As a star who rose to prominence in comedy — as the lead in Blake Edwards’s Blind Date, the weirdly popular and thoroughly gimmicky Look Who’s Talking, and TV’s Nick and Nora-ish Moonlighting — Willis cemented his status as a leading man in an iconic action role. Die Hard remains one of the finest American “high action” films ever made; its durability owes to many factors, but a big asset was certainly John McClane’s earthiness. McClane’s working class charisma owed itself to Willis’s undeniable, almost inexplicable screen presence. Profane wisecracks and and an increasingly battered, bruised, and bloody physique deflate the image of the Superman action figure, but his endurance is magnified by his gritty, blue collar determination. This balancing act hinged upon another basic component of stardom: cool. Willis virtually created his own style of blockbuster stardom, and from that entitlement grew the ego that finally burst onto screen as Eddie “Hudson Hawk” Hawkins.

Terminator Salvation also opens with a text crawl that recapitulates information we don’t need to know. In fact, it restates events that we already saw in Terminators one through three, and the rest of it is restated in expository dialogue only minutes into the film. The text crawl of T4 assumes two things: 1.) We’re really dense, and utterly incapably of tracking basic plot points along with the film, and 2.) None of us has seen a Terminator film before. Evidently because an audience shelling out greenbacks to the fourth film in a franchise is rarely familiar with the movies that preceded it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a film that assumes its target audience actively desires to have no taste or aesthetic standard. It assumes that the viewer’s reservoir of self-awareness tops out at the recognition that all they want out of life is a big, stupid movie about stupid characters and big robots that beat the shit out of each other. It is a movie so big and so stupid and so damn long that it very nearly forgets about halfway through that it is a movie whose sole purpose for existence is to sell toys and entertain people with big, stupid robot battles and exquisitely rendered explosions. How do you forget something that elementary?

The crowning irony of this year’s reboot of the Star Trek franchise (hereby dubbed ST09) is that J.J. Abrams deliberately set out to make the film even more mainstream, citing the Star Wars films as immediate reference points, despite the fact that for years, the Trek franchise has been desperately moving toward the mainstream on its own. With Abrams at the helm, Star Trek has come full circle in its continuing voyage through modern media, originating in television, moving to film, then relaunching television spinoffs, and finally, respawning as an exclusively film franchise, but the economy of Abrams’s fleet, efficient TV style butchers the wonder and awe of Star Trek on a fundamental level.

It seems as though 2007 and 2008 are mirror images of each other.  2007 was a year in which blockbuster summer entertainment hit an all-time low, with unimaginative sequels and threequels failing creatively left and right.  However, there were a lot of great films that came out outside of the bloated summer mold that were fantastic, so many that putting together a list of my favorites that year was almost impossible and actually ranking them was out of the question.  This year was the opposite, the summer movie season was …

When people think of the great romances of the screen, they are inevitably drawn to the classics of Old Hollywood, or else the stale and uninspired romantic blockbuster comedies of recent years. The recent cash cows seem to be trying to leach on the successes of the seemingly unaffected and painless comedies of Leo McCarey and to a lesser degree, Howard Hawks. McCarey’s films bringing a unique and unparallelled humanism, while Hawks offers a complex and thorough exploration of gender roles within relationships and society. It’s hidden under the guise …

My queue is pimp.
I understand that such a statement is highly subjective, but it’s true. If we were in the fifth grade, on a playground, my queue could beat up your queue . It didn’t get that way over night, though.  No. Hell no. There were hours, days, WEEKS of hardcore training and tweeking to get it as pimp as it is. It’s like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Or the Mighty Ducks. It’s actually more like the Mighty Ducks. With Air Bud as their center. Not that either …