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Apocalypse, Please
ALAN MOORE and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, written in the mid-1980s, is a dreary affair from first panel to last. It churns out its grimy vision of Manhattan with, in addition to signature reds and...
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Getting Naked
IT’S INTERESTING to hear an audience’s reaction to naked people onscreen. When Hanna (Kate Winslet) began to undress her newfound captive in The Reader, and then dared to stand behind him naked, and...
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Observe and Recoil
HAVING SEEN the trailer approximately three hundred times, my expectations for Observe and Report (Warner Bros.) were already somewhere around zero: Seth Rogen interrupting a newsanchor to correct her...
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When Your Dad Turns 17
I’M NOT going to deny it: of course 17 Again (Warner Bros.) is Zac Efron porn. As the younger version of Michael O’Donnell, a character he plays with a mismatched Matthew Perry, he opens the movie...
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The Last Great Newspaper Movie?
THERE HAS probably never been a better time to appeal to nostalgia when telling a story that involves newspapers: they’re almost gone, but not so gone that we aren’t still sad about the passing. But...
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Streaming for Gold
THE INTERNET now offers more streaming movies and TV shows than free IQ tests. Of all the options out there—YouTube, Hulu, Joox, and so on—I pay fealty (and nine bucks a month) to Netflix. Their...
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The Pwns of Girlfriends Past
CONSIDER THE fact that Matthew McConaughey—loved by many, hated by many more—has never starred in a “serious” movie, and you’ll have a good idea where to start with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner...
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Shock and Awe
IF THE DAVINCI Code put Tom Hanks in danger of turning into Nicholas Cage—a speaking slab of wood with nothing better to do than run around uttering historical gobbledygook in increasingly annoyed...
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No Country for Real Movies
IT WAS a slow week at the movies. And I mean really slow. Yeah, I know, this week boasted some of the most crowded theaters and record ticket sales since, oh, I don’t know, the last Transformers...
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They’re Getting Prettier
IT MUST be hard to be David Yates. The poor director has been entrusted with an enormous task: pleasing everyone. And now that the long-delayed thing is finally being seen, he can enjoy a moment of...
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Grade Inflation
IN 1982, Stephen J. Cannell unveiled The A-Team, a weekly, hour-long series about a crack commando unit sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped...
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Is "The Kids Are All Right" Propaganda in the Culture Wars?
This post over at “Mere Orthodoxy,” entitled “The Culture Wars Enter American Cinema,” reminded me that I meant to solicit some opinions on the film “The Kids Are All Right.” Christopher Benson, author...
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