Major Tom gets short shrift — Moonage Daydream wants to be both a documentary and a concert film. It doesn’t succeed as either. Brett Morgen’s new film about David Bowie is a spectacle. It’s nearly two and a half hours of eye and ear candy. IMAX visuals and titanic sound in an overwhelming swirl. If all…

And make your own endings — We have more entertainment now than we ever did before. Thanks to an overabundance of streaming services, we’ve got scripted television out the wazoo. Stories, stories, and more stories. So many stories. One of the things stories do now that they didn’t do before is spread continuity across multiple shows…

Help for the aged and the addle-brained — I was a kid/teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’m also a boy. My cultural touchstones are, amongst other things, the movies of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Dungeons & Dragons, the very first tabletop roleplaying game. …

A look back at Spielberg’s UFO opus — I love the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unlike some of you, I was old enough to see it in the theater during its initial run. “Encounters” came out in 1977, the same year as Star Wars. …

Life is too damn short — A while back, Scott Woods wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled “How About We Just Don’t Watch the ‘Game of Thrones’ Prequel?” I don’t think I’d ever read Woods before but, from the headline alone, I knew he and I were simpatico. I have no intention of…

Don’t let Rian Johnson convince you otherwise — I’m going to say something now that will shock some of you… The Star Wars sequel trilogy is worse than the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Way worse. Shitting on the prequels was one of the Internet’s favorite past-times for many, many years. Hell, to some extent, it still is. It…

The show that started it all — You’ll never see anything amazing on either Ancient Aliens or The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Neither show will have a world-class Big Reveal. It’s just not gonna happen. Or, if it did, you’d hear about it way in advance. If the History Channel ever caught something irrefutable on camera, they…

How Tinseltown was almost in Long Beach, California — At a nondescript intersection in Long Beach, California Hollywood began. Between 1913 and 1918, all four corners of 6th and Alameda were home to Balboa Studios, the first movie studio west of Chicago. During those years, the company made over 1,000 films and was the city’s largest employer. …

Comeback vehicles for the fallen star — Will Smith’s favorable reputation took a serious hit at March’s Academy Awards. I don’t have to remind anyone of the Slap Heard ‘Round the World. What should we do? Should we throw Smith out with the bath water? …