Agh, crap – I hate being right sometimes. If, like me, you watched the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s latest “Shutter Island” and started to worry almost immediately, well I’ve got some bad news. The New York Times has confirmed your deepest cinematic fears. Personally, I’m still blaming the curse of face-still-too-small-for-his-head actor Leonardo DeCaprio, which – I think you’ll find – is the only rational explanation for the gradual decline of one of the true giants of modern cinema.

Hey, are you a single Wordsmoker?  Me too.  Wouldn’t it be nice to snuggle up with a loved one and watch a movie?  WELL STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT – YOU ARE FUCKING SINGLE.  So rather then just watch movies and cry about how they are all SOOOO in love, I have decided to help us all out and take notes on dating, according to the movies.  First up, the obvious choice – The Ugly Truth – in listicle format to make it easier for everyone.

Look, sometimes we all need a silly movie about pretty people in pretty clothes amid pretty settings. But frequently, romantic comedies suffer from what one might call the Pretty Woman syndrome: sure, it’s fun while one watches it, but afterward one is left with the cold hard reality animating the story – what Rachel Leigh Cook’s character called, in the one good line in She’s All That, “that whole hooker thing.”

In light of “The Book of Eli” and my not-quite-sober boredom on Sunday night, I offered a tweetblast on post-apocalyptic movie truisms:

#NOFUTUREFILMS.

Find them there, or play along here.

In #NOFUTUREFILMS …

Hello there Young Wordwalker! Did you go and see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace? I did, and I haven’t watched it ever again. It’s not even worth illegally downloading, which is a fact. But imagine someone summed up everything you thought wrong with that movie, and then critiqued that movie for over 70 minutes, using a voice which seems to be a mixture of Dr Zoidberg, Walter Matthau and all the while emoting like a slightly-less-insane Cliff Yablonski? Then you’d have perfection, and some sort of revenge.

A piece of video editing, originally posted on the blog at Film Freak Central. Reposted here for fellow Wordsmokers to parse and fling boogers at.

Man, I hope this doesn’t suck. I love these two. And James Franco and Mila Kunis. Please don’t suck.

It’s not the apocalypse we need to worry about–it’s the inevitable thereafter.

The Road is on its way–finally–to a theater near you (November 25th) and the expected debate after its limited prerelease via the film festival circuit is already topical and typical: Which is better? The book or the film? A predictable back-and-forth that momentarily ignores that each stands on its own merits; it’s the ages-old apples and oranges analogy. That said, it’s worth discussing what the marvel of celluloid has to offer a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of literature written by a still-living legend.

Using an even older picture than Nikki Finke’s, here is the very biased, incomplete, selective Wordsmoker Entertainment Lasso. While it’s not fiction, it’s still scary.

Roundup sounded too complete.

Hugh Jackman will not be hosting the Oscars this year as there has been an epidemic of “Jazz Hands” amongst tween Wolverine fans.

At the Doha/Tribeca Film Festival, Mira Nair said “If we don’t make our own stories, nobody else will,” about Amelia. This quote is totally taken out of context but is ridiculous even in context.

What is the value of, say, the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet - when Franco Zeffirelli, Mel Gibson and Glenn Close are the real value-adds of your production? And seriously – Alicia Silverstone vs. Jane Austen? One merely jotted down some words – the other uses vast creativity to interpret them. And which came first – the sublime acting of John Travolta, or the brilliance of L. Ron Hubbard? You ask yourself – who am I to say?

Fellow Wordsmokers:

The youngest of the Spys family warns me this may be a day late and a dollar short for this savvy group, but I am highly recommending Interview Project at DavidLynch.com. for several reasons: 1) I find it entertaining; 2) It is a damn cool presentation of humanity and the human condition; and 3) Like writing this, watching is a great distraction from things more productive.

Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian maybe got out the wrong side of the bed, or maybe it’s just because he had to sit through “Inglourious Basterds” again after a re-cut, but – wow – he lays the shit into Tarantino here. Even if you’ve read every bad review out there, it’s still nice to see some vitriol used in a cutting manner. Even under the image used in the article