Get Smart (2008) -vs- Johnny English (2003)
 The Smackdown Summer is here with new versions of familiar entertainments: A new Batman, a new Hell Boy, and now another spy spoof. Every spy sendup owes something in spirit to Maxwell Smart. As the […]
Major Star Vehicle
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008) -vs- Semi-Pro (2008)
The Smackdown Movie makers could take a hint from the guy putting anchovies on your pizza: A little goes a long way. That could mean fewer sequels, prequels and franchises that began life as comic […]
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) -vs- Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
 The Smackdown Movies — unlike real life — give us a taste of life as we’d like it: Dashing heroes, beautiful heroines. That idea bites the dust as the sequels and prequels and wrinkquels downgrade […]
There Will Be Blood (2007) -vs- Gangs of New York (2002)
The Smackdown It’s easy to admire virtue and nobility. Possessing either can be difficult. Maybe that’s why our movies seem to feature five Norman Bates and ten Gordon Gekkos for every George Bailey or Atticus Finch. […]
Michael Clayton (2007) -vs- The Rainmaker (1997)
The Smackdown American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a lawyer as someone “skilled in the circumvention of the law” and he presciently wrote this a century before either of our two films hit the […]
27 Dresses (2008) -vs- The Wedding Planner (2001)
The Smackdown Since a lot of romantic comedies have a wedding somewhere in the film, the reasoning must go, why not have an entire movie about them? From “The Wedding Singer” to “Wedding Crashers” to […]
The Bucket List (2007) -vs- Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Both the hotly-promoted “The Bucket List” and the below-the-radar “Bubba Ho-Tep” feature a pair of geriatric geezers (one white, one black) undertaking adventure in the twilight of their lives in a search to give meaning to what went before. Both films are entertaining, but can the big budget, major studio offering with an “A List” cast and a big name director trump a small, independently-made gem based on a Bram Stoker Award nominated short story? Can Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman best Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis? Is gallimaufry globetrotting more poignant than fighting giant roaches in Nacogdoches? Will the Hollywood-based screenwriter from NYU’s film school hold his own against the Mojo Storyteller from the Big Thicket in East Texas? In short, will “The Bucket List” command as fervent and as loyal a following as “Bubba Ho-Tep?” Will the questions ever stop…
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Hairspray (2007) -vs- Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Thirty Years of Dancing Travolta! The Smackdown It was three decades ago that a charismatic sitcom star named John Travolta crossed over into feature film fame with the cultural sensation Saturday Night Fever. In the […]
American Gangster (2007) -vs- Hoodlum (1997)
The Smackdown Audiences love gangsters on film. They appeared as early as 1912 in D.W. Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley. Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scarface set the tone in the early 1930s for generations of […]
American Gangster (2007) -vs- The Godfather, Part II (1974)
The Smackdown It can’t be easy being a young criminal crime boss and drug lord, coming from a struggling underclass, living in the shadow of an even more powerful criminal. Both Frank Lucas and Michael […]