Melissa and I have to do some major renovation to our NetFlix queue. We've run out of stuff that we actively wanted to see, and now it's just movies we forgot why we put in there. There's a load of classics that I put in there from the AFI Top 100 Movies list, some lesser-known movies with Lord of the Rings actors, The first season of Star Blazers ( Read more... )

Now that Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is finally out in theaters, I can finally come clean about something that has been going on for years: I deliberately stopped reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" halfway through because I thought the ending of this series would be more EPIC in the Theatrical Release ( Read more... )

Melissa and I watched THE SOCIAL NETWORK via Netflix last night. MAN, what a movie. As a casual user of Facebook (maybe 2x daily), it was interesting to see how the site came together. I know it was not an entirely factual account. I mean, I'm sure the book's author embellished a bit, and then "West Wing" Sorkin wrote a screenplay from THAT, and ( Read more... )

Thanks to the weekly family Pizza-and-DVD night (which we've been using to educate Matthew on the important classics of 80's cinema) I made a disturbing discovery:

Mario Puzo, author of THE GODFATHER, wrote the story and screenplays for SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN II.WTF? How did he land this job? And how did he get the second one, after the whole ( Read more... )

I like movies about the undead. But call me a Zombie Snob (snOmbie?), but I think the latest trend of inserting Zombies or vampires into every corner of film culture is diluting something great into a yawn-inducing me-too shoveling festival. For every "Shaun of the Dead" there's a "Lost Boys 2 : The Tribe"


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A good article from a site I've never heard of before. I agree with almost all of it: 4. Smaug needs to be a classic movie villain first, dragon second ( Read more... )

I'm going to call Hollywood today and give them my verdict: A 10-year moratorium on the word "Rise" or "Rising" in Movie and Video Game titles. Frankly, it's a cop-out of a title word, especially in sequels. It's a lazy shorthand way of saying "Here's a crappy new character! Oooh, let's see how he/she stirs things up with our existing cast!" or " ( Read more... )

Never ceases to amaze me. Apparently, some film-school students did an homage to Grindhouse films a few years back (called "Grindhouse"), and sent Quentin Tarantino a copy of it after he declined a viewing of the film. Now the grads are whining because Quentin made his own Grindhouse homage movie, also called "Grindhouse" and calling it theft. ( Read more... )

I'll admit it right now, I have not yet seen "300". I am fully aware that this might mean that I have to turn in my Man CardBut a funny story from Shawn: He was watching the movie and halfway through, a random stranger behind him said "Man, what is up with all the DUDE-ITY???" Yeah, It's a film about 300 men... in loincloths, for pretty much the ( Read more... )