Friends, fan boys and countrymen, I come not to praise Comic-Con but to bury it. Oops, don't need to because Hollywood has beaten me to it. Now that the recently completed 41st Comic-Con Festival in San Diego has become a celebration of everything that has...
The cicadas have already begun their seasonal dirge, and despite the unprecedented heat, summer is moving into its final, sultry stage. Sultry, however, is not the word to describe the summer box office. Words like limp, mediocre and just plain dismal would seem more appropriate....
Whenever I feel lonely, I just remember that I have friends. Lots and lots of friends. People whom I have never met, never talked to and could never pick out of a line-up. Yep, they are almost like family. The social network revolution has become the...
There are various ways of guessing the future. In ancient Greece, the Oracle of Delphi is believed to have sniffed fumes from a crack in the earth. In other practices, people “read” the entrails of a goat or chicken. The prophecies could be pretty...
OK, maybe the studio master plan isn't exactly playing out as they had hoped. According to an e-mail report from Boxoffice.com, movie ticket sales for 2010 are running 5.3 percent behind those of 2009. Since this 5.3 percent basically represents total cash (rather than actual...
In Hamlet, the moody Dane with an attitude problem observes, "O, woe is me, To have seen what I what I have seen, see what I see!" Obviously the poor chap had just been to the movies. Or maybe he had attended the recent Produced by...
Sex sells movies. Well, sometimes. Actually, it's more like a balancing act, since the right amount can work but other times...
Writing a screenplay is a lonely pursuit. Just the writer and a blank screen trying to conjure something magical from various loose strings of words and ideas. But the first-time screenwriter no longer needs to be alone. A vast army of people are just waiting...
Nobody can pick a winner. That is the age-old wisdom of Hollywood, which is odd coming from a bunch of folks who also insist that they are the only people who can successfully do the one thing they claim can't be done. The sheer absurdity...
You can't spend more than two weeks dealing with movies without hearing numerous references to the infamous William Goldman quote concerning Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything." Goldman was referring to the level of ignorance that he found in the Hollywood system. Or at least that's what I...