I know you can't tell this from my pretty pretty picture, but I wear contacts.

I'd hate to imagine what would happen to the entertainment industry if a well-meaning time traveler ever goes back and seduces Hitler's mom before he's born, thereby preventing World War II.

If modern government surveillance is so intrusive that even dopey action movies like Eagle Eye are calling it out, I say we rise up in revolution right now.

Blame it on the external genitals if you want, but the romantic comedy is just about my least favorite genre.

I've discovered yet another occupation hazard in the high-stress, high-stakes, hos-and-Lear-jets lifestyle of the professional guy who sits in a theater for a couple hours a week and then tells everyone else what that experience was like. (This is how I think of myself. I finish, on average, two thoughts a day.)

Let's assume, for a moment, that like most people on this spinning disaster of a planet, your life is a flaming pile of garbage.

What with my utter contempt for everything outside the glowing shell of my own person, I usually don't bother reading the reviews of those other, lesser critics and their other, lesser opinions.

Great cinema makes us ask big questions. In the case of College, we're made to ask the biggest of all: What did we do to deserve this?

As longtime readers know, I've got a thing for Vin Diesel.

Something about Frankenstein puts me in a good mood.

The nice thing about being a Star Wars nerd is that however nerdy you may be, you can count on there always being a bigger Star Wars nerd than you.

Latest example of a movie with a Two-Face Trailer: Tropic Thunder.

Considering the drug war itself is a ludicrous, destructive, racist campaign of tragedy and squandered resources, there haven't been many funny drug movies.

Dear Mr. Movie:

Between this job, where I catch 1-to-3 monster movies a month, and my job at a bookstore, where every other book I pick up is a paranormal romance about a half-vampire/half-werewolf/all-sexy chick whose quest to kill all the bad vampires can't fill the emptiness in her heart, I would swear there's something in humanity that doesn't want to be human.

In the spirit of Step Brothers, the latest comedy about the ever-hilarious adventures of the emotionally stunted American male, I irresponsibly finished this review a whole day later than I should have.

Contrary to the prevailing opinion of the hundreds of fan letters I receive each and every day, I don't know everything.

Our criteria here involved people with superpowers, so technically, a perfectly normal human such as Batman wouldn't qualify for this list.

If you had your druthers, what kind of supervillain would you be?

You know what's weird? Teeth. They're just little bones that live outside your skin.

As a movie critic, I sometimes have to make some pretty major sacrifices.

There will be nothing below this first line of text.

After seeing WALL-E, I'm left with a deep and unswerving grudge toward its makers: cartoon robots shouldn't be able to make adult humans choke up.

The trailers for Wanted made it look like The Lobotomy Matrix: people flying through windows in slow-mo, doing weird things with bullets, engaging in comically improbable car chases--dumb, in other words, but with a slim chance to be very, very fun.

In Trainspotting, Sick Boy introduced us to the Had It/Lost It Theory of musical criticism: Great bands, he says, have "it," which makes them great, but sooner or later they lose it, and once it's gone, you can never get it back.

I recently had a swarm of bees living in my front yard, so in those three months where I didn't leave the house, I became something of an expert on them.

I am thoroughly impressed by the mulligan taken with The Incredible Hulk.

Here it comes: Billy Madison is the Pulp Fiction of doofy ridiculous comedies.

These days, my favorite movies to go see are the ones where I have absolutely no idea whether they're going to shine like the sky or suck like a suck-monster.

On the scale of insanity ranging from sitting quietly on the couch to wearing the cushions for pants while rounding up a neighborhood dog ultra-army, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull rates somewhere around hosting a tea party inside your sofa-fort.

Though I once had a Wong Kar Wai poster in my bedroom, I hadn't seen one of his movies till this weekend.

I haven't read The Chronicles of Narnia since I was a little kid, but what I remember most is how deeply, deeply sad they made me.

I would hate to live in a David Mamet movie.

There are few things in life as exciting as the technicalities of the American legal system.

I'm not much for fate, but I do believe the name we're born with can determine a lot about the person we grow up to be.

The brilliance of recent superhero movies has been in linking talented, off-beat directors with an equally talented cast -- in other words, treating them as serious movies rather than Atrocious Pun Delivery Systems (a registered trademark of Joel Schumacher Productions).

When I look back on my notes for a movie that blew the proverbial big one, there's better than even odds they'll contain the phrase "OK so far."

Back in college, one of my roommates had a million dollar idea: The Fight Channel.

I think Al Pacino might actually be a dead person.

Next on our list of Guys Who Looked Like Dorks 10-15 Years Ago But Turned Out to Be Really Cool: that galoot from Wings and Ned and Stacey.

If anyone ever tells you life is boring or predictable, you tell them fifteen years ago George Clooney had nipples on his Batman suit, and today he's one of the heroes of the film world.

I'm getting tired of all these movies that aren't good enough to watch again but not bad enough to hate again.

Simon Pegg's set the bar awfully high for himself with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

At this point, I don't even remember for certain whether Shutter was advertised as "from the people who brought you The Ring," or if that was just the selling point for every other piece of J-horror in the last five years.

Like Superman, Batman, and all the greats, I have an alter-ego.

You know how Pitch Black was perfect and awesome, but David Twohy's next film, The Chronicles of Riddick, was a big crazy mess?

If the government didn't want stealing to be such a popular crime, then they should never have made it so damn cool.

In nerd terms (RIP, Gary Gygax), director Roland Emmerich wields a +5 vorpal sword against my critical abilities.

I'm not very interested in history, myself. For one, there are no zombies in it. That's not a world I want to live in.

At this point, I swear I've been seeing the trailers for Vantage Point since the days when all the actors looked the same because we hadn't evolved a second cell yet and it's really hard to tell one flagellate apart from another.