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A year or so ago, I was looking at a photograph of Amelia Earhart and thinking “If they ever make a movie about her, I bet they’ll cast Hilary Swank.” A couple weeks later, I heard that Mira Nair (of Salaam Bombay and Namesake fame) was directing Amelia, starring Hilary Swank. The news seemed pretty [...]

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”  – John Keats in a letter to Fanny Brawne
How blessed we are to still find films that whisper to us. I first approached Jane [...]

I’m not overly familiar with the 1980 version of Fame aside from its hit title song, but I do know it was rated R, which alone gives it an edge over this slick, but bland PG revamp that, despite periodically producing a beat you can dance to, acts too much like a soap you’d see [...]

I don’t know if anyone was exactly hungering for a film version of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, but this one from directors Chris Miller (Shrek the Third) and Phil Lord is a well-rendered and fairly entertaining CGI effort that might literally make you hungry.

Let’s say the electric guitar had never been invented. Pop music wouldn’t be the same. Would all the artists on the Billboard charts ‘lo these many decades have even existed? What colors would be missing from music if you take away how an electric guitar acts/responds through different amplifiers and effects? One answer is the [...]

Even before I took my three younger nephews (ages 4, 6, and 7) to see this somewhat frantic, effects-filled kid flick about super spy guinea pigs, they were quoting one-liners from its trailers. Especially funny to them was the sight and sound of one of the rodents farting inside a tricked-out, super-fast hamster ball.

When the eminent Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron was brought on to direct the third (and still best) Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, he proved that the franchise would be strongest when it  departed from a rote retelling of J.K. Rowling’s books and charted its own identity and style. As the books progressed, each [...]

While this second entry in Ben Stiller’s family-friendly, Mannequin-inspired franchise is certainly calmer and more entertaining than its hyperactive predecessor, it earns points alone for featuring Darth Vader and Oscar the Grouch in the same scene.
It sees Stiller infiltrating the Smithsonian Institute to help his wax figure friends, who have been shipped there, along with [...]

Once while I was in the 5th Grade, I wrote a story about a pair of kleptomaniacal chimpanzees who escape from the San Diego zoo and, after a series of adventures, end up flying around in a raft kept aloft by two parachutes filled with wind. When Pixar made Up, a tale of an old [...]

So there was a lot of hype when this came out last year. My more conscientious friends told me I had to see it. Well, I put it off for a long time, because, growing up the way I did, in a hippie new age environment, I felt that I probably knew all about its [...]