Vision

Rob Lowe, Snow White and the Academy Awards

The infamous opening number to the 1989 Academy Awards, which featured Snow White and Rob Lowe and killed the career of show producer Allen Carr, turned up on YouTube: Seeing this for the first time, I thought the opening was campy, hokey and overdone, but that seemed like the point. You don't line up a dozen dancing tables with lampshade heads and a chorus line of male ushers belting out "whenever you're down in the dumps, try putting on Judy's red pumps" without knowing you're completely over ... (read more)

2006/10/24

Six Minute Preview of Sorkin's Studio 60

Before NBC gets it pulled as a copyright violation, check out the six-minute preview of Studio 60, Aaron Sorkin's new fall series about a legendary but washed-up late-night comedy show. I haven't been interested in the series, because television shows about television are like blogs about blogging -- they should be opposed on principle. But the promo, which NBC showed to the press during its upfront event, looks as great as West Wing did when it began. Does anyone know what series it could ... (read more)

2006/05/18

The Washington Media are a Joke

After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner: Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other ... (read more)

2006/05/04

They Call Me Mush Mouth

I live in a ------ apartment that was supposed to be temporary. I work at a job that was also supposed to be temporary until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, which apparently is nothing. I have lots of sex, but I haven't had a relationship last more than a couple of months. I don't even have the self-discipline to floss daily. I've had four root canals. Four. I'm thirty-five. I've had four root canals. -- Nate Fisher, Six Feet Under I loved Six Feet Under until the show ... (read more)

2006/04/26

Sony's Universal Media Disc Format Lays an Egg

Sony PSP games and movies are released on Universal Media Disc format, but the name's a joke. No other devices support the format, Sony won't support burners or third-party efforts to open it up, and Brian Carnell passes along the news that movie studios have now cut back or abandoned UMD releases: It's hard to see why UMD failed.The movies were expensive -- $20 to $25 per movie.The PSP couldn't be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.The failure should make UMD ... (read more)

2006/04/24

Katherine Harris Had Me at 'Herlo'

When the number of people drawn to your Internet flamewar reaches critical mass, it becomes a This is Your Life episode where anyone you've ever angered might pop out from behind the curtain. I'm waiting for a few people to appear, such as the guy I tried to beat up at Bentley College in 1986. I've always wanted to know if I landed at least one bruise with my flurry of sting-like-a-butterfly blows. Though I'm loathe to admit this, Katherine Harris is kind of hot. The 2.8 she's pulling on Am I ... (read more)

2006/03/16

Serenity Doesn't Have a Prayer

Joss Whedon, the creator of the film Serenity and the Firefly TV series that preceded it, offers a correction to an Entertainment Weekly item declaring an end to the franchise: EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it. Geeks love Serenity, a great space western ... (read more)

2006/01/06

Handshake or No Handshake

NBC's web site offers a Flash version of Deal or No Deal, an odd new game show that pits a player's greed against the arithmetic mean. I've only caught a few minutes of the show, which aired last week and will be repeated Monday on CNBC, but I may start watching to see Howie Mandel not shake hands with the contestants. Mandel's a germophobe, writes Mark Evanier: I think it's weird that NBC has one reality show where the contestants are expected to eat rat --------- but they also have two -- ... (read more)

2005/12/25

CNN Dicks Cheney with Subliminal Messages

The Drudge Retort has obtained video footage that proves the superimposition of an X mark over Vice President Cheney during a televised speech Tuesday wasn't just an innocent technical glitch by CNN, as claimed by anchor Daryn Kagan-Limbaugh. In a story impacting hard across the conservative blogosphere, Matt Drudge reported Tuesday on a "large black 'X' repeatedly flashed over the vice president's face!" The X, which appeared for two frames displayed over one-fifteenth of a second, turns out ... (read more)

2005/11/23

Jerry Lewis vs. Jerry's Kids

At an appearance in Chicago Wednesday night, Jerry Lewis flew into a rage when heckled off the stage by disability activists in wheelchairs, telling security to eject one overweight protester by commanding "move that living waterbed out of here." The hecklers were from Jerry's Orphans, a group begun in the early '90s by Mike Ervin, a former Muscular Dystrophy Association poster child. They're angry about their portrayal in the Labor Day Telethon, as described in a documentary The Kids Are All ... (read more)

2005/11/18

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