Florence Foster Jenkins movie review: don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear
When FFJ sticks to farce, it works wonderfully, like something P.G. Wodehouse might have loved. But the longer it goes on, the more maudlin it gets.
American Idol
Rock the Kasbah movie review: whitemansplaining, the movie
Behold Bill Murray as the white savior barreling into a foreign land and teaching the ignorant natives how to be better people. Obnoxious and tone deaf.
question of the day: What is the greatest aspect of Fox’s legacy, 25 years in?
The X-Files? In Living Color? The Simpsons? Firefly? Something else?
question of the day: Is ‘American Idol’ sexist and racist?
Or is the rap unfair for reasons that I can’t appreciate because I don’t watch the show? If it is indeed racist and sexist, how could the show overcome that and still be popular with a nation for whom sexism and racism is seemingly entrenched?
“amusing ourselves to death”: why many won’t care about the loss of Net neutrality… but why we must
We as a society are in danger of drowing under not a flow of information but a flow of entertainment…
save Paul Rudd; movie apathy; everybody loves ‘Mad Men’; more: leftover links
Every week my browser gets cluttered up with tabs for stuff that I stumble across and figure I might be able to use as a Question of the Day or a WTF Thought for the Day or grist for some other post…
‘Doctor Who’ breaks ratings records in the U.S.
But it’s not quite how it sounds. The Mirror: The first episode of the new Dr Who series was watched by 1.2 million viewers at the weekend. This is the biggest draw BBC America has ever had. And it’s pretty good for a basic cable channel that doesn’t even reach huge chunks of the American … more…
Green Lantern’s CGI wardrobe, cutting the cord to cable TV, sexy Shrek, and more: leftover links
Every week my browser gets cluttered up with tabs for stuff that I stumble across and figure I might be able to use as a Question of the Day or a WTF Thought for the Day or grist for some other post. And inevitably, I end the week with most of that material unused. But … more…
question of the day: Who should get paid $38 million to be a judge on ‘American Idol’?
I don’t pretend to understand why audiences find the modern Gong Show freak show American Idol so enthralling, so I don’t even know where to begin thinking about this bit of news. According to a scoop at Deadline Hollywood, the rumor that Howard Stern would be replacing Simon Cowell as a judge on that show … more…
question of the weekend: How do we fix what’s wrong with American politics?
Last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow proposed that we need to find a new word for “something that is both catastrophically important to the future of the United States and totally freaking boring,” something that “speaks directly to whether government is capable of actually governing.” She was referring to the filibuster, which is … more…
