Gale Anne Hurd

COUNTLESS comic-book bad guys have made the fatal mistake of underestimating the Hulk. Have Hollywood and the media made the same costly error? For weeks, industry gossip and news reports have focused not only on the shaky stance of Friday's “Speed...

You know, "Aeon Flux" isn't that bad. Oh, don't get me wrong. It's silly, it's pointless, and director Karyn Kusama clearly has no idea what she's doing ... but if you're looking for a mindless action movie set in a dystopic future society where hot...

"Come for the wines, stay for the food" is the motto at the new Vertical Wine Bistro in Pasadena. Vertical, in reference to tastings of several vintages of the same wine, and vertical, I suppose, because the posh wine bistro is upstairs, across from...

Friday August 21, 1998      How's this for a dubious comic premise?: Two college roommates, certain to flunk out their first semester, discover an obscure school regulation stating that if one roommate commits suicide, the other roommate automatically...

In a more eco-minded Hollywood fantasy world, every suburban house would have a special centralized recycling kitchen where families would reprocess all the congealed oatmeal and cold eggs that don't get eaten because Junior has to dash out to save the...

Friday October 31, 1997      Before he exploded onto the scene of commercial screenwriting with his back-to-back scripts for "Die Hard" and "The Fugitive," young Jeb Stuart wrote a screenplay in a college workshop program that showed enough promise to...

Wednesday July 1, 1998      You know you're not in the intended demographic group for "Armageddon," the loud new film about how a Bruce Willis-led team of roughnecks tries to save the world from a deadly asteroid, if:      * you even notice it's loud;...

Monday January 18, 1999      Imagine an alien life force that is electrical rather than protoplasmic in nature, and you've got the gimmick that energizes "Virus," an unpretentious, amusing thrill-a-minute sci-fi horror thriller / monster movie that plugs...

Wednesday August 4, 1999      Blame it on Bobby Sherman. What are two 15-year-old girls to do? They've just got to make that midnight deadline for posting an entry into the "Win a Date With Bobby Sherman Contest"--he's their singing idol--so what to do...

A story about a nice guy who turns as big, bad and green as King Kong on a bender, "Hulk" is based on the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who launched their monster around the time that Kennedy and Khrushchev were set to launch their...

"I am an obsolete design," Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-101 says with as much melancholy as a machine can muster, but hearing the line spoken in "Terminator 3" makes you wonder if the actor had himself in mind as much as his character. For as a 55-year-...

"The Punisher" is that rare comic book movie that actually feels like a comic book. Which turns out to be mostly, but not entirely, a good thing. Though he is the namesake of one of Marvel's most popular books, the Punisher — unlike cohorts Spider-...