The problem is that the moral meaning of the gore keeps changing. The airborne organs of a helpless Karen villager are supposed to make us scream, "Rambo, right this injustice!" while the splattered guts of a Burmese army officer are meant to evoke a reaction along the lines of, "Aw yeah."

Whatever the reason for my fascination that night in the market, I casually rolled my cart up the aisle where Ebert studied the frozen pizzas.

Paranormal Activity 2 is an efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19... A Gotcha! Moment is a moment when something is sudden, loud and scary.

"The Social Network" is a horror movie. It doesn't shed a drop of blood, yet it manages to conjure some of the dread we feel when faced with a scenario -- any scenario, petty or grave, fictional or real -- that we are powerless to stop. It's about the gleaming new stadiums that rise up in major cities every few years without fail, despite protests and lawsuits and complaints to the zoning board. It's about finding out that you owe more in taxes than you expected, thanks to code changes hammered out behind closed doors by parties with deep pockets and a vested interest. It's about revisiting a cherished stretch of public beach for the sixth or seventh year running, and finding it fenced-off and swarming with cement mixers and guys in hard hats. And it's about how the United States avenged an attack by invading a country that had nothing to do with it.

I've read that derivatives are so complex they're created by computers and not even the software authors really understand them.

Jeremy Piven might not seem the obvious choice to play the ringleader of this menagerie, but shows a side of himself I haven’t seen before: The pep-talking, super confident, ultra cynical salesman.

"Bedtime Stories" is not my cup of tea. Even the saucer.

Missing the e 
in epic...

In Synecdoche, Kaufman has been afforded a privilege he doesn’t deserve; his unimaginative imagery never comes close to the magnificence that visionary director John Moore creates in the turbulent tableaux of Max Payne.

It is, like Quantum [of Solace], edited like shattered glass, but here the shards have been choreographed so that a sense of spatial geography is maintained.

"Ballast" is the very life of life.

A friend came into the room while I was watching the film, saw a closeup of the head of a Gila monster and said, "That's beautiful." I asked if she liked lizards. "I hate lizards," she said, shuddering. She wasn't thinking about lizards. She was observing the iridescent scales of the creature's head. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We are the beholder.

CITY OF EMBER is about teaching children to think for themselves, to question authority, to pursue the truth even at great risk and as a child of parents that gave me a QUESTION AUTHORITY shirt as a kid – I found CITY OF EMBER to be a fantastic film.

And while I hate to make sweeping proclamations based on twenty-five minutes of unfinished footage, I'm beginning to sense that he's transformed Moore's "unfilmable" deconstruction of the twentieth-century superhero into indelible twenty-first century cinema.

(and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist)

Zach has really made a WATCHMEN movie. It's very real and so friggin far away. But it is in fact a very real and actual thing.

I literally can not wait to see Manhattan in Vietnam zapping that guy!

This film will be the best movie that Quentin Tarantino has made yet.

...Audiences will scream, clap and cheer by the end of the film - Oh - and it is absolutely worth the wait.

Moriarty on Wall-E

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/37364:

My first son Toshi has grown up surrounded by Pixar imagery. I’ve got all the movies in the house, and my wife watched them frequently, in rotation, enjoying all of them equally. I think A BUG’S LIFE and CARS are both very good movies, above-average entertainments with rich characterization and beautifully-realized animation. I don’t love them the same way I love other films they’ve made, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve both landed with the same impact as THE INCREDIBLES and the TOY STORY films and RATATOUILLE and FINDING NEMO and MONSTERS INC. In the case of CARS, it’s got the richest afterlife in terms of merchandising of anything Pixar’s made...

That last part is central to his thesis:

I’m content and pleased to just live in the Pixar world that they’ve generated over the past 24 years. Right now, as I type this, Woody is standing on the corner of my desk. I didn’t put him there. I didn’t see Toshi put him there. He’s just... there. And I guarantee when I wake up tomorrow, he’ll be gone. And I won’t see that happen, either. There’s a different WALL-E from Thinkway Toys up on each of my shelves. The smaller one is the iDance version, where you can plug your iPod into him, and he’ll dance along with it, while also doubling as a speaker for you to use with the player. It’s got surprisingly good sound.

Today was Toshi’s birthday. Toshi’s three now, and he just got his own bed in his own room, something we’ve planned on since we moved into the house. And the only way he’d agree to this new bed is if he picked out his own sheets, and the only sheets that were acceptable were these Wall-E sheets.

Today, he had a WALL-E cake. A real one. Pretty slick. And all the place settings were WALL-E themed. So was the piñata. He got WALL-E toys today of his own. So, you know, he doesn’t break Daddy’s WALL-E toys. Ahem. In our bedroom, in his bedroom, in my sister-in-law’s room, in my mother-in-law’s room, in the other office, in the family room, on the patio, in the kitchen, in the garage... there’s not a room in my house where I could go where I wouldn’t see some iconography of Pixar. Seriously.

Of course it's a great movie, his house is drowning in the merch.*

The coup de grâce:

Anyone still making any comparisons between the character of WALL-E and the robot from SHORT CIRCUIT haven’t seen the two films... Johnny 5 was a military robot, if I remember correctly, and WALL-E is a garbage disposal.

*Another example of this kind of geek reasoning:

(The most important movie of 1993:) The Nightmare Before Christmas
Does this even need to be expounded upon? 15 year old movie and the merchandising has never been stronger.

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