By Marilyn Ferdinand

A 2005 film from Australia called The Proposition showed up on cable last week. I was intrigued at the possibilities of a Western out of Australia. How would it differ from American Westerns? What were the unique circumstances of colonizing and civilizing Australia that both paralleled and diverged from the American experience? I’ve been to Australia and know that, like Canadians, Aussies aren’t just Americans with funny accents. However, you wouldn’t know that by watching The Proposition, a cliche-ridden American Western rip-off that revels in ultraviolence (my full review here). OK, just another couple of mindlessly spent hours, not an unusual experience for a film critic.
What really amazed me was what I found when I turned to the opinions of my fellow critics. The 86% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes left me speechless.

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Posted on August 22, 2007

By Kathryn Ware

No sooner had HBO aired the season finale of John From Cincinnati than it was announced the show had been cancelled. Or, to put it another way, using the show’s own unique phraseology, HBO had “dumped out,” giving John and company the big flush.

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Posted on August 21, 2007

By Julia Gray

I thought I was prepared for Sunday’s episode of Bridezillas with last week’s bride, Stephani, until she blurted out, “I win with a two-carat diamond solitaire. I win in life because that’s just me. I win. I’m a princess. Daddy pays for everything . . . I tell my husband what to do . . . ”

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Posted on August 20, 2007

By Julia Gray

“I wonder if they can put vodka in Starbuck’s coffee,” wonders Stephani, one of this week’s featured brides on We TV’s Bridezillas. This is a request we’ve all wanted to ask our local barista at one time or another, but not while we’re downing a Xanax for the umpteenth time that day, in front of a film crew whilst our portly fiance is driving the car.

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Posted on August 16, 2007

By Julia Gray

When I heard that Kimora Lee Simmons and her husband, hip hop mogul and satchel-ass pants designer Russell Simmons were getting a divorce, I was hoping that Kimora’s 15 minutes would finally be up. Why such vitriol you ask? Well, her first offense was taking over the Hello, Kitty icon and turning it into expensive jewelry for her line of clothing and accessories, Baby Phat. Then, in an article in Vanity Fair, she compared herself to the late Coretta Scott King. Seriously.
The Style Network’s new reality series Kimora: Life In the Fab Lane is an inside peek at Kimora’s world. Last night’s episode featured Kimora planning an ad campaign for her Baby Phat line. There’s a hitch, though. The chosen theme, Russia, does not exactly reflect the pink T-shirts and hip sweat suits that are Baby Phat’s signature. I don’t remember seeing photos of Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front festooned in pink sweats or prisoners in the gulag trying to keep warm in dolman-sleeved tees. So, Senior Director of Marketing James (serfs aren’t allowed last names) has been assigned the task of making new designs to match the theme, not go over budget and most importantly, not let Kimora know there’s a problem.

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Posted on August 13, 2007

By Julia Gray

“My name is Tim. T-I-M. And I’m addicted to crack cocaine.”
This is how every episode of A&E’s Intervention begins. Each week highlights a person with a life-threatening addiction and they agree to have cameras follow their adventures under the guise that they’re in a documentary about addiction. Little do they know that they will face an intervention during the last 15 minutes of each show with an “interventionist” who, along with family and friends, will hopefully convince the addict to be trucked off to rehab someplace across country – or else.

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Posted on August 6, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

I’m from Minneapolis and I’ve driven on the stretch of 35W that collapsed into the Mississippi River about a million times. The highway is a major north-south route through the city, and also happens to run along the edge of both the West and East Banks of the University of Minnesota, where I was an undergraduate for, oh, a good six or seven years. I was having too much fun to leave, and besides, we were kicking a lot of ass at The Minnesota Daily.
I just saw the big ol’ house that me and four friends lived in our junior year on a national network broadcast. One of the all-time great party houses (before these guys prettied it up). I think we paid $190 a month each in rent. Our landlord was an ass; I’ll never forget the time one of my roommates, whose father was friends with my father at the same age, swung a golf club at him.
We lived just a few blocks west of the first entrance and exit ramps of 35W just after the bridge crossed the Mississippi; the campus was a few blocks to the east. We walked by that bridge every day.

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Posted on August 3, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If you’re going to get a hankering for a good black-and-white horror flick, just after midnight in that time that bridges Friday and Saturday is as good a time to get it. The folks running the Independent Film Channel certainly get it, because they had the presence of mind to present This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, the subtitled 1967 sequel to At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul by Brazilian macabre master Jose Mojica Marins.
This one’s even better than At Midnight because Marins demonstrates growth as a filmmaker – which basically means it’s even more Felliniesque, there’s considerably more screaming and cheesecake, the women are hotter, and Zé now has a hunchbacked assistant named Bruno.

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Posted on July 30, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If you like your women cold and hard as a well-digger’s ass in January, you’ll like FX’s new series, Damages. (Tuesday’s premiere episode, which I wasn’t home to see Tuesday, is being re-run several times tonight and probably to death this weekend, so you’ll have ample chance to see it.) If you like legal dramas where you sit there the whole time trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on but you go along for the ride anyway because it’s not often that you get to see the dark, manipulative underbelly of the legal profession, you’ll like this show, too.
I like my women a bit softer than that, and there are times when I don’t feel like working that hard in order to enjoy a TV show, but it’s still a show worth watching because it solidifies common opinion that lawyers suck.

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Posted on July 26, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Do you believe in God? Well, do ya, punk? That’s kinda the premise behind Saving Grace, TNT’s new Monday night show that, I’m hoping, will quell my incessant bitching about the state of Monday night TV. It’s a good show, but whether it turns out to be a great one will depend how well Holly Hunter can beat it into submission. Or lets us in on why she keeps kissing police headquarters lab rat Laura San Giacamo on the cheek, whichever comes first.
Hunter plays Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City detective who gets her morning hangover started with a healthy Jack and Coke because, well, history has shown that cops with the shakes aim their guns better with some hair of the dog. She drives her own Porsche on duty (which ought to make the citizenry wonder about the pay scale for their civil servants) and her hobbies involve an adulterous affair with her partner (police fraternity runs rampant in Oklahoma City, it seems), parking in handicapped spaces, sucker punching smart-assed cattlemen, and fishtailing through the crowded Okie streets giving her grade-school nephew and his girlfriend a high-speed joyride while blaring the siren and flashing her gun. She also likes to drive drunk and mow down pedestrians, but more on that later.

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Posted on July 24, 2007