People talk about returning to their roots like it's a good thing, but I think they're forgetting that roots are usually surrounded by half-buried garbage and bug-digested corpses.

I may never have felt more doomed gearing up to see a movie than I felt on my way to see Dance Flick.

For a certain type of person -- mostly guys who eat dinner off junk mail and get confused when someone wants to interrupt our GoldenEye game to go meet girls (i.e. superstuds) -- Terminator Salvation had a basically perfect trailer.

I think it was Gandhi who once said "If we weren't meant to whale the hell out of each other, we would never have been given fists."

There are some things that, through the virtue of sheer awesomeness, become virtually immune to criticism.

I've said it before, but one of the biggest keys to success is in something as simple as your name.

Back before I struck it rich telling people what to think about popular entertainment, I worked for a chain of packing and shipping stores.

And now, a humiliating, soul-searing confession: I have never seen a complete episode of the original Star Trek.

Apparently there's a real movement going on in the French horror scene right now, which is news to me because I always thought everywhere was America.

I always like beginnings and origin stories more than tales from a character's later life.

High on the list of fictional characters I like much better than anyone in real life: Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in HBO's The Wire.

I am a gambling man. Every year I bet the Mariners will not only win the Series, they'll cure cancer and invent robots that will sweep our floors while other robots feed us grapes. Back in '79, when I was floating around the ether for the 12th straight millennium, I bet I'd be born within the next five years. Cleaned up on that one.

If there's one genre that keeps on recycling the same plot lines over and over again, it's the nature documentary.

One of the cool things about getting to see the best and worst of everything that comes out is you get unnecessarily familiar with the work of writers and directors who might otherwise go totally unnoticed.

I have tried, so far, to use this space to highlight the more obscure films I've stumbled across/been assaulted by in my years as an unwashed recluse.

There's nothing more fun for everyone than ultra-hip arguments about whether that guy who used to be cool is still cool now that he's all popular and junk.

Unless I'm mistaken, and I really was too lazy to look it up, this week marks the two-year anniversary of this column.

In certain corners of the Internet, ferocious debate rages as to what makes a “real” zombie.

Surprise! A clown just kidnapped your girlfriend.

Here’s how you know Joseph Gordon-Levitt is worth watching: he’s got looks, youth, talent and opportunity, but he persistently throws it away on awesome little movies barely anyone goes to see.

I appear to be stuck in a time warp.

From the continuing case files of studly HBO actors in thankless movie roles: Aidan Gillen of "The Wire" as the unstoppable criminal mastermind in 12 Rounds.

My favorite part of this job is definitely attending rom-coms and kids' movies by myself, but second to that, what I like best is being subjected to the same trailer up to a dozen times before the movie it's advertising actually comes out.

If there's one Hollywood cliche that needs to be taken behind the barn, shot down like an old horse, and ground into cinematic dog food, it's the heartfelt speech some dope makes to win back his girlfriend.

Back when I was a wealthy man, I had it all: twenty channels of HBO, a small, dirty apartment above a bar, all the spaghetti and Winco-brand spaghetti sauce I could force myself to swallow.

So who here was cool enough to have read the Watchmen graphic novel before we'd all heard they were making a movie out of it?

The tricky thing in talking about bad movies is that for some of us--failures, mostly, much like the terrible things we like making fun of--bad equals good. So when I say that, until very recently, 2000's Voodoo Academy was the worst movie I'd ever seen, this could create the confusion that it's nonstop riotous fun.

It's time to throw down our vodka bottles, dump the ash out of our shoes, and hustle off to church, for the Lord has clearly heard our prayers: a new Street Fighter movie is upon us.

Who among you is "fired up" to see Fired Up!?

For us movie critics, a Bat Signal blazes in the sky whenever a French foreign film hits theaters.

I'm far too cowardly to have tested this out myself, but theoretically speaking, I think horror movie slashers might just be misunderstood superheroes.

Once in a bar (man, I wish I had a story that didn't start that way), I expressed to the girls we were with that if I had the money, I'd retire then and there.

There may be no better example of the depth of human futility than the professional movie industry.

When I heard the new action-thriller Taken was PG-13 instead of the expected R, I immediately made the world's wittiest and most insightful prediction about how it was destined to suck.

On the bitterly cold afternoon I went to see Frost/Nixon, the marquee had spelled the second "N" of Nixon's name backwards.

If you've ever got a significant chunk of your life you feel like just throwing away, I recommend watching complete horror franchises.

Biopics have the odd distinction of being simultaneously empowering and utterly demoralizing.

Paradoxically, the reason I love horror movies so much is because so damn many of them are so damn bad.

You know the absolute best part about being young?

I often think about what a book or movie would be like if it had been better, but I'm not sure I've ever thought about what one would be like if only it had been worse.

World War 2? WW2 WW2 WW2. WW2? WW2!

Sap and cheese aren't just the chief ingredients of an especially disgusting breakfast, they're the chosen weapons of Hollywood tearjerkers.

Attention would-be alien overlords:

The only "punishing" going on in the new Punisher: War Zone is the "punishment" inflicted on those of us who have to watch it.

It's a pretty bold move to name a movie after a country.

Four reasons we should all quit our day jobs and immediately become delivery boys/girls: Snow Crash, Han Solo, Fry from Futurama, and the Transporter movies.

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'm getting tired of World War II and/or Holocaust movies.

When my tin-can phone rang to wake me up at Critic of Pure Reason HQ in the weeds along Highway 240 to let me know my latest assignment involved vampires and sexy teens, I was so excited I almost spilled my swamp-water.

Revenge, as the French say, is a dish best served to those low-class Normandy-stealing hooligans to the north.

When you think about it, which I don't recommend no matter what "it" is, the notion of being a role model is kind of creepy.