“Don’t tell me the jive session has beat off without baby!” With the likes of His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and Bringing Up Baby, it may seem odd that my first foray into Howard Hawks‘ oeuvre would be the screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Considering I’m criminally behind on catching up with [...]

“Farewell Norma. I never loved you.” It all starts with a kiss for the cameras and the dot of an eyeliner pen. From there a star is born in the form of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) while her accidental impetus to become an actress ends up an industry dinosaur of a bygone era overnight. Silent [...]

“I’m a bear with very little brain and long words bother me” Written in the 1920s by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard, Winnie the Pooh has been a children’s favorite for almost a century now. First adapted to film by Disney in the 60s and last seen in 2005′s Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, it [...]

“Mad Love, Buddy” And the award for movie with the worst message for young adults is Young Adult. Bravo Diablo Cody for what appears to be a cathartic foray into justifying arrogance, shallowness, and alcoholism as signs of great artistic talent rather than portraying them as glaring issues needing work, help, and maturity. Kudos for [...]

“They’re four foot high, blind, n’ got kicked to def by a bunch a kids. We got nuthin’ to worry ’bout” After the extraordinary success Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead’s comedy/horror mash-up found internationally, it’s no surprise their friend Joe Cornish’s feature directorial debut has achieved equally staggering results. Attack the [...]

“Laughter, the third greatest gift of all!” If you saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it’ll be no surprise that Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller were chosen as the ones to bring The Muppets back to the big screen. Almost three decades since the last true Muppet movie besides their literary adventures after Jim Henson’s untimely death, [...]

“Pizza-bot sad” Two guys with a Pixar DVD extra each and many animation credits to their names hit a homerun with their first shot at a theatrical short film. Director Angus MacLane and writer Josh Cooley bring to life a cornucopia of discarded Happy Meal-esque toys inside the ever-growing universe of the studio’s biggest franchise. [...]

“In Santa We Believe” After the box office failure of Flushed Away, I was worried Aardman Animations may have been dead. With the fire that consumed thirty years of their history and the realization mainstream Americans simply don’t ‘get’ thew British-tinged dry humor, the Academy Award for Wallace & Gromit didn’t seem to prove enough. [...]

“Sometimes you have to back up to go forward” It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I loathed Happy Feet. As a concept the film seemed quite solid—cute penguins dancing, a modern soundtrack to tap along with, the comedy stylings of Robin Williams—but the final result was an ambush of politics and sexuality [...]