NOAH:  Worth A Ticket –The Word According to Darren Aronofsky When Darren Aronofsky decided to follow Black Swan, the biggest hit of his career, with the story of Noah and the Ark, it seemed like a perverse choice.  Traditionally, the big-budget biblical epic has been among the blandest and most conservative of Hollywood genres, […]

  There were a few moments in this week’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE where you could actually have mistaken it for a place that offers trenchant political satire.  That’s hasn’t been SNL‘s mode since Tina Fey hung up her Sarah Palin glasses–the political bits have instead tended to the silly and bland.  But the “Tech Talk” […]

> MISSING:  Premieres Thursday 8PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On… If you’ve seen any of the commercials for ABC’s new MISSING, you know that it’s basically Ashley Judd playing Liam Neeson’s role in Taken, and on the basis of the pilot, really that’s all you need to know.  The show is pure […]

  INTO THE BADLANDS:  Sunday 10PM on AMC – If Nothing Else Is On… The first 5 minutes of the pilot for INTO THE BADLANDS tell you pretty much all you need to know.  There’s an opening narration placing us in one of those post-apocalyptic, neo-western futures, the kind where “Barons” rule, aided by sworn […]

  ORPHAN BLACK:  Saturday 9PM on BBCAmerica In an era of non-stop TV drama overhype, last season’s arrival of ORPHAN BLACK was that extreme rarity:  the real thing.  Even its network didn’t seem to know initially what it had on its hands, as BBCAmerica promoted the show, but reserved the bulk of its marketing resources […]

  It’s not really a surprise to see Alfonso Cuaron join James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott in that small group of film artists who have made 3D part of the essential toolbox of their imagery (no, Baz Luhrmann and Guillermo del Toro don’t make the list, although Michael Bay might).  Cuaron is a […]

  LONDON ROAD may have seemed marginally less odd as the stage musical it originally was.  No matter how naturalistic a play may be, the mechanics of theatre make it somewhat stylized, and that may have brought the show’s conceits to life when it was staged by England’s National Theatre company.  But as a film […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2:  Watch It At Home – The Webs Aren’t Very Tight This Time The huge, lumbering pieces of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 rarely succeed in fitting together.  It’s as though the studio and filmmakers–director Marc Webb and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner (plus co-story writer James Vanderbilt)–started with […]