Skot managed to get out to a movie theatre and catch WALL-E; me, I been busy. Okay, not so much, but I’m not going to surround myself with kids under any circumstances, no matter how good the movie is. And anyway, I managed to get my paws on something that I had long considered the [...]

Just checked out WALL-E. It was a wonderful animated film, maybe the best one to date from Disney/Pixar.
It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city [...]

Back on April 26th– nearly two months ago– I reviewed The Love Guru based on one three-minute trailer shown on NBC. In fact, I seem to remember saying something like it “looks like one of the worst movies to come along in quite a while.”
From the IMDb:
Mike Myers’s The Love Guru , which is being [...]

Finally, finally finally got out and caught a movie, at the spiffy new Century 20 in Tanforan Mall. It’s a nice new theatre with excellent presentation, but it isn’t without some problems. For one thing, it’s understaffed: On the way to our auditorium I came across a pair of propped-open exit doors, which is an [...]

Inevitably, the seasons turn, in the slow, majestic way they do. They nicely divide out our lives into climatic themes: eras of birth, growth, yielding to the quiet dark of winter. This is true, of course unless you live in California. In Southern California there really aren’t any seasons, just stretches of shorter and longer [...]

A few months back I mentioned I finished a feature-length screenplay. This is not really news per se: I’m sure yours is coming along nicely. But if ya ask me it’s what you do with the finished manuscript that’s important.
Last fall John (the co-writer of the thing) and I took a free half-hour of advice [...]

Salon, the online magazine, has been running a contest to find the worst pitch. Pitching, to those of you untouched by the sinister tendrils of showbiznezz, is the practice of summarizing your movie idea to its barest most marketable essence. The Salon contest was judged by Harvey Weinstein, who was probably relieved that he already [...]

This Daily Variety review caught my eye - they’re at Cannes looking at the movies in competition.
No doubt it will be back to the drawings board for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara.
Here’s my thinking - if I were writing a [...]

The odyssey that is “Arrangements” sort of met it’s logical conclusion. It was programmed into a screening block called “Homegrown,” a showcase for Santa Cruz filmmakers. It took place in the afternoon, between a women-themed program and one on African hip-hop. The screening venue was the Regal Cinemas Riverfront Theatre, a big ol’ twin-plex [...]

I’m proud of TPN:: Box Office Weekly. I believe the editorial and critical content on these pages is of a generally higher level than most media-news blogsites. At the end of the film Ratatouille, the food critic Anton Ego put forth a splendid little summary of what criticism truly is. I’ll excerpt it here:
In [...]