Yesterday, we discussed the way streaming media — which has long held out the digital era’s promise of easy access to all filmed entertainment, anytime, anywhere — has in fact led to a balkanization of programming and resulted in a situation where many movies and TV shows are less available …
It was recently announced by the minds that run 21st Century FOX that, going forward from season 15, The Simpsons would no longer be released in digital video disc format. Taken as a specific instance, this is no great loss; the critical consensus is that The Simpsons lost its bite a …
It doesn’t take a genius to know that this country is in trouble. Which is fortunate, because I am not a genius. Mass murders, police brutality, economic turmoil, terrorism at home and abroad, a constantly shifting social landscape, even the degradation of the very air, land, and water we need …
Last week, Matt Singer wrote a wonderful article at ScreenCrush with the title “Stop Telling Me To Turn My Brain Off During Movies”. It was a refreshingly welcome, and long-overdue, answer to the too-frequent claim that, by paying any attention whatsover to a movie’s idiotic qualities, we are somehow betraying …
There is a clip from yesterday’s Daily Show circulating around in which Jon Stewart, devoid of his usual joking manner, laments the Charleston church massacre while dreading that once again, faced with a mass murder, America isn’t going to do anything. And that’s probably right. But the problem isn’t so much …
And so it was jail again: he could tell, before he had sight, from the smell. Shit and piss and standing water and stale-peach body funk. He clenched his eyelids against torch-light and let his mind wander along his body: his jaw was fat and sore, his lower back had …
In yesterday’s review of Wayward Pines, it was noted that the 2015 Grand Champeen of ridiculous TV camp roles is Oscar nominee Terrence Howard. About Howard we know many things: we know, for example, that he loves his own reflection, and does not love women and their dirty, filthy vaginas. We also …
It would be hard to find a director who squandered his early reputation for excellence more quickly and more thoroughly than M. Night Shyamalan. Sunk partly by his own ambition and partly by his adherence to a structure that allowed critics to easily stereotype him as ‘the twist endings guy’, …
