MOVIE REVIEWS: CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The new Conan the Barbarian is getting the same sort of reviews that Arnold Schwarzenegger did when he … left office as governor of California: pretty awful. “Conan the Barbarian is a brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D,” comments Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: 30 MINUTES OR LESS

You’ve got to figure that the filmmakers behind 30 Minutes or Less were just asking for it when they came up with that title. Critics have pounced on it with glee (that’s another movie they’ve pounced on; see Glee: The 3D Concert). For example, Ann Horniday in the Washington Post: “Would that 30 Minutes or […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: FINAL DESTINATION 5

Horror movies rarely receive positive reviews, and the fifth Final Destination movie is no exception. (The previous four didn’t fare much better.) Mike Hale refers to a line in the movie in which a character remarks, “It’s just that I’ve seen this before.” Hale calls the line “too depressingly true to be funny.” Likewise Betsy […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE HELP

For a film with such a charged subject matter — how African-American maids living in Mississippi during the 1960s viewed their employers — it seems odd that many critics focus their attention not on the plot of The Help but on the performances of the lead actors, in particular Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who […]

CHICAGO TV CRITIC FIRED FOR FAKING REVIEW

Paige Wiser, the television critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has been fired after writing a review of a “Glee Live!” concert, part of which she never saw. She told the newspaper that she brought her 6- and 7-year-old kids to the concert, one of whom became sick during the performance “What I should have done […]

KANYE WEST RAPS TREATMENT BY MATT LAUER

Rap singer Kanye West took to his Twitter account Wednesday to complain about his treatment by Matt Lauer during an interview taped for today’s (Thursday) edition of NBC’s Today show. West was asked about former President George W. Bush’s comment that the singer’s criticism that he did not care about black people during the Hurricane […]

MOVIE REVIEWS: RED

Want to know whether RED is worth seeing? Well, you’re not going to get much help from the critics, most of whom are clearly ambivalent about it. For example, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times concludes: “RED is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish […]

CBS ACCUSED OF USING LOCAL NEWSCASTS TO HYPE NEW SERIES

CBS-owned stations in major markets last Monday devoted part of their early-evening newscasts to promoting the premiere of the new Hawaii Five-0 that night in what veteran TV critic Robert Feder called “a well-coordinated plan to prostitute the newscasts of CBS-owned stations nationwide.” On his blog at Vocalo.org, Feder, who for 28 years was the […]

HORROR FILM GETS NO RATING FROM MPAA, NO STAR FROM EBERT

The horror film The Human Centipede is opening in a handful of theaters this weekend. It was not submitted to the MPAA for a rating. The Chicago Sun-Times‘s Roger Ebert is awarding it no stars as well. In his review, he writes: “I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I […]