Losing your job ain’t so bad when you get to date Julia Roberts
Tuned InUncategorized
Test Pilot: Up All Night
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
The New Transformers: Turn On the Dark
For good or ill, director Michael Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood’s military-entertainment complex
Tuned InUncategorized
Test Pilot: Ringer
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so
…
Violent Video Games: The Top 8 Big Money Franchises
In observance of the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision to treat video games to the same First Amendment protection as art, music, and movies, here’s a look at some of the biggest names in violent game franchises.
Tuned InUncategorized
Test Pilot: 2 Broke Girls
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
Tuned InUncategorized
Programming Note
I’m going to be on vacation for the next week, traversing the wilds of southeast Michigan and, with any luck, having at least one sandwich at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Keep checking this space, though: there may be a guest post or two, and I’ve set up Robo-James—taking a break from his burgeoning career in the world of robot …
Tuned InUncategorized
ABC Announces Its Fall Premiere Dates
Following Fox and The CW, ABC today announced its rollout schedule for its new and returning fall shows. While the networks have experimented in recent years with staggered fall schedules to avoid shows getting lost in a pileup of premieres, most of ABC’s new shows will debut traditionally, in late September—the exceptions being the …
Tuned InUncategorized
End of a Cop Show Era? Goodbye to Law & Order: Criminal Intent
I’m not a fan of phony eulogies, and so I will confess up front that I was not a huge fan of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which just ended its run on USA. It’s partly that I could never sign on to its central selling point, the performance of Vincent D’Onofrio as Goren, who had his curtain call this last season; what some fans saw as …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Morning After: Faerie Tale
HBO’s True Blood returned last night with a season four premiere that expanded further on the show’s sexy-magic Southern gothic world: a little witchcraft, a little more vampire politics and a visit with Sookie to a Faerie world/prison that looked a bit like the world’s cheesiest gallery opening party. True Blood lost me after its …
Peter Falk: The One-Eyed Man Was King
Best known as TV’s wily, shambling Lt. Columbo, Falk was also a working-class movie hero, in a half-century career playing comic gangsters, harried husbands and one great granddad
Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher: What’s Her Motivation?
The saggy premise of her new comedy could use some augmentation
Tuned InRemembrance
Peter Falk Dies at 83
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biW9BbWJtQU]
Actor Peter Falk reportedly died last night at age 83, at his home in Beverly Hills. According to his daughter, reports USA Today, Falk had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
As an actor, Falk was a performer who was more than he at first seemed: he had a famously …