THE MASTER:  Worth A Ticket – The Title Describes the Filmmaker Our shorthand for describing movie directors, even great ones, is to compare them to other filmmakers.  So Quentin Tarantino is Sergio Leone plus half a dozen (at least) obscure exploitation and art-house directors, Soderbergh is Godardian, Scorsese recreates the aesthetic of Michael Powell, […]

  SCANDAL:  Thursday 10PM on ABC WHERE WE WERE:  Washington DC, where Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) is the best fixer around.  Not a lawyer (although she has a law degree), not a publicist (although she’s expert at manipulating the press), and not a lobbyist (although she’s been known to influence public policy), she’s the one […]

  MAJOR CRIMES has been doing for TNT what it was created to do–that is, fill the hole left by the departure of the network’s long-running hit The Closer–and it’s earned the Season 2 renewal it’s already received.  Putting aside a bump for last night’s season finale, it’s been getting around a 0.7 rating in […]

  Did anyone, anywhere, expect LIZ & DICK to be something other than junk?  Lifetime’s TV-movie, with its stunt casting of Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor, was calibrated to get train-wreck eyeballs (it might as well have come with a TMZ tie-in) and it certainly may succeed at that.  There’s some justice to this, since […]

  NOT FADE AWAY:  Watch It At Home – The Tumultuous 1960s (Again) What do you do after you’ve created the seminal television drama of our time?  If you’re David Chase, it seems that you take a few years off to soak in your Sopranos adulation and awards (consistently refusing to discuss the controversial ending, […]

  The screenplay for THE SPECTACULAR NOW, a Dramatic Competition entry at Sundance, was written by the team of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who also wrote (500) Days of Summer, but the new film has none of the breezy and somewhat gimmicky visual style of that hit.  Director James Ponsoldt, instead, goes to the […]

  DO NO HARM:  Thursday 10PM on NBC A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and the 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) give plenty of notes, […]

  As a series, Cinemax’s BANSHEE has been notable for the sheer knock-down, drag-out-edness of its action scenes.  One episode started with a bungled robbery which led to a chase that must have lasted 10 minutes, and when hero ex-con turned fake-sheriff of Banshee, PA Lucas Hood (Antony Starr) faced down an MMA fighter who […]