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This week’s endless arguments about The Sopranos reminded me of a question I’d been thinking about lately: Is it possible for a show to have a finale so bad–or for that matter, several seasons so bad–that they retroactively destroy your perception of the show’s overall greatness?
TV shows, unlike movies, are fluid things: your opinion …
I said a few days ago that I would return one last time to a description of the big international show at the Biennale organized by Rob Storr, “Think With the Senses/Feel With the Mind”. And walk with the feet. It’s a big, big show that begins at the Arsenale and concludes, 100 artists and a mile or so later, at the Giardini. As …
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Everyone thinks of Big Love as a show about a guy with three wives. They forget that it’s also a show about three women who have two wives and a husband. By their belief system–shared more deeply by some of them than others–Barb, Marge and Nicki are as much married to one another as to Bill.
The second-season opening jumped …
I stopped by the Venice Guggenheim, located in Peggy Guggenheim’s former palazzo, to see the joint Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney show. (More on that later.) I got distracted by her permanent collection. Guggenheim moved to Venice in 1949, after the gradual disintegration of the community of emigre artists who had fled to New York during …
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Because too much discussion of The Sopranos finale is never enough, we’re turning over this space this morning to LA Times columnist and TIME contributor Joel Stein for a Special Guest Post about the big finish. (We’ll offer equal time to Charles Krauthammer just as soon as he sends us something.) Take it away, Joel:
Oh, I felt …
I’m not giving out the prizes here, but now having seen most of the official pavilions at the Biennale — and yes, I’ve been here for five days and yes, it takes that long and longer to do justice to this thing — the pan-African group show at the Arsenale is not to be missed. It represents Africans — defined to include Arab North …
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…at least for today. Tonight is the return of Big Love, a favorite HBO drama that has gotten a raw deal from critics who relegate it to also-ran status.
Another TV critic–I think it was Salon’s Heather Havrilesky–once argued that Six Feet Under got short-shrifted as too “soap-opera,” which is to say, code for “too female.” Which, if …
At the Czech pavilion at the Giardini, you can have one of those experiences where the presentation gets badly in the way of the art. The artist is Irena Juzova. (Apologies, there are two accents in her last name, but as I’ve explained before, there are technical complications to doing accents over letters on this blog that would give …
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The review copies of John from Cincinnati I got from HBO had no opening credits or music. So last night, after the great blackout of ’07, I watched them for the first time, like you did once we all stopped screaming at our TVs.
I don’t have anything to change about my mixed-to-disappointed review. (About which: if TV critics were really …
Here’s a nice surprise. Some artists whose work never interested me before show up at the Biennale in a different light — and it’s the same work, more or less. The Russian pavilion features four individual artists and one collective, AES+F, which stands for Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. …
I usually give this blog a rest on weekends, but since I’m in Venice I blogged right on through, fully aware that the majority of readers don’t check back til Monday. Now that you’re here, if you care to you can backtrack to find the posts on the U.S. and British pavilions, among other things. Now on to France.
One of my best …
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SPOILER ALERT: Do I really have to warn you?
HBO photo: Craig Blankenhorn
So let’s cut to the (David) chase. I thought the ending was beautiful. Judging from the comments already pouring into the Television Without Pity forums (and my neighbors screaming curses into their Brooklyn backyards at 10:01 last night), you didn’t. Consider …
At the Giardini, the wooded park where the Biennale’s national pavilions are all set out in world’s fair style, the British pavilion occupies what you might call a high ground of the Old World. As you approach, France is on its left, Germany on the right. The salmon brick and white marble neo-classical pavilion, with its columns and …
