On Wednesday I was all excited to get a screener of The Descendants. On Thursday I watched it and was underwhelmed. Noel Murray's review said it all: lots of potential, but it ended up being kind of thin and predictable. (Note: I also don't like Little Miss Sunshine. I gather they're the same ilk of movie, so maybe I…

I attended a sold-out midnight screening of New Moon (for work-related reasons! really!). The teens and twentysomething women outnumbered the older ones, but there were a good number of moms there with their daughters. They all looked extremely suburban and normal, and most of them were fixated on the whole Team…

I can understand feminists and women with good taste in literature and entertainment being angry at Twilight for all these reasons. But the people I've encountered who hate Twilight with the most vehemence — as in, "Don't even mention it, or I'll launch into a rant" — are guys. Specifically, guys who are outraged that…

I don't remember the movie well, but how is that a cheat? It seems more like a cruel but believable twist. Rebirth is just metaphysical claptrap they were giving people to keep them happy about their approaching 30th birthday, which in fact is their execution date.

Yeah, I don't get why people associate these books with Twilight. At all. Meyer's recommendation must have had a huge impact on sales or something. I thought one of the potential romantic relationships was interesting and the other not, but neither was the primary focus. The books actually mock the eagerness of…

The comedy of Kafka is that his characters are in a surreal world but don't realize it, or don't know how to react to it. For instance, Gregor keeps trying to go to work, worries about being late, makes excuses to the boss, etc., not understanding that being a bug suspends all his usual rules.

There's a Canadian movie called Cold Comfort (1989) where the guy from Due South gets abducted by a psycho redneck to be a boyfriend for his shut-in daughter. I think they eventually fall in love, but I could be wrong. That's no romantic romp, though; it's a dark thriller that takes the abduction seriously. Not to be…

Much blood and innards are spilt, various heads removed, some folks briefly tortured, and there are some pretty disturbing fucking masks. Most of the carnage is just like looking at a pretty painting of war, though.

I'd say some of the characterizations and plot devices sucked in a unique way; this movie's view of the Greek pantheon was further off the rails than that of the merely dumb Clash of the Titans remake.

It may not bomb. His last lazy, gimmick-driven comedy, Just Go With It, did very well. Maybe that had something to do with the presence of Jennifer Aniston, but this one has Al Pacino, for what that's worth.

Not always. Anyone who has read Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death in its entirety will feel compelled to complain about its length immediately. But since I read it to interview him, not review him, I didn't get that satisfaction.

If the show stays true to Murphy's pattern of writing women, Vivian will welcome Ben back into her life in approximately 2.5 seconds (unless she fucks the security guard first, in which case, slightly longer) and forget all about the infidelity. That's why I can't feel a shred of sympathy for her.

Nip/Tuck once maintained the faint semblance of being a realistic show. This is N/T with an even stupider, less likable Sean and Julia and the masked Beauty Killer/Rapist (or whatever the fuck his name was) as the stealth hero, namely Rubber Man.

Damn, that was awesome. Haven't heard that one since I was eight, but no wonder I thought Space: 1999 was far superior to Star Trek.

The Prisoner was the first one that popped into my head. Of course, I did just watch it for the first time. But it sums up what I love about '60s themes.

The True Blood theme (and credit sequence) are way better than the show. They make you expect a demented Southern gothic along the lines of Angel Heart instead of a demented Southern gothic soap opera.

I predate Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine; we didn't have horror series books back in the late '70s. So I read people like Bellairs and William Sleator — House of Stairs and Blackbriar were creepy mindfucks.

I watched both for the first time. I saw Carpenter's The Thing at a drive-in in 1982 when I was a half-asleep kid and my dad didn't realize or perhaps care how much gore it contained, but that doesn't count.

I tried and failed to hook some family members on Breaking Bad this weekend. Their response after watching the first two episodes of season 1 was essentially "Holy shit, is it always this intense? and no, I don't think I really care to know what happens next."

I thought The Believer was a powerful and nuanced movie about religion. Specifically, about someone who's renounced his religious background in favor of a quasi-religious fascist ideology, but still feels compelled back toward the mysteries of his original faith. It's similar in some ways to O'Connor's Wise Blood, a…