Category: Arts & Entertainment
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The Beast Must Have a Problem He’s Not Telling Us About
A recap of a Friday night at home watching the movies, including a new favorite
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Just ’cause it’s a theme song, don’t mean it’s not true
When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly…
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Maybe I Didn’t Want to Believe As Much as I’d Originally Thought
Somehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed. Of course, if you go see the movie at all,…
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Why So Serious?, or, I Miss the Giant Penny
According to the box office numbers, there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has already seen The Dark Knight. But just in case, I’ll include a spoiler warning: it’s pretty damn good. The movie mentions several times how the Joker and Batman are both “freaks” and outsiders, and how lonely it is to be…
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To Be in the Venture Compound in the Summertime
I’ve got 2 Venture Brothers-related confessions to make: first is that before he showed up in the series, I’d never heard of Klaus Nomi. Second is that until last week’s episode (“What Goes Down Must Come Up”), I’ve thought this season was clever but not hilariously funny. This episode had me dying, though. (Yeah, I’m…
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The Right Hand of Doom
I really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a…
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An Inconvenient Contaminant
I saw Wall-E last week for my birthday (thanks, Rain!), but have been too busy distracted buying stuff and staring blankly at computer screens to be able to write anything about it. It’s so good I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “wonderful.” At this point, it’s a given that any…
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All up in her griddle
A couple weeks ago, my satellite went out, and I seriously considered just canceling the service altogether. Even if I were home long enough to watch TV, all the shows I’m most interested in are available on the internet. And if I ever do get free time, wouldn’t I be better off going outdoors, or…
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Iz not so great, aktually
This “half-season” of “Battlestar Galactica” ended last Friday with an episode called “Revelations.” I don’t really have much to say worth a spoiler warning, but if you want to know nothing about the episode, you might want to skip this post. Maybe the series has always been like this, and I just couldn’t tell because…
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Spoilers
Last month, news came over the wireless that Steven Moffat is taking over “Doctor Who” when its fifth season starts in 2010. I didn’t think much about the announcement, since I haven’t been paying much attention to the series. It’s turned into kind of a shrill, nonsensical mess with increasingly overwrought finales. Even though it…
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MST3K at Comic Con
Via Andrew P Mayer’s blog, there’s an announcement that almost everybody who ever appeared on Mystery Science Theater are going to be speaking at a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con: We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m. On the panel will be:…
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Espinazo
It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some…