Mike Long

The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that

Well, I liked it. That’s no guarantee you will. Years ago, I did stand-up. Learned a lot doing that. One thing you learn is that there’s often a difference between the craft of comedy and what it takes to reliably

A Terminator mega-robot is fun to watch only if he (it?) is making his (its?) marauding way toward its target; generally, that’s the good guy in the movie who, by superhuman strength and unprecedented cleverness, will dispatch said Terminator in

I went to see Management because Steve Zahn is in it, and I’ll see him in anything. Steve Zahn turns out to be pretty much the only reason to see Management, and then only if you’re a big Steve Zahn

Sin Nombre is a fictionalized account of the largely unknown (to Americans, at least) struggle that would-be immigrants go through long before they even get to the U.S. border. The story of a young man on the run from a

Every action picture is a science-fiction picture anymore. How else to explain Hero Survival In A Hail of Bullets, Inexhaustible Supply Of Energy In A Street Fight, and the Amazing Car That Still Operates After Driving Off A Building? Star

Crank: High Voltage is surely the most visually inventive picture of the year. It is not just candy for your eyes, it is amphetamines. It is among the best times I’ve had at the movies in the past few years.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine sounds like an idea for a direct-to-DVD cash-in project: pluck out one character and fill in the back-story, which is considerably cheaper than bringing back the whole cast for another big-screen adventure. But Wolverine aspires to more

The explicit portrayal of rape in Last House on the Left (2009) is repugnant and coarsening and wrong. Director Dennis Iliadis dwells on the act long past the moment in which we get the point; long past when we have

The Great Buck Howard is a funny, knowing gift for anyone who loves old-fashioned show business: It celebrates the entertainer who is in it for the fun of putting on a good show, and for bringing a little pleasure to

Watching Gomorrah is like learning Latin: You’d rather say you’ve done it than actually do it. Gomorrah is a slightly fictionalized portrayal of life under the influence of the criminal organization Camorra (unknown to most of the U.S., but apparently

Lots of filmmakers set out to make an evocative picture without concern for making an engaging one. Their motivation, I believe, is to do something out of the ordinary that will set them apart as artists. They see storytelling as

The Echelon Conspiracy could spin off a veritable global economy of work in the form of books, magazine articles, documentaries and parodies to investigate and explain the dissonance between the picture’s pre-production pedigree and the post-production fiasco. There are surely

Some of the biggest movies of any year aren’t in wide release until January, so some of us don’t see all them until much later. As of this week, I think I’ve seen what passes for “everything” from 2008. Herewith,

I saw The International a few days after I saw Fired Up and I’m trying to figure out how two lowbrow pictures can inspire such different reactions in me. Going in, I knew that both were peddled as screen fodder–something

I enjoy silly comedies, and Fired Up fills the bill. It’s a standard variation on a plot done a million times before. In this case, two football jocks decide to attend cheerleader camp in order to apply their formidable sexual

2008 was not a very good year for movies–that’s the lesson here. But Big Hollywood rules. Thanks, Andrew & John, for the chance to get to knock it around with the other contributors. Good to get to know y’all a

… “sanctimonious wife-beating creep” re Penn.

The best song was the theme from GRAN TORINO. There was no competition. Seriously. Don’t take my word for it, go download it from itunes or amazon and listen to it. Best song from any movie this year. Or from

Ha to the joke. ha to the construction. Love the construction. Is it okay to love the construction?

I want to be on Red Eye. Is this the proper forum to make that request? If not, oh well.

Drink every time a presenter says that a film “teaches us to / makes us aware of”….

for Funniest Post. Doug, come on up here and get yer prize!

for mentioning Dr. Gene Scott, the man who integrated the gospel altar call with a spectacular tapestry of profanity. The late Dr. Gene amazed me. I was never sure if he was a bizarre but sincere man of God, or

…for so precisely describing Beyonce’s descent as “gallumphing.”