Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

I am, beneath everything else, a fan. I was fixed in this mode as a young boy and am awed by people who take the risks of performance.

Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced — because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.