movies Articles


Nice retrospective podcast on Real Genius

If you have interest at all in 1980's "culture", the tech industry, and/or the movie Real Genius, you should check out the iMore Review program Review 16: Real Genius. Don Melton, Matt Drance, Guy English, and Rene Ritchie do a great job of running down the highs and lows …

Review: Untraceable

Well, that's an hour and 38 minutes that we'll never see again... however, I must say that it was not as bad as Meet the Spartans. To say that Untraceable was a bad film is to really be nice to it. If you need yet another film showing you grotesque …

Review: Meet the Spartans

Send-up of 300 falls on its sword. Short form: at matinee prices, you still feel like you were ripped off for the full price of the film--thankfully it's barely an hour and a half long. Meet the Spartans is the kind of film that makes you wish that Jason Friedberg …

There Will Be Blood: Don't Bother

If you're seriously considering watching this 2:38 monstrosity, then, please rethink. Carol and I would have walked out an hour in, except that we were trapped in the middle of the theater (with at least one immediately-adjacent theater goer asleep) and were trading looks of disbelief because we couldn't …

Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Listening to NPR tonight, and in particular to Marketplace when I hear Ben Stein issuing a rant about oil companies and prices. That wasn't that surprising, given his history. However, when they went to break afterward, the commentator said "Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?" without further comment...

Review: An Inconvenient Truth

Mr. Gore has a point. Carol and I have been putting off going to see An Inconvenient Truth for the last few weeks out of concern over boredom, propaganda, and general bad moviemaking. The reviews of this movie by others (which many of you may know I don't usually read …

Review: Wordplay

It's been a while since I could say this about a film, but run—do not walk—to Wordplay, the new documentary about the annual crossword puzzle tournament. I know, you're wondering if I've gone completely mental at this point. But, I assure you that Carol and I spent the …

CS Monitor looks at 'docu-ganda' genre

I haven't seen it yet (we're working on that), but there is an interesting article that I've been meaning to post about since early this month in the Christian Science Monitor about Al's movie, An Inconvenient Truth and other films that provide a documentary format, but a single point of …

Review: The Da Vinci Code

As I'm sure you can already guess by now, Carol & I went to see The Da Vinci Code yesterday , a new film starring Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard, based on the book of the same name from Dan Brown. On balance, we enjoyed the film as a fast-paced thriller …

Review: Kinky Boots

My folks were in town visiting this week, so we all went down to Bethesda to catch a movie at the Bethesda Row Cinema (since my folks don't tend to see many movies at all, much less ones that are in limited release). We decided to see Kinky Boots, a …

Review: United 93

Last night Carol and I went to see United 93, the new film about the United flight that was taken down by passengers on 9/11 outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There's been a lot of talk about this movie, discussing it's relative accuracy, the timing of its release, and whether …

Review: Last Holiday

Last Holiday, an apparent loose remake of a 1950 film of the same name starring the late Alec Guinness, is a cute, if simple, comedic look at a life cut short and the reevaluation that comes with that. In this case, Queen Latifa's personality is enough to pull together a …

Review: Casonova

Casonova, starring Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller, with a strong supporting cast including Oliver Platt, Jeremy Irons, and Lena Olin is a very enjoyable fictional tale about Giacomo Casonova and his exploits in Venice. Although I don't expect we'll be seeing any Oscar nominations for this film, it doesn't change …

Review: Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia:The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the film adaptation of C.S. Lewis novel of the same name, is an attempt to take a classic book (and we're all sure that Disney is intending to take the whole series) and turn it into a film …

Review: The Family Stone

The Family Stone would have been your typical holiday family relationship film, with some amusing situations and a host of lightly-developed characters, except for the feeling that the characters in the film actually cared for each other. Unlike so many of these films that are released between November and December …

Review: Fun With Dick and Jane

We needed a break, something light to escape with after the frenetic holidays were ebbing into some pre-New Year's relaxation, and Fun With Dick and Jane fit the bill. Thankfully short at about 90 minutes, this re-staging of the 1977 film of the same name (starring Jane Fonda and George …

Review: Syriana

Syriana is a political thriller about securing American oil interests in the Middle East. It doesn't claim to be a true story (especially since it takes place in a fictitious country) but it does have elements that will be familiar to anyone paying attention to the news in the last …

Review: The Producers

Carol and I went to see The Producers a few days ago. This version (the 2005 version, starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, not the 1968 version starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) is a successful film adaptation of the musical adaptation of the film about the production of musicals …

Commander-in-Chief

Not exactly a movie, a new TV series, but it's interesting nonetheless and you don't have to wait a year for the sequel. Last night, Carol and I sat down and watched the second episode of Commander in Chief (IMDB link), the new drama on ABC centered around the first …

Wallace and Gromit: the curse of the warehouse

I took this headline directly from The Scotsman, which has an article of the same name detailing an unfortunate warehouse fire that destroyed many of the artifacts from past films by Aardman Animations, the creators of Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit series.