It’s sometimes hard to be a fan of big movies.  In many cases, you end up being an apologist for popcorn flicks when you say things like, “It’s ok to turn your brain off and enjoy the flashing pictures for 2 hours.”  You not only sound like an idiot who’s cool with letting the light [...]

In all likelihood, people are going to watch Gentlemen Broncos for one of two reasons: 1.) because it’s from the team that created and directed Napoleon Dynamite, a film that has garnered enough “indie” and word-of-mouth street cred for the husband-wife team to pull in an audience for another film or two (I could be [...]

Wine culture can seem particularly daunting to the uninitiated. The sipping, the swirling, the swishing, the spitting, all practices of an art that, for those who are used to pressing their lips to a glass for the sole purpose of having a drink for the sake of a drink, has a such an apparent high [...]

Picture the Bourne trilogy written by the guy who gave us the Transporter trilogy and released in January for a reason: you’ve got Taken, a 90-minute movie that requires an even lower set of expectations for the first month of the year’s batch of releases. There’s a reason this month has a reputation for the [...]

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night inspired the creation of The Monkees, a television series/band whose Beatles-inspired, critics-divined nickname, the Pre-Fab Four, ultimately inspired The Monkees’ first and only foray into film: Head.  Follow that?  Everything The Beatles were, The Monkees were considered not, despite their later efforts to take what they were given and [...]

For the most part, 2008 musically passed with the grandeur of an oboe solo for me: nobody noticed or cared, except for the occasional court-awareness, awe-struck moment of, “Whoa, hey! There’s an oboe solo going on right now.”

I suddenly understand Wayne Campbell at the feet of Alice Cooper explaining his unworthiness: 13, 15, 17 years in the making (seriously, who can keep track at this point?), the now mythical release of Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy has finally been revealed and I can’t imagine a three paragraph review is going to do [...]

Anime nerds unite! This could our next target for geek outrage. Apparently someone decided to green light a live-action version of the kick-ass anime series, ‘Cowboy Bebop’ without consulting me first. This one makes me nervous like the idea of a live-action version of ‘Thundercats’ makes me nervous (is that even happening any more?). Check [...]

I’m not sure if you’d technically classify this film as a remake or another adaptation, but Tim Burton’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ is a saccharine visual overdose. And it should be.

Long gone are the campy memories of Adam West as Batman. No more do we have the gothic tales of Burton’s tortured soul Batman. And Schumacher’s neon fetish Batman is now dead and buried (and, seriously, we’re all better for it). Thanks to Nolan’s gritty, neo-realistic interpretation of Batman in his 2005 flick ‘Batman Begins’, [...]

So if you’re a comic book fan, it’s no surprise that Alan Moore is considered by many to the one of the “greats” of genre. And if you know that, you also know that he’s not a big fan of any of the adaptations of his comic work to the big screen. ‘From Hell’, ‘League [...]

Michael Haneke is kind of a riddle in his 2008 shot-for-shot remake of his own 1997 horror film, ‘Funny Games.’ His film is a criticism on violence in film; it plays out more like a deconstructive essay than it does an actual film, goading the audience on, mocking them for the violence he feels the [...]