So, my post about The Tree of Life yesterday was cranky, and worse, inarticulate. I ended up sounding silly, and Simon, justifiably, slapped back at me for it. As an apology and explanation, I wanted to lay out a couple of things to do a better job of explaining both my preexisting assumptions and prejudices and what I find obnoxious about this particular trailer.1. I tend to think of mass-market... 

I loved this piece my friend Alex Gutierrez wrote about the structural changes the advent of cell phones have caused in our one-crazy-night movies. She says: The “One Crazy Night” movie genre—which includes films like Can’t Hardly Wait, 200 Cigarettes, andSuperbad—is predicated on communication failure. In these films, the many members of the ensemble cast find it hard... 

This “So You Want To Be A Journalist” video cracked me up, as a veteran of a trade magazine, as someone was once the kind of radical who staged protests at college administration buildings, and as a Theoretically Wise Person who often speaks to people who would like to be journalists when they grow up: More importantly though, however crude this is as a medium, it’s an important... 

I didn’t mean to get on this kick about religious movies, but over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, SEK goes to town on Crusader Pictures, and the rather silly mission statement thereof. He’s spending more time on the historical etymology of the name than the purpose of the company, which I think is fair, given the pearl-clutching the founders are making about defining it. But I honestly think... 

I wish many good things for John Cena, but as far as his mainstream film career goes, I was thinking more buddy comedies, less overly-serious-family-and-local-sports dramas with Patricia Clarkson and Danny Glover: More broadly, I think this movie reflects an unfortunate trend in sports movies, where every final contest has to be a matter of life and death, or at least major societal change. For a... 

I don’t think The Company Men looks terribly good, though to his credit, Ben Affleck is probably the least maudlin thing in it, and it’s not his fault the writer and director set him up to have little girls praying for his future employment: But I do think this is a good illustration of how bad action movies can be for men’s careers. Normally we think of them as an advantage. Action... 

kepkanation sets me straight on my complaints about The Dry Land: I think in part this only feels tired and overdone, and like she’s playing the “kicky, curvy Latina girlfriend” because the majority of the movies about Iraq and Afghanistan so far have made the deployments about white guys with their white buddies and their white girlfriends/wives (think Brothers, which was, sure,... 

So, there’s a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows trailer:I really do feel like I should have some sort of emotional reaction to this, but I just…don’t. The closest the movies ever got to really solid was Alfonso Cuarón turn helming Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Azkaban, and all the teenaged social stuff in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The movies have always... 

Dance movies are among the more logical, and I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me before: If you do a good job of shooting full dance routines, without cutting off dancers’ bodies, and capturing the full effect of the routined, and then show it in 3D, it could be a genuinely different and more fulfilling experience than just seeing the actors flat on screen. I probably see... 

I do think it’s fair to ask why Katherine Heigel makes dreadful movies, and why the movies she’s making have become increasingly dreadful (not even my appreciation of James Marsden extends to making excuses for 27 Dresses).  But I do want to make a small defense of the roundly-lambasted The Ugly Truth: It’s absolutely true that it’s a movie driven in part by vibrating-panties...