If there’s anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it’s an incompetent stupid action comedy. It’s not so bad it’s good. It’s so bad it’s nothing else but bad.
Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.
Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.
Nobody looks perfect. We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.
We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.
Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy – the kind of ride where some people puke and others can’t wait to get on again.
Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.
Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it’s claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer’s list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Here’s how much I know about hockey. Mike Royko and I were in a tiny bar one winter night, and the radio kept reporting goals by the Blackhawks. I mentioned how frequently the team was scoring. ‘You’re listening to the highlights,’ Royko observed.
I begin to feel like most Americans don’t understand the First Amendment, don’t understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don’t understand that it’s the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.
I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.
Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.
Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn’t matter.
If your religion doesn’t respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.
But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
I’m kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That’s fine with me.
Film theory has nothing to do with film.
Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can’t give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.