ANONYMOUS:  Watch It At Home – The Bard Was A Beard, Claims Wheezy Expose   ANONYMOUS is history tailored for the 1%. Although screenwriter John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich have swirled it into a complicated tangle of conspiracies and scandals, the idea at the center of Anonymous is simple enough (uh, Spoiler Alert):  […]

  To say BATMAN BEGINS successfully rebooted the Warners franchise is accurate, but incomplete.  Christopher Nolan’s film, from the script he wrote with David S. Goyer, is a complete rethinking of the very concept of a comic book/superhero movie, one comparable to what The Godfather and Cabaret did with the gangster movie and the musical […]

> Watch it At Home;  Something Acceptable. As romantic comedies with Kate Hudson go, SOMETHING BORROWED isn’t so bad.  After her spectacular debut in Almost Famous, Hudson’s become something of a brand name for dreadful rom-coms that nevertheless make money (How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, You, Me & Dupree, Fool’s Gold, My […]

> THE CHANGE UP – Watch It At Home:  Cliches with Dirty Words Are Still Cliches There have been plenty of R-rated comedies this summer–a bumper crop, really–but none more fully committed to raunch than THE CHANGE-UP.  The script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (they wrote The Hangover, but also Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) […]

    Watch it at home.   The genial PAUL really only has one joke–luckily it’s a pretty good one: what if ET had the persona of Seth Rogen? While Paul isn’t the first alien to crack jokes (remember Alf?), Rogen’s voice gives the guy a little slacker/stoner kick. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are […]

  FINAL DESTINATION 5 – Watch It At Home:  Death Takes No Holiday   There’s only one thing worth mentioning in FINAL DESTINATION 5… and it’s the one thing I can’t talk about.  Let’s just say that if you’ve been a follower of the series all along, the filmmakers (whether it was screenwriter Eric Heisserer […]

  HUGO:  Worth A Ticket – If Only For the Visual Splendors   Paramount doesn’t have much choice but to market Martin Scorsese’s HUGO as a family movie:  it’s got a PG rating, a young boy and girl as the hero and heroine, a children’s book (“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick) as […]

> Worth a ticket. The director and writer of Saw, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, combine again to bring us–hey, where are you going?  No, seriously:  don’t run away.  Leaving aside that Saw is rather unfairly maligned (before it became the poster child for “torture porn” and a dumb sequel machine for Lionsgate, the original […]