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Hearts of lightness. HBO: Claudette Barius
A little while ago, I mentioned one thing that’s bugged me all along about Entourage: the difficulty of telling whether Vince is actually supposed to be a good actor or not. Last night we finally got to see him on set, and it didn’t clear much up. On the one hand the script’s cues seem to be …
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From left, Showtime’s Meadowlands and HBO’s Conchords
Work on an unspecified Big Fat Project has prevented me from cranking out many full-fledged reviews lately but I want to put in a word for Meadowlands, an eight-episode British import drama that starts on Showtime Sunday. It’s a dark, fanciful mystery about a tough guy and his family …
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After awarding his last Showcase of all time today (well, a week or so ago, but his last Price Is Right just aired), Bob Barker said his final farewell to his audience:
“I want to thank you very, very much for inviting me into your home for the past 50 years. I am deeply grateful. And please remember: help control the pet population. …
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My Culture Complex column in this week’s Time (the one with Mike Bloomberg and Arnold getting all cuddly on the cover) is about two personal obsessions of mine: real estate, and TV shows that obsess about real estate. More specifically, the fact cable home shows have gone from focusing on decoration and DIY and become about money, money, …
Okay, I’m back from Venice. If you really need to read more abot the Biennale, here’s a link to my overview piece in the new issue of Time International. Now on to other subjects.
Here’s one. I had a chance recently to preview all eight episodes of The Power of Art, the Simon Schama documentary series that begins Monday night, June …
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By which I don’t mean TV-program-that-is-a-work-of-fiction–I mean a TV program that was fictionalized within another TV show or movie.
Off the top of my head, I have to give the TV-division award to The Itchy & Scratchy Show. They fight! They fight! They fight and fight and fight! Is there any show-within-a-show that better captures …
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I’ll be catching up on last night’s premiere of Top Chef, which I didn’t get around to between Rescue Me and having gone to a screening of Seth Rogen’s Superbad. It’s supergood! Michael Cera’s character talks exactly like George Michael, except he gets to swear. Jonah Hill’s character talks exactly like Seth Rogen, plus his character’s …
My stay in Venice is winding down. (After a week of running around this place, so am I.) For my last Biennale post, rather than offer final observations, I decided to talk again with an artist who has work showing here. Those are the people the Biennale is all about.
Christine Hill is an American, raised in Binghamton, N.Y., who has …
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I just sat in on a conference call with CNN and and YouTube, who are teaming up on what they are calling the “first-ever viewer-generated presidential debates.” The debates (one with the Democrats on July 23, one with the GOP on Sept. 17) will feature questions taken entirely from the public’s online video submissions, which can be …
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We’ve spent a couple of weeks on the season 3 finale here at LDG, so for this week I thought I’d take a different tack, go (slightly) back and toss out one of the bigger questions about the island’s mythology:
What (or who) is the smoke monster, anyway?
There are a lot of subquestions implied in that. If Smokey is an independent …
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The fact that I’m watching Rescue Me’s season premiere on FX tonight says good things and bad things about it. I still like the show enough to want to see where it’s going, but I was disappointed enough by season 3 not to have watched the advance screeners FX sent me.
Rescue Me has always been a hit-big or miss-big show, and its …
The Italian pavilion has a very funny video installation, called Democrazy, by Francesco Vezzoli, a satire of the American (and increasingly, the world’s) political campaign process. It consists of two sixty-second videos — parody presidential campaign spots — that play simultaneously on large screens facing one another in a …
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In 2001, Trey Parker and Matt Stone created That’s My Bush!, a relatively mild sitcom about the new President, and cultural critics everywhere took notice. Was it disrespectful? Could this be good for a nation still divided over the election recount?
Six years later, Comedy Central is debuting Lil’ Bush: Resident of the United States, …
