I get it. I mean, I get the idea. Shoot ‘Em Up is a purposefully over-the-top video game level fantasy of gunplay, wacky action moves, and intentional winking. I was ready and primed for something with the crazy feel of the Transporter or old Tarantino or something like that. The experience […]

When I saw they were making another Transformers movie, I responded in pretty much the same way I did to the news of a live action Garfield movie: Oh yuck, who cares, and I’m certainly not going to see it.  As momentum (and nerdly peer pressure) built, I realized I couldn’t escape.  I wasn’t expecting […]

How can Robots be so good and both Ice Age movies be so lame? Sure, both Ice Age movies have good attention to detail insofar as biology and various species-specific jokes, but when the best part of both movies is the non-verbal interstitial episodes of Scrat trying to get his walnut, maybe you should […]

At first, you pity wee Pendragon Pictures - they finally make a blip on the radar screen by producing a feature film of a popular science fiction story but doing it for the first time as it was originally written, set in 1898 with Martians chasing horse drawn wagons, etc - and then the Spielberg […]

Funny, I liked it better until I had to explain why. It’s always tough to follow a huge smash hit, especially in the horror/thriller genre. Gore Verbinski did not return, but Hideo Nakata, who directed Ringu, the Japanese original did. The challenge of course is to come up with something while retaining the magic of the old. The Ring […]

As fans of Helen Fielding’s books generally agree, the second Bridget Jones book (on which this film is based) is the inferior work of the two about our hapless heroine. That said, one would hope, with the magical chemistry of the cast and the success of the filmmakers with the previous adaptation, that this […]

Dreamworks and Disney and Warner Brothers and Pixar, as animation studios, all have sought to find their own voice in an industry only recently beginning to be taken as seriously as the work deserves. Obviously, of these two groups, Disney and Warner are the hand-drawn titans, and Pixar and Dreamworks are the computer animated […]

Fe Fi Ho Hum. As with all visceral disappointments, Shrek 2 stymied my ability to write for well over a week (or two- gulp). Long(ish) time readers may recall that I found the first Shrek to be funny, but hardly an enduring classic like Pixar’s Monster’s Inc of the same year. It […]

See what I do for you people? I suffer, so that you might live. Ever catch a family member sniffing your underwear? I haven’t either, but I suspect it feels something like how I felt leaving the theatre. Filthy, inappropriate, violated, and over all, uncomprehending of the appeal. It’s not […]

If you loved the first Matrix, scratched your head at the second, and actually care about getting those unanswered questions taken care of in the 3rd one, maybe this isn’t the movie for you. It will only make you mad. The only question I had left over from #2 (thanks to some incredibly […]