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Well, *Shawshank* it ain’t. Chris Rock ain’t Morgan Freeman, Adam Sandler ain’t Tim Robbins, and bone-crunching revenge football ain’t heartfelt and poignant personal redemption. Although James Cromwell *is* here as the warden. And so is a big dumb sweet black guy, though he has no miraculous abilities. Oh, wait — that was *The Green Mile.*
‘Ahhhh! Nature! It’s all over me! Get it off!’ screams Melman the urban giraffe once he reaches the titular island in *Madagascar,* and New Yorkers will scream, too, with laughter, because we recognize ourselves in it, and everyone else will scream with laughter because they’ll think it’s making fun of our neuroses. But we like our neuroses just fine, thank you, and appreciate the tribute to them that *Madagascar* is.
The supremely underappreciated Barry Pepper (25th Hour) gets his Cast Away — or maybe it’s his Dances with Wolves — with this captivating Canadian film about a bush pilot and WWII veteran in the remote, arctic Northwest Territories in 1953 who crashes in the middle of cold, frozen nowhere. He’s not quite alone — his … more…
Not another doctor show? Oh, but when Scrubs debuted in 2001, it was instantly the perfect antidote for the increasingly soapy melodrama of ER — and here are the DVDs to prove it. The first season, 24 brilliant episodes, veers from the profoundly silly to the achingly poignant, often in the same scene, as it … more…
Imagine if Christopher Guest had all sense of compassion excised and saw fit to remove his frontal lobe — you know, the area of the brain that prevents us from doing and saying every damn outrageous thing that crosses our minds. Then he might make a film like Hacks, a refreshingly aggressive and offensive mockumentary … more…
It’s very easy to puncture the self-importance of Hollywood types, and this HBO original series never fails to take that easy route, though it cloaks itself in a veneer of intelligence and insight. Vince Chase is the hottest thing to hit the movies since Johnny Depp, but Adrian Grenier (Hart’s War) fails to make us … more…
Visually, Cartoon Network’s kiddie entry Ed, Edd n Eddy is delightfully gonzo, its inventive animation style and garish colors reflecting the adolescent confusion of its identically named boy heroes. But their goofy misadventures hold little appeal for grownup cartoon fans — this one is pretty much strictly for the kiddies. In these six brief 10-minute … more…
It’s the series that launched Melissa Joan Hart as a star, and if you’re saying “Who?” you’re not alone. It’s not as if this Nickoeleon sitcom for peewees boded well for its then-adolescent headliner in its 1991 debut season, when throughout 13 episodes, Hart’s just-barely-teenaged Clarissa broke the fourth wall to whine directly at the … more…
It’s a bit of a labeling error to call this series from cable network A&E and Britain’s London Weekend Television a “reality” show, unless you’re talking about the original reality genre: the documentary. There’s nothing of the exhibitionist game show about the surprisingly engrossing minidoc that is each of these standalone episode — no one … more…
Oh, how can I possibly resist Apocalyptic cheese like NBC’s *Revelations*? It’s goofy Jesus stuff *and* it’s ridiculous prime-time ‘drama.’ It’s movie actors slumming on TV *and* it’s a finely calculated mercenary attempt to get all those consumers of *The Da Vinci Code* back in front of the boob tube, where they belong. What’s *not* to have a love/hate/despairing-for-the-culture relationship with?
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