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Here's what's so great about the new Paul Rudd/Jason Segel flick I Love You, Man: it may be the most honest movie about male friendships I've ever seen.

Yeah, it's a wacky comedy with gross-out elements like projectile vomiting and a scene where Segel fights The Incredible Hulk...er... Lou Ferrigno.

But the hilariously awkward heart of the film is that most men will recognize in Paul Rudd's own fumbling attempt to cultivate male friends something they themselves have struggled with at one point or another. Most American men have trouble making new friends. Not because we're cold, solitary cave-creatures but because the process of making friends as an adult male is uncomfortably close to dating and the society has simply not prepared us for that.

Paul Rudd and Jason Segel take this existential crisis and somehow make it so funny that I'm still cracking up, days later, thinking about throwaway scenes.

(Minor spoilers after the cut - nothing too big)

The Cartoon Network's new Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon premiered on Friday -- and it's well worth checking out.

(Theme music owes a bit to The Tick, I think, but it's not that tongue-in-cheek.)

As discussed in this Wired interview, it's the first time in decades that we've seen a lighter Batman -- not the driven, disturbed and haunted vigilante of the breakthrough Batman: The Animated Series or the "Dark Knight" of the new batch of Batman films.

The show will team a solo Batman with a different DC comics character each episode -- and it looks like they're going to the back-benches with some of the people who will be showing up. The first episode "Rise of the Blue Beetle!" is light enough for kids, but it's not junk-food. Adult comic fans, sci-fi geeks and kids-at-heart of all ages will also enjoy the show's wit and imagination.

Reminds me a bit of what they did with Superman Adventures some years ago - taking essential elements of the property and telling really great pop stories with them.

The new Bond movie came out this week and, of course, I was there to see it on opening night. Haven't missed one in the theater since Goldeneye.

On the whole I liked it, but there's good news and there's bad news...

This weekend I saw the new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading -- the Coens' twisted version of a spy film.

The Coen brothers don't actually do spoofs - their films rarely directly reference or mock anything specific. But they do have a penchant for taking established film genres -- detective flicks, gangster pictures, caper movies, Capra-esque morality tales, romantic comedies -- and giving them their own bizarre twist.

In this sense, Burn After Reading is firmly in the tradition of The Big Lebowski (a bizarro Raymond Chandler-style detective movie) and Fargo (a murder mystery with the unlikeliest of heroes, villains and settings). Like those films Burn's plot is complicated, unlikely and whirls and circles itself like the hula-hoops in The Hudsucker Proxy. But it splits the difference between those films in terms of serious darkness.

What people will probably talk about most is Brad Pitt's performance as...well, a complete doofus. We've seen Pitt the romantic leading man, the dirtied-up terrifying villain (Kalifornia) and the spastic head case (12 Monkeys). But even in The Mexican I'm not sure we've ever seen him this broadly, proudly moronic.

But for my money some of the best scenes are the drier CIA-centric ones with John Malkovich as a disgraced, defeated analyst and JK Simmons (the dad in Juno, Garth Pancake from The Ladykillers) and David Rasche as his former bosses.

What did you guys think?

We all love Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black is OK, too ...

There's a real reason why critics loved this movie. It pokes, prods, and makes laughs possible that otherwise would not be OK in the walking, living, thinking, sympathetic (and PC) real world. And it brings down the film industry, which many a critic, I bet, not-so-secretly wants to see.

And so, in those ha-ha Hollywood moments, the movie gets a little too inside baseball, if you're just looking for the good ol' haha.

It's summer, which means reality TV is at its best. You've probably been a Survivor or Real World fan. You've glanced, with disgust, at I (heart) New York.
But you probably haven't been watching the newest round of strange, test-of-wills, change-your-life, reality shows.
Check 'em out.

Queen Bees, on The N, Fridays at 8:30 p.m.
Seven royal bitches -- those girls who talk smack about their peers in gym class or berate their boyfriends in public -- are put into mean girl rehab.
The one who makes the biggest turnaround win $25,000. Finally, a chance watch the nastiest women get what they give.

The Baby Borrowers, on NBC, Wednesdays 9 p.m.
The commercials promise, "It's not TV. It's birth control."
Five teenage couples are given a chance to live together like adults -- with jobs and children.
The results are revealing. Couples break up. The fight over cleanup responsibilities. They decide they couldn't possible take care of children -- not right now at least.
The finale is this week, but you can catch earlier episodes on WeTV.

From G's to Gents, on MTV
Fonzworth Bentley turns a bunch of rough and tumble dudes into polished gentlemen.
The characters are priceless. And from the looks of the season preview, Bentley manages to have a real, positive affect on these gangstas.

Went to the midnight showing of The Dark Knight last night and am dead on my feet today as a result.

The above picture? That's me today, minus the smile.

But it was worth it.

My brief assessment after the jump (minor spoilers ahead, nothing major).

So it's official: Wanted was pretty awful.

I think it's rare that the experience of watching a movie is so boring and frustrating that even some brief Angelina Jolie nudity (or that of a body double, I'm not sure) doesn't make up for it.

This was that experience.

But here's the thing: I didn't think the effects were bad or ridiculous. I just thought the script was crap, the original work was tweaked just enough for it not to be as interesting and it was carried out poorly. Also, the soundtrack was just awful.

Ech.

Last week columnist Jeri Rowe stopped me in the newsroom with a huge grin on his face.

"I've got something for you," he said. "It's for the blog, but I'm going to need it back."

"Okay," I said.

"No, really," he said. "I'm going to need it back."

"Fair enough," I said, a little curious now.

That's when he hit me with this -- an advanced copy of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Snuff.

Jeri needn't have worried: I finished it in one night.

Just saw Iron Man.

I had high hopes, so I was a little scared of being let down.

But, long story short: one of the best super-hero movies I've ever seen, and the best one Marvel has produced in a long while.

Saw Sweeney Todd this weekend, and enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to.

Here's my thing about musicals: I don't hate them. I just hate it when they take themselves too seriously. When there's dancing and singing involved it's very easy to go of the tracks of drama and into melodrama. And, though I know this makes me awful and closed-minded, I have a really hard time not laughing when people burst into a song in a way that I'm supposed to find moving rather than mirthful.

So -- Guys and Dolls I like. Les Miserable, not so much.

I dug Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Dreamgirls was too much.

Like Chicago, I feel like Sweeney Todd split the difference pretty well. I never saw the stage show, so I have to assume that most of the credit for the movie's tone should go to director Tim Burton, who has spent decades mixing the dramatic and the hilarious to great effect (Beetlejuice, Batman, Ed Wood).

The plot seems tailor-made for Burton -- a strange alchemy of Dickensian morality play and morbid, surreal storytelling worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Which is a perfect playground for Johnny Depp (who seems almost preternaturally attracted to the weird), Helena Bonham Carter (who seems to have made a career of playing kind of creepy goth chicks) and Sacha Baron Cohen (who, with Borat under the belt, took to the sliminess and ambiguous nationality of his character like a fish to water).

I won't ruin any major plot points for you, but I will say this: if you're hoping for a happy ending, you might be better off seeing PS. I Love You.

Went to see "Saw 4" with my little (18-year-old) sister this weekend.

And man did it make me feel old.

Let me start with some wild hyperbole: I'm not sure I've ever seen a better Western than The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

And I've seen (and loved) a lot of Westerns. From John Wayne as Chisolm to Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, from the grit of Sam Peckenpah's Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid and Eastwood's Unforgiven to the comic puckishness of Support Your Local Sheriff and Maverick.

But this one -- this one has it all. A strange, heartbreaking script that is at once timeless and topical. A knockout cast of some of my favorite actors (Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell, a career-making turn for Casey Affleck). Great cameos (Nick Cave, James Carville). Beautiful, stunning cinematography. Brilliant, spooky direction.

And, beyond all that, it does not spare one of the greatest strengths of any authentic film of the genre: the ubiquitous weirdness of the Old West.

[SOME SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP]