The main reason I wanted to watch The Incredible Hulk is because Iron Man 2 was so good. I remembered hearing that Robert Downey Jr. made a cameo in this movie as Tony Stark, so I took this out from Netflix as a sort-of Iron Man 1.5. Tony Stark is in the movie; unfortunately he’s not in his Hulkbuster armor. This would have made for one half of an awesome all-CGI fight scene. I’m not sure if this is a reboot or a sequel to Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie. The cast and director are completely different. What’s good about it is that The Incredible Hulk covers the Hulk’s origin in the opening credits, so you don’t have to sit through Ang Lee’s snoozer before watching this. Edward Norton is great as the yoga practicing, always-trying-to-keep-his-cool Bruce Banner. Old school Hulk fans will be happy that Lou Ferrigno makes a cameo appearence as an easily-bought-off-with-pizza security guard. Who wears short shorts? Hulk wears short shorts! Bruce Banner’s love interest Betty dates the dad from Mordern Family. What is it with this guy? He looks like Eddie Munster all grown up, yet in fictional worlds he lands Liv Tyler and Julie Bowen? I don’t get it. I wonder if he keeps in touch with cousin Marilyn. Maybe it’s just because I watched hours and hours of Lost the day before, but I thought Michael Emerson would have been the perfect guy to play Betty’s boyfriend instead. He’s snarky, he’s swarmy, he’s the perfect other guy. Later in the movie, I thought Michael Emerson would make a much better Mr. Blue than the guy they cast. Okay, I want to replace two people with Ben from Lost. This may be a sign that I have been watching...

My girlfriend thinks that fantasy baseball is a waste of time. I’m starting to agree with her, because if it wasn’t for fantasy baseball, I may have never watched or even heard of The Room. Earlier this year, I joined a fantasy baseball league through my friend Carl and was told that everyone’s team names were references to The Room. Since I never saw The Room, or even heard of it before this, I named my team Never Saw The Room. Naming your team Never Saw The Room in a league of devotees to The Room leads to people telling you that you have to see the movie. It turns out I really didn’t. The Room is hailed as one of those it’s-so-bad-it’s-good movies and has developed a cult following similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People go to midnight screenings dressed as the characters, and Adult Swim ran it once as an April Fool’s joke. Unlike Rocky Horror, there are no catchy songs and the acting is much, much worse. It’s on par production quality-wise with your average Skinimax movie. There’s the cheesy synthesized music, the slow-cam sex scene (behind a gauze curtain no less!), and very crappy acting matched with very crappy dialogue. The director, writer and star of The Room, Tommy Wiseau, scares me on many levels. He’s a mess of White Snake era hair atop a roided up Long Island guido. But he can’t be from Long Island with that accent that stems from the “Ridiculous” region of Europe. He has the freakiest laugh in existence. It’s creepier and more off-putting than The Joker’s and he throws it into every line he can for his character Johnny. I imagine each of Johnny’s lines in the script looks like: JOHNNY...

Going into Iron Man 2, I was feeling a little worried. People were telling me that it wasn’t as good as the first one, that there were too many characters and that it was all just a long commercial for an eventual Avengers movie. Having now seen it, they were wrong on all three counts. Iron Man 2 is an awesome movie. It’s full of energy. It starts at 10 and just keeps going. In one way, Iron Man 2 is better than Iron Man. I’m talking about the decision to replace Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle as James “Rhodey” Rhodes. I really don’t understand why Terrence Howard would not do everything in his power to come back for this sequel. From what I’ve heard, he was the highest paid actor in Iron Man, more than Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges, all because he was the first actor signed to the film. Going into the sequel, he was scheduled for a major pay cut because when you’re in a cast with Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson, you’re bound to become number three or four on the pay scale. One early 90s outfit that still looks cool today. Instead of taking the pay cut and getting in on what may be the biggest movie of 2010 (sorry Twilight fans, I see Iron Man 2 doing better than Eclipse), not to mention getting his own armor in this one, the super-badass War Machine armor, Terrence Howard left to make…Fighting. I don’t remember this movie either. I’ve never been a big fan of Terrence Howard, and Don Cheadle is awesome in everything he does, so when I first heard this news, I thought “Upgrade!” As soon as Rhodey appeared on screen in...

If The Lives of Others isn’t in your Netflix queue already, go add it right now. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait. Okay, welcome back. Wait, what do you mean what do I mean welcome back? You didn’t click away from this page to Netflix and add it to your queue? You were just waiting me out? Wow, I thought we had a trust thing going here. Guess I was wrong. Okay, hopefully I can convince you to add it by the end of this entry. But I’m still a little hurt. The Lives of Others takes place in 1984 East Berlin and is about Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, who starts the movie as the textbook definition of asshole East German bureaucrat. He specializes in sniffing out enemies of the state and is willing to bury people for the slightest infractions against East Germany. If this guy was a cop, he’d be the kind that gave out jaywalking tickets on empty streets. For zie last time, I um not Herr Moby! Because of his tenacious zealotry to the state, HGW is his boss’s top choice to spy on and build a case against Georg Dreyman, a playwright who is believed to be conspiring to produce propaganda against East Germany. Over the course of listening in on Dreyman’s daily life, HGW’s heart grows three sizes. Combine this with HGW finding out the motives of his bosses have more to do with greed and lust than preserving the state and HGW begins to subtlety turn on them. All this makes for a very intense and sometimes thrilling drama, but there is one big unintended comedic bit. HGW’s boss, Grubitz, looks exactly like Principal Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s got it all: the awkwardly parted red...

I should have known that Date Night was going to be a disappointment right at the first scene. Steve Carell, playing New Jersey accountant Phil Foster, is in a meeting with that annoying SNL couple that call each other babe all the time and ignores whoever they’re talking to. A couple of questions: Does anyone anywhere find these characters funny on SNL? Does even Jason Sudeikis hate these characters enought that they had to replace him from a role he started on SNL? Speaking of SNL, Kristin Wiig also has a minor part in the movie. You might not recognize her, because she’s not playing the Target Lady. Until now I was convinced that the Target Lady was the only character Kristin Wiig could play. I can’t be the only one who thinks that every one of her characters on SNL is the Target Lady in a different outfit. When your movie revolves around how boring the main characters’ marriage is, you have to be very careful to not bore your audience. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the makers of Date Night this. The movie has some very funny comedic high points, but for the most part, it just meanders around why Phil and Claire’s marriage is a snooze fest, which causes those scenes to be a bit of a snooze fest. I can’t hate on Date Night completely. Looking at the graph, you can see that I thought there were some very funny bits in it. And it’s true, the jokes that work really work. There just aren’t enough of them, and one of the jokes that worked, Phil and Claire being given a hard time about taking another couple’s dinner reservation, is beaten to death so badly that I think...

While I didn’t see Paper Man at the Tribeca Film Festival, it is a Tribeca Film Festival film that I saw while the festival was running. We made it back to Brooklyn from our free Snow Men screening with time to spare to catch the 9:30 Saturday night screening of Paper Man at Brooklyn Heights Cinemas. Woo-hoo! Double feature! I probably would have liked Paper Man less if I hadn’t seen Greenberg. While watching Paper Man, I couldn’t help but think “This is what Greenberg would be like if that movie wasn’t so annoying.” Similar to Greenberg, Paper Man is about a man with mental issues and without social skills who finds himself trying to get by in a new environment. Greenberg has an awkward relationship a personal assistant played by Greta Gerwig. Paper Man’s Richard Dunn, played by Jeff Daniels, has an awkward friendship with a local high school student played by Emma Stone. Greenberg vents his frustrations to his English best friend who didn’t talk much. Dunn vents all his frustrations to his imaginary best friend named Captain Excellent, a superhero played by Ryan Reynolds. In every one of these match-ups, Paper Man wins. But then again, being better than Greenberg isn’t that much of a compliment. I wasn’t excited about Ryan Reynolds being cast as Green Lantern Hal Jordon in the upcoming Green Lantern movie. Out of all the stars of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, I thought Nathan Fillion would have been the much better choice as Hal Jordan. Besides looking like Hal Jordan, Fillion proved he can do outerspace action in Sci-Fi’s short-lived Firefly.After seeing Ryan Reynolds here, I’m more excited than I was before about Reynolds as Green Lantern. The guy can carry himself like a superhero. Though the costume...

Late April brings the Tribeca Film Festival to New York City. When the film guide became available, I pored through it, surprised by how many movies I wanted to see. Last year, I couldn’t find one movie that caught my interest. This year, I had a list of 40. I narrowed this way-too-large list to a much more manageable list of three movies I’d really want to see if I could score tickets. With tickets to this year’s festival running $16.50 each, $4 above the average cost of a movie in Manhattan and $6.50 more than I’m used to paying in Brooklyn, I knew I’d be able to justify seeing one movie. That number dwindled when I tried buying tickets to Beware the Gonzo, a teen comedy that looked enjoyably quirky. On top of the $16.50 ticket price, there was a processing fee of $3.50 per ticket. Stacked on top of that, there was another $4 charge to print my tickets at home. How is that it costs four bucks for me to use my own printer, ink and paper to print my tickets? The prospect of paying $22 per ticket had me convinced that I wouldn’t see any movies at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. This is why it seems odd that I saw two movies from the festival on Saturday. Despite not seeing any movies at the festival, I was happy to attend the Tribeca Family Festival on Saturday, May 1. If you’ve never been to the Tribeca Family Festival, you should definitely go to it next year. It’s my favorite part of the Tribeca Film Festival and my favorite NYC street fair. Unlike most street fairs, it’s not the same sausage booth, beer booth and sock vendor repeated for a mile....