Insidious is a rotten movie getting unaccountably good reviews in some quarters. For instance, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly says: “Insidious is a haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I’ve seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it’s that unsettling.”
Only it ain’t, though.
April 3rd, 2011 | Comments (16)
I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium,…
November 9th, 2009 | Comments (7)
Washington acting like a person Director Tony Scott ought to put up a statue to Denzel Washington in his sculpture garden, then pray to it at least three times a day to express his gratitude for the way the actor…
June 14th, 2009 | Comments (9)
This is a vengeful slagging of previews I’ve seen at least ten-thousand times, maybe through bad luck, bad timing, bad karma, it’s hard to say. They’re all for movies opening March 20th. Except for The Soloist, which may never open,…
March 15th, 2009 | Comments (17)
Here’s a friendly warning for you: don’t count on the movies to get you through the holidays, any more than they got you through the Wall Street seizures or this gut-wrencher of an election. As bad as the movies have…
November 3rd, 2008 | Comments (1)
A few weeks ago, I went to see a new Russian horror film called S.S.D. (the acronym translates to “Death to Soviet Children”) about a bunch of annoying Moscow urbanites who get slaughtered while shooting a reality TV show in…
October 8th, 2008 | Comments (1)
This article is a War Nerd Classic Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena and I’ll bet Toyotas to Subarus the Christian’ll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: lions are…
But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.
There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few. I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every…
Some of the weirdest, longest wars around have been on the other side of the Big River, but for some reason most American war nerds would rather read about Eurasian battles. Not sure why, except I remember when I was…
When we lived in Long Beach, my dad used to say the same thing every time we saw the sign to the yacht club: “You know what a boat is?” He’d ask the car that, then wait for somebody to…
Well, it’s ten years and a couple of days since 9/11. The reason I’m two days late doing a look back is that 9/11 is boring. I’m sick of it. And the ten years since are just depressing, at least if you’re an American.
While everybody was distracted with Libya, something interesting happened on the Golan Heights. The Palestinians, with a lot of pushing from the Assad people, staged their own version of the Green March. And it failed.
