While most pundits expected Speed Racer to underperform, I don't think any of them expected the kind of debacle that resulted. For a film that was once touted as one of the summer's big blockbusters to finish third during its opening weekend is ...
Beginning this week, I have decided to re-structure the "Video Views" weekly column so it no longer represents a prose catalog of new releases but instead concentrates on one or two hot topics or something interesting associated with a new release. ...
October 1982. My seventeenth birthday was nearly two years in the future and, unlike many of my contemporaries, I looked younger than my age. On that fateful afternoon, I was standing in the lobby of a single mega-theater (2000 seats), awaiting my ...
This was supposed to be the weekend of Speed Racer - or at least that's how it looked a few months ago. May was supposed to be neatly compartmentalized. First weekend: Iron Man. Second weekend: Speed Racer. Third weekend: Prince Caspian. Fourth...
A bit of consumer advice: if you don't have a Blu-Ray player at this time and you live in the United States, don't use your stimulus rebate check to buy one. Wait until November - that's when price cuts and sales will drive down prices into a range ...
Generally speaking, consistency is a desirable quality in a film critic. It's how individuals use reviews to determine the likelihood of liking or disliking a movie. If a reader doesn't have a barometer for a critic, it's impossible to tell how ...
This is the weekend of Iron Man. Anything else is pretty much inconsequential. This opening has been awaited for a long time by a wide variety of people. Web publishers who operate movie-related sites have been holding out for May 2 because ...
The biggest two movies new to DVD this week are available in both standard and Blu-Ray formats. The third film, despite getting its share of accolades, is only arriving as a standard DVD. This would appear to be the shape of things to come, at ...
I am willing to give Paramount's publicity and marketing department a huge share of the credit for transforming Iron Man into a must-see event. Though Tony Stark's legion of devoted fans may howl at this pronouncement, in the pantheon of comic book ...
Consider this the proverbial calm before the storm. Choices are mediocre this week. Next week is, of course, Iron Man, and fans are already gearing up for it (and, in at least one case, lining up for it). The interesting thing about next week is ...
Since the death of HD-DVD and the end of the format war, there has been an upswing in Blu-Ray revenue, which is a good thing for Hollywood. High def DVD sales are still dwarfed by those of their standard DVD cousin but it's at least a positive sign ...
The rumors of this death, sadly, have not been exaggerated...I can remember as a child seeing my father sitting at the kitchen table in the morning, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. I have similar memories of my grandfather when I...
This is an odd time for theatrical releases. It's the first weekend in a while when a few mid-budget films are opening that are capable of generating some interest. It's also a weekend when studios are taking the trash out, getting things nice and ...
It's David Lean week at the video store. Three of his films: Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and A Passage to India are being re-released as two-disc Collector's Editions. This is fine - classics like this deserve to be re-packaged...
Originally, I had hoped the site redesign, which I have unoriginally dubbed "ReelViews 2.0," would be ready by May 1, but I underestimated the amount of time necessary to add reviews to the newly created database (the underlying foundation of the ...
The end of the drought is nearing: Al Pacino, a Judd Apatow-produced comedy, and a teaming of Jet Li and Jackie Chan. But that's next weekend. What about today? Sadly, more of the same. A lot of movies that few people care about and even fewer ...
I frequently write things that have nothing do with movies, although most of them go unpublished because of my fundamental laziness when it comes to taking all the tedious steps necessary to get them from a semi-final state to where they're in a ...