In honor of college basketball's wildest month and the new season of Breaking Bad (Sundays, 10PM | 9C), we bring you AMC's March Badness -- a four-part tournament series that celebrates the baddest of the bad from your favorite movies. This week, we're going to the dark side, as the big screen's baddest sci-fi boys battle for galactic domination. From evil computer programs (2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, The Matrix's Agent Smith) to a certain lightsaber-wiedling Dark Lord of the Sith, they're all here. But which one has the badness to subjugate the rest? You decide, then defend your picks in the comments.

Michael Douglas had a lot to live up to -- his father, Kirk Douglas, is one of the greatest actors of all time. But, lucky for Michael, he's somehow managed to create a legacy all his own. Though he's virtually disappeared in recent years, we're left with an impressive string of hits that stand the test of time -- and hopefully hint at more to come.

1. Falling Down (1993)
Possibly the most underrated Douglas movie -- and also quite possibly the best -- Falling Down casts Douglas as a cubicle jockey at the end of his rope who takes to shooting up the highway when he can't order a McDonald's-type breakfast after 10:30 a.m. It's not an easy flick to watch, but given that Douglas often plays variations on himself, his restrained performance here is an all-time high.

2. The Game (1997)
In David Fincher's tricky, fun thriller, Douglas plays a man in over his head, as the birthday present his brother gives him goes horribly, horribly wrong. Or does it? Douglas makes all the unlikely twists and turns believable, right up until (and including) the surprise ending. Without his central performance, the movie would never have worked.

Continue reading "Flashback Five - The Best Movies of Michael Douglas" »

Aristotle, in his Poetics, tried to reveal the underlying structure of narrative art as it was known in his day. It's just a shame he died 2,300 years before Quentin Tarantino started making movies, because I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about it. So even though the Academy chose to snub his latest oeuvre,  I present my own clumsy attempt at a Tarantinian (Tarantinoian?) "Poetics:"

In general, the simulations of human beings that populate Quentin Tarantino flicks, for all their snappy dialogue, communicate meaningfully only through violence and the threat of violence. The paradigmatic Tarantino Scene proceeds this way: Character A implicitly threatens Character B with a fatal assault. But instead of carrying out that threat immediately, A toys with B, discussing theories of cinema, superheroes or hamburgers, which serves not to charm B but to further terrify him or her. Then, just as maximum tension is reached, the threat is fulfilled, and A does great violence to B, unless of course great violence is done to A first.

Continue reading "Peter Sagal - Aristotle, Quentin Tarantino, and The Signature Stand-Off" »

Just because you can fight on the stable surface of Earth doesn't mean you can fight in space. It takes grit; it takes the right stuff. And only a select few action stars have what it takes to head into zero gravity and stay standing. Sylvester Stallone? Tom Cruise? In their dreams! The following tough guys (and gals) have the stomach to leave the atmosphere, conquer the cosmos, and never look back.

Korben Dallas and Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), The Fifth Element and Armageddon
The first time Willis went extraterrestrial it was as a rough-and-tumble cabdriving ex-soldier who saves the entire galaxy, in The Fifth Element. He stuck to the formula for Armageddon, his second deep-space mission: as an oil driller who saves Earth, he manages to conquer the nightmarish environment of an asteroid, staying alive only long enough to sacrifice himself and unleash a pretty cool space explosion. Willis is proof enough that once you go space, you never come back.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), Star Trek
With apologies to William Shatner, Chris Pine is the Captain Kirk who does the most serious action damage in space. It's not really Shatner's fault: the original Star Trek came way before the modern action movie and special effects. Pine's version of the young captain has all of the swagger, but is also skilled in choreographed fighting and making things explode. If you're looking for someone to blow up a bad guy's ship, you could do a lot worse than this guy.

Continue reading "Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver Do More Than Explore Space...They Own It!" »

Hollywood loves to come up with outlandish prophesies. In The Terminator, assassin cyborgs from a nuclear wasteland travel through time. Escape From New York transforms Manhattan into a maximum-security prison, while The Day After Tomorrow casts the planet into an ice age virtually overnight. If these fortune-peddling flicks were accurate, most of us would either be dead, fighting zombies, or zooming around on hover boards. Which movie do you think predicted the most unrealistic future?