TIME’s Feifei Sun and Claire Suddath pick the most unforgettable dresses ever to appear at the Academy Awards
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Vacation Robo-Post: Pimp My Blogroll!
Astute Tuned Inlanders may have noticed that last week, I finally began updating my favorite-links blogroll, at left, and pruning or correcting some of the broken links. I plan on expanding the list with some new favorites too, but, you know, baby steps.
Along those lines, this seemed like a perfect time to poll the Tuned In readership: …
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Programming Note
I’m away this week, but Tuned Inland shall not be abandoned in my absence. TIME’s prolific movie critic Richard Corliss will be contributing some guest Big Love and Glee posts in my absence (and the week of Oscars, yet!), sometime Tuned Inlander Steve Snyder will be stopping in, and I’ve also programmed Robo-James with some discussion …
Unknown: Liam Neeson Gets Re-Taken
Unknown, Liam Neeson’s standard-issue conspiracy thriller, hopes to be mistaken for a Jason Bourne film — or, better yet, a sequel to Neeson’s 2009 hit Taken
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The Morning After: Scarn Tootin'
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Objectively, as a critic, I probably wasn’t supposed to like “Threat Level: Midnight,” in which Michael Scott’s long-gestating movie finally came to fruition. It probably wasn’t plausible that the entire office would participate, and the episode was essentially like a giant, well-produced …
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Community Watch: Docu-Mental
Spoilers for last night’s Community coming up:
A typical episode of Community—there aren’t any typical episodes, but humor me—can really be reviewed on a few levels: the basic sitcom level (how funny was it), the format level (how well did its parody or formal experiment work, on its own and with the storyline) and the story-arc …
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Parks and Recreation Watch: Escape from Ice Town
Spoilers for last night’s Parks and Recreation coming up:
We could talk endlessly here about the cast of characters on Parks and Recreation, but one of my favorite things about the show is how Pawnee itself has become a character. Episode by episode, it’s developed into one of the richest fictional towns since Springfield, Wherever, …
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Dead Tree Alert: Game Changer?
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My column in the print issue of TIME this week looks at the success of the revival of The Game on BET, and how it suggests that the unfortunately-conventional wisdom of TV may be wrong: it may actually be good business to produce TV series featuring largely-minority casts, of the kind that …
Why I’m So Glad I Am Not Number Four
Despite Alex Pettyfer’s sexy smolder, this sloppy, cynical attempt to build a young-adult film franchise never catches fire
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The Morning After: Survivor Reviver
I promise to give up the meta-discussion of TV criticism after this week—I think—but there was one important issue that Josh Levin failed to address when critiquing the pitfalls of weekly TV-episode reviewing in Slate: It hurts your damn fingers. That is particularly the case on such a TV-heavy night as last night: we had the …
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NBC Casts Wonder Woman, Prime Suspect. Good Actress = Good Show?
I usually don’t bother reporting casting news on this blog, because I’d end up doing little else, but yesterday came reports that NBC had found actresses to re-create two iconic, if very different, classic-TV roles. In its remake of Prime Suspect, Maria Bello (A History of Violence) will reportedly take on the role of a tough, …
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Watson vs. the Humans, Night Three: GUI Defeats Human!
Spoilers for last night’s finale of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
Well, Homo sapiens, it was a great run. Two hundred thousand years! Yes, there was a war here and there and we caused a few extinctions and whatnot. But we developed language and mathematics, left crap on the ground that can be seen from space, and kicked the …
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Arthur Goes to Washington: The War Over Public Broadcasting Begins, Again
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As the debate over the federal budget intensifies in Washington, Republican lawmakers have targeted—again—funding for public broadcasting. Those who want to make the cuts would like the public to see them as taking on a group of privileged elitist liberals, who do not deserve …