This was my third most anticipated movie of the summer (behind Prometheus and, of course, The Dark Knight Rises). I’m sorry to say it’s merely pretty good. I’m really torn on this one, because I absolutely love all the risks that Sacha Baron Cohen took, but I don’t think all of them pay off. What…
Category: Mindless Mondays
Movie Review: Men in Black III
So this movie is a little bit better than you might think (which matches up with my expectations of it as being in the middle ground for summer movies, not too bad, not extremely good). And in that way, it’s a minor miracle that a film that really says nothing and was made solely to…
Movie Review: The Pirates
So this animated movie pretty much came and went during the last week of April but I might as well talk about it anyway. What Works: Well, like all Aardman claymation movies (the same guys who make all the Wallace and Gromit films and the excellent Chicken Run about a decade back), the movie is…
Movie Review: Why “Battleship” Deserves To Be the Flop of the Summer
This movie is awful. I’d like to take a small victory lap in that as I correctly put it on my “List of five movies that will suck,” summer list. What Works: Virtually nothing. I can’t single out the direction because it was a mess. The script featured everything that’s wrong with Hollywood movies. And…
Monday Morning Movie Reviewer: The Avengers
So I semi-reviewed this movie when I talked about the experience of seeing it in China, but this is more the standard review…By now, literally everybody that goes to the movies has seen this but I might as well discuss it anyway. What Works: This movie is thoroughly mediocre, and exactly what you’d expect…so in…
Consider Buying an Alabama Liberal T-Shirt
http://alabamaliberal.spreadshirt.com/ That’s a link to our t-shirt designs which you can customize in any size or color you want. The profits on the shirts aren’t more than 4 to 6 dollars on each one (depending on which one you buy) but it would go a long way towards making the site even somewhat profitable instead…
Alabama Liberal’s May Book of the Month Club Pick Is…
Christopher Buckley’s “They Eat Puppies Don’t They?”! In this superb satire, Buckley (the brilliant satirist behind “Thank You For Smoking”) takes on the symbiotic yet adversarial relationship between China and the United States, and includes scores of great pot shots about the military industrial complex for good measure. The book begins when defense industry lobbyist…
What’s It Like to Go to the Movies in China? (With Humiliating Kevin Spacey Picture)
Continuing on with our Alabama Liberal China week, I thought it might interest some—-not many, but some—-to know what it’s like to go to a movie (The Avengers) in Shanghai. If you answered “Probably not much different and you’re wasting our time writing about this when you could be endlessly talking about the presidential election,”…
TV Review: What’s It Like to Watch TV in China?
Kicking off our China week on the site after a two week trip to Shanghai (and weekend in Hong Kong) begins with a twist on our usual media Mondays. Later on today I’ll be talking about Chinese “cinema,” but first let’s talk about one of the last things anyone would notice before they visited China…
A Final Roundup of Missed 2011 Movies including The Artist, Win Win, A Separation, Conan Can’t Stop, and More
So what in the hell does that awkward title mean? It means that I recently took a very long international roundtrip on an airplane (more about where I went tomorrow, but I think most readers will be in for a surprise) and one of the only things keeping you sane back in coach—-where I was…
TV Review: I Recap the “Desperate Housewives” Series Finale, So You Don’t Have to Watch It
Dear Readers, there is a shameful period of my past that I’m none too happy about. No, I don’t mean any incidents in college or high school that may or may not involve elaborate pranks and debauchery, I mean the 2004-2005 television season when I, like just about anyone at the time who was watching…
Mom Joke: Collar on Backwards
A little boy got on the bus, sat next to a man reading a book, and noticed he had his collar on backwards. The little boy asked why he wore his collar backwards. The man, who was a priest, said, ‘I am a Father’ The little boy replied, ‘My Daddy doesn’t wear his collar like…
Entertainment Editorial: Five Shows Ruined By Success
In an age of a thousand TV channels, it’s become harder than ever to really break out and enjoy that fleeting sensation known as “success” in television—-the kind of thing that can get Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner and The Sopranos’s David Chase enough money to never have to work for five lifetimes—-and that can guarantee…