As one more sign of my undying devotion to my readers, which is to say a moviegoing subset of people who're bored at work and are too wussy to risk pornography, I just caught a flick in a city I don't even live in.

What with life being a nonstop assault of baffling choices and thundering confusion, I usually find it barrel-throwingly annoying when a movie does the same thing. If I want things I can't possibly understand, I'll just comb my hair into my eyes and sneak into a high school classroom.

This weekend when I faced the choice between a kid and a kickass van, I went with the van.

Time travel is obsessed with two things: killing Hitler, and preserving the non-Hitler part of the past at all costs.

I'm about to call this movie a laughable pile of biting-its-own-tail lunacy, but let's get one thing straight: I like films that aren't afraid to go nuts.

Greetings, citizens of now.

My memory of the video game Prince of Persia involves jumping, jumping over pits of spikes, falling into pits of spikes, falling again, and then quitting to play Goldrunner instead.

As soon as I popped in 2005's A Sound of Thunder, it demanded I watch it.

Hanging out with obnoxious people can be exciting, but sooner or later you realize it's mostly just obnoxious.

If you're thinking of putting together a zombie movie, my advice to you is to set it someplace totally new.

For me, the definitive Robin Hood will always be Disney's.

Logically, time travel is impossible, or people from the future would already be here.

"Iron Man 2 is just like Iron Man, but with way more robots" sounds like my dreams.

Most times when a movie sucks, it’s because it lacks something.

Because I can, I'm going to complain about the "dream sequence fake-out" some more.

Justice is hard to come by. Car crashes strike drunken texters and defensive-driving mothers alike. Innocent men end up on death row. And in the greatest tragedy of them all, sometimes awesome movies make fewer millions than the millions it cost to make them.

Movie trends are strange things.

One time I tried to build a car out of four turtles and a whip.

Every single day, movies inspire Earth's impressionable youth to fight back against German terrorists, stand toe-to-toe with slavering alien queens and march into Mordor with nothing more than a couple knives and a bag of salt.

People bitch about their daily rituals a lot like the solution isn't totally obvious.

Kids' brains don't just lie to their parents, they lie to themselves. Hot dogs taste great!

The problem with trying to make jokes about the '80s is the decade was itself one big joke.

It's a common flaw of epics, especially fantasy epics so long they make the Bible look like a Chick tract, to pad their stories with a lot of action-filled tangents with little to no connection to the main story.

There's a term in this business called "burying the lede" for when you downplay the most interesting part of your story in favor of other facts. A real-life example would be if we went out on a date and I talked about yarn for two hours before mentioning I could knit you a fully functional private jet/kitten.

You know who doesn't take requests anymore? DJs, MTV and serial killers.

As a measure of how backwards we still are, think about all the things in your house you could fix with other things in your house.

Steampunk, for you non-geeks out there, is that brass-and-wood science fiction subgenre beloved by everyone who thinks they look cool in a derby.

We all know the Iraq wars were started over oil.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone I'm probably the greatest man alive.

Keeping up with every movie worth watching is a real Sisyphean task.

I have a strong bias against any story or world that gets revisited too often, which explains my aversion to both 12-volume fantasy series and getting up in the morning.

If you're romantically involved with someone in the same profession, I can understand the urge to collaborate.

I want you all to know that, if I mysteriously disappear sometime in the next few days, it was probably Kevin Smith.

New subgenre I'll be looking out for: movies — especially remakes — that totally ignore the fundamental question of their premise.

If I had any ambition, first I would make that colossal plate of nachos I've been thinking about for the last hour.

Woe be to anyone who has to set a scene in an insane asylum.

It’s an insider secret that us movie critics never talk smack about action stars for fear they’ll land their private jets in the gravel driveway of our trailer parks, front-kick our doors off their tin hinges, and pound us into movie critic-gravy.

Sorry this one's coming at you a day late, dear audience.

Public perception of science fiction is kinda schizophrenic.

I've come to the conclusion that, with the exception of Point Break, for every scene you place on a beach, your movie ends up 10% more boring.

It's 3 p.m. on a Saturday, and I'm lying on the floor still in my pajamas.

For everyone who's tired of corporations being the bad guys in modern thrillers, I just want to remind you that, back in 1997, Cyberdyne Systems launched an artificial intelligence program that ended up killing us all in a nuclear fire.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but what they don't say is your imitators will by definition be undertalented squad of hacks who drag your work down with crummy-by-association.

Hey, let's play that game we all spent most of our childhood doing where we're sexy outlaws on a mission of personal revenge.

Behold my unparalleled prognosticative skill: two weeks ago, I predicted angels were one of the next big things.

The motives behind certain movies--especially the experimental, impressionistic, or disturbing ones--can be as inscrutable as those of your big brother. And like when your brother decides to punch you, the experience will be painful, no matter how much he thinks you need it.

Top three skills in the postapocalyptic world: 1) bulletmaking, 2) sword- and/or stick-fighting, 3) sauce cooking.

Since science fiction is about the future, a place we'd all like to get to somehow, be it via lightning-powered machines or by the regular day-by-day kind of time travel, you would think we'd be interested in seeing visions of it that'd be fun to live in.

In my ongoing quest to be the biggest dork in the room, I try to keep up on the recent trends in sci-fi and fantasy.

There's something ridiculous about building a celebrity millionaire movie career around playing awkward, nerdy, no-friends virgins.