Okay, so I haven't seen the movie, but what I heard from those ardent comic-book geeks, Smith and Garman, was that this movie lacked two of the three things you need in a comic-book movie/TV show to make it worth watching: heart, humor, and spectacle.

Okay, so it's not the greatest movie ever made. So sorry. However, having grown in this neighborhood, when this was actually happening, I can tell you, the wine trade in Sonoma/Napa was incredible, and a lot of that feeling is transmitted in this film. I especially like the part where everyone is flabbergasted that…

How much are they going to change about Steve's life to make sure the movie works better on an "emotional" level?

SPOILER ALERT: She stabs the guy in the neck with a pen and ends up "under review"…? I would have expected her to be locked up and looking at attempted murder or maybe manslaughter. (but you know, it's the FBI - what the fuck do THEY care about Justice in the old Justice Department, anyway?) He's great, she's not,…

Short list:

Andrei Tarkovsky was dying of (I believe) lung cancer while shooting his last film, The Sacrifice; he believed that he, his wife, and the great actor Anatoli Solonitsyn had been poisoned while shooting Stalker some six years previously. Stalker was shot partly in an old chemical plant…

Sadly, many people who have seen that movie were later surprised to find out that the event of the Titanic sinking was historical. I realize that many people are in fact completely stupid, but I will bet you that if he'd looked hard enough, Cameron could have easily fictionalized part of that true story better than he…

The only ahistorical part of Titanic is the Rose/Jack story. The framing device of going back and looking for treasure is a cheap way to get into the story. The whole rest of the movie, all the stuff you see about the ship sinking, THAT was all true. And there are many real people in that story who were really, really…

As Kevin Smith often says, it's not "Show Art", or "Show Truth", but "Show Business".

Well, the movie came out in 1982, and yeah, they didn't talk about Gandhi that much in High School in the nice upper-middle-class white neighborhoods where I grew up, so…

Describing watching Gandhi as the equivalent of being forced to eat your vegetables for three hours straight, while others on this very blog have some sort of fondness for Titanic (which was three hours long, full of the potential for true stories while telling a fictional one - in the middle of an actual historical…