Any kind of recasting is a potentially dangerous minefield. Once audiences have become familiar with an actor in a role, or once an actor has been inextricably linked to a character, it can become difficult to change the actor without risking the ...
Sequels have been around for as long as movies have, but it's only in the last 30 years (or so) that they have begun to dominate the summer box office. Thus far this year, two of the top three movies are sequels. Last year, four of the top five fit...
It's becoming increasingly difficult to defend George Lucas. It's hard to reconcile the greedy corporate fat cat at the top of Lucasfilm's empire with the hungry filmmaker who transformed cinema and enthralled millions in 1977. Fans who once ...
I love irony, even when it's directed at me. Thanks to the reader who made me aware of the following amusing little bit of information.Yesterday's ReelThoughts entry, "Interviewing False Deities," was designed primarily to be a commentary about the ...
While watching bits and pieces of the Olympics coverage over the weekend, I couldn't help but wince every time a sycophantic NBC reporter (usually a blond woman) approached a victorious athlete following his/her win. The questions asked in those "...
Today, I will take an opportunity to follow-up on some recent ReelThoughts posts in light of various questions/comments/issues raised by readers via e-mail.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post to generate the biggest response was "Theft of Services." ...
What does it mean to be #1? If that position is to be determined based on pure box office gross (unadjusted by inflation), it's Titanic. Based on tickets sold, it's Gone with the Wind. Based on critics' polls, it's Citizen Kane. And based on ...
I have always found there to be something mournful about August. Temperature-wise, it's my second favorite month of the year (behind July), but it always feels more like an ending than a beginning. Perhaps it's the shortening of daylight hours. ...
An interesting e-mail showed up in my inbox the other day. It asked, in part: "Do you consider those who use ad blockers while reading your site to be stealing content?" On the surface, this may seem like a ridiculous suggestion, but I can assure ...
Note: Numbers in this piece refer to domestic gross, not world-wide gross. While the latter total is widely available for films released in the last 20 years, estimates of international grosses become increasingly unreliable the older a title is.The...
I debated at some length whether to write this column. After all, did I really have anything unique to add to the thousands upon thousands of words that have been written about this subject over the past week? What decided the matter for me was ...
3-D has been around for a long time. Until now, however, it has never been seen cinematically as anything more than a fad. Now, with techniques becoming more sophisticated and digital projectors multiplying like hyperactive cockroaches, we face a ...
When I wrote the original "Plastic Patton" piece a couple of weeks ago, I didn't expect there to be a Part 2. Just goes to show you never know where on-line articles are going to take you…Following a lengthy phone conversation with Robert Harris, ...
Change is good, and that has certainly been the case with Batman. For clarity's sake, the Caped Crusader I'm referring to is the live-action one from movies and TV, not the comic book hero or the one who has participated in various animated programs...
Some reviewers hand out four-star ratings like candy. Such is their right. It's their rating and their system. I have always felt that, for a four-star citation to mean anything, it must be handed out on only the rarest of occasions to the most ...
Since I began writing reviews in 1992, I have devoted more than 3.2 million words to film criticism and commentary. That's somewhere between 5000 and 6000 pages of a hardback book. The sheer volume of what I have written didn't occur to me until I ...
There is a controversy swirling about the recently released Blu-Ray disc of Patton. Robert Harris writes about it in his June 24 column for the Digital Bits. I wanted to wait until I had an opportunity to watch the Patton Blu-Ray on a 52" monitor ...