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Alex Remington
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Alex Remington writes about baseball at Yahoo Sports Big League Stew and Fangraphs. He occasionally blogs about pop culture at Remingtonstein.

Blog Entries by Alex Remington

Apocalypto: Mel Gibson's Insane Triumph, a Triumphant Action Epic Shot Entirely in Mayan

(30) Comments | Posted March 15, 2010 | 1:51 AM

When it comes to Mel Gibson, it's hard to separate the man from his work. When most people think of him now, they think of two things: his anti-Semitic ravings one night, and The Passion of the Christ (both of which South Park memorialized in the award-winning "The Passion...

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Just Rent The Wire:Brooklyn's Finest Is a Mediocre Cop Movie.

(4) Comments | Posted March 7, 2010 | 10:25 AM

This is the world we live in: any time you make a movie about morally conflicted cops battling charismatic drug dealers on violent city streets, you're going to draw comparisons to The Wire -- and almost inevitably, your movie will come up short. At times, Brooklyn's Finest is gleefully...

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Alice in Wonderland: An Unnecessary Adaptation That's Merely Decent

(11) Comments | Posted March 6, 2010 | 1:27 PM

Ever since Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was announced, fierce debates have taken place about whether he should even have attempted such an oft-adapted story. Burton's gotten to the point in his career where he can pretty much do what he wants, and what he wants is the same thing...

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The Sword in the Stone: Better Than Narnia and Harry Potter, T.H. White's Classic is One of the Great Works of the 20th Century

(1) Comments | Posted March 5, 2010 | 6:17 PM

It's hard to overstate the Disney effect on modern storytelling. Their princess retellings of classic fairy tales and children's literature, whether collected by oral folklorists like the Grimms or written by 19th century authors like Hans Christian Anderson or Robert Louis Stevenson, scrubbed most of the sex and violence and...

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Hackers: A Comically Inept Movie With Perhaps the Worst Computer Visuals of the '90s

(16) Comments | Posted March 2, 2010 | 12:33 AM

Once upon a time, the word "hacker" had a sort of outlaw cachet. At the beginning of the boom of the internet and World Wide Web -- say, the early '80s to the late '90s -- computers were ubiquitous but mysterious, seemingly limitless in capacity. And hackers were the wizards...

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Interview with Will McRobb, Co-Creator of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," One of the Best Kid's Shows in TV History

(1) Comments | Posted February 21, 2010 | 10:12 PM

It's mighty strange
You're looking happily deranged
[lyrics incomprehensible]
Or have you picked your target yet?
Hey Sandy!
--"Hey Sandy," Polaris

If you were in school in the mid-1990s, you may remember those lyrics -- including the impossible-to-understand third line -- as the theme song to one of the strangest...

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The Last Mimzy: Stories: Well-Thought Out But Poorly Written WWII-Era Sci-Fi

(4) Comments | Posted February 21, 2010 | 1:52 PM

Henry Kuttner is one of the lost masters of science fiction, according to Ray Bradbury, who wrote the introduction to a posthumous collection of Kuttner's short fiction. Writing under numerous pseudonyms (and often with his wife, C.M. Moore as a collaborator) for numerous low-rent sci-fi publications in the '30s, '40s,...

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Sam and Max Hit the Road: One of the Great Comic Book Games Ever

(3) Comments | Posted February 20, 2010 | 1:54 AM

Steve Purcell has done just about everything, and he's done it with Sam and Max -- a six-foot dog and a toothy rabbit with a taste for carnage. Purcell's not quite a legend, but he probably should be. In the late 1980s, he briefly freelanced for Marvel, and on...

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What Dreams May Come: An Original Vision of the Afterlife, Poorly Cast But Gorgeously Rendered

(2) Comments | Posted February 15, 2010 | 5:37 PM

The greatest crime committed by the 1998 film What Dreams May Come is its excessive, nearly humorless earnest, personified by its star, Robin Williams. That's certainly better than the alternative -- the sort of emotion-denying ubersnark with which we're all too familiar -- but it deadens the impact of what...

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Wristcutters: A Love Story a Beautifully Morbid Romantic Comedy With Little Romance and No Comedy, but Plenty of Imagination

(0) Comments | Posted February 14, 2010 | 9:38 PM

A movie's premise might be its most important piece. If you have a killer premise, it's hard to make a movie any worse than mediocre; by contrast, if you have a terrible premise, it's hard to make a movie any better than mediocre. Wristcutters: A Love Story, based on a...

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The Monster Squad: See It Instead of The Wolfman This Weekend, It's One of the Best Kids' Horror Movies

(2) Comments | Posted February 12, 2010 | 4:06 PM

The Monster Squad has a ridiculously easy premise for an '80s movie: bring together Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and then get a team of kids to try to stop them. It's sort of like The Goonies (rating: 65) with monsters...

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Extract: Mike Judge's Latest is Also His Worst, But It's Still Pretty Good

(2) Comments | Posted February 10, 2010 | 3:28 PM

Extract goes down smoothly, but there's not much there. Mike Judge's third live-action movie is a much more modest affair than the biting satire of the brilliant Office Space (rating: 88) or the uneven Idiocracy (rating: 78). It isn't quite clear who he's satirizing here, if anybody, which makes this...

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Beyond Human: An Exploration of the Human Future of Robotics, Long on Sci-Fi but Short on Sci-Fact

(0) Comments | Posted February 10, 2010 | 12:43 AM

I recently reviewed Almost Human, a book that followed the Carnegie Mellon robotics department's frequent frustration with building robots in the present day. Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs muses about the future, quoting futurists and science fiction and reasoning through thought...

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Interview with Nina Paley, Animator and Director of Sita Sings the Blues, a Fantastic Jazz Musical Retelling of the Ramayana

(0) Comments | Posted February 2, 2010 | 1:37 AM

American cartoonist Nina Paley has one of the hottest indie movies around, Sita Sings the Blues (rating: 86), her animated retelling of the classic Hindi story called the Ramayana, set to the jazz songs of 1920's torch singer Annette Hanshaw. Released for free on the internet in 2008,...

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The Secret of NIMH: It's Just Not Quite as Good As You Remembered

(25) Comments | Posted January 31, 2010 | 12:21 AM

Whenever someone other than Disney wanted to make a Disney-like animated movie, they usually came to Don Bluth. After a long career at Disney, beginning with work on Sleeping Beauty (rating: 90) in 1959, in the late '70s, he made a series of movies with all the Disney design principles,...

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Popular History of Human Evolution That Actually Contributes to Understanding

(12) Comments | Posted January 30, 2010 | 2:58 PM

Popular nonfiction is a tricky beast. It's one thing for someone to write a memoir, or a long-form investigation that the journalist-author has personally researched and reported. But it's hard to boil down complex science into readable prose for laypeople that omits the jargon, math, and much of the...

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Escape from New York: Slighty Dated, but Still a Fantastic Proto-Action Blockbuster

(4) Comments | Posted January 28, 2010 | 11:44 PM

John Carpenter just might be the best filmmaker of the 1980s. With 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 (rating: 85), and 1978's Halloween, Carpenter began an astonishingly productive decade, establishing himself as perhaps the best thriller director and best horror director in Hollywood. The list of hits over the next 10...

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Sita Sings the Blues: A Vibrant Ramayana Retelling with Humor and Pathos

(1) Comments | Posted January 25, 2010 | 12:41 AM

Cartoonist Nina Paley has a distinctive style in her strips, whether she's drawing couples or cats: round, expressive faces with easy, honest smiles and occasionally painful comeuppances. Paley has a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of sarcasm or snark. She spent six years making Sita...

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The Book of Eli: An Okay Post-Apocalyptic Movie Nearly Sunk by its Ambivalent Christianity

(47) Comments | Posted January 24, 2010 | 2:31 AM

As movie premises go, it's hard to top a post-apocalyptic action movie. Every scene and setpiece is a perfect empty canvas for a lunatic art department to create a frightening, barely recognizable vision of our world, to tell a story with burnt-out rubble of how humanity destroyed itself, as we...

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Outlander: Somehow, Unfortunately, Low-Budget Beowulf + Aliens Isn't Awesome

(1) Comments | Posted January 22, 2010 | 12:25 AM

I criticized the Korean monster flick The Host as a movie that understood its genre but didn't add much of its own. The same can be said of Howard McCain's 2008 movie Outlander, which takes an unbeatable premise -- Beowulf with intersteller alien monsters playing the part of...

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