If you listen to the mainstream media, Peter Jackson's King Kong is a failure - a box office dud that has underperformed since it opened a week before Christmas. The reality, as is sometimes the case, is less dire. Kong is performing respectably. ...
It has recently occurred to me that seemingly every superhero movie contains a romantic component. Superman has Lois. Spiderman has Mary Jane. Batman has a new girl in every film (must be those rubber nipples). Reed Richards has Sue Storm. ...
As I get older, I get crankier. I wonder what I'll be like if I live to be 70. Not that long ago, I could sit through a three or four hour movie without a word of protest. Thinking back, I don't remember having trouble with films like Gettysburg, ...
A long time in coming? Indeed.When I posted the first two installments of my fantasy trilogy last year, they were in a mostly finished form, having been written and edited in the early 1990s. The third book, The Price of Terror, was incomplete at ...
It has been said that even bad press is good publicity, and there's a certain amount of truth to that. There's certainly no lack of press (good and bad) surrouding the release of The Da Vinci Code, which opens on Friday. It's a curious thing to ...
It's well documented that I don't give out four star reviews easily. In fact, over the past 28 months, I have accorded this rating to only three movies: Maria Full of Grace, Munich, and United 93. My stinginess can be attributed to two things: an ...
There's a common misconception about film critics - that all we enjoy are stuffy, pretentious films that drag on interminably and are as lively as a stone gargoyle. While that probably describes some of the more esoteric and high-minded critics, it'...
I knew when I wrote the review for An Inconvenient Truth that there would be rough waves ahead. I don't enjoy reviewing movies with a political slant because of the volume of negative e-mail those reviews generate. (Actually, it's not the negativity ...
Making these predictions has become as annual a ritual as watching the Oscars. I do both with limited enthusiasm. Some people can't understand how I, a film critic, can dislike the Academy Awards. The reason is simple: they bore me. It's not an ...
Film festivals generate two types of fatigue. The first is the kind everyone is familiar with: not enough sleep. For me, a typical day at the Toronto Film Festival begins with the alarm going off at 7:00 am (or earlier) and doesn't end until about ...
It wasn't long ago that the concept of a "sequel" was a rarity. By that I mean the exception rather than the rule. There were a few each year - the lastest James Bond, the next Star Trek, another Rocky or Friday the 13th. But you could count on one...
Okay, I'll start by admitting that I blew the call about Best Picture. So the rumors of Crash's ascension were not overstated. (I saw Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday morning, and she voiced a suspicion that Crash might win. ...
Direct-to-DVD. Those words are not so much a label as they are a Scarlet Letter. If the industry wants to move forward with its stated goal of expanding the video market, the negative connotations associated with this term have to be removed. As long...
There are essentially four types of film critics, and there's not a lot of love lost between members of the different groups. That doesn't mean we can't get along, but it's like putting Democrats and Republicans in the same room. As long as you don...
As a critic, perhaps I shouldn't be so cynical about movies I haven't yet seen. So let me state up front that my comments below have nothing to do with a movie's quality or lack thereof. I haven't seen these pictures. For all I know, this could be...
This is one of those commentaries that, if written in a "real-world" publication, would generate limited (if any) controversy. But this isn't the real world. This the Internet, and the Internet is a place where all sorts of baseless rumors and ...
Ethics are a curious thing, since they define how we live our lives. Consider for a moment the importance of ethics across a wide span of life, from big business to politics to religion. Everyone has to develop their own personal code. I'm not ...