"I hate these movies. I won't see these movies."

In the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, in a provocative mini-essay that, alas, isn’t posted on the magazine’s website (yet), critic Lisa Schwarzbaum explains why she was more than happy to turn the chore of reviewing Captivity over to fellow EW scribe Owen Gleiberman:

“It’s quite simple: I hate these movies. I won’t see these movies. Never saw Saw or its sequels, never will. I’m not impressed with the ‘quality’ of the gore or the ‘wit’ of the filmmaking. I’m not enjoyably scared; I’m horrified, and not in the way horror fans get off, groaning and screaming with pack-mentality excitement. Instead, my horror is one of disturbance and anger: Who makes this vile crap? What is remotely defensible about a movie like Captivity, in which a woman is abducted and tortured for the sake of ticket sales? Nothing, that’s what. While moviegoers can vote with their wallets, I vote with my computer keyboard. Or rather, the silence of the keys, as I stay away from stuff I have no stomach for seeing, even on the job.”

No, this is Spinal Tap

While I was out in L.A. this past week, doing legwork for a magazine article and reviewing Captivity for Variety, the long-suffering Mrs. L. was left home to tend to our son when he started complaining about headaches and neck and back pains. Fearing the worst -- i.e., meningitis -- she brought George to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a viral infection. (Thank God that, unlike some folks in Sicko and a lot of folks who review movies, Mrs. L. has a real job with real medical insurance coverage.) Naturally, I was more than a little upset when I heard about this, especially since I was thousands of miles away and unable to do much but worry. But I have to admit that when I heard George was given a spinal tap, the first thing that sprang to my mind was...