See what I mean? There have been plenty of adaptations of H.G. Wells’ classic The Invisible Man, going all the way back to 1933. My personal experience covers the pretty bad Hollow Man (featuring Kevin Bacon) and hot garbage that is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention the original novel itself. Based on […]

Fair enough. My son was looking forward to seeing Sonic for weeks. I was not as enthusiastic, but such are the sacrifices a parent makes for his kid. Unlike him, my memory of Sonic goes all the way back to the original Sega Genesis game, not to mention I also remember many crappy movies based […]

Dear cruel world. The advantage in avoiding all trailers for a movie is that you do not know what is coming. Unfortunately, that is also the danger. What little I knew going into the screening of Downhill was that it starred Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and was about a family on ski trip. IMDb […]

Don’t oversell it. Watching a DC Extended Universe (DCEU) movie is a bit like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football. Every time you line up the kick, she promises that, this time, she won’t pull it away. By now, you have slipped four discs in your spine, bruised your tailbone, dislocated a hip, and […]

Travel well indeed. Guy Ritchie needed a win. After the success of his two Sherlock Holmes films in 2009 and 2011, people largely ignored the very good The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) was an unmitigated disaster, and the Aladdin remake (2019) was a pile of shit that was […]

A tale of two movies. Sitting next to each other, in the same theater on the same night, my wife and I saw two entirely different movies. I saw a heartwarming movie with adorable, courageous kids, a solid story, and a tight running time that kept the film from meandering. My wife saw a jumbled, […]

So this is what death throes look like. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was a little too talkative one day during math class. My teacher told me stay after the bell rung, and, once everyone else had left the room, told me I could not leave until I acted like a […]

Do you smell something? It seems almost unfair to write about Dolittle. Why on Earth would a movie with a $175 million budget and starring Robert Downey Jr. be opening in the armpit of the Hollywood calendar known as January? All the kids are back in school, almost everyone blew all of their spending money […]

Seven miles shallow. As I crawl out from underneath a mountain of award-hopeful movies, a look forward at upcoming releases in January reminds me that twenty-five indie/documentary/foreign films in a row isn’t as long as it seems. Bad Boys 3? Gretel & Hansel? Like a Boss? Dolittle? DOLITTLE? Why is Dolittle, a $175 million movie […]

One is the loneliest number. The previous two years, I have repeated the same opening paragraph in my year-end review – ending the paragraph wondering how aliens hadn’t yet put us out of our misery – and I thought about doing it again. It still applies. Horrible things continue to happen, too many people are […]