Mystery Science Theater 3000 just sounds like something nerds would like. It elevated low-budget to high-concept: a couple of guys cracking jokes at bad old public domain movies, dressed up in a ridiculous science fiction premise. (The premise was explained in the terrific theme song, which gets stuck in...

Every once in a great while, a work of art comes along of such shockingly immediate greatness that it demands a piece of eternity upon the moment of its arrival: Casablanca, or Toy Story, or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Susanna Clarke's brilliant Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell....

"My outer life is that of a rock and roll guitarist and minor rock star... but that's not my main interest in being on earth," says musical mystic Richard Lloyd. "Everybody has to have a gig, so that's mine." His next gig is tonight, Thursday the 14th, at the Velvet...

Just about everyone knew Skip Caray's voice. It was nasal and throaty, and thanks to the long reach of TBS, it was on just about every night for much of the year, whether the Braves mostly lost (in the '80s) or won (in the '90s), and TBS's entire programming schedule...

When I was growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read Odyssey magazine religiously, put up a space shuttle poster on my wall, envied friends who went off to Space Camp, wore out an old VHS copy of "The Dream is Alive," and, once or twice a year,...

It would be hard for a movie to enter theaters with more buzz to live up to than The Dark Knight. Critical raves were near-unanimous, crystallizing around praise for the haunted last performance of Heath Ledger, which more than a few whispered was so unsettlingly brilliant that it may have...

In a disappointing movie summer, two critically acclaimed popcorn directors stand out. The summer movie season officially kicked off with a flick by the master himself, Steven Spielberg's only modestly entertaining addition to the Indiana Jones series. We had to wait two more months for a really satisfying action...

He stood 6'6", perhaps, and his protruding stomach seemed nearly as wide as his legs were long. His scraggly, unkempt beard reached nearly that far, though his t-shirt rarely did. Somewhere beneath the tip of the beard and the tip of the shirt you could usually see his gut sticking...

Pixar's magnificent WALL-E might be their best movie yet, and that's saying something. It's a robot love story that's more touching and more human than anything else in theaters, and it might be the best romantic comedy since High Fidelity. The genre-bending is even more remarkable than that, as its...

Saturday Night Live was never better than in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a large cast, an outrageously talented writing staff, and a near-monopoly on the young comics who would go on to dominate the television and movies of the next two decades. During that time, two names...

Baseball, America's National Pastime, has long been infatuated with its long, illustrious history. Box scores are largely unchanged since their invention by cricket enthusiast Henry Chadwick in 1863. The Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves are in their third centuries and 139th seasons as continually operating ballclubs; they are five...

Today is Gene Wilder's 73rd birthday. One of America's greatest comic actors, he hasn't done much in front of the cameras in the past decade. He's been writing, living relatively peacefully with a wife he adores, occasionally appearing in a feature article somewhere. He beat cancer a couple years ago...

Ben Stiller sucks. But he didn't used to.

I used to lump Ben Stiller in with all the other prominent cases of comic arrested development: Adam Sandler, Jack Black, and Will Ferrell. Four "actors" whose acting repertoire at this point in their careers consists of only one character, the...

Thanks to three big-budget '80s thrill rides, Indiana Jones is one of the most iconic characters ever to grace the big screen. Indiana Jones movies basically define the big-budget thrill ride, the summer blockbuster, the popcorn movie. Now, following incessant prodding by George Lucas, Indy's once again gracing the big...

Odds are, you've seen David Pasquesi or heard his voice, though you may not realize it. Of the seventeen movies he's appeared in, six were directed by fellow Second City alums, including three by fellow Chicagoan Harold Ramis. He played Stew the Meat Man in the television show and...

Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Steven Spielberg. In an era where conquest is achieved not though territorial annexation but through cultural ubiquity, Spielberg is king. And now his most famous creation is back, looking out from billboards, signs and posters, sporting a case of 27 year-old three-day shadow:...

George W. Bush: You guys are awesome.
Harold & Kumar: No, you're awesome!
George W. Bush: No, you guys are awesome!
--dialogue from the movie

What is courage? Courage is making a movie called Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay in which George W. Bush is...

Studio exec 1: Hey, Jackie Chan and Jet Li have never been in a movie together before.* We should do a movie where they team up.

Studio exec 2: That's brilliant! But the main character should be played by a white kid who can't act.

At least, I'm...

I was born in Atlanta in late 1983, where, for the past two decades, the local baseball team had been one of the most hopeless in the country. Then a funny thing happened when I was 7: the Braves went from worst to first, narrowly lost one of the most...

Charlton Heston died tonight at the age of 83. One of the great leading men of Hollywood, a man of limited range but unlimited charisma, whose wealth of memorable screen performances fortunately overwhelmed his increasingly outspoken politics, Heston never quietly enjoyed his fame, but never squandered it.

Charlton Heston's defining...