Hilary Duff submitted a pilot episode that got turned down this season; that allowed “Gossip Girl”(8 p.m. Central Mondays on The CW) to cast her for — as every report on the subject says — “several episodes” as starlet-turned-student Olivia Burke. Basically, she’s a recurring character whose amount of recurrence is to be determined.
Which sitcom would you take with you to a desert island: “The Office” (8 p.m. Central Thursdays on NBC) or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (9 p.m. Central Thursdays on FX)?
“(500) Days of Summer,” the would-be-romantic, too-sad-to-be-a-comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, starts with a narrated warning that this is not a love story. It’s not so we’ll smirk and say, “Isn’t that cute — a love story that says it’s not a love story.” It’s meant as a literal warning, so don’t say it […]
I’m curious to hear from my readers on this one: How important is it to you that a franchise has continuity between each of its installments? I ask this because two of my favorite sagas are “Star Wars,” in which every story fits on a coherent timeline, and “Terminator,” which has launched three distinct timelines since 2001 […]
Watching “The Clone Wars” (7 p.m. Central Fridays on Cartoon Network), I wonder if the “Star Wars” prequels should’ve been animated all along. “Clone Wars” feels more like “Star Wars” than the live-action movies do. You would think the opposite would be true — that living, breathing actors would automatically deliver more immediacy and realism. But the […]
The other day someone asked me who my favorite actor is and I found out something interesting about myself: I don’t have one. Despite being a “movie guy” and a “TV guy,” I don’t have an actor where I’ll make it a point to see all of their movies.
Entertainment Weekly wondered why “Jennifer’s Body” had low box office returns, and suggested that people had their fill of the real Megan Fox through the media and didn’t need to see her in a movie. It’s always a shaky proposition to guess why something is popular or unpopular, but I think EW is stretching a bit, and […]
There’s a nice scene in the pilot episode of “The Cleveland Show” (7:30 p.m. Central Sundays on Fox) where Peter, Quagmire, Joe and the “Family Guy” gang gather around to say goodbye to spinoff-bound Cleveland Brown. Peter hugs Cleveland, and of course, Quagmire says something sexual in the background, but basically it’s a normal farewell scene.
It used to be that the best shows were front-loaded toward the start of the week. I fondly recall “Buffy” nights from my college years when my friends would come over on Tuesdays for pizza, along with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” “Dark Angel,” “Roswell,” “Gilmore Girls,” “24” and “Undeclared.” OK, not all of those […]
“Jennifer’s Body” is a cynical, heavy handed and occasionally scary follow-up to “Juno” from screenwriter Diablo Cody. In interviews, Cody said she wanted flip the horror standard and have a girl be the villain and the guys the victims; to say that’s groundbreaking is to ignore the whole history of horror films (one thing that makes this one […]