About an hour into The American, George Clooney walks into an empty café where the proprietor is watching the great masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West. (It’s the scene that introduces Henry Fonda’s bad guy.) If director Anton Corbijn wanted guys like me to use this reference as a cue to compare … Continue reading
I’m no marketing mastermind, but I think I have a possible partial explanation for why The Switch wasn’t able to do Pixar-level business on its first week in theaters. Have you seen those posters? It’s possible that most people weren’t exactly intrigued at the image of co-star Jason Bateman turning up his nose as … Continue reading
Here’s a question: Do you like movies about gladiators? Or: Are you ready for an end-of-summer action flick about angry guys swinging swords at each other? Are you like me, and you think Gladiator was just a little too serious and 300 wasn’t remotely serious enough? If so, then Centurion is the sweet spot. If you want to see a rough-and-tumble, unpretentious, … Continue reading
An answer track, in musical vernacular, is a response to a previously recorded and released song. The Ten Awesomest Movies About Fighting is a post by my great friend Zach Oat over at Television Without Pity (read his work daily!) to celebrate the release of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. (Read my review!) I … Continue reading
The Expendables travel around in a flying boat that is marked with the words “Wildlife Conservancy,” which is kind of the key to the movie’s sense of humor right there. Whenever these guys visit a foreign locale, they let loose with an inferno of gunfire and scorched earth that probably wipes out at least … Continue reading
Well, I’m won over. I get it now. I admit, I was skeptical about this Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World thing. If you click through to this editorial, you will see my comprehensive thoughts on the comic and the movie and director Edgar Wright’s work in general. Up until now, I saw all kinds … Continue reading
Somewhere in its middle section, Middle Men has a scene that details the porno-watching preferences of Islamic terrorists. If that doesn’t make a movie worth watching, please tell me what does. Middle Men is the new feature from George Gallo, who is best known, and justly, for his script for the action-comedy classic Midnight … Continue reading
The Other Guys does so many things right that I don’t even know where to start. I definitely don’t intend to go into much detail on this one, because to talk too much about the movie would be to ruin at least a couple of its best jokes, and only an asshole would do … Continue reading
If I see any more movies this year that I like as much as I liked Get Low, it will have been a pretty damn special year for movies. I don’t see a lot of movies like Get Low. There’s a soul in it. It’s a labor of love, and it shows. It’s … Continue reading
The very first person you hear from in the thorough and informative documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist & Rebel is the gloriously creepy Gene Simmons of KISS. Gene kicks things off by maintaining that any American male alive “would give his left nut to be Hugh Hefner.” I object to this statement, if not … Continue reading