‘Phantom Menace’ in 3D: Now THIS is podracing (Movie review)
In the 1983 documentary “From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga,” George Lucas talks about how a lot of movies like to show off the work of the construction crew on screen. […]
Oscars
‘The Descendants’ another low-key masterpiece from Alexander Payne (Movie review)
I just got done reading Chuck Klosterman’s novel “The Visible Man,” which deals with the nature of reality. In a wider sense, all pop entertainment deals with the problem of reality, because fiction is the […]
David Fincher makes ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ better than it deserves to be (Movie review)
I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly but I’m not an avid follower of the book world, so I kind of got the impression that EW was forcing things in the wake of “Harry Potter” when it became obsessed […]
Jason Segel shows us the Muppets have aged well (Movie review)
After a batch of truly terrible previews for Disney-Pixar movies (not only did the movies look bad, the trailers themselves were interminable), my screening of “The Muppets” (a franchise that Disney now owns) finally began — and, […]
Baseball fans will find lots to love and debate about ‘Moneyball’ (Movie review)
“Moneyball” includes so many scenes of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brat Pitt) and other baseball people spitting chew into cups that it almost plays like an extended version of that “Naked Gun” riff where […]
‘Blue Valentine,’ ‘It’s Kind of a Funny Story,’ ‘Cedar Rapids,’ ‘Hobo with a Shotgun,’ ‘Hall Pass,’ ‘Skateland’ (Movie reviews)
With a few days off from work and a couple weeks to go before the fall TV season, I took the opportunity to rent some movies that I’d wanted to see for a while that […]
How did the apes get that way in the first place? ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ has the answers (Movie review)
A cool thing about science fiction novels is that not only do they explore future possibilities, they also inspire other writers’ imaginations; sometimes one writer’s little idea leads to a whole line of fictional exploration […]
Final ‘Harry Potter’ film ‘Deathly Hallows Part 2’ stylishly, bleakly goes through the motions (Movie review)
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was my least favorite of J.K. Rowling’s books because the goal-oriented plot left little room for surprises: Harry and his friends need to destroy a handful of Horcruxes — […]
A look back at 2010, and ‘2010: The Year We Make Contact’ (Movie commentary)
With 2010 winding down, I decided to take a look back at “2010,” the 1984 movie, to see how prescient Peter Hyams (the film’s director) and Arthur C. Clarke (the book‘s author) were in predicting the future.
‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1’ does its artistic best with the Horcrux quest (Movie review)
After the heart-racing wonder of last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” it’s time to take a deep breath and slow down for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1.” And — yawn — find some Horcruxes. […]