Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.
We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.
I don’t require movies to be about good people, and I don’t reject screen violence.
I do suspect my star ratings average too high. But, of course, star ratings are ridiculous. I’m stuck with them.
Here’s a notion: Peace in the Middle East would come about more easily if the region were governed by women.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.
It’s strange: We leave the movie having enjoyed its conclusion so much that we almost forgot our earlier reservations. But they were there, and they were real.
One hopeful sign that the filmmakers can learn and grow is that the sequel does not contain a single pie, if you know what I mean.
As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that’s what I’m looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not.
We can’t help identifying with the protagonist. It’s coded in our movie-going DNA.
To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?
Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.
It is human nature to look away from illness. We don’t enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality.
Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren’t yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic’s day consists of trying to keep that window open.
Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star.
It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.
It’s the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
It’s like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.
Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer’s estate should sue.
There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn’t know what funny is.