So, while the others here at the site were acting like grownups and watching Inception, my friend Jake and I decided to fight maturity for an afternoon and watch Despicable Me. This debut film from Illumination Entertainment has an excellent concept going for it: a comic-book story not only told from the perspective of a supervillain, but one in [...]
Mill Creek is the anti-Criterion. Founded in 2002, this company specializes in amassing largely forgotten public domain movies and random television shows into DVD box sets sold at bargain basement prices. You can find these collections packed into the checkout aisles and the bargain bins of just about any chain store that carries movies. The [...]
Inglourious Basterds is the latest offering from Quentin Tarantino, a director I have every reason to hate. He’s a plagiarist and an egomaniac; his movies often seem to serve no artistic purpose aside from showcasing his own encyclopedic knowledge of film; he is brazenly, gleefully anti-intellectual in his attitude toward the whole film-making process; [...]
There were so many ways District 9 could have gone wrong. It has a director and cast nobody’s heard of, it relies heavily on special effects and spectacle yet had a (by Hollywood standards) meager budget. It shifts narrative style back and forth between pseudo-documentary and cinematic. It throws a [...]
I Paid $6.50 To Get Motion Sickness: The Taking of Pelham 123 Review
It’s a little unfortunate that the remake of 1974’s Taking of Pelham 123 opens with the Jay-Z song “99 Problems,” because inevitably someone’s going to take that as a cue to list all the problems the movie has. Sorry, Tony Scott, but [...]
One of these days, Pixar is going to drop the ball big time. Every year I go to the theater expecting to walk out unimpressed, because no person or group in this industry (especially one under the shadow of the Mouse) can maintain a level of quality that SQUIRREL!
Okay, got that out of my [...]
