Buenos Greetos, America! Do you know what time it is? No, I’m serious, somebody replaced my wall clock with half a live chicken and I have no idea what time it is. Come to think of it, I hope to hell that’s a whole live chicken with only the front half sticking out of the wall, because it’s going to freak me out all to hell if it turns out half a chicken is somehow staying alive on my wall. And have you ever had a clock you had to feed? I don’t recommend it. Anyway, forget that I asked, now that I think about it, by the time any of you read this and get back to me, it’ll be an entirely different time and I probably won’t even care then. Let’s just compromise and say it’s Entertainment Police time. Deal? Sweet.

Blades of Glory
Anyone want to write in and offer up a plausible explanation why it took the Hollywood bigwigs this long to finally bring a cinematic retelling of the amazing life of actor Ruben Blades to the big screen? The only rationale I can come up with involves a labyrinthine international conspiracy that would make Oliver Stone barf out his ass. But whatever the reason for the delay, the long wait was clearly worth it when you see the life of the genius behind Predator 2 and Disorganized Crime eat up the screen like it was a giant slice of bubble tape. If Hollywood makes a better biopic this year, well, good for them.

Honey, I Think I Love My Wife
Finally, Rick Moranis gets over his illogical fear of blackface and steps gracefully into the role he was born to play in American public life: The white guy who’s a really funny black guy in blackface. It seems like for years actors have been going the other way, Eddie Murphy hitting the makeup truck hard and playing the entire white cast on Entourage, and Martin Lawrence splashing on the whiteface to play a soulful white retard in Rain Man. Since when do only black men have a license to make us laugh by pretending to be a race they’re not? I want to see Chinese guys dressed up like they’re Australian and Cubans who can do a hilarious Samoan. Get on it, Hollywood.

Peter Pan’s Labyrinth
One of the most painful experiences from my childhood that still sticks with me today was seeing Disney’s Michael Jackson biopic Peter Pan in the theater and coming to realize, a sickly feeling rising up from my stomach as each minute passed, that they were going to leave out the part at the end of the book where Pan goes shithouse and chases the lost boys through the hedge maze with an axe. Why? It’s a painful lesson for a child to learn, about the compromises and cowardice of the adult world. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, as brooding Spaniard Benecio Del Taco was scarred enough to wait until he grew up to set the record straight with this harrowing remake, true to the source material down to the last comma. Trust me, I counted. One word of warning for parents, however: You must bring your children to this film. I don’t care if you have to pull them out of school, permanently, you owe it to your children to tell them the story of Peter Pan, the whole story, the way it was meant to be told. All else pales in importance.

Rocky Balboa
Few thought soulful beefcake Sylvester Stallone would dare make yet another Rocky sequel after earning a lifetime of love and adulation from lingerie-clad weirdos for his genre-bending penultimate effort, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But just like in the movie, Cobra doesn’t know when to quit, so he keeps churning these things out like an Amish dude who won’t accept that the town already has way more butter than it can use. But is it any good? If you’ve got a thing for watching old guys get beat up, but couldn’t score tickets to the latest Evander Hoylfield fight, then yeah, this one will probably scratch that itch. Fans of recognizable cinematic values would probably be better off hopping from theater to theater, watching the Coke commercials before all the main features instead. All in all the quality of the movie hardly matters, since lingerie-clad true believers will be driving midnight showings of this thing for decades to come regardless.


Well, America, I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for this week. I’m not actually afraid, I mean, I won’t be sleeping with the bathroom light on tonight or anything. Actually that’s a pretty bizarre figure of speech when you really think about it. Weird. Anyway, join us again next time so as not to be left outside in the cold dark void of the unknowing. Until then, I’m Roland McShyster and you’re some other person out there.

March 12, 2007
It’s a new year, and I’m proud to inform you I’m no longer bagging groceries at the Safeway. They wanted to go in another direction, whatever that means. So now I volunteer at the local library, but I also help my mom with a lot of home... (3/12/07)

2006 Movies
Buenos Greetings, America! Roland McShyster here, back on the attack and off the crack! What better way to celebrate the months we’ve been apart than to round up the top flicks of the past year? 2006 was a busy year for movies, and though I know... (2/5/07)

2006 Movies
It’s been far too long since my sarcastic commentaries have ridden the internet nodes. So let’s have no tarrying and move right into a look at the best movies of 2006. … Ha! Ultimate sting, villains. Now let’s take a look at some... (1/15/07)

2006 Oscarama!
What's that smell,... (3/27/06)

February 27, 2006
Thanks to the commune’s "New edition whenever we fucking feel like it" policy, I have the liberty of reviewing some theater-release movies, instead of my usual bottom-of-the-dregs DVD releases. But I’m going to skip that joy, since if you’re... (2/27/06)