I found Cooper charming when he was playing an asshole TV star on "Nip/Tuck" and making fun of his own assholishness. Of course, he wasn't famous enough then to incarnate the asshole as genuinely and unironically as he no doubt does now.

The New Yorker just ran a piece on how the studio dropped the ball on The Hurt Locker by distributing it like some arthouse anti-war film instead of the kickass traditional action film it actually is. ("Traditional" meaning you can actually tell what's going on and who's about to get blowed up.) It's been doing pretty…

I liked the movie, but also found the shifts from faux-doc to third-person and back pretty jarring. Ended up being willing to accept it because I cared about the characters. (In Cloverfield, by contrast, they stuck to their first-person conceit with admirable consistency, but I didn't give a rat's ass about anyone, so…

I thought Copley was an inspired choice. It's like seeing the "Brundlefly" transformation recreated by Michael Scott, only he's playing it straight. (Though it was less elaborate and funny, Cronenberg is what I was most reminded of.)

So it's like Twilight with fucking, and time travel instead of blood sucking?

I agree. He's over the top in Funny People, but it's great. After all those boring roles, it was like seeing him tear open his shirt and reveal the comedy Hulk within.

I started reading the book and couldn't finish. I'm allergic to preciousness and whimsy, and it seemed big in that department.

Moon was brilliant (or at least absorbing) because of the script and the acting, the two things that depend least on money and the most on vision. I don't really know, but I'm guessing the script is one of the cheapest elements of any movie (unless you hire some bloated celebrity like Joe Eszterhas— most writers are…

I seem to remember that Channing Tatum was pretty good in Stop-Loss, but I could be confusing him with that other generic blond pretty boy he was acting next to.

Sadly, there were no songs and no sex scenes. But there was a sexually tinged weapons/training montage set to a cover of "(Bang a Gong) Get It On," which was pretty funny.

Funny People was not very schmaltzy. But it was a rambling mess, and Sandler was funniest when he was being an asshole, which may go against his likable-idiot appeal.

Most genre movies are critic proof and have a self-selecting audience. (Does anyone go to G-Force expecting it to be WALL-E or Up? No, they go to keep the kids quiet for a couple hours.) Hence, reviewing them is generally boring and thankless unless they manage to transcend their genre in some way. When this happens,…

Wouldn't that make it a Michael Bay film?

The Collector has a smaller release than most horror films — it's not playing in my market, and we get all the Saws, etc. I wonder what determines the width of release — test screenings?

Yeah, I'm trying to reserve judgment for now because I like Apatow and I probably have to see this, but the jokes in the trailer were really bad. Especially the first trailer with the bit mocking Eric Bana's accent. He talks funny! Two scenes making fun of funny-talking foreigners doesn't bode well, but hey, it's a…

There will be movies about misanthropic writers until the writers who write them stop being misanthropic and and learn to Love Life, which writers cannot do because most of them, even the supposedly successful ones, are always on the brink of having to get a "real job." Paycheck insecurity does make you grumpy, but…

I jumped at the leg grabbing, and I also watched Inside this weekend and didn't startle once. There's something about the big screen that puts you back in that state of childhood dread, I guess.

I would have to go back and look at reviews from the era, but I thought a lot of people saw Altman's MASH for the same reason they might see Bruno today: They thought it would be countercultural and outrageous and everyone would be discussing it around the water cooler (if they had water coolers back then). Wasn't the…

Mary Gaitskill's novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin is a great dissection-via-fiction of Rand and the people who love her. It manages to be both satirical and sympathetic (though I'm sure a real Randista wouldn't agree with me there). And it demonstrates the female Rand fan/kinky-sex connection conclusively.

I nearly nodded off.