My wife is a great deal smarter than I am. To anyone who knows me, that’s a statement as obvious as “water is wet” and “walls hurt when you run into them.” But a while back, she made a comment to me that children’s literature has a much higher quality bar than adult literature. Kids have a natural B.S. detector, and will usually reject something of low quality, while adults make hacks like Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown rich.* We saw that last year, with the release of The Lego Movie, a “children’s movie” that’s easily in 2014’s... Read More

I remember seeing Jurassic Park in 1993. As a callow young punk, my father and I saw it at the dearly departed Village 4 theater in Boulder. I remember gasps from the audience at that first view of the Brachiosaurus.  I remember yelps of terror during the kitchen scene with the velociraptors. But the scene I remember most is the scene everybody remembers most. The T-Rex attack. The sound of the impact tremors. The sound waves rippling through water. The feeling of primal, escalating dread. Since then, Jurassic Park has become a landmark in blockbuster cinema. Pretty much everyone has had... Read More

In 2008, Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby’s excellent book The Chris Farley Show was released. Among other things, the biography of comedian Chris Farley explored Farley’s belief that, as a big guy, audiences only ever wanted to see “fatty fall down.” He felt that audiences would never accept him as anything but a lumbering, clumsy oaf. As it is, the movie industry is like junior high-shallow, selfish and stupid. If you’re a person of size, Hollywood is a particularly cruel place. But when you factor in casual sexism, why then you’ve hit the misery trifecta!... Read More

  On the weekend of May 29, the film San Andreas was released. During that weekend alone, it made over $54 million. That means it’s on track to be a hit domestically. I have no doubt it will be a gigantic success overseas. Star Dwayne Johnson now has the cache to make things happen.* But the question is…why? It’s got dull CGI effects. It’s got a lazy script.** It’s a movie so appallingly terrible that Jenny McCarthy wants her kids vaccinated against it. And it doesn’t really seem to matter. Johnson plays Ray, a hyper-competent helicopter pilot and leader... Read More