kevin smith

I’ve never been opposed to chick-flicks. I’m usually even a fan of a lot of the manly-maligned pictures. Yet, for some reason, Sex and the City was a movie that put me off conceptually. I wasn’t a fan of the television show; the times I encountered it on late night cable and tried to give it a chance, I just wasn’t impressed.

One of the running themes of this week's show is the question of "Why?" Explaining why we have the opinions we have is an important element of film critique, which we talk about this week as Rafe rants about Kevin Smith's anti-critic Twitter tirade. We also talk about the rising prices of movie tickets and how the 3-D phenomenon has been exploited to that end.

I’ve been living “off the grid” for the past few months, rarely checking my Twitter and Facebook feeds or looking at what many other sites have been reporting. This weekend I decided to finally change that. Wow, what timing.

It's our annual pre-Oscar round up. Listen as Rafe, Margaret, and Jeff round up all the contenders and pick which movies they expect to take home awards next Sunday. Will the recent Hurt Locker controversy cost the movie its statue? Is ten selections for best picture too many? Just what is the value of Jeff's life in a bet?

It’s a running gag in Cop Out that the detectives played by Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan have probably watched too many bad buddy-cop movies, and resort to a clichéd, abused use of that dialog when playing “bad cop” with a suspect.

When someone puts a fresh spin on something tried and true, it normally is met with mixed results: those who welcome change by accepting the newer version and then those who stick to fundamentals and tend to say you are ruining a perfectly good thing. That is kind of how it is with Kevin Smith’s new film Cop Out.

After months of prolonged waiting, Shutter Island has arrived and all three of us are impressed, to say the least. We're less impressed with The Wolfman remake and Sidney Poitier's '80s movies, but we dive into those as well. Add in some movie news talk about changes to the Oscars and Kevin Smith, and you have a well rounded hour of entertainment news and reviews.

It's an episode so long we couldn't possibly cram it into our traditional hourlong format (a technical malfunction with the timer notwithstanding). Inside you'll hear reviews of Sherlock Holmes, Up in the Air, and Family Guy: Something, Something, Something Darkside, as well as the finish of James Cameron month with Strange Days and True Lies.

Kevin Smith often cites Richard Linklater’s Slacker as the movie that inspired him to make Clerks. The independent film showed Smith that a simple concept and shoestring budget could be transformed into an interesting story. I always think about that when I see Clerks, because Smith’s movie had a reverse effect on me.

This week it isn't the movies that are in theaters that have us excited, but the movies we're looking at for our continual Artist of the Month discussion. Sure, we have reviews of Couple's Retreat and the Toy Story / Toy Story 2 double feature, but we also look at Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Psycho.