POLITICAL ANIMALS: Sunday 10PM on USA 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, helpful […]

  Warning:  this piece will discuss details of the storyline of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as well as the other Batman films.  GIANT SPOILERS WILL ABOUND; proceed at your own risk. Christopher Nolan is remarkable among the great directors of action films–Steven Spielberg, David Lean, James Cameron, John Ford, certainly Michael Bay–in that while working […]

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES:  Worth A Ticket – The Saga That Rewrote Superhero Movies Goes Out With A Weighty Bang Christopher Nolan likes his intricate, novelistic plotting.  You remember the portion of The Dark Knight where Batman had to travel to Hong Kong to capture a banker who was laundering money for Gotham City’s gangsters, because […]

  If THE DARK KNIGHT had no superhero or comic book trappings–if The Joker were scarred but not hideously made up, and Batman were a bit lower-tech and merely disguised rather than wearing a cowl and cape–Christopher Nolan’s film would still be one of the best action-adventure crime movies of the past 20 years.  Within […]

  PERCEPTION:  Monday 10PM on TNT 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, helpful and […]

  To say BATMAN BEGINS successfully rebooted the Warners franchise is accurate, but incomplete.  Christopher Nolan’s film, from the script he wrote with David S. Goyer, is a complete rethinking of the very concept of a comic book/superhero movie, one comparable to what The Godfather and Cabaret did with the gangster movie and the musical […]

  EUREKA, while never a breakout hit, was a sturdy performer for 5 years on Syfy–and one of the increasingly small number of shows on its air that was actually science-fiction, as opposed to superhero fantasy, horror, reality, paranormal thriller, or whatever else the network is trying to use to broaden its brand (while actually […]

  And then this happened. With BATMAN & ROBIN, the franchise that had been reclaimed for adults by Tim Burton in 1989 was turned back over to children (and not bright children) by Joel Schumacher in 1997.  Schumacher took everything he’d done in Batman Forever and turned it up, as they say, to 11.  He […]