My career choice hasn’t been a gateway to riches, but it has a few perks, one of which is the appearance of dozens of DVD screeners in my mailbox in the weeks before Christmas. “Academy screeners” is their full name – DVDs of movies made for members of the Motion Picture Academy of America so that members can nominate Oscar winners without having to drag themselves to a theatre. I don’t ... (Continue reading)
A few months ago, I found myself having to defend a major entertainment corporation while a guest on a national TV show – not the sort of position any critic relishes. A critic’s credibility is a fragile thing, but you’re always safe defaulting to the contrarian, lone wolf stance much beloved of politicians on the election trail, young rock bands with a little-heard debut album to sell (or older ones ... (Continue reading)
There are two rituals at the onset of every fall television season; in the first, someone looks over the crop of failed shows from the last season and announces some venerable genre – the three-camera sitcom, the police procedural – as being creatively dead, followed by the unexpected success of a show that singlehandedly revives it. The cycle’s tedious regularity is just one of the reasons why some of us, ... (Continue reading)
The sign outside the fire hall in Malton, just near Toronto’s Pearson airport, read “Remember 9-11.” It was just a couple of days since the 8th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but I was pleased – and somewhat surprised – that someone was still making the effort. I was in my late thirties on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just two months from ... (Continue reading)
The critical success of the show Mad Men, which has just returned for its third season, is probably due to how seductively easy it is to write about. Writers on deadline are ravenous scavengers and, when they run out of things to say about its pre-Beatles 60s setting, its slick period aesthetic or the New York advertising world where most of its characters are employed, they can – if suitably ... (Continue reading)
Vampires are back. Not that they ever went away, but they’ve been given a pop culture revival that strives to make them even more appealing than ever before. For tweens, there are the painfully attractive, but misunderstood, nightwalking misfits of Twilight, the Stephenie Meyer novel that was recently adapted into the first of a series of films, and for adults, there are the infighting and oversexed bloodsuckers of True Blood, ... (Continue reading)
But nostalgia for kid’s shows doesn’t stand scrutiny During the four years I wrote a daily TV column, I could always rely on at least one study a year, often more, decrying the debilitating effect that television had on the young mind. Among the most recent is a University of Washington report that blamed TV viewing for preventing babies from learning language, while in the U.K., a survey of ... (Continue reading)
As Easter weekend rolled around, and with it the end of my agonizing Lenten sacrifice of caffeinated drinks, I couldn’t help but remember childhood Easters and the ritual rolling out of 50s- and 60s-era biblical epics on the big three U.S. networks. The big event was always Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 remake of his own 1923 silent-era Mosaic blockbuster, The Ten Commandments, alongside less-esteemed widescreen biblical adaptations like King Of ... (Continue reading)
If you believe the critics, the most watched shows in America today are Mad Men, Damages, Rescue Me, Breaking Bad and Weeds, and not American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, NCIS, Grey's Anatomy and CSI: Miami. While average ratings for the big networks are falling, it's a testament to the profound gravity and cultural triumph of "quality cable" - the roster of dramas airing their short but well-publicized seasons on ... (Continue reading)
Culture and entertainment columnist Rick McGinnis stresses the need for a critical wherewithal when it comes to governing how and where our children spend their time in the technological age. (Continue reading)
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Culture and entertainment columnist Rick McGinnis stresses the need for a critical wherewithal when it ...
