I often think about what a book or movie would be like if it had been better, but I'm not sure I've ever thought about what one would be like if only it had been worse.

World War 2? WW2 WW2 WW2. WW2? WW2!

Sap and cheese aren't just the chief ingredients of an especially disgusting breakfast, they're the chosen weapons of Hollywood tearjerkers.

Attention would-be alien overlords:

The only "punishing" going on in the new Punisher: War Zone is the "punishment" inflicted on those of us who have to watch it.

It's a pretty bold move to name a movie after a country.

Four reasons we should all quit our day jobs and immediately become delivery boys/girls: Snow Crash, Han Solo, Fry from Futurama, and the Transporter movies.

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'm getting tired of World War II and/or Holocaust movies.

When my tin-can phone rang to wake me up at Critic of Pure Reason HQ in the weeds along Highway 240 to let me know my latest assignment involved vampires and sexy teens, I was so excited I almost spilled my swamp-water.

Revenge, as the French say, is a dish best served to those low-class Normandy-stealing hooligans to the north.

When you think about it, which I don't recommend no matter what "it" is, the notion of being a role model is kind of creepy.

Twenty minutes into Changeling, all I would have had to say about it was "It was...good."

Kevin Smith's Clerks was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw, so it's always held a special place in my heart.

After we watched every zombie movie we could find in the Columbia Basin, me and my buddy's great plan for the summer was to watch complete horror franchises.

I came home from a much-deserved vacation last week to discover my roommates had, in my absence, drawn more than 70 clowns on my bedroom walls.

There are times in every man or movie genre's life when he or it needs to take a good look at him -- or itself -- and think about packing it in.

I know you can't tell this from my pretty pretty picture, but I wear contacts.

I'd hate to imagine what would happen to the entertainment industry if a well-meaning time traveler ever goes back and seduces Hitler's mom before he's born, thereby preventing World War II.

If modern government surveillance is so intrusive that even dopey action movies like Eagle Eye are calling it out, I say we rise up in revolution right now.

Blame it on the external genitals if you want, but the romantic comedy is just about my least favorite genre.

I've discovered yet another occupation hazard in the high-stress, high-stakes, hos-and-Lear-jets lifestyle of the professional guy who sits in a theater for a couple hours a week and then tells everyone else what that experience was like. (This is how I think of myself. I finish, on average, two thoughts a day.)

Let's assume, for a moment, that like most people on this spinning disaster of a planet, your life is a flaming pile of garbage.

What with my utter contempt for everything outside the glowing shell of my own person, I usually don't bother reading the reviews of those other, lesser critics and their other, lesser opinions.

Great cinema makes us ask big questions. In the case of College, we're made to ask the biggest of all: What did we do to deserve this?

As longtime readers know, I've got a thing for Vin Diesel.

Something about Frankenstein puts me in a good mood.

The nice thing about being a Star Wars nerd is that however nerdy you may be, you can count on there always being a bigger Star Wars nerd than you.

Latest example of a movie with a Two-Face Trailer: Tropic Thunder.

Considering the drug war itself is a ludicrous, destructive, racist campaign of tragedy and squandered resources, there haven't been many funny drug movies.

Dear Mr. Movie:

Between this job, where I catch 1-to-3 monster movies a month, and my job at a bookstore, where every other book I pick up is a paranormal romance about a half-vampire/half-werewolf/all-sexy chick whose quest to kill all the bad vampires can't fill the emptiness in her heart, I would swear there's something in humanity that doesn't want to be human.

In the spirit of Step Brothers, the latest comedy about the ever-hilarious adventures of the emotionally stunted American male, I irresponsibly finished this review a whole day later than I should have.

Contrary to the prevailing opinion of the hundreds of fan letters I receive each and every day, I don't know everything.

Our criteria here involved people with superpowers, so technically, a perfectly normal human such as Batman wouldn't qualify for this list.

If you had your druthers, what kind of supervillain would you be?

You know what's weird? Teeth. They're just little bones that live outside your skin.

As a movie critic, I sometimes have to make some pretty major sacrifices.

There will be nothing below this first line of text.

After seeing WALL-E, I'm left with a deep and unswerving grudge toward its makers: cartoon robots shouldn't be able to make adult humans choke up.

The trailers for Wanted made it look like The Lobotomy Matrix: people flying through windows in slow-mo, doing weird things with bullets, engaging in comically improbable car chases--dumb, in other words, but with a slim chance to be very, very fun.

In Trainspotting, Sick Boy introduced us to the Had It/Lost It Theory of musical criticism: Great bands, he says, have "it," which makes them great, but sooner or later they lose it, and once it's gone, you can never get it back.

I recently had a swarm of bees living in my front yard, so in those three months where I didn't leave the house, I became something of an expert on them.

I am thoroughly impressed by the mulligan taken with The Incredible Hulk.

Here it comes: Billy Madison is the Pulp Fiction of doofy ridiculous comedies.

These days, my favorite movies to go see are the ones where I have absolutely no idea whether they're going to shine like the sky or suck like a suck-monster.

On the scale of insanity ranging from sitting quietly on the couch to wearing the cushions for pants while rounding up a neighborhood dog ultra-army, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull rates somewhere around hosting a tea party inside your sofa-fort.

Though I once had a Wong Kar Wai poster in my bedroom, I hadn't seen one of his movies till this weekend.

I haven't read The Chronicles of Narnia since I was a little kid, but what I remember most is how deeply, deeply sad they made me.

I would hate to live in a David Mamet movie.

There are few things in life as exciting as the technicalities of the American legal system.