Rick McGinnis
Written on 26 Jan, 2012 at 11:45 in
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Rick McGinnis Just as the sordid but ongoing saga of filmmaker and convicted pedophile Roman Polanski fades once again from the headlines, stories of child abuse in Hollywood have erupted again, with an unprecedented frequency. Of course, if you don’t know where to look for this sort of news, you might never have heard a thing.
In late November, a composer who had won awards for his work on Sesame Street was charged with ... (Continue reading)
Written on 12 Dec, 2011 at 13:03 in
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Rick McGinnis I’m sure that I’ve seen too many movies. There’s no scientific way to be sure, I’ll admit, but the wary feeling I get in my stomach when I sit down in a cinema or open a new DVD is probably some instinctual sign that, many years ago, I should have said “enough, already.” What keeps me going, I suppose, is the rare moment when I discover that there are still films ... (Continue reading)
Written on 16 Nov, 2011 at 11:19 in
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Rick McGinnis In Hollywood, the maxim “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” isn’t just a saying, it’s a business strategy and a creative philosophy, which is why it was only a matter of time before prime time television went back to the Sixties.
With a total of 15 Emmy awards, AMC’s Mad Men has taken the place of The Sopranos as the quality cable show that primetime networks most wanted to emulate, and ... (Continue reading)
Written on 28 Oct, 2011 at 7:44 in
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Rick McGinnis The Fall TV season is debuting as I write this and from a distance it looks and sounds like the usual anxious three-legged race, with all of the networks somehow bound to each other by their rosters of copycat shows, an annual ritual that, at least until the cancellations begin, gives the illusion of themes and trends that only makes TV critics’ jobs easier.
We have two shows set in the implicitly ... (Continue reading)
Written on 19 Sep, 2011 at 10:03 in
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Columnist Rick McGinnis Television is the most modern, the most omnipresent, and the most pervasive of all the media arts, which is the reason I devote so much time in this column to analyzing its effect on our culture. It’s not hard to understand why; unless parents have made the conscious decision to take TV out of their home, it’s likely that the average child will have seen many hours of television programming before ... (Continue reading)
Written on 25 Aug, 2011 at 9:59 in
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Rick McGinnis For any halfway sensible TV viewer, “reality TV” is usually mentioned with a broad verbal wink, since the inference suggested by its very name is a kind of semantic gag that is presumed to tie viewers and the people who make it together in an agreed complicity. Simply put, the stuff is heavily staged, out of economic and dramatic necessity, and has been since the birth of the genre, which is ... (Continue reading)
Written on 20 Jun, 2011 at 8:27 in
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Rick McGinnis Before I say anything else about Game Of Thrones, this Spring’s big-budget HBO epic miniseries, it has to be understood that there’s nothing family friendly about the show. Full of blood and sex, full-frontal nudity, incest, animal cruelty and some wildly explicit language, it almost seems like the producers, having seen quality cable push the boundaries with each new series, are attempting to set precedents so far past anything any but ... (Continue reading)
Written on 26 May, 2011 at 13:35 in
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Rick McGinnis
While heroes pay the bills in Hollywood, the creative class labouring in movies and TV are in thrall to anti-heroes, a mad love reinforced in the hymns sung by critics hardwired to prefer a menacing, flawed protagonist to a clear-browed, virtuous one. Batman versus Superman, if you will, and a loaded choice ultimately corrosive to the audience’s moral clarity, especially in an industry more competent at asking questions like “Ginger or Mary ... (Continue reading)
Written on 7 Apr, 2011 at 20:15 in
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Rick McGinnis Editor’s Note: There are book titles and quotes in this column that use language that some reader’s might find offensive.
Despite my wife’s best efforts, I never had much time for the popular parenting textbooks that ended up on our bookshelves – the “What To Expect When You’re...” series and their like, all written in useful gulps of text, with diagrams and bullet points and bold headings to help guide ... (Continue reading)
Written on 18 Mar, 2011 at 7:21 in
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Rick McGinnis At the end of January of this year, writer Yann Martel mailed his last book to Stephen Harper. For over three and a half years, the prize-winning author of The Life of Pi has sent a biweekly letter to the Prime Minister, enclosed with a book that he hoped our country’s elected leader would read, in the hope that it would – as he said in the letter accompanying the first book – provoke an “unwitting self-examination,” and “shudders of ... (Continue reading)
Written on 14 Feb, 2011 at 19:35 in
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Rick McGinnis The opening scene of Mother and Child, a 2009 box office dud recently recalled to life on DVD, opens with a scene that’s pitifully familiar. A boy and a girl – teenagers, and just barely at that – sit on a bed kissing; it’s the bad hair and bellbottom ‘70s, but it could really be any time since what’s next is dramatically inevitable. In one quick cut she’s pregnant, in a ... (Continue reading)
Written on 10 Jan, 2011 at 11:29 in
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Rick McGinnis It’s a rare film that justifies its running time, and if over two decades’ worth of movie reviewing has taught me anything, it’s that every film, no matter how good, is probably too long. That proved itself once again with The Social Network, one of the films tipped early on as an Oscar favourite when it was released this fall. It’s just a minute over two hours long, and while hardly ... (Continue reading)
Written on 6 Dec, 2010 at 11:47 in
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Rick McGinnis There are no accidents in popular culture. Trends and fads might crest with seeming randomness, but do not be fooled – every hit movie, TV show or book and the copycats in its wake are meant to scratch some cultural itch. The motivations might be obscure at the time, but hindsight reveals all, so I cannot help but anticipate just what led to the recent ubiquity of the zombie.
A quick scan ... (Continue reading)
Written on 21 Nov, 2010 at 11:58 in
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Rick McGinnis “Welcome to Earth – population zero,” goes the ominous tagline at the start of every episode of Life After People, the History Channel-produced documentary series that aired its second season just recently in Canada on History Television. It’s our cue to get cozy and enjoy an hour’s worth of empty cities falling to pieces, if they’re not inundated by rivers and seas, while the pride of mankind’s achievements collapse spectacularly into ... (Continue reading)
Written on 22 Oct, 2010 at 5:23 in
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Rick McGinnis There’s a scene early on in The September Issue, a recent documentary about Vogue magazine’s doorstopper-sized fall edition, which must have made the filmmakers gasp when they knew they had it captured. At Paris fashion week, an unnamed but very chic-looking woman stage-whispers in French into the ear of a highly improbable man named Andre Leon Talley that “Anna is the most powerful woman in the United States.” The Anna in ... (Continue reading)
