I should probably warn you that nothing that comes after this is going to be very good.

At one point, everyone from Philip J. Fry to the degenerates who made Custer's Revenge have wanted to experience life as a video game.

Not that anybody cares in this era of selling yourself into indentured servitude for a soggy bag of carrots and a dry corner of the doghouse, but a crummy, low-paying job can almost be saved if you've got some good co-workers.

Much like when you get whipped with chains every day, sometimes it's hard to tell whether a bad situation is getting better or you're just getting used to it.

In times of emergency, I turn to the movies for help.

I can never quite buy into the storytelling convention that once you achieve your dream of becoming the world's greatest warrior, you inevitably realize that dream is hollow.

Some things need no analysis. Like Keith Richards and socking people with pillows for no reason, their greatness is self-evident.

You know what makes me so mad I could spend years plotting my elaborate, blood-soaked, unstoppable revenge?

If my life of crime ever descends from the amateur to the professional, I'm going to sensibly invest a portion of my robbings until I can buy a drill hand.

Some topics are undeniable social landmines.

If you haven't already thought about what you'll do when the aliens show up and blow it all to hell, thanks in advance for making me step over your burning corpse, jerk.

You know what? Sometimes, two great tastes don't go great together.

A lot of movies are based around bad ideas.

If a tree makes a yearly habit of telling a really convoluted, gory, incomprehensible story in the woods and no one thinks it's any good, does it get to tell the sequel next year?

To an outside observer, I was obviously racing toward nerddom from a young age.

If you really want to get rich, I suggest killing yourself.

If you take a look at it, it's pretty obvious why old people are medicated so heavily.

So I just moved to Southern California, and boy are my arms tired!

What do you think of when you think of California?

What with all the autograph signing and top hat shopping, I don't have the chance to see every single movie in the theater.

When it comes time to choose what to review here, I don't use a single system.

Ben Affleck!

For reasons that must have nothing to do with my stunning lack of popularity, I've never experienced a backlash, but it's an odd phenomenon.

Movies written to turn no-names into stars don't have the best track record.

Following horror franchises is a lot like following Seattle sports teams.

Clearly, there can be no higher public good than convincing the world that certain famous, successful people deserve to be much more famous and successful than you dum-dums have made them so far.

In the great economy debate, capitalism has other points in its favor beyond locking us all into soul-withering jobs from which the only escape is to look at kitties on the Internet.

Generally, dark, dour movies about wild hedonists just do not work.

To steal a thought from myself, I don't think artistic theft is that big a deal.

For reasons that probably have to do with "it's boring," you don't see many gangster movies where the leads are uncomfortable using guns, knives, brass knuckles, and pens, be they to the throat or full of man-eating pigs.

Language is a funny thing.

Once upon a time, Shane Black was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood.

Any movie with a line like "No, you keep [this enormously huge knife]. You appreciate a good blade" is basically immune to criticism.

Ever since we were first coughed up by indigested tyrannosaurs, mankind has longed for real life to be like a video game.

It's no secret that big talent can often accompany an even bigger wad of jerkiness. Thank heavens for that, as it makes it much easier for us to look down on our betters by imagining they go home at night to yell at their animals and not recycle.

My criterion for buying DVDs is the same I use to find a girlfriend: whatever Johnny the Blade has for sale in the back of his truck.

Whenever someone writes me for the secret of my success, which is never, because the post office doesn't deliver to moving freight trains, I tell them "Don't be afraid to be awful."

If you believe the movies, the only acts of kindness you'll ever encounter will be at the hands of people too dumb to use those hands as anything more complicated than big fleshy spoons.

I'm having an increasingly difficult time believing any movie where characters get trapped in a cliched horror situation and react like they've never heard of zombies or Jason. I don't care how stupid I look, if I'm out in the woods and some creep's hanging around, I'm building a fort out of knives and a gun out of other guns.

If we were in some strange me-niverse where my reaction to a movie were all that mattered, nothing new would have released this week.

Covering a popular blockbuster in a space I usually reserve for the neglected and obscure is a little like filling an issue of Dungeon Master's Quarterly with discussions about how underrated World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2 are.

Really all that needs to be said about Inception is "Just go see it, you fools! You fools!"

The blank space at the end of this sentence represents how much I care that a beloved children's classic like The Sorcerer's Apprentice has been exploited for a modern-day "boom! boom! KABLOWIE" Disney movie:

You know how when you kick a guy's head off, and it doesn't go as far as you thought, or the hair flops in a silly way, and it just doesn't feel as good as it should have?

If you spend any time at all thinking about the original Predator, and Lord knows I have, you'll reach the inevitable conclusion it was the outcome of government conspiracy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a romantic comedy in possession of a good nature will be hated by teen boys as if it were made of showering and the plague.

Much like lying down on the job, following the crowd gets a bad rap.

Praise heavens we live in the DVD era.

If the best surprises are the ones that come out of nowhere, I don't understand why everyone gets so upset when I cut their brake lines.

Time may not be cyclical, but you can count on one thing: every month, except when I don't feel like it or I forget to update my Netflix queue, you'll get a dose of Big Awful Friday.