Rick McGinnis
Written on 6 Dec, 2010 at 11:47 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
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
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
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
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
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)
Written on 13 Sep, 2010 at 18:42 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Rick McGinnis I envy people who’ve maintained a constant connection to their faith, but not just for the bedrock of moral certainty that’s been beneath their feet their entire life. If you haven’t walked a meandering path all over the political and spiritual landscape, you probably won’t have experienced the panic that overwhelms you the morning after you’ve returned from that tacitly secular, hyperbolically ambivalent place generally accepted today as the mainstream. You ... (Continue reading)
Written on 18 Aug, 2010 at 5:51 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Rick McGinnis Esquire magazine’s motto is “man at his best,” but if you only watched movies and television, the last couple of decades would have made it harder for you to figure out just when, particularly, a man could count on hitting his golden years – that plateau where health, wealth and hard-won wisdom combine at a tolerable average.
It certainly isn’t the gormless, sullen teen years. Senior citizens on both the big and ... (Continue reading)
Written on 22 Jun, 2010 at 6:36 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Rick McGinnis The scientist Stephen Hawking recently returned to TV screens with a new miniseries, his first since 1997, and like all eager presenters, he took the time to do some interviews to publicize the show.
The series, Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe, is the sort of symphonic, planet-hopping science entertainment that it seems so much easier to produce in an age of flashy computer graphics, and begins and ends with Hawking, frail and ... (Continue reading)
Written on 9 Apr, 2010 at 6:49 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis, Television Shows | Author:
Amusements Rick McGinnis Among most men of my acquaintance – and this probably says more about my friends than anything else – the most eagerly anticipated TV series this year is HBO’s The Pacific, which will started airing last month (after this column was submitted). It’s a companion piece to the critically-lauded Band of Brothers, the 2001 miniseries that followed a group of paratroopers from basic training to the end of World War Two, ... (Continue reading)
Written on 20 Mar, 2010 at 18:51 in
Columnist, Movie Review, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Amusements Rick McGinnis There are a few rules about reviewing movies that no one can teach you – that only become evident after you’ve sat through many hundreds of hours of films you probably didn’t enjoy and written reviews that, taken as a whole, provide evidence of a life in the midst of being wasted. Some apply generally to the whole history of moviemaking and can even be extended to other art forms, such ... (Continue reading)
Written on 17 Jan, 2010 at 19:14 in
Columnist, Movie Review, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Amusements Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 23 Dec, 2009 at 8:06 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 13 Nov, 2009 at 5:58 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis, Television Shows | Author:
Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 23 Oct, 2009 at 10:27 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis, Society & Culture | Author:
Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 29 Sep, 2009 at 5:38 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Amusements Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 14 Aug, 2009 at 11:39 in
Columnist, Rick McGinnis, Society & Culture | Author:
Rick McGinnis 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)
Written on 13 Jul, 2009 at 13:20 in
Columnist, Marriage and Family, Rick McGinnis | Author:
Rick McGinnis 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)
