I spend a fair amount of time talking to people connected with the movie world. They tend to be larger than life, and always entertaining. There seems to be little rhyme or reason as to how a movie comes into being, or what subject it might be about.
Next March the poor unsuspecting world is […]

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In December Le Carre’s iconic book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will be hitting the big screen.  I will be curious to see how this complex story can be compressed into a two hour production.
It was written in 1972 by author John Le Carre. The author kicked off his writing career with two novellas, Call For […]

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It’s unfortunate for Rhys Ifans, who turns out a terrific performance in this lightly dramatic biopic about the life and times of British dope smuggler Howard Marks (aka Mr. Donald Nice, among other names) that writer/director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Immortal Beloved) didn’t give him a more coherent story to take part in. It starts out […]

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Returning to the exaggerated self-portraits that they created in director Michael Winterbottom’s meta-film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon again play versions of themselves in this Michael Winterbottom film - created by editing down bits and pieces from the critically acclaimed six-episode television series of the same name. The […]

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Money Ball is deservingly going to draw comparisons to The Social Network primarily because both are true stories about people who found success doing the seemingly impossible by going about their business in an unlikely and unusual way.  The other comparison will come from the fact that both had academy award level performances.

Money Ball is […]

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What do you get when you give the fractured fairy tale treatment to the classic story of Robin Hood: a reworking of the basic plot, some slyly witty writing and topical references, top-of-the-line vocal talent? Why, of course, it’s Hoodwinked, a comical airy soufflé of a movie. Following on that relative success, a sequel, […]

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In his feature debut, Mexican writer/director Jorge Michel Grau is on the cusp of something great. The setup is solid: a family of middle-class cannibals attempts to carry on with their lives and make do in Mexico City after the untimely death of their patriarch and sole hunter. Mix in some infighting between the two […]

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For the telling of an epic prison-camp escape and trek to freedom – all the way from Siberia to India – four thousand, five hundred miles across wolf-haunted forests, the high Gobi Desert and finally, over the Himalayas into Tibet – The Way Back is a surprisingly understated and subdued narrative. But then it’s […]

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Tangled is just about the only movie that we actually got up and went to see when it was in the theater, rather than waiting for an offer to review the eventual DVD, so mad props for the trailer which we watched on-line, and which was promising enough to get us out of the house […]

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Inside The World Of WikiLeaks
When the web site Wikileaks first started it was greeted by yawns and indifference. The web was already awash with sites dedicated to conspiracies and whistle blowing. What made Wikileaks any different?
We now know the answer to that question. Wikileaks was different, they opted to go where other sites feared to […]

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Oh, it’s obvious from the start that this is a Baz Luhrmann movie . . . splashy, visual, an assembly of appealing (or appalling) characters, a fairly predictable but non-the-less satisfactory ‘go where your dream takes you!’ plot, music that won’t stop, and simply acres of swirling neon-colored marabou, very strange Mohawk hairstyles […]

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“We can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
If this familiar phrase gets your adrenaline going then I have a feeling anything I’m going to say below this paragraph will be mostly irrelevant. The only thing you need to know is that The Six Million Dollar Man is finally available in North America - and not […]

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Of all the important musicians in the last century, it’s pretty easy to see that John Lennon stands out for his influence on music, pop culture, and society in general. Along with Lennon himself, his music and activism, along with their effects on the world, have been well documented in countless short and feature-length documentaries. […]

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Will Ferrell is famous as one of Hollywood’s top comedic leading men known primarily for his overacting and generally crazy onscreen antics.   However, Ferrell has a complementary talent: (other than his sexy crooning vocals featured in “Semi-Pro”) voice acting.
Ferrell voices the title character “Megamind” an evil blue alien who crash-lands on earth after his home […]

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Since you probably missed director Taylor Hackford’s (Ray, The Devil’s Advocate) Love Ranch during its very limited theatrical release this summer, consider this your notice that it’s actually a well-made, powerfully acted film that is worth checking out on DVD when it is released early next month (November 9th, to be specific). Hackford, directing his […]

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If you haven’t yet heard about the twisted premise underlying Dutch director Tom Six’s “thriller” The Human Centipede, take a moment to imagine what it might entail. Now imagine something a little bit worse. And then probably a little worse than that. Got an image in your mind? “But wait,” you think, “that’s much too […]

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After filmmaker Albert Nerenberg and his wife suffered through deaths in the family leading up to the birth of their first child, he found that he had “lost his laugh.” Like all dedicated creatives, he let his own life experience serve as inspiration for a new project - an investigation into laughter - where it […]

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“Hello my name is Artois. If I am alone I am lost.” In the first five minutes, Virgil (Mark Scheibmeir)  and his girlfriend Angie (Sydney Andrews) discover a lost goat on a country road with the above message around his neck. And then the goat is gone. What just happened? That’s the question you’re likely […]

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“I do spend some of my time on bottled water… but I have other responsibilities as well,” says Lauren Robin, the one employee at the FDA in charge of ensuring that the bottled water industry meets federal safety guidelines. But since 60-70% of bottled water is produced and sold within state lines, the FDA has […]

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A Collection Of Cartoons by Drew Aquilina
Being a book reviewer is an interesting occupation, although one that is rarely talked about at career day in your local high school. While I am by no means a fan of the movie Forest Gump, but there is a line from the dialogue that hits home “Life is […]

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Though John Waters is the name most often equated with the underground film movement of the 1970s (think Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Female Trouble), to a subset of underground film aficionados (including Waters himself), there is a set of twin brothers that inspired and made that no-budget movement from the ground up. These brothers (who […]

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Since 2002, when Angela Bettis made what was in my opinion, a star-making role as May Canady in the indie horror-comedy-drama May (if you haven’t seen this film, go check it out right now - really, you can stop reading this review and go see May instead, I won’t be offended), I’ve been waiting for […]

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Like a musical jam session - a jazzy musical jam session, some might say- Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense weaves its way through interviews with various musicians, along with brief (and sometimes lengthy) samples of those musicians performing live. For those with special ties to a particular jazz movement, or to musicians […]

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After five and a half hours - a full seven episodes - of this addicting reality show, you’re likely to look around your own home and feel a little bit better about the clutter you may have. “Hoarders” - a reality show in the best sense of the term - features people (and sometimes couples) […]

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Movie executives love it when movies do well. In fact they love when movies do well they want to do a sequel. Unfortunately, more often than not sequels rarely recapture the magic of their predecessor. Iron Man 2 does nearly everything the first film did only with more explosions and suits of armor.
We open the […]

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One of the joys of reading historical novels is that the reader is afforded the opportunity to open a window into another dimension, to venture into places, people and events – and as nearly as possible and given a writer of sufficient skill and imagination – to explore and experience them at first hand. […]

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As part of the lead-up to the June 18th 2010 release of Toy Story 3, some genius of marketing had the madly original notion to release a special edition combo pack of the original Toy Story and Toy Story 2 – each package containing a DVD and Blu-Ray version of the movie. Times are tight, […]

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Just because it is stupid doesn’t mean you won’t laugh.

“Hot Tub Time Machine” brings four friends back together after their relationships have strained and Lou (Rob Corddry) ends up in the hospital. Their solution: to go to a ski lodge for the weekend. When they get there they realize that the place they had […]

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Never having read the Roald Dahl book that this clever stop-motion animation feature was based on, I can’t say if it is true to the original story and characters, but it sure does make an amusing experience all on it’s own. This kind of movie practically cries out to be intricate and detailed – as […]

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“Throughout time, there have been mysteries mankind cannot explain…” So begins the narrated opening credits for the History channel documentary series MysteryQuest, immediately letting audience members know what kind of interesting ride they’re in for.  Even better, the narration continues with the following: “But advances in technology have led to new theories, and the search […]

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