Is there anywhere in the great landscape of aesthetic confusion a sure guide that would allow us to shun the arid plains of austere and empty formalism, the banal shallows of mediocre uplift and compromise, not to mention the great sunken morasses of foul and pestilent postmodernism, and instead to tread always the balmy highlands…
Tag: tv
Thank you, Steve Martin!
I have, on occasion, talked a little smack about Steve Martin, suggesting that El Stevo, on occasion, has expressed a little frustration about having to be, you know, funny in order to maintain the level of public attention and recognition to which he feels himself entitled. But now I have to take a good chunk…
Better Call Saul … and tell him that Vince Gilligan is an *sshole!
Yeah, series creator Vince Gilligan, or maybe series star and executive producer Bob Odenkirk, who, I assume, are largely responsible for the endless flow of pretentious crap that is, for the most part, the sum and substance of the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, the AMC cult fav/mega hit, whose sixth and final season…
Sandra Oh and “The Chair”: Sorry, I can’t see the plot for the clichés!
I have not been “on campus” for (checks notes) 49 years, for which I thank God on my knees every fucking day—and that ain’t no lie. So I am not the best person to review The Chair, a Netflix mini-series that has gotten props for taking a reasonably honest look at political correctness, sexism, racism,…
Hail to thee, Blithe Spirits! Well, one of them, anyway.
Almost seven years ago, writing in the Bright Lights Film Journal, in a piece rather enigmatically entitled “We’ll Roll in the Hey Nonny Nonny!” Antic Antiques to Keep a Drowsy Emperor Awake, if He’s Not Too Sleepy, I wrote about first my fascination and then my frustration with the 1945 film version of Noël Coward’s…
Questions that should not be asked, much less answered: What was the deal with “guest stars” on Murder, She Wrote?
Murder, She Wrote, the (very) long-running 80s-90s TV series featuring Angela Lansbury as the intrepid J. B. Fletcher, is today widely known as the “insomniac’s delight”, not because it’s always available on reruns—though it is—but because it puts you to sleep. Who needs Nytol when you’ve got J. B. Fletcher on the case? Yet, even…
TV or not TV? Isn’t there a third option?
I’ve already argued that the pickings at the multiplex are pretty slim, nor am I a fan of what I have labeled “Heavy TV”, disliking it so much I had to write a sequel to my original putdown.1 My appetite, such as it was, for the doings of sadistic serial killers is pretty much exhausted,…
At least they didn’t call him “bwana”*
Faute de mieux—or, really, faute de anything—I recently “found myself” watching the latest iteration of MacGyver, bailing after the first five minutes, though, back in the day, I bailed on “MacGyver I”, so beloved by Marge Simpson’s chain-smoking spinster sisters, even more quickly, in three minutes, when Big Mac made a bomb out of a…
God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world: Magnum, P.I. is back on the air!
Okay, that’s a little too cheerful, isn’t it? Well, when God gives you lemons, pour yourself a double shot of Tequila, I always say. It’s sure as hell better than lemonade. No, the return of Magnum, P.I. to television won’t compensate for much of anything, but the “good news” is that’s significantly less irritating than…
Lauren Gussis’ “Insatiable”—let me count the clichés. Okay, I give up.
When word hit the street that Lauren Gussis, one of the “geniuses” behind the TV series devoted to heroic mass torturer/murderer Dexter, had come up with something even more shocking—a Netflix original about a fat teen-ager who became not fat and hence “Insatiable”, the howls of outrage among the easily outraged—those who seek to expel…