Entries for December 2008

There's a list of movies that should never get the remake treatment, no matter how desperate Hollywood may be for story ideas. "Gone With the Wind" comes to mind. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "The Godfather," and "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" would be a few more.

I think we can now safely add "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to the list.

There's nothing particularly unique about the story of "Twilight" on the surface. Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love. Boy turns out to have a long pair of fangs destined for her luscious young neck."Twilight" is a Romeo-and-Juliet tale with a twist. Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is a sweet, clumsy high school student who moves to Forks, Wash. to stay with her police chief father, Charlie (Billy Burke), when her mother gets remarried. There she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), the gorgeous, seductive young man who's impossibly fast and strong and his skin is ice cold.

One of the rules of being an American movie watcher is you have to watch a Christmas film sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.This rule is largely responsible for me being able to recite a vast number of lines from Cousin Eddie, Clark and the rest of the Griswold gang in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" at any time I deem them appropriate, the frequency of which increases the closer the calendar gets to Dec. 25.