brainwagon

Today’s DVD acquisition is The Best of the Thunderbirds. This year both the Thunderbirds and myself are celebrating our 40th birthdays. I’m not your traditional geek fan, but I do admit to a certain admiration fo the high quality of the SuperMarionation techniques and the nostalgic sixties/space race enthusiasm for technology that seemed to die […]

Since I was frustrated by server problems this weekend, this weekend was a double movie weekend: I went out to see both The Bourne Supremacy and Catwoman. So today you get two brief reviews for the price of one. Matt Damon returns in his role as Jason Bourne, a government assassin who is suffering from […]

I must admit, I had low expectations from I, Robot. Perhaps it’s just that I see a lot of decent science fiction which is turned into utter dreck when adapted for the screen, but I steeled myself for the worst, plunked down my $8.75, and went to see it anyway, without reading a review. The […]

There was nothing on television worth watching last night, so I took the missus out to see King Arthur, the latest in a sequence of “great hero” movies that appear to be popular this year. beginning with Troy and will presumably end with Alexander later this year. King Arthur isn’t the middle ages, Arthur in […]

The other part of my weekend was spent donating my dollars to the latest summer movie extravaganza: Spiderman 2. All the principles are back: Toby McGuire, Kirsten Dunst, Rosemary Harris and even a brief appearance by Willem Dafoe. The plot follows two rather different paths: one, following the creation of a new super-villain: Doctor Octopus; […]

I must admit, I’m a bit of a fluff movie-goer. I go to movies to be entertained, not to learn. When I wish to learn, I read books, news, or even the Internet. I don’t see many documentary or independent films. I’m also not an enormous Michael Moore fan. I find some of his work […]

When it comes to television, I’m about as jaded as they come. Let’s face it, it’s mostly crap. That’s what makes it so difficult when genuinely great shows are cancelled. Such a show was Fox’s Firefly. I must admit: I was skeptical of the premise. A mixture of space and Wild West? What’s up with […]

Today’s weekend movie was Dodgeball, starring Ben Stiller, and featuring a large list of cameo appearances from some fun celebrities. Ben Stiller plays White Goodman, evil head of the Globo Gym, who is trying to buy out Peter La Fluer, played by Vince Vaughn, who owns Average Joes Gym. As one might imagine, Globo Gym […]

Ah, this time, a Saturday evening saw my wife and I attending a late showing of The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel to Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel as Riddick, an escaped convict with an uncanny ability to see in the dark and to kill. I must admit, I wasn’t a huge fan of Pitch […]

The summer movie season is upon us, which means that Saturdays are the day for seeing the latest release of the week. Today’s movie was the latest in the immensely popular Harry Potter series. The franchise is already well established, so you probably know what to expect: young Harry, Hermione and Ron are back at […]

Well, this weekend’s movie extravaganza was The Day After Tomorrow, a classic global catastrophe film. Dennis Quaid stars as a paleoclimatologist who is the first to recognize that global warming can cause (and in the short span of the movie actually does cause) a global ice age. I could tell you that the science of […]

It’s rare that a sequel film surpasses a good original film, but I must say: Shrek 2 must be judged as one of those rare films. It builds on everything that was good about the original: the look, the story, and the vocal talent and delivers a new movie which is familar but not predictable […]

Today someone on our local message board posted a link to MSNBC – Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved?, a story that suggested that if one could fire George Lucas, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman and put in more Christopher Lee, you could hire some real writers and salvage the entire script. Not a bad […]

This weekend’s block buster is Troy, the classic tale of the Iliad. Brad Pitt stars as Achilles, the moody and reluctant (if somewhat bloodthirsty) Achilles, Eric Bana as Hector, hero of Troy, and Orlando Bloom as Paris, who steals the lovely Helen from King Menelaus and provokes a tizzy that ultimately results in a war […]

I’m a huge fan of what reasonably called "bad cinema". I go to see the terrible comedies, the action films, horror movies, what most serious students of film would call the bottom of the barrel. I prefer movies with guns, and hookers and firetrucks (can anyone name that movie) or scantilly clad Kung Fu fighting […]