I’ve seen both The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up a good fifteen times a piece, and I’ll gladly watch either anytime they happen to come on the tube.  They are a rare combination of humor, emotion and a good amount of depth.  So I went into Funny People, Apatow’s third effort, with a great deal [...]

One of the reasons that Wolverine is one of the most interesting of those crazy X-Men is his mysterious past. Questions about his origin have filled all the previous films in the billion-dollar franchise. Who the heck went through the trouble of filling him with metal? What was he like BEFORE he was filled with [...]

Oftentimes it’s fairly easy to determine what qualities in a film make it enjoyable.  Perhaps it has a great performance from a lead actor, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.  Maybe it has a tight, well-constructed plot that keeps you guessing until the end.  Maybe the cinematography is beautiful.  It can be any number of [...]

One of the problems with success is that it tends to inflate expectations.  Writer/director Rian Johnson’s first film, Brick, was almost universally lauded as an amazing achievement for a first film.  In case you haven’t seen it (and you should), Brick tells a classic film noir tale that plays out in an unusual setting: an [...]

In Gran Torino, director Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an old man who enjoys his solitude, his cigarettes, and a fair helping of racist banter.  The story centers around Walt, whose wife has recently passed, and his Hmong neighbors.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but essentially Walt hates his Hmong neighbors at [...]