On a personal level, I was offended by Pixels, the new Adam Sandler comedy that sees he and his comedian friends save the earth from aliens that have taken the form of retro video game characters like Donkey Kong, Frogger, Centipede and Pac-Man.

The movie, directed by Chris Columbus, isn’t about video games; it prostitutes the likenesses of retro video games to make a buck at the box office, completely missing the point of why those games and the gamers who master them are so great.

This year is Pac-Man’s 35th anniversary. He makes an appearance in Pixels as a city-destroying monster—not the most flattering portrait of one of gaming’s all-time coolest characters. Pac-Man is not, and never will be, the bad guy!

Here’s better way to celebrate the yellow chomper’s 35th year: This Saturday, July 25th, at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET on TGLive.com, you can watch four of the best Pac-Man players in the world attempt to do the impossible in the Twin Galaxies Pac-Man Kill Screen Challenge.

The 256th level of Pac-Man is virtually impossible to beat. That’s because a glitch in the game’s programming causes a swarm of random numbers, letters and all-around glitchy-ness to obscure the level so obscenely that the player can’t see what he/she is doing. This Saturday, if the four Pac-Man champions stepping up to the plate can somehow manage to get past the madness of level 256, they’ll set new records and step foot in unknown gaming territory.

If you’re curious about gaming culture, don’t watch Pixels this weekend. Instead, tune in and watch four actual gaming masters make history, all from the comfort of your own home!

The beautiful thing about old-school arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede is that they take passion, endurance and dedication to master. Few people on this earth are equipped with the skills to be the best at these electronic mental marathons, and these special few are basically freaks of nature (watch Seth Gordon’s modern classic The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters to fully understand their freakiness). Retro arcade gaming is an amazing, fascinating, largely undiscovered American subculture that’s deserved to be the subject of a  big-budget, big-screen vehicle for a long time. (No, Wreck-It Ralph doesn’t count; that movie’s about the games, not the gamers.)

Pixels, a movie by Chris Columbus and a product of Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions empire, is meant to be about retro gamers, but isn’t about anything at all. This movie makes no sense, has no message, isn’t funny and harbors what is easily the worst performance of Peter Dinklage‘s career. It’s a crying shame, especially for a lifelong gamer like myself, though the movie is extraordinarily impressive in one, very unexpected facet of its presentation, which I’ll save for later.

The plot is Independence Day, except woefully over-simplified and with classic video game characters playing the aliens. In a flashback to 1982 (when video arcades still existed), we meet our heroes. Sam Brenner is an good-natured arcade wizard, but he loses a NASA-sponsored gaming tournament to Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant, a cocky, mullet-rocking little person who smokes him at Donkey Kong. Sam’s best buddy, Will, is loyal to the end, though, and assures Sam that he’s destined for bigger things. As a consolation prize, they make a new friend at the arcade, a Napoleon Dynamite-like creature named Ludlow. This opening sequence has a great, vintage look and starts the movie on the right foot, though it’s all downhill from there.

Jump ahead to present day, and aliens that inexplicably look and behave exactly like the characters in the games Sam mastered as a kid have declared war on earth and threaten to blow our blue planet to smithereens. (Well, not exactly “smithereens”; everything the aliens touch gets “pixelated,” falling apart into neon-bright cubes of light.) Naturally (predictably), adult Sam (Sandler), Will (Kevin James), Eddie (Dinklage) and Ludlow (Josh Gad) are the only ones with enough gamer skill to save the day. (Oddly enough, Will grew up to be the President of the United States, which fast-tracked his friends to the front of the military earth-defense line.)

Nonsense incoming: When a giant, alien Pac-Man starts tearing apart New York City, he and his friends jump into color-coded cars, chasing Pac-Man through the streets and alleys as if they were the evil ghosts from the game. Sam was good at arcade games. How in the world, then, is he suddenly also a professional driver? Earlier in the movie, he’s holding a laser gun, shooting “centipedes” out of the night sky in London. I could have sworn he was a master of buttons and joysticks, not a badass gunman with perfect aim. It’s moronic. This movie isn’t about video games or gamers; it’s generic, trashy, sci-fi action shlock that prostitutes retro gaming and uses it as arbitrary window dressing. Blech.

Across the board, the cast is on their D-game. Sandler’s been playing the same, sleepy-Seth-Rogen character for the past several years, and he doesn’t break that streak here (same goes for Kevin James and his meathead routine). Michelle Monaghan plays Sandler’s love interest, and her role as a sexy government official is as demeaning and stereotypical as you’d imagine. Gad alternates between shrieking and sulking as the mentally unstable Ludlow, but his performance is more off-putting than funny.

Like I said, Dinklage is a mess: He puts on a mind-numbing accent that sounds like Barry White trying to talk like a “totally tubular” ’80s kid, and his comedic timing is near nonexistent. He says nasty things, like demanding a three-way with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Columbus lingers on him forever, as if he’s positive the audience is erupting in laughter at the absurdity of it all. Instead: crickets. Not one laugh-worthy line. Not one. It’s painful to see such a great actor fail so miserably.

Family-friendly action adventures like this typically leave you with some kind of moral or encouraging message. For the life of me, I don’t know what Pixels is trying to say. All of its heroes have dreams, and at the end of the story, all those dreams come true. But they learn nothing about themselves along the way. It’s a head-scratcher trying to figure out the point of it all. You’d think, maybe, that the message would be about retro games and how, even amongst today’s more complex, technologically advanced games, they still hold up as essential gaming experiences. Nope. Spoiler alert: Sam saves the world by ditching his old-school gaming philosophies and adopting a modern gaming approach. I honestly don’t understand most of this movie.

I saved the good news for last, though it’ll only apply to those willing to shell out extra dough for a movie ticket. Pixels has some of the best 3-D glasses implementation I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Aside from a few exceptions (Pixar movies, Coraline, Avatar), I detest putting on those damn 3-D glasses, but this movie blew me away: the colors were vibrant; people’s noses looked closer to us than their ears; shots of large crowds had cavernous depth. The more obvious visual effects—like the aliens exploding into a zillion “pixels”—looked great too, but it was the subtle stuff that dropped my jaw. I really, really didn’t like this movie, but at least it’s a fun tech demonstration.

The buzz around what could potentially be the first good Adam Sandler film in a while (sorry The Cobbler, but no) has finally culminated in a first trailer for Pixels.

In 1982 the world sends out a capsule to the universe as a peaceful token of our openness to communication. With clips of President Reagan and Rubik’s Cubes and…Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Only the aliens take it the wrong way. They interpret the pixellated muncher and the patience-challenged gorilla as a threat to their existence so they build weapons to match. When they begin attacking the planet Earth, U.S. President Will Cooper, played by Kevin James, and his First Lady, played by Jane Krakowski, know to look for one man: his childhood best friend and ’80s video game champion Sam Brenner (Adam Sandler). Along with a team of old school gamers including Peter Dinklage and Josh Gad they will have to figure out how to beat the ultimate arcade challenge. And the stakes are high.

Directed by Chris Columbus, the screenplay was written by Timothy Dowling whose past credits include Role Models and Just Go With It.

Rounding out the cast is Sean Bean, Michelle Monaghan, and Pretty Little Liar’s Ashley Benson.

Pixels is the eighth time Adam Sandler and Kevin James are partnering up in a comedy. The release date is set for July 24th, 2015.

The Cobbler is barely a movie. To describe it more accurately would be to call it a collection of scenes that people filmed and others assembled in the hopes that you would accidentally pay for a ticket while trying to see Chappie. Don’t do that. The Cobbler isn’t trying hard enough to earn your dollar, even inadvertently. It’s barely trying hard enough to keep Adam Sandler awake for the length of its production.

Sandler plays a cobbler who inherits a magic sewing machine, which allows him to resemble the owner of whatever shoes he repairs. Beyond this starting point, The Cobbler leads down several underdeveloped subplots, simply dropping those ideas once the script finds a more tantalizing story to follow. At first, Sandler’s Max Simkin is simply trying to keep the family business afloat as neighborhood stores are closing and being sold off. Soon, Max slips on Method Man’s shoes and discovers he can (queue record scratch) walk in another man’s shoes. Max uses his ability to assume the identity of a criminal in order to rob people without ramifications, because everyone here is scared of the large black man. Max sneaks into the home of a sexy woman while wearing the attractive Dan Stevens’ shoes, scares children while wearing a dead man’s shoes, and generally pulls highly unethical gags as an attempt at mildly enjoyable humor.

This bouncing between ideas sends The Cobbler’s tone crashing into walls. When the film begins, Max’s connection to the family shoe repair shop has been waning. His father had abandoned him and his mother years ago for unspoken reasons, and his now elderly mother shows some signs of dementia. There are discussions of shifting cultural identity in a changing urban landscape, and Melonie Diaz as an activist against gentrification; however, by the end of The Cobbler this progresses into an under-explained “Gotcha!” crime caper involving strong-arm drug dealers and a murderous slum lord. With some clever editing, The Cobbler could be recut into a PG family comedy, or a raunchy Happy Madison laugher, but its lack of commitment to any one element makes all aspects fail miserably. There’s no cohesion to the humor, no narrative details worth your attention.

This is a movie so convoluted with half-pursued sort of stories that it assumes the sprawling, plotless feel of a movie like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, but without any insight into the types of people it portrays or the atmosphere it depicts. Instead, The Cobbler is comfortable in delivering caricatures, platitudes, and pratfalls in place of jokes. Every character is drawn so paper-thin they more closely resemble stereotypes than human beings. Adam Sandler is sad. Method Man is a criminal. Lynn Cohen is old. Ellen Barkin is a bitch. And Melonie Diaz has a heart of gold so maybe if Sandler plays his cards right he’ll get a kiss before the credits roll.

Among the many misguided choices made in The Cobbler, the strangest misfire is how the movie underuses Adam Sandler. When Max Simkin slips on someone else’s shoes, rather than have Sandler act like the other actors, more often it’s the lesser-known actors that play Sandler’s character pretending to be their character. I like Method Man fine as an actor. Sometimes he’s great (How High, HBO’s The Wire), sometimes he’s just ok (How High, Red Tails). But in a comedy as broad as The Cobbler wants to be, it’s simply funnier and easier to follow Adam Sandler pretending to be Method Man, than Meth attempt playing Sandler playing Meth.

Most of all, this is a sad misstep for Tom McCarthy. The writer/director of two indie gems (The Station Agent, The Visitor) as well as a co-writer on Pixar’s Up, most recently wrote the cloying Million Dollar Arm. My sincere hope is that The Cobbler doesn’t launch a Shyamalanian bottoming out of his work. McCarthy’s next film Spotlight is a promising drama about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals starring Michael Keaton, Rachel McCadams and Mark Ruffalo. There exists a glimmer on the horizon. But no one should see The Cobbler, not even as a curiosity. It’s not a good-bad movie, it’s a bad-bad movie. The Cobbler is completely unsure of what it wants to be, or how to go about executing it.

The Cobbler Video Review

Remember the old question, “If an alien landed on Earth, how would you explain America to him?” The answer is: Sean Astin. He is the embodiment of so much of what has shaped our cinematic history. From cult classics to box office blockbusters, child actor to leading man, the movies he has been such a memorable part of are staples for any avid movie buff’s collection and his public life has been something to be proud of as well.

Here are 15 reasons we love Sean Astin in honor of his 44th year.

That was his feature DEBUT. What were you doing at that age?

In 1991, he played rebellious bad boy Billy Tepper in Toy Soldiers alongside Will Wheaton as Joey Trotta, two teens who take on a criminal trying to hold their school hostage.

In 1992, he was Dave in Encino Man, who with his friend Stoney Brown (Pauly Shore) befriended newly unfrozen caveman Link, Brendan Fraser.

You know, from the Patty Duke Show? How could this not make someone instantly awesome? Not to say it’s all rainbows and butterflies. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1982 and together they have been active in promoting public awareness for mental health issues.

He calls 3 other men ‘father’ as well: his biological father, Michael Tell, the man thought to be his biological father for the early years of his life, Desi Arnaz, Jr. and his mother’s current husband of 29 years, Michael Pearce. However, John Astin is the one he most associates with that title.

In 1992, Astin married Christine Harrell. They will celebrate their 23rd anniversary on July 11th this year and have 3 daughters. His eldest, Alexandra, also played his onscreen daughter, Elanor, in one of his last scenes in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

With Astin capturing the soul of this true story about a kid with not much going for him but incredible heart whose dream in life was to play football for Notre Dame, this was also the first movie Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn would share a scene in. That’s history, folks.

He would reprise his role twice more in 2002 and 2003 with The Two Towers and Return of the King.

He’s inked with the number ‘9’ in Tengwar script, the language of the Elves of Middle Earth. John Rhys-Davies is the only one of the nine without out it, though his body double got inked with it!

Co-written with Joe Layden, it focuses on his cinematic career with emphasis on his experience in Lord of the Rings.

He’s had major roles in both 50 First Dates (2004) and Click (2006).

Astin had to gain 35 to 40 pounds to play the role of the very round but dependable hobbit. This was an issue, however, because Sean Astin has been an avid long distance runner since he was a teen and has since completed 9 marathons and even more half-marathons, 10k and 5k runs. He basically had to cool it on the running so he wouldn’t lose the weight. He is also a spokesperson for RunDisney and in 2012 he created the Twitter movement and running group #Run3rd.

He’s served on two presidential campaigns, two non-partisan Presidential committees, and was a Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army from 1995 to 2005. He is the host of Vox Populi Radio a non-partisan platform to discuss politics and current issues.

Slated to be released this year, it brings attention to one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history.

And that’s the long and short of it!

For a director like Jason Reitman, who in the past has been so innately in touch with how human connection works (the nuanced Up In the Air and insightful Thank You For Smoking demonstrate his expertise), to make a movie so out of touch, out of date, and overbearing is, frankly, baffling. I don’t understand how his latest effort, Men, Women & Children, came from the same guy that made Juno, a film whose characters felt so grounded and earnest.

Men, Women & Children is an ensemble film about how the internet has reduced all of us to half-awake iPeople and mutated the way we communicate. With an array of cardboard characters and relationships it sends a message: The internet is totally messing with our brains, man! Sadly, everything about the film is sorely behind the times, telling us little about ourselves we don’t already know. If this were the year 2000, Reitman would have had a thought-provoking, prophetic cautionary tale on his hands; In the year 2014, he comes off as naive as his clueless characters do.

The film opens pleasantly enough, with voiceover narration by Emma Thompson accompanying an image of the Voyager I spacecraft, the furthest man-made object from earth, hurtling toward the edge of the solar system. Then the film zooms in on the “pale blue dot” we call home, introducing us to its multiple characters. You know how in almost all zombie movies, it’s an unspoken rule that the characters live in a world where zombie movies don’t exist? Men, Women & Children is similar in that its characters seem to be just discovering the wonders of the internet, despite it being 20-effing-14.

Adam Sandler plays Don, whose marriage to Helen (Roemarie DeWitt) has grown stale, as many do. With the house empty, he grabs his tissues and hunkers down in front of his computer to masturbate. Ahhh…masturbation; the ultimate bandaid for marital-malaise. Or is it? Frustrated by his malware-infected PC, he walks over to his son Chris’ (Travis Tope) room to use his. There, he discovers an online escort agency and sets up a meeting with one of the girls. Helen is no victim in the situation, though–she’s been experimenting with “affair” website Ashley Madison behind his back.

When you strip away the fact that Don and Helen found their affairs online, all that’s left is a story we’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of times before: An unhappy couple cheats on each other. Considering the film’s premise, shouldn’t we be presented some new kind of perspective on this scenario? The infidelity is the focus here, and unique repercussions of the digital element are nowhere to be found. They may as well have used carrier pigeons instead of a mouse and keyboard.

By a mile, the best relationship in the movie is between a teenage ex-football star named Tim (Ansel Elgort) and a reclusive, quiet girl, Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever). Tim left football to hang out with friends he made in his favorite online role-playing game, which consequently lost him all his high school friends. His mom left he and his dad Kent (Dean Norris) to move to California with another man, and ever since Kent’s been trying hard to understand why his son would give up football (the only interest they used to share). Feeling isolated and alone, he’s drawn to Brandy, who’s in a similar rut. Her mom Patricia (Jennifer Garner) goes to borderline psycho lengths to monitor her every move, tracking everything Brandy does online and deleting “dangerous” messages before she can read them. In each other, Tim and Brandy find a respite from a world that doesn’t understand them. A scene in which the outcasts lay together in front of a waterfall at night is the film’s most touching.

The mother-daughter relationship between Brandy and Patricia, like the Don-Helen plot, illuminates nothing new about internet evils. Just because the tightly-wound Patricia uses technology to be overprotective doesn’t change the fact that, for storytelling purposes, she’s simply an overprotective mother and nothing more. Everyone in this film is so one-dimensional, their trajectories so predictable and clichéd. Judy Greer, for example, plays a mom who takes risqué photos of her snooty daughter Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) and posts them online, a sleazy parenting move that may ruin Hannah’s chances of landing a spot on an American Idol-esque talent competition. The fact that Greer’s character is genuinely surprised that the TV show executives find her daughter’s site questionable is absurd. Again, maybe 15 years ago this story line would make sense, but we’ve come way too far since then.

One thing the film has going for it are some key, good performances, most notably from Sandler. As Don you can see him bearing the weight of his unfulfilled life on his shoulders, often zoning out and staring off at nothing as his wife and son move around him. There’s an honesty to the performance that makes you wish he’d venture into the dramatic arena more often instead of churning out family movie schlock. Elgort and Dever are excellent as well, imbuing their thinly-written parts with real heart.

At least Reitman hasn’t lost his ambition–Men, Women & Children is a huge, intricately woven film that at least attempts to say something profound about the current digital-obsessed landscape. His message may be out of date, but maybe someday, years from now, we’ll look back on this movie fondly, as a time capsule of how foolish we once were to let online nonsense muck everything up so bad.

Men, Women & Children trailer

The Mill Valley Film Festival has built a reputation as a showcase for future Oscar winners and emergent independent and foreign filmmakers. The festival has hosted five of the last six Best Picture Oscar winners, rolling out the red carpet for A-list actors and filmmakers while heavily supporting local filmmakers as well. Nestled in one of the most beautiful places in the world, filmmakers, actors, and attendees alike are drawn to Mill Valley every year by the easy, low-stress atmosphere, the gorgeous surroundings, the varied special events and, of course, the films. In its 37th year, the festival looks to deliver everything loyal festival-goers expect and more.

“Variety has said once–probably more than once–that Mill Valley has the ambience of a destination festival and the clout of an urban festival,” said festival founder and director Mark Fishkin at yesterday’s press conference. “Change” is one of the themes of this year’s festival, with the folks behind the festival embracing the evolving landscape of film and film distribution. Said Fishkin: “For us, change is inevitable, but we are still part of a special division of the film industry, which is theatrical exhibition. We take our role as curators very seriously, whether it’s films that are coming from the Bay Area or films coming from Cannes.”

The Homesman

Tommy Lee Jones‘ latest offering, The Homesman, will open the festival, with star Hilary Swank set to attend. The film is a Western, following a claim jumper (Jones) and a young woman (Swank) as they escort three insane woman through the treacherous frontier between Nebraska and Iowa. Fishkin describes it as a “feminist Western” that is “extremely moving. We’re just so proud to be showing it in this year’s festival.”

Co-headlining opening night is Men, Women, & Children, Jason Reitman‘s new film starring Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Judy Greer, and Jennifer Garner that explores the strange effect the internet age has on parents and their teens. Reitman will be in attendance to present. Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies will also play opening night, completing the killer triple-threat. The film, about a woman stuck in slacker adolescence, stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Keira Knightley, and Sam Rockwell.

The festival looks to finish as strong as it started, with Jean-Marc Valée‘s follow-up to Dallas Buyers Club, spiritual quest movie Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed, who embarked on a 1,100-mile hike to heal deep emotional wounds. Laura Dern also stars, and will be honored with a tribute.

French favorite Juliette Binoche stars across Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria. Binoche plays an actress who’s asked to return to a play that made her famous 20 years ago, but this time in an older role, forcing her to reflect on the young woman she once was and what she’s become since. Another French actress who can do no wrong, Marion Cotillard is outstanding in the Dardenne brothers’ new film, Two Days, One Night. Recalling the best of Italian neorealism, the film follows a woman who’s got a weekend to convince her co-workers to forego their bonuses to save her job.

The Theory of Everything

Two emerging young actors will be spotlighted as Eddie Redmayne and Elle Fanning will be in attendance to discuss their respective new films. Fanning stars in Low Down, which views the troubled life of jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes) from the perspective of his teenage daughter (Fanning). Set in the ’70s, the film also stars Glenn Close, Peter Dinklage, and Lena Headey. In a breakout performance, Redmayne portrays legendary physicist Stephen Hawking in the stirring biopic The Theory of Everything, which is quickly generating momentum on the festival circuit.

Several other films that have been building steam on the festival circuit will play at the festival as well. English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner is played brilliantly by Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, which we loved at Cannes. Also portraying a significant real-life figure is Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars in The Imitation Game, the story of English mathematician Alan Turing and his groundbreaking intelligence work during World War II. Steve Carell‘s highly-anticipated turn in Foxcatcher as John Du Pont, the man who shot olympic great David Schultz, will surely continue to stir up Oscar talk as the film plays late in the festival. Robert Downey Jr. stars as a big city lawyer who returns home to defend his father (Robert Duvall), the town judge, who is suspected of murder.

Metallica is set to play a pleasantly unexpected role in the festival as his year’s artist in residence, with each of the four members of the band presenting a film. Drummer Lars Ulrich has naturally chosen to highlight Whiplash, Damien Chazelle‘s drama about a young aspiring drummer and his relentless instructor. Chazelle will also be in attendance. Lead singer James Hetfield has chosen to present a classic, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, while guitarist Kirk Hammett, one of the world’s foremost horror aficionados, will offer up Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Bassist Robert Trujillo is showing a sneak peek at a documentary he produced himself, Jaco, which tells the story of legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius.

On the local side of things is a special screening of Soul of a Banquet, a documentary by filmmaker Wayne Wang  about celebrity chef Cecilia Chang. Wang and Chang, who both have deep San Francisco Bay Area roots, will be in attendance to celebrate their storied careers and present their film collaboration. Chuck Workman, another Bay Area legend who’s best known for editing the clip reels at the Oscars, will be honored at the festival as well.

There’s little to be heard in the trailer for the latest feature film from writer/director Jason Reitman outside of The Plaintain’s hazy cover of the Donna Summer disco classic “I Feel Love.” Men, Women & Children fades between shots of the film’s leading men, women and teenagers attached to their modern tech devices. iPhone chat bubbles, album artwork, and streaming video chats hang above the heads of Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, and The Fault in Our Stars‘ Ansel Elgort. Also starring are Kaitlyn Dever, Judy Greer, Rosemarie DeWitt, and frequent Reitman-collaborator J.K. Simmons.

Paramount recently announced the film will land a limited theatrical release on October 3rd, before expanding wider October 17th. The news makes Men, Women & Children yet another potential awards contender opening (at least partially) on October 17th. That weekend, the new Reitman feature will go up against the Brad Pitt war drama Fury (after Sony moved the picture’s release up from November 14th), Birdman and Camp X-Ray (both in limited release), as well as Kill the Messenger (which like MW&C, expands on the 17th). Holdovers like David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, the Robert Downey Jr.-lead The Judge, and Whiplash will still likely be in theaters for what might turn out to be a very enjoyable October at the movies.

Watch Men, Women & Children trailer