I cannot fathom how it could be that I had never heard of a Francis Ford Coppola time travel movie staring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage until I unearthed it by digging a little too deeply and greedily in the mines of Netflix and shoved it into my queue like I would a precious jewel into my adventurer's sack. Anyway, it arrived like a mysterious stranger in my mailbox one day and we watched it.

This is certainly one of…

Babel, why are you so hard to rate? There are moments of brilliance in which strong acting and scriptwriting kept me on the edge of my seat. But it's inter-cut with heavy-handed dramatic nonsense and put together like a bad patchwork scarecrow.

With just the Moroccan and Mexican storylines, this could have been called "White Family Has a Bad Day." And that might actually have been a pretty good movie (with some serious massaging of the Mexican script and better…

A movie can be well-made, well-scripted, have a point, and still be pretty forgettable. Thank You for Smoking is such a movie for me. Did I enjoy it while watching it? Yes, I did. Did I think it was pretty clever and have a good plot? Again, yes. This was also a perfect role for Aaron Eckhart whose attractiveness and inoffensive charm fit his character perfectly.

I found the humor to be pretty bland, considering the topic, but I did…