“Having dreams is what makes life tolerable.” Rudy is an excellent underdog movie, doing almost everything right and almost nothing wrong. On a technical level, as the sum of its parts, it’s very good, borderline great. It’s also one of my favorite movies in the entire world. It has X-factor magic in spades, it’s genuinely…
When I saw The Shawshank Redemption in high school, it was one of the movies (along with, believe it or not, The 40 Year Old Virgin) that convinced me that movies could tell stories on a more profound level than simple entertainment. Shawshank has a little bit of a strange backstory. It was a pretty…
Well that was a step down from Season 6. Not an outright disaster… just a bastion of mediocrity. Definitely a step down. First, the good: As expected, giving Neil Patrick Harris some dramatic material to work with gives the show great moments. Both his relationships — with soft-hearted Nora or, more effectively, with silver-tongued stripper…
Party Down is a comedy that ran for two seasons on Starz before being canceled. And, goddamn, what a pair of seasons. It burned bright and bailed just before its writing or premise grew stale, giving us some fantastic character growth and hysterical jokes in just twenty episodes. Party Down is about a catering company…
In my Top 100 Everything entry about How I Met Your Mother, I admitted that I gave up on the show during its sixth season. The show just became too miserable, too disappointing, too unsatisfying for me to tune in every week. Well, my wife and I have slowly been working through the series, and…
The Wayside School trilogy of books is, as far as I’m concerned, a seminal masterpiece of comedy and kidlit. They operate on a surreal, childlike level of logic that still speaks to my brain today. More than that, the Wayside School books are honest portrayals of the confusion and paradoxes involved with being a child.…
Last week, I reviewed the first musical by StarKid Productions, A Very Potter Musical. The second production by the group is called Me and My Dick and it’s a coming-of-age, high school love story in which everyone’s genitals are anthropormophized, walking around and having conversations with their owners. If you couldn’t guess by the title, it’s a…
Antz (1998) Kevin: Is it even possible to talk about DreamWorks’ first animated film without also talking about A Bug’s Life which was released that same year? Some part of me wants to say Antz is overrated, considering it got a fresh 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience reviews were not nearly as favorable, though,…
I’m a half decade behind on this, but I finally watched the legendary fan-made musical A Very Potter Musical put on by StarKid Productions, a troupe noteworthy for the talent they bring to musicals with parody-based or otherwise intriguing premises. Inspired by the praise from both my wife and fellow Earn This writer Brian (read his Starkid…
Download link (you may have to right click and “Save As”) Brian and I got together sat down to discuss “things we haven’t seen yet.” This includes two topics: First, famous shows or movies we haven’t seen, and why we haven’t yet seen them. (Though neither of us have seen all of Seinfeld, we marvel at…