J.J. Abrams

A teeny little feature in the Times' Home & Garden section about parents who turned their house into a maze of hidden puzzles, games and treasures for their four pre-teen kids will be a movie. J.J. Abrams (producer of Lost, Cloverfield, etc.) has signed on to produce, and two scribes (neither is the article's author, Penelope Green) will whip up a script, according to Reuters. The premise seems a little, uh, Chronicles of Narnia-ish (closets leading to other worlds and all) and maybe a little like Jumanji too. But as long as they don't hire Robin Williams for the movie, Mr. Abrams should do alright at the box office.  read more »

On Saturday night at Tribeca Film Festival’s premiere of Tennessee, we caught up with the righteous and stern Lieutenant Daniels from The Wire, also known as Lance Reddick.  read more »

Oh, poor New York. It just isn’t getting any better for you at the movies, is it?

After seeing I am Legend, with the haunted empty Manhattan streets, and the rabid virus-mutated zombies, and the German Shepherd, etc., you might think you’d be prepared to watch Cloverfield.

And you’d think wrong!

The top secret J.J. Abrams produced-project has had people speculating for months about just what was going to be destroying New York this time. Weather has been done already. Germs too. And terrorism … oh wait, that was real ... and for anyone who spent time in New York in the fall of 2001, certain scenes in this movie will feel almost unbearably too close.

Do any of us really need to watch a building collapse downtown, only to send up a rolling, menacing thick cloud of dust? Or, to see dazed and traumatized people wandering about with ash on their face?  read more »

Cialis, Viagra, Spanish Fly, whatever—nothing could save the Bucket List (No. 7) from a limp performance this weekend. The movie, starring geriatric gents Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, may have managed a robust national opening, but it was blown away here in the city like a couple of old farts on the observatory deck of the Empire State Building during a wind advisory. At 10 theaters, the film averaged a listless $9,000 per screen. Everyone’s seen Steel Magnolias: Pull the plug!  read more »

About 10 minutes into the new Will Smith movie I Am Legend, which opens in Manhattan theaters on Friday, my heart rate went up to about 200 and stayed there for the next hour and a half.

Staggering back out into Times Square's holiday crush from the screening room it seemed we'd just been through an aerobic workout before even facing the crowds of tourists and commuters--surprisingly not zombies.

And the lingering questions were weird ones. Would corn naturally grow in Madison Square Park if humanity were wiped out, or did Will Smith have to plant it there himself? Should I get a German shepherd?

But what really stuck was this: why is Hollywood (and, it sometimes seems, much of the rest of the world the world) so keen to see New York City obliterated?  read more »

• A bunch of geeks join the new J.J. Abram’s Star Trek movie.
• Why can’t die-hard fans quit Weezer? MTV lets us know.
• Guilty pleasure movies: ones that the critics hate, but we love. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter Is Dead, anyone?
• Proust was a neuroscientist. “[I]n understanding the brain, artists and writers got there first, anticipating many major scientific discoveries in their work.”
• Norman Mailer wrote his own obituary for Boston Magazine in 1979. “Gloria Steinem stated: ‘A pity. He was getting ready to see the light.’”