I’m writing this column at the end of what has to be one of the least interesting summers in movie history. To make matters worse – if you work for a Hollywood studio – it’s also been one of the least profitable, but that doesn’t mean that movies aren’t important. As the Middle East erupted into bloody riots that took the life [...]
For most families, college is the acid test of their parenting, the point when independence is finally granted and the long years of helicopter parenting (hopefully) cease. In the aftermath of three generations that have embraced youthful rebellion as an inevitable stage of life – an idea almost unheard of a century ago – we send our children off to university (or [...]
Growing up during the Cold War, I saw the Earth end many times over. Mushroom clouds bloomed in films and TV shows such as The Day After, Testament, Threads, The War Game, By Dawn’s Early Light, On the Beach, The Bedford Incident, Fail Safe and Miracle Mile. Looking back from today, they might vary in quality but they share a [...]
Culture matters. I would carve these words on stone slabs and hand deliver them to every conservative and pro-life organization in the English-speaking world if I thought that it would make a difference, but I’m no longer sure it will. We may, I fear, have absented ourselves from culture and the arts for so long that everything we do now is a [...]
When The Hunger Games opened in theatres this past March it was a sensation, earning over US$150 million in its first weekend and becoming the third highest-grossing opening weekend of all time. Dealers in hindsight told us we shouldn’t have been surprised – 17.5 million copies of the Suzanne Collins’ original young readers sci-fi novel had been sold in the U.S. by [...]
The premise of the documentary The Other F Word is that there’s something outlandish, even implausible, in the spectacle of a man who’s made his living and his name as a punk rock musician taking on the role of a father. It’s an idea made visible by the image on the film’s poster and DVD packaging, of Lars Frederiksen from the punk [...]
As a purely anecdotal aside, I’d like to mention that few of the people I know who’ve walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim trail that provides the setting for Emilio Estevez’ film The Way, were actually Catholic, or even appreciably Christian. The Camino has become, in an age of widened horizons but jaded palettes, a kind of extreme tourism destination, [...]
In the 2009 film Up In The Air, George Clooney and co-star Vera Farmiga were enlisted to basically make air miles seem sexy. In Higher Ground, the directorial debut in which Farmiga also stars, she’s set herself an even more difficult task – making an intelligent, general interest film about religious faith. In a featurette included with the film’s DVD release, [...]
I spent one night of my holidays watching the new Bluray re-issue of Meet Me In St. Louis, a film that might be the pinnacle of the MGM colour musical, and is very probably the zenith of Judy Garland’s career. I enjoyed it even more than the last time I saw it, but like almost anything from what’s called Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” [...]
Just as the sordid but ongoing saga of filmmaker and convicted pedophile Roman Polanski fades once again from the headlines, stories of child abuse in Hollywood have erupted again, with an unprecedented frequency. Of course, if you don’t know where to look for this sort of news, you might never have heard a thing. In late November, a composer who had won [...]
I’m sure that I’ve seen too many movies. There’s no scientific way to be sure, I’ll admit, but the wary feeling I get in my stomach when I sit down in a cinema or open a new DVD is probably some instinctual sign that, many years ago, I should have said “enough, already.” What keeps me going, I suppose, is the rare [...]
In Hollywood, the maxim “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” isn’t just a saying, it’s a business strategy and a creative philosophy, which is why it was only a matter of time before prime time television went back to the Sixties. With a total of 15 Emmy awards, AMC’s Mad Men has taken the place of The Sopranos as the quality [...]
The Fall TV season is debuting as I write this and from a distance it looks and sounds like the usual anxious three-legged race, with all of the networks somehow bound to each other by their rosters of copycat shows, an annual ritual that, at least until the cancellations begin, gives the illusion of themes and trends that only makes TV critics’ [...]
Television is the most modern, the most omnipresent, and the most pervasive of all the media arts, which is the reason I devote so much time in this column to analyzing its effect on our culture. It’s not hard to understand why; unless parents have made the conscious decision to take TV out of their home, it’s likely that the average child [...]
For any halfway sensible TV viewer, “reality TV” is usually mentioned with a broad verbal wink, since the inference suggested by its very name is a kind of semantic gag that is presumed to tie viewers and the people who make it together in an agreed complicity. Simply put, the stuff is heavily staged, out of economic and dramatic necessity, and has [...]