Transformers: Dark of the Moon – 1 Bucket

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a movie made up exclusively of interjections, a lot of plot but no story. It is tempting to diagnose the director, notorious Hollywood hack Michael Bay, with a severe case of ADD, but there is so little variety to all the shit that happens in the movie that doing [...]

The Great Buck Howard – 2 1/2 Buckets

The Great Buck Howard is the epitome of pleasant, but disposable filmmaking, amiably acted and assembled but utterly inconsequential in nature. John Malkovich plays the titular washed-up “mentalist”—don’t dare call him a magician—who made 61 appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” but can’t book Leno’s program, leaving him to play only half-capacity dates in Podunk [...]

Burn After Reading – 1 Bucket

There are those who have never quite been on Joel and Ethan Coen’s wavelength in terms of comedy, but I’m not in that group. In fact, I’m as big a Coen Brothers fan as anybody; I even dug their critically-lambasted Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. But I flat-out didn’t get why 95 percent of the material in [...]