So I saw it the other night. It was okay. Beautifully shot. A bit plodding at times. Good acting, but on the whole, pretty forgettable for me. Too many words have been written about the whole "gay" thing, and nothing I could say could add or detract. It doesn’t have, as rightwing homophobes suggest, a "gay agenda"; it’s just about … Read More
American Idol
Four of the 24 American Idol contestants are from North Carolina. Two of them are guys dudes; two are girls. The two girls suck.
Get A Life
A guy in England converted his studio apartment into a replica of Star Trek’s Voyager. The flat now has moulded walls, touch-panel blue lighting and a life-size model of the show’s transporter room. There’s a command console, reshaped windows to look like portholes and set up vertical lights so he can pretend to be “beamed up”. It cost him £20,000, … Read More
Sunday Review
The Stones sucked. The rest was boring, except the cool double-reverse with the wide receiver throwing a touchdown pass.
In Praise Of Harper Lee
In case you missed it, the New York Times recently did a nice article about Harper Lee and the impact of her only novel To Kill A Mockingbird: The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, "To Kill a Mockingbird" remains the only book Ms. Lee has written. It is difficult to overestimate the sustained power of the novel or … Read More
Oscar Time
Complete list and my predictions below the fold.
RIP Wendy Wasserstein
AP: Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who celebrated women confronting feminism, careers, love and motherhood in such works as "The Heidi Chronicles" and "The Sisters Rosensweig," died Monday. She was 55. She was a phenomenal playwright, and will be missed.
I Must Be Getting Old
I just saw a TV ad for Sprint. They were offering a new phone. It was called the "Sprint Music Store". With this new phone — and phone plan — you can download songs directly to your cellular. The TV ad featured Bon Jovi, but presumably you can download other artists. That tagline informed me: "Now you can download music … Read More
Entertainment News
Two Crappy Television Networks Go Off The Air In Order To Form One Really Crappy Television Network NEW YORK (Reuters) – CBS Corp (NYSE:CBSA – news) and Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE:TWX – news) Warner Brothers television network on Tuesday said they will close their respective UPN and WB networks and jointly launch the CW network. Here’s our guess at the … Read More
Plug Finally Pulled
It was getting slightly better in my opinion, but nowhere near like the Sorkin days: NBC Cancels West Wing After Seventh Season
Logic We Love To Laugh At
Anyone who saw or read about the Golden Globes knows that many of the honored films and TV shows are hardly "family fare". There’s "Brokeback Mountain" (the so-called "gay cowboy" movie), "Weeds" (a very funny show on Showtime about a Mom who deals in dope in an upscale California suburb), and "Syriana" (a George Clooney movie which depicts Middle Eastern … Read More
TV Sends Out Distress Signal
Ah, modern technology: British military choppers searched the English Channel for hours this month after receiving a distress call relayed from space. A military base in Scotland — 650 miles away — picked up the signal on Jan. 5, relayed by satellite. Something terrible had surely happened, and rescue teams were rushed out to find the victims. But there was … Read More
From The Sublime To The Ridiculous
Sublime: The great Shelley Winters who passed away this weekend: Several actors have won more than one Academy Award. But Shelley Winters was the only star who scored multiple trophies–and an underwater rescue of Gene Hackman. Winters, the unsinkable two-time Oscar winner who worked and worked and worked, whether the job came in a prestige picture (Lolita), a disaster epic … Read More
iClothes
Okay, this iPod craze is getting a little out of hand.
Defective Non-Fiction
This is rather unheard of. Random House is offering a refund to people who purchased one of the books it published — a book entitled A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Frey’s book, a non-fiction drug-and-alcohol memoir, was on Oprah’s Book-of-the-Month list last September. It was also, as it turns out, much exaggerated. Read more.