Happy New Year!

Ok, my friends have been asking me to update, so in the new year of 2006, I will do my best. No, I'm not going to talk about diet, personal commitments to love myself all the more or vows to quit eating sugar. If it's bad or good for you, why wait to the new year to start or stop?

The one thing people seem to be asking me about a lot righ now is movies. Yes, I'm a "recovering" film critic. Well, I'm not recovering, I still gotta do the job (Listen to my reviews on 620 KTAR or watch them on Your Life A to Z on NewsChannel 3 in Phoenix.). So here it is, I do know that when all the chips fall, I really loved George Clooney's austere and poignant "Good Night, and Good Luck." To me, it's got Best Picture written all over it. Munich was darn good, as were, Capote, Hustle & Flow, Pride & Prejudice, Walk the Line, and Felicity Huffman is the driving force behind Transamerica. (I'll tell you about my brush with Felicity, Transamerica's director Duncan Tucker and 60 Minutes later this week - talk about fun stuff!)

You have to check out what I like to call Lord of the Kings - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe if your a fan of the books. If you're a Chronicles junkie, you know that the story is good, but not as involving compared to the other books by C.S. Lewis (I recommend The Screwtape Letters by Lewis if you've never read him.)

Don't get mad if I left off some good movies like King Kong or Cinderella man. I didn't want to bore you with the same titles that other critics have on their lists too. Plus, there are more than 10 films that I want to give kudos to like March of the Penguins, Mad Hot Ballroom, Murderball and Grizzly Man - all documentaries I might add. I would like to add there are PLENTY of films that I wouldn't even recommmend to the sick person at work who insists on double dipping their germs in the community cookie plate. Number one on my foul list - the "Sound of Thunder." Why? Because they took a perfectly good sci-fi story by sci-fi-meister Ray Bradbury and turned it into a B-movie story with bad science, bad special effects and misused perfectly good actors Ben Kingsley and Ed Burns... but then, everyone has their Ishtar.