7 Days in May | More Hughes and Cruise

Weird Science (1985)



It had been a while since I'd seen Weird Science and I wasn't sure how I was going to like a movie about a couple of teenage boys who create their own woman to do whatever they want with. And there's some weirdness about it, to be sure. It's a total nerd fantasy, so even when Lisa isn't doing the boys' exact bidding, she's still acting in their best interest: trying to improve their lives by boosting their confidence.

Taken for what it is, though, it's still very funny and even sweet. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are loveable nerds who aren't as socially awkward as they are just unpopular. They like technology and aren't that good at sports, so kids at school don't like or know what to do with them. The boys have accepted this, so the movie is about Lisa's helping them get past it.

Bill Paxton has a great role as Mitchell-Smith's obnoxious older brother and Robert Downey Jr is one of the bullies who ruthlessly taunts the leads. It's a fun movie with a lot of imagination, and David - who is exactly the target audience of early teenaged boy - enjoyed it a lot.

Pretty in Pink (1986)



I'm moderating a panel this weekend (more on that later) about the concept of "timeless" art, so it's been a topic of conversation around the house and on Facebook lately. The John Hughes movies are especially appropriate to look at in that context. Breakfast Club feels timeless to me. Sixteen Candles feels very dated. And it's not about fashions or music.

Pretty in Pink is another one that doesn't feel timeless, though for different reasons than Sixteen Candles. It's not offensive to modern cultural mores, but there's something off about it and it's been off since 1986. So much so that John Hughes basically rewrote it with Some Kind of Wonderful.

I've always had a hard time identifying what it is that I don't like about Pretty in Pink, because there's so much more about it that I love. Molly Ringwald brings her usual earnestness and sincerity to Andie and I always like that about her characters. I identified with Jon Cryer's Duckie more than I'm comfortable admitting, but I love that he never plays the Nice Guy card by using his loyalty to Andie to shame her into liking him back. Oh sure, he gets pissed at her and behaves badly, but it's clear to me that he's doing it because he wants what's best for her and thinks she's making a huge mistake; not just because he's jealous.

Annie Potts is awesome as Iona, but easily my favorite character in the movie is James Spader's Steff. He's such an irredeemable cad, but I love that about him and I totally understand why he's popular. With most "popular bully" characters in teen movies, I don't get why people like them other than that they're just rich or skilled at sports. But Steff has an easy-going charm that pulls me in and even though he's evil underneath, there's also an element of humanity that sometimes peeks through. Spader's one of my favorite actors and that starts right here.

Andrew McCarthy I can take or leave, but he's perfect for the role he's given. Like in Mannequin, he just has to look pleasant and sincere. It's around his character Blane that the movie doesn't quite work, though. The conflict between his feelings for Andie and his loyalty to his friends is fine. But his redemption at the end is lame. To begin with, it's stupid that she has to show up at the prom by herself in order for him to apologize. If she hadn't done that, I assume that he would never have had the guts to fix things himself and that they'd have stayed apart. And then his weird apology is ruined by his claim that Andie didn't believe in him, either. It's possible that he's technically correct, but that's the wrong time to bring that up and tries to lay the blame on her when he's clearly the one who broke the relationship. I like Blane and I like that Duckie isn't rewarded for his obsession, but I like Blane less at the exact moment that I'm supposed to be excited that he and Andie have worked things out.

Better Off Dead (1985)



David's known about "I want my two dollars!" his entire life, but we just now got around to seeing the movie that that comes from. Better Off Dead throws a lot of jokes around, so not all of them work, but most of them do and are still funny all these years later. Just a lot of goofy fun.

Legend (1985)



Went back a little further in time for the next movies in our Cruiseathon. I often hear Legend as the punchline to jokes about bad '80s fantasy, but that's ridiculous. It's an awesome, gorgeous movie with a masterful performance by Tim Curry and a killer soundtrack by Tangerine Dream (with great, additional songs by Bryan Ferry and Yes' Jon Anderson). It's totally off model for Tom Cruise, but that's part of the fun. And I'll never complain about Mia Sara being in anything. Also: extremely quotable.

Top Gun (1986)



I don't know that this holds up quite as well for me, but it's still big, dumb fun. I get a little bored with the overwrought emotions, but the humor, dogfights, and volleyball are always worth revisiting.

Alien (1979)



Alien: Covenant gave me a reason to finally share the Alien movies with David. He’s known about them since like second or third grade, because a friend of his was all about Aliens and Predators, so he and David would play AvP during recess. Eventually - I don’t remember how many years later - I decided that David could handle the PG-13 movie from 2004 and he liked it quite a bit. But it only took about 10 minutes of AvP: Requiem to figure out that I was pushing him too fast. I mean, really no one should be made to watch Requiem, but it was especially inappropriate for whatever age David was at the time. We let the series sit for a few years.

The main thing that was concerning to David was the face-huggers. He can handle gore, but he has a real phobia about anything that attaches to or burrows into your body. Covenant got him interested in seeing Prometheus, though, so we did that and he handled it well. Even the part where a snake-like creatures crawls down a dude's throat. He hasn't seen Covenant yet, but we decided to go back and watch the original first. Which I think is best, because part of what's cool about Alien is knowing nothing about what these creatures are or where they come from. He had to leave the room right before John Hurt looks in that egg, but he loved the rest of it. As do I.

A Room with a View (1985)



John Hughes and Early Tom Cruise marathons have inspired me to revisit other of my favorite '80s movies with David. A Room with a View was too big a tonal shift for him to fully enjoy, but I was reminded of how much I love it. And it was something I was going to rewatch anyway, since I finally read the novel this Spring.

Room with a View not only started me on a major Helena Bonham Carter crush (and maybe a smaller one on Rupert Graves as well), it also launched my interest in period films in general; a genre that I still love to this day.

Diane asked me why I love it so much (besides Helena Bonham Carter, whom she totally knows about). I think it has something to do with my being able to relate to repressed British people who are desperate to drop convention and let themselves be themselves.

Zorro (1957-61)



Season Two of Zorro ended in 1959, but Walt Disney kept Guy Williams on salary and made four more episodes (hour-long this time) to run on the anthology series Walt Disney Presents. The first two ran in Autumn 1960 and formed a single story about a group of Mexican bandits who show up in Los Angeles to challenge Zorro's supremacy as local outlaw.

The next episode ran in January 1961, featuring Annette Funicello, who was back as a different character: a family friend of Diego's who's trying to elope with the wrong fella. And saving the best for last, an April 1961 episode had Ricardo Montalban and Wild Wild West's wonderful Ross Martin as a pair of scoundrels who know enough about Diego's past to suspect that he's Zorro. It's a great finale and makes me wish that there'd been a whole series just about those two characters.

Jam of the Week: "Secret" by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark

In honor of Pretty in Pink. I love "If You Leave," but "Secret" was the first OMD song I ever heard and it made me an instant fan. I said that I identified with Duckie; I identified with this song for the same reason.

7 Days in May | John Hughes and Tom Cruise

Mr. Mom (1983)



Started a John Hughes marathon this week. Should've included Vacation as well, but we'll have to go back and pick that one up later. My memory - probably tainted by the sequels (including Christmas Vacation, which I don't like as much as most of my friends) - is that it's overrated, but still funny. I should see it again and make up my mind.

But this is about Mr. Mom, which is also very funny. Michael Keaton is really charming and I always love Terri Garr, too. And the way it deals with gender issues holds up surprisingly well. Sure, the premise is supposed to be funny because stay-at-home dads... that's a disaster waiting to happen, right? But the movie never shames either spouse or suggests that they're better off in their traditional roles. It upholds both business career and homemaking as important, vital work, regardless of the gender of the person doing it. Not all of Hughes' writing stays this fresh, so I was really pleased.

Sixteen Candles (1984)



Here's one that doesn't hold up as well. Anthony Michael Hall is really funny as Farmer Ted and Molly Ringwald is very effective as the awkward Samantha, but I don't ever root for her to end up with Michael Schoeffling's Jake. That's partly Schoeffling's fault, but it's also the script's for the way it introduces him. It suggests that he's noticed Sam before, but doesn't do anything about it until he steals a private note revealing that she wants to have sex with him. Creepy.

I'm not as creeped out by Ted's ending up with Jake's girlfriend, Caroline. I've heard people describe that as date rape, but the movie makes it pretty clear that both characters were drunk and that Ted remembers even less of it than Caroline does. It's not a part of the movie that I cheer about, but I don't find it as problematic as a lot of folks claim.

But then there's Gedde Watanabe's character, who is super troublesome. And the whole theme of the movie seems to be about how graceless teenage life is. And it is, which is why Sixteen Candles resonated with a lot of kids in its day, but as an adult it's kind of hard to watch.

The Breakfast Club (1985)



I don't have the words for how much I love this movie. It is to my teenage years what Star Wars was to my childhood. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but it feels like hundreds. For years, I could quote the whole thing.

The themes in it are profound and I've failed for 30 years to make up my mind about what happened on Monday. A tiny part of me has wanted a sequel to give me the official answer, but I know that's not what I really want. I appreciate being able to waffle back and forth about who stayed friends and who ignored whom. I love thinking about it and changing my mind and I don't want that locked in.

Far and Away (1992)



The Mummy has put us on a bit of a Tom Cruise kick. Not because it was great, but because I want to relive (and share with David) some of the Cruise movies that were great.

Far and Away is one of those. It's a giant, sweeping epic held together by the charisma of its two leads and a beautiful score by John Williams.

Things to Come (1936)



I'd always heard about the wonderful visuals - both in design and effects - of Things to Come, so I wanted to see it for myself. And it sure is cool to look at. But it's barely a story and I certainly don't care about any of the characters it shoots past me at light speed. I'm glad to have checked it off my list, but can't imagine revisiting it.

Stage Fright (1950)



Stage Fright, on the other hand, is amazing. Last year I finally sought out some Marlene Dietrich movies, because I'd never seen any. I feel pretty confident about my handle on her oeuvre now, so I'm not being a completist about it, but Stage Fright was a straggler still on the pile because it's directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I love Alfred Hitchcock, but not every movie, so I'm never 100% confident that one I haven't seen will be a winner. This one is though.

It begins JJ Abrams-style in the middle of the action with Jane Wyman and Richard Todd on the run from the cops. We quickly learn that Todd's the one the cops are after and that he's just enlisted Wyman's help, so after a brief flashback to catch her and us up on what happened, the plot is off and running. Basically, Todd is wanted for the murder of his lover's (Dietrich) husband. He believes that the blame has been shifted onto him because of bad luck and some bad decision-making on his part, but Wyman suspects that it may have been an intentional framing by Dietrich.

After Wyman puts Todd into hiding with her dad (wonderfully played by Alastair Sim, who's becoming one of my favorite actors), Wyman sets out to get a confession from Dietrich and prove Todd's innocence. But what's so cool is that things never unfold the way I expected them to. The story's just similar enough to others I've seen that I think I know how it's going to go, but then someone makes a weird (but always plausible) decision or reveals some new information that takes the story in a new direction. It kept me guessing - and hooked in - every step of the way.

Fire Down Below (1957)



This is another movie that defied my expectations for it. It starts off with Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon as co-owners of a boat that they charter to rich people in the Caribbean. When they're paid to help passportless Rita Hayworth escape the authorities by taking her to another island, both are immediately attracted to her and the movie sets itself up as a romantic triangle. But it's not actually about who Hayworth is going to end up with.

I don't even want to reveal what it's really about, because finding that out was such a cool journey, but it's safe to describe Fire Down Below as a fascinating character study of all three leads and that the lead it's most concerned with isn't the one I thought it would be.

Zorro (1957-61)



I quickly jammed through the rest of Season 2 and I'm glad I did it that way. Parceling it out was turning it into kind of a slog, but binge-watching it meant that mediocre episodes were immediately followed by more exciting ones. And there were a few storylines that I enjoyed quite a bit.

The series never did return to the 13-episode arcs of the first season, but there were several multi-part storylines. One of the best starred Annette Funicello, who was given the role as a 16th Birthday present by Walt Disney. She plays a young woman who's come to Los Angeles to meet her estranged father. She's convinced that he lives there and she's even received letters from him postmarked Los Angeles, but no one has heard of the man. It's a cool mystery and Funicello brings a lot of conviction and spunk to her role.

There's still sort of a Season 3 left, so I'm not done with the show, but "Season 3" is only four episodes, so I'm almost there.

Jam of the Week: "Green & Gold" by Lianne La Havas

A great, funky, sultry groove that reminds me of Sade.

7 Days in May | Some Kind of Hughesiful

Pretty in Pink (1986)



This year is the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club, so we went to a special screening at a local theater. It got us interested in John Hughes again and talking about later movies that were inspired by his work. Which got me wanting to watch them again.

I always forget that Pretty in Pink wasn't directed by Hughes, but it was written by him. For whatever it's worth, he's also an executive producer on it, but it's the writing that makes it a Hughes film. I was shortly out of high school when it came out and totally related to the characters. Not so much the rich/poor caste system they experience, but the obstacles they encounter in their quests for love and the frustrations they have in trying to overcome them. For Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy), it's peer pressure as represented mostly by Steff (James Spader). As much as I like Duckie Dale (John Cryer), Steff is his closest competition for my favorite character in the movie. There is no douchier character in fiction, but the combination of Hughes' writing and Spader's performance elevates Steff above a villainous stereotype and makes him a believable, but tragic character with understandable, if reprehensible motivations.

As for Duckie, his obstacle to love is the simple fact that Andie doesn't feel the same way he does. Sadly, as a teenager I most related to him, but I was also encouraged by the way he's more or less honest with Andie about his feelings. He uses humor to make them seem less intense than they are, but I wasn't even that brave as a kid. There's a reason that OMD's "Secret" was an especially resonant song for me back in the day.

Which leads me to the music. I was very much a New Wave kid, but before Pretty in Pink, my access to that genre was limited by what made it onto our town's Top 40 station. The Pretty in Pink soundtrack introduced me to The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, and other bands that I'd missed, leading me down numerous musical rabbit holes that I'm forever grateful for.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)



I wanted to also rewatch Some Kind of Wonderful, which is essentially a gender-swapped remake of Pretty in Pink with the ending "fixed," but I'd loaned out my copy and didn't get it back in time. Instead, we watched a couple of later movies that are very much in the John Hughes wheelhouse. Meaning that they're funny, touching, and insightful looks at what high school is like.

First up was 10 Things I Hate About You, the adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew that launched Heath Ledger's career and should have done the same for Julia Stiles. Why isn't she in more stuff? Anyway, since the movie's following Shakespeare's plot and not conventional romantic comedy tropes, it's wonderfully convoluted (without being confusing) and doesn't follow the typical romcom structure. Yes, there's a point at which an obstacle is thrown in the way of young love, and yes, it has to do with a deception perpetrated by one of the leads early in the relationship, but the obstacle comes up very late in the story and isn't resolved at all in the usual way.

Instead of the deceiver - in this case, Ledger's character - having to make a grand gesture to atone for the mistake, the situation is pretty easily resolved by the fact that Stiles' character is obviously in love with him, which makes her prone to forgiveness. She's also smart enough to understand why he did what he did before he really knew her and how that doesn't necessarily mean he'll keep doing it. After all, she gets the whole idea of behaving badly as a form of self-protection.

That's what I love so much about this movie. Both characters have self-protected themselves right out of society and it's beautiful seeing them slowly lower their defenses with each other. Unlike most romantic comedies where we're asked to root for the couple simply because they're likable and cute, 10 Things I Hate About You builds sympathy for its leads by making them angry, painful messes whom we want to see find acceptance and companionship in each other.

Easy A (2010)



Watching Easy A shortly after 10 Things, I realized what it is that I still like about a great teen comedy all these many years since I graduated. Loneliness and feeling like an outsider isn't something you completely grow out of. I have a ridiculously happy family life, but even then I'm occasionally susceptible to feeling a bit on my own. It's just human nature. And even when I don't personally feel that way, I'm sympathetic to those who do. So stories about loneliness and the experience of being an outsider are powerful. And high school is a perfect setting for those kinds of stories, where those themes can present themselves at almost cartoonish levels without feeling implausible.

10 Things I Hate About You is about a pair of self-imposed outsiders who find acceptance in each other without compromising themselves. Easy A is about a girl who doesn't want to be an outsider, thinks she's found a quick route into the group, but ends up even more ostracized than before. She has to figure out what she's going to do about that and in the end reaches the same conclusion that the 10 Things leads do. She says "screw it" to trying to fight her way into a group of people who don't want her and instead finds acceptance in someone else who's made the same decision. Way easier to do in the movies than in real life, but it's still a powerful and important message.

The LXB adds to my list of favorite films

I'm going to take the week off from the LXB (I'm unqualified to talk about reality TV treasure hunters), but won't let that keep me from pointing out that last week's Top Ten Movies assignment was super popular and successful.

I especially love the themed lists that three of the members came up with, so I'll list those first.

• Top Ten Monkey Movies [Cool and Collected]
• Top Ten Time Travel Movies [Cavalcade of Awesome]
• Top Ten Vincent Price Movies [AEIOU and Sometimes Why]

But, as predicted, there were lots of movies that could easily have gone on my own list.

• Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Summer School, Back to the Future, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off [Flashlights Are Something to Eat]
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Life With Fandom]
• Can't Buy Me Love and The Avengers (I debated including The Avengers on my list, but decided I needed some distance from it to give it an objective ranking. I'm glad to see not everyone was that shy, because my feeling is that it deserves to be there.) [Random Toy Reviews]
• Terminator, Die Hard, and First Blood [Movie Hodge Podge]
• This is Spinal Tap [That Figures, who gets bonus points for also picking Night of the Demon.]
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Aliens, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Batman (1966) [My pal Erik Johnson]
• The Crow [Jason Vorhees]
• Lean On Me [Team Hellions]

Some of those were picked by multiple bloggers, so I linked to the one I saw first. Seriously, the LXB roll call on this one is full of great films, so if you're looking to kill some time, you should check them all out.

The LXB Speaks | Saturday Matinees

One of the cool things about the League of Extraordinary Bloggers is discovering a bunch of cool, new blogs with interests similar to mine. So each week I want to do a round-up post to point out blogs whose responses to the previous week's assignment I most relate to. Last week was about Saturday-afternoon comfort movies and there were some great films listed.

My friend Charles Raymond is the guy who introduced me to the LXB and his pick is certainly one of my all-time favorites, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I used to call myself an Indiana Jones fan, but lately I'm realizing that I'm really just a Raiders fan. The other movies all have things that I like, but also things that I deeply don't care for. Raiders is nearly perfect.

I have similar feelings about AEIOU and Sometimes Why's pick, Star Wars. The more that universe expands, the tighter I circle around the original film. It's not perfect, but it'll always be perfect to me.

A couple of other movies I haven't thought about in a while, but are extremely re-watchable, are Red Dawn (mentioned by Branded in the '80s), Back to the Future (claimed by both the Cavalcade of Awesome and The Sexy Geek's House of Swag), and Weird Science (Geek Chunks' pick). That last one reminds me of the countless number of times I've watched other John Hughes films, especially The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And those (along with Red Dawn) remind me of some other movies I wore out in the '80s: The Lost Boys and Dirty Dancing. I have no idea why I like Dirty Dancing so much other than a crush on Jennifer Grey and very manly feelings for Patrick Swayze, but dude, I watched that movie a lot back in the day.

You can check out the complete run-down of LXB responses to this question at Cool and Collected.

10 movies I loved in 2010

So here they are. My ten favorite films from last year. Not necessarily the "best" in any objective way, but the ten I unabashedly dug the most.

Number 10



The other Leonardo DiCaprio movie that invites more than one possible interpretation. I like this one more though because though everything wasn't spelled out, it didn't need to cut away just before a crucial moment to deliver the ambiguity. We got the complete story. How we interpret it is up to us.

Number 9



Iron Man 2 got a lot of flack for not being Iron Man. And its critics are right that it isn't as tight a movie as the first one and feels like it spends a lot of time setting up The Avengers. But it was very entertaining in the process and though I never felt like Tony was actually going to die, I was engaged by the mystery of how he was going to survive. Which really, is as much as any adventure series with a recurring character can do. Besides, if nothing else, the film brought Scarlett Johannson as Black Widow and that's Top Ten worthy all by itself.

Movie News: I Hate Tentacles

Meet Blackbeard



This man is in talks to play Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean 4. I didn't think those movies could get any better, but I guess I was wrong. (I know it's cool to hate the last two, but I can't help liking them.) Penelope Cruz is going to be in it too, which could ease my grieving over Keira's absence.

Sharktopus vs Dinoshark



The world's not awesome enough for a movie with both Sharktopus and Dinoshark in it, but Undead Backbrain has the complete skinny on their separate films.

Moby Dick with Dragons



And Danny Glover as a fantasy-world Ahab. I'm skeptically curious.

Doc Savage movie



I don't know enough about Doc Savage to be truly excited about this, but any pulp adventure movie set in the '30s is going to get my money.

Dean Koontz's Frankenstein on screen... again



It was meant to be a TV series (I reviewed the TV-movie/pilot a few years ago), but Koontz didn't like how it was going and pulled his name off it, choosing instead to co-author a series of novels. Now those novels are becoming at least one film. I never did get around to reading them, but I'm curious now to see how the new film version compares to the old one.

Monster in Paris



Unfortunately, they're not making a movie out of my and Jason Copland's Paris-set giant monster comic just yet, but there is an animated film in the works about "a shy movie projectionist and an inventor who team up with a cabaret star, an eccentric scientist and his monkey to save the city from a monster."

I miss John Hughes



I pulled out The Smiths' Louder than Bombs to listen to recently. That album always makes me think of John Hughes because he's the one who introduced me to it. After the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, I made a habit of getting the soundtracks to all his films, knowing that I'd find some amazing stuff on them. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" was on Pretty in Pink and Kirsty Macoll's cover of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby" is on She's Having a Baby, but I also have Hughes to thank for Echo and the Bunnymen, Love and Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel, Kate Bush, Flesh for Lulu, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and of course Simple Minds. He's even responsible for my digging into Bowie's career any earlier than Let's Dance thanks to that quote at the beginning of The Breakfast Club.

By sheer coincidence, Vanity Fair ran a series of articles on Hughes about the same time I was listening to The Smiths. /Film has conveniently collected them, but my favorite part was learning that he never lost that love for new music. According to /Film's summary, "His iTunes library filled several hard drives, and he planned the playlists for his sons’ weddings as carefully as he had the soundtracks for his movies. In recent years, he took to dispensing pre-loaded iPods to people he liked, much as he’d assiduously compiled mix tapes for Ringwald and Broderick in the old days." There's a great story about the one he gave John Candy's son and how it was eventually used, but you should go read that one for yourself.

March Theatrical Releases

Okay, March looks a lot better than February did.



March 7

10,000 B.C.: By all rights, this should be Beyond Awesome with all the cavegirls and ancient civilizations and sabretooth tigers and domesticated mammoths. But I'd be lying if I said that "From the Director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow" didn't make me nervous. Independence Day was a fun, but disposable movie and you couldn't have dragged me into The Day After Tomorrow with all the domesticated mammoths in the world.

The Bank Job: Jason Statham. Bank heist. '70s detectives and criminals. Government conspiracy. They got me.

Snow Angels (limited release): Kate Beckinsale is all I need to know about this movie, but the rest of it looks pretty good too. Olivia Thirlby is even cuter here than she was in Juno.

Okay. Yes. It's all about the girls with me on this one.

March 14

Doomsday: Speaking of Kate Beckinsale, I really thought that was her in the trailer for this. Makes me much less nervous about Rhona Mitra's taking over for Kate in the next Underworld film. And even though it's not Kate here, the Road Warrior/Escape from New York vibe is strong enough to make it my most anticipated movie of the month.

Horton Hears a Who: I'd about had it with big screen adaptations of Dr. Suess books, but going animated is a step in the right direction. I'm not convinced that they can pad it out to feature length without making it feel like padding, but it's one of my favorite Suess stories, so I'm willing to give it a try.

March 21

Drillbit Taylor: Owen Wilson was painfully unfunny at the Oscars, mostly because he wasn't even trying to be funny and that made me sad. He's one of my favorite comic actors and I'm worried about him. Not every movie of his is great, but this one written by Seth Rogen and Kristofor Brown, based on a concept by John Hughes, and produced by Judd Apatow has all the ingredients it needs to be hilarious.

March 28

Superhero Movie: I'm expecting very little from this, but it has Leslie Nielsen in it, so I'm guaranteed a laugh or two.

Flawless: Michael Caine. Bank heist. '60s detectives and criminals. No government conspiracy, but they still got me.