
Independent reviews of television, movies, books, music, theatre, dance, culture, and the arts.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Every Road Leads Home: Toy Story 3

Labels:
Andrew Dupuis,
Film
Friday, June 25, 2010
American Conscience: John Mellencamp's On the Rural Route 7609

Labels:
John Corcelli,
Music
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Five Cancelled TV Shows You Should Watch
Gone are the days of television producers holding out for that mythical 100th episode in order to guarantee a syndicated afterlife following cancellation. With DVD rentals, Netflix and Hulu.com, On-demand services from your cable provider, and entire cable channels devoted to running and rerunning every old TV show ever produced, no TV show is ever truly gone.
Even so-called failed shows, shows with no ratings and a single season (or half season) run, can have real impact, often years after airing only a few episodes on broadcast TV. Shows like Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, or Joss Whedon’s Firefly can meet untimely ends, but still stick around long enough to find their audiences, sometimes 10 years after their cancellation. Some of these shows were ahead of their time, some were just too idiosyncratic to find their audiences, many were ambitious and brilliant but flawed, and others just aired in the wrong timeslot or on the wrong channel.
Today I’m looking at 5 recent additions to the list of my favourite ‘failed’ shows. I’ll be sticking with shows of 1-hour length, and leave the sitcoms to a future post.
Labels:
Mark Clamen,
Television
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tom Cruise’s Film Career: Nice Try But No Cigar

Labels:
Film,
Shlomo Schwartzberg
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Treme on Hiatus: The Devil's in the Details
The first-season finale of Treme on June 20 was titled “I’ll Fly Away,” and the 1929 gospel song about loss and redemption is performed at a funeral that ends the episode. Some of the lyrics (“Like a bird thrown/ driven by the storm...”) certainly apply to Katrina, which has taken place six months before the fictional TV saga begins. But, with oil now befouling the Gulf of Mexico, an untold number of those birds cannot fly at all. If only the HBO series -- which is scheduled to resume production this fall -- could fast-forward to 2010 and address this Louisiana double whammy
Labels:
Susan Green,
Television
Monday, June 21, 2010
Produced and Abandoned: The Whole Wide World (1996)

Labels:
Film,
Kevin Courrier,
Produced and Abandoned
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Indefensible Film: From Paris with Love (2010)

I've got one of my own now that was just released on DVD: Pierre Morel's From Paris With Love (2010). The film is the latest from French filmmaker/producer Luc Besson's factory of gonzo action/adventure films. It's gloriously politically incorrect, outrageously violent, delightfully vulgar, probably sexist and utterly ridiculous on almost every level, and yet I found it refreshingly entertaining because it just doesn't bend to anybody's idea of taste. And who holds this thing all together? John Travolta. More about him in a sec, but first the plot.
Labels:
David Churchill,
Film
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