Jared Rasic

The first time I saw the trailer for The Watch (then called Neighborhood Watch) was two days after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. All you could really do is wince at the timing and feel sorry for everyone involved in the project. As the months progressed, the trailers focused more on the alien invasion plot line as opposed to the neighborhood watch aspects. It looked like maybe the film could avoid the negative comparisons it was receiving at the beginning of its marketing run.
As of press time, The Watch had flopped pretty horribly, making only $13 million in its opening weekend on a $68 million dollar budget. Some speculate that the movie bombed because of the neighborhood watch subject matter, which I don’t buy since the Aurora massacre had absolutely no negative effects on The Dark Knight Rises record breaking box office totals. I think The Watch is tanking because critical reviews are poor, word of mouth is nonexistent and everyone is still spending their movie budget on Batman. But it’s unfair to judge films on what they aren’t, so let’s look at what it is.

Hatfields & McCoys
Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton as dueling rednecks over five hours? Sounds like an acceptable way to spend a weekend to me. I’m sure the History Channel rushed this out to stores so they could make room for 12 more hours of American Pickers on their programming block—not that I’m complaining. Seriously though, this mini-series has Powers Boothe (Rapid Fire), Tom Berenger (Platoon) and a script by Ted Mann (Deadwood), so the pedigree is more than stellar enough to warrant a gigantic chunk of your life.

As the Spiderman franchise reboots and comes wall-crawling back into our lives, it seems like a good time to look back at some of the highlights and lowlights of comic over the last 35 years. I’m specifically focusing on the super hero movies based on comic books, or else this would just be 500 words on Unbreakable…the greatest of all super hero movies.

Wes Anderson doesn’t care if anyone likes his films. I think if the world stopped paying to see them, he would continue to make them, with his own money and show them to friends when they came over for dinner. He’s an auteur and one of the handful alive today like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke and a few others. As with those filmmakers, it’s usually easy to tell within the first minute when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Yet for some reason, critics single out Anderson for his distinctive style.

Imagine this: You get directions to a house in the suburbs where you’re instructed to pull into the garage, close the door and await further instructions. A man comes out of the house, takes you inside and orders you to shower and to “be thorough” with the soap. After cleaning yourself and putting on a very New Age white robe, you’re blindfolded, zip-cuffed and driven to an undisclosed location in the San Fernando Valley. Then, after doing a complicated secret handshake, you’re taken to another room with a dozen other people in robes. Then she appears, the woman you’re there to see. Maggie. A beautiful, blonde mystery. Maggie then tells you a story about how she traveled back in time from 2056 to save her friends from a series of calamitous events that will change the world. Maggie has followers, maybe including you now, and she wants to take you to a safe place.