Jennifer 8. Lee's recent book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a bit like her subject matter: slightly enjoyable, but mostly bland, trite, and unworthy of the meal it evokes. The book is presented as an inquiry into the identity of Chinese food in America, but she unnecessarily mixes uninteresting passages...

Spike Jonze had a pretty impeccable record, from directing Christopher Walken's triumphal dance in the video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," to producing MTV's transcendently stupid pain-porn Jackass, to his magnificent collaborations with Charlie Kaufman on Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Nothing about that remotely suggests that he...

You probably didn't see Ong-Bak 2, the prequel to spectacular 2003 film that introduced American audiences to muay thai, the Thai national martial art. Filmed in an almost distractingly slick style, with slow-motion replays of its hero's most eye-popping stunts, it made a star of Tony Jaa and a minor...

Grant Heslov's movie The Men Who Stare At Goats is a good premise stuck in a mess of a movie. Based on a stranger-than-fiction book about paranormal research within the U.S. military, it should be a black comedy about the lengths to which our army will go to kill people....

I'm a fan of Nathan Rabin -- really, of all the critics at The Onion AV Club. There's no source I trust more, not because I always agree but because I know exactly where they stand. In 500 words of praise or pan, I can get an exact, nearly...

Christy Marx isn't a household name, but she's a writer who's had success in nearly every medium. Among her more popular works were the 1980s television show Jem & the Holograms and two point-and-click adventure games for Sierra On-Line in the early 1990s, but a glance at her IMDB and...

Judd Apatow's new movie, Funny People, is more ambitious and less successful than his previous films, the easy-to-digest and massively popular romantic comedies The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Funny People is a sort of message movie, a take on the classic story about a dying man trying...

His strong falsetto and iconic dancing made Michael Jackson the best-selling singer of all time, the self-described "King of Pop" who bought the Beatles catalogue and married Elvis Presley's daughter. But he spent his last years in arrears, reclusivity, court cases, and tabloid headlines. He died at the age of...

Seth Gordon is a young documentarian, director of King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a very entertaining documentary about Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell, two men in pursuit of the all-time record for the original "Donkey Kong" arcarde game. It grossed less than $1 million in theaters, but achieved...

Paul Masvidal has been playing metal for a long time. Coming out of the Florida metal community, he played with the seminal death metal band Death, and he and his childhood friend Sean Reinert founded the band Cynic way back in the late 1980s. After one landmark album, 1994's Focus,...

The band Psychostick is somewhat devoted to metal, and seriously devoted to food. Their latest album, Sandwich, released on May 5, has about as many food songs than Weird Al Yankovic's Food Album and Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food combined. As the band explains on "Too Many...

For nearly three years, I was a weekly customer of the Hunan Palace Chinese buffet one block from where I work. Week in, week out, I would sit in a booth with a book, they would bring me a Diet Coke and a fork, and I would have my...

One of the best metal albums of the decade quietly came out last November, Traced in Air by Cynic, their first album in a decade and a half.

The band Cynic was something like a progressive metal NWA: one classic album, a supergroup lineup that went...

The Woggles are one of Athens, Georgia's great rock bands, and they're one of the most fun bands you'll ever see. They have another album coming out later this year, and their last album, 2007's Rock and Roll Backlash is one of my favorite records of the last several years....

If you were watching Nickelodeon in the mid-'90s -- if you are a "Millenial," in other words -- you probably came home from school to watch The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a bizarre, surreal, heartfelt, hilarious little gem of a sitcom that evolved from a Nickelodeon ad campaign into...

In January, film critic David Denby published an essay called Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation. It's not a perfect book, but he's right. His book is a bit like Harry Frankfurt's popular essay "On Bullshit," which opened with the famous sentence, "One of the...

Miss March is a 90-minute road trip sex comedy from Fox Searchlight Pictures. As with other examples of the genre, like Road Trip and Sex Drive, you pretty much know what you're getting: naked breasts, some swear words, off-color jokes, and gross-out humor, and you can expect it won't be...

Mia Sara. For men of a certain age -- Generation Y, maybe -- those two words bring back a luminous smile from the haze of memory. She started her career with two impressive starring roles, becoming immortal when she played Sloan Peterson, Ferris's girlfriend in 1986's Ferris Bueller's Day Off....

It's Oscar season again. By this point, the litany of objections are almost a parody of a self-parody: the show's too long, the jokes are terrible, the self-congratulatory preaching to the choir gets harder to swallow every year, they get all the nominees and winners wrong, the endless celebrity gawking...

Handmade, frightening, beautiful, and full of wonder, Coraline is one of the best movies you'll see this year. Like a much gentler Pan's Labyrinth, it is a horror movie for children, one which does not soften its chills with laughter, but never stoops to cheap thrills. It is a simple...