Friday, October 14 2011
Clear! Old-School Medical Drama, Stat!
A once-popular medical drama reveals how much has changed in America's health care industry -- and its television medical dramas -- and how much remains the same.
Wednesday, October 12 2011
Mohawks and Korans: Taqwacores Punk Mash-up
The Taqwacore movement seizes space in the punk narrative and social fabric, which allows Muslim voices to take root and explore their own version of rebellion.
Wednesday, September 21 2011
Buster Keaton the Inventor and Charlie Chaplin the Conjurer
The films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin share a fraternal vitality and invention.
Wednesday, September 14 2011
Tainted Pasts: Pornography in ‘Meet Monica Velour’ and ‘The Girl Next Door’
Meet Monica Velour and The Girl Next Door demonstrate that mainstream representations of pornography, even in a society in which sex proliferates, are still surprisingly one-sided and inconsistent with counter-narratives offered by industry insiders themselves.
Thursday, September 1 2011
Life, Murder and Companionship: Dexter’s Quest for Friendship
Looking back over Dexter’s journey, the need for a trustworthy companion has never been greater. As the character has become more human, the desire for companionship and a normal life has overtaken the necessitation to kill. It has become—in fact always was—the driving force in his life.
Friday, August 19 2011
Comedy, Technology and DVD Extras: In Defense of a Dying Format
Media formats come and go, subject to the gale-force winds of technology and the retail market. Me, I'm still clinging to my Monty Python collections on VHS.
Thursday, August 4 2011
The Guys Who Bond in the Sky: ‘Toward the Unknown’
All this aircraft is blatantly fetishized, with Bond at one point giving his plane an impulsive and passionate smack of the lips.
Monday, June 27 2011
What Harm Can ‘Ice Road Truckers’ Do to Tender Young Minds?
We went into Ice Road Truckers with the best intentions for our eight-year-old, I swear. It's the History channel, right? It's educational!
Wednesday, June 8 2011
Characters, Compounds, & the Study of Change in ‘Breaking Bad: Season 3’
Walter White didn't just wake up one morning and decide he'd spice up his life by cooking methamphetamine and muscling his way into a business with life-or-death stakes. It was a chain of events.
Thursday, June 2 2011
Beware the Urge to Serve Two Masters, Especially One So ‘Primitive’ as the Blues
They say Bluesman Robert Johnson went to a crossroads one night and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his guitar prowess -- but no one ever accused him of serving two masters.
Thursday, May 26 2011
Share the Stage, ‘Glee’—TV Feels a Song Coming On
The history of TV musicals is richer -- and stranger -- than you think. At least three sitcoms were singing long before Glee came along: That's Life, The Monkees and The Partridge Family. Before them, well, if I could sing it to you...
Wednesday, May 11 2011
How Sherlock Holmes and Isaac Asimov Can Help Purge Your Social Media Addiction
Old books and even older movies can fend off the creeping anxiety of information overload.
Wednesday, April 13 2011
Jim Carrey’s Brilliant Dark Side
The Cable Guy and I Love You Phillip Morris show what Jim Carrey is capable of when no one is watching.
Tuesday, April 5 2011
‘Cinema’—That’s Italian for Cinema
New DVD provider RaroVideo USA is coming out of the gate with two lavish Criterion-worthy releases: The Clowns and the Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection. One is nominally "arty" and the other "lowdown", but the lines deserve to be blurred.
Monday, April 4 2011
Richard Whitman Shrugged: The Merging of Identities in ‘Mad Men: Season 4’
Military deserter, super-confident ad man, or attentive fiancé. Is there a real Don Draper or is he destined for instability?
Tuesday, March 22 2011
Flash Over Substance: ‘Broadcast News’, Redux
As in real life, the TV news industry in Broadcast News looks less like a small pond and more like shark-infested waters.
Monday, March 21 2011
Banksy’s Bare Wit-ness
Like Aristophanes in Ancient Greece, Mark Twain in 19th century America, or Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, Banksy’s visual humor chastises power in its multiple manifestations by hauling it before the court of public opinion for a well-deserved flogging.
Tuesday, March 15 2011
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ at 34: Still Thrilling After All These Years
What makes Close Encounters of the Third Kind stand out to this day is that it isn’t the usual UFO tale of “us vs them”, like Spielberg’s later remake of War of the Worlds; rather, it's very much a story about Earthlings.
Tuesday, March 1 2011
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as Motion Comic: Paper Doll or New Art Form?
Will motion comics become the digital equivalent of the film strip? Merely an interesting artifact of a particular period of media production? Or are they the crude beginnings of a new art form?
Tuesday, February 22 2011
What ‘La Femme Nikita’ Has to Say about Egypt and Former President Hosni Mubarek
La Femme Nikita's miserable and corrupted world of moral dead zones and US-sanctioned torture forces its hero to make a real-world choice between pragmatic collusion or principled, perhaps doomed, resistance.
