The comic book is to this age what shoot'em up Westerns were to an older time: an outlet for children’s heroic fantasies. So perhaps Jonah Hex, a combination of the two, was inevitable. This DC Comics Western slyly refers to this fact, as a Frontier father watches his son read an illustrated Western storybook by candlelight. The father tells him it isn’t highest literary material. He can feel ... more >
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Here come the autobots. Again.
Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox and Josh Duhamel
Directed by Michael Bay
I won't judge you solely on the fact that you want to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'm sure there are good deeds in you past that can somewhat atone for it. But I'm not sure there is any level of sainthood that can fully cleanse yourself from this. The sole innovation of Michael Bay's giant metamorphosing alien robot epic is somehow turning a Gremlin hatchback into a ... more >
How to lose friends and alienate people
Faux-pas elevated to art-form level
Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst and Megan Fox
Directed by Robert B. Weide
How does such a proven genre-deflater as Simon Pegg fall into such conventional quicksand? Pegg undid the undead in the zombie film parody Shaun of the Dead. He uncuffed the cop action blowout in Hot Fuzz. So what happens when he tries to de-celebrate the celebrity culture in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People? Nothing quite so deflating. Which is deflating for the audience. While it has ... more >