In Tangled, Disney finally gets around to adapting the story of Rapunzel, (Mandi Moore), who was a child of a king and queen who was kidnapped shortly after birth and raised by Goethel, a mean, jealous woman who relied upon the healing power of her golden hair to stave off growing old.


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The Harry Potter saga has had some ups and downs. The first, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, was sort of nostalgic for me, because I was nineteen and getting out of childhood when I saw it in theatres during the holidays in 2001, but it stood as a reminder of the joy of the first day of school, making new friends, and eating chocolate treats ( Read more... )

Now this is what I'm talking about!


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The Joy Luck Club was a film about two consecutive generations of Chinese American women living in San Francisco, California. The first emigrated directly from China, the next has been raised as Chinese Americans.


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Early in the movie "The Social Network," we see Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg bust into the homepages for all the female residence halls in Harvard. He takes the pictures of the females and writes a program for a game calle "Facemash," where you compare the attractiveness of two different girls one after another. It is a superficial, ( Read more... )

There are certain characters in movies who make a bad first impression upon me as people, but are so damn entertaining I can't resist following their interactions to see what behavior they'll have next ( Read more... )

In a year where the headlines about the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf, Toyota gas pedals, the earthquake in Haiti, the flooding in Pakistan, trapped miners found dead in West Virginia, trapped miners hanging on for dear life in Chile, and lunatics like Pastor Terry Jones threatening to burn the Qu'aran and throw the war in Afghanistan into real code red ( Read more... )

As Blake and I sat and watched Gran Torino, the second of Clint Eastwood's directorial efforts in 2008, we couldn't help but laugh because of how we thought about the similarites we found between Clint Eastwood's character and a retired court judge I've done plays with in the theatre arts community in Minneapolis.


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I am so tempted to mismarket Inception to draw an audience of mindless popcorn filmgoers to see it ( Read more... )

You know how when you're on a long, cross-country car trip and there are miles and miles between the big towns, and how when you finally get to an exit for food or a hotel stay? It's a long time coming.

2010 is that long car trip to Denver, and Toy Story 3 is the long awaited dinner stop in Council Bluffs after making it across Iowa.


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