Movies
Rainn Wilson: Failure Was Good for Me
Two years ago, Rainn Wilson of The Office was the lead star in The Rocker, a movie that cost $15 million to make and only earned $6.8 million. It opened on 2,784 screens and earned $1,180,836 the first weekend -- only $424 per theater. Wilson didn't take the failure well, he recently admitted in an New York Magazine interview: I was literally in my car at five-thirty in the morning and I started to weep ... as I drove down the 105 Freeway. They said, "It's just like Kelsey Grammer when he did ... (read more)The Danger of Employing Redskins as Movie Actors
Although it's getting a lot of flak from publishers and authors, Google Books is one of the most amazing contributions to world knowledge launched on the web in years. The ability to search the full text of thousands of books published prior to 1923 -- and hence in the public domain -- is amazing. I've been poking around it for a while, and I found something today while studying how Americans used the term "redskins" before Washington's NFL team chose that repulsive racist mascot in 1933. In ... (read more)They're Gonna Put Me in the Movies
I haven't seen the film Paranormal Activity, but I did fill out a web form requesting that it be shown in my town. That's apparently enough for me to earn a spot in the credits of the film when it comes out on DVD. I got an email inviting me to add my name to the credits, and if you click the link the invitation will be extended to you as well. After I filled out the form, I was shown a list of other people who are going to be credited. The list was 3,346 people long when I saw it, and ... (read more)Rewatching 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'
"I did not achieve this position in life by having some snot-nosed punk leave my cheese out in the wind." -- Dean of Students Ed Rooney ... (read more)Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye
Roger Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen appears to be considerably more entertaining than the film itself: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start ... (read more)IMDB Strikes Crude with 'Year One' Content Advisory
The movie reference site IMDb has a parents guide feature that's useful when determining whether a movie contains sexual content that would be inappropriate for your children. (Like most Americans I'm much more comfortable exposing the younguns to movies that contain bloodshed than any film that makes even the slightest reference to sex. I blame my Catholic upbringing and spaghetti Westerns.) The feature is edited by users in the manner of Wikipedia and does not get editorial oversight from ... (read more)Screenwriter: Watch the Watchmen Twice
As a fan of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel, I thought Watchmen was a terrific movie in spite of the excessive gore and the 17-hour run time. The comic's amusingly dystopian 1985 was captured perfectly -- President Nixon did not age well over the four terms he held office -- and I'm planning to see the movie again in IMAX, primarily for Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach and the incredible opening credit sequence. See if you can spot the tasteless metaphor in Watchmen screenwriter David ... (read more)The Sarah Connor's Great-Grandparents Chronicles
David Friedman asks a good question: Why does Skynet keep sending Terminators after Sarah Connor? Or even John Connor, for that matter? Why not go back a hundred years, or two hundred years, and kill her great grandparents? ... Future John Connor would surely send a human into the past to stop the Terminator from killing his great great grandparents. So how does this person fight against a robot killer in an age when technology is so primitive, using his knowledge from the future? And how does ... (read more)Who Belongs in the Brat Pack?
I don't spend enough time tackling the big questions on Workbench, so I'd like to rectify that today by addressing a subject of great import among those of us who came of age in the '80s: Are James Spader and Robert Downey Jr. part of the Brat Pack? The term Brat Pack was coined by journalist David Blum in the June 10, 1985, issue of New York magazine. His cover story Hollywood's Brat Pack describes a world, now lost, in which attractive young women fought for the right to engage in ... (read more)Jeff Bridges Visits the Dentist
The actor Jeff Bridges passes along a fish tale I hadn't heard before, concerning a fisherman in Wichita, Kan., who saw a basketball behaving oddly in a lake: It turned out to be a flathead catfish who had obviously tried to swallow a basketball which became stuck in its mouth!! The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface. Bill tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his ... (read more)
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