I pity the fool!

For April Fool's Day over at Popdose, I compiled a list of films featuring, what else, fools -- both the comic and the tragic. (Sarah Palin's not on there because she hasn't made a movie, although I'm sure that's coming.) It was tough to narrow down, but here's what I came up with:

• Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) in Lethal Weapon 2
• Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) in Arsenic and Old Lace
• Fredo Corleone (John Cazale) in The Godfather, Part II
• Igor (Marty Feldman) in Young Frankenstein
• Carl Spackler (Bill Murray) in Caddyshack

And I already thought of someone I forgot: Stephen Stucker as Johnny in Airplane! "Look, there's a sale at Penny's!"

Thanksgiving: 'We would be honored if you would join us.'

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope your dinner is full of good food, stimulating conversation and relatives who don't make you pray the meal would just end already so you could get to hiding in the den, watching football with your pants unbuttoned. You know who you are.

But even if it is bad, keep in mind that your dinner could be worse: It could be like the one Han Solo got invited to in The Empire Strikes Back:



In honor of Thanksgiving, I revisit that troublesome gathering along with some other memorable cinematic dinners for my latest Farkakte Film Flashback column at Popdose.com.

Han, no slave to social etiquette, shoots at Vader with his laser blaster, but Vader absorbs the blasts into his glove, raising the question: Why don’t they make the stormtroopers’ uniforms out of whatever that glove is made of?

Read it tonight while you're chawing on that leftover drumstick.

[Image: I-Mockery.com]

Wait, does 'Bio-Dome' count as a biopic?

Given the less than spectacular reviews for the new Amelia Earhart biopic, it's entirely possible that Monday's Variety headline will be "Amelia crashes and burns at the box office." And that would be their right.

Still, if nothing else it inspired me to take a walk down biopic lane over at Popdose.com, revisiting some more successful biographical films, and some, well, like The Doors:

Ah, The Doors. How could it have been any worse, really? By the fourth or fifth time a suicidal Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) was shown hanging out of a window or off a fire escape, I felt like yelling, “Just let go already!”

Read the rest over at Popdose.

What Michael Moore needs in his next movie is a giant robot

In my latest for Popdose.com, I offer a random list of five business movies I deem worthy of the key to the executive washroom, in honor of the release of Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. (Which I'm sure is more depressing than any of them, since Michael Douglas doesn't get arrested at the end.)

Among them is probably the greatest boardroom drama of the last 25 years. Yes, I'm referring to Robocop.

Robocop is a lot of things: ultraviolent action flick, cynical yet increasingly prescient futuristic satire, the last great Nancy Allen movie. But when you get right down to it, it’s a boardroom drama, featuring a boardroom where there was a very good chance you’d be shot 4,000 times by a killer robot. (Show of hands: How many of you have been in a meeting where you were secretly hoping that robot would turn up and put you out of your misery? Thought so.)

Read the whole thing at Popdose.