Movies

'Over the Hedge' Rocks the Suburbs

Took the kids yesterday to see Over the Hedge, an animated comic strip adaptation by DreamWorks about forest creatures who find their home overtaken by a humongous residential community. Computer-animated films are my favorite family movies these days, because even when the story's dull the rendering effects are worth seeing on a giant screen. I didn't notice a single new visual in Over the Hedge comparable to the fur in Monsters Inc. or the expressive human faces in The Incredibles, but ... (read more)

2006/05/25

Sony's Universal Media Disc Format Lays an Egg

Sony PSP games and movies are released on Universal Media Disc format, but the name's a joke. No other devices support the format, Sony won't support burners or third-party efforts to open it up, and Brian Carnell passes along the news that movie studios have now cut back or abandoned UMD releases: It's hard to see why UMD failed.The movies were expensive -- $20 to $25 per movie.The PSP couldn't be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.The failure should make UMD ... (read more)

2006/04/24

The World's Most Beloved Coroner

I chaperoned a field trip this week to a high school production of The Wizard of Oz, which was fun because kids love getting out of school to see plays. This one had winged attack monkeys roaming the audience, the Wicked Witch singing Michael Jackson's "Bad" and a climactic scene involving water guns. At the end, they brought a surprise guest on stage: Meinhardt Raabe, the 90-year-old who played the Coroner in the movie. Raabe, who lives in a retirement community south of Jacksonville, may ... (read more)

2006/04/06

Movie Downloaders Pay a High Price

Six studios have begun selling movie downloads this week on Movielink. Purchased movies can be kept forever for computer viewing and burned to DVD but can't be watched in DVD players. There's also a limit on the number of computers that can view a movie, and the service and site require Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Prices for new movies are higher than DVDs -- Nicolas Cage's The Weather Man sells for $27 on Movielink and $22 on Amazon.Com. So you're getting less convenience at ... (read more)

2006/04/03

The Seminal Moment at the Academy Awards

I watched the Oscars last night even though I haven't seen a single film for which an actor, director or screenwriter was nominated. I have to go all the way down the list to "best achievement in makeup" before reaching a winner that I've seen, the Chronicles of Narnia. I had the same experience with musicians at the Grammys and TV actors at the Emmys. At some point raising young kids and working obsessively have robbed me of all pop culture that isn't aimed at children. I was more excited ... (read more)

2006/03/06

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Wired News is running my story today about the center of the world: the Shamrock "K" Horse Center near Coffeyville, Kansas. Maggie Dew, the geocacher who journeyed to the center and brought back photos, has planted a cache not far from the city at a '60s landmark called Peace Point: Some friends and I had a little shop in downtown Coffeyville called the Hobbit Hole. We had a peace flag in the front window, and it wasn't long before someone decided to lob a brick through it. During the same ... (read more)

2006/02/22

Serenity Doesn't Have a Prayer

Joss Whedon, the creator of the film Serenity and the Firefly TV series that preceded it, offers a correction to an Entertainment Weekly item declaring an end to the franchise: EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it. Geeks love Serenity, a great space western ... (read more)

2006/01/06

The Lion, The Witch and The Arms Dealer

I took the boys last night to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Film Franchise We Hope Will Be a Cash Machine Like Harry Potter. The film's a wonderfully realized vision of the book, at least through my hazy recollection of tearing through all seven novels 25 years ago in the Collier boxed set, which I've kept all of these years. But the logic of the C.S. Lewis novel makes less sense than it did when I was a child. I don't care if they're just a bunch of dissident animals ... (read more)

2005/12/22

Jerry Lewis vs. Jerry's Kids

At an appearance in Chicago Wednesday night, Jerry Lewis flew into a rage when heckled off the stage by disability activists in wheelchairs, telling security to eject one overweight protester by commanding "move that living waterbed out of here." The hecklers were from Jerry's Orphans, a group begun in the early '90s by Mike Ervin, a former Muscular Dystrophy Association poster child. They're angry about their portrayal in the Labor Day Telethon, as described in a documentary The Kids Are All ... (read more)

2005/11/18

Mark Evanier attended an onstage Jerry Lewis interview Thursday night, learning an odd bit of trivia about the comedian's socks: Asked about the white sweatsocks that he usually wears, sometimes even with formal garb, he said, "I wear them because I like them. They feel comfortable to me. I change socks about four times a day, always putting on a brand new, never-before-worn pair. Each year, I send hundreds of pairs of socks to --" and he gave the name of some charitable organization in Las ... (read more)

2005/11/05

Read More Entries