We are celebrating at the Earn This office because we just broke 25,000 viewers a few days ago! A big thank you from the bottom of my heart to Grant and Colton for agreeing to put their wisdom into digital ink for this blog, to the many readers, to the few subscribers, and to Google…
Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) There was a point about halfway into It’s Kind of a Funny Story when I was confident the film was headed into four-star territory. The set-up in this movie is phenomenal in three ways: the way it establishes its conflict, the way it introduces its colorful cast of characters,…
Goodness knows there are more active musical artists today than there were thirty years ago – or five years ago, or yesterday. Just like the global population, the “band population” has a birth rate that exceeds its mortality rate. (Don’t ask for an analogue for shifting line-ups or new group formation – it gets gruesome.)…
Today, The Social Network—aka “The Facebook Movie”—comes out to widespread anticipation and Oscar buzz. Upon first glance, I was barely interested in this project, but then I learned that Aaron Sorkin wrote it. And yes, the trailer was promising, the subject matter naturally relevant, and the hype and advance buzz have been so deafening that…
Part 3 of our Aaron Sorkin exploration… Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 4) The opening sequence of The American President is so good, it would be enough to carry the rest of a mediocre film into watchable status. Thankfully, though, it doesn’t represent the extent of the pleasures here, in the film…
Our next Aaron Sorkin exploration… Rating: 2 stars (out of 4) The trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War and its IMDB page promise two very different movies. The latter will remind you of the tremendous amount of talent that has been gathered in front of and behind the camera, but the former promises only a breezy,…
With the much-anticipated The Social Network dropping in theaters this Friday, I thought it appropriate to look back on the career of the inimitable writer Aaron Sorkin. A comprehensive piece will be arriving later this week, but for now, let’s review a few of his most prominent films. Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) A…
Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) Is The Town ‘Heat meets The Departed,’ as the ads portray? No—it’s better. Is it Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s scintillating first directorial effort? Not quite, although comparing anything with a Dennis Lehane adaptation (hello, Mystic River and Shutter Island) is unfair. Should it put the final nail in…
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4) Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers. The show’s opening sequence explains that…
“Silence is the enemy.” At some point on this past August 11th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away. At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a…