-confidence into a position on Hollywood's A-List without many hits to back it up.  Not that I'm complaining:  he's one of the best actors working today, capable of delivering shattering, subtle dramatic work as in last year's Michael Clayton.  But I've got a confession to make.  My affection for Clooney's work goes back a bit before he caught America's attention on TV's ER, back to a time when he starred in one of the funniest movies no one's ever seen, 1988's Return of the Killer Tomatoes.  It began a decades-long love affair with the “other” George Clooney, the comic goofball willing to do almost anything for a laugh.  His performances in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty are among the funniest in recent memory, and I'd go so far as to say that when he wants to be, Clooney is the funniest guy in the movies today.  So it's a good thing he was on hand to act in his latest directorial outing, Leatherheads.  It's an overreaching story about the early days of pro football and a time when good old American barnstorming gave way to big business and the horror of “rules”, but it's light on its' feet and nicely nails the rhythms of old-school screwball comedy.  Just don't expect to pass a test on what happened the next day."  MORE

1/23/07:  "In its' history, the United States has fought two kinds of wars:  those we won, and those we were able to pull back from with our nation's way of life unchanged.  I think that's one of the fascinations of the US Civil War, the notion that the breakaway Confederacy actually lost in a way alien to the US military experience.  Clint Eastwood had already told the story of the price our troops paid for one of our greatest military triumphs in Flags of Our Fathers.  Now, in its' extraordinary companion piece Letters From Iwo Jima, he turns things around to show us the horror of true defeat as experienced by the Japanese troops who fought the Battle of Iwo Jima.

The film begins well before the US invasion, but at a time when Japanese forces know it's coming.  Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker drafted into service, wearily digs trenches with his friend Nozaki (Yuki Matsuzaki) under the harsh command of Lieutenant Ito (Shido Nakamura).  Then, a new commander arrives: General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) has been to the United States, and has greater knowledge of and respect for the enemy than his counterparts."  MORE

7/7/07:  "One of the hardest things about articulating a critical position on movies is defining and describing that certain feeling I get in my gut when a movie that's made me laugh (sometimes a lot) comes to a close and I more or less don't feel anything.  I haven't cried (and yes, I'm a crier), I feel no better than average about the fact that things worked out for the characters, and I'm just generally ambivalent about the entire enterprise.  The new Robin Williams comedy License to Wed is such a movie:  maybe my position will become clearer to me after I walk you through the plot.

Ben Murphy (John Krasinski) and Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) are an adorable couple who seem made for each other.  So much so that he's finally screwed up the courage to pop the question.  Sadie's only too happy to say “yes”, but on one condition:  she wants to be married in the same church as her parents (Peter Strauss and Roxanne Hart).  Sounds easy enough, but Ben soon regrets agreeing when he meets Reverend Frank (Robin Williams).  He's a little odd in a “I knocked the real Reverend over the head and took his place” sort of way and insists that every couple he marries first go through a “Marriage Preparation Course” of his own creation."  MORE

11/10/07:  "We're screwed.  I turn the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over and over in my head:  even in the absence of a preferable victory, how could we even get out without collapsing the International Jenga stack into total and irreparable chaos?  The only conclusion this thinking ever draws?  We're screwed.  Which brings me to Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford's wonky new drama, which trots out every possible argument for and against the wars, has no answers, only challenges to get our asses out there and come up with some.  In essence, it's a movie telling us to go unscrew ourselves:  very well-acted and intellectually engaging, but also targeted primarily at those least likely to be open to anything but being told they're right.

Three (maybe three and a half) stories play out simultaneously:  Professor Stephen Malley (Redford) asks bright but slacking student Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield) to meet with him about his spotty attendance at Malley's political science class.  Todd's lost his faith in politics and the power of the little guy to make a difference, so the Professor tells him the story of two students who had that faith. They're Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Pena) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke), who we now see as soldiers in Afghanistan."  MORE

6/27/07:  "Those who peruse my Blog recently chuckled with disdain when I declared John McTiernan's Die Hard to be the 10th Greatest American Movie.  But they also have some idea of the high bar I set for any further adventures of NYC Police Detective John McClane (as immortally played by Bruce Willis).  Die Hard 2 had its' moments, although it's far too long and full of its' own cleverness, while Die Hard With a Vengeance was a sorry attempt to shoehorn McClane and Special Guest Star Samuel L. Jackson into a Lethal Weapon sequel.  Now, twelve years after that misfire, McClane returns in his best sequel yet.  Live Free or Die Hard may fall far short of the Greatest Action Movie Ever Made, but it's a fun, exciting summer thrill ride with some of the best stunt/FX sequences I've ever seen.

The last few years haven't been so good for McClane.  He's divorced and his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) isn't speaking to him.  It's during a late-night attempt to ambush her into talking that he finds himself in just the right area to pick up computer hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long, best known for being a computer in those cute Mac/PC TV ads), wanted by the FBI for questioning."  MORE

5/6/07:  "I've never been to Las Vegas, and can't say I've ever felt a strong desire to go.  Sure, I bet it's cool to stand in the street surrounded by all those lights, and some of the shows sound like an interesting stop as part of a better trip, but at the end of the day all that stuff sounds a lot like coating cigarettes in chocolate.  I doubt there's anything fun you can do in Vegas that you couldn't do someplace else that isn't working so hard to ruin your life while you're there.  This view is only re-enforced by Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, a movie about the World Series of Poker that makes the event seem to occur someplace just south of Hell.

Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) calls himself a professional poker player, but he's really a professional loser.  He's always in search of money to gamble, and always looking for a way to lose anything he happens to win.  Huck's father is a legend:  L.C. Cheever (Robert Duvall) has won the World Series of Poker twice and taught his son how to play just well enough to never beat his Dad.  L.C. left Huck and his Mom when he was young, and now pretty much everything the kid does is about taking out that anger.  Even when he meets idealistic lounge singer Billie (Drew Barrymore), he only knows how to express his affection by stealing her money."  MORE