Premiere magazine have announced their 20 Most Overrated Films Of All Time. In alphabetical order, here they are:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• American Beauty
• An American in Paris
• A Beautiful Mind
• Chariots Of Fire
• Chicago
• Clerks
• Easy Rider
• Fantasia
• Field Of Dreams
• Forrest Gump
• Gone With The Wind
• Good Will Hunting
• Jules and Jim
• Monster’s Ball
• Moonstruck
• Mystic River
• Nashville
• The Red Shoes
• The Wizard of Oz

Difficult to disagree with some of those choices. You ever tried to watch “American Beauty” a second time? It’s so pretentious. Less said about “A Beautiful Mind” the better. And surely “Chicago” didn’t deserve six oscars?

But I won’t have anyone rag on “Jules and Jim”, or “Gone With The Wind” or even “Clerks” for that matter. Anyone else see something they don’t think belongs on that list?

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You read that right. Eddie Murphy will be donning Axel Foley’s sneakers and sunglasses one more time for Beverly Hills Cop IV. It’s been 12 years since the third installment of the maverick Detroit cop’s adventures in L.A., and Murphy hasn’t been getting any younger. Will Foley still be chasing bad guys down the street and rolling over car bonnets? And does anyone still have Judge Reinhold’s (right) number?

Murphy had been settling into family friendly fluff like “Dr. Dolittle” and “Daddy Day Care” in recent years, as well as giving Donkey a voice in “Shrek”. So maybe he’s thinking one last action movie before it’s too late.

I’m not sure how excited people are going to get for Beverly Hills Cop IV (no one got that excited for Beverly Hills Cop III if I remember rightly) but this is good news if only because we’ll be hearing that theme tune one more time.

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Something has gone very wrong here, because Christopher Guest mockumentaries are supposed to be funny. It’s more or less guaranteed. “Best In Show”, “Waiting For Guffman”, “A Mighty Wind”, these are funny movies. “Spinal Tap” (which Rob Reiner directed, but Guest masterminded) was genius, so Guest and his troupe poking fun at Hollywood in “For Your Consideration” should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it was just too easy, because “FYC” doesn’t take sly digs at Hollywood, it takes violent stabs. Maybe they all just really hate their jobs (and why not? everybody else does) but this movie feels like one big long complaint about movies.

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Ever wondered what Kevin Smith has on his iPod? Me neither, but if he’s willing to share then I’m willing to read. The “Clerks” director originally submitted his ultimate tracklisting to Apple as part of iTunes Celebrity Playlist, but they turned it away because he’d gone into too much detail. They asked him to trim it down, he said no, and the thing went unpublished.

But now Smith has posted the list on his Silent Bob Speaks website, and turns out he’s my new favourite music critic. Read the full article here or read on for the playlist…

Read on »

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The theatrical trailer for Spidey’s third outing is currently the hottest property on iFilm.The webslinger isn’t looking too shabby, though the CGI scenes still resemble excerpts from a video game.

Thomas Haden Church has recovered from his Sideways hangover, to play the villain Sandman, who apparently killed poor old Uncle Ben. This makes Tobey Maguire mad enough to take on a very literal dark side, something which happens to every superhero sooner or later.

Fair play to Sam Raimi though. He’s stuck by this franchise for an entire trilogy instead of jumping ship just when things were getting interesting (I’m looking at you Bryan Singer).

The Spiderman 3 release date is set for May 4th 2007 in the US and the UK, so it’s some way off. But at least you don’t live in Bulgaria, where for some reason they have to wait until May 11th.

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Dancing penguins continued to tap dance their way to the top of the box office. “Happy Feet” was the winner of the Thanksgiving festivities, paying back its $100 million production budget in just two weeks, according to Box Office Mojo. The penguin’s chief competitor, the penguin-suited James Bond, still trailed just moments behind “Happy Feet” with a $31 million gross putting it at $94 million. While the super-spy has a little bit longer way to go to breaking its $150 million production budget, there’s little doubt Daniel Craig’s first outing was a critical success.

Tony Scott’s “Deja Vu” was a distant memory to the top two, however, at just over $20 million. And with the exception of the snow in “Happy Feet”, audiences seem unwilling to choke down the holiday season just yet - at least in the comedy department, with “Deck the Halls” opening with $12 million. Even further back, Darren Aronofsky’s long-awaited opened with $5.4 million next to Jack Black’s “Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny”, with $3.1 million.

The bottom rounded out with the mockumentary “For Your Consideration”, which just $2 million.

Next week sees the “The Nativity Story” opening alongside the Reynold-less “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj” (okay, he makes a cameo) and the horror-thriller “Turistas”.

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“Boston Legal” debuted last night after a several week hiatus, and personally, I can’t say I blame ABC for keeping “Boston Legal” for an extra couple of weeks or so, or at least, I can’t blame them too much.

“Hands” is once again in the plot, and at this point, I find myself questioning why they don’t just make Christian Clemenson a lead in the show. He already won an Emmy for his performance as Jerry “Hands” Espenson - it seems only natural to make him a part of the show, as currently Alan Shore is spending too much time backtracking to Jerry and not enough time engaging the rest of the cast. And yes, I know Jerry held a knife to Shirley’s throat last season, but c’mon, are you telling me there’s anyone crazier in this place than Denny Crane?

All ranting aside, the episode finds Alan and Jerry defending a mentally imbalanced woman suspected of hanging her ex-lover. Denny Crane not finds out Bethany is not her daughter, but that her mother is every bit as determined in pursing him as he is to Bethany. Denise is still reeling from Daniel Post’s death, and might just take Alan Shore on a pretty explicit offer. And of course, Brad and Jeff come to blows in the bathroom.

The ending, however, is the most dynamite addition - one which explains just why ABC held on to this morsel of “Boston Legal” for so long, as murdering pervert Lincoln kidnaps Shirley.

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There’s a virtual stocking stuffer of DVD releases which fall comfortably into the “Just In Time For the Holidays” category.

Among the most considerable release for comic geeks like myself is “Superman Returns”. But geeks should be aware of the Kevin Smith’s own return to View Askiew, “Clerks II”, which also hits DVD shelves today, along with “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder”. The CGI adventure “The Ant Bully” is also out, along with the Kane-starring “See No Evil”.

Season Five of “Ellen” is also available, as is season one of “Jamie Kennedy’s Blowin’ Up” and the first season of “St. Elsewhere”.

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I can see why certain critics have it in for the show, as yesterday’s part of last week’s episode seems haphazardly written. But yet the other part, and latter half, of “Studio 60″ was still just right up there with the standards of the last episode and the other well-done airings the show has seen.

Sometimes “Studio 60″ can be smart and other times it can be smarmy. For an example of the latter, there’s a bit in Jordan McDeere’s office where the character inexplicably and for no reason at all states “Race car is a palindrome.” What the heck does that even mean? Yes, I know a palindrome is word spelled the same backwards as it is forward, but what does it mean for Jordan’s character? Why did she even say it? There were quite a few lines like that here. I think sometimes Sorkin’s random dialogue is, unlike Joss Whedon’s pop culture-saturated Buffy scripting, more reliant on intellectual in-jokes. I don’t think Sorkin is doing this in purpose - the show’s chief characters had stated again and again that television should not be dumbed down - but I think sometimes Sorkin writes this jokes without so much of a life jacket, and they go down like the Titantic as a result.

But not all of Sorkin’s intellectually-inclined material is problematic. When wrapped in context and not asked to fill dead air, it can provided an intriguing insight into the characters. Take the introduction of mentor-writer Alex Dwyer (Simon Helberg) - Matt retorts he staged “Looking Back in Anger” in Dutch. Now, if you have read “Looking Back in Anger” and you can picture it in Dutch, you pretty much get a sparkling image of Alex Dwyer inside and out - brooding, difficult, random and ultimately loyal and well-intentioned. But if you haven’t read “Looking Back in Anger”, it doesn’t matter - because Sorkin bang-bang-bang dialogue more than compensates for the possibility.

By the way, I love the inclusion of writers Darius and Lucy into the show. Lucy you might recognize as Lucy Davis, last seen as Dianne in “Shaun of the Dead”. The two characters are really enjoyable minor figures who could probably carry an entire episode, if not make their way into the cast as title characters some day.

The Christmas episode next week looks certainly interesting - it’ll be interesting to see what role the very Jewish Matt plays in all of this.

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This movie was really bad.

Really bad.

I thought I’d spend an unusually cold day here in Seattle by watching something that would make me laugh. I really should have picked a different movie. I’ve been waiting for this movie to hit DVD for a while now because it’d looked so funny in all the trailers and commercials. I am one of the many that enjoyed Super Troopers and somewhat enjoyed The Dukes Of Hazzard, both done by the Broken Lizard writing crew, but I really thought this movie was garbage.

This movie is about two brothers who, by tradition, are obligated to spread the ashes of their dead father in his homeland of Munich, Germany during the fabled festival, Oktoberfest. While there, they stumble upon a secret Fight Club-type drinking competition and a hidden shame of their family history. This shame, and their thirst for large amounts of beer, propels them to put together an American team of boozers to go back the following year and defend their family reputation the only way they know how, by drinking an un-Godly amount of German alcoholic beverages.

The first thirty seconds of the movie had me intrigued. There was a scrolling warning message telling me that drinking like they do in the movie will kill me. I was then dedicated to the next two hours in front of my TV. I really wish I had them back. The acting and the story were so bad I ended up fast-forwarding through about twenty minutes of ‘filler’ just to get to the climactic end, which was totally predictable.

The special features? I really couldn’t tell you. I refused to have that disc spinning in my DVD player any longer. They did however throw in some extra meaningless nudity which I’m always a big fan of.

Save yourself the few bucks and rent something else. This means a lot coming from me. I am 24 and I drink a lot of beer.

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