Covid-19 · Digital · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Pandemic · Societal Trends · TV & Streaming · Videos
YouTube is a global idea farm, not unlike Big Agriculture: welcome, user, to your pre-fab silo, built “just for you” by YouTube’s secret algorithm. That algorithm loads about 70% of[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · New Media · Societal Trends · Theory · Thrillers & Action · TV & Streaming
The encounter between the lead characters and The Circle evokes a wider sense of anxiety regarding the extent to which we upload information about every area of our lives into[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · TV & Streaming · War
This is the first piece of a multi-part, long-form series entitled “The Twilight Zone and the Culture Wars.” The series spotlights several episodes from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and[…]
Books · Crime · TV & Streaming
Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, by David Koenig. 248pp. Bonaventure Press, 2021. The story of Columbo is the story of Peter Falk. Not Richard Levinson[…]
Horror · Psychology · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming · Women in Film
But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it[…]
Classical · Historical & Epic · TV & Streaming
What haunts me in the story of Nero is the mercurial nature of art and fiction. They are good for us only so far as they encourage our well-being. Human[…]
Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) * * * Cop Rock (ABC,[…]
Digital · Movie Theatres · New Media · TV & Streaming
Like it or not, we humans are social creatures. We ride waves of communal feeling all the time. If you like sports, consider sitting in the stands with thousands of[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
It is a fascinating exercise to consume this show according to the twenty-first-century rules of binge-watching. As the hours pass and the on-screen death count rises, the sustained passivity of[…]
Documentaries · Philosophy · TV & Streaming
The film’s childhood-centric poignancy is underscored by the depravity of today’s kindergarteners having to be concerned more with the logistics of hardened desks or evacuation drills thanks in part to[…]
Fashion · LGBT & Queer · TV & Streaming
Queer Eye strips queerness of radical intention and repackages it as the non-threatening support system of heteronormative practice, with the Fab Five offered up as the ultimate Gay Best Friend[…]
Crime · Franchises & Series · Philosophy · TV & Streaming
As Jonah Weiner puts it, the final scene “does stage a violent death, patently and unambiguously: ours.” If the cut-to-black is punitive, it’s also Chase’s memento mori: remember that you[…]
Animation · Comics · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has infinitely more in common with the psychic quest for one’s identity, the yearning for belonging and friendship, and the no-rules imagination – sometimes[…]
Biopic · Drama · Essays · TV & Streaming
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” –[…]
Religion & Spirituality · TV & Streaming
The esoteric spiritualism of Pope Lenny brings God crashing to earth. God is impotent; if God is in everything, then God is as sacred as the flotsam of the world,[…]
Counterculture · Essays · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
“I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment – that of looking down within the tarn – had been to deepen the first singular impression. There[…]
Crime · TV & Streaming · Writers & Critics
“The end has already happened, and all Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart can do is arrange the bodies in a pattern that makes them look less like bodies, more like[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · TV & Streaming · Westerns
Today is actor Richard Boone’s birthday (June 18, 1917 – January 10, 1981). We’re celebrating it by reprinting Alan Vanneman’s pithy write-up (previously published in issue 48, May 2005) of[…]
“Are we trapped like Truman? Is this why we want him to leave his world? Then what will we do? Turn off the set? Leave our society with its endless[…]
Actors & Personalities · TV & Streaming
Ashton Kutcher, producer and star of MTV’s celebrity prankster series Punk’d, played a prank on Steve Wozniak in the film Jobs, where he stars in the title role. The prank[…]
