6/6/10:  "If adventure had a name, it would be Indiana Jones.  If adventure had a theme song, it would go like this: “Duh-duh-DUH-duh, Duh-duh-duh, Duh-duh-DUH-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh”.  It's difficult, as we close in on the 30th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to remember that the movies chugged along for a good 80 years WITHOUT Harrison Ford's iconic whip-toting archaeologist of action, because he's so utterly the embodiment of a certain kind of escapist adventure that it feels now like he invented it rather than the other way around.  Like George Lucas' other triumphant franchise, Raiders was conceived as an homage to the serialized B-movie entertainment that flourished in the 40's and early 50's.  The thing is, what Lucas lacked in originality, he more than made up for in execution, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by his legendary pal Steven Spielberg, wasn't just the most expensive self-contained serial ever made, it's still the only one you really need.

In 1936, Fedora-clad adventurer “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford) treks through the South American jungle with an exploration party in search of a valuable statue.  Natives, turncoats and hidden traps pick them off one at a time until it's just Indy and Satipo (Alfred Molina)."  MORE

10/23/09:  "Most popular movies wield some sort of influence over the films that follow them, if in no other way because writers start including their names in their “It's X meets Y” pitches to studio executives.  But there are only a handful that can say they “changed everything” in a lasting or meaningful way.  Nothing “changes everything forever”, of course, since given a few decades something else always comes along to shift the paradigm again.  For instance, who could ever have imagined in the early 90's that animated films would be as popular as they are today and yet you'd essentially never see one that seems influenced by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?  The reason why?  A nuclear explosion of everything-changing proportions that hit on November 22, 1995 in the form of Pixar Entertainment's first feature-length release.  And because Toy Story did change everything for the animated films that followed, Pixar is understandably hesitant to allow their crown jewel to become old hat, in the same way George Lucas keeps giving his everything-changing Star Wars trilogy a technological makeover every few years.  Thus, here in the fall of 2009, moviegoers got a look at a double-feature of Toy Story and its' excellent sequel shined up and looking better than ever in state-of-the-art 3D.

Andy (voice of John Morris) is a little kid who loves his toys."  MORE

10/12/08:  "I've heard a fair amount of backlash against The Dark Knight saying that, while it stirs up a hornet's nest of hot button issues, it doesn't really “say” anything about the times in which we live.  Perhaps that's because what it does say is more about how iconic comic book characters would deal with those problems than how we as citizens of the real world have.  The fact is that action blockbusters very rarely have “something to say”.  They may add spice to their narratives by referencing the topical, but if a big-budget FX spectacular takes a stand on anything, you can expect that it's going to be “Pollution is bad”, “Corruption is wrong” or “Water is wet”.  So how strange was it in 2006 to see producers Joel Silver and The Wachowski Brothers (who also wrote the script) to embark on a big-budget action spectacular based on Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta, an anarchist tract they tweaked into a commentary on the politics of power and fear, post 9/11?  Although Hollywood had been mostly mum on the Bush Administration and the War on Terror, public opinion was steadily turning against both by this time, so that doesn't make V a particularly incendiary title.  What does is its' central contention:  that terrorism, the single dirtiest word in American life in the years following Al Qaeda's attacks on the US, is morally neutral."  MORE

11/4/07:  "Like most people, I really wish George Lucas could keep his hands off the Star Wars trilogy and would stop tinkering with special effects, making Greedo shoot first and generally mucking up his Masterpieces.  But there are some movies that benefit from post-release tinkering, and they're generally the ones that were mucked up originally.  For instance, there's Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's futurist classic filming of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  By now, most anyone who cares knows the story:  in 1982, Warner Bros. looked at a movie which in some ways was far ahead of its' time and freaked out at its' ambiguous villains and downbeat ending and decided to make some changes.  They made tiny but pivotal alterations to scenes involving Replicant heavy Roy Batty that made him less sympathetic and more conventionally diabolical.  They sliced out two key scenes that establish something VERY important about Harrison Ford's lead character.  And they assigned Ford to record an awful narration track which explained some things to death, changed/ruined the meaning of others, and worst of all tacked on an absurdly out-of-left field happy ending.  Ford intentionally tanked his recording session, but the studio used it anyway.  The result is a movie-crippling drag on what's already not one of his best performances.  But something about Blade Runner shined through all this wreckage and the movie attracted a cult following."  MORE

10/5/07:  "Produced and co-written by the young Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment sensibilities were seminal to my childhood movie experience, Poltergeist was marketed under the tagline “It Knows What Scares You”.  It certainly knew what scared me when I first saw it on HBO at the age of 10.  Closets, your toys sitting there staring at you in the dark, thunderstorms, and worst of all, old dead trees.  Oh, and it's got some ghosts too.  I hadn't seen the film from beginning to end in years, and it's interesting to watch it with parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as my points of identification rather than their poor, put-upon kids.  But it holds up surprisingly well, with a loose, frisky spirit and patient faith in its' subject matter that you wouldn't see in a similar movie today.

Life is good for the Freeling family, Mom Diane (JoBeth Williams) dotes over 16-year old daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), 8-year old son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and 5-year-old daughter Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) while Dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson) is the top home salesman for the ever-expanding planned community in which they live."  MORE