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What distinguishes reality TV from other fame-making mediums is that to
get famous because of it, one doesn’t have to be liked one bit. (For
more on reality TV’s unique terribleness, James Wolcott has a scathing, cheekily overdramatic column on it in the most recent Vanity Fair.)
Movie stars succeed because we like them—our liking them, or ...
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Emily Nussbaum makes the case against Cougar Town in this week’s New York: Courtney Cox’s Jules Cobb is no Samantha Jones. “The Samantha Jones iconography has gone retro, regressing to a Cathy cartoon in heels,” Nussbaum writes. “Jules Cobb, the divorced ninny played by Cox, might date younger men but she’s no cougar. Samantha Jones might have ...
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Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids.
And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully
shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts
who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just
might be a failure of ...
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Is precociousness always a put on? Or is it possible that some
precocious kids, while certainly not as worldly as they seem to be, are
as mature as they seem to be? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Should you doubt that Melrose Place has a unique purchase on
the hearts of longtime television watchers, I direct you to the
following positive reviews: “It’s as fresh as yesterday’s daisy,” “It's
still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about
its badness, you know?” and “[It’s] operating at the same level of
glorious ...
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Dana, I have an Inglorious Basterd’s question for you. I saw
the movie over the weekend and I loved it—it’s not perfect, by any
stretch, but, damn, it was fun—and, unlike you, it didn’t leave me
feeling a bit queasy. In your review,
your major critique of the film was that Quentin Tarantino, again and
again, “unproblematically offers up ...
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Did anyone who watched Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s arrival in Burbank this morning not
cry? Though the reunion of Lee and her daughter, Hannah, was the
bigtime tearjerker, for all the obvious, poignant,
mommy-daughter-love-runs-deep reasons, there was another quieter moment
that had me dripping tears into my cheerios ... (Read more in Double ...
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June, Drop Dead Diva ties together two things we’ve been kicking around the blog the last few days: Is T.V. a better place for women than film?... (Read more in Double X.)
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What is television good for? Curbing population growth,
of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare
Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his
country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making... (Read more in Double X.)
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There was a hugely fascinating article in this weekend's New York Times about a Japanese social phenomenon that needs to be read to be believed: A growing community of men are happily in love with 2-D animated characters. It’s like Lars and The Real Girl, but instead of being in love with anatomically correct dolls, these men are in love with ...