handcrafted by maryann johanson (human) | 100% free of AIs and algorithms
Thundercats! Are! Go! No, wait: that was Thunderbirds. Still, Thundercats are indeed go, in their first DVD collection, which is sure to draw as much cash from the pockets of retro-hungry Generation Xers as the cartoon originally drew from the pockets of our parents, to buy all those damn Thunderbird toys that were the inspiration … more…
There was a time, though it is little remembered now, when Debra Messing (The Wedding Date) wasn’t quite the desperately annoying woman-child of Will & Grace and was, instead, merely the mildly irritating stereotypical New York neurotic Stacey, who marries pompous ass Ned (Thomas Haden Church: Sideways) merely to live in his fabulous, rent-controlled apartment … more…
This charming Disney Channel series, about an American woman abroad in Australia during that nation’s gold rush, is a delight for family viewing, reliably inoffensive without avoiding tough issues from racism and sexism to the awkwardness of creating an ad hoc family out of new friends. Maggie Scott (Louise Caire Clark) and her daughter, young … more…
This is what, the 18,562,012th film version of Jane Austen? How many times can Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy misunderstand each other and yearn and burn and fail to see past their own snobbery and stubbornness until they finally do? Oh my god, do we really need another *Pride & Prejudice*?
I knew nothing about *A History of Violence* before I sat down to watch it, absolutely nothing except that it starred Viggo Mortensen, and that that was enough to make me want to see it. I had even managed to avoid hearing that this was a David Cronenberg film, knowledge that certainly would have colored my expectations about it, as would have the knowledge, which I did not have until just before the movie began, that this was based on a graphic novel.
It’s something close to a stroke of genius that once-wunderkind screenwriter Shane Black sought out Robert Downey Jr. to star in his directorial debut. Not because Downey is so achingly sublime an actor and so funkily charismatic a screen presence that it near to makes you want to weep with despair at what brilliance we’ve missed from him over the years during which he wasn’t able to keep his shit together — though he certainly does give us one of the most deliciously shivery-great performances so far this year in *Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.*
All over the country, little girls with equine fixations will be blinking their dreamy pony-filled eyes at their daddies and pleading please please please prettyplease can we see the horse movie? And oddly enough, *Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story* is the cinematic equivalent of the deployment of such adorable nascent feminine wiles: Please don’t shoot the horse with the broken leg, Daddy, Dakota Fanning with her enormous eyes brimming with tears and her quivering lip doesn’t exactly say, but she might as well have. Please nurse the horse back to health at tremendous personal expense and sacrifice so you can later give it to me as a prezzie and I can train her and we can enter the massively prestigious Breeder’s Cup race with her! Pul-eeeeeeze!
Oh, it’s totally a chick flick: there’s all sorts of stuff about shoes, and there will be some happy tears at the end. But it’s the good kind of chick flick, about real women with real problems that other real women can identify with.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a journalist? That’s what *Good Night, and Good Luck.* feels like, a smooth, sardonic smack in the face of today’s so-called newspeople, the cinematic equivalent of a withering glare and a disdainful roll of the eyes. Oh, this is an angry movie, calm and collected on the surface and seethed with reeled-in rage underneath. Yeah, it’s about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on McCarthy’s insanity, but what it’s really about is how we need a Murrow now and is there no one, not one supposed journalist, with the balls to take up Murrow’s mantle of integrity and honesty and fearlessness?
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
sample sponsored post (sponsored) - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce quis risus odio.
