Month: May 2005

This isn’t just a movie. You don’t have to have been married by a justice of the peace in Jedi robes or have named your dog Boba or have spent the last three weeks on a line outside the Ziegfeld or Grauman’s Chinese Theater to feel that. If you’re any kind of geek and you’re around my age — 35 — you’ve spent pretty much your whole life waiting for this moment. It was nine years ago — 1996 — that George Lucas announced he’d be making a new *Star Wars* trilogy, and if you’re like me, hearing this was like being eight years old again and being told to wait patiently for summer vacation or your birthday. It won’t be finished until *2005*? How can I possibly be expected to wait for that kind of eternity to find out how Darth Vader becomes Darth Vader?

Just when you think the genre of the humiliation comedy can’t reach any new depths of repugnance and depravity, along comes Will Ferrell, the doofus king of self-debasement in the name of entertainment, to prove you wrong.

Is the movie silly? Yup. Even maybe kinda dumb? You betcha. I laughed anyway — I admit it. I think maybe it’s cuz I’ve missed Martin Short all these long years since SCTV. Remember Ed Grimley? I loved him. His Nathan Therm on Saturday Night Live? (Of course I remember Nathan Therm? What makes you … more…

Hey, if you’re into whiny soap operas about self-obsessed people who never shut up complaining about how miserable they are, have at it. But if you get enough of that in real life or just don’t care to spend a couple hours with fake people who are that exasperating, no one would blame you for … more…

In a male-dominated industry — filmmaking — there’s probably not a specialty more fueled by testosterone than stuntwork, and the women who choose this bruise- and discrimination-ridden path are exactly as tough as you’d expect. Two of them are profiled in Amanda Micheli’s festival-favorite documentary, which never lets its enormous love and respect for its … more…

Okay, baron, actually. Orlando Bloom plays a baron, a medieval French baron. But still. Yum. I’m sorry — I can’t help it. He’s *beautiful.* So, I’m shallow. I admit it. He’s *gorgeous,* and any hotblooded heterosexual woman who denies she’s going to see *Kingdom of Heaven* just because Orlando Bloom is in it is lying, I tell ya: lying. Or else she’s a medieval scholar and wants to see how Hollywood gets it all wrong. But even that woman is going to Not Care how wrong it might be when he strides across the screen all long and lanky and swings a sword and gets all angst-ridden for more reasons than a man should have to be angst-ridden and blinks those limpid eyes in masculine pain and talks with that mouth you just want to smush and make all the hurt go away…