G.I. JOE: RETALIATION:  Not Even For Free – Endlessly Dumb Exercise In Boom-Boom Action There’s a difference between making a movie for 11-year old boys and having a script that seems to have been written by one.  (Or in this case by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, doing a faithful imitation of one.)  Idiocy […]

  ORPHAN BLACK:  Saturday 9PM on BBCAmerica – Potential DVR Alert BBCAmerica’s second foray into original scripted drama, ORPHAN BLACK, while less inherently prestigious than Copper–lacking as it does that show’s historical setting and Tom Fontana auspices–is at least in its first hour a considerably more diverting entertainment. The first sequence is a grabber.  Petty […]

  Greg Garcia has made a successful niche for himself on network television as poet of the lower-middle-class, small-town, gently surrealist sitcom, first with My Name Is Earl and now with RAISING HOPE.  The only problem with Garcia’s type of show is that the constant requirement for more inventively conceptual, eccentric storylines can lead to […]

  I’m not sure when THE NEIGHBORS started winning me over.  I dismissed the pilot as an overbroad, gimmicky, mostly witless rehash of 3d Rock From the Sun, but as quickly as an October episode where Zabvronian alien Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), who usually speaks with a British accent that would put her in good […]

  Whatever one may say about WHITNEY and whether it’s a sitcom that deserves to reach a Season 3, it’s clear that NBC and its producers (including star Whitney Cummings herself) heard the complaints about the show’s original version.  Season 2 wasn’t officially a reboot, but it featured an assortment of changes in style and tone.  Both Whitney and […]

  REVOLUTION:  Monday 10PM on NBC Of all the mysteries that surround the events of NBC’s REVOLUTION, the one that definitely won’t be answered this season is how the show would rate if it didn’t have The Voice as its lead-in.  NBC decided that it would be safer to keep Revolution off the air for 4 months than to air […]

  THE CROODS:  Watch It At Home – Prehistoric Sitcom’s Bland Storyline Doesn’t Evolve Hollywood already has a thriving CG-animated prehistoric franchise in the Ice Age series, but DreamWorks Animation is in serious need of a hit, so now there’s the new THE CROODS.  It’s far too familiar, not just in the setting and plot territory it explores […]

  OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN:  Watch It At Home – Better Luck in June In Hollywood’s grand tradition of 2 movies about volcanoes, 2 about Snow White, 2 about Christopher Columbus and 2 about Truman Capote, this year we’re getting a pair of terrorist attacks on the White House, each foiled by a heroic Secret Service […]