There's no way to review this movie without spoiling it, so in short: it's got a few laughs and a couple of good action scenes, but it's a warp-speed train wreck of bad writing, vastly inferior to its goofy but fun 2009 predecessor.  Fans waited a long time for this movie, and deserved better.  Benedict Cumberbatch needs to have a long talk with his agent.

Spoilers will soon follow, so if you want to avoid them, click away now.

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In response to Hollywood's Favorite Villain: The Businessman:

I'm having a hard time thinking of a recent big movie that didn't feature an evil businessman as the villain.  Now that Hollywood's other acceptable farm team of evil, the neo-Nazi, is looking a bit long in the tooth, it's pretty much all they've got left.

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Whether it's Mortimer and Randolph or Gordon Gekko, Hollywood loves to make businessmen villains.  From the Free Enterprise blog:

Hollywood script writers must be going through an unimaginative streak. As The Wall Street Journal reports, this summer will see the release of movies in which the antagonists are…surprise - corrupt, evil, and greedy business executives scarier than Darth Vader, the Joker, or Hannibal Lecter.

Doesn't Hollywood feel some shame for continuing to perpetuate trite mischaracterizations? Apparently not:

Hollywood's latest wave of business bashing is far from over, says Mr. Batmanglij. "A lot of people think 'Oh, making the corporations bad is cliché, we've seen it before,' " he says. "That holds as much water as saying that shooting a scary scene in the dark has been done before. It's scary for a reason."

The East, due out May 31, is about an underground activist collective whose creative attacks allow corporate bosses to “experience the terror of their crimes.” The group creates an oil spill inside the home of an oil-company CEO and makes drug-company executives taste the ruinous side effects of their own medicine. The bad business barometer reaches so high in this film that the "good guys" are people who intentionally inflict harm on others.

I'm waiting for the movie about the oil company executives whose investments in energy technology are responsible for turning small, depressed towns into bustling centers of commerce and new, high-paying jobs due to the miracle of shale oil and gas recovery. Considering that oil and natural gas have created 1 million jobs since 2002, script writers could visit any number of towns across America for inspiration. I'm also waiting for the movie about the pharmaceutical executives who take financial risks in investing millions of dollars to develop antretroiviral blockbuster drugs responsible for saving and improving the lives of millions of HIV-positive Africans. But I'm not holding my breath. The scripts of those movies, if they've ever been written, are at the bottom of a trash can in some movie executive's office.

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One of the great unheralded screen duos of Hollywood's Golden Era was Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, two character actors who made a total of nine films together between 1941 and 1946. The most famous of these pairings are the first two, "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and "Casablanca" (1942), in which both men played memorable supporting roles.

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I just want to end this week on a high note. One of my favorite movie scenes and yet slightly apropos to our current crises.

For a decade that started in the mid-1950s, a movement known as "Free Cinema" didn’t exactly sweep England, but it coincide, borrow from, and influence what became known in France as  cinéma vérité -- a movement that profoundly affected a generation of America directors who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies.

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Earlier this week it was reported that Rod Stewart, 68, is blaming a bad steroid habit in the ‘80s for a visible reduction in the size of his member.   But the Daily Mail published photos today of the spike haired crooner with his 42 year old wife Penny Lancaster.   It appears that Mr. Stewart doesn’t fully comprehend that his member’s proportions are completely intact. It’s his entire person that’s shrinking.

Though not as well known today as those involving battle, during World War II, Hollywood produced a number of memorable wartime dramas that examined the noble sacrifices expected from and being made by those not in uniform. "Mrs. Miniver" is probably the most widely-known, but there is also Jean Renoir's 1943 masterpiece, "This Land Is Mine," Errol Flynn's near-masterpiece, "Edge of Darkness" (1943), Don Ameche's "Happy Land"  (1943), and Jimmy Stewart's "Mortal Storm" (1940).

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Though he was 42 at the time, in 1980 Robert Redford still had his boyish good looks, which serve him well as the title character in "Brubaker," a prison drama "suggested" by the true story of a reform-minded warden at war with The System in a Southern prison.

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In response to The Arrested Development Trailer has Arrived:

Something that occurs to me:  Had Firefly been made six years later, it never would have gone off the air.  The rise of alternate "broadcasters" like Amazon and Netflix would have guaranteed its run.

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