Bottle Shock, could do for Chardonnay what Sideways did for Pinot Noir. At least it will send wine Neanderthals like me surging out of the theater desperate to slake a strange new thirst for the Napa Valley golden wine that is the heart of this quirky little movie. Bottle Shock won’t get the attention that Sideways did, because it is not as outrageously crass as that prior movie, but it actually has a better and bigger story. I’m not sure... Read more

How dare they. No, I mean really, how DARE they?! Imagine if someone did a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and it ended up savagely racist? That’s what they’ve done here. A profoundly Catholic novel, in this “adaptation”, Brideshead Revisited is viciously anti-Catholic. They turned a movie about God and the soul, into a lurid love triangle between a homosexual, his sister and a hapless hunk. It’s lame. It’s bad. I will have much more to say about... Read more

Too Dark. Too long. Too fast. Too pretentious. Too loud. Too many characters. Too much steady cam. Too little substance. Too little fun. The whole world has lost its mind. Heath was great, although the role was completely over the top and didn’t call for any subtlety of performance. And his commitment to method acting certainly wasn’t worth his life. But I bet they will give him the Oscar as an attempt at a kharmic balancing act: “Sorry we ate... Read more

“Remember this, never forget it, you’re just a piece of meat.”(1950’s studio boss Harry Cohn, to actress Kim Novak) P.S. Think that is terrible? So do we. Checks here. Read more

“We want a story that starts out with an earthquakeand works its way up to a climax.” Samuel Goldwyn Read more

I know it’s brilliant. I just don’t know exactly what it is. I know what it isn’t: a kids movie. It’s too cynical. And too foreboding. I say this as someone who thinks Bambi/Lion King style tragedies are good for kids. Wall-E is different than these in that it is on many levels like a bedtime story based on Al Gore’s Power Point movie. And I admit that made me uncomfortable for part of the film. I remember feeling waves... Read more

Here is a link to a partial transcript of an interview I did with friend Tony Rossi for The Christopher Closeup podcasts. A nice chunk of the interview was all about my favorite TV show, the freshly re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (2003) on the Sci-Fi Channel. Tony is also an unabashed fan of the show, so we completely geeked out in the interview speculating wildly about the ultimate direction of the show and why it is so great as entertainment. Here’s... Read more

Back in March I was interviewed for the online version of the magazine of Catholic United for the Faith, which is called “Lay Witness.” In opening the stack of mail waiting for me back at the Act One offices, I just found a letter from the magazine telling me that the interview is posted here. They enclosed a copy of the print version of the magazine with the letter. INterstingly, my interview didn’t make the print version. But there was... Read more

Here is a snip from Daily Variety’s review today of Journey to the Center of the Earth the latest classic work to apparently be rendered banal by Walden Media. “What Journey to the Center of the Earth emphasizes is how technology ends up dictating content: Helmer Brevig [note from Barb: “helmer” is Tinseltown speak for d”director”] seems compelled to remind us again and again, that we’re in 3-D, so something flies at our faces for no apparent reason except to... Read more

I just have to ask. Why, oh why, America, did so many of you watch ABS’c latest summer entertainment for the brain dead, the idiocy-fest Wipeout? It was the biggest summer premiere for the network in the last three years. Which means we will now see many similarly themed, but probably not as stunningly produced and intellectually stimulating, knockoffs on the other networks, and certainly a rash of super-extended, extreme degradation Wipeouts on ABC. All I hear as I travel... Read more