• The French Dispatch

    The French Dispatch

    This movie made me spend a lot of time thinking about Wes Anderson’s childhood.  Can you picture him? Sitting in his room surrounded by copies of The New Yorker and independent comics and smoking clove cigarettes.  His only friend, a weird kid like him that he kind of hates. His first love – an older…

  • Morbius

    Morbius

    The internet is a funny place.  People took this movie and pretended it was the height of cinema as a joke on pretentious film lovers. And then the joke went so far that Sony actually thought they had something and rereleased it only for it to bomb twice.  “It’s Morbin Time!” indeed.  The short version…

  • Marvel Phase 4

    Marvel Phase 4

    It’s 1996 and I’m 17 and I was flirting with the girl who sells tickets at the movie theater. I was working concessions and hoping that I was going to be promoted someday to that sweet usher job. It’s dead as disco and so we did not have much to do but chat. Finally, a…

  • The Fabelmans and the lions in winter

    The Fabelmans and the lions in winter

    Henry II: I hope we never die. Eleanor of Aquitaine: So do I. Henry II: Do you think there’s any chance of it? It’s central to this movie’s appeal that it could have been titled: Young Steven Spielberg. The Fabelmans tells the story of a young boy who is taken to a John Ford movie…

  • The Bob’s Burgers Movie

    Bob’s Burgers is one of those shows for me and my family that’s consistently on and consistently makes us happy.  Sometimes it achieves real greatness but mostly it’s comfort food.  Bob is a chef who consistently refuses to make comfort food in his pursuit of amazing, interesting burger of the day.  He’s played by H.…

  • The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

    Each year Christmas comes for us all. It comes to the straits and the squares and to broken people. Maybe especially to broken people.  It starts with one of the great Christmas songs of all time. Fairytale of New York. Which begins with  it was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tank The lyrics get better and…

  • Vengeance

    Like Cleveland Indians baseball great Jake Taylor this movie calls its shot and then wonderfully, blissfully nails it.  In Major League, Taylor pretended he was going to hit it out of the park and then squeezed a bunt into a game-winning play that confounded the defense.  Here writer/director BJ Novak uses the lure of podcast…

  • Pig

    I believe in Nic Cage. You guys watch Brooklyn 99? There’s this great bit about Cage where the show’s happy, yet kinda dumb, lead character is stuck with a snooty classics professor and he tries to get him to watch all the great Nic Cage movies.  So in order he describes the plots to Face/Off, Con…

  • Nope

    You ever been to a comic book convention? Over the years I’ve been to several and I always find them fun but frustrating. There are always these people there with tables who either never really were celebrities or were celebrities for five minutes 40 years ago.  And some of them, if they were connected to…

  • The King of Marvin Gardens

    With apologies to everyone who made this delightful and dark character study, we have to start with a scene in another movie.  It’s the chicken sandwich scene in Bob Rafeleon’s Five East Pieces. I saw it, in its entirety or most of its entirety on some clip show somewhere. And then tracked down the movie.  The…