MTV launched the reality TV craze two decades ago with its long-running Real World. Since the first two seasons, the show has strayed from social experiment to girls/guys gone wild, spawning guilty pleasures like The Challenge and The Gauntlet, but not serious television. This changed with Real World: Brooklyn. Iraq War vet Ryan is to Real World: Brooklyn what Pedro Zamora was to Real World: San Francisco. Both put human faces on issues of the day. Not since the start of the war has the American media been able to perfectly articulate what a soldier experiences when he must weigh his personal convictions, service to country and down-right fear of having to return.
Check out the episode below.
Monday, March 23, 2009
LA Times: Bless the 'Big Love' mess
The third season of the best drama on TV -- aka, HBO's Big Love -- came to an end last night, and I'm already feeling the withdrawal. Part of the issue, I think, is Big Love's third season ended on such a dramatic high, that the season finale felt like the height of sweeps. There were new plot developments, loose ends, raw tension -- hell, TV so damn good I don't think I want to wait another year for the series to pick up again.(Side note: When is Chloe Sevigny gonna get an Emmy for her work on this show?!)
Here's what the LA Times' Mary McNamara wrote of the show:
HBO's Emmy-free and too long under-appreciated Big Love came out of its yearlong, writers-strike-created hiatus like the buffed-up guy tired of eating sand.
But instead of going for fireballs and kidnappings (OK, there were a few of those, but they were totally incidental), cancer scares and intra-cast murder attempts (well, yes, there were those too, but again, not the point), creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer took their strange and startling American fable to new heights, and depths.
All of which came to a DefCon 1 "conclusion" in the season finale Sunday night. Oh, there were several moments of "closure" in the final minutes, but that was just the writers handing a bit of narrative Xanax to keep viewers from developing unsightly nervous tics while they wait to see what will really happen next season. Read the rest by CLICKING HERE
Here's what the LA Times' Mary McNamara wrote of the show:
HBO's Emmy-free and too long under-appreciated Big Love came out of its yearlong, writers-strike-created hiatus like the buffed-up guy tired of eating sand.
But instead of going for fireballs and kidnappings (OK, there were a few of those, but they were totally incidental), cancer scares and intra-cast murder attempts (well, yes, there were those too, but again, not the point), creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer took their strange and startling American fable to new heights, and depths.
All of which came to a DefCon 1 "conclusion" in the season finale Sunday night. Oh, there were several moments of "closure" in the final minutes, but that was just the writers handing a bit of narrative Xanax to keep viewers from developing unsightly nervous tics while they wait to see what will really happen next season. Read the rest by CLICKING HERE
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Rant: Beyonce Knowles and acting. Why?
I saw THIS TRAILER recently for Beyonce's latest movie, Obsessed. The movie, which is released April 16, is a weak update of Fatal Attraction, with Beyonce playing the devoted housewife, Idris Elba (The Wire) as the suspect husband and Ali Larter (Heroes) as the crazed stalker vixen. We have no plans to watch this movie. If it had any shot of being remotely entertaining in that cheap thrill, guilty pleasure kind of way that Halle Berry's Perfect Stranger satisfied, the director's erased that possibility when they cast Beyonce as the housewife.This is Beyonce's eighth movie. And while she was able to show some fortitude as an actor in Cadillac Records, she's overall quite bland on the big screen. The ferocious entertainer that you see in her music videos or her stage performances is generally dwarfed by the talent that shares the screen with her in film. In short, she can't act. when you place her with actors who have even minor chops -- let's say Ali Larter, for example -- the outcome is quite painful to watch.
So why does she do it? I doubt she has some innate desire within her to express herself artistically through acting. Nothing about her Dreamgirls performance suggested this to be the case, and that was her biggest role to date. And even though she pulled off that one dramatic scene in Cadillac Records, she was essentially asleep emotionally through the rest of the film.
So why the hell does she insist on embarrassing herself in this way? The answer is quite simple. If you can pull $4 million for simply memorizing lines and walking through a production, why not.
Friday, March 6, 2009
UpComing -- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The newest trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine is awesome. Check it out.
Monday, March 2, 2009
UpComing: Watchmen
The highly anticipated film adaptation of the most acclaimed graphic novel, Watchmen, is released March 6 to a wide audience. This film -- from 300 director Zack Snyder -- will either be ridiculously awesome, or it will blow, hard.
Synopsis: A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the Doomsday Clock -- which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union -- moves closer to midnight.
When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion -- a disbanded group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers -- Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future.
Their mission is to watch over humanity...but who is watching the Watchmen? --© Warner Bros
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