Profanity, angry and otherwise: Is there a time and a place for everything, even if it starts with F? iStockphoto.com

 

by Linda Holmes

Let us unpack the diverse set of issues that have bloomed in the wake of yesterday's story about young McKay Hatch and his crusade against profanity.

Bullying is terrible. Sending $2000 worth of pizza to a kid's house is terrible. Overnight phone calls are awful, death threats are criminal, and trying to get people to join a club and behave differently is not the same thing as censorship. In social settings, people who unleash a string of infuriated profanity at the slightest provocation are profoundly unsettling — though I'd argue that's more because of the fury than because of the profanity.

But here's the thing: There are times, in life and in art, when there's no substitute for "bulls--t." Or "f---." Or whatever other word you want to substitute that requires the use of asterisks. There just ... isn't.

Some examples of colorful profanity, from art and from experience, after the jump ...

Continue reading "The Well-Tempered F-Word" >

Chamber music in the cold: Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Anthony McGill couldn't provide a live performance given the weather. What kind of conditions would have been best? Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Read:

• Were you curious about the decision not to play real instruments during the chamber-music performance at President Obama's inauguration? Slate explains what conditions are good and bad for musical instruments, and provides some insight as to why.

• Salon's Mike Madden sums up how hard it is for a bunch of plugged-in people to discover that the White House is, at least right now, surprisingly unfriendly to most communication technologies more recent than what you can get from the Beeper King.

Note:

• Following the goings-on at the Screen Actors Guild? Big news yesterday. The short version is that a majority of the SAG board, frustrated by a filibuster that prevented a vote at a previous meeting, submitted a "written assent" that authorized the dismissal of SAG executive director Doug Allen. The more "moderate" faction of the union, which seems more likely to reach agreement with the studios and avoid a strike, scored a victory over the faction that had been in charge, which has been more willing to authorize a strike, particularly to secure a better contract where internet residuals and other new media issues are concerned. It's probably a development that makes a SAG strike much less likely, but beyond that, whether it's good news depends entirely on whom you ask.

• The 'Senate signed off on bumping the mandatory move to digital-only TV broadcasts, previously scheduled for February, was to June 12. The House seems likely to do the same.

• If all the Thriller-dance wedding videos aren't enough for you, you'll be glad to know that there's going to be a musical.

Ignore:

• "Worst [Blank] Ever" is a wildly overused construction these days, but when the next words you read are "Hilary Duff To Star In Bonnie And Clyde Remake," it does make you think..."Well, maybe."

• Donny Osmond is apparently the latest entrant on Dancing With The Stars. Since when do gigantic Broadway stars qualify to share the stage with hapless doofuses and graceless athletes? I call foul.

We're getting a late start this morning, but what goes with a late start better than an enormously entertaining harmonica video? Nothing, that's what. In the clip above, Buddy Greene explains that there is more to his instrument than "Oh, Susanna."

Steven Johnson is best known to me for the book Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argues that video games and television are making us smarter, not dumber. (Check out his 2005 Fresh Air interview here.) He's recently been guest-blogging at the very popular Boing Boing, where today, he talked about how boring he found old-school board games when he played them with his kids.

Battleship, he argues, is mostly guessing followed by very simple pattern-following; Candy Land contains absolutely no decision-making at all. (In the Candy Land commercial above, they seem to stress that you don't have to know anything to play Candy Land, so he may be missing the point.) What's great about the post is the spirited, largely respectful discussion it spawned in the comments about games, kids, nostalgia, and whether the purpose of Candy Land is mostly to teach you how to play a game at all -- we're not born knowing how to take turns, after all.

It turned into a neat little chat, definitely worth checking out if you're interested in games for kids, or even if you're not.

The red-carpet dress: Beauty is one thing; tripping is another. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

I like to look at pretty dresses. How luscious is the color of that dress on Kate Winslet? But the older and grumpier I become, the more difficult it gets for me to just look at a dress without thinking about logistics. What about walking? What about breathing? What about sitting in an auditorium seat for a couple of hours?

Not all these things are concerns for the people in attendance at the major festive celebrations of Hollywood, but they are concerns to me.

This is the lens through which I see beautiful dresses on celebrities now; I analyze what you can't do in that dress.

Can't Go To Best Buy Without Being Stopped By Security And Accused Of Smuggling Out A Nintendo Wii: Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

 

Can't Get Anyone To Pay Attention To Your Very Pretty Face: Emily Blunt

Emily Blunt Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

 

Can't Find A Competent Train-Wrangler: Claire Danes

Claire Danes Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

 

The rest of the list, after the jump...

Continue reading "Ten Can't-Do Dresses From The SAG Awards Red Carpet" >

Neil Gaiman: A big award at kind of a convenient moment. HarperCollins

 

by Linda Holmes

The American Library Association has given Neil Gaiman the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, a novel about a child raised by a collection of ghosts. The ALA calls the book "a delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing."

It's good news for Gaiman, certainly, but it's also nice for Focus Features, since it comes just before the release of Coraline, a film opening February 6 that's based on Gaiman's 2002 novella of the same name. It can't hurt to have another award to feature in your campaign.

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by Linda Holmes

Going for the rare double-mention in a single day is The Amazing Race, which we talked about earlier in the context of compelling footage of India, and which is back today with its announcement of new teams, in advance of the February 15 premiere of the new season. The show's first deaf contestant will race with his mom, two 4'9" stuntmen will tackle the planet, and, as seen above, a kid will attempt to exploit his father's "advanced" age to gain an advantage. (Seriously, watch it: it's a pretty funny clip.)

UPDATE: I totally apologize for not snagging the fact that "the guy" in the clip is writer/actor Mike White -- mostly mentioned for doing School Of Rock and Chuck and Buck, but a genius to me mostly because he was a writer on Freaks And Geeks. I did initially think I recognized him, but I tend to think that about half the people I see in reality-show casts, and I always assume that at most, it means I saw them in a deodorant commercial or something. See the comments for details.

Chris Harrison: The host who guides us into the darkness, seen here at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Let's get this out of the way now: The Bachelor is a horrible, horrible show from an actual-quality standpoint. Unlike well-edited and well-produced reality shows like Survivor, its pacing has all the agility of a cow on roller skates, and its tone has the velvety light touch you might get from a marching band made up entirely of tubas.

But Pringles aren't actually very good either, and that doesn't mean people don't consume them by the can.

I haven't watched the show with any regularity for quite a few seasons (and good for me!), but this year, I started to hear rumblings that it was less irritating and obnoxious than usual, which is mostly the fault of Jason Mesnick, the "handsome single dad" currently operating as the titular Bachelor. Traditionally, the person chosen as the Bachelor has no discernible merit, which is what makes the show sort of hilariously hopeless. What it has often become is a large group of women tearing each other's hair out for the opportunity to date a dude you could easily meet at any sports bar on any Friday, provided you are adequately spray-tanned.

That's not even counting the way that host Chris Harrison keeps saying "COMING UP!" in this voice of foreboding before telling you everything that's going to happen after the next commercial, after the commercial after that, and for the rest of the show. It's not unusual to see the same clip six or eight times, between the "Next week on The Bachelor!" preview, the "Tonight on The Bachelor!" preview, several "Later on The Bachelor!" previews, and a "Next on The Bachelor!" preview. The voice-overs and interviews are painfully expository, constantly announcing, for example, that dancing happened, just as we are watching dancing actually happen.

How they got me, after the jump...

Continue reading "Today In Self-Loathing: Watching 'The Bachelor'" >

The "poverty porn" problem: A man in actual India walks by a poster depicting movie India. Is there a problem here? Pal Pillai/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

As the Slumdog Millionaire awards train speeds along, with a (well-deserved) Screen Actors Guild Award bestowed on the whole cast on Sunday night, what might normally be a backlash against the movie itself (as almost always happens when acclamation begins to pile up) is taking the form of a lot of questions about whether the movie is, in the words you'll see most often, "poverty porn."

If you haven't followed this debate, you can start with this L.A. Times piece, in which an Indian film professor says that the movie is "a white man's imagined India." For a stronger negative view, try this.

It's not just the movie itself, either. Even before the film, you could take a so-called "poverty tour" of Mumbai's actual slums -- and the "slum tourism" industry has seen a big boost since the release of the film, in case what you saw on screen didn't make enough of an impression.

Interestingly, I've had this debate with people before, because before I saw intense images of Mumbai poverty in the high-culture context of an Oscar-nominated movie, I saw them in the thoroughly pop-culture context of The Amazing Race, which has filmed wrenching episodes in India in more than one of its world-traveling seasons. And when those episodes aired, there was inevitably a message-board debate about staring at poverty; filming disabled children panhandling from passing cars. The line between exploitation and the shedding of light on things the audience might otherwise never see is a tough one to draw.

I'm very interested in opinions on this question. Real poverty as part of a not-very-real story; an unsolved crisis as an element of fantasy. On the one hand, people are more aware than before of poverty in India in a way that may be more vivid; on the other..."slum tourism" sounds grotesque and creepy to my ear. What do you think?

Paul Blart: Mall Cop: You may not like it, but you're going to live with it. Sony Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

Read:

• I must admit that I wasn't terribly familiar with the existence of an enormous Nigerian moviemaking industry until I read this CBC piece on the movie Nollywood Babylon, which showed up last week at the Sundance Film Festival.

• Speaking of Sundance, last week's Manohla Dargis piece in the New York Times was only the beginning of the dissection of this year's quieter festival and sluggish market for films. The next Times piece puts it pretty bluntly: "Buyers proved fussy."

• Interesting Wall Street Journal discussion of why movies shouldn't necessarily get star ratings or letter grades. This piece also bleeds over into the "Are review aggregators killing criticism?" question, which is one to which I hope we'll be returning in the next couple of weeks.

Note:

• Doubt Kevin James at your peril. The former King Of Queens star's film Paul Blart: Mall Cop has spent its second week as America's favorite movie. The other big winner this weekend? Slumdog Millionaire. I must say, when I imagine the American moviegoing public as a person, I see us as quite an unpredictable little minx.

• While the on-stage presentations at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night carefully sidestepped the ongoing tension among various factions and union leaders, actors' red-carpet and backstage comments...didn't. Want the dirt? Variety has it, naturally.

• Bravo to Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch for calling out this ridiculous red-carpet interview of James Franco by former N'Sync member Joey Fatone as the insulting, hopelessly dated mess it was. I was about to say "James Franco deserves better," but the fact is, we all do. Every now and then, using a celebrity instead of a journalist to do your interviewing creates problems even in situations as apparently substance-free as "So you're nominated for this movie; whose suit are you wearing?"

Ignore:

• My guess is that if you have $2.85 million to spare these days, you have something better to do with it than purchasing Benjamin Button's house.

• Don't get me wrong; I'm crazy about James Earl Jones. But when he says he used to try to convince people it was the Un-Cola guy and not him as Darth Vader's voice? Well, you've got to look back long enough to ignore that.

by Linda Holmes

Dear Friday Night Lights,

What a cliché it is to begin by telling you that this is a terribly difficult letter to write. Why? In this case because I must begin with a confession that may change our relationship forever.

NPR's Neda Ulaby interviewed me about bad pilots in the fall of 2006, just before your debut. I reserved most of my wrath for the hideous 20 Good Years, a miserably failed sitcom almost no one remembers, and Jericho, one of the most famous failed dramas of all time.

(The preceding clause will cause thousands of angry fans to descend upon my house and pour truckloads of nuts in my windows. More details here.)

But I also talked about you. Your jumpy camera work, your confusing array of characters I couldn't keep track of, your overall sense of ... dull. Fortunately for me and for my dignity, that part of the interview didn't make the cut.

What happened next, after the jump...

Continue reading "A Late-Blooming Love Letter To NBC's 'Friday Night Lights'" >

by Linda Holmes

I am filing this under "How Did I Not Know About This Sooner?": CNBC.com has been running a bracket tournament of the 64 greatest "As Seen On TV" infomercial products of all time, in search of a single winner. As you can see from the full bracket, many greats have already fallen.

The Flowbee.

The Snuggie.

Miss Cleo.

The (not made up) Tiddy Bear.

And now, they are down to four. The Foreman Grill, the Bowflex, Girls Gone Wild, and the Shamwow (above) (you're apparently spending TWENTY DOLLARS A MONTH on paper towels; you must be stopped!).

Based on these Final Four, somehow, we want to be both meat-stuffed and lean and muscular; both clean and dirty. This is America, you guys. And I'm here to tell you, if Girls Gone Wild defeats the Shamwow, then we all are in a heap of trouble.

Hat-tip to AdFreak, one of my favorite blogs, without which I might never have seen this clash of giants.

Alice Waters: The famous Berkeley local-foods advocate, seen here looking friendly at a book signing, had a substantially less friendly run-in with another chef at an inauguration party. Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

The big story in the food world this week was not that Top Chef host Tom Colicchio might have saved cookbook author Joan Nathan's life by performing a Heimlich maneuver on her at a pre-inaugural party at her house in Washington, D.C. on Sunday.

It's what took place in an upstairs room of that same house.

Marian Burros disclosed the closed-door mano-a-mano between feisty ex-White House chef Walter Scheib and righteous locavore Alice Waters for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog.

How the feud started and how it ended, and why even a good "-ism" is still just an "-ism," after the jump...

Continue reading "Alice Waters Was a Foodie Hero. Now She's the Food Police." >

by Linda Holmes

It's the weekend again, and that means the pickings are slim, since everyone assumes you have more to do with your Friday and Saturday nights than watching television. If that's not the case, I certainly won't tell.

Tonight's episode of Friday Night Lights is called "Tami Knows Best," and any episode that focuses on Tami Taylor (the remarkable Connie Britton) is okay with me. (NBC, 9:00 p.m.)

Last week's season premiere of Battlestar Galactica set off plenty of controversy among fans (that's it in the clip above), and it's time for the chatter to begin again as another new episode appears. (Sci Fi, 10:00 p.m.)

Anyone still watch the Miss America pageant? Anyone? It's proceeding in a sort of reality-show format over on TLC, and it continues this weekend. (TLC, Saturday, 7:00 p.m.)

If you're looking for more clues about the acting categories for this year's Oscars, check out the Screen Actors Guild awards that air Sunday night. As we've mentioned in recent days, SAG is absolutely roiled in internal controversy, and you have to think at least a little bit of that will bubble over into some thinly veiled barbs. Red-carpet brawling! Bring it on! (TBS or TNT, Sunday, 8:00 p.m.)

The Super Bowl: It's already over! Look! It's happening right now! Electronic Arts

 

by Glenn McDonald

Another great example of better living through technology: As they do every year, videogame industry titan EA Sports today announced the winner of the Super Bowl as predicted by their flagship football simulation game, Madden NFL 09.

Using each team's projected roster, and up-to-date player statistics, EA pitted the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Arizona Cardinals in a Super Bowl simulation game. Pittsburgh fans will be happy to hear that the Steelers pulled out the victory by a final score of 28-24, giving the team an unprecedented sixth Super Bowl title, and their second championship in four years.

The stats breakdown, and what this means for a regular person, after the jump...

Continue reading "Super Bowl Winner Revealed!" >

by Linda Holmes

When I first heard a fairly superficial list of similarities between Forrest Gump and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, it didn't strike me as particularly compelling. I don't really care that they both worked on boats or they both went to war: such are the realities of Guy Recounts His Long Life movies.

It's the tone and the self-important pronouncements about life -- many of which, in Button's case, make absolutely no sense given the actual details of the movie's conceit -- that make them feel like the same movie. (And they are, as many have already pointed out, from the same screenwriter.) The above video from FunnyOrDie.com makes a pretty good jab at this issue, although without hearing Brad Pitt's syrupy "Well ah guess ah wuz just special"-style narration, you really can't grasp how similar they feel from a theater seat.

Aretha Franklin's Inauguration Hat: Can almost 12,000 Facebook fans be wrong? Alex Wong/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Read:

• I was wondering just the other day what were the Eight Best Non-Human Tool Users. Thanks, Internet!

• We talked in some of the Oscar coverage yesterday about the box-office relevance of the nominations, particularly for Best Picture. Interesting analysis at the New York Times, with my only two quibbles being that the benefit to Slumdog Millionaire didn't get a mention, and that I respectfully submit that there is, in fact, no such thing as a "gay movie."

Also along Oscar-analysis lines, Mark Blankenship wonders not only whether the animated-feature category will continue to lock animation out of Best Picture (also a point Bob Mondello made yesterday), but whether dividing actors by gender really makes a whole lot of sense.

Note:

• In the last few days, 11,269 people have become official Facebook fans of Aretha Franklin's Inauguration Hat. That has to be the most popular hat on Facebook.

• Let us all begin whatever chanting and praying might be required to bring the stupendous Amy Ryan back to The Office after her much-too-short visit. Even the fact that Ryan's return is being seriously contemplated, given the fact that she was nominated for an Oscar last year (for Gone Baby Gone) and still has a very active career, speaks powerfully to the collapse of the assumption that going on television is a low-class thing for a respected actor to do. And on a comedy, no less.

Ignore:

• Less important than Cindy McCain possibly appearing on Dancing With The Stars? Cindy McCain definitely not appearing on Dancing With The Stars.

Last man standing: The world has changed a lot, but Archie is still going strong. Archie Comics Publications

 

by Glen Weldon

Used to be, comics were everywhere. Not so long ago, squeaky spinner racks crammed with four-color whimsy were thick on the ground; you couldn't enter a drugstore, supermarket or bookshop without spotting this here large, friendly sign.

But over the course of the 1980s, the spinner rack, and the comic books it carried, steadily disappeared from the country's Pick n' Saves and Pathmarks. No longer could a kid repair to the newsstand to thumb through the latest issue of Marvel Team-Up while his mother puttered down the condiments aisle.

Even the most popular comics, with the toughest, too legit-to-quit heroes -- your Wolverines, your Hulks, your Supermans -- abandoned newsstands, retreating like frightened woodland creatures to the relative safety (and steady sales) of the comics specialty shop.

The sole survivor? The only comic book character that can still be found in every supermarket in the country, where he merits prominent point-of-purchase placement alongside US Weekly and Fabulous Fruitini Orbit gum? A skinny teenaged redhead in a sweater vest.

The question: what is it about Archie Andrews that has allowed him to bravely weather a sales environment harsh enough to send the X-Men fleeing for cover? Did he get Mr. Lodge to front him some cash? Is that weird tic-tac-toe thing inscribed on the side of his head some kind of eldritch protection sigil?

We explore this mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a letterman jacket, after the jump.

Continue reading "Let Us Now Praise Archie Andrews, Lone Survivor of the Great Checkout Stand Apocalypse" >

by Linda Holmes

Sorry about the sporadic blogging today, folks -- hope we can make up for it by offering the live chat from this morning, as well as my chat with Neal Conan on today's Talk Of The Nation, where we covered Oscar matters, violent wrestling, and the relevance of being raised Catholic to your experience of watching Doubt. Had a lot of fun over there; the audio of the segment is now available.

Back to our regular schedule tomorrow!

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt: Doesn't this picture, taken at the German premiere of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, kinda make you want to ignore them? Good news, then. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 

Read:

• Well, our live chat with Bob Mondello, of course. We talked about everything from Angelina Jolie's lips to the lack of nominees of color to whether Heath Ledger will really win that award. (You may be surprised by Bob's response.)

• A good roundup of general Oscar thoughts is up at Slashfilm. Their readers can be counted on to hash out the major ongoing debates without (usually) falling into total chaos.

• It's always worth reading what Ebert has to say at a time like this.

Note:

• Interested in the public statements from nominees? E! has a good roundup.

• I wasn't terribly surprised by this discussion of people not wild about the word "slumdog," until I discovered it was a word that screenwriter Simon Beaufoy made up. Which somehow makes me more uncomfortable with it.

Ignore:

• Let's just go with: All of today's uses of the word "Brangelina."

UPDATE: The live chat has ended -- but you can play it back to see what Linda thinks about Angelina Jolie's lips. And your Oscar-noms observations (questions, frustrations, etc.) are still more than welcome in the comments.

Live chat: This is not the preferred way of participating in our live chat with NPR's Bob Mondello tomorrow. iStockphoto.com

 

by Linda Holmes

UPDATE: The complete list of nominees is here. As promised, I have a lot of questions. Hint: Several of mine involve Best Actress. Ugh.

I'm tickled to announce a whole new deal for Monkey See. It's the first time we've done this, but if it goes well, perhaps it won't be the last.

We're hosting a live online chat with NPR film critic Bob Mondello tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m., where we'll take your questions and thoughts — most likely about Oscar nominations that did or did not materialize.

Lots (and lots) of you read Bob's piece last week on Neglected Films Of 2008 (if you didn't, you should), but you can also check out his Top Ten (Plus Twelve Bonus Picks), as well as oodles of other reviews.

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing tomorrow's nominations, and no matter what they are, I will have lots of questions.

Is there any possibility that whatever recognition The Dark Knight receives will pacify its partisans, who have greater hunger for mainstream affirmation than you'd expect from dystopia aficionados?

Will The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button receive too many nominations? (Prediction not requiring clairvoyance: Too many for me, yes.)

Can the Slumdog Millionaire train possibly pick up any more speed than it already has? Will Wall-E get that Best Picture nomination, and if it does, what non-animated movie will it seem to have bumped?

And are Mickey Rourke's dogs destined to become the Most Recognized Pets in awards history?

Come right back here at 10:00 a.m. Thursday (that's Eastern time), and bring your questions and comments about movies, awards, oversights, what you hope to see actually grabbing a statue, and whatever else is on your mind.

Lots of folks don't pay a lot of attention to the internecine dramas of Hollywood labor strife until it starts postponing new episodes of Grey's Anatomy, so not everyone has been following the extraordinary bitterness now marking the internal battles within the Screen Actors Guild. Remember, this isn't the negotiation between the actors and the studios; this is intraunion infighting. A 30-hour filibuster? Hollywood actors openly calling each other "children" on one side and "petulant and foul-mouthed" on the other? Circulating e-mails suggesting nobody vote to give a SAG award to anyone who's opposed a strike? By the time awards season gets fully in gear, they may need to hire bigger bouncers at the after-parties in case a couple of guys in tuxes start smacking each other around. Shocking, really.

He can move... and look for Obama to dance around any controversial aspects of support for the arts in coming months. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

 

by Marc Acito

We shouldn't be surprised that President-elect Obama has proposed an arts platform for his administration. After all, this is the man who busted a move with Ellen DeGeneres and then accepted the Democratic nomination while wearing a magenta tie that matched the dresses of his wife and two daughters.

But the last time the country had a conversation about the arts, the arts lost. That was in the 1980s, when Republicans sought to kill the National Endowment for the Arts over a handful of controversial artists.

So before the arts community gets all excited, we need to remember that Obama's also the guy who chose Rick Warren to speak at his inauguration. So I'm thinking that performance artists who smear chocolate over their naked bodies while reciting the Lord's Prayer should prepare to be disappointed.

Continue reading "From Obama's Arts Policy, Expecting 'No Drama'" >

by Linda Holmes

So what do you do if you're not watching the season premiere of Lost later? There's still a good bit to choose from.

Tonight on the Sundance Channel's Spectacle: Elvis Costello With... series, your bespectacled host welcomes Kris Kristofferson, Norah Jones, Rosanne Cash, and John Mellencamp. In the clip above, Cash chats about her father's guitar circles. (Sundance, 9:00 p.m.)

Over on Fox, the new series Lie To Me, starring Tim Roth as The Mentalist -- or, not The Mentalist, because he's on The Mentalist, but same difference -- kicks off tonight. (Fox, 9:00 p.m.)

Damages viewers get another new episode this evening. Who wouldn't support an episode called "I Know Your Pig"? (FX, 10:00 p.m.)

Bravo has worked hard to create the impression that the "Restaurant Wars" episode of each season of Top Chef is a major event, and tonight is no exception. They're blowing it up into a 75-minute episode, which will undoubtedly feature fifteen extra minutes of mishandling scallops. (Bravo, 10:00 p.m.)

If you remember the very first Dogs In Wigs post of all time, we discussed Dance Party Friday, the spectacular local-weather feature in which the News 12 staff in Cincinnati gets its groove on at 5:45 AM on Fridays if there's no traffic to report. (A recent example.)

In the same vein, enjoy the above "Snowmageddon '09" video, further evidence that when local news and weather meet, hilarity is sure to follow. (Or, as one of my friends put it, "Too much time, not enough editorial control.")

Fallout 3: Unsettling images of the destroyed landmarks of Washington, D.C. are only part of the story of how this game gets into your head. Bethesda Softworks

 

by Glenn McDonald

Tour around the various online and print videogame publications, and you'll come across a game that's making all the Best of '08 lists. That game is Fallout 3 -- a post-apocalyptic RPG in which the player roams the radioactive core of Washington, DC in the wake of worldwide nuclear war. A nice theme to explore as we switch administrations.

Fallout 3 is state-of-the-art game design, and I can say this with confidence because (a) I've followed the industry professionally for many years, and (b) the game has completely devoured my free and not-so-free time for the last month or so.

I would also contend that the game is the final winning argument -- if one still needs to be made -- for videogames as art. Not everyone agrees about this. Film critic Roger Ebert has been sparring with the gamer community for a few years now on this; whether videogames should be considered alongside literature and film from a critical point of view.

An argument for Fallout as art, after the jump...

Continue reading "'Fallout 3': The Art Of The Game" >

by Linda Holmes

Tonight is the two-hour premiere of the fifth season of Lost, as you know if you ever watch ABC or have much of a collection of Facebook friends. (There are nearly 263,000 people signed up on Facebook as officially booked viewers of tonight's premiere.)

When I read one of the recent interviews with the show's creators, I was struck by this passage:

There's been a steady attrition over the years, because the show demands that you watch every episode. And Lord knows, I wish there was a way we could do the show where the casual viewer could come along, but once you start writing for those people, the long-term fans will (bleeping) kill you, as well they should. We always thought it would be a cult show, and that's the show we've been writing.

I don't mean to doubt a creator's view of his own story, but I'm here to tell you that you do not have to watch every episode, and you can be a casual viewer. I know, because I've been one, and I still very much enjoyed the two hours you're going to see tonight.

How is this possible? HOW? After the jump...

Continue reading "'Lost': Time For A Little Premiere-Day Heresy" >

Read:

• Tad Friend in The New Yorker has an exhaustive look at movie marketing. In a sense, you know all this -- the online marketing, trailers, leaks -- but it's still interesting to see it laid out with a current film, the romantic comedy New In Town, as one of the reference points.

• Definitely worth catching for those of you with musical theater in your blood: notes from a lengthy discussion with Stephen Sondheim, including discussions of Ethel Merman swearing, homosexuality in Oklahoma! (or not), and more about the part-Spanish-language production of West Side Story.

• The minute I saw Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Anthony McGill, and Gabriele Montero perform a John Williams piece at yesterday's inauguration, I started counting down to the inevitable backlash against it as a pop-ified version of chamber music. Ma, after all, has been on both The Colbert Report and The West Wing, while John Williams is widely known as the composer of crowd-friendly film scores to movies like Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Lovely as I thought the piece was, I am utterly unsurprised (and more than a little amused) by, for instance, this comment thread at the New York Times, and how much it has in common with the hundreds of self-congratulatory discussions of hating Coldplay that the internet has produced in the last five or six years.

Note:

• Girl-detective series Veronica Mars, which ran for three seasons on what's now the CW, was one of those shows whose fans make up in enthusiasm what they lack in numerosity. And now, they've been thrown into a whole new tizzy with showrunner Rob Thomas making noises about a movie to continue the story.

• Remember the discussion we had a while ago about how to behave at the theater? Patti LuPone would appreciate it if you would not take her picture during a performance of Gypsy, and if you don't believe me, check out the clip at the top of this post, in which an unfortunately disobedient audience member gets what-for from Mama Rose.

Ignore:

• Absent some compelling reason, you probably don't need to worry too much about the new Obama musical.

• Were you dying to know what former O.C. star Mischa Barton had to say about the inauguration? I didn't think so.

Inauguration Report: Click to see the live feed.  

 

You read David Pogue, right? Of course you do.

Which is why you know that the New York Times tech columnist weighed in today — in a grudging, hey-you-trend-chasing-kids-get-off-my-lawn kinda way — on the joys and frustrations of Twitter.

Now, we are not here to mock David Pogue, even if today's column is pretty much a classic example of dude-almost-gets-it. No, we are here to draw your attention to NPR's Inauguration Report project — and to suggest that we put it to use here on Monkey See.

It's a brave new Monkey See-ing world, after the jump ...

Continue reading "Monkey See At The Inauguration: Twitter Junkies and Flickr Whores, Unite!" >

by Linda Holmes

The Television Critics Association press tour has been going on all week, and today, there was a remarkably prickly exchange between the assembled reporters and ABC president Steve McPherson. In particular, McPherson seemed downright agitated by questions about Grey's Anatomy. If you've been turned off by the dead-boyfriend storyline, if you wonder whether network guys ever get tired of explaining bad or weird creative decisions, or if you're curious about rumors regarding cast departures, head over to Alan Sepinwall's blog and read his report on the entire thing.

3 Weeks - 3,000 Photos (New York City) from Robbie on Vimeo.

by Linda Holmes

This just...made me feel good. Robbie went to New York for three weeks, during which he took more than 3,000 photos, which he mixed with Noah And The Whale's "Shape Of My Heart" to make this video. It's hard to capture vacations, and even harder to capture New York, but with its combination of tourist elements and the ordinary stuff in between, this comes close.

by Linda Holmes

It's kind of a huge night/weekend for actual real-live quality television, so let's take a deep breath and dive in.

Friday Night Lights, television's finest family drama as well as a spectacular show about football, finally returns to NBC for its third season, which finished a DirecTV-only run this week. I'm begging. I'm pleading. Don't make me embarrass myself. Don't deprive yourself of Friday Night Lights. (NBC, 9:00 p.m.)

More sci-fi than sports in your heart? Then you probably know that the widely acclaimed Battlestar Galactica kicks off its final season tonight as well. (Sci Fi, 10:00 p.m.)

Moving forward to Sunday, whether you're in Washington for the inaugural festivities, clogged streets, transportation headaches, and thousand-dollar closet accommodations or not, you can enjoy We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration At The Lincoln Memorial live on HBO -- even if you don't get HBO. The channel is allowing cable providers to carry the concert free for everyone, so you, too, may get your dose of Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Stevie Wonder, Garth Brooks, will.i.am, John Legend, Mary J. Blige, James Taylor, U2... (HBO, 2:30 p.m.)

Sunday night is also when two of HBO's most popular and well-regarded shows return for new seasons: Big Love at 9:00 p.m. and Flight Of The Conchords at 10:00 p.m. That second one, of course, is if you're not catching The United States Of Tara, the new Showtime series we discussed earlier today.

Whew. Enjoy.

David Lee Roth: Do you like the way he says "Awwwww yeeeeah"? Have we got a site for you. Jesse Grant/Getty Images Entertainment

 

by Marc Hirsh

It doesn't get "Dogs In Wigs"-ier than this: The David Lee Roth soundboard. It seems that someone has acquired the isolated vocal track from Van Halen's "Runnin' With The Devil" and chopped it up into easily clickable clips. Pepper your day with any of four "Hey!"s, three "Woo!"s, thirteen (obviously) variations of "Ah yeah!" and/or one magnificently ludicrous extended exclamation that I swear I've somehow never picked up on in the two decades that I've owned Van Halen. That's right: it's not just a primo time-waster, it counts as art appreciation as well.

Hotel For Dogs: Hotels good. Dogs good. And yet? Paramount Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

I like hotels. I also like dogs. But somehow, when you put them together with "For" in the middle, it becomes a movie I have no inclination to see at all.

It occurs to me, though, that this is true of many things. That I can think of many "[Item A] For [Item B]" movie titles that wouldn't draw me in, even though I like both Item A and Item B. Allow me to demonstrate.

1. Sassy Haircuts For The Wii
2. Mustard For Bunny Slippers
3. Dove Shampoo For Neil Patrick Harris
4. Margaritas For My Elementary-School-Aged Nephews
5. Alec Baldwin For Congress
6. Swimming For Minnesota
7. Fancy Makeup For Cats
8. Mopey Guitar-Dude Songs For Tap Dancers
9. Comfortable Shoes For My Camera
10. Love Poems For Awkward Nerds

by Todd Kliman

My inbox was nearly gummed up this week with friends and family writing to ask if I'd seen the new video from Barack Obama making the rounds.

Pronouncements from Barack the putative economic savior? Wise words from Barack the cool-headed healer of our bitter partisan divide?

Nope, shrewd judgments from Barack the food critic.

The President-elect and his thoughts on Dixie Kitchen, after the jump...

Continue reading "The President-Elect As Food Critic: What Barack Obama Was Up To In August 2001" >

The United States Of Tara: Toni Collette, shown here in her "annoying teenager" persona, has a lot to handle. Showtime

 

by Linda Holmes

It's time for the next big prestige-project pay-cable dramatic rollout: Showtime's The United States Of Tara, a new half-hour comedy-drama starring Toni Collette and written and executive-produced by Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of Juno. Those are impressive credentials, and it's disappointing, but not surprising, that the show can't quite live up to them yet.

The show, which premieres Sunday night at 10:00 p.m., tells the story of Tara, a mother and wife whose disassociative identity disorder forces her husband and kids to live with several "alters" (her other personalities, in the more familiar terminology), including a beer-soaked trucker named Buck, a traditional housewife named Alice, and a young, rebellious teenager named T.

The question I ask of any television show or any movie where someone plays multiple characters is whether I care about any of them individually. Certainly, in Tara, Collette impresses with her ability to shed her skin, but if all she's doing is disappearing into a series of caricatures, then the result is more a salute to her pliability than a story that's going to be involving in the long term.

A look at the pilot and an unexpected puppet reference, after the jump...

Continue reading "'The United States Of Tara': Diablo Cody Serves Up Diablo Cody Goodness" >

Maksim Chmerkovskiy: He's not a star, but he dances with them. Michael Buckner/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Read:

• Authors may come to dread electronic reading methods like Amazon's Kindle, if only because it makes locating overused phrases so much easier. Exhibit A: A gentleman who found, in a single Ken Follett novel, 13 instances of the phrase "his heart in his mouth." (via Bookninja.)
• I've been utterly fascinated by The Dark Knight as a phenomenon of interactivity with critics (or perhaps "haranguing of dissenters"), and if you can take a little more of that discussion, Jim Emerson's post at Roger Ebert's blog, in which he talks about "liking" and "disliking," is a knockout.

Note:

• To the surprise of no one, Fox and Warner Brothers have reached a settlement to allow the release of the breathlessly anticipated Watchmen. Entertainment Weekly's take avoids seeing much cause for celebration, essentially tagging everyone involved as a cynical, publicity-seeking whiner.
• NBC has some wackadoodle ideas about how to run a network these days, but here's a move that makes creative sense: they've given early renewals for next season to both The Office and 30 Rock.

Ignore:

• Something-something Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff engagement blah blah blah. E! presents details about the proposal issued by one of the non-stars on Dancing With The Stars to one of the other non-stars on Dancing With The Stars. This proposal included candles and rose petals. Celebrities really are just like us!
• USA Today has the scoop on what the inauguration means to some actors. Short version: The ones who are coming to town, they're pretty into it. Admittedly, this piece is almost worth reading just for the quote (about President-elect Barack Obama), "I find him very soulful in private."

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

by Linda Holmes

If you spend much time kicking around the Internet, someone has already sent this to you, but in case you spent Thursday preparing for President Bush's farewell address or getting all excited about the premiere of Celebrity Rehab Presents: Sober House, here's a marvelous video presentation in which the audio consists of an explanation of the Star Wars trilogy by a person who's never seen any of the movies. It seems like a pretty pedestrian idea, but it's carried off with a great deal of panache.

by Linda Holmes

Neil Patrick Harris hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend, and...this happened. Fans of Harris' early work, let us say, will be amused. The fact that no comment is made about the origin of the music is what makes it so delightful.

Well, this is unexpected.

Apparently, we like TV shows better when they're interrupted by commercial breaks. Seriously, the study was fairly thorough. It involved Happy Days.

This may revolutionize the way I watch America's Next Top Model. But...probably not. I can make it through a recorded episode of that show in about seven minutes, once I fast-forward through all the filler. I'd rather have the 53 minutes of free time than the incrementally greater enjoyment of girls hanging from trapezes trying to keep their legs straight for a picture. Or would I?

by Linda Holmes

We're happy to bring back The Discerning Viewer after its hiatus-inspired...er, hiatus. Take note that all times are Eastern, and that all times tonight should be assumed to be very tentative, because President Bush delivers his farewell address on all the networks at 8:00 p.m.

When we last saw the crew at The Office, everyone except poor Andy (Ed Helms) knew all about Angela and Dwight's fling; tonight, the fallout when the news finally reaches him. If the episode title "The Duel" refers, as it seems it does, to a battle between Andy and Dwight, that's guaranteed gold. (NBC, 9:00 p.m.)

Last week's 30 Rock was, in a word, brilliant, and Salma Hayek's guest run continues this week in "Flu Shot," which also features the always-welcome Dr. Spaceman (Chris Parnell). If Tracy Morgan's spectacularly weird speech at the Golden Globes made you wonder what all the fuss is about, it's time to join in, if only because then, people will stop harassing you to watch it. (NBC, 9:30 p.m.)

Patrick Swayze has been in the news lately as a result of his battle with cancer, but A&E is forging ahead with the premiere of his new series The Beast, which I haven't yet seen, but which has gotten mixed reviews from some of my most trusted reviewers, including Alan Sepinwall and Mo Ryan. (A&E, 10:00 p.m.)

Tonight, CBS airs the final CSI featuring William Petersen. (The show is currently pegged for 9:15 p.m. Eastern, though that's soft, based on the running time of President Bush's farewell address and the attendant coverage -- so be sure to consider that in the setting of your DVR, where applicable.)

Having seen the episode, I can tell you that Petersen's send-off contains elements of send-offs past from other shows (you'll know them when you see them), as Gil Grissom's departure shares space with the permanent installation of Laurence Fishburne's Dr. Raymond Langston, the new lead. Honestly, Fishburne doesn't seem to be moving entirely comfortably in the character quite yet, but taking an extremely high-profile position in an ensemble that's been together since 2000 can't be easy, even for an actor of his caliber.

Some shows manage what seem to be crippling departures surprisingly well: M*A*S*H, of course, did it a few times; ER gradually lost its entire original cast and survived commercially if not artistically; Cheers lasted long after Shelley Long bailed on the enterprise. Here's the question: What departures have worked the best? Maybe it's a big one, like when Clooney left ER, but maybe there's a small character whose absence was wisely leveraged into a great story. As television's top-rated show loses its lead, I ask you: what TV departures did you most admire?

Ricardo Montalbán, (seen here in 2004): A career that went far beyond Fantasy Island. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images Entertainment

 

by Linda Holmes

Did you see what I did? I did it to him right in the headline. I made Ricardo Montalbán, who died yesterday, all about Fantasy Island, even though his career as a movie and television actor adds up to 167 listings in his Internet Movie Database entry, and that doesn't count his work in theater.

But to me, and to a broad swath of people who were young when Fantasy Island bowed in 1978, he is the white-suited Mr. Roarke, who welcomed guests to his private island, where he had the ability to...well, make fantasies come true. Kind of. Often ironically. You can see full episodes online -- here, for instance, is one where the two stories are a man who wants to find the perfect woman and a woman who wants to learn about the criminal mind.

"Khaaaaaaan!", after the jump...

Continue reading "Ricardo Montalbán: 'Smiles, Everyone, Smiles'" >

The Wrestler: One of a few films about which the Golden Tomatoes have something to say. Fox Searchlight

 

by Linda Holmes

If you're familiar with the site Rotten Tomatoes, you know that it aggregates the opinions of many, many critics in order to present a general sense of a film's critical response. These are critics who have at least some credentials; they're not rounding up everybody with a blog and a ticket to the cineplex.

What emerges is an imperfect system in which every registered critic's opinion is counted, meaning that some people you wouldn't trust with your cable remote are weighted equally with people you've been reading for 25 years. It's absolutely, emphatically not a substitute for reading real reviews, and it's not a substitute for thinking for yourself, and it would be a grave mistake to suggest that the quality of a film is reliably reflected in its ability to appeal to the largest number of critics.

Nevertheless, what they call "Tomatometer" rankings do make for an interesting data set, and they've now released the "Golden Tomato Awards," in which they determine which movies were, overall, the best-reviewed of the year.

In the past, this hasn't correlated reliably with awards performance. I was intrigued by the fact that the top-rated dramas of 2007 were, in order, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, The Savages, There Will Be Blood, and This Is England -- only one of which got a Best Picture nomination. (I noted with some satisfaction the very high placement of Gone Baby Gone, which I thought was outstanding and very unfairly left out of almost all awards consideration last year in favor of more bombastic movies.)

So what happened this year? We investigate, after the jump...

Continue reading "Criticism As A Democracy...For What It's Worth" >

Gwyneth Paltrow: She wants to pump you up, but fortunately, you don't need to care. Francois Durand/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

I've been trying to think of good ways to sort through the piles and piles of entertainment news that hits my radar every day, and it ultimately occurred to me that what we need is a sorting mechanism. Some things you should actually read, some you should make note of, and some (let's be honest: most) you can safely ignore. Let me help.

Read:

• The Cinematical roundup Sundance '09: Our 12 Most Anticipated Films. You will hear about many of these quite a bit more in the coming year; it's good to start becoming familiar with them.
• The New York Times explanation of the significance of Beethoven in Peanuts. Lovely.

Note:

• Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher on The Sopranos, thinks he knows what happened in the finale.
• Leonard Cohen, whose career has (it cannot be denied) benefited in part from the "Hallelujah" revival that has been (I'm sorry; I know it's not fair) partially nudged along by American Idol and similar shows, is on tour and coming to New York.
• Speaking of which, Idol alum and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson will perform the national anthem at the Super Bowl. After squeamishly turning away from saturation coverage of recent tragedies in her personal life, I'm pleased to see her in the news as a talented performer again.
• If you have listened to the audio commentaries on the Moonlighting DVDs -- and I have -- you won't be surprised that there is (admittedly very early) chatter about a reunion movie. Love-hate relationships between co-stars, remember, are 50 percent love.

Ignore:

• Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham both have their pictures taken looking like zombies. This, fortunately, does not affect you.
• Paris Hilton cuts her hair. I wish Paris Hilton would move to New Zealand.
• Non-noted fitness non-expert Gwyneth Paltrow is opening a gym. You will almost surely not join this gym.

Patrick McGoohan: The Prisoner was a mystery show not for the faint of heart. Authenticated News/Courtesy Of Getty Images

 

by Marc Hirsh

Yesterday was a tough one for sci-fi fans, as the news hit that both Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGoohan had died. While Montalbán's performances in Fantasy Island, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and the thickly cushioned front seat of a Chrysler Cordoba gave him fame across multiple audiences and generations, McGoohan's renown was more limited, as it hinged primarily on a single thing: The Prisoner, the landmark television show he helped create in the late 1960s.

I first came across The Prisoner in college, when I stumbled on it one Sunday evening on the television in the common room of my dorm. I had no idea what to make of the thing, and neither did the other guy who happened to be in the room. We watched with befuddled glee as Number Six foiled the plans of what we would soon learn was one of many Number Twos.

And we were hooked. The two of us never really spoke outside of that (not that talking would have helped), but every Sunday, it was just him, me and the local PBS station freaking our minds out but good. Pre-Internet, we had no idea what it was; pre-DVD, we had no way of catching up on any episodes we'd missed. It was just this weird, amazing anomaly that we had to catch while we could or be left wondering.

How you, too, can have your mind blown, after the jump...

Continue reading "Sad News From The 'Tally Ho'" >

by Linda Holmes

What was surprising about last night's American Idol premiere is that it actually did, in some ways, show signs of improvement in the ways producers promised. They said it would be less about inflicting pain on the hapless and hopeless, and it was. Less of what one of my pals calls the "emotional snuff film," in which a bad audition is shown, and then the auditioner has a lengthy breakdown, wailing about how this was his/her only chance at happiness. Somewhat less delusion. A little more graciousness, on average, about being rejected. In that sense, it was a bit more comfortable.

But then: Bikini Girl, as they called her. Katrina Darrell auditioned in her two-piece, and she received lots and lots of attention, just as she planned, none of which was for her singing. Her actual audition was mercilessly average, no better than any one of ten girls you could find in any college a cappella group. New judge Kara DioGuardi took her down a peg, as judges have done since the show began.

And then came the sexist classification of it as a "catfight," the mention of "claws" that has somehow never come up when Simon Cowell has said things hundreds of times nastier than this to contestants both male and female...and eyes rolled all over again.

Let's see that book: Is that a novel? Then you may be a reader. iStockphoto.com

 

by Linda Holmes

During a recent vacation, I happily devoured Nixonland, an 800-plus-page behemoth that I stuck to with such constancy that I'm fairly sure that toting it around and clutching it awkwardly with my short-lady fingers actually injured my wrist. Not kidding.

As L.A. Times book editor David L. Ulin points out today, this would not help me contribute to American "reading" under the definition used by the National Endowment for the Arts in its series of studies on reading in America. The last couple of reports had stated that reading was on the decline, but the one released this week, called "Reading On The Rise," shows that the trend is reversing itself. American "literacy," they say, is improving.

What's the catch? After the jump...

Continue reading "Are We Readers? And Are We The Right Kind Of Readers?" >

by Glen Weldon

This is not our topic today: We hope you're not too sad. Marvel

 

So yes, as you have likely heard, the Obama-Meets-Spidey issue of Amazing Spider-Man comes out today.

This has duly occasioned the predictable, but no less puzzling, mainstream media response that such publicity stunts are engineered to bring about. If you're interested, you can read about it here, or here, or here, or here or here.

Not here, though.

No, here we've got bigger, less nakedly exploitative Spider-fish to fry, namely: Marking the one-year anniversary of the Quickie Divorce that Quite Literally Changed the (Marvel) Universe.

After the jump: A disquisition on matters matrimonial and meta-human, or: Why the cosmic annulment of Spidey's marriage to Mary Jane made for a better comic, and why Lois and Clark need couples counseling.

Continue reading "Until Retroactive, Reality-Altering, Demon-Wrought Reboot Do Us Part" >

by Linda Holmes

While watching the Golden Globes and the tribute to Steven Spielberg, I got talking to a friend about Twister. Not a movie I think about very often -- not a movie anyone thinks about very often. Except maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman, who thinks, "Wait, I was in Twister?" (Yes. Yes, you were. And also Patch Adams. The Robin Williams silly-doctor movie. We won't tell the Academy.)

But what's amazing, in retrospect, is how terrifying and fabulous the Twister trailers were, particularly compared to how flat the movie is. Sure, the trailer has the advantage of skipping over the boring bickering-exes business between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, but it also suggests far more movement and genuine suspense than the movie comes anywhere close to delivering. Even more than the trailer above -- which is a corker -- I remember a trailer I can't find online now, which featured an almost entirely dark screen as the sounds of the tornado approached, rattling the...root cellar, or wherever we were meant to be hiding. I don't think any of the movie was even shown; just the sounds in the dark theater. And I came home thinking, "I cannot wait to see that movie."

And then that movie turned out to be Twister.

Has this happened to you? I'm not talking about ordinary situations where the clips make the movie look better than it is. (And some other time, we will discuss the trailer that tells the entire story and thereby ruins the movie, which is a separate pet peeve.) I'm talking about sitting in the theater sounding your internal "WOOOO!" only to find, a few weeks later, that you have been wooed falsely, as it were. You have hooted in vain. Tell your tale. We care about your wasted hoots.

Kara DioGuardi: American Idol has a new judge, a few new rules, and undoubtedly a lot of renditions of the National Anthem. Fox

 

by Linda Holmes

It's that time again. You've heard the rumbling; you've sensed that somewhere, Stevie Wonder songs were being butchered. And now, it's that time.

American Idol returns for its eighth season tonight, and for the first time, the notorious juggernaut is a little on the defensive. Ratings slid last year — not that much, but enough to make people nervous — so, predictably, the show is rolling out a few changes.

The most well publicized is the arrival of Kara DioGuardi, the new fourth judge. Because she's a woman and Paula Abdul is a woman, there was early speculation that she might be part of a plan to phase out Abdul, whose behavior last year was startlingly odd at times. (There was, for example, that incident where she critiqued a performance that hadn't yet occurred.)

DioGuardi has been around a while as a songwriter and producer, working right in the Idol wheelhouse, not only with actual Idol alumni including Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Clay Aiken, and Katharine McPhee, but with much of the sparkle-pink teen-pop genre that includes Hilary Duff, Vanessa Hudgens (of High School Musical), and even Jessica Simpson.

Presumably, she at least knows something about the production of the kind of music Idol participants aspire to make, for ... whatever that may be worth.

More about the new season, after the jump...

Continue reading "'American Idol': It Begins" >

Superheroes: This fellow is only a good blurb away from joining the ranks of our unofficial saviors of the streets. iStockphoto.com

 

by Marc Hirsh

There's been a lot of talk in the past year about how we're in the middle of a cinematic superhero boom. But what's gone mostly unnoticed is that the two most successful films in this supposed trend — The Dark Knight and Iron Man — don't technically involve superpowers at all.

Batman augments intense fight training with fancy gadgets and psychological gamesmanship, remember? And Iron Man is just a dude who solved a particularly tricky engineering problem.

Even the costumed crimefighters of the eagerly anticipated Watchmen have no actual extra-human abilities. (What about omnipotent physics-experiment-gone-awry Doctor Manhattan, you ask? Well, he doesn't wear a costume, silly.)

Does this say something profound about the current American zeitgeist? Who cares? But it means wonders for you, Everyday Person In The Natural World!

Sure, you might not be able to fly or stop bullets or have multiple conversations in multiple timelines on multiple planets, but you can certainly throw on a cape and a mask in the hopes of striking fear in the hearts of evildoers. (Although it's important to remember: you still can't stop bullets.)

And it turns out that a number of folks have been doing exactly that. We know this thanks to the fine people at the World Superhero Registry. Here you'll find profiles of confirmed and semi-confirmed folks with slick monikers and stylized duds (and the occasional severe Rorschach complex) trying to make a difference on the streets.

The Registry gives a quick summary of a number of real-life superheroes, listing "Region" and "Identity" but not, sad to say, "Powers." Wouldn't you scroll down in the vain, irrational hope of seeing it followed by anything other than the word "None," just once?

Five of the greatest self-appointed superheroes we found, after the jump...

Continue reading "Have Cape, Will Crusade" >

American Teen: It's worth seeing the DVD, just for the terrible performances the documentary subjects (including "popular girl" Megan Krizmanich) give in an artificial environment. Paramount Vantage

 

by Linda Holmes

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival opens this Thursday, January 15. If you hark back to Sundance 2008, one of the big splashes was the documentary American Teen, a crafty little movie that was marketed as a reality-show Breakfast Club but was actually much less about classic arcs (basketball stud going for the scholarship; Montague-Capulet romance between outcast and pretty boy) than about tiny moments of truth plucked from piles and piles of footage. Appallingly bad breakup etiquette from seemingly sane individuals, battles between queen bees and queen wanna-bes, and the fine line between a genuine free spirit and a self-pitying drama queen: these things, I remember so well.

The film is also a great conversation-starter: Is Hannah, who's so sure she doesn't fit in, the biggest cliché in the group? Is Megan, the cruel girl at the top of the social structure, getting what she deserves when her friends start to turn on her, or does it just mean they're worse than she is? Why did that freshman girl agree to date Jake the band geek when she clearly can't stand him?

The unexpected way a bad interview makes for a great DVD, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Wonderfully Awkward 'American Teen' Extras" >

Cristeta Comerford: The White House chef (seen here in 2002) is staying put. Maybe it was the macaroni and cheese. Getty Images

 

by Todd Kliman

The New York Times has quashed the raging food-world rumors about the possibility of a new White House chef.

And now Walter Scheib can say it: I told you so.

Scheib is a former White House chef who cooked for Clinton and Bush the Younger. I called him two weeks after the election, as breathless readers were flooding my e-mail inbox with questions about who Obama would appoint for the role — as if chef were a cabinet position only slightly less important than Secretary of State.

Speculation had centered on celebrity chefs with Chicago ties. Predictably, circumstantial evidence had supplanted the need for real, actual evidence.

Rick Bayless? readers asked me. After all, the Obamas love his Chicago restaurant Topolobampo, and go there on special occasions.

Or what about Art Smith, a 2-time James Beard Award winner who opened a restaurant called Art and Soul on Capitol Hill just before the election? Mere coincidence? Or was this Smith's way of positioning himself for the gig?

I rang Scheib. He couldn't have been blunter.

What Scheib had to say, after the jump...

Continue reading "There's No New White House Chef — And One Man Knew It" >

Kate Winslet: Sure, she talks too much, but those two Golden Globe awards look pretty good on her. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Maybe Kate Winslet knew she was going to win two Golden Globe awards last night for her lead performance in Revolutionary Road and her supporting performance in The Reader. Maybe that explains why she was one of the only actresses on stage who had combed her hair.

Winslet's two big-shot acting trophies made her the most visible individual winner of the evening, but the hulking powerhouse of the ceremony on the movie side was Slumdog Millionaire, which took home the award for outstanding drama, as well as awards for its screenplay, score, and director. As we noted when the nominations came out, the Hollywood Foreign Press snubbed Milk pretty brutally from the outset, and the one big chance they gave it passed last night when Sean Penn lost out to Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler in the closely-watched race for Best Actor.

Heath Ledger's supporting performance as the Joker was The Dark Knight's one big win, which only adds to the perception that his Oscar is probably inevitable. Not only because the performance is spectacular, but because it's the only aspect of the stupendously popular film has any awards momentum at all, and the Academy is unlikely to let it walk away with nothing.

The television side and 30 Rock's continuing roll, after the jump...

Continue reading "Golden Globe Wrap-Up: A Good Night To Be Kate Winslet" >

by Linda Holmes

The other night, I attended a sort of dinner-club-ish show with a singer/piano guy backed by a small band. Not very edgy, this event; he performed "Love Will Keep Us Together" as well as "Weekend In New England." I'm just saying; there was nothing raucous or rip-roaring about it. Not an every-man-for-himself mosh pit. It will be important in a moment.

Anyway, when everyone else had come in and been seated, and before the show actually started, an (I'm guessing) intoxicated lady came toddling down the aisle (in her party dress and feather boa, thank you very much) and plopped into the lap of someone she knew. Her noisy arrival meant nothing good for anyone in the room, but it was particularly bad news for the people behind her, who couldn't see a thing with her wrapped around this guy and teetering on his lap. If a piano player is going to wear bright red tails with sparkles for his performance, you'd like to be able to at least see him.

Boa Lady is confronted by the mob and how you can help, after the jump...

Continue reading "Open Questions: The Live Audience's Guide To Life" >

When Facebook tells me whether I like the same movies as my friends, one set of films causes more hiccups than any other. I like the same movies as this person, EXCEPT. I would be "Best Friends" with this person (movie-wise), EXCEPT.

The "except"? The Lord Of The Rings.

I'm just not a creature person. Hobbits, elves, animatronic doodads, The Dark Crystal, that Genesis video with Reagan and Brezhnev...it's not my thing. One of my friends -- and now I can't remember which one, so I'm unable to credit this rather fantastic and useful theory -- makes it a rule never to see or read anything where any character has inappropriate punctuation (like a randomly dropped apostrophe) in his name. That rules out much of the fantasy genre, as you know.

At some point, I just didn't make it on board the Tolkien bandwagon (those movies predated the time when I was doing much writing about anything other than television, among other things), and I'm not inclined to start now. I've made it this far, right? Someday, probably, when I'm trapped on a plane or I'm sick with the flu, I will be tempted, but you know what? I think I will still refuse. It's not a judgment either on the material or on the people who like it. It's just not for me. Think me a heathen; you won't be the first.

What have you made it this far without? It's okay if it's Casablanca or James Joyce; we won't tell.

by Linda Holmes

On Patton Oswalt's gut-busting comedy record Werewolves And Lollipops, there's a marvelous bit about how he realized at one point that if he had a time machine, he wouldn't use it to meet Abe Lincoln or stop wars or anything like that.

Can this man be saved? If so, when? And who else deserves a career intervention? Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

No, he would go back and kill George Lucas before he had a chance to make the Star Wars prequels.

Now, I am not asking you to embrace bloodlust, even in jest. But I think we all have writers/actors/directors/musicians we would perhaps think of more fondly if we'd been able to go back in time and persuade them in a nonviolent manner to retire before they ruined themselves.

Stephen King before he became an Entertainment Weekly columnist? Ben Stiller after Zoolander? Perhaps Aaron Sorkin after the second season of The West Wing?

Feel free to argue strenuously — not only for your preferred candidate, but also for the precise correct moment for the nonviolent coaxing to occur in order to maximize the payoff.

by Glen Weldon

Comic book fans, like most species of geek, treasure our outsider status. The fact that said status is largely self-imposed and self-perpetuated isn't so much important — we're all about the treasuring, over here. And the brooding.

Thus, as a species, we're given to snottily rejecting anything that smacks of the popular, of the cultural mainstream. You can always count on us to find a way to prize even the most ham-fisted tale of four-color adventure over, say, Gossip Girl. And to be kinda jerky about it in the process. It's reflexive and reductive and not remotely fair, but there it is.

So why, you may ask, are we comic book geeks now pulling so hard for The Dark Knight to receive an Oscar nod, of all things?

(Especially when we're the kind of schmucks who ruin your Oscar party by gobbling up the Funyuns while opining to all within earshot that the Academy Awards are an empty exercise in feeding the nation's collective middlebrow sensibility. And that, further, they certainly have nothing whatsoever to say about artistic merit.)

So why do we suddenly care so damn much about a stupid Oscar? Why do we feel we are owed one?

Four words: Legends of the Superheroes.

And, okay, five more: Charlie Callas in a bodystocking.

After the jump: The live-action superhero abomination that still haunts our unquiet dreams. (And no, it's not Elektra) ...

Continue reading "Why the Universe Owes 'The Dark Knight' a Frickin' Oscar" >

In stitches: The move to ABC gives the Scrubs cast another shot at comedy on its own terms.ABC

 

by Marc Hirsh

Scrubs begins its eighth, and in all likelihood final, season tonight at 9:00 — on ABC. I mention this because you might otherwise miss it, since you might have assumed that last year's doofy medieval-fantasy episode was the series finale.

Or you might remember that the show's returning, but accidentally tune in to NBC, where it spent its first seven years, and be faced with the second half of The Biggest Loser instead.

Or you might not watch Scrubs, might have never watched Scrubs, might not be inclined to start now, and might be quite sure you couldn't care less.

Any of those would be more or less par for the course. Since its debut in 2001, Scrubs has been very possibly the most underrated show on television; certainly it's the most under-appreciated.

Most obviously, it was under-appreciated by NBC. The network could never settle on a time slot. It dismissively burned off episodes two at a time on occasion (a habit that ABC has, for now, dismayingly picked up). It even switched around the running order so that, if ABC hadn't picked it up, the entire series would have ended with an episode that creator Bill Lawrence never intended as a finale.

NBC's meddling may not have even stopped with the network switch: Rumors abound that Heroes' Masi Oka and Chuck's Sarah Lancaster have been prevented from reprising their roles as lab assistant Franklyn and Lisa The Gift Shop Girl for the show's actual finale.

Why Scrubs never got enough love, after the jump...

Continue reading "'Scrubs': My (Probably) Final Appreciation" >

by Linda Holmes

Open Questions Week continues, and today, I want to ask about pushing and shoving.

We all do it. "You have to watch this movie. Sit down. I'm putting the DVD in. Hey-hey-hey -- don't try to stand up. Sit down. On the couch. Stop talking. I'm pressing 'play.' Don't try to go to the kitchen, or I'll make you watch it twice."

Or maybe you do it with music: "I'm putting this on your iPod, and if you try to remove it, your iPod will blow up, and if you don't listen to it within a week, it will start destroying files. You don't want that, do you? I didn't think so."

This is cultural proselytizing by brute force, and you only do it with people you really like, because anyone else would probably be rather unsettled by it.

Frisky Dingo: You should watch. No, really, you should watch. Adult Swim

 

For me, on New Year's Eve, it was Frisky Dingo, an Adult Swim cartoon I discussed in the year-end TV-on-DVD piece. You almost have to force Frisky Dingo on people, because they will almost certainly have never heard of it, the concept (superhero parody) doesn't exactly sell itself, and the name sounds like it refers to either something very child-oriented or something very adult-oriented, depending on your point of view.

But it's riotously funny, and I find that most people can be hooked within one or two 11-minute episodes. It's just a matter of getting them into the handcuffs.

So what do you find yourself pushing most frequently? Is it something obscure? Something popular that most of your friends eschew as hopelessly middlebrow? A movie everyone else has forgotten all about? You never know; maybe you can pick up a convert, and isn't that what it's all about?

True crime? It is to laugh: David Samuels' The Runner is more a true-confessions kind of book. The New Press

 

by Sarah D. Bunting

A new year brings with it New Year's resolutions — to lose weight, to quit smoking, to cap the impractical-shoe budget once and for all. It's easy to make these resolutions, then break them as the second week (or hour) of January dawns.

It's even easier to suggest resolutions for other people, so I'd like to propose a New Year's resolution for David Samuels, the author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, to wit:

"The next time I write a true-crime book, I resolve to write an actual true-crime book, not pad a con-man profile I already wrote for The New Yorker with indictments of Ivy League admissions policies and our haves-versus-have-nots society."

In fairness to Samuels, such indictments have their place. And the book is not bad or anything; it's quite well written.

But I don't read true crime for good writing, and neither does anyone else. (Fortunately, because it's in short supply). I read it because I want to learn about a given case. Ann Rule hasn't sold a bajillion books because she's such a fantastic wordsmith; her prose is mediocre at best. But she knows how to identify a juicy story, she knows how to get access to everyone involved with it, and she knows how to keep it moving.

What happens when you don't keep it moving, after the jump ...

Continue reading "A New Year's Resolution For The True-Crime Author" >

by Linda Holmes

I mentioned here last week that I have been, at times, an outspoken defender of Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. Yes, it's the worst title in the history of reality television, quite possibly, and that's already a field with an impressive history of bad titles. Yes, the world might be a better place without either celebrities or rehab, let alone the meeting of the two.

But it's also a show where, every now and then, someone accidentally says something weirdly insightful, mostly because he or she forgot to be a self-centered yahoo for about ten seconds and a little window opened up that let a beam of light crack the otherwise impenetrable wall of superficiality. Intermittent reinforcement, right? The most effective kind of all.

I'm always fascinated by other people's "outspoken defender" experiences. It's not the same as "guilty pleasures," exactly -- guilty pleasures are the things you know have no merit but enjoy anyway. I'm talking about being the one person who truly found The Love Guru hilarious, or being the biggest fan that the ABC show Cavemen -- which was based on the insurance-selling cavemen, by the way -- ever had. The best thing you can bring to your consumption of popular entertainment is a genuine ability to think for yourself (as opposed to an ability to disagree with the majority, which is totally different, of course), so in some ways, this may be your mark of genius.

So let's throw it open: Are you an outspoken defender? Of what? Do you admit it to your family? Your friends? Have you suffered what one of my college professors would have called the disapprobation of your peers as a result? If I can admit to mine, after all, you can admit to yours.

How about a magic trick? Heath Ledger's Joker helped drive The Dark Knight to the top of your 2008 list -- and the critics' lists, too. Warner Bros.

 

by Trey Graham

Nearly 3,500 of you weighed in, and your verdict was clear: With a solid 41 percent of the almost 7,500 votes cast, The Dark Knight was your favorite movie of the year.

Not that we disagree: It made Bob Mondello's list, too.

David Edelstein begged to differ — but then he liked Sex and the City and sniffed at Slumdog Millionaire, so make what you will of that.

Come to think of it: That's what keeping up with a critic (or two, or three) is all about. You don't have to agree with 'em. The idea is to get to know their taste, and figure out how it squares with yours. Disagreeing — without assuming that the other person is an idiot — is the name of the game. Unconvinced? Check out the chart below. Is of these three NPR critics more on your wavelength than the others?

Side by side by side: Disagree with our critics? Well, so did they ... Kirk Radish/NPR

 

But we digress. Wall-E was another movie that made your list and the critics' picks: You ranked it No. 2, and Mondello, Edelstein and Kenneth Turan all picked it for their Top 10 roundups. (Does that mean you're antsy about the, um, uuuuuupcoming release of Pixar's Up?)

I loved Slumdog, so I was happy to see it land at No. 3 on the user poll — especially since it was only in 10 theaters initially, and it's still playing at only 614 venues nationwide. That's real passion reflected in those poll results — and in Slumdog's per-screen average, which is higher at this point than the average for Yes Man (a newer film, playing on 3,400 screens, and a star-driven comedy besides).

The tally: Click for complete results.

 

Milk made your short list, too, which I'd argue says good things about Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn and the NPR audience too. So did The Visitor: Nearly 10 percent of you picked that unassuming but enormously affecting character study as one of your three favorite movies of the year — which pleased me and Mr. Mondello no end.

That's your Top 5 — you'll find the rest of the NPR Listener Poll's Top 10 Best Movies of 2008 in that bar chart at right, and the complete list of results in the widget over on the original poll page.

After the jump: Your favorite blockbusters ...

Continue reading "Best Movies of 2008: Your Picks" >

Before you get too down in the mouth over the state of popular entertainment, check out this lovely retrospective of 2008 movies, created by a guy named Matt Shapiro. It takes a lot of care to put something like this together so that it works, and this one is a great success. There truly were a healthy number of very, very good movies this year, and if you don't say to yourself, "Oh, right, that too!" at least once, I'll be surprised. Kudos to Matt.

Via Slashfilm (naturally) and Low Resolution.

Neil Patrick Harris: An Emmy for this guy is on my list of 2009 television wishes. Michael Buckner/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Everyone agrees that 2008 was a difficult year for TV, which isn't too surprising when you consider that in late 2007 and early 2008, there were no writers on the job for three months. (It would be more depressing if they'd been gone three months and it didn't matter.)

So will 2009 be better? One would hope. How does it get there? Five things I'd like to see:

1. Learn the lesson that if a storyline sounds stupid, it probably is. There are exceptions to the general rule that where there's silliness smoke, there's preposterousness fire -- I have been an outspoken defender of, of all things, VH1's Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew -- but on the whole, a little more skepticism wouldn't hurt. Someone on the Grey's Anatomy staff could have simply said, "Sex with a ghost doesn't sound like a good idea," and it would have saved everyone a lot of heartache. In fact, "No sex with ghosts" wouldn't be a bad rule.

Four more choices, after the jump...

Continue reading "A 2009 Television Wish List" >

by Glen Weldon

Know this: Among those few, those happy few, those bands of geeky brothers and sisters who dutifully hit their local comic shops every Wednesday to pick up the week's batch of new comics, there exists a host of distinct species and subspecies.

Blue Beetle: What it has to do with my No. 1 Geek Confession of 2008, after the jump. DC Comics

 

Let's start with the most basic split in the trunk of the comic book fan's taxonomic tree. And it's got nothing to do with DC vs. Marvel.

No, this classification is even more fundamental, and it's bound up in one's essential character. Which is to say: It's not what you read, it's how you read.

After the jump: Reading habits as Rorschach blots, the five ongoing series that consistently end up at the bottom of my pile, and why that's a good thing.

Continue reading "Toward a Comics-Geek Taxonomy, Plus Five Flatly Awesome Comics" >