Because of Hoover's comment about needing to take off the white gloves "like they do in Italy," I assumed he was being portrayed as a torture fiend and the movie was making an anti-torture statement. Also, his "This is the beginning of America's war on crime" speech seemed to be intended to echo G.W. and the war on…

I think Last of the Mohicans comes off as boring crap if you watch it panned and scanned or letterboxed on a tiny screen. It just needs to be big. I tried to watch it free via On Demand and gave up, yet I remember liking it the first time.

I'm bored of movies that depict that era by trying to reproduce the sleek, artificial surfaces of its own movies with better technology (see: The Cotton Club, The Aviator). Public Enemies looked like "Cops" at times, but at least it was different. Also, the small-town sets have a grunginess that feels authentic, and…

I live in a supposedly hip small city with two theaters that combine indie with mainstream fare, and none of the films you cite have arrived yet. They will, but it takes eons, and then they stay for about a week. I can't blame the theater owners (all local); they need to make money off something, and Transformers on…

I have to write a review this weekend, and it's this or Transformers. I hated the first Transformers, so I'm not sure why I would bother panning a sequel that apparently has even more of the stuff I did not like in the first one. On the other hand, I hate weepies. In neither case would I persuade a single member of…

The best romantic comedies, starting in the screwball era, have been about men and women who were peers and verbal sparring partners, on a more or less equal footing. (Sometimes the heroine would even reject a higher-status, "proper" mate to go with the hero because he made her laugh.) Yes, there've been sugar-daddy…

I too was impressed by the sheer chutzpah of a woolly, woozy, raunchy stoner comedy hijacking the huge budget of a family film and gleefully misusing it. And everyone involved seemed to be having fun. But funny? Only intermittently, unless you're baked.

What I find marginally interesting about this premise is that she's obviously older and his boss. (And a total bitch, to boot.) Based on the trailer, I was hoping for something a tiny bit edgy or satirical. So they bring out a CGI-enhanced eagle.

Twilight is best appreciated as an unintentional satire of teen-girl emotion porn. In the movie's case, I think it was half intentional, and I laughed pretty hard. I couldn't get through the book. But read a few pages here and there, and it's fucking hilarious.

Aside from the fact that the title hails from an earlier era, movies with some form of "take" in the title are doing quite well these days. Anyway, the word "hijacking" freaks people out, plus it's long.

Good point. But then, at the time, people took for granted the urban setting we find so "gritty" now. It's not just that we're nostalgic for the '70s, but that it's inherently interesting to explore a different place, time, and aesthetic. The time-capsule thing. It's what made me watch the American "Life on Mars" till…

SPOILERS:

The color-coded names were downplayed if present at all (I think they're in the credits). Travolta called himself Ryder, not Mr. Blue.

He also stutters and stammers in this one to show what a humble regular guy he is.

There's something about a big-budget, well-advertised "aggressively meh" movie that just calls out for a D-plus.

The giant crab gets instantaneously cooked during a drug-trip sequence, then eaten, suggesting it might have been better to cast a giant lobster. Amazingly, no jokes about getting crabs are made.

Were the Sleestaks always voiced by dinner-theater-Shakespeare actors? Because that was one of the only funny parts of the movie.

I was one of the critics who gave this a negative review (not to suggest that anyone actually read it). It was a very underwhelming, even boring experience in the theater, though as Nathan rehashes the best bits, I do remember laughing at them. It was one of those movies where you have good will toward everyone…

The canyon is a quarry. They got some helicopter footage in Barre, Vermont, also known as the Granite City, and CGI'ed it up. Needless to say, only people in Vermont really care about this.

I went to college centuries ago (the late '80s), and no one I knew read Robbins or anything that evoked the glorious '60s counterculture. That was the shit thirtysomething yuppies were trying to force down our throats, or so we thought. It was all about Pynchon and Nabokov, though I preferred Kafka. Retro Euro…