The needs of the many.

Captain James T. Kirk finds himself called on the carpet after breaking the Prime Directive in an attempt to rescue a world — as well as his friend, Commander Spock.  Stripped of his command, he prepares to serve as First Officer under his mentor Christopher Pike, but an attack on a Star Fleet archive leads [...]

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Borne ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel leaps to life this week in Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic-yet-haunting version of The Great Gatsby.  The classic story of old and new wealth, conspicuous consumption, and the shattering of illusions, myths, and lives has only rarely been tackled by Hollywood (just 5 times, including this version), but it’s practically designed [...]

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Droning.

Caution: Review may contain mild spoilers. Jack Harper has a lonely job.  He is one half of the “mop-up crew,” the last two humans on Earth after an apocalyptic war wiped out the planet.  His partner Vicca is also his lover, more by default than choice.  They make an effective team, working to clean up [...]

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There's my boys.

Tony Stark’s last adventure has him rattled.  After all, almost getting killed by a wormhole and watching Norse gods dancing through the atmosphere will do that to a guy.  When his past comes back to haunt him, he’s unprepared — and when the world’s biggest terrorist attacks his friend, he’s in the mood for revenge. [...]

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You don't know Jack.

“How do you know that giants aren’t real?” a young Jack asks his father after he reads him a bedtime fairy tale.  “I don’t,” replies the father — and it’s not long before Jack discovers that everything he needs to know he learned in kindergarten, or at least bedtime stories.  Can the poor farmer boy [...]

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Anyone? Anyone?

My big beef with the Oscars has always been that they are annual. That fact in and of itself seems to assume that Hollywood comes up with sincerely great and timeless motion pictures every single year — which, in what is probably my over-curmudgeonly and certainly non-expert opinion, they don’t. However, I also think that [...]

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Flashback.

In 1979, the revolutionary Iranian government allowed a mob to seize the American embassy in Tehran, and then kept the staff hostage for 444 days.  Six Americans managed to escape the sacking of the embassy and ended up in the residence of the Canadian ambassador.  How did they get out?  If they made a movie [...]

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Observation.

Can one pill change your life? Steven Soderbergh returns as director to address this question in Side Effects … or perhaps not, as this langorous puzzler unfolds over the course of 106 minutes.  With all sorts of people taking short cuts to happiness and pleasure, including pills and get-rich-quick schemes, can we tell what’s real and [...]

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Yippie-ki-yay.

“Do you go looking for trouble, or does it always find you?” John McClane’s son Jack asks him in the fifth film of the Die Hard franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard.  “I still ask myself the same question,” the elder McClane answers with a laugh.  In this case, though, Bruce Willis and company [...]

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Redemption.

I have to admit, I was a bit chagrined yesterday when voters in the poll selected Warm Bodies as the film to review this weekend.  I’ve never been a big fan of the zombie genre, although I thought Zombieland was a brilliant and funny deconstruction of it.  (I even made Tina Korbe and Guy Benson [...]

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There. And there. And there. But not yet back again.

Every week I plan to see a new movie and write a review, but some weeks — especially in January and February — it gets difficult to pick a film.  This week, I asked readers to choose between four films, and they chose the one that had actually been in release for a while.  The [...]

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It's not what you think.

What happens when a professional thief gets betrayed by his partners and left for dead in a ditch?  Most everyone else would find a new line of work, but not Parker.  He wants his cut — and he’ll stop at nothing to get it. Parker comes from a series of novels and short stories by [...]

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"Energy matters."

Full disclosure: I’m a friend of filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, producers of the new documentary Fracknation.  I’ve been looking forward to this effort for some time, interviewing Phelim and Ann during the last couple of years as they prepared for and produced the film. Outside of friendship — and Ann and Phelim are [...]

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Values

When the President put his pen to nearly two dozen executive orders regarding gun control, there were a couple of glaring omissions which many of us quickly noted. One was the fact that the previously ballyhooed “balanced approach” to gun violence, mental health issues and the “culture” of violence in video games and films turned [...]

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Full of bullets and cliches, signifying nothing.

Last year, I resolved to see a new film each week and write a review, but a back injury and the election got in the way of that effort.  This year, I’m off to a fresh start … even if Hollywood isn’t.  Gangster Squad offers a collection of clichés and wooden performances that ends up [...]

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And not a short journey at all

Before we begin, let’s get the required disclaimer out of the way. This is a review of the movie “The Hobbit. An Unexpected Journey.” And if you haven’t seen it yet and somehow managed to not know the details of a movie based on a book originally published in 1937 which has sold as many [...]

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Uncovered.

If you’ve been following the news about Benghazi, you’ll have two questions after watching this clip. One: Didn’t we already know this? Answer: Yes, “we” did, but not because our government was eager for us to find out. McClatchy published an interview with a Libyan guard wounded in the attack just two days after it [...]

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Crimes.

No word yet on what the violation was, but I assume it must be far more serious than using an alias or a computer. Given the insanity of the past two weeks, replete with the White House nudging Google to pull the video off of YouTube and the State Department running ads on Pakistani TV [...]

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"[Y]ou know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it."

Via the Standard, a fine idea that I would take more seriously if he had mentioned it before the movie was condemned by the Cairo embassy, blamed for the Benghazi attack by Susan Rice, apologized for by the State Department via TV ads in Pakistan, and then discussed at length by The One himself in [...]

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Hostages.

Let me recycle a few lines from the post on Martin Dempsey phoning Terry Jones because this is where I think we’re headed, at least as long as American troops are stationed in large numbers in the Middle East: Loyola’s right that military leaders phoning citizens to ask them to pipe down for the sake [...]

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Questions.

Via BuzzFeed, simple question from the Univision moderators: Why wasn’t your administration better prepared to secure America’s embassies on September 11th? The response, true to form, is nearly six minutes of meandering about how it’s important to stay engaged in the Middle East, how the Mohammed movie is “offensive” but shouldn’t be a pretext for [...]

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Terror.

So here’s where we’re at after a week of inane White House spin. Until yesterday, the official line was that this attack — which involved heavy weapons — just might have been a spontaneous protest over the Mohammed YouTube video that got way, way out of control. Certainly it wasn’t anything organized or foreseeable or [...]

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It's come to this.

On a day when Egypt is appeasing its mob by issuing arrest warrants for the people responsible for the film (a capital offense there, do note), this is what’s running in the biggest paper in Los Angeles. Turns out the author, Sarah Chayes, is a former assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of [...]

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"He set out to create a response and he got it, in spades."

The key bit comes at the end. As you watch, bear in mind that Rushdie’s old tormentors in Iran announced just today that they’ll “search for, track, and pursue” the filmmaker. The only consolation here is my hunch that his old friend Hitchens would have recoiled at this sentiment, that a provocateur being hunted like [...]

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Blame.

Although the tumult subsided Saturday, senior administration officials said they had concluded that the sometimes violent protests in Muslim countries may presage a sustained crisis with unpredictable diplomatic and political consequences. While pressing Arab leaders to tamp down the unrest, Mr. Obama and his advisers are left to consider whether to scale back diplomatic activities [...]

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