I don’t know if you guys knew this, but Hollywood is kind of shallow. If you’re a woman, regardless of your talent, intelligence, or drive, an awful lot of people are going to base their first and last impressions of you on your looks and body type. How many wildly talented women never got their shot because they didn’t wear a size zero? Take Charlize Theron for example. Impossibly attractive, she was first noticed in 1996’s 2 Days in the Valley.* For several years, she appeared in a string of forgettable films. She took a risk in 2003 playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. The... Read More

There’s a very real conundrum at the heart of film criticism. On the one hand, most people don’t really understand exactly how hard it is to make a movie. First, you need a script that’s either a) good, b) marketable, or c) both. Then you need to figure out how much it’s all going to cost. Then you need to get your hands on the budget. Then you need to actually make the movie and deal with the million-and-one problems that accompany the filmmaking process. Finally, you need to get your movie in front of other people’s eyeballs, and pray to eight pound, six ounce, newborn baby Jesus that... Read More

Post a pic or it didn’t happen. As of last month, there were a hair over 2 billion active users of Facebook. Maybe you’re not old and uncool like me, and you have better things to do than dwell on Facebook. Cool, because there are over 700 million Instagram users as of April. Maybe you’d rather insult your favorite celebrity? You can do that on Twitter with 328 million of your closest friends.* Maybe you don’t like social media. The omnipresent need to overshare every moment of your life. The gradual chipping away of critical thinking skills. The creeping fear that you’ll... Read More

Straight Outta Compton is really two movies stitched together. The first movie is intense, angry, joyful, and it’s about a group of friends trying to escape the madness of a racist society through art. There’s a couple of scenes in the beginning that encapsulates that perfectly. First, young Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) sits on a school bus, writing lyrics in a notebook. He’s in South Central Los Angeles, ground zero of America’s failed war on drugs. A few seats up, a group of kids are yelling playfully at a car driven by a gangbanger. The gangbanger does not like... Read More