Last year, The Chicago Tribune filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection. Today, Philadelphia's major papers, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News, joined the parade. The same fate has befallen many smaller papers, and more ...
And now for something completely different…It's the afternoon of Sunday, September 1, 1985, and I'm feeling strange. Outside, there's the bustle of a Sunday afternoon in a city. The temperature is mild but not unbearable, recalling the heights of...
Analog television is now dead, gone the way of the sabertooth tiger and the dodo. From a purely practical perspective, this doesn't impact me. The two television sets I use for watching TV programming are connected to cable; I haven't used an ...
As the economy worsens, it's legitimate to ask how this is impacting the motion picture industry, if at all. It's a time-honored tradition that, in bad times, people often turn to entertainment as a means of escape. At about ten dollars per ticket...
How much of what we enjoy as adults is influenced by what we enjoyed as children? As I have been exploring the 1980s by re-visiting many of the movies of my youth, it has occurred to me that much of what I valued as a teenager doesn't seem as good ...
There's a growing sentiment in some corners of the blogosphere that, because the majority of the critical community disliked Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, we are "out of touch." Really? What does that mean? As Roger Ebert noted, "It's not a...
"A change, my dear, and it seems not a moment too soon…" So spoke Colin Baker at the end of "The Caves of Androzani," the actor's late-inning introduction to the role of Doctor Who. Those words might just as easily apply to the American Presidency...
Predicting Oscar winners is as much a skill as an art, and it has little to do with who deserves to win. Anyone who predicts on the basis of quality is doomed to score low. The first lesson to learn when predicting Oscars (especially if you're ...
In the northern hemisphere, when does spring begin? Is it based on what the groundhog decrees? Is it when the first robin shows off its red breast? Is it the day of the vernal equinox? Is it when the Easter Bunny hops from house-to-house doing ...
To be 100% accurate, Miramax is not "dead," meaning it has not ceased to function as an entity. But, after recent cutbacks by Disney have left the art house subsidiary with only a skeleton crew of 20 and almost no operating budget (about four titles...
A good way to honor ReelViews' anniversary (January 26) is to provide a site upgrade. Hopefully, this one will be less traumatic than last June's, which caused untold anguish in some circles. This one is designed to sharpen the look of the site and...
Re-making Star Wars?Everything old is new again, and there are no sacred cows. Those are precepts upon which the current film industry is built. If it has been made, it's fair game for a re-make. It's not hard to explain Hollywood's fetish for re-...
Paparazzi are almost universally despised, and with good reason. The most aggressive of them tend to be an arrogant, opportunistic bunch who enjoy squashing the right to privacy of others by hiding beneath the cloak of "freedom of the press." There...
Roger Ebert once commented that he believes a movie good enough to warrant a recommendation for home viewing is good enough to see in a theater. A recommendation considers only the movie, not the situation in which it is viewed. If only it was that ...
As temperatures are finally starting to warm up in the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada, the domestic box office is cooling down. After a record-setting spring, multiplexes saw attendance take a dip - and not into the pool - during the ...
January 26, 2009: Australia Day, Chinese New Year, ReelViews becomes a teenager.If not for a snowstorm in January 1996, there might be no ReelViews. I'm driven by inertia. I can procrastinate with the best but, once I get started on something, I ...
After a long slumber, I am emerging from hibernation to provide new reviews of older movies. In the past, I have always found it more rewarding to group these so-called video reviews into themes - such as when I provided essays for all of the films ...