But for one unfortunately critical element, Logan and Noah Miller’s SWEETWATER (the brothers rewrote a script originally by Andrew McKenzie) is a highly enjoyable darkly comic western, as subsumed in stylized movie traditions (and their subversion) as a Tarantino movie, but without Tarantino’s post-modern stew of references. Sweetwater is your basic frontier town, half-way to Santa […]

  BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance):  Worth A Ticket – A Stunt, But An Amazing One Alejandro G. Inarritu’s BIRDMAN is, like this year’s Boyhood, a film defined by its form.  In the case of Boyhood, that form was inextricable from its content:  its depiction of the passage of time, and the experience […]

> 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 […]

> 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 […]

  BURN NOTICE went heavy on action for its final hour, attempting to look like a more expensive show than it actually ever was.  Burn was never a well-respected series (it was memorably ridiculed in an SNL skit as a hit no one knew anything about), with inch-deep plots and characterizations that hardly budged in the 7 seasons it […]

  HAL & HARPER (no network):  Cooper Raiff launched his career as an actor-writer-director with Shithouse, which won the Narrative Grand Jury Award at SXSW.  He parlayed that into Cha Cha Real Smooth, which was less well-regarded but nevertheless bought by Apple for $15M out of Sundance.  Like many indie filmmakers, he’s now shifted into television, […]

  Marvel may own the movie houses, but DC Comics has been demonstrating that it has the edge when it comes to the small screen.  ARROW has steadily improved since its debut, and in its second season it provided a model of the way comic book action-adventures can work on TV within the limitations of […]

  RECKLESS:  Sunday 9PM on CBS – If Nothing Else Is On… In the Charleston of CBS’s summer potboiler RECKLESS, it seems like just about everyone is sleeping with everyone else, or wants to.  That absurdly overheated quality is the most likable thing about what’s otherwise a fairly conventional legal procedural, which comes from a […]