It’s a simple question we all have to ask ourselves sooner or later: Am I the sort of person who enjoys a good ol’ fashioned icky-fun movie about giant bugs? Go ahead and ask yourself. I’ll wait here.

Is the answer yes? Good, because that’s exactly what Infestation intends to be, and for the most part, it delivers. Chris Marquette (Fanboys) stars as Cooper, a fun-loving slacker who is about to be fired from his latest dead-end office job when…something happens.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

In the Mix comes described as an “edgy romantic comedy,” which I guess is a romantic comedy in which people shoot at each other. Our star-crossed lovers are club DJ Darrell (R&B star Usher) and Mafia princess Dolly (adorable Emmanuelle Chriqui); they’ve known each other all their lives, but, you know, not in that way. Darrell’s late father was a trusted employee of Dollie’s daddy Frank (Chazz Palminteri), the mob boss of New Jersey. Frank hires Darrell to DJ a party, which proves fortuitous when a rival attempts a hit on him and Darrell takes the bullet in his shoulder.

It’s only a flesh wound, and Darrell quickly recuperates in Frank’s spacious McMobsion. Given the potential mob war a-brewing, Frank is unwilling to let Dolly leave the house without protection, but Dolly refuses to be accompanied by one of his goons. (Frank is perpetually surrounded by a cast of goombahs who might have finally made it onto The Sopranos if the show had run seventeen seasons; Robert Costanzo IS Fat Tony!)

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There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.

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Via Defamer comes news of a feature film shooting this month in Long Island. It’s called Reality Horror Night, and the cast includes Destiney Moore, Erik Chopin, Paul Grassi, Billy Garcia, Frenchy and Ty White. Perhaps you don’t recognize any of those names, but you may have at least passing familiarity with some of the TV shows that brought them whatever fame they possess: VH1 Rock of Love, The Biggest Loser, The Mole, Survivor and The Amazing Race.

The premise, according to this press release: the reality stars “are invited to participate in a new TV Show where the prize is $1,000,000. Before the first contestant is voted off, a ‘freakish accident’ happens, and they meet their demise. When the second and third guest ‘bite the dust’ our contestants discover that they are not only playing for $1,000,000 but playing for their lives. This light-comedy, light-horror, suspenseful film ponders the question..."Would you kill for $1,000,000?" Little do our Reality Stars know that this night might be considered a scam, a scam for their lives.”

“Light-horror” suggests these folks won’t meet with especially gruesome ends, which is a shame.

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You can always tell when it’s the holiday season, because the studios begin to clear out their coffers to release titles both new and classic, no matter whether they’ve already been released on DVD.

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This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience.

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This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Based solely on its critical reception, it would have been easy to confuse the release of Gigli in theaters with the release of a notorious child murderer from prison. The title became an instant punchline, made even funnier by the fact that no one could pronounce it. (As the title character informs us repeatedly throughout the movie, it “rhymes with really.”) Few movies could be as terrible as it was purported to be, and indeed, Gigli isn’t one of them. In fact, it seems as though America has re-evaluated the movie since its release. I expected to find it much higher on the Bottom 100 chart, but #71 sounds about right.

The wave of bad publicity that crushed the movie can largely be blamed on the off-screen shenanigans of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. You could argue that it was unfair of reviewers to take out their frustrations on the movie itself, and you would have a point, but let us not forget how truly obnoxious the whole Ben ‘n Jen circus became.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, this is not a rerun. Unwatchable is back from a brief (but oh so blissful) summer hiatus, and we’ll continue our march up the IMDb’s list of the 100 worst movies ever made next time with #76. But as you may dimly recall, I was forced to skip #88 initially because it had not yet been released on DVD at the time. It was a better world back then, a world in which College Road Trip was not available on video, and I miss it so. But we can’t go back. College Road Trip is now out on DVD, it will always be out on DVD, clogging landfills and supporting drinks on coffee tables, so let’s just get it over with.

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It’s been a while since the work of hard-boiled crime writer Jim Thompson was adapted for the screen (since 1997, to be precise, which is when This World, Then the Fireworks debuted), but producer Charlie Loventhal is giving it a shot. He’ll bring a feature based on Thompson’s 1953 novel Recoil to the screen, Variety reports. “Story follows a young inmate who's sprung from prison, only to be set up for murder by the same corrupt political insiders who sponsored his parole.” Ralph Pezzullo, who recently scripted an adaptation of his nonfiction book Jawbreaker (co-written with Gary Berntsen) for Oliver Stone, will write the screenplay.

The Hughes brothers are pimpin’ again.

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In re-launching the Morning Deal Report, we promised you all the latest news on comic book and videogame adaptations, but here’s one we didn’t see coming: According to the Hollywood Reporter, J.J. Abrams will soon be bringing a New York Times feature to the big screen. The article, entitled “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” concerns “an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.” The $8.5 million residence houses “an elaborately clever ‘scavenger hunt’ built into the apartment that involved dozens of historical figures, a fictional book and a soundtrack.” It’s nice to have more money than you know what to do with, or so I’m told.

Variety reports that Spike Lee will take a break from feuding with Clint Eastwood long enough to direct The Time Traveler, adapted from “a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.”

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Sex and the City:  The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life.  There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good.  One thing is for sure:  it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming.  They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original.  The comparison is by no means coincidental:  legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life.  If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

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Over the years, whenever one of the long lulls between seasons of The Sopranos would finally draw to a close, creator David Chase would emerge from the back room of the Bada Bing and entertain a few questions about the upcoming episodes. After jotting down a few of his substance-free replies, one enterprising reporter or another would ask whether or not this was the end of The Sopranos, for real this time. At which point Chase would make it perfectly clear that what he really wanted to do was direct. Direct movies.

This comment was usually accompanied by some remarks about the base nature of the television medium, how impossible it was to do good work in it, and how movies were really where it was at. Remarks which left us fans of the series dumbfounded. Had Chase no inkling that The Sopranos was head and shoulders above 99% of what was released to theaters while it was on the air? Did he truly think there were more than five people on the planet who had more creative freedom than he enjoyed in his years with HBO? Did he never hear the phrase - on his own television show, even - "Be careful what you wish for"?

Well, now Chase is getting what he wished for.

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You kids today, with your sequels and remakes and instantaneous re-boots, you’re spoiled! Between The Dark Knight and Gotham Knight and umpteen animated Bat-shows on the tube, you’re up to your pointy ears in Batman. It wasn’t like this back in my day, let me tell you. Growing up as a Batman fan in the 70s and early 80s, I would have killed for just one Batman movie, any Batman movie, even one directed by Joel Schumacher. But between the end of the ABC television series in 1968 and the first Tim Burton movie in 1989, there was a long Bat-drought, broken up only by the occasional rumor and ill-conceived attempt at resurrection.

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There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.

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The fourteenth annual Screen Actors Guild Awards were handed out Sunday night, in a brisk televised program that the striking Screen Writers' Guild gave its blessing to. This year's awards got perhaps a bit more attention than usual in this season, when the writers' strike turned the Golden Globes into a glorified press conference and threatens to do we know not what to the Academy Awards show. Dignified yet friendly, the evening struck a nice balance between this year's gutted-out version of the Golden Globes and the bedazzled vulgarity of the traditional Oscar blow-out, which helped to compensate for the fact that the list of chosen winners didn't have a lot of surprises. Among the movie nominees, There Will Be Blood's Daniel Day-Lewis took the Best Actor prize, which he dedicated to the late Heath Ledger. Julie Christie (Away from Her won for Best Actress, while awards for Best Supporting performance went to Javier Bardem (for No Country for Old Men) and Ruby Dee (for American Gangster). The SAG Awards also set aside awards for Best Cast Ensemble and Best Stunt Ensemble: these went to the fine actors who appeared together in No Country for Old Men and those motherfucking lunatics who risked life and limb while giving the finger to gravity itself in The Bourne Ultimatum, respectively.

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