How long has George Romero been fashioning his living dead epic, which concludes this summer with the long-awaited (if you like zombies, that is; fans of the Olsen twins have probably not been counting the days) Land of the Dead? Well, let’s put it this way: Night of the Living Dead – maybe the most […]

Like the SUV your uncle Fred bought before gas prices went up, DVDs are loaded with extras. Unlike your uncle’s SUV, which came with air-conditioning, onboard navigation, and power everything, you get the DVD extras whether you want them or not, and they’re usually dumber than mud. I suspected this for years; […]

My crystal ball has been partly cloudy this year. While I did pick the 50-1 Kentucky Derby winner (you’ll just have to take my word on that), I didn’t have any money on the damn thing, and when it comes to how I did in EW’s in-house Oscar pool…don’t ask. Let’s just say I was […]

The first thing I used to turn to in this magazine was the movie reviews. No more. Since my youngest son showed me how to burn CDs and my daughter-in-law taught me how to use my computer to get music online (to a geezer like me that’s a beautiful thing, like sucking songs through a […]

Like Shakespearean tragedy, the course of romantic comedy is immutable: In Act 1, the boy gets the girl; in Act 2, he loses her; in Act 3, he gets her back. A good story, but it’s a little long in the tooth. At this point it better have something else going for it. What the […]

Some bad habits are hard to break. Making stupid cell phone calls while driving on the turnpike. Snack hunting in the fridge after 10 p.m. Scanning USA Today’s Life section for the inevitable postmortem on how last night’s American Idol contestants did. And then there’s believing in movie stars. The Hollywood elite were less than […]

magine this ad on Country Music Television, whose major daytime audience consists of women between the ages of 18 and 35:
We fade in on a pretty woman buckling her two young children into the station wagon. Cross-fade to her delivering them at school and waving goodbye. […]

It’s always annoying to be bumped by the front-of-the-book boys and girls (this column was slated to go last week, but then News & Notes ran „Has 24 Gone Too Far?”), but the additional time has given me a chance to refine these 14 Lessons. Hell, even back-of-the-book guys understand that when it comes to […]

Nobody wanted to like Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, more than I, and no one put less stock in the largely negative reviews the book generated. There’s a reason for that. In 1993 I found myself on Good Morning America with a young writer named Scott Smith after stirring up a minor […]

I love the movies. At my local theater they know me at the box office, at the snack bar, where my order rarely varies (popcorn and a medium soft drink, half Pepsi and half Diet Pepsi), and at the entrance to the cinemas, where the ticket taker in the wheelchair always asks after the wife […]