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When Does an Adaptation Stop Being an Adaptation?
AMC’s The Walking Dead and I have a strange relationship in that I watch it but don’t particularly care for it. I can’t really tell you why I tune in every week, but it has something to do with my...
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Missteps on Mars: Why John Carter Failed and How It Actually Didn’t
John Carter lightly transported itself into theaters this past weekend, securing a relatively meager $30m opening domestically, though it managed to secure another $70m internationally. While I will...
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‘Prometheus’ is an ‘Alien’ Prequel That Will Rock, But Don’t Watch the Trailer
The full length trailer for Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus recently hit the … broadband? I don’t know how the internet works, but regardless if you would so choose, you could join the legions that have hit...
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Hyperbole is the Biggest Threat to Modern Cinema and it Threateningly...
In doing a quick bit of research for this article, I came across an article from none other than our own publisher, Neil Miller. Now, I didn’t bother to read the entire article, because I got what I...
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Here’s the Thing About Tweeting Television
Some big time shows are finally back on the air and with them has come an air of excitement and, of course, the urge to share your opinion of what happened with everyone in the entire world, because...
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Chill Out: James Bond Even Drank a Mint Julep Once
In a world with nothing much of interest happening (apparently), the internet got all aflutter when it was announced that James Bond would drink a Heineken in Skyfall. People everywhere were freaking...
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When Defending a Movie Becomes Intellectual Genocide or Why Hating on Haters...
Here’s a question: when we did we stop being fans of movies and become defenders of them? Follow up: when did it become a punishable offense not to enjoy things the same way others do? Sub question:...
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The Gentleman’s Guide to Hating or Why Calling Criticism Sexist or Racist...
First things first – calling criticism sexist or racist does not make you worse than Hitler unless in doing so you also start a World War, attempt a genocide, and paint competent but uninspired...
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Of Course Movie Theaters Allowing Texting Is an (Almost) Completely Terrible...
Recently at CinemaCon, Amy Miles, the chief executive officer of Regal Entertainment, birthed the idea that movie theaters should maybe consider allowing texting at certain types of movies – basically...
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Focus on the Feature (or Are You Even Watching This?)
A few weeks ago I wrote about Live Tweeting television. At the time, my focus was on how you end up spoiling a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Time zones and the rotation of the Earth and that sort...
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‘Avengers’ Box Office Blow Out: Why It Means Everything and Mostly Nothing
The Avengers is kind of a major success. What, you hadn’t heard? Of course you did. Avengers box office is on the tips of tongues, internet screens, newspapers, and even within the pages of Time...
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What Hollywood Won’t Learn From Making a Movie About a Peg-Based Board Game
With what is being called a massive failure at the box office, pulling in just $25 million domestic dollars (or 12% of its budget), Peter Berg‘s Battleship is sinking, but not before firing a warning...
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Golden Age? Sure, But TV Will Always Aspire to Be Film
It seems that we are living in a golden age of television. With shows ranging from Mad Men to Game of Thrones or Modern Family to Dexter, Breaking Bad, or anything else garnering epic amounts of hype,...
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Dear Theater Chains: Rejuvenate the Movie-Going Experience and Quit Complaining
I’m not afraid of a little capitalism. Hey, we all embrace it, working every day for the man in the city, or stealing shit. Unless you’re high on bath salts and living off the faces of hobos, you need...
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Evasions 101: The Art of Escaping Large Objects
Editor’s Note: The following article contains discussion of events from the third act of Prometheus. You’ve been warned. Prometheus just can’t get a break. From poor reviews to my upcoming list of...
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Galactic Goofs: The 10 Stupidest Crew Mistakes in ‘Prometheus’
It was perhaps the most anticipated movie of the year after The Dark Knight Rises, but Ridley Scott‘s return to the Alien world in Prometheus has been anything but universally embraced. While many...
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How Unobtrusive 3D Actually Kills 3D Enjoyment
3D has long been a viable tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal. Sure, it’s not a particularly awesome tool, but it can be a fun tool. My first theatrical experience was a neat showing of Night of the...
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It’s Time to Stop Making (These) Jokes About Comic-Con
San Diego Comic-Con, the Western Hemisphere’s nerd mecca, is rapidly approaching and with it will undoubtedly flow the inane, poorly thought out, and overused “anti-Comic-Con” rhetoric we’ve come to...
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Bad Dialogue Cliches: This Time It’s Not Personal
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, though I’ve never been one to ascribe to that notion. In Hollywood, virtually everything is, at some level, derivative. Hell, not just Hollywood....
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Mourning on the Internet: Coping with Celebrity Deaths
This isn’t going to be some touchy-feely deal on how to come to grips with death, because, as you may recall, I think most people overreact to celebrity deaths and for the most part you should just...
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Why I Hope Batman Doesn’t Die in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
The long awaited climax to director Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, is finally coming to theaters this week. While we’ll all have answers soon enough, the question on everyone’s...
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Keep Calm and Carry On: Movie Theaters Are Still Sacred
By this point you couldn’t have avoided it: something terrible happened in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. A masked gunman burst into a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises and fired into...
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Forget Christopher Nolan: Why DC Needs its Own Kevin Feige
The trailer for Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel recently made it online after rolling in front of the related DC property The Dark Knight Rises. Reactions have been mostly positive to the somber looking...
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Why the NC-17 Rating Isn’t Just Unnecessary, It’s Offensive
Much of the on-line film community has a fairly strong anti-MPAA lean to it. Hell, we here at FSR even pushed to have the “governing” body disbanded seeing as how they serve no real purpose....
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Bring Back the Beef: Modern Cinema’s Tiny Action Stars
It’s Expendables week and if you’re anything like me, you couldn’t be more erect. There’s just something about a bunch of hulked up dudes, rippling with muscle, dripping with sweat, kicking ass, and...
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Make Death Matter and Give Characters Their Due
Death is a profound thing. It has long been utilized in the art of storytelling to make the fiercest of impacts. From the first written work of fiction (“Beowulf”) to the works of Shakespeare to the...
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It’s Time to Stop Bitching About People Sharing Opinions on the Internet
In a very real way, the Internet was invented so that people could bitch about stuff. You might think that the internet was a invented (by Al Gore) as a way of people to share information. This is...
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For Your Own Sanity (and the World’s), Leave Celebrities Alone
I gripe a lot about the speed of the internet in transmitting information. It’s almost incorrect to use the word “information,” as I think about it. It’s the spread of thought, maybe. Information...
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No Thanks, I’ll Stick With the Seat I Paid For
In one of my earliest Boiling Points I discussed seat saver’s etiquette. I had watched a lone person try to save nearly an entire row of seats and thought that was just ridiculous. Listen, if you’re...
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Why a Remade ‘RoboCop’ is the Right Call
As with any movie that people can actively remember that gets remade, there has been plenty of poo-pooing of the recently underway RoboCop reboot. The 1987 classic from Paul Verhoeven set the standard...
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Give Me My Money Back: Movies Can Be Objectively Bad
Some time ago, not so long that I’ve forgotten, but so long that I can no longer totally remember, I watched a film that was bad. Upon completion of said film, I went with the cliched statement of “I...
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When Originality is Overrated
There has been a constant war against sequels, prequels, and remakes for a decade now, one draped in the flag of “Originality.” There are no original films anymore, they say, as everything is in...
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In Defense of Tim Burton
Before we even start one might ask, “Does Tim Burton need defending?” Obviously, he does (or else why would I write this?), and he needs it because the Tim Burton of today is not the Tim Burton we...
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Boo! It’s Time For Cheap Scares in Horror to Die
Halloween is nearly upon us and for once I’m not railing against the studio system for a lack of horror in theaters. It seems five years of complaining has finally gotten through to them. Just...
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An Open Letter to Creepy Advisory Weirdos
Dear Creepy Advisory Weirdos, First and foremost I would like to thank you for your willingness to offer advice and commend you on your steadfastness in courting danger everyday by continuing to live...
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Disney Buying Lucasfilm Is the Best Lucasfilm News in 20 Years
A strange thing happened when it was announced that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm and was intent on continuing the Star Wars franchise: people forgot how shitty Lucasfilm has been. That’s the only...
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Boiling Point: The ‘World War Z’ Trailer Illustrates All That’s Wrong in...
It’d be beating a dead horse to gripe about Hollywood’s reliance on sequels, prequels, and adaptations, but not all is right in the world with the recent release of the trailer for the World War Z...
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Put the Special Back in Special Edition and Make the Collector’s Edition...
I’ve never been accused of being particularly smart with money. For the longest time I thought having an “addictive personality” was a good thing, like people really couldn’t get enough of you, which...
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Surprise: Everyone on the Internet Wants You To Know How Bad ‘Liz & Dick’ Sucked
If you logged on to Twitter at all yesterday evening, you were likely bombarded with tweets about Liz & Dick, a Lifetime Original movie that sucked, not to be confused with Lez & Dick, a...
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Why Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Batman Is a Bad Idea
A week ago, the folks at HitFix said that “according to sources,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to pick up the cape and cowl and assume the mantle of Batman in the planned Justice League film. The...
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Twitter Debates ‘The Hobbit’ in 48FPS
Yesterday on Twitter a minor spat broke out, as is often the case when people type things on the internet. Participants included our own @FakeRobHunter, FEARNet writer @ScottEWeinberg, Movies.com...
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So We’re Back to Blaming Movies and Video Games For Real-Life Violence
In the wake of the most recent tragedy in Newton, Connecticut, where a gunman murdered twenty-seven people, many of them children, people look first for answers and second for responsibility. What...
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Quit Criticizing Things You Haven’t Seen (Especially You, Spike Lee)
If there’s one thing Spike Lee is known for, it’s complaining about racism. Turns out he’s also a sometimes movie director, which I hadn’t realized, what with him being mostly in the news for being an...
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How Abrams’ Mystery Machine is Doing Movie Hype Right
While answering questions about something very few people care about (NBC’s Revolution) writer/director/mystery boxer/producer J.J. Abrams went on the defensive about his secrecy concerning projects....
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It’s Time to Give Tom Cruise a Break
Tom Cruise is in the entertainment news again, but not for the widely acclaimed and well received action flick Jack Reacher. No, the Hollywood powerhouse is once again being talked about because of...
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Take Action: Why You Need to See Action Films Theatrically
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s full fledged return to the big screen in this weekend’s The Last Stand isn’t triumphant by any measure, but it is a pretty fun action film which is all the more impressive...
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Django Unattained: How Reverend Al Sharpton Ruined a Cool Collector’s Item
I want to tell you a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down. It started a couple weeks ago when the awesome collectible manufacturer NECA released a line of Django Unchained...
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Marvel’s Mighty Misstep: ‘Iron Man 3′ Super Bowl Trailer Disappoints
It goes without saying these days that one of the highlights of the Super Bowl every year are the big budget, balls to the wall commercials that come out, pimping everything from Doritos to cars to...
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Is ‘Amazing Spider-Man 2′ Preparing to Ruin Venom a Second Time?
Like any comic property that has a million built-in fans, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is already getting swirled up in the rumor mill. Most recently is the thought that Marc Webb is planning on bringing...
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Silly Hobbitssess and Goofy Giants: When Did Fantasy Movies Get Taken Over by...
While talking my dog on a stroll through Hollywood, my gaze fell upon a sufficiently giant billboard for the upcoming failure that will be Jack the Giant Slayer. Having previously seen a trailer, I...
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