> THE FIRM:  Thursdays 10PM on NBC – Change the Channel THE FIRM isn’t NBC’s #1 priority for midseason–that would clearly be Smash.  (In other news, there’s no truth to the rumor that NBC has decided to change its corporate name to “Smash–The Monday After the Super Bowl”.)  But The Firm is the inheritor of […]

> 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 […]

> One of the good things about going to midnight premieres of blockbusters (there aren’t all that many) is that the audience is exactly the group (young, first adopters, eagerly moviegoing) Hollywood is targeting.  A theatre almost entirely composed of that crowd provides a ready-made focus group to gauge how upcoming releases are faring with […]

    RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Worth A Ticket:  Simian Power   Although it’s positioned as the last big adventure epic of the summer, for most of its length Rupert Wyatt’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES isn’t really an action movie.  Somewhat surprisingly, while it establishes an alternative mythology […]

    THE TWILIGHT SAGA – BREAKING DAWN PART 1:  Watch It At Home – The Saga Sags In Slow Prelude To The End   The worldwide phenomenon that is Twilight often finds itself compared to Harry Potter, and for obvious reasons:  both are multi-film, multi-billion dollar franchises aimed at young audiences and telling a […]

SAFE HOUSE:  Watch It At Home – You’ve Seen It     SAFE HOUSE feels like a remake, even though technically it’s not.  It’s a little bit Training Day, a little Bourne, a little Man On Fire (and everything else Tony Scott has ever done), with almost nothing added of its own, an exercise in […]

The title of MAD MEN‘s Season 5 finale was “The Phantom,” and as is almost always the case with Matthew Weiner’s opus, it had several meanings.  (Weiner shared credit for the finale’s script with Jonathan Igla, and directed the episode himself.)  Most specifically, the phantom was that of Adam Whitman, Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) brother, […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]