THE THING:  Watch It At Home – Not Interesting Enough To Be Scary   The third movie iteration of THE THING is as impersonal as the creature it’s about.  This version, the first feature directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr and with a script credited to Eric Heisserer (he wrote the remake of […]

  There’s a tendency to compare any slow-moving, beautifully-photographed drama with an abundance of natural imagery to the films of Terence Malick, but that’s unfair to the very particular surreal spirituality Malick brings even to his more insufferable projects.  In the case of AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, the more apt comparison is probably to Robert […]

> A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and […]

  Nothing ever came up roses for SMASH, and tonight, after two misbegotten NBC seasons, on a holiday weekend buried against reruns and NASCAR, the show’s Broadway curtain came down for the last time.  The saddest thing about its passing, of course, is the enormous waste it represented:  of a truly distinctive setting and topic; […]

  TRUE BLOOD:  Sunday 9PM on HBO You don’t typically associate HBO with “guilty pleasure”–even its genre shows, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire to Game of Thrones, have the weight of dramas determined to reinvent their forms–but TRUE BLOOD has been the exception.  An all-you-can-eat buffet of vampires, werewolves, sex, political satire, more sex, shapeshifters, witches, yet more sex, faeries, […]

REVOLUTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC – If Nothing Else Is On… REVOLUTION is Falling Skies without aliens, The Walking Dead without zombies, Jericho… well, actually it pretty much is Jericho.  We’ve all strolled down this post-apocalyptic road before (let’s not even try to count the number of movies set there), and based on its pilot, […]

> LUCK – Sundays 9PM on HBO starting January 29 – Potential DVR Alert The TV auteur David Milch got rich by co-creating (with Steven Bochco) NYPD Blue, but he’s probably most beloved for creating Deadwood.  Deadwood, while never a giant hit–it ran only 36 episodes on HBO, and never had a proper ending–was a […]

> VEEP:  Sundays 10PM on HBO – Potential DVR Alert   Although of course it made all the sense in the world to precede tonight’s premiere of its new political comedy VEEP with the trailer for its upcoming political comedy-drama, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, in some ways HBO might have considered thinking twice.  Both Sorkin […]