Time for another MPAA-related rant. Maybe I should dedicate one day a week to an anti-MPAA ReelThought.Last week, I saw Broken Flowers, the lastest Jim Jarmusch film. The MPAA has given it a justifiable R-rating. That's not what this column is ...
There is a commonly believed myth that film critics should go into a movie screening with no expectations. After all, expectations damage objectivity. The reality, however, is that there is no such thing as an "objective review," and any critic ...
It's unbelievable how upset some people can be made by a simple statement. In the midst of my Bay-bashing yesterday, I snuck in the following two sentences: "Adam Sandler's appeal is on the wane - witness the performance of The Longest Yard. (Since ...
So Michael Bay's The Island is a box office disaster of Heaven's Gate proportions. Even with overseas sales and DVD proceeds figured in, this movie looks set to lose a ton of money. In the normal course of things, this wouldn't be a big deal for ...
Normally, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I'm a card-carrying unbeliever. While I don't accept that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, I don't subscribe to the theory that Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination. I'm not a "UFO person" (...
For those who read The Price of the Crown, welcome back to the land of Devforth. For those who haven't, I would encourage reading the first book, but it isn't a necessity. The Price of Magic is intended to be a stand-alone, although there are ...
Now to an episode-by-episode overview of the new "Doctor Who." As I see it, the 13-epidode season is divided into two sections: the setup (episodes 1-7) and the payoff (episodes 8-13). Most of the bad stuff and the least successful stories comes ...
The BBC Science Fiction TV series "Doctor Who" first came to the United States in 1978, fifteen years after its debut in the U.K. (There were isolated instances of the program being shown pre-'78, but that was the year when Time-Life purchased four ...
Generally speaking, I am amused by hate mail. Sometimes, it's banal - along the lines of: "You suck. You wouldnt know a good movie if it bit you on the ass." (Real e-mail from a couple of days ago.) Those are boring and are punished for their lack...
Now that seemingly every third motion picture is a sequel, the question has to be asked: How does a subsequent installment of a movie series impact the viewer's impressions of what has gone before? It's a tricky question, and not one that many movie-...
There's an example of the MPAA's unfairness and irrationality on display in theaters for everyone to see. If you believe that using the ratings is a reasonable way to determine the moral suitability of a film, this may cause you to re-think your ...
When Warner Brothers determined the opening date of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, they carefully examined the release schedule and decided this was the best weekend to put it into theaters. The only other "major" is the R-rated Wedding Crashers...
If you are a documentary lover, this is as close to heaven as it gets this side of a film festival. A few years ago, documentaries were few and far between. Even in art house theaters, only the occasional high profile effort like Hoop Dreams or ...
As a critic, sometimes I think it's good idea to take off the month of August. The dog days, indeed. What can one say when the biggest cinematic event of the month is the release of The Dukes of Hazzard? Hollywood's cannibalization of their small-...
Spoilers follow...This may be written for only a couple of hundred people, but for those of you who hung in there for all 36 days (actually 35, since I posted the final two chapters at the same time), here are some of my thoughts on the book I wrote ...
If you conduct an on-line search for one particular word, you will get an amazing array of responses. It's the "Orginal Hypertex Project." It's a language and translation wizard. It's a swingers club in Manchester. It's an undersea adventure ...
For those of us who write movie reviews, there's a phrase we all know: "review embargo." In layman's terms, this means that reviews are not supposed to appear on a website until the day the movie opens. Studios like to employ embargoes because it ...