> Not Even For Free It was a feel-good story last weekend when the expensive shambles called Sucker Punch went down, defeated by the relatively low-budget family comedy DIARY OF A WIMPY KID:  RODRICK RULES.  (Mitch Metcalf’s weekend boxoffice roundup is here.)  The story would have been better, though, if Wimpy 2 were any good. […]

  ONE DAY – Watch It At Home:  An Off-Day   What went wrong with ONE DAY?  It’s been clear for a while that its studio, Focus Features, didn’t have great confidence in the film:  first  they postponed the opening from its original midsummer date to late August (which has turned out to be an […]

> Watch It At Home. Were the executives at Warner Bros so desperate to be in business with Russell Brand that they huddled together in a conference room one day, frantically going through their library titles in search of alcoholic lead roles he could play?  (“Days of Wine and Roses… a little dark.  Clean and […]

> As has been reported, there really was an ambulance outside the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto after the midnight premiere of Alexandre Courtes’ THE INCIDENT, there to rescue at least one person who had fainted during the movie.  Of course, this may just mean that Toronto Film Festival patrons have delicate sensibilities–an idea supported by […]

> Watch It At Home:  For Fans of Florescent Green Another summer weekend; another superhero epic.  What used to be an extravagant event genre is now hard-pressed to muster more than a yawn.  What is there to say about GREEN LANTERN?  Well, it’s better than January’s sophomoric Green Hornet, so at least it’s got color […]

    MELANCHOLIA – Watch It At Home – The Title Tells the Tale   Here’s a quick primer in Oscar rules and how studios can get around them.  In order for a film to be Oscar-eligible (other than in a few special categories like Documentary and Foreign Film), it needs a theatrical release in […]

  PROJECT NIM:  Worth A Ticket – If You Can Stand It   At first I wondered why on earth Fox Searchlight hadn’t grabbed James Marsh’s documentary PROJECT NIM at Sundance, to serve as an unofficial prequel to Big Fox’s release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes next month.  It seemed like a […]

> Worth A Ticket. Of all the “Friends” who kept America company in its collective living room for a decade, David Schwimmer has taken the most concerted step away from the work that made him famous.  While Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow have mostly continued in TV comedy, and Jennifer Aniston’s […]