Time to lay out the rules for the 2015 edition of the "Beat Berardinelli" Oscar prediction contest. As is the case every year, I have made a few minor changes. Also, a new prize. This year, as was the case last year, my "live commentary" will come in...
Note #1: This is an attempt to be controversial. It is not, however, a cry to receive hate mail. If you want to dispute my proposal, that's fine. But please do me the dignity of reading it all the way through (not skimming it or just reading ...
[Note: In 2014, as in 2012 and 2013, this article will be published over a span of several days, with the reveal of two or three new titles every day during the December 25-30 period. It's done that way to generate some suspense and keep the website ...
Link to "One and Done (Part 1)"Link to "One and Done (Part 2)"For Hollywood to weather the "one-and-done" storm, it has to adapt. When television threatened movies during the 1950s, the industry moved toward color and widescreen to provide an ...
Link to "One and Done (Part 1)"Link to "One and Done (Part 3)"In Part 1 of this essay, I provided an overview of what I call the "one-and-done" phenomenon which has been responsible in part for shaping (and skewing) the 2014 box office for high ...
Did Sony Pictures "cave in"? The question, like so many others involving terrorists and terrorism, is more complicated than it might seem. True, there's no credible evidence to support the idea of a terrorist plot being prepared against theaters. ...
Link to "One and Done (Part 2)"Link to "One and Done (Part 3)"Is it an aberration? That's the question that haunts many of Hollywood's studio executives as they craft plans for the next few years. Is the box office downturn of 2014 a "blip on the ...
In the days leading up to Black Friday, a huge marketing campaign swung into motion. What was being promoted? The latest gadget? A new toy? The "big thing" on sale for Christmas 2014? No… In fact, the subject of the promotional frenzy was an 88-...
I have long since moved away from calling my Bottom 10 a "Worst of..." list. Considering how many truly awful films I have given myself the latitude to skip, it's almost unfair to those remaining to be singled out as the biggest cinematic offenders. ...
It has now been close to 13 years since I embarked upon what I called at the time my greatest challenge as a film reviewer: whittling down the nearly 6000 films I had seen (at the time) to the top 2%. I have no idea if I got it "right" or not, but ...
The era of good manners is dead. I'm not sure exactly when it happened. When I was a kid, people still said "please" and "thank you." They held open doors, relinquished train and bus seats for the elderly and the infirm, and apologized if they said...
What is The Last Whisper of the Gods? It's the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy I have toiled over for the past three years. Actually, I began writing The Last Whisper of the Gods in early 2007 and had about half the book done when real life ...
It seems like just yesterday when there was widespread speculation which format would win the high-def home video war: Blu-Ray or HD-DVD? That was seven years ago. At the time, I engaged in speculation about how long the eventual winner would enjoy ...
I remember the first movie I viewed theatrically. It wasn't the first movie I had ever seen - not by a long shot. By the time my father took me to a theater, I was used to watching films (monster movies, mainly) on TV. My initial experience with a ...
For the dead, death is a permanent state, its precise composition impossible to determine by anyone able to discuss it. What lies on the other side is something no one can assert with surety. We can believe, but that's another thing. For the living, ...
When the 2014 Oscar nominations were first announced, it looked like there would be a number of tight races. As is often the case, however, the fortunes of the nominees have waxed and waned. Some of the front-runners have become also-rans and a few ...
Time to lay out the rules for the 2014 edition of the "Beat Berardinelli" Oscar prediction contest. There are some tweaks from last year's rules, a few of which are designed to make my job easier. There has also been a change in the prize. This year...