Jack Black's Gulliver's Travels was not the journey Jonathan Swift envisioned

This was an impossibly nitwitted film filled with Jack Black's signature kinetic mania, bathroom humor and sad unclever satire. Heading into this hot mess of tired flatulence and urine jokes I knew it was going to just be Jack Black's usual flailing arms and motormouth bulldozing that has become his trademark. But the notes he hits here are so dull and whittled-down its hard to even imagine him in inspired performances like School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda and especially the brilliance of Tenacious D (the folk metal comedy routine he does with Kyle Gass not the awful Pick of Destiny movie). The movie starts with Gulliver being a sad sack loser mail room clerk who is goaded into asking his reporter boss Darcy (Amanda Peet) for a writing assignment. She sends him to the Bermuda Triangle and the hilarity is suppose to immediately ensue. Unfortunately for the viewer nothing but tedious trite movie drivel commenced. Gulliver's boat (aptly named the No Sail) is caught in a whirlpool that takes him to the land of Lilliput. A kingdom with people only a few inches tall. They at first imprison him out of fear then end worshiping him after he rescues the king from a fire by relieving himself on the burning castle. Filming at its finest. There's a silly subplot where Horatio (Jason Segel) is coached by Gulliver to awkwardly woo the Princess (Emily Blunt) in in turn is promised to General Edward Edwardian (Chris O'Dowd). The punchlines are all to familiar even the visual are pretty impressive. The comic power of Billy Connolly (King Theodore) and Catherine Tate (Queen Isabelle) are completely wasted on this script which was both pompous and puerile by equal measure. The director Rob Letterman continually delivers movies that seem half-finished as in Monsters vs. Aliens and Shark Tale. Somehow Darcy shows up in Lilliput just in time to see Gulliver fight the giant robot created by the hated Blefuscusians, a fight that ends with a giant mechanical wedgey. This was not the journey Jonathan Swift envisioned. Obviously it was a kids movie but the Teletubbies had more wit and charm than this disaster. My advice: don't travel with Gulliver on this failed adventure.

Green Lantern: Green does not mean go

Green Lantern is the type of bad movie making that should be stopped. Over-produced and over-hyped this film was obviously gunning for a franchise. Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is an arrogant test pilot that we're suppose to sympathize with because his daddy was blown up in an experimental plane. But instead of empathy as the viewer I felt ambivalence. He was rich, had a gorgeous girlfriend (Blake Lively) and killer abs. When Jordan rescues a dying alien who is a member of the Green Lantern Corps (basically cosmic cops in spandex) he is given the dying aliens ring of power. To forever become a defender of the universe. The ring's/ lantern's energy is powered by the will of all living beings. Jordan is taken to Oa the home planet of the Guardians (little men who look a lot like blue versions of the swelled-headed vein-popping telekinetic aliens from that Star Trek episode entitled The Menagerie.) We're tricked into believing Jordan is angst ridden and frightened and that this ring will find something in him that he didn't know he had.

Reynolds' jovial nature made the movie mildly watchable but Lively is given basically a paper doll thin character by the 5 writers (you know when that many names are credited it's going to be a bad script.) The story jumped from sci-fi wizardry to forced and fake moments of tenderness. There was no clear direction either and a set of bad guys so week and tired they made Casanova Frankenstein (Mystery Men) seem scary. The only real threat was this giant amorphous skull-creature-thingy named Parallax (a rouge Guardian turned baddie) that Green Lantern suckered into flying into the sun. Really? An immortal entity that can consume planets is going to let Ryan Reynolds lead it to burn itself up in the corona of the sun. Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Homicide: Life on the Streets) brought no edge or sex appeal as the director of this cumbersome mess. Green Lantern had neither the gravitas and exuberance of Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Mans nor the cunning and tension of Christopher Nolan's Batman reboots. The heavy hitting support players (Tim Robbins, Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard and Angela Basset) were wasted on dumb dialogue and callow back stories. Green Lantern was always a second string character in the DC comic universe and it pains me to see this guy get a big budget movie and I'm still waiting on a good Wonder Woman. The bottom line is that this movie should have never received a green light.

Clogs and Curmudgeons: Caught in the middle of life

Excuse the graphic nature of the following sentence. The other day I got out of the shower and caught a glimpse of my naked body in the the bathroom mirror. I was shocked. I wondered who was the middle-aged man staring back at me. What cruel funhouse mirror was swapped for the one in my bathroom? This person with a soft waistline and gray chest hairs was not me. Where did he come from; or better question, when did he arrive? Gone was that beautiful face with youthful intensity, temerity and arrogance. When was it replaced by this haggard weapon looking back at me now? The collateral damage of time creasing my cheeks with not very subtle lines.

I just read an article in the The Economist that finds the age of 46 the year with the highest cases of worry and depression. We who are in this age group of mid-lifers are literally stuck in middle age. Bookend between the calamities of raising teenagers and aging ever more needy parents creates a tsunami like effect on our emotions as they pour over the shores of our mind. Coupled with a bad economy we are indeed clogged in the bottom of a pipe with little hope of immediately relief. What happened to us? We are suppose to the be trendsetters. The story makers. We are the X-Generation. We were suppose to just Do It! I was never suppose to punch a clock or fall into a lock-step with any company's dogma. But here I find myself dancing to a corporate master's whip crunched into the small crevices of middle-management, the very cliché my peers and I put down and ridiculed back in college.

Mid-Career Workers Squeezed Off of the Street blared loudly at me from the screen of my computer. I learned reading this piece on Fins website that the down turn in the economy where "middle-aged, mid-career workers have borne an inordinate share of layoffs and cuts by attrition". As if we didn't already have enough on our plates. So now we're fired not because of the high-level of expertise or tons of experience (or lack thereof) we bring to the table, but because businesses can make bigger profits with younger, less smart and willing to do anything for less workers. We are out of work longer and once we do find a job its usually at salaries significantly reduced from what we were making with very little benefits. Reading these abysmal statistics I was at first disconnected from them. Those poor people I thought before realizing they were talking about me. Aren't we suppose to be living in a post-generational time period. An epoch where liver spot removal and midnight runs to Duane Reade to pick up a box of Just for Men (have to look bright and young for that management meeting in the morning) was no longer necessary.

To a certain extent I enjoy the aging process. Though the boldness of that young gamblers spirit may be gone, I've realized great risks can be taken as long as they are armored with clear strategies. Sex grows better because I am now at ease with my body. I've long passed the point fear motivated me to the gym. Now I workout for myself. At this certain age you understand that you will always be too-something. Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too light, too dark. So therefore you accept the skin you reside in and that opens the doors to amazing exploration. Things you would now do you deemed too kinky or too contrived when you were 25. Your focus becomes razor sharp. Gone or ignored are the distractions that used to tatter your time and days. Like a Times Square card shark we can move the pieces of our lives in and out of view rapidly trying to trick life into finding the wrong card in our reductive game of monty.

But all too often as those cards which symbolize the itinerant pieces of our lives grow larger or multiply into many more parts and we start to spend the vast majority of our time maneuvering things. Moving things from one shelf so we can dust only to put them back into an ever more crowded space. Our lives lose their fluidity as the cogs grind and connect and the viscosity of youth and dreams dry up; leaving us commanding a lumbering machine that only moves forward from its on momentum rather than from the true locomotion of passions or ambition. Gravity seems to pull us closer to the bottom of that u-bend.

As I gradually look more like my parents and less like my nieces and nephews a pall sometimes comes over me. I think I can deal with the frenzy of gray hair or the list (which is getting longer by the day) of foods I can no longer eat without repercussion; being called "Daddy" by horny twenty-somethings hitting on me or even the slower pace of my step. My biggest grief with middle-age is what I feel is a loss of options. Responsibility chokes my life. An endless Sargasso Sea of good intentions and doing-the-right things. Even now the simplest decisions must be weighed against dire consequences. When I was 25 I could thumb my nose at work. Who cared? The sun and the pier called my name. But now the notion of missing work causes paroxysms that spread through my soul from an epicenter of doom in my brain filling in the gaps of my end of times imagination. I can't miss work. I need that paid time off to go to North Carolina to see my in-firmed mother. What if I don't get paid for the day? How will I pay my rent? I need the overtime and I won't get it if I don't go in. My life's course is not a multi-lane super highway with on/ off ramps galore. It is a tight narrow black top flowing straight into the horizon with no exits in sight. My life has become a slow turning thumbscrew of banality.

Now without soundling like a complete whining asshole there are somethings middle-agers can do. We can take this huge amount of experiential life we've amassed and put it to good use. If I'm going to be under-employed let that time off benefit others. I've started volunteering at an LGBT homeless shelter. I'm going to move my mother to NYC and hopefully make her happy in her declining years. I'm going back to film school to finally follow that dream I abandoned so many years ago that it now seems unforgiving. I am going to continue to write my novels and short stories with the hope that one day somebody will actually read them. That there will be one day that the clog in the bottom of the u-bend will not be me.

Apocalypto: Rumble in the junble

Lush and dramatic cinematography gives gravitas to the most basic of human stories. A man's love and determination to keep his family together. Rudy Youngblood plays Jaguar Paw a swaggering hunter who was the best in his village. He was brash, handsome and arrogant. He was soon humbled when taken into captivity by a band of marauding soldiers pillaging villages looking for human sacrifices to Kukulcan the Mayan sun god. Secreting his pregnant wife and their young son down a pit he promises to do whatever it takes to return and rescue them from the hole. He, along with his fellow villagers are dragged through the Yucatan jungle to the mighty city of temples. Opulent, decadent and blood-thirsty the great masses of thousands shout with trance-like frenzy as a high priest gruesomely vivisects hundres of captives while the royal family looks on with dispassion. At the very moment Jaguar Paw is to be sacrificed a total eclipse blights the sun and throws the ritual into darkness just as the Omens had foretold. Jaguar Paw is spared and given his freedom. But when he kills the son of the general he is pursued relentlessly through the jungle as he rushes to return to his beloved.

The acting was strong in this movie and the make-up never hindered but actually aided in the performances. Youngblood was able to push through a very physical role and show us severe heartache coupled with defiant exuberance at each obstacle he faced and overcame. Raoul Trujillo who plays the general Zero Wolfe is a powerful adversary that leads his men into harms way to avenge his son's death. Dalia Hernández as Seven the pregnant wife gives a beautiful determined yet bitterweet performance. Mel Gibson's direction wasn't as heavy handed as it was in The Passion of the Christ. He allowed us to be first be overwhelmed by the scale and spectacle of this film before bringing us back to a human-sized storyline. When the standard chase begins in the movie's third act we are completely engaged and running with the jaguars like a native. The ominous ending was unexpected and a bit ironic when Jaguar Paw is yet spared again when his chasers are caught off guard by the arrival of Spanish conquistadors. He finally rescues his wife along with his newborn son but we are haunted with lingering idea that as violent and reprobate as the Mayan civilization appeared to be, what was coming ashore from those ships was going to be infinitely worse for his family, his people and ultimately his way of life.

Mysterious and spooky and all together ookey American Horror Story

From the creators of Glee and Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story is a slick and twisted amalgam of the subversive satire of the cartoon version of the Addams Family and the fun inducing gore of the first—and still the best—Scream movie.

Chills and scares come at you rapid fire from the Pez-disperser like script. Spitting out incongruously humorous, touching, sexy and often demented moments by equal measure usually at the same time. Unlike the slow methodical cancerous descent into fear of Stanley Kubrik's The Shinning, AHS is filled with paroxysms that jolt you on to a razor's edge of anticipation. Witty dialogue and innovative kookery coupled with bizarro characters surrounding a seemingly ordinary family who are themselves rife with dark secrets make for a joyously frightening psychosexual hoot.

American Horror Story gets off to a shocking start by breaking one of the few taboos left in entertainment: infanticide. The first five minutes slap you in the face with a young girl with Down Syndrome trying to stop two little boys, who are obviously the neighborhood roughs, from entering the derelict Victorian mansion that becomes the central character of the show. What the identical twins find in the basement are dismembered baby parts floating in formaldehyde and a mysterious entity that decidedly doesn't like children or rather likes to cause them terrible physical pain and death. As we quickly and squeamishly find out.

Fast-forward some years later and a family trying to buy a new life in Los Angeles has purchased the beautifully restored home. A devastated mother coping with both the stillbirth of her youngest child and her husband's infidelity along with their morose daughter move from the east coast to sunny southern California hoping it will repair their damaged family. Quickly finding out why the massive home was so cheap (it was the scene of the gruesome murder-suicide of its previous owners) the Harmon family unpacks and settles into some very strange WTF occurrences; including finding what looks like a dissection lab in the basement and a secret sadomasochist dungeon.

Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) is the heart of the family and around whom the story unfolds. Played straightforwardly without pretense Ms. Britton’s understatedness allows the zaniness of the supporting players to shine through. She is hurt and aggrieved by both her horrible miscarriage and catching her husband having sex with one of his 20 year-old students. Now almost a year later she’s taxed with the loss of her child, marriage and libido all the while her husband wants to reconcile in a more biblical sense. Dylan McDermott plays her lumbering psychiatrist husband Dr. Ben Harmon. Mr. McDermott toggling between shouting rants and pouting earnestness makes for a disjointed performance that reminds me of his affected acting from The Practice, but he’s most believable when playing the family patriarch as a creepy, narcissistic horn dog. Taissa Farmiga (Vera’s younger sister) effectively brings an almost gothic gloominess to her role as misunderstood tween Violet (she’s a cutter) that would make Wynona Ryder’s original mournful teenager from Beetlejuice proud.

But what makes this show hum however, is the cabal of aberrant nuts that roam the Southland’s landscape. Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) can bring bucket loads of crazy to a role like no other. Her housekeeper Moira sets just the right tone of mystery as she tries to seduce Dr. Harmon. Of course he doesn’t see the milky-eyed harridan that Moira is today but instead he sees her as her former young hottie self (Alexandra Breckenridge) in a French maid outfit that plays up to his philandering. Evan Peters plays Tate, a patient of Dr. Harmon’s who likens himself to a serial killer. He falls in love with the daughter. Violet and Tate’s most tender (and weirdest) moments come when they both share their equal fondness for self-mutilation and fantasizing about how to kill the other teenagers at their school. Dennis O’Hare (True Blood) is at it again with his succulent lunacy. As the burned and disfigured Larry, yet another former owner of the house, his character uses gasoline instead of fangs to kill people this time by burning his wife and two children to death. Rubber Man is a mysterious walking neoprene suit that shows up randomly and has sex with Vivien proving that Latex can be both sexy and scary at the same time. And then there’s Jessica Lange as Constance. Ripping through the scenery with her southern belle maliciousness she is the repository of the long and evil history of the house and is the mother of the aforementioned little girl with Down Syndrome. She percolates while on camera and delivers the episodes best lines. When housekeeper Moira finds her stealing Vivien’s diamond earrings Constance quips with her lilting, yet menacing drawl “Why is it that its always the old whores who acts the part of a moralistic prude.” Tacking on “When anything goes missing they always blame the maid. And don’t make me kill you again.”

Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy have crafted a naughty but ingenious show that doesn’t lack subtlety but also delivers on its promise of being both sexy and scary at the same time. With offbeat characters played with joy and just the right amount of inscrutability American Horror Story promises to be a good old-fashioned watch through your fingers fright fest. With copious amounts sweaty undulating flesh and gushing blood thrown in for good measure. This little bit of fright is exactly what we need after True Blood came completely off the rails this past season. FX may provide me with my supernatural fix for the fall.