We’re back after a few weeks’ absence. With our return we talk about The Raven and The Cabin in the Woods, one of which is the most awesome movie several of us have seen in theaters in quite a while (hint: it doesn’t have John Cusack in it). After our reviews we start laying out the summer with a thumbs up/thumbs down for the upcoming potential blockbusters. What are we most interested... 

When it comes to horror and suspense, it doesn’t get much better than the original trailblazer, Edgar Allen Poe. Yet, Poe’s world has gotten a rather horrid treatment when it comes to film. Perhaps it’s because Poe’s creations were more about the dark recesses of the mind – something about his prose just can’t make the leap to the big screen. Maybe it’s because we’re so enamored... 

I’ve been considering Woody Allen’s Play it Again, Sam quite a bit since viewing it the other day. I really like the contrast between Allen’s film critic character, and the fictional Bogart he receives life advice from. It seems to me that this is something many of us do. We pick up pearls of wisdom from movies and other stories that we can apply to our own lives. If enough of those pearls come... 

One of the running themes of this week’s show is the question of “Why?” Explaining why we have the opinions we have is an important element of film critique, which we talk about this week as Rafe rants about Kevin Smith’s anti-critic Twitter tirade. We also talk about the rising prices of movie tickets and how the 3-D phenomenon has been exploited to that end. Finally, we offer... 

It’s been a while since we’ve had a fantastic time travel movie, and with the release of Hot Tub Time Machine it will continue to be a while before we get one that’s fantastic. The time travel comedy from Accepted director Steve Pink (and Sex Drive scribes John Morris and Sean Anders, as well as new scriptwriter John Heald) is a movie best described as good, but suffers from conflicting intentions... 

So one night a bunch of guys are sitting around with nothing better to do than hop in a hot tub and start drinking. The next thing you know craziness has ensued and the group of friends are transported back in time to 1986. There are leg warmers, jam boxes, walkmans, neon colors on clothes, and the standard plastic sunglasses of the day, gee, I hope the frames and the ear pieces are two different colors.... 

We’re back with new reviews of Old Dogs and The Fantastic Mister Fox, as well as Rafe’s survival story after watching Twilight. We also discuss a disappointment in the stacking of votes in our poll for December’s artist of the month, the biggest financial failures in film in the last decade, and more Oscar contenders, as well as two weeks worth of John Cusack in this fully loaded... 

We’ll admit it – Woody Harrelson has very little to do with this week’s podcast, but when you find a picture of him looking like a madman, you can’t pass it up. We do talk about Emmerich’s decline with 2012 (and what its $65 million box office take probably means), John Cusack’s romantic-comedy side with Say Anything… and High Fidelity, early Oscar buzz around... 

We credited Eli Roth with the creation of the “torture porn” sub-genre of movies – a subsection of film where creative and graphic ways of torturing victims on screen superseded plot or character development. I think it’s time to give Roland Emmerich credit for the disaster porn sub-genre. With Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow already under his belt, Emmerich’s latest,... 

For the first time in a few weeks, we have new reviews to talk about, with Disney’s A Christmas Carol and The Men Who Stare at Goats in theaters. Up is headed for DVD/Blu-ray this week which has us excited. We also have our first conversation about artist of the month John Cusack, looking at movies that don’t feature a lot of the star as well as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil....