I give The Help sooo much credit; it won me over despite my utter determination to hate it. You can ask Couch Baron, to whom I spent a good ten minutes bitching on IM about …

My initial definition for “slam-drunk” was as follows:
slam-drunk. n. A beverage guaranteed to give you a working buzz-on in a single serving. (“The Gibsons at Oyster Bar are a slam-drunk, man.”)
But now I feel as …

I didn’t realize how tense I had gotten, physically, while watching Martha Marcy May Marlene until that last black screen. What an outstanding slow build of “can’t look”/”can’t look away” — you’d think the inciting …

I have no idea what the movie is trying to do. I only know that it fails on almost every level save the acting, and even that isn’t great; it’s merely not as disastrous as …

The specific buzz around Shame, and Michael Fassbender’s performance, did not fill me with anticipation. Sometimes, when a performance is repeatedly called brave or groundbreaking, the distinction between the bravery or originality of the performance …

It has all the tools for a great movie: a good old-fashioned ’70s-Cold-War-paranoia plot; a roster of fantastic actors and Hey, It’s That Guys, including Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, and the dude who …

Hello Sars and the Nation! I write in search of audiobook recs.
It’s time for the annual road trip to see the BF’s family for Christmas, and I’m thinking an audiobook or two would be a …

Watching a lot of movies in a row can scramble the brain, but it can also let those movies reflect on and inform one another. For example, the Oscars Death Race is a time of …

A one-star reviewer of Meek’s Cutoff on the IMDb complained that there’s no dialogue for the first 15 minutes. This is one of the many things I liked about the movie. These people have gotten …

When one needs baseball-related gift ideas, one turns to The Vine.
My gifting needs are for my uncle who is in his late 70s and works for the Texas Rangers. He reads a lot and I’ve …